Graham Hovey

February 20, 2010

Graham Hovey, who covered World War II in Africa and Europe as an International News Service correspondent and was later a member of the editorial board and Washington foreign affairs reporter for The New York Times, passed away Saturday, February 20, 2010. He had been a resident of Allentown and the Luther Crest retirement community since October 1998. Graham Hovey was born January 18, 1916, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, a son of the late Leroy D. and Lois Graham Hovey. He attended the University of Northern Iowa but graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1938 with a bachelor's degree in journalism and economics. He was awarded his master's degree in political science and history from Minnesota in 1953. He was married in Waterloo, Iowa, on June 20, 1941, to Mary Jean Landgraf, a professional librarian. She survives along with their son, Thomas D. Hovey; his wife, Barbara A., of Forty Fort; three grandchildren, Attorney Matthew T. Hovey, of Pottstown; Carolyn B. Hovey, of Forty Fort; David L. Hovey, of Forty Fort. Also surviving are two nieces, Marjorie Eger, of Indiana, and Lois Schmoe, of Florida. He and his wife had moved to Allentown from Ann Arbor, Minn., to be closer to their son Thomas, a news photographer for WNEP-TV (Channel 16), who resides with his family in Forty Fort. In Allentown, Graham Hovey had lectured on U.S. foreign policy at Cedar Crest College for the Institute for Learning in Retirement. Hovey started his career in journalism in 1938 as a reporter on the Waterloo Courier in Iowa. The career would include two hitches as a Washington correspondent, two periods abroad as a European correspondent, based in Rome and London, but also intervals on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Though he spent most of his life covering U.S. foreign policy, as a reporter, editorial writer and public radio commentator, Hovey once summed up his career in journalism by saying he had covered "fires and floods, funerals and football, the jail house and the White House, a World Series and a World War." After two years on the Waterloo Courier, Hovey joined International News Service (INS) in Detroit in 1940 and helped cover the World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the Cincinnati Reds that fall. A year later, based in Chicago for INS, he covered the National Football League championship game in Wrigley Field between the Chicago Bears and the New York Giants, two weeks after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States unto World War II. In May 1942, Hovey left sports behind when INS sent him to Africa as a war correspondent, where he covered the American and British forces in Tunisia until the German surrender in Africa, May 9, 1943. Later in Italy, he covered the siege at Cassino, the allied breakout from the Anzio beachhead and the liberation of Rome, June 4, 1944, the first of the enemy capitals to fall to the Allies. In France, after the Riviera invasion in August 1944, Hovey and four colleagues took a Jeep into what was still No-Man's Land, lived with French underground forces for a week and broke the first stories on the wiping out of the tiny French village of Oradoursur-Glane and the slaughter of all its men, women and children by the German S.S. division called "Das Reich." It was an incident compared to the earlier extermination by Nazis of Lidice in Czechoslovakia. It produced a historic war crimes trial after the war and would embarrass President Ronald Reagan who, during a state visit to Germany, laid a wreath at the cemetery where Das Reich troops are buried. Hovey left INS in late 1944 to become a foreign affairs reporter for the Associated Press in Washington. Two years later, he joined the New Republic as an assistant editor for foreign affairs. But in 1947, he changed course to enter graduate school and teach journalism, first at Minnesota, then at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he rose to the rank of associate professor. He also broadcast a weekly radio program called "The Background of the News" for the University Station WHA and the 10-station Wisconsin State Broadcasting Service. This, in turn, led to a two-year Fulbright research grant in Italy during which Hovey was accredited to Radiotelevisione Italiana and broadcast a weekly "Letter from Italy" for U.S. stations belonging to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, a forerunner of National Public Radio. In 1956, Hovey returned to daily journalism as an editorial writer and frequent United Nations correspondent for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. And in January 1959, he was appointed the first European correspondent for the Minneapolis newspapers, based on London, though his "beat" covered Europe, east and west. He remained in this post until invited in 1965 by John B. Oakes to join the editorial board of The New York Times. There he wrote editorials and occasional signed editorial columns on Europe, Africa and the Americas, and traveled abroad nearly every year. When Oakes left the editorial department to become senior editor of The Times in 1977, Hovey returned to foreign-affairs reporting in the Times's Washington bureau until he retired from the paper in 1980 to become professor of communication and director of the Journalism Fellows program at The University of Michigan. He also taught an editorial-writing course called "The Opinion Function." Later, as a professor emeritus at Michigan he taught a first-year seminar called "The Making of U.S. Foreign Policy." Among the many awards that Mr. Hovey received are: Overseas Press Club of America, "Best Press Interpretation of Foreign Affairs" and a shared National Headliners Club Award, both for United Nations coverage, 1958; Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota 1985; Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin, 1978; Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Northern Iowa, 1981. He was inducted to the Minnesota Daily Hall of Distinction, 1999. Services will be private and held at the convenience of the family. Arrangements are by Stephens Funeral Home Inc. Please share online condolences at www.stephensfuneral.com . In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Landgraf-Hovey Scholarship, University of Northern Iowa Foundation, 205 Commons, Cedar Falls, IA 50614 or Salvation Army, 144 N. 8th St., Allentown, PA 18101.