Jim Hoagland, whose long career as a foreign correspondent, editor and columnist for The Washington Post brought him two Pulitzer Prizes and made his work a must-read among the nation’s top diplomats and politicians, died on Monday in Washington. He was 84.
His daughter, Lily Hoagland, said the death, in a hospital, was from a stroke.
Tall and courtly, Mr. Hoagland was the textbook definition of a foreign correspondent, with an encyclopedic knowledge of global affairs and a bulging Rolodex of high-placed contacts.
In the weeks before the death of King Hussein of Jordan in 1999, conventional wisdom held that his brother, Crown Prince Hassan, would succeed him. Drawing on contacts in Jordan and Washington, Mr. Hoagland wrote a column saying that the choice would instead be the king’s son, Prince Abdullah. He was right.
“He just scooped everybody,” David Ignatius, a columnist and former foreign editor at The Post, said in an interview. “At the time he wrote it, I think even Hassan may well have thought he was the next king.”
He was a favorite of both Ben Bradlee, the famed editor of The Post, who hired him practically on sight in 1966 to work as a Metro reporter, and of Katharine Graham, the newspaper’s longtime publisher, who often took Mr. Hoagland on her trips abroad to meet foreign leaders.
Rare among the Washington establishment, he came from humble roots. His parents were textile workers in small-town South Carolina who split up when he was young, and he was raised by his paternal grandparents.
Having grown up in the segregated South, he said, he had a healthy skepticism of the world, an asset he wielded on one of his first big assignments for The Post, a 10-part series on apartheid in South Africa.
“I spent a good part of my childhood telling myself lies about race,” he told the Columbia, S.C., newspaper The State in 1981. “So I was attuned to how people could deceive themselves about it.”
The series won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting; became the basis of a book by Mr. Hoagland, “South Africa: Civilizations in Conflict” (1972); and is widely credited with helping to introduce apartheid as a moral issue in American foreign policy.
He later served as bureau chief in Beirut and Paris, then in Washington as a diplomatic correspondent. In 1979, Mr. Bradlee made him foreign editor.
In that job he hired platoons of reporters; opened bureaus in Ivory Coast, New Delhi and Warsaw; and, he claimed, was soon running more articles from overseas than The New York Times.
“He really was the best editor I ever had, in the sense that he was able to keep prodding me with questions to dig into the root of a story,” said Bill Drozdiak, whom he hired to cover West Germany and who later became foreign editor.
After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Mr. Hoagland not only directed The Post’s reporters in Beirut, but also contributed his own reporting from Washington by working his sources within the government.
The Post’s coverage of the war drew considerable criticism; the paper — and Mr. Hoagland — were accused of being anti-Israel. In response, he and Mr. Bradlee agreed to a rabbi’s request to visit The Post’s newsroom and watch Mr. Hoagland in action.
“We didn’t try to make an effort to put on a show or anything,” Mr. Hoagland said in an interview for the 2017 documentary “The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee.”
The rabbi came away impressed. As Mr. Hoagland recalled, “He said, ‘I’m convinced that you’re doing the right thing, that you’re trying as hard as you can to keep any bias out of the newspaper.’ And he then had the grace to write a report in which he said just that.”
Mr. Hoagland returned to Paris in 1986, this time to write a twice-weekly foreign affairs column, which was later syndicated, appearing in scores of newspapers. With the column, he established a reputation for sober news analysis rooted in deep reporting.
Mr. Hoagland was a strong advocate for American power, but also skeptical of how it was deployed — as when President Bill Clinton, for example, pushed to expand NATO eastward in the 1990s. Mr. Hoagland feared the expansion would incite a response from Russia.
“American policymakers once again risk being intoxicated by the politics of liberation,” he wrote in a 1996 column, “in which euphoria and hope crowd out or postpone cleareyed, critical evaluation of American interests.”
He won his second Pulitzer in 1991, for columns on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf war. He came away from that conflict convinced that the Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was a threat to world security.
Mr. Hoagland grew close to Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled Iraqi dissident, and by the late 1990s had become a cheerleader for a U.S. invasion of the country to topple Mr. Hussein and liberate the Iraqi people, who would greet them with open arms.
Though he was somewhat skeptical of the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, he believed that the United States had a moral obligation to invade the country — a surprising burst of idealism from a writer otherwise known for his coolheaded realism.
Yet even as he insisted that the United States would prove victorious, he also cautioned against pushing too far.
“We’ve established a military power unequaled since the Roman Empire,” he told The Rock Hill Herald, his hometown newspaper in South Carolina, in 2003. “The danger is overreach. We can become victims of imperial overreach — believing we can go anywhere and do anything.”
Jimmie Lee Hoagland was born on Jan. 22, 1940, in Rock Hill, near the North Carolina border. His father, Leroy Hoagland Jr., served in the Marines during World War II and, after the parents split up, moved to Chicago, where he tended bar. His mother, Edith, later married James Estes and worked in insurance.
Jim lived with his grandparents on a farm along the Catawba River. A precocious student, he found solace in the Rock Hill public library.
“It was an essential first passport to a world of ideas and outside experiences for a boy from the country,” he said in a 1984 talk at Winthrop University, in Rock Hill.
He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina and worked summers at The Rock Hill Evening Herald. He graduated in 1961, then spent two years studying French at the University of Aix-en-Provence.
Mr. Hoagland served in the Air Force in Germany for two years. After being discharged, he was on his way back to South Carolina to look for a job, perhaps in a congressional office, when he stopped in Washington see a friend — whose brother introduced him to Mr. Bradlee.
The two hit it off, and Mr. Hoagland soon found himself writing on the paper’s Metro desk, alongside other recent hires who would go on to storied careers at The Post, like Carl Bernstein and Leonard Downie Jr.
Though he mostly covered news in the Washington area, he returned to his home state as a reporter at least once, in February 1968, after police officers shot into a group of Black students during a civil-rights protest at South Carolina State College, in Orangeburg, killing three and wounding 28.
During the ensuing unrest, a protester hit Mr. Hoagland in the head, spewing blood over his shirt.
Mr. Hoagland’s first three marriages, to Jane Murdoch, Gretchen Theobald and Elizabeth Becker, ended in divorce. Ms. Becker was a foreign correspondent for The Post and later for The Times.
Along with his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Jane Stanton Hitchcock; his son, Lee; two grandchildren; and his half brothers, Lane and Joel Estes.
Though Mr. Hoagland never moved back to the South, he retained a guarded fondness for it and often returned to visit, occasions that sometimes resulted in profiles by local newspapers.
One question he was constantly asked was how he connected his down-home past to his globe-trotting present. The key, he said, was the sense of curiosity he had found as a child and that had never left him.
“My strength as a foreign correspondent,” he replied in one such interview, with The State in 1981, “was that I conveyed a sense of adventure. I guess that’s why I’m in the business. It’s a daily sense of adventure.”
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