Of course, Mr. Hiatt had strong views of his own. His many years as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Post — he joined the paper in 1981 and covered Virginia politics and the Pentagon before foreign tours in Tokyo and Moscow — made him a passionate supporter of democracy, human rights and U.S. leadership of those causes. Embattled freedom fighters such as Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and Russia’s Boris Nemtsov knew Mr. Hiatt as an eloquent and tireless champion; when she traveled to Washington after her release from years of imprisonment, Aung San Suu Kyi visited The Post to thank him personally. However, years later, when Aung San Suu Kyi defended a genocidal military campaign against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority, Mr. Hiatt did not hesitate to condemn her.
Not only Nobel Prize winners attracted his support and advocacy. For years, he waged a lonely editorial and literary crusade on behalf of Wang Bingzhang, a Chinese dissident who was abducted in Vietnam in 2002, and his Canadian daughter Ti-Anna Wang. A much-praised novel for young adults that Mr. Hiatt published in 2013 was based on the family’s story.
When Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who had become a regular contributor to The Post’s Global Opinions section, was murdered in 2018 by a hit team dispatched by the kingdom’s ruler, Mr. Hiatt reacted forcefully. In addition to orchestrating a months-long series of editorials and op-eds demanding justice, he established an Opinion staff fellowship named after Khashoggi and encouraged other dissident writers from the Arab world and elsewhere to use The Post as a platform. Journalists from Egypt, India, Turkey, Venezuela and elsewhere who have been banned from domestic media are now published in Global Opinions.
At a time of partisan tribalism, Mr. Hiatt — and the unsigned editorials representing The Post’s position, which he oversaw — were notable for their independence. Mr. Hiatt’s outrage over the mass murders and other depravities of Saddam Hussein led him and the editorial board to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a stance that earned him enmity from many readers and colleagues. But conservative hawks who believed The Post had joined their side were disabused when Mr. Hiatt’s board conducted a fierce campaign against the torture of detainees in Iraq and at the Guantánamo Bay prison. In the summer of 2016, Mr. Hiatt authored a searing and prescient editorial that declared Mr. Trump unfit for the presidency — one of a series of commentaries for which he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Post editorials during Mr. Trump’s term, while mostly critical, gave the president credit for successes such as the defeat of the Islamic State and the freeing of U.S. citizens unjustly imprisoned abroad. Defenders of Mr. Trump were regularly published online and on the op-ed pages.
In his final years as editor, Mr. Hiatt led an unprecedented expansion of The Post’s opinion staff, which came to employ dozens of columnists, bloggers and cartoonists, as well as editors, videographers and designers. The challenges of managing this sprawling team were compounded by the pandemic and by the professional and moral dilemmas prompted by Mr. Trump’s violation of democratic norms; new social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter raised their own questions. That The Post’s Opinion staff avoided the upheavals that afflicted some other media and cultural institutions was largely because of the leadership skills of Mr. Hiatt. Mr. Hiatt was a careful listener, an honest broker and, most of all, an editor of surpassing intelligence, compassion and integrity. He leaves us a powerful personal and journalistic legacy.