William Eaton; won Pulitzer as journalist
WASHINGTON -- William J. Eaton, a Pulitzer-prize winning Washington and foreign correspondent whose friendly curiosity about the impact the pending dissolution of the Soviet Union was having on ordinary Russians enlivened his reports from Moscow, is dead at 74.
Mr. Eaton, whose career in journalism spanned more than a half-century, died in a Potomac, Md., hospice Tuesday night after more than a year of illness in which he struggled with several medical problems.
A memorial service will be held Oct. 1 at the National Press Club.
Mr. Eaton was awarded a Pulitzer prize for national reporting in 1970 for his articles for the Chicago Daily News on the protracted Senate confirmation fight over President Nixon's unsuccessful nomination of US Circuit Court Judge Clement J. Haynsworth Jr. to the Supreme Court.
The son of a Chicago plasterer, Mr. Eaton was active in the American Newspaper Guild. Like several other hard-digging reporters of that era, he had the notorious distinction of being on Nixon's Enemies List.
As the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Moscow from 1984 to 1988, when Mikhail Gorbachev began a process that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Eaton ''would rather schmooze Russians in the street and in their homes" than pore over turgid government reports, recalled a Times colleague, Stanley Meisler.
''He seemed to know more than a little about just about everything," recalled Richard Cooper, who was the deputy bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Washington.
Retiring in 1994, Mr. Eaton became curator of the Humphrey Fellowship program at the University of Maryland. He was a veteran of the Army, in which he held the rank of sergeant, and was a president of the National Press Club.
Mr. Eaton's daughter, Susan, was a union leader, community activist, and public policy professor at Harvard University. She died last year.
Mr. Eaton leaves his wife, Carole Kennon; a daughter, Sally Misare of Castle Rock, Colo.; and two grandchildren. A first marriage to Marilyn Myers Eaton ended in divorce.
