Edition: U.S. / Global

Joseph C. Harsch, 93, a Journalist Who Witnessed History

Published: June 5, 1998

Joseph C. Harsch, a dashing newspaper, radio and television journalist and author who had a knack for being on hand when history was made, died on Wednesday at his home in Jamestown, R.I. He was 93.

Mr. Harsch, an Ohio-born Christian Scientist, logged much mileage during his journalistic career. He worked for the Christian Science Monitor from 1929 to 1988. For half those years, he worked concurrently for network radio and television: for CBS from 1943 to 1949 and later for NBC and then ABC.

He was a correspondent in Washington in the Depression-racked 1930's and then covered World War II initially from bases in Fascist Rome and then Hitler's Berlin from 1939 to 1941. After the war he was a columnist for The Monitor and its chief editorial writer.

His writing could be vivid. A month after the devastating Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he was on board the American carrier Enterprise as it departed from Hawaii, and he encountered a promising naval officer, William F. Halsey Jr., who later became a five-star admiral of the fleet.

''There were tears in his eyes -- whether from the wind whipping in over the lip of the deck or from depth of feeling was the unanswered question,'' Mr. Harsch wrote.

Late in his life, he won praise for a volume of memoirs he wrote, ''At the Hinge of History: A Reporter's Story'' (1993, University of Georgia Press).

As The Monitor said yesterday, ''He seemed to be everywhere, or at least everywhere something important was happening.''

He was in Washington when the Depression confronted President Herbert Hoover, and he was still there when President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal began grappling with it. He moved on to London and was there in September, 1939, when Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war against Nazi Germany.

After that Mr. Harsch moved on to wartime Berlin, and later to Hawaii, on his way to the Soviet Union. And so he and his wife, Anne, happened to be in Hawaii in December, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II.

As he told the story, when he awoke in his hotel room to noise of the attack, he woke his wife, saying, ''Listen to this, dear. You have often asked me what an air raid sounds like. This is a good imitation.''

Later he was in Australia with Gen. Douglas MacArthur when the general, having commanded the unsuccessful defense of the Philippines against the Japanese, made his prophetic pledge, ''I shall return.''

Mr. Harsch went on to be with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in France, and in ''At the Hinge of History'' he recalled the part he played in the capture of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, in a bathroom in a German castle: Mr. Harsch did some translating for a British officer.

Mr. Harsch sent reports from Nazi concentration camps in 1945, after they were overrun by the advancing Allied forces. And early in the Cold War, in 1947 and 1948, he roved behind what Winston Churchill had named the Iron Curtain. Presciently, Mr. Harsch concluded that it would not be permanent.

His many writings include the books ''Pattern of Conquest'' (1941), in which he analyzed the threat posed by Nazism before the United States entered the war, and ''The Curtain Isn't Iron'' (1950), about the Cold War and the Soviet Union.

He was made a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, and he won two Overseas Press Club Awards and other honors.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, he received one bachelor's degree in 1927 from Williams College and another in 1929 from Cambridge University.

He married Anne Elizabeth Wood in 1932. She died last year.

He is survived by his wife, the former Edna Raemer -- his longtime editorial assistant -- whom he married late last month; three sons, William of Saunderstown, R.I., Jonathan of Jamestown and Paul of Pownal, Vt.; 12 grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and a sister, Katherine Jamieson of Toledo, Ohio.

Photo: Joseph C. Harsch. (The Christian Science Monitor)