Lance Morrow

Lance Morrow
Born	Lance Thomas Morrow (1939-09-21)September 21, 1939 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	November 29, 2024(2024-11-29) (aged 85) Spencertown, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Essayist author journalist
Alma mater	Harvard University (BA)
Period	1963–2024
Spouse	Brooke Wayne (divorced) Susan Brind ​ (m. 1988)​
Children	2
Relatives	James K. Morrow (cousin)

Lance Morrow was an American essayist who worked as an active journalist for 70 years, beginning as a staff reporter at the Danville News in Danville Pa. in 1955 at the age of 16.

https://www.amazon.com/Chief-Memoir-Fathers-Sons/dp/0020054009.

In the words of The Wall Street Journal “Morrow was the farthest thing from a partisan or a conformist…Morrow’s knowledge of American politics was vast, much of it based on his own experience and memory.”

Lance Morrow, 1939-2024

Lance Morrow 1939-2024, The elegant writer covered American life and politics since LBJ Wall Street Journal December 01, 2024.

Morrow’s parents were Washington journalists and knew many of the political operatives of the time. His introduction to American politics began as a Senate page boy in the early 1950s, bringing ice cream to Lyndon Johnson and observing Joe McCarthy first hand. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/business/media/lance-morrow-dead.html

Morrow attended the Jesuit School Gonzaga in Washington, an experience he discussed with Ted Koppel on Nightline in the early 1990s. Koppel asked Morrow about another Gonzaga graduate Pat Buchanan, whom Morrow did not know personally. Morrow described the “Buchanan boys” as notorious Gonzaga school bullies in his first book The Chief.

https://www.amazon.com/Chief-Memoir-Fathers-Sons/dp/0020054009.

After graduating Magna cum Laude from Harvard in 1963 Morrow worked at the Washington Star with Carl Bernstein, who became a lifelong friend. Bernstein dedicated his memoir Chasing History to Morrow in 2022. Morrow, according to Bernstein, “occupies a unique place in the journalism of our time” and has been an “incomparable joy” in the author’s life.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/16/chasing-history-review-carl-bernstein-watergate-woodward-wallace-washington-post-star

While at the Washington Star in 1964 Morrow found the body of John Kennedy’s girlfriend Mary Pinchot Meyer shot through the head on Canal Towpath.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/44-years-later-a-washington-dc-death-unresolved-93263961/

Morrow worked for Time Magazine from 1965-2005, during which time Morrow wrote a record 152 Time cover stories, chronicling the major issues, wars, ethical dilemmas, cultural phenomena and personalities of the of the late twentieth century into the twenty first. Morrow remains widely quoted as an American political and cultural analyst.

https://www.azquotes.com/author/10446-Lance_Morrow

Morrow was a close witness to the unfolding history of America, recording and interpreting major events as they happened. He was also an interface influencing both the views of the general public and the actions of officials, hence influencing what happens.

https://modernagejournal.com/lance-morrows-time-at-the-top/238001/

Morrow was one of the first journalists with Hugh Sidey to write about the Watergate Break-in

In the words of Douglas Brinkley, Peggy Noonan “borrowed heavily” from Morrow’s essay cover story The Boys of Pointe du Hoc in her primary speech for Reagan; a speech that was drawn upon again by Biden in 2024

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/douglas-brinkley/the-boys-of-pointe-du-hoc/

Morrow pioneered the Magazine back page essay form which his editor Henry Grunwald assigned to him in the nineteen seventies. Morrow developed his own distinctive version of the essay as a high literary form of political and cultural commentary that was read by millions of people around the world on a regular basis. Morrow won The National Magazine Award for the Essay in 1981, was a finalist for the award for his cover story on Evil, chronicling, among other things, his visit to Bosnia as a war zone with Elie Wiesel, in 1991, and contributed the essay (written on a two hour deadline after the first plane went in) for Time Magazine on 9/11 that won The National Magazine Award in 2001. Morrow continued to write his distinctive essays as a contributing columnist for The Wall Street Journal in the last decade of his life.

Morrow was an early supporter of feminism, and wrote in favor of Geraldine Ferraro in the 1984 presidential election. https://time.com/archive/6884220/why-not-a-woman/

He also wrote in defense of men,

https://time.com/archive/6724726/men-are-they-really-that-bad/

Morrow began his career covering the Civil Rights Movement.

1968: The Year That Changed America" Part Three: Summer (TV Episode 2018) - IMDb

His father Hugh Morrow as chief aide to Nelson Rockefeller was the liaison between Martin Luther King Jr. and Rockefeller (who was one of his primary backers). Morrow was an admirer of King and wrote about him extensively.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-gift-of-grace-to-the-united-states

Morrow’s friendship with Life journalist Travis Williams when they were undergraduates at Harvard was featured in the 2020 book The Last Negroes at Harvard.

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Negroes-Harvard-Changed-Forever-ebook/dp/B07LC9DSRG

https://www.facebook.com/KentGarrettPodcasts/posts/the-harvard-gazette-provides-an-excerpt-from-the-last-negroes-at-harvard-at-the-/176041064145236

Race and Friendship at Harvard, 1963

In 1989 Morrow wrote a Time essay that saved Mt. Sinai From development, opening the way for Mt.Sinai to become World Heritage Site.https://time.com/archive/6714401/essay-trashing-mount-sinai/

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/379212/the-time-magazine-essay-that-saved-sinai/

Morrow sailed with William F. Buckley Jr. every summer for twenty years. In the words of Rush Limbaugh Buckley regarded Morrow as a “a lefty journalist” and one of his closest friends. Morrow was asked to write the introduction to the rerelease of Buckley’s first sailing book Windfall, and the introduction to Buckley’s book on Whitaker Chambers, The Odyssey of a Friend..

https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-friend-Whittaker-Chambers-1954-1961/dp/B0006C03EK

Morrow wrote many biographical profiles of the figures of our time, Man of the Year cover stories for Time Magazine, and profiles for Smithsonian. His final profile was a long biographical essay/obituary of Jimmy Carter for City Journal, written in the last days of Morrow’s life.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/president-jimmy-carter-death-obituary

In 1995 Morrow was invited to join the “University Professors” honors faculty at Boston University with Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Roger Scruton, Derek Walcott, Glen Loury, Shelley Glashaw, Rosanna Warren and Geoffrey Hill.

https://newcriterion.com/article/lance-morrow-1939-2024/

While on the University Professors faculty Morrow continued to write on contract for Time for another ten years, those years however were punctuated by very serious illness.

Morrow suffered his first heart attack at the age of 36 after working all night on the cover story on the 1976 Republican Convention in Iowa. He suffered from heart disease for the rest of his life, becoming one of six experimental stem cell/gene therapy heart patients at New York Hospital in 1998, which involved extensive heart surgery that took him a decade to recover from.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/9780446518703

Morrow married the author Susan Brind Morrow in 1988 while working on two back to back cover stories for Time on Israel and the Palestinians. The early days of their marriage were spent driving around Gaza interviewing Palestinian residents and the Israeli military. Morrow wrote in 2023 about his 1988 interview with the founder of Hamas

https://www.city-journal.org/article/an-encounter-with-sheikh-yassin.

Brind Morrow was on a Foundation Grant in Egypt from 1988-1990. Her first book The Names of Things gives a close account of their early marriage.

https://www.amazon.com/Names-Things-Susan-Brind-Morrow/dp/1573220272

susanbrindmorrow.com

The couple lived together on a farm in the Hudson Valley from 1992 until Morrow’s death in 2024.

Morrow married Brooke Wayne, a researcher at Time, in 1968. The marriage ended in 1982. Morrow has two sons from his first marriage, James Morrow, National Editor of The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and Justin Morrow, a writer and film maker in New York.

Morrow covered every presidential election over six decades from the beginning of his career until his death in 2024, when he was too ill to vote. Morrow wrote regularly for the Wall Street Journal in the last year of his life, refusing to take a side in the upcoming election and heavily criticizing both sides. Morrow’s final essay for The Wall Street Journal ends,

As mankind penetrates further into the 21st Century, the future becomes ever more difficult to imagine- politically, biologically, electronically, environmentally, existentially. No one knows what lies ahead, or what it will mean, or where it will wind up. The possibilities are extreme. At the far edge of the moral imagination we hear the future’s sucking sound, pulling the world toward God knows what.

The Future Can’t Happen Here

Lance Morrow October 2024

Bibliography

• The Chief: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (1985)
• Fishing in the Tiber: Essays (1988)
• America: A Rediscovery (1989)
• Heart: A Memoir (1995)
• Evil: An Investigation (2003)
• The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power (2005)
• Second Drafts of History: Essays (2006)
• God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money (2020)
• The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism (2023)

External links

• PBS Here & Now 9/17/2003 episode (audio) discusses Morrow's book Evil: An Investigation
• Appearances on C-SPAN