Lives of Consequence
William Livingston Claiborne '60, P'94
For nearly three decades, William Livingston Claiborne '60, P'94 served as a foreign and national journalist for The Washington Post, working on four continents covering several wars and revolutions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. He also was a national desk staff writer and bureau chief for The Washington Post, working in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
At The Washington Post, Claiborne worked as a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, Israel, New Delhi, India, Johannesburg, South Africa and Toronto, Canada, where he covered the collapse of the monarchy in Iran, the birth of majority-rule democracy in South Africa, the rise and fall of Middle East peace and the political transformation of the African continent and the Indian subcontinent.
In the United States, he covered several presidential elections, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon. Reporting from all 50 states, he covered stories ranging from earthquakes in California, river floods in Mississippi River, the bombing in Oklahoma City, the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the Unibomber case, mass shootings in schools, and New York City's near bankruptcy in the 1970s.
Honored for his work, Claiborne was the recipient of several journalism prizes including the Frank Tripp Memorial Award and the New York Publishers Association Award, for exposing slumlords in Rochester, N.Y., and the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild Front Page Award, for writing about appalling prison conditions in Washington, D.C. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1972 and 1982.
At Hobart, he majored in English and was a member of Kappa Sigma and the Herald staff.
His club memberships included the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Newspaper Guild, the Foreign Correspondents Associations of East Africa, South Africa, Israel, India and Canada, and the Melbourne Savage Club.
Claiborne retired from the Washington Post in 2001 and lived with his wife, Alma, in Melbourne, Australia, where they were closer to their daughter, Lisa, a 1994 William Smith graduate; and their granddaughters. He died on Jan. 1, 2013.