Warren Hoge, Who Covered Wars and World Crises for The Times, Dies at 82

Warren Hoge, a former correspondent for The New York Times who coated civil wars in Latin America, the loss of life of Diana, Princess of Wales, and quite a few world crises earlier than rising to the highest ranks of the paper’s newsroom management, died on Wednesday at his residence in Manhattan. He was 82.

His spouse, Olivia Hoge, mentioned the trigger was pancreatic most cancers, which was identified early final yr.

In a 32-year Times profession, Mr. Hoge (pronounced hoag), was a flexible reporter and a vivid author. In Rio de Janeiro, his first overseas project, he chronicled a go to by Pope John Paul II and the conundrums of that sprawling Brazilian metropolis of gorgeous seashores and hillside slums, which had been terrorized for a decade by vigilante loss of life squads that had slain 3,000 suspected killers and rapists.

Covering political turmoil and guerrilla warfare in South and Central America from 1979 to 1983, Mr. Hoge wrote tons of of articles on the civil wars that had ebbed and flowed in purple tides for years in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

“No cadaver is ever pleasant to look upon,” Mr. Hoge wrote in 1983, in a laudatory assessment of Joan Didion’s latest e book, “Salvador.”

“In my own experience,” he added, in The New York Times Book Review, “the horror of the notion came not when I was staring down at a culvert piled with the morning’s grisly harvest of corpses but when, after many weeks of doing so, I pondered that in a country so small the sheer number of such deaths meant that killing had to have become a daily occupation of many Salvadorans.

“It was a mathematical certainty,” he wrote. “It meant that there were hearths where a father bounced his baby on his knee and asked what was for dinner and spread his arms wide in his favorite chair to stretch from his body the rigors of another day spent torturing, mutilating and killing people.”

Returning to New York, the place he had been the product of a privileged Manhattan upbringing, Mr. Hoge turned The Times’s overseas news editor for 4 years starting in 1983, directing worldwide protection by scores of workers correspondents, part-time reporters and a cadre of specialised editors in New York.

In 1987, he was named assistant managing editor accountable for administrative and personnel issues. He saved his masthead title when he edited The Times’s Sunday Magazine from 1991 to 1993 and, till 1996, when he oversaw the Sunday Book Review and the tradition, fashion, sports activities and journey news sections.

As the London bureau chief from 1996 to 2003, Mr. Hoge performed key roles in protecting the loss of life of Diana in a Paris automotive crash on the night time of Aug. 31, 1997. He wrote 5,000 phrases just about in a single day: her obituary and articles on Prince Charles returning the physique to a grieving British nation, the plans for her funeral, and the royal household, traumatized by its loss and criticism of its tight rein on emotions.

“I saw people sobbing in the streets and surging out of subway stations clutching floral tributes,” Mr. Hoge mentioned in a 2017 round-table retrospective with different Times reporters who had coated Diana’s loss of life. “Mourners thronged the grounds outside her Kensington Palace residence, virtually carpeting the field with flowers and pushing bouquets through the wrought iron gate. Many stood in stricken silence; others knelt, prayed, made the sign of the cross, and slumped to the ground in tears.”

He coated the Labour Party authorities of Prime Minister Tony Blair and wrote an 8,000-word Times journal profile of him. He additionally coated the cultures of Britain and Scandinavia and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which ended many of the conflicts between Ulster Catholics and Protestants that had left 1000’s useless.

As chief United Nations correspondent from 2004 to 2008, Mr. Hoge wrote some 1,300 articles, many for the entrance web page, on conflicts in Central Africa and the Middle East and on aid efforts in pure disasters. That included the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the deadliest in recorded historical past, which took 230,000 lives in a matter of hours.

By the time his journalism profession was over, Mr. Hoge had reported from greater than 80 nations.

Warren McClamroch Hoge was born in Manhattan on April 13, 1941, the third of 4 kids of James Fulton and Virginia (McClamroch) Hoge. His father was a New York trademark lawyer, and his mom a socially distinguished patron of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and Carnegie Hall. Warren and his siblings — his older brother, James, and his sisters, Barbara and Virginia — grew up in an eight-room residence on Park Avenue.

James, the eldest, turned writer of The Chicago Sun-Times and later of The Daily News of New York. Warren, 5 years youthful, adopted James into the Buckley School in Manhattan and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the place Warren was expelled for playing. He transferred to Trinity School in Manhattan and graduated in 1959. Warren, like James, attended Yale, graduating in 1963 with a bachelor’s diploma in English.

He was within the Army for six months in 1964 and within the Army Reserve till 1970. He took graduate programs at George Washington University whereas working as a reporter for the previous Washington Star in 1964 and 1965, then turned The New York Post’s Washington bureau chief for 4 years. In 1970, he moved to The Post’s New York workplace, the place he quickly rose to metropolis editor and assistant managing editor.

A.M. Rosenthal, the managing editor of The Times and shortly to be the chief editor, employed Mr. Hoge in 1976 as a metro reporter. A yr later, he was named deputy metropolitan editor; by 1979, after solely three years on the workers, he turned the bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1981, Mr. Hoge married Olivia Larisch in Rio. She was the daughter of Count Johann Larisch of Marbella, Spain, and Countess Wilhelmine Larisch.

In addition to his spouse, he’s survived by their son, Nicholas; two stepdaughters, Christina Villax and Tatjana Leimer; his brother, James; his sister Virginia Verwaal; and 6 step-grandchildren. His different sister, Barbara Hoge Daine, died in 2001.

After leaving The Times in 2008, Mr. Hoge was named vice chairman for exterior affairs of the International Peace Institute, a New York-based lobbying and analysis group with shut ties to the United Nations. He turned the institute’s senior adviser in 2012.

In 1991, when Mr. Hoge was appointed editor of The Times Sunday Magazine, congratulatory notes poured in from many political and media leaders who had been his associates. Avenue, a New York society journal, ran a profile detailing his fashionable sartorial tastes and itemizing a constellation of actresses and style fashions he had dated in a bachelor life that lasted till he was 40.

But it was a largely flattering portrait. “He’s in the Social Register, he’s married to an Austrian countess,” the article mentioned. “His friends say only nice things about him. ‘Warren’s middle name is charm,’ declares one. ‘He’s the Fred Astaire of dance partners,’ says another. He gets high marks for politeness and civility. ‘Warren has a fundamental decency,’ says a Times editor. ‘He’s ambitious, but he’s nice to people over and under him.’”

William McDonald contributed reporting.