Arnaud de Borchgrave, the son of a Belgian count and a storied foreign correspondent who cabled back bell-ringing scoops throughout the Cold War decades, often from the battlefield, died on Sunday in Washington. He was 88.
His wife, Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave, said the cause was bladder cancer.
Twice a best-selling novelist, Mr. de Borchgrave led a life that rivaled fiction. A teenager when he enlisted in the British Navy, he was wounded on D-Day. He was wounded again, as a Newsweek reporter, in Vietnam (where he lobbed a grenade at North Vietnamese soldiers). He covered, by his estimate, at least 18 wars. At 58, he was named editor in chief of a daily newspaper, though he had never worked for one before.
A correspondent and editor at Newsweek for decades, Mr. de Borchgrave was fired by the magazine in 1980, after his increasingly conservative political bent found its way into his dispatches, ending in his likening the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Hitler’s pre-World War II grab of Czechoslovakia.
He found a more hospitable place to work in 1985. He was hired to direct the news coverage and the editorials of The Washington Times, the daily newspaper started with the financial support of the Unification Church and its founder, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the conservative South Korean evangelist who led a worldwide spiritual movement.
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He gave up editorial control in 1991, rejoined what had been renamed United Press International as president in 1998 and stayed on in 2000 when Mr. Moon’s News World Communications bought the news service to rescue it. He became editor at large in 2001 and continued writing a column.
In the last one, dated Dec. 21, 2014, he urged the United States to extricate itself from Middle East quagmires and “to look inward and prioritize long overdue and neglected domestic crises, from collapsing infrastructure coast to coast, to the rapid erosion of America’s backbone — i.e., the middle classes — and alarming growth of poverty.”
In July, France named him to its Legion of Honor.
If he could have, Mr. de Borchgrave, who boasted of his prescience, might have drafted his own obituary. According to Harlan Ullman, a fellow columnist at U.P.I., he came close. “He once joked with me,” Dr. Ullman said, “that his tombstone would read: ‘I knew this would happen.’ ”
