Jim Hoagland obit

Jim Hoagland, Pulitzer-winning voice on world affairs, dies at 84

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Jim Hoagland, a Washington Post journalist whose intrepid reporting and erudite columns were twice honored with the Pulitzer Prize and made him for decades a leading voice in world affairs, died Nov. 4 at a hospital in Washington. He was 84.

The cause was a stroke, said his son, Lee Hoagland.

Mr. Hoagland began his education in a two-room schoolhouse in South Carolina and first traveled abroad after college on a Rotary scholarship that took him to France. He found in newspapering a means to see and understand the world and was hired in 1966 at The Post, where he distinguished himself early on as one of the premier foreign correspondents of his generation.

“Give him an airline ticket and stand back,” John Anderson, his editor on the foreign desk, told the Associated Press in 1971 when Mr. Hoagland received his first Pulitzer, in the international reporting category, for his dispatches from South Africa on the struggle against apartheid. Mr. Hoagland was only 31 at the time.

His posting in Africa, from 1969 to 1972, was the first of his several foreign assignments. Mr. Hoagland spent much of the 1970s in Beirut as Middle East correspondent and then in Paris, where he solidified a reputation as an elegant Francophone and inveterate Francophile. He lived in Paris on and off throughout his life.

In the 1980s, he returned to The Post’s main newsroom to lead the foreign desk, shaping the newspaper’s international coverage and cultivating a generation of foreign correspondents. Never having forgotten his own hunger to see the world when he started out, he placed a notice on a bulletin board inviting any reporter interested in overseas assignments to come by his office.

Mr. Hoagland also served the paper as diplomatic correspondent and in the latter years of his career brought his global interests and expertise to a syndicated column. The column attracted the readership not only of people intrigued by foreign policy, but also of the diplomats and leaders who shaped it.

He befriended French President François Mitterrand. Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state and national security adviser, once took offense at something Mr. Hoagland had written about him and refused to speak to him for a year. But even Kissinger resumed reading Mr. Hoagland’s column, eventually extending a begrudging compliment: “Hoagland, you’re an acquired taste.”

Mr. Hoagland did not indulge in the armchair opining that separates journalists from pundits. As a columnist, he remained a reporter first and foremost. David Ignatius, a fellow foreign affairs columnist for The Post, recalled in an interview that he often said of his friend: “If you don’t understand why Jim Hoagland wrote something, wait a week and then you’ll understand.” Such was the depth of Mr. Hoagland’s sourcing.

Mr. Hoagland won his second Pulitzer Prize in 1991 in the commentary category for what the prize board described as his “searching and prescient columns” on the events leading up to the Persian Gulf War and on the political travails of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mr. Hoagland had interviewed Gorbachev during one of many visits with heads of state that he made with Katharine Graham, then the chairwoman of The Post Co. Robert G. Kaiser, a former Moscow correspondent who later became The Post’s managing editor, was present for the interview and recalled that Mr. Hoagland impressed even the most expert Sovietologist with his preparation.

“He was a very serious practitioner,” Kaiser said.

In the Gulf War of 1991, a U.S.-led coalition easily liberated Kuwait from an invasion by neighboring Iraq but left Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in power. Mr. Hoagland had interviewed Hussein and, speaking years later to the Georgetowner publication, likened the experience to “sitting across the desk from a coiled boa constrictor.”

Mr. Hoagland had used his column to draw international attention to Hussein’s persecution of the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq, a campaign that included poison gas attacks and that Mr. Hoagland denounced in a 1988 column as a “step-by-step genocide.”

He castigated the U.S. government at the time for what he regarded as its insufficient effort to stop that campaign and years after the Persian Gulf War referred to Hussein as “the corpse who won’t die, the telltale heart beating loudly beneath the boards where America thought he had been buried forever.”

When President George W. Bush took office and began preparations for what became the 2003 invasion to topple Hussein — in large part on the grounds that Iraq allegedly possessed weapons of mass destruction — Mr. Hoagland supported that effort.

He described Iraq in a 2002 column as “America’s most important unfinished business abroad” and wrote that “fears that Iraq will fall apart if the strong tyrannical hand of Saddam Hussein is removed are both exaggerated and irrelevant.”

The latter assertion proved tragically wrong, as Iraq collapsed into civil war in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion. When no weapons of mass destruction were discovered, Mr. Hoagland conceded that “the Bush administration cannot avoid the responsibility for having conflated Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs and ties to terrorism into an urgent threat to U.S. citizens and interests.”

But he maintained that “the moral responsibility that the United States, the United Nations and others continue to bear for turning a blind eye to the gangster behavior of Baghdad for so long must not be obscured,” and that “no statute of limitations, explicit or implicit, should be extended to war crimes and corruption of the enormity of those committed by the Baathist regime.”

Jimmie Lee Hoagland was born in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on Jan. 22, 1940. He was raised primarily by his paternal grandparents, who were farmers. Mr. Hoagland’s mother sold insurance while raising two other sons. His father served with the Marine Corps in World War II and later bartended in Chicago.

Mr. Hoagland credited a teacher at the small schoolhouse he attended as sparking his interest in books and the world around him. He traced his journalistic skepticism to his early experience in a church that featured snake handlers, and where the faithful spoke in tongues.

“Somehow I didn’t quite fit in with that,” he said in an interview with the Kunhardt Film Foundation. When Mr. Hoagland was 8 or 9, the minister announced that the world would end on Dec. 31 of that year. “So you can imagine on New Year’s Eve going to bed rather upset,” Mr. Hoagland recalled, and “waking up on New Year’s Day and saying, ‘I’m always gonna need at least two sources.’”

He studied French in school and was sports editor at his high school newspaper. While attending the University of South Carolina, where he received a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1961, he got his start as a professional newspaperman at the Rock Hill Evening Herald.

After his college graduation, Mr. Hoagland did graduate work in Aix-en-Provence, France, and served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer in what was then West Germany. He worked for several newspapers in South Carolina before joining the New York Times in Paris as a copy editor on the newspaper’s international edition.

On a tip, Mr. Hoagland paid a visit to The Post in late 1965 to meet with Benjamin C. Bradlee, recently named the newspaper’s managing editor. Bradlee had set out to establish The Post, then by all accounts an also-ran, into a major national and international newspaper. He hired Mr. Hoagland essentially on the spot.

Mr. Hoagland was first assigned to the metropolitan desk, where he met Leonard Downie Jr., who years later became the newspaper’s executive editor. At the time, Downie was a reporter working on an investigative project that exposed the local savings and loan industry for preying on minority borrowers.

Downie, by his own account, struggled as a writer. In an interview, he recalled that as he finished his reporting, an editor suggested that he “ought to have a writer” help him. He turned to Mr. Hoagland, who played a principal role in crafting the series and shared a byline.

Mr. Hoagland returned to South Carolina in 1968 to cover an event that became known as the Orangeburg Massacre, in which law enforcement officers opened fire on a student civil rights demonstration, killing three protesters and wounding more than two dozen. Mr. Hoagland was attacked by an activist in the aftermath and suffered a head injury.

Mr. Hoagland studied international reporting as a Ford Foundation fellow at Columbia Journalism School before going overseas for The Post. His posting to Africa took him thousands of miles from home but in some ways back to the Jim Crow South, as he observed the brutality of the apartheid system of racial segregation. In one of his Pulitzer-winning dispatches, he interviewed two gold miners — one who was White and earned the equivalent of $420 per month, and another who was Black and made $28 for the same work.

The difference in pay, explained a supervisor escorting Mr. Hoagland through the mine, was because the first miner’s skin was white. “It is the most valuable commodity you can have in South Africa,” Mr. Hoagland quoted him as saying. “It is more valuable than this yellow stuff we blast out of the earth.”

Mr. Hoagland’s reporting on apartheid became a book, “South Africa: Civilizations in Conflict” (1972). In an era before email and cellphones, he was at times out of contact with his editors for weeks. He would surface with reams of notes and set about writing. He moved with ease from country to country, sending back dispatches that went beyond spot reporting to explain the world with vivid detail and learned lucidity.

“He was a sophisticated man of the world, but he was also a great believer in shoe-leather reporting and finding out things people didn’t want you to know and putting them in the newspaper,” said Glenn Frankel, a colleague on The Post’s foreign desk who in 1989 received a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Middle East.

Mr. Hoagland became a contributing editor to The Post in 2010. His final column appeared in 2020.

Mr. Hoagland’s marriages to Jane Murdock, Gretchen Theobald and Elizabeth Becker ended in divorce. Becker, a former Post correspondent, later reported for the Times.

Survivors include his wife of 29 years, mystery novelist Jane Stanton Hitchcock; two children from his marriage to Becker, Lee Hoagland and Lily Hoagland; two half-brothers; and three grandchildren. A daughter from his marriage to Murdock, Laura Dahdah, died in 2003.

Inside the newsroom and beyond, Mr. Hoagland was known for the urbane manner that he developed over years spent in world capitals and in Georgetown salons. But he maintained that for a columnist, and for anyone, the most valuable attribute was common sense.

It is “simply the most important thing in life, and should never be sacrificed for false notions of self-importance and pomp,” he told his hometown Rock Hill newspaper in 2010. “What I learned early was that there was always somebody who knew more about a thing than you did, and the trick was to ask them the right question.”