Warren Hogg, a former New York Times correspondent who covered the Latin American civil wars, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and several global crises before rising to the highest ranks to lead the newspaper’s newsroom, died Wednesday at his Manhattan home. He was 82 years old.
His wife, Olivia Hogg, said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which he was diagnosed with early last year.
During his 32 years at The Times, Mr. Hogg (pronounced Hogg) was a multi-talented reporter and spirited writer. In Rio de Janeiro, his first overseas assignment, he chronicles the visit of Pope John Paul II and the mysteries of that sprawling Brazilian city of beautiful beaches and hillside slums, terrorized for a decade by vigilante death squads that murdered 3,000 suspected people. them. murderers and rapists.
Covering political turmoil and guerrilla warfare in South and Central America from 1979 to 1983, Mr. Hogg wrote hundreds of articles on the civil wars that saw red tides for years in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Mr. Hogg wrote in 1983, in a laudatory review of Joan Didion’s last book, Salvador: “There is no corpse so pleasant to look at.”
He added in The New York Times Book Review: “In my own experience, the horror of the thought did not come when I was staring down a stream filled with the ghastly harvest of corpses in the morning, but when, after several weeks of doing so, I thought of the sheer number of such deaths in A country so small means that killing is bound to become a daily occupation for many Salvadorans.
“It was a mathematical certainty,” he wrote. “It meant there were hearths where a father put his child on his knee and ordered dinner, then spread his arms in his favorite chair to stretch out the rigors of another day spent torturing, maiming and killing people.”
Returning to New York, the product of a privileged Manhattan upbringing, Mr. Hogg became The Times foreign editor for four years beginning in 1983, directing global coverage for dozens of staff reporters, part-time correspondents, and a cadre of journalists. Professional editors in New York.
In 1987, he was appointed Assistant Editor-in-Chief, responsible for administrative and personnel affairs. He retained his title when he edited The Times Sunday Magazine from 1991 to 1993, and until 1996, when he oversaw the Sunday Book Review and the culture, style, sports and travel news sections.
As head of the London bureau from 1996 to 2003, Mr Hogg played key roles in the coverage of Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris on the night of August 31, 1997. He wrote nearly 5,000 words overnight: her obituary and articles on Prince. Charles returns the body to a grieving British nation, plans her funeral, and the royal family is traumatized by her loss and criticized for her strict control of emotions.
“I saw people weeping in the streets and coming out of tube stations holding flowers,” Mr Hogg said at a 2017 roundtable retrospective with other Times correspondents who covered Diana’s death. Mourners swarmed the grounds outside her Kensington Palace residence, covered the square with flowers and pushed bouquets through the Iron Gate. Many stood in utter silence; others knelt and prayed, made the sign of the cross, and fell to the ground weeping.
He covered the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair and wrote an 8,000-word profile on him for The Times Magazine. He also covered the cultures of Britain and Scandinavia and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which ended most of the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Ulster that left thousands dead.
As the chief UN correspondent from 2004 to 2008, Mr. Hogg wrote nearly 1,300 articles, many for the front page, on conflicts in Central Africa and the Middle East and on relief efforts in natural disasters. This included the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004, the deadliest earthquake in recorded history, which killed 230,000 people in a matter of hours.
By the time his journalistic career ended, Mr. Hogg had reported from more than 80 countries.
Warren McClamrush Hogg was born in Manhattan on April 13, 1941, the third of four children to James Fulton and Virginia (McClamrush) Hogg. His father was a New York trademark attorney, and his mother was a socially prominent 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 apartment on Park Avenue.
James, the eldest, became publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times and later The Daily News of New York. Warren, five years his junior, followed James to the Buckley School in Manhattan and Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where Warren had been expelled for gambling. He transferred to Trinity School in Manhattan, graduating in 1959. Like James, Warren attended Yale University, graduating in 1963 with a BA in English.
He was in the Army for six months in 1964 and in the Army Reserve until 1970. He took graduate courses at George Washington University while working as a correspondent for the old Washington Star in 1964 and 1965, then became Washington bureau chief for the New York Post. for four years. In 1970, he moved to The Post’s New York bureau, where he quickly rose to the position of city editor and assistant managing editor.
A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’ managing editor and soon-to-be executive editor, hired Mr. Hogg in 1976 as Metro correspondent. And a year later he was appointed deputy editor-in-chief of the capital. By 1979, after only three years on the job, he was head of the office in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1981, Mr. Hogg married Olivia Larisch in Rio. She was the daughter of Count Johann Larisch of Marbella, Spain and Countess Wilhelmine Larisch.
In addition to his wife, he left behind their son Nicholas. two daughters, Christina Vilax and Tatjana Leimer; His brother, James. his sister, Virginia Howe Hogg; and six grandchildren. His other sister, Barbara Hogg Dane, died in 2001.
After leaving The Times in 2008, Mr. Hogg was named Vice President of Foreign Affairs for the Institute for International Peace, a New York-based lobbying and research organization with close ties to the United Nations. He became Senior Advisor to the Institute in 2012.
In 1991, when Mr. Hogg was appointed editor-in-chief of The Times Sunday Magazine, letters of congratulations poured in from many of the political and media leaders who were his friends. Avenue Magazine, a New York society magazine, published a profile detailing his elegant tastes in clothing and listing a group of actresses and models he dated during a bachelor life that lasted until he was 40.
But it was a pretty cool picture. The article stated: “He is registered in the social register, and he is married to an Austrian countess.” “His friends say only nice things about him. Warren’s middle name is Magic,” declares one. Another says, “He’s the Fred Astaire of dance partners.” He gets high marks for politeness and civility. “Warren has high morals,” says a Times editor. “He’s ambitious, but he’s kind to the people above and below him.”
William MacDonald contributed reporting.