Karl Meyer, a noted foreign correspondent and editorial writer for The Washington Post and The New York Times, died Dec. 22, 2019, at age 91.
Meyer graduated from Wisconsin in 1951. At Princeton he earned an MPA in 1953 from the Woodrow Wilson School and a Ph.D. in 1956 in politics. He spent 15 years with The Post as an editorial writer and bureau chief in London and New York. Later he joined the editorial board of The Times in 1979 as a senior writer on foreign affairs before retiring in 1998.
An adventurous reporter, Meyer covered Castro’s revolution in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1973, he wrote The Plundered Past, which helped inspire a cultural heritage restitution movement.
In a signed editorial in 1990, Meyer responded to a revelation of serious derelictions by Walter Duranty, The Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning bureau chief in the 1920s and early 1930s. Meyer wrote that Duranty had ignored Stalin’s terrible crimes against his own people and was guilty of “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.”
Meyer is survived by Shareen Blair Brysac, his third wife, whom he married in 1989; three children from his first marriage; and three grandchildren.
Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA