James Hoge, who was a blue-blooded editor and writer of blue-collar newspapers in Chicago and New York for a quarter-century after which lengthy guided a number one journal on worldwide relations, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 87.
His son James Patrick Hoge confirmed the demise, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Heart, however didn’t specify the trigger. Mr. Hoge’s demise got here 4 weeks after that of his youthful brother, Warren, a former overseas correspondent and prime editor at The New York Instances.
Few editors at main American newspapers have been as younger as Mr. Hoge was when he rose to the highest at The Chicago Solar-Instances, a tabloid geared toward a working-class readership. He turned town editor at age 29, editor in chief at 33 and writer at 44.
He shook up the employees, strove for sprightlier writing and, like different newspaper editors within the Nineteen Seventies, launched new sections on enterprise, meals and vogue. “I’m at all times agitating,” he mentioned.
The payoff was six Pulitzer Prizes on his watch: two every for characteristic images and criticism and one every for spot information reporting (regarding violence by younger radicals in Chicago) and native information reporting (on new proof within the still-unsolved 1966 homicide of Valerie Percy, a daughter of Charles H. Percy of Illinois, then making his first United States Senate race).
As editor, Mr. Hoge (pronounced Hoag) gave his blessing to an investigation into the questionable use of Roman Catholic Church cash by Chicago’s cardinal, John Cody. And he ran Seymour M. Hersh’s 1969 account of the My Lai bloodbath, a mass killing of civilians by American troopers in Vietnam.
A notably hard-charging endeavor was the newspaper’s 1977 buy of a downtown Chicago bar, completed in partnership with a watchdog group, the Higher Authorities Affiliation. With hidden cameras, journalists documented a sample of metropolis inspectors taking bribes and kickbacks in return for ignoring well being and security hazards on the bar, which was referred to as the Mirage Tavern.
The shakedowns fashioned a 25-part sequence in 1978 that led to authorities investigations and a transforming of Chicago’s constructing code. Nonetheless, the deception inherent to such an operation troubled editors at different newspapers. Although The Solar-Instances was nominated for a Pulitzer, it was denied the prize due to the undercover ways.
In these years, it was virtually not possible to learn a newspaper or journal profile of the blond, blue-eyed Mr. Hoge that didn’t scramble for adjectives to explain him as good-looking. Robert Redford was an occasional level of reference. So, too, was the truth that he was reared in Park Avenue wealth and, at his demise, lived in a Gramercy Park duplex in Manhattan.
He may very well be heat and beneficiant with buddies, and somebody who nurtured new expertise. However various others at The Solar-Instances deemed him aloof and insensitive, even ruthless now and again, to such an extent that some reporters took to calling him “Attila the Hoge.”
For a few years within the Nineteen Seventies Mr. Hoge edited each The Solar-Instances and The Chicago Day by day Information, a struggling afternoon newspaper whose 4 abroad bureaus he closed to chop prices. Even again then — lengthy earlier than many newspapers went out of enterprise in a web-based world — The Day by day Information was past salvation. It was shuttered in 1978.
In 1984, Mr. Hoge’s time in Chicago additionally ended. He had put collectively a bunch that sought to purchase The Solar-Instances from its father or mother firm, Discipline Enterprises, however they had been no match for Rupert Murdoch and the $100 million he supplied. Mr. Hoge left the newspaper as soon as the brand new homeowners took over in January. Months later he was again in his hometown, New York, because the writer of The Day by day Information, a once-mighty tabloid that had fallen on robust instances in a metropolis with a shrinking working class and a rising inhabitants of non-English audio system and readers.
“Survival is at stake, and there’s no time to lose,” Mr. Hoge advised Information workers in 1986. That very same yr the Day by day Information columnist Jimmy Breslin gained a Pulitzer for commentary. However Mr. Hoge foundered when he sought to scale back the overstaffing and featherbedding that had lengthy outlined labor practices on the newspaper.
The unions pushed again laborious, with a five-month strike in 1990 and 1991 that was scarred by a number of bodily assaults on individuals who did go to work. There was enduring bitterness. When the strike ended and a brand new proprietor, Robert Maxwell, took over, dozens of Day by day Information staff chanted “Hoge should go.” Briefly order, he did.
After accepting fellowships at Harvard and Columbia, Mr. Hoge turned an editor and writer but once more in 1992, this time at Overseas Affairs, a journal of the Council on Overseas Relations. Conscious that some council members fretted over his tabloid background, he had some enjoyable with them, providing a mock journal cowl with the mannequin Cindy Crawford and teasers like “sexiest ethnic rivalries.”
Extra sedately, Overseas Affairs did evolve. He shortened articles, inspired livelier writing, printed six instances a yr as a substitute of 4, launched editions in a number of languages, almost doubled the circulation — and made a revenue.
“One must be cautious, however we’re how we are able to make it simpler to get by means of the journal and a bit extra pleasant,” he mentioned. Amongst those that applauded his modifications was Leslie H. Gelb, a former senior authorities official and New York Instances columnist. “It usually used to simply sit on espresso tables,” he mentioned of the journal in 1998. “Now persons are truly studying it.”
Mr. Hoge left Overseas Affairs in 2010. Along with writing occasional articles on worldwide issues, he was the board chairman of Human Rights Look ahead to a number of years and a senior adviser at Teneo, a consulting agency.
James Fulton Hoge Jr. was born in Manhattan on Dec. 25, 1935, considered one of 4 youngsters of James Sr., a profitable trademark lawyer, and Virginia (McClamroch) Hoge, a patron of Carnegie Corridor, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
The elder Mr. Hoge would convey dwelling 4 or 5 newspapers at a time and leaf by means of them along with his youngsters with look-at-that enthusiasm. James and his brother, Warren, got here to embrace journalism.
Each brothers attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and Yale, with James graduating the academy in 1954 and the college in 1958 with a bachelor’s diploma in political science. In 1961, he acquired a grasp’s diploma from the College of Chicago with a thesis on Woodrow Wilson’s overseas coverage.
The virtually routine concentrate on his privileged background may make Mr. Hoge bristle, as he did throughout a 1989 Vainness Truthful interview. “Positive, my father made dwelling,” he mentioned, “however I by no means obtained a penny of inheritance. I didn’t have any belief funds. I put myself by means of graduate faculty. I’ve paid for every thing in my life. I began work at $76 per week, and that was my sole earnings.”
“In the event you appear to be a WASP and also you speak like a WASP, there’s a sort of inverse racism,” he added. “That’s shortchanging us who’re like that.”
In 1962, Mr. Hoge married Alice Albright, a contract journalist and later a screenwriter, whose grandfather Joseph Medill Patterson had based The Day by day Information in New York and whose aunt, Alicia Patterson, based Newsday, on Lengthy Island. Their marriage led to 1971. Mr. Hoge’s second marriage, in 1981 to Sharon King, a client reporter, additionally led to divorce, in 1999. That very same yr he married Kathleen Lacey, now a senior managing director at Teneo.
Along with his son James, from his first marriage, he’s survived by Ms. Lacey; a sister, Virginia Verwaal; a daughter, Alicia, and one other son, Robert Warren Hoge, each additionally from his first marriage; a son, Spencer, from a relationship with the tv journalist Cynthia McFadden; two stepsons, Kienan and Devin Lacey; 5 granddaughters; and three grandsons. His different sister, Barbara Hoge Daine, died in 2001.
Mr. Hoge had begun his journalism profession as a reporter, in 1963 at The Solar-Instances, however discovered that writing was not his power. “At greatest I used to be workmanlike,” he advised New York journal in 1984, and added: “Finally, I found that I had extra pure expertise as an editor. And through the years I’ve taken quite a lot of vicarious pleasure in different folks’s writing.”
