William Randolph Hearst, Journalist, Dies at 85

By The Associated Press

Published: May 15, 1993

William Randolph Hearst Jr., editor in chief of the Hearst newspapers and an heir to the publishing empire established by his father, died yesterday. He was 85.

He died at his home in New York, said George Raine, the assistant city editor at the San Francisco Examiner, flagship newspaper of the Hearst chain. Mr. Raine declined to give a cause of death.

Mr. Hearst, the second of five sons born to William Randolph and Millicent Willson Hearst, found his calling as a reporter and editor. He shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1956.

For nearly 40 years he wrote a Sunday editorial column called "Editor's Report." He lobbied for a strong military, pushed for a modern highway system and traveled extensively to interview world leaders.

He enjoyed friendships with Hollywood celebrities like John Wayne and Bing Crosby and the camaraderie of New York nightclub life. With Howard Hughes, he shared a passion for airplanes and fast cars.

But he kept a lower public profile in the years following the 1974 kidnapping of his niece, Patricia Hearst, who was abducted by a terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, in California and wound up being convicted in a bank robbery. A Legacy's Limits

Mr. Hearst sat on the board of trustees of the privately held Hearst Corp. but neither he nor his brothers ever inherited the leadership mantle of their powerful father. That role went to outsiders.

"The old man was a flamboyant editor and publisher," Mr. Hearst wrote. "He lived for headlines and national press battles. I lived in my father's shadow all my life."

That long shadow began at The Examiner. Mr. Hearst's grandfather, George Hearst, a wealthy silver miner and California Senator, was said to have received the failing paper as partial payment of a poker debt.

In 1887, the Senator entrusted The Examiner to Mr. Hearst's father, who turned it around, then bought The Journal in New York and began to challenge Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, The New York World.

As the Hearst newspaper chain grew, so did the elder Hearst's reputation as a news media barons. Privileged Existence

His second son and namesake was born in New York City on Jan. 27, 1908. As a child, he split his time between the family's huge apartment on the West Side and his grandmother's home in Pleasanton, Calif.

William Randolph Hearst Jr. and his brothers led a privileged existence. "None of us knew the meaning of financial need," he wrote in his book "The Hearsts: Father and Son," published in 1991. "We asked, and things simply appeared," he recalled.

Despite the lavishness of the surroundings, Mr. Hearst recalled that his father "made it clear from our high school years that each of us would have to pull his own weight in life, especially if we went to work for him." Starting at the Presses

Mr. Hearst did. During vacations from a San Rafael, Calif., military academy, he worked at the Hearst-owned New York Mirror as a flyboy, loading and unloading presses.

He left the University of California after two years and joined the staff of the New York American, another Hearst paper, as a police reporter. He was made publisher in 1936, a year before two Hearst papers merged to become the Journal-American.

Mr. Hearst was a war correspondent in Europe from 1943 to 1945. Once his father, who also served as his editor, wired him to stop writing about bombing raids until he flew in one. Mr. Hearst promptly went up in a B-26.

After his work in managing the newspaper, Mr. Hearst decided he was preferred writing. In 1955, four years after his father's death, he received permission to visit the Soviet Union and took his colleagues Frank Conniff and Kingsbury Smith with him.

Through Mr. Smith's persistence, they won exclusive interviews with Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov, Communist party secretary Nikita Khrushchev and others.

Their articles, distributed through the Hearst-owned International News Service, won wide attention because they gave the first indication of the post-Stalin leadership's attitude on Allied-Soviet relationships.

The series won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting -- an award established by Mr. Pulitzer, the senior Hearst's turn-of-the-century rival.

Months after the Moscow visit, Mr. Hearst was namedto the post of editor in chief of the chain's newspapers -- a position his father had held for nearly 50 years. But he did not control the corporation. Supported McCarthy

Editorially, Mr. Hearst continued his father's crusade against Communism and supported Senator Joseph McCarthy even after he had been discredited.

Mr. Hearst was twice divorced before marrying Austine McDonnell, a society gossip columnist, in 1948. The couple had two sons, William Randolph III and Austin. Mrs. Hearst died in June 1991.