Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor, dies at the age of 66
Fred Hiatt, the longtime editorial page editor of The Washington Post, who used his position atop one of the nation’s most visible and influential opinion platforms to support justice and human rights, died Monday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 66.
He had been visiting his daughter in Brooklyn on Nov. 24 and was out shopping for the family’s Thanksgiving dinner when he went into sudden cardiac arrest, said his wife, Margaret Shapiro, who is known as Pooh. A bystander immediately called 911, she said, but Hiatt never regained consciousness. She said he had a history of heart ailments. He lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Hiatt, a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing, led The Post’s opinion section for more than two decades. In that time, he expanded the staff from about a dozen people to more than 80, broadening its reach and its ranks to include not only seasoned journalists but also younger, up-and-coming writers, videographers, bloggers and designers. Karen Tumulty, a deputy editorial page editor, said the section is now “the house that Fred built.”
Hiatt was perhaps best known in recent years for leading the newspaper’s outraged response to the 2018 abduction and murder of one of its Saudi contributors, Jamal Khashoggi, a legal permanent resident of Virginia. On Oct. 5, 2018, when Khashoggi first disappeared, Hiatt ran an attention-grabbing empty white space on the opinion page where Khashoggi’s column would have appeared.
Hiatt orchestrated numerous editorials and essays by outside contributors demanding justice on Khashoggi’s behalf, established a fellowship in his name and gave a global platform to other dissident writers from the Arab world who had been banned from their domestic media.
An intelligence report released by the Biden administration in February said that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia had approved the Khashoggi assassination.
Donald E. Graham, the publisher of The Post who named Hiatt as editorial page editor in 1999, said that he had chosen him for his independence, “which is a somewhat rare quality in Washington.”
As The Post’s editorial board noted in a tribute published online Monday, Hiatt had championed Aung San Suu Kyi when she was an imprisoned freedom fighter in Myanmar, and she visited The Post to thank him personally for his support. But years later, when she defended a genocidal military campaign against the country’s Rohingya minority, he condemned her in an editorial.
“Few journalists have rivaled his idealism and complete dedication to the causes of democracy and human rights worldwide,” Frederick J. Ryan Jr., The Post’s current publisher and chief executive, said in a statement.