Hearst, William Randolph, Jr.

▪ 1994

      U.S. journalist and newspaper proprietor (b. Jan. 27, 1908, New York, N.Y.—d. May 14, 1993, New York), shared a 1956 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting shortly after being named editor in chief of the Hearst Corp. The privately held company had been built into a media empire by William Randolph Hearst, Sr., the flamboyant press baron. The younger Hearst, the second of five sons, spent two years at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the New York American as a police reporter. He was named publisher of the paper in 1936, the year before the Hearst paper became the Journal-American after a merger. During World War II, when Hearst was serving as a war correspondent in Europe and North Africa, he reportedly was told by his father, who was also his editor, to stop reporting on bombing missions until he had flown one. He did so, and he continued to seek the approval of his father, with whom he shared a fervent anticommunist stance. After his father died in 1951, Hearst headed a 17-man editorial committee to unravel the affairs of the chain of 18 newspapers, including the flagship San Francisco Examiner, and 11 magazines. As editor in chief, Hearst helped revitalize the business and scored a personal coup when he, Frank Conniff, and Kingsbury Smith secured a series of revealing interviews with four politicians in Moscow and published a series of eight articles that rightly predicted that Nikita Khrushchev would become the next leader of the Soviet Union. The series earned the trio Pulitzer Prizes. Hearst, who for 40 years wrote a politically conservative editorial column for the chain, steadfastly championed Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his 1950s communist witch-hunts. Hearst's name was also identified with that of his niece Patty, who, after being abducted by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, helped them rob a bank; she was then incarcerated for seven years. In 1991 Hearst published The Hearsts: Father and Son, in which he acknowledged that his own career had been overshadowed by that of his father.

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