Frazier Hunt - Obituary

Obituary

Obituary from the New York Times, December 27, 1967:

Frazier Hunt, 82, War Reporter In the Romantic Tradition, Dies. From the Marne to Moscow, From Lenin to Hitler, He Covered the Big Story

Newtown, Pa., Dec. 27 (UPI)—Frazier Hunt, author, newspaperman and correspondent in two wars, died on Christmas Eve, it was disclosed today. He was 82 years old.

Mr. Hunt suffered a stroke at his home here last Wednesday and was taken to Abington Hospital in Montgomery County where he died.

His wife, Emma, died in 1964. He is survived by a son Robert, three grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.

A Flair for Adventure

A swashbuckling 240-pound Midwesterner who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and whose habitual attire was a trenchcoat and a fedora, Frazier Hunt fulfilled a romantic’s ideal of a foreign correspondent. For three decades, from World War I through World War II, his life was one adventure after another, one exclusive story following hard upon another from all over the world.

He interviewed the world’s leading statesmen, from Lenin, who talked to him in broken English in the first days of the Bolshevik Revolution, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he shared a luncheon tray in the White House. He covered big wars, small wars, revolutions and coups. He talked to the famous, from Maxim Gorky to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. And he was equally at home with the little known, whose words he reported in a notable survey of American opinion in 1936, a survey that forecast Mr. Roosevelt’s re-election.

Mr. Hunt—Spike as he was universally called—scored many notable exclusives, but perhaps none so dramatic as his acquiring a copy of the Treaty of Versailles before its release to the public. Carrying it from Paris to Chicago in the bottom of his kit bag, Mr. Hunt delivered the document to The Chicago Tribune, which published it. “I was called everything from a public benefactor to a traitor who should be publicly hung,” Mr. Hunt recalled in his autobiography, “One American and His Attempt at Education,” published in 1938.

Covered Pacific Campaign

In his career, Mr. Hunt worked for a variety of publishers and news services, including the International News Service, the National Editorial Association, and King Features. Many of his dispatches appeared in Hearst newspapers in New York and in The New York World-Telegram. In World War II, he covered the Pacific campaign and General MacArthur for The Reader's Digest.

Two biographies of General MacArthur were among his 14 books. The others included an account of the life of Dr. Allan Dafoe, physician to the Dionne quintuplets; a biography of King Edward VIII, with whom, as the Prince of Wales, he had shot craps ; and a life of Billy the Kid, his final book, which was published in 1956 by Hasting’s House as “The Tragic Days of Billy the Kid.”

Frazier Hunt was born in Rock Island, Ill., Dec. 1, 1885, and was graduated in 1908 from the University of Illinois, where he was a cheerleader. Ever afterward he had a voice that roared.

He was a cub reporter in Chicago for two years, a sugar planter in Mexico for two-and-a-half years and editor of a country newspaper in Alexis, Ill. In 1916, he came to New York and joined the staff of The New York Sun. According to legend, he was hired by Keats Speed, The Sun’s city editor, solely because Mr. Speed, a tall man, was impressed with Mr. Hunt’s height.

Assigned to cover a draft camp at Camp Upton on Long Island during World War I, he invented the character of Yaphank Bennie, who epitomized the shy, awkward boys who were undergoing basic training. Yaphank Bennie brought its creator national fame.

Mr. Hunt went to Europe to cover the war, first for the American Red Cross Magazine and then for The Chicago Tribune. A front-line correspondent, he witnessed part of the Battle of the Marne from a shell hole and marched with the American 42d Division on the Meuse-Argonne front.

Toward the end of the fighting in Europe, he was assigned to cover American troop intervention in the Russian Revolution. The presence of some 5,000 troops in the Arctic, near Archangel, was then little known. His dramatic dispatches, filed from Norway after he had left the front, were credited with forcing President Wilson to order the withdrawal of these soldiers.

Later, Mr. Hunt journeyed to Petrograd, now Leningrad, and to Moscow, where he interviewed the principal Bolshevik leaders. His cordial reception owed much to the sympathy he then expressed for the aims of the revolution and to his friendship with Lincoln Steffens, the American journalist.

Roved the World

After the war, Mr. Hunt went around the world as a roving correspondent. He interviewed Sun Yat-sen in China and Mohandas K. Gandi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) in India. He covered the bizarre attempt of Gabriel D'Annunzio, the Italian poet, to capture to port of Fiume. In Mexico, he cornered and questioned Pancho Villa. In Detroit, he interviewed Henry Ford on mysticism and religion. Mr. Hunt took his notebooks and typewriter back to Europe in 1922, where he developed a drinking relationship with Sinclair Lewis, covered Kemal Ataturk and the rise of Turkish nationalism, interviewed (and dismissed) Adolf Hitler, talked to Benito Mussolini, jogged across Siberia, interviewed Chinese and Japanese leaders. For 10 years his photograph and byline were almost as renowned as the names of those whose words and deeds he reported.

Returning to the United States in 1932, Mr. Hunt reported the first years of the New Deal, for which he had warm personal sympathies. For a while he was also a radio newscaster for the General Electric Company. In 1940, he returned to Europe to report on World War II, shifting to the Pacific theater after the United States entered the conflict in 1941.

With General MacArthur, whom he came to idolize, Mr. Hunt enjoyed a reputation for gusto and a hearty, self-confident roughness. His reportage, then, as earlier, was cast in the first person.

After the war, Mr. Hunt lived with his wife, the former Miss Emma Kern, in Newtown, Bucks County, Pa. He and Miss Kern, a childhood sweetheart, were married in 1911.