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, reports The Post. He was 84

According to The Post, “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 he received his first Pulitzer, in the international reporting category, for his dispatches from South Africa on the struggle against apartheid. Hoagland was only 31 at the time.

His posting in Africa, from 1969 to 1972, was the first of his several foreign assignments. 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.

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, states The Post.

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