Arnaud de Borchgrave: Lovely Fun, Lovely Man

​Arnaud de Borchgrave, who streaked into the journalistic firmament at the end of World War II, died Sunday. He was 88, and had been a National Press Club member since 2003.

Born a Belgian count with a Jewish mother, a Rothschild, de Borchgrave thanked Britain's Royal Navy for saving his family by serving as an underage seaman during the war. The family had sailed, he told me, from Marseilles in a tramp steamer, but were betrayed by the captain -- who set off not for freedom, but for a Nazi-controlled port. The British Navy intervened and took them to England. In gratitude, de Borchgrave, aged 16, joined the Royal Navy "before the mast." He had a hard time of it from sexual predators on his ship, and said he had been raped by a non-commissioned officer.

After the war, he joined United Press, later to become United Press International when it absorbed Hearst's International News Service.

As with many young journalists of the time, before the trade became dominated by journalism schools and prizes, he set out to reap its great reward, going everywhere and knowing everyone. He did both. Small, dapper, charming and ambitious, what he lacked in command of English, he made up for in command of his situation. He was fiery and energetic: a true enfant terrible.

Later, de Borchgrave joined Newsweek and flourished as a war correspondent, covering 18 wars, he said. He co-wrote a propagandist novel, "The Spike," which was an attack on communism. He was vigorously anti-communist, which led the U.S. right-wing to embrace him as a staunch conservative. "Nonsense" he said. He was a staunch journalist.

His anti-communist views led him to be offered the job of editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, where he adopted an imperial style with his staff. He would write them notes on 3M canary yellow Post-its and drop them from a balcony onto the staff below. They were known as "yellow rain." Later in life, he was very disappointed in the totally political hue that enveloped the paper: He was too much of a journalist to approve of its being taken over for political rhetoric.

De Borchgrave was a frequent guest of mine on "White House Chronicle," where we comported ourselves with schoolboy joy before the TV show, after the show and between takes, trading elaborate insults.

Sample: "Arnaud, how was it covering the Boer War?"

"I got a lot of scoops, which is more than you did in Crimea?"

We could keep it up for long periods. Two old newspapermen behaving like,well, two old newspapermen.

Lovely fun. Lovely man.