Homer Bigart

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Homer William Bigart (born October 25, 1907 in Hawley, Pennsylvania, died April 16, 1991 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire) was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and later the New York Times. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one Pulitzer Prize for Telegraphic Reporting - International for his reporting in World War II, and the one Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his reporting in the Korean War.

Homer Bigart was one of the greatest reporters in the history of American journalism. In a profession whose work is usually ephemeral, in which reporters joke that they are only as good as their last story, Mr. Bigart stood as an enduring role model. During a prize-collecting career of nearly four decades, he always seemed to be at the top of his game, much to the dismay of his competitors. His articles remained taut, witty and astringently understated, even when created under deadline pressure and the appalling working conditions imposed by war and famine; even when they concerned mundane events that lesser reporters regarded as routine. Mr. Bigart knew that what counted was not the place but the poetry and that a reporter could create memorable prose from even the most unremarkable happening. Such pieces became models of grace by which young reporters measured their own talent, and they were the reality from which a legend was born. In journalism schools and in the drafty city rooms of a town that always prided itself on being the ultimate stop for the nation's most gifted newspaper reporters, Mr. Bigart was regarded with awe.

He won most of the major national and local prizes in journalism. There was a Pulitzer Prize, and there was an uncommon second Pulitzer. There were an Overseas Press Club award and the George Polk Memorial Award and the Meyer Berger Award and a Page One Award, and many others. All were given for the resourcefulness and courage that Mr. Bigart repeatedly showed in World War II, the Greek civil war, the Korean War and the turbulent years that followed, when he wrote about the civil-rights struggle and hunger and the extraordinary changes that were taking place in urban and rural America. All of his articles were written either for The Herald Tribune, where he worked from 1929 to 1955, or The Times, where he worked from 1955 until his retirement in 1972. If his reporter friends told him that the encomiums in his stocking approached an indecent level, they were proud that he had won such praise, because they felt he was the best of them. Wherever he went and whatever he did, his copy rose above the moment; no awards judge could resist Mr. Bigart at his best. For example, there was the opening of the article he wrote from the battleship Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, telling readers of The Herald Tribune that one of the greatest military struggles in world history was finally over: "Japan, paying for her desperate throw of the dice at Pearl Harbor, passed from the ranks of the major powers at 9:05 A.M. today when Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the document of unconditional surrender. If the memories of the bestialities of the Japanese prison camps were not so fresh in mind, one might have felt sorry for Shigemitsu as he hobbled on his wooden leg toward the green baize covered table where the papers lay waiting. He leaned heavily on his cane and had difficulty seating himself. The cane, which he rested against the table, dropped to the deck of this battleship as he signed."

And there was the time in 1943 that he took a troopship to London and was surprised that it had not been torpedoed, reports of scores of U-boats to the contrary. Three paragraphs from the end of his dispatch he wrote: "Then you woke up one morning and the ship was very steady, and you knew she had entered the harbor. You had arrived. You had crossed the submarine-infested Atlantic without sighting even a porpoise. A hell of a thing to have to confess to your grandchildren."

War is damaging to the sense of humor of those who are caught up in it, but Mr. Bigart, describing the American Army's pursuit of the Germans in Sicily and noting that civilian conduct had been "exemplary," wrote this on July 25, 1943, as a last paragraph: "In fact, the Sicilians are too friendly. Their attitude strengthens the impression that this island is a forgotten portion of Southern California, instead of a segment of enemy Italy." "Generally, there is no mistaking the dead -- their strange contorted posture leaves no room for doubt. But this soldier, his steel helmet tilted over his face, seemed merely resting in the field. We did not know until we came within a few steps and saw a gray hand hanging limply from a sleeve."

After he joined The Times, Mr. Bigart covered such important assignments as the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal, in Israel in 1961. The following year Mr. Bigart surveyed the war in Vietnam. He was already in his middle 50's, but he had lost none of his ability to understand a situation and report it quickly. David Halberstam, who succeeded Mr. Bigart for The Times, recalled that Mr. Bigart was one of the first reporters to conclude that contrary to the Pentagon's representations, America was not about to win an easy war, and that the war was in fact a tragedy and a mistake. He advised younger reporters to write that the American effort "just doesn't work." Mr. Halberstam said Mr. Bigart's irreverence, his "unerring instincts," his willingness to challenge "the official version" and his leadership were the sustenance that younger reporters needed to chronicle an unprecedented American military tragedy.

In 1963, when The Times asked him to cover the grim winter confronting unemployed coal miners in Kentucky, it was clear that Mr. Bigart had lost none of his reportorial eye: "Creeks are littered with garbage, choked with boulders and silt dislodged by strip-mine operations. Hillsides that should be a solid blaze of autumn color are slashed with ugly terraces, where bulldozers and steam shovels have stripped away the forest to get at the coal beneath."

The legend was not built simply on his articles. It rested as much on the man himself. Mr. Bigart, a shy and private man with a pronounced stammer, was at once retiring and combative, devoted equally, it seemed, to minding his own business and to hoisting a few with friends. It was on these occasions that he told the stories the journalists of his era loved to tell and hear. And he did it as well in bars as in print. His insouciant one-liners about people, places and things were not soon forgotten by colleagues. At The Herald Tribune, for example, one colleague (and rival) was Marguerite Higgins, a determined World War II and Korean War correspondent who won much fame because of the aggressive way she pursued reporting. Miss Higgins was a pioneer working in what men liked to think of as their province, and she often outmaneuvered most male rivals, who, in those prefeminist days, would have preferred her to be shy and confined to the society page, or, as they might have put it, barefoot and pregnant.

On one occasion, she did become pregnant. When Mr. Bigart learned of it, he snapped: "Oh, g-good. And wh-wh- who is the mother?" Later, when the baby was born, Mr. Bigart cheerily inquired if the mother had devoured it. Another competitor in the old days was Clifton Daniel, a correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem in the late 1940's when Mr. Bigart covered Israel for The Herald Tribune. Years later Mr. Daniel, who eventually became managing editor of The Times, recalled how hard he had to work to avoid being scooped by Mr. Bigart. "I worked out a system for keeping an eye on him," Mr. Daniel said. "I persuaded him to move into the Eden Hotel, where I lived after the King David was bombed by the Zionist underground. Moreover I had a car, and Homer didn't; I offered to give him a lift whenever there was a big story to be covered out of town, so I always knew where he was." But the ploy didn't work. Britain then ran Palestine under a United Nations mandate, and Mr. Daniel said that Mr. Bigart "sneaked out of the press room of the British Office of Information and held a clandestine interview one night with one of the biggest underground leaders. I didn't know anything about it until the next day," Mr. Daniel said.

Later, after Mr. Bigart returned to New York, he would occasionally drink martinis at a grungy newspaper bar in the Times Square area where the customers could always see what they were breathing. Taking stock of the environment one night, Mr. Bigart politely inquired of the bartender what day of the week they changed the air. One evening, late in life, he decided to tell Murray Illson, a reporter friend at The Times, that he was marrying again. "I showed her mine, and she showed me hers," Mr. Bigart said. Before Mr. Illson could say anything, Mr. Bigart added, "Our bankbooks."

Like other great reporters of his generation, Mr. Bigart never hesitated to show disdain for his editors and independence from them. One evening late in his career, he was assigned to write about a riot, drawing on information from reporters on the street. As one reporter, John Kifner, called in from a phone booth, rioters began shaking it and Mr. Kifner conveyed his fright to Mr. Bigart. But Mr. Bigart, busy fending off editors he regarded as hysterical, comforted Mr. Kifner by noting, "At least you're dealing with sane people."

Homer William Bigart was born Oct. 25, 1907, in Hawley, Pa., in the Pocono region, the son of Homer S. Bigart, a woolens manufacturer, and Anna Schardt Bigart. He attended public schools there, then ventured to Pittsburgh to enroll in the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He thought he wanted to be an architect. The institute felt otherwise. "They found I couldn't draw," Mr. Bigart later recalled, "and invited me to find another school." In 1929, Mr. Bigart complied. He enrolled in the New York University School of Journalism and got a job as a night copy boy on The Herald Tribune. N.Y.U. liked him well enough, but Mr. Bigart remained unconvinced that his journalism professors knew much about journalism. He dropped out, and in 1929, as the Great Depression was starting, joined The Trib full time. Since he was neither a college graduate nor adept at office politics, he remained a copy boy for four years. But then The Trib decided to give him a chance and made him a general-assignment reporter at $25 a week. At first, it seemed he would not make it. He was a painfully slow writer. Editors were amazed at his bizarre typing style, in which he double-spaced between words. He made the errors that young reporters are prone to make. Once, assigned to cover the start of coach railroad service between New York and Florida, he went to the wrong track and wrote about the wrong railroad.

It was in this period that Mr. Bigart found he could use his halting speech to become a more effective reporter. The stammer made it easier for him to pose as a bumbler who was not very smart. He would often say to those he interviewed something like, "G-g-gee, I d-d-didn't really understand that. C-c-could you repeat it?" Most of those he interviewed went to extra lengths to make sure he got the story straight, and the result was that Mr. Bigart's articles seemed to be clearer than anyone else's; the quotations were invariably rich.

During the 1930's the paper found ample reason to have more and more confidence in Mr. Bigart's skills, and in 1942 he was asked if he would become a war correspondent. He agreed and went on to cover the London blitz, the bombing of Nazi Germany, the battles of North Africa, Italy and southern France. When the war was over in Europe, he moved to the Pacific and covered the final months of the war against Japan. He always seemed determined to cover war at the cannon's mouth and was one of the first reporters to enter Hiroshima after the Americans dropped the atomic bomb.

Newsweek called him "the hardest kind of worker and the fairest kind of competitor." Philip Potter of The Baltimore Sun said Mr. Bigart "worked over his copy more than any of the rest of us correspondents, who were anxious after a hard day in the field to get our copy written and filed so we could get a drink. Homer would still be at his portable, crossing off one word because he had thought of a better one," Mr. Potter said. "He observed things that we had missed."

The plaudits kept coming when he covered the war in Korea. In that war, Newsweek called him "the best war correspondent of an embattled generation." The people who ran some of the countries Mr. Bigart visited as a reporter did not entirely agree with that appraisal. Because of the independence of his reporting, he was ordered out of Hungary, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Vietnam. The Vietnamese order was rescinded; the censor admitted he had made a translation error that led him to believe that Mr. Bigart had written something obscene.

When Mr. Bigart left The Trib to join The Times, there was no particular joy in it for him. The Trib was a decade away from its demise, and its economic problems were not lost on Mr. Bigart. But it was a paper with a proud tradition of giving writers their head, and Mr. Bigart loved it. "It seemed to me that he always looked down on The Times, even when he worked there," Mr. Daniel said. "Its main fault, in his eyes, was that it wasn't The Trib. It was too proud and stiff-necked for his taste. But he knew that if he couldn't work for The Trib, the next best thing was The Times. He was not disloyal to it; he just wasn't in love with it."

Mr. Bigart's first two wives were Alice Veit, who died in 1959 after they were divorced, and Alice Weel, a producer for CBS News, who died in 1969. The next year he married Else Holmelund Minarik, the author of children's books, who survived him.