Warren Hoge, a former correspondent for The New York Occasions who coated civil wars in Latin America, the demise 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 house in Manhattan. He was 82.
His spouse, Olivia Hoge, mentioned the trigger was pancreatic most cancers, which was recognized early final yr.
In a 32-year Occasions 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 lovely seashores and hillside slums, which had been terrorized for a decade by vigilante demise squads that had slain 3,000 suspected killers and rapists.
Overlaying political turmoil and guerrilla warfare in South and Central America from 1979 to 1983, Mr. Hoge wrote a whole lot of articles on the civil wars that had ebbed and flowed in pink tides for years in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
“No cadaver is ever nice to look upon,” Mr. Hoge wrote in 1983, in a laudatory assessment of Joan Didion’s current guide, “Salvador.”
“In my very own expertise,” he added, in The New York Occasions E book Overview, “the horror of the notion got here not once I was staring down at a culvert piled with the morning’s grisly harvest of corpses however when, after many weeks of doing so, I contemplated that in a rustic so small the sheer variety of such deaths meant that killing needed to have develop into a each day occupation of many Salvadorans.
“It was a mathematical certainty,” he wrote. “It meant that there have been hearths the place a father bounced his child on his knee and requested what was for dinner and unfold his arms huge in his favourite chair to stretch from his physique the trials of one other day spent torturing, mutilating and killing individuals.”
Returning to New York, the place he had been the product of a privileged Manhattan upbringing, Mr. Hoge grew to become The Occasions’s overseas information editor for 4 years starting in 1983, directing worldwide protection by scores of employees 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 Occasions’s Sunday Journal from 1991 to 1993 and, till 1996, when he oversaw the Sunday E book Overview and the tradition, fashion, sports activities and journey information sections.
Because the London bureau chief from 1996 to 2003, Mr. Hoge performed key roles in protecting the demise of Diana in a Paris automobile crash on the night time of Aug. 31, 1997. He wrote 5,000 phrases nearly 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 noticed individuals sobbing within the streets and surging out of subway stations clutching floral tributes,” Mr. Hoge mentioned in a 2017 round-table retrospective with different Occasions reporters who had coated Diana’s demise. “Mourners thronged the grounds outdoors her Kensington Palace residence, nearly carpeting the sphere with flowers and pushing bouquets by means of the wrought iron gate. Many stood in stricken silence; others knelt, prayed, made the signal of the cross, and slumped to the bottom in tears.”
He coated the Labour Social gathering authorities of Prime Minister Tony Blair and wrote an 8,000-word Occasions journal profile of him. He additionally coated the cultures of Britain and Scandinavia and the 1998 Good Friday Settlement in Belfast, Northern Eire, which ended many of the conflicts between Ulster Catholics and Protestants that had left hundreds 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 Center East and on reduction 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 point 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 Corridor. Warren and his siblings — his older brother, James, and his sisters, Barbara and Virginia — grew up in an eight-room house on Park Avenue.
James, the eldest, grew to become writer of The Chicago Solar-Occasions and later of The Each day Information of New York. Warren, 5 years youthful, adopted James into the Buckley Faculty in Manhattan and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, the place Warren was expelled for playing. He transferred to Trinity Faculty 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 Military for six months in 1964 and within the Military Reserve till 1970. He took graduate programs at George Washington College whereas working as a reporter for the outdated Washington Star in 1964 and 1965, then grew to become The New York Publish’s Washington bureau chief for 4 years. In 1970, he moved to The Publish’s New York workplace, the place he quickly rose to metropolis editor and assistant managing editor.
A.M. Rosenthal, the managing editor of The Occasions and shortly to be the manager 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 employees, he grew to become the bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1981, Mr. Hoge married Olivia Larisch in Rio. She was the daughter of Depend Johann Larisch of Marbella, Spain, and Countess Wilhelmine Larisch.
Along with 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 Occasions in 2008, Mr. Hoge was named vp for exterior affairs of the Worldwide Peace Institute, a New York-based lobbying and analysis group with shut ties to the United Nations. He grew to become the institute’s senior adviser in 2012.
In 1991, when Mr. Hoge was appointed editor of The Occasions Sunday Journal, congratulatory notes poured in from many political and media leaders who had been his pals. Avenue, a New York society journal, ran a profile detailing his trendy 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 surely was a largely flattering portrait. “He’s within the Social Register, he’s married to an Austrian countess,” the article mentioned. “His pals say solely good issues about him. ‘Warren’s center identify is attraction,’ declares one. ‘He’s the Fred Astaire of dance companions,’ says one other. He will get excessive marks for politeness and civility. ‘Warren has a elementary decency,’ says a Occasions editor. ‘He’s formidable, however he’s good to individuals over and beneath him.’”
William McDonald contributed reporting.
