Jan Jarboe Russell spent thirteen years gathering stories for Texas Monthly before she went looking for one the country had mostly forgotten: a family internment camp in Crystal City, Texas, where the United States held German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants and their American-born children, then quietly traded some of them to the enemy in wartime prisoner exchanges. Russell, the San Antonio journalist and author whose 2015 book on that camp became a New York Times bestseller, died September 29, 2026, in San Antonio. She was 75.

The book, The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II, drew on interviews with roughly fifty people who had lived inside the camp's fences as children. Russell traced how the Texas camp fit into a wartime program that confined more than 31,000 people nationwide, a detail documented by the Christian Science Monitor when the book came out. "In about the 50 children of the camp that I spent time with and interviewed, some of them say that as hard as it was, those were the best years of their life because they were with their parents and their siblings," she told NPR in 2015. In the same breath she refused to soften what the place was: "No one was ever tortured in Crystal City. No one ever went hungry," she said, even as she laid out the camp's 290 acres of barbed wire, armed guards, and censored mail. The book went on to win the Texas Institute of Letters' Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Nonfiction in 2016.

Russell grew up in Cleveland, a small town northeast of Houston, where her father worked as a minister of music, an upbringing steeped in the hold the Baptist Church could have on East Texas life, according to a tribute published by Texas Monthly. She left for the University of Texas at Austin, worked at the student newspaper The Daily Texan, and graduated in 1972 with a journalism degree.

She began as a political reporter for the San Antonio Light, then spent 1976 covering national politics for the Hearst Bureau in Washington, D.C., before returning to Texas to write a closely read political column for the San Antonio Express-News. In 1984 she was one of twelve American journalists chosen for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. San Antonio became the home she chose for herself, and by the 1980s she had joined Texas Monthly as a staff writer, a post she held for thirteen years. A former Texas Monthly colleague, who wrote the tribute marking her death, called her 1988 investigation of corrupt adoption practices the piece that stayed with them longest for its horror, and called her 1991 profile of the Houston oilman Oscar Wyatt an unrivaled portrait of a certain kind of Texas operator. Her range at the magazine stretched from H-E-B's grocery wars to a South Texas sanctuary built for silent prayer, subjects she reported with the same close attention, according to Friends of the Daily Texan.

Her first book, Cisneros: Portrait of a New American (1985), profiled Henry Cisneros, then the mayor of San Antonio. She reached a much wider audience in 1999 with Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson, published by Scribner after nearly two hundred interviews; The Washington Post later named it one of the year's best books. She also compiled They Lived to Tell the Tale (2007), an anthology of Explorers Club adventure stories, and wrote Dreaming Red, a history of the San Antonio contemporary art space Artpace.

The Daily Texan inducted her into its Hall of Fame on October 16, 2015, with its Editorial Award, honoring her alongside fellow journalists Ronnie Dugger, John Pope, and Mary Walsh, according to Friends of the Daily Texan. She was a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Philosophical Society of Texas, and in 2018 she received Gemini Ink's Award for Literary Excellence.

A longtime friend and Texas Monthly colleague, writing after her death, placed her among the state's defining women, in the company of Ann Richards and Molly Ivins and Lady Bird Johnson herself: tough, witty, and quick on her feet, though never quite convinced she measured up to what she had already proven she could do. The same tribute remembered her showing up for the people in her life, her husband, her children, and her many friends, with a loyalty practiced every day rather than claimed.

She was married to Lewis F. "Lucky" Russell Jr., who met her enthusiasms, the tribute recalled, with a wry tolerance, and she raised two children, Maury and Tyler. In her final years, Russell completed one more book, about Eleanor Roosevelt's secret life in Greenwich Village, a subject that had held her attention for years.

What Russell left on the page outlasts any single tribute: a documented history of the only family internment camp the United States ever ran, a biography that reshaped how Lady Bird Johnson was understood, and a run of Texas Monthly stories that trained readers to expect precision alongside color. The Daily Texan Hall of Fame she joined keeps inducting student journalists cut from the same cloth she was. Her husband, her children, and the readers who keep finding their way to the story of Crystal City carry the rest forward.