Boyd France; in '47 reporter talked to Exodus passengers
WASHINGTON - Boyd France, who as a young reporter interviewed passengers on the Jewish refugee ship Exodus and who later became Washington bureau chief of BusinessWeek magazine and
During World War II, Mr. France drove an ambulance for the American Field Service, serving initially with the British Army in Iraq, North Africa, and Italy and then with the Free French Army in France and Germany. He remained in Paris after the war.
Although he had no background or experience in journalism, he wangled a job as a reporter for the English-language Paris Post and later for Reuters news service.
In July 1947, he and his wife, Denise Francoise Henry, were spending their honeymoon in the small Mediterranean town of Port-de-Bouc, where Mr. France had been sent to cover the saga of a Chesapeake Bay vessel called the President Warfield before it was rechristened Exodus 1947.
Aboard the Exodus were 4,500 Jewish war refugees who had been denied entry into the British mandate of Palestine. The Royal Navy was escorting the ship from Haifa, Israel, to Cyprus, and French authorities offered the passengers an opportunity to disembark at Port-de-Bouc. The passengers refused.
"We wish to go to Palestine," a spokesman told the authorities. "We shall not land in Europe as long as we are alive."
To get the story, Mr. France swam out to a small boat that positioned him close enough to the ship for him to interview the captain and passengers. He had paid a local bar owner to allow his wife to stay on the bar's public phone to keep it available until he returned to file his report. His account attracted worldwide attention.
He became the Paris bureau chief for BusinessWeek McGraw-Hill in 1948. He joined the Washington bureau in 1951 and was chief White House and State Department correspondent until retiring in 1986.
Harold Boyd France was born in New York and grew up on Long Island and in Winter Park, Fla. His father, Royal France, was a corporate lawyer and economics professor who became a civil rights crusader and legal defender of Communist Party members.
An uncle, Joseph France, was a US senator from Maryland who sought the Republican nomination for president in 1932 as a progressive alternative to Herbert Hoover.
Mr. France received a bachelor's degree in 1941 from Rollins College in Winter Park. A year earlier, Time magazine had reported on the arrival in New York of "two footloose, footsore Rollins College undergraduates," Mr. France, then 20, and his buddy, John Roderick MacArthur, 19. MacArthur's uncle, playwright Charles MacArthur, had offered the men a free trip to California if they could get to Manhattan on $2 and cadge free lodging from a top-flight New York hotel.
"After a week of catch-as-catch-can meals and flophouse nights, the Hotel Astor offered them a room," Time reported.
Mr. France and his college pal, whose father was the founder of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, enjoyed adventures in Mexico before joining the American Field Service together.
Besides his son, he leaves his wife of 62 years, of Cabin John, Md.; three other children, Catherine Nelsen of Cabin John, Linda Hartge of Brookville, and Bruce France of St. Paul; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. 