William Honan

William Honan (May 11, 1930 - April 28, 2014) was an American journalist and author. During his career, he directed coverage of the arts at The New York Times as its culture editor in the 1980s. Honan also held editorial positions at the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Saturday Review and The Villager, a weekly newspaper serving downtown Manhattan.

As a reporter, Honan set (and holds) the record for the most stories published in the New York Times Magazine (over 30).

Honan also helped solve one of the biggest and longest unsolved art thefts of the 20th century - the disappearance of over $200 million worth of medieval treasures from Quedlinburg, Germany at the end of the Second World War. Honan was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting on this story. The quest to find the "Quedlinburg Hoard" later became the subject of one of Honan's numerous books.

Early life

Honan was born in Manhattan on May 11, 1930, the son of William Francis Honan, a thoracic surgeon and Annette Neudecker Honan, a journalist. He is a brother of Park Honan, an academic and author.

He graduated from Oberlin College in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in history. In 1955 he earned a master's degree in drama from the University of Virginia. After serving in the Army, Honan moved to New York City where he managed Ed Koch's early political campaigns and began a notable career in journalism.

Career

The Villager

Honan worked at The Villager, a downtown New York City paper, from 1957 to 1960, and is credited with turning the publication from "a little society paper" to a force in Manhattan politics. Serving as editor, Honan convinced the assistant publisher, Jim Bledsoe, to endorse political candidates in 1959. In a 2,500-word, full-page editorial the paper backed Reform candidates against Carmine De Sapio, the last head of the Tammany Hall political machine. The editorial accused De Sapio of corruption.

De Sapio ended up winning the election by a margin The Villager in its headline called "Razor Margin." However, the paper also correctly predicted that this race was "the last hurrah" for De Sapio and the Tammany machine. De Sapio would run in and lose in the next three election cycles.

The New York Times

Honan joined the Times in 1969 as an editor at the Times Magazine. He went on to become editor of the Travel section in 1970 and editor of the Arts and Leisure section in 1974. He was promoted to daily cultural news editor in 1982 and held that job until 1988, at which point Honan was appointed chief cultural correspondent, a position that entailed "reporting on and analyzing trends in all the arts for daily and Sunday sections."

Books

Ted Kennedy, Profile of a Survivor

Honan gained direct and continuous access to Senator Edward Kennedy during the most tumultuous time of the Senator's life. Honan published his accounts of Kennedy's life in a series of New York Times Magazine articles in advance of the 1972 presidential election, when there was widespread speculation that Kennedy would make a run for the White House.

Honan expanded upon these articles in his 1972 book, Ted Kennedy, Profile of a Survivor: Edward M. Kennedy after Bobby, after Chappaquiddick, and after three years of Nixon. The book covers Kennedy's early career in the Senate, the Chappaquiddick incident, the aftermath of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Kennedy's anti-war speeches opposing President Richard Nixon's policy of Vietnamization.

Visions of Infamy

Visions of Infamy is a full biography of Hector Charles Bywater, the leading naval journalist of the first part of the 20th century who Honan argues was the architect of Japan's naval war against the United States in the Second World War. Bywater's 1925 book, The Great Pacific War, was a fictional account of how Japan might engage the United States in a theoretical future naval conflict and how the U.S. might respond. As Honan points out in Visions of Infamy, both Japan and the U.S. adopted strategies that were remarkably faithful to what Bywater promulgated in his fictionalized war game. Honan goes on to argue that this was much more than just a coincidence.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto familiarized himself with Bywater's works while serving two postings as Japanese naval attaché in Washington, D.C. As Honan demonstrated, Yamamoto adopted Bywater's plan, notably in the surprise attack against the U.S. fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. Separately, U.S. naval strategists came to adopt Bywater's controversial idea of island hopping to reverse Japanese advances in the Pacific and ultimately bring overwhelming naval and aerial superiority to bear against the Japanese forces. This strategy, known as War Plan Orange, became the official joint policy of the United States Army and Navy in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. One particularly notable example is Bywater's strategy for the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, in which U.S. commanders chose the very beaches to land forces on the archipelago that Bywater recommended. As Honan remarked, Bywater taught "two of the most powerful nations on Earth how to make war with each other."

Bywater was considered a relatively minor figure by military historians until Honan's book.

Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard

Honan published Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard in 1997. The book chronicles the story of how the "Quedlinburg Hoard" - a cache of medieval treasures valued at over $200 million - disappeared in the Harz Mountains at the end of the Second World War, only to resurface 40 years later in a small Texas town. Honan played a vital role in discovering the whereabouts of the art treasures.

In his capacity as chief cultural correspondent of the Times, Honan covered many of the controversies in the art world that involved the repatriation of artworks from war-ravaged countries and regions, many of which came to light at the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, many revelations came to light about World War II-era exploits, but few governments, particularly those in eastern Europe that were disproportionately effected, had the resources to launch full-scale investigations to find the lost treasures of their homelands. Investigative reporters in the United States had other things on their minds as well, but Honan was an exception. Over the course of many months, Honan pursued a series of leads that ultimately led him to a small Texas town. There he discovered that an American soldier at the end of the Second World War had orchestrated one of the greatest art thefts in history. Honan's book, Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard, recounts this detective story. The book has also been praised as a chronicle of the methods of the investigative reporter.

Family

Honan was married to Nancy Burton, an attorney and writer, for 37 years. He has two sons, Bradley Honan, CEO of KRC Research, and Daniel Honan, a media entrepreneur. His daughter, Edith Honan, is Politics & General News Reporter with Reuters. Honan has two granchildren.