Larger Than Life

At the Villa Akhnaton, on Cairo's outskirts, newsmen found the host in a loquacious mood. Karl Henry von Wiegand had been a journalist before his guests were born, and he was eager to spin yarns out of his past. Inevitably, he remembered his 1914 interview with Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Germany, some three months after the prince's father, Kaiser Wilhelm, had entered World War I: "Willie said to me, 'My dear Wiegand, you must tell Papa that we have lost the war. Every time I attempt to tell him, he gets furious at me.' "

As he reminisced through that long afternoon six years ago, the old man and his improbable stories sounded like a relic from a world that never was. But Karl von Wiegand brought that world alive. He was a living legend, whose very name might have been lifted from E. Phillips Oppenheim. He was the stage version of the foreign correspondent, complete with collar-up trench coat, brim-down hat, and blackthorn cane. He was a man who had known Hitler in 1921, interviewed two Popes, chartered the Graf Zeppelin for a trip around the world, covered twelve wars and been wounded in two. He had been a working newspaperman for 62 years.

Must Run. Separating the real from the legendary Von Wiegand would have been an impossible assignment for Von Wiegand himself. He took too much pleasure in embellishing the legend. Born in Germany, raised on an Iowa farm, he once told an interviewer that he had worked as a ranch hand for Buffalo Bill --a fancy so wild and appropriate that it has never been disproved. Fact is that he learned telegraphy as a young man in Arizona, tried working as a country newspaper correspondent, then moved to California, where his natural flamboyance caught the eye of another flamboyant journalist, William Randolph Hearst. Eventually, the two men formed a professional alliance so strong that Von Wiegand stories bore a "must-run" mandate second only to Hearst's "The Chief says."

The world became Von Wiegand's dateline. He went everywhere, usually twice. War was his private preserve. He spotted the first World War in the making, and in July 1914 he made the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia the subject of a 138-word cable to the United Press, then his employer. His reward was a rebuke for the length of his message. He was on hand shortly after the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, and during the battle for Shanghai coolly covered both sides: "I'd go in the morning to the Chinese front and then at noon call a taxicab and motor over to the Japanese front." He was at Addis Ababa shortly before Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935.

Hitler was an old acquaintance; Von Wiegand had known the Nazi long before the beer-hall days. In 1940, when he sought an audience with the Fuehrer, Hitler deferred his drive toward Paris long enough to meet Von Wiegand near Brussels--a reunion that Von Wiegand recorded in his usual breathless style: "Hitler dashed up in a six-wheeled open car, sitting beside the chauffeur. There was a clicking of heels and an outstretching of arms in salute. Von Ribbentrop greeting him at the entrance. It is two years since my last talk with Hitler."

Part newsman, part showman, Von Wiegand brought to foreign correspondence a Sunday-supplement excitement that never waned. When the Hearst papers chartered the Graf Zeppelin in 1929 for a global flight, Von Wiegand, at 55, was as eager to ride it as he was to rush to Manila early in December 1941, at 67, sensing another war. And when war broke out, Karl von Wiegand stood so close to it--at the end of Manila's Pier 7 during a Japanese bomber attack--that concussion permanently damaged the retinas of both eyes. Captured later by the Japanese in company with Lady Hay-Drummond-Hay, another Hearst journalist, he was held only briefly and was released because of ill health.

Last War. It was Von Wiegand's last war, but far from the end of his career. In 1945, he flashed a perceptive alarm to the West about the "Red Russian tidal flood . . . The war has loosened upon Europe the most powerful imperialistic force since Napoleon--totalitarian, Communist Soviet Russia." Eyesight failing, he roved restlessly about his old international haunts, a derring-do journalist, lost in the geopolitical maze of another era. In 1959, from New Delhi, he sent up another rocket: "Soviet Russia and Red China reportedly have agreed in Peiping to divide the globe north of the Equator into two areas of Red operations."

Last April, fiddle-footed as ever, he flew out of the Sahara, chasing down one more story from the Far East. But the hunt was over. Stricken with pneumonia in Tokyo, he was rushed by plane to a hospital in Zurich, his summer home. There, Karl von Wiegand died last week at 86, the last of his breed, a legend somewhat larger than life.

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