Hodding Carter III, an Emmy-winning journalist and political commentator who covered the civil rights movement in the South, served as the State Department’s spokesman during the Iran hostage crisis and promoted media innovation as head of the Knight journalism foundation, died May 11 at a retirement community in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 88.
The cause was complications from a series of strokes, said his daughter Catherine Carter Sullivan.
A Mississippi newspaperman with a Princeton pedigree, Mr. Carter helped run his family’s crusading, anti-segregationist newspaper and worked for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign before becoming the top public affairs official for Cyrus R. Vance, the publicity-averse secretary of state, in 1979.
Mr. Carter, who was unrelated to the president but shared his background as a White liberal from the South, persuaded Vance to allow television cameras into daily briefings at Foggy Bottom. With a soothing drawl, he answered reporters’ questions on strategic arms negotiations, the Panama Canal treaties and the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.
But he was little known to most Americans before November 1979, when Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of hostages. Mr. Carter went on to deliver frank and frequent updates on the hostages’ condition and efforts to rescue them, becoming “as omnipresent as Johnny Carson or Walter Cronkite,” as People magazine put it. Some White House officials grumbled that it was hard to tell which Carter was president.
Mr. Carter parlayed his prominence into a contract with the William Morris talent agency, reinventing himself as a columnist and broadcast journalist after leaving the State Department in 1980. He appeared as a panelist on programs including “This Week With David Brinkley,” worked as a correspondent for “Frontline,” hosted the PBS media-analysis series “Inside Story” and received four Emmy Awards for television documentaries on foreign policy and civil rights.
He also taught at universities and, beginning in 1997, led the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Over the next eight years he grew the organization’s endowment to more than $1.9 billion and more than doubled its grants to journalists and news organizations, to some $90 million annually.
But he remained best known for his tenure as assistant secretary of state for public affairs, which led veteran Washington correspondent William M. Beecher to call him “the best guy I have seen in his job in 20 years.” Hailed by Time magazine as “the new voice of America” during the hostage crisis, he said that he benefited from an early image as “an ignorant, silly hick from Mississippi,” which bought him time to learn the ins and outs of the job.
While Mr. Carter was largely unfamiliar with the intricacies of foreign policy, he was far from a rube, having spent nearly two decades as a journalist at his family’s newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss. His father, the longtime publisher and editor, had received a 1946 Pulitzer Prize and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan for writing editorials against intolerance.
Mr. Carter followed in his footsteps as a reporter and later as publisher, writing roughly 6,000 editorials before coming to Washington. He developed a good rapport with journalists including Ted Koppel, who described Mr. Carter in a Christian Science Monitor interview as “a tough, aggressive, worthy adversary,” and laced his briefings with Southern colloquialisms and — when he found it necessary — evasive responses.
When a reporter wrongly speculated about a State Department policy, Mr. Carter replied, “That dog won’t hunt.” When another complained that Mr. Carter had “slipped off the point,” Mr. Carter replied: “I hope so.” Annoyed by a question from journalist and conservative gadfly Lester Kinsolving, he grabbed a rubber chicken from the podium and lobbed it at the reporter.
“The briefing is a form of ritualized combat,” Mr. Carter told The Washington Post in 1980. “I like the give and take.”
Mr. Carter was sometimes criticized for turning his televised briefings into a bully pulpit. But for the most part he maintained the respect of reporters and his boss, Vance, whose resignation in April 1980 precipitated Mr. Carter’s own departure less than three months later.
The secretary of state had quit in protest of President Carter’s decision to launch a military rescue effort in Iran, which Vance considered ill-advised. His instincts proved correct: The mission ended with a helicopter crash in the desert and the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen, with the last of the 52 American hostages remaining in captivity until January 1981.
Mr. Carter often said that he was the last to know about key developments, including the rescue mission. After telling a group of newspaper publishers in Hawaii that military action in Iran was not imminent, he took an overnight flight home and was shaken awake by a flight attendant, who wanted to express his sympathies about the raid.
“What raid?” Mr. Carter recalled asking, in a 1981 article for Playboy.
“Oh, God,” the attendant replied. “I think you had better talk to the captain.”
The oldest of three sons, William Hodding Carter III was born in New Orleans on April 7, 1935, and grew up in Greenville. His mother, the former Betty Werlein, was a feature writer who co-founded the Delta Star in 1936 with his father, Hodding Carter Jr. Two years later, they purchased the Star’s competitor and merged the papers to form the Delta Democrat-Times.
“There was never a time I didn’t realize we were completely out of step with the Whites in Greenville,” Mr. Carter told The Post. His mother was said to have protected the family home from KKK attacks by sitting at the door with a shotgun on her knees.
Mr. Carter graduated from high school in Greenville after studying for a time at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He initially vowed that he would never be a “Little” Hodding, a sidekick to his father, who was known as Big Hod. But after receiving a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1957 and serving in the Marine Corps for two years, Mr. Carter came home to Greenville, deciding that he owed a year to the family business.
Instead he stayed for 17, facing some of the same threats that had dogged his parents.
“I carried a gun in my car, in my pocket and in my desk from ’59 until my brother” — Thomas, the youngest son — “killed himself with a pistol in ’64,” Mr. Carter told the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record. His brother Philip took the reins of the paper before the Carters sold it to a politically conservative newspaper chain in 1980, angering some of their liberal readers.
Mr. Carter made headlines in 1978 when he divorced his first wife, Margaret “Peggy” Wolfe, and married President Carter’s human rights chief, Patricia Derian, with whom he had worked in Democratic Party politics in Mississippi. She died in 2016. Two years later, Mr. Carter found late-in-life love when he reconnected with Patricia O’Brien, an author and reporter who had profiled him decades earlier.
“I fell in love with her instantly,” Mr. Carter told the New York Times after their wedding in 2019. “But it took her at least a couple of hours to fall in love with me.”
Survivors include his wife, of Brookline, Mass.; four children from his first marriage, Hodding Carter IV of Camden, Maine, Catherine Carter Sullivan of Jackson, Miss., Margaret Carter Joseph of Brevard, N.C., and Finn Carter of Worcester, Mass.; three stepchildren from his marriage to Derian, Mike Derian of Takoma Park, Md., and Craig Derian and Brooke Derian, both of Chapel Hill; a brother; and 12 grandchildren.
While teaching at schools including the University of North Carolina, where he was a professor of leadership and public policy, Mr. Carter stressed that although his job in government was to relay information that officials wanted known, he was also charged with withholding certain facts.
“If any reporters think they’re going to get the truth out of a government official, they should be summarily fired,” he told students in 1990. He added that his own briefings were honest — mostly.
“I gave out utterly misleading info only about four times, and I wasn’t happy about it. But I didn’t know about it, either,” he said. “That was probably one of the reasons why we failed in that administration. For a long time, I was never given any B.S. to go out there with.”