Joseph C. Harsch

Joseph C. Harsch (May 25, 1905 – June 3, 1998) was an American newspaper, radio, and television journalist. He spent more than sixty years writing for The Christian Science Monitor and at the time of his departure from his stationing in London he was named as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE Hon).

Early life Joseph Close Harsch was born in Toledo, Ohio, the son of Paul Harsch, a real estate salesman, and his wife Leila Close. When Paul Harsch became a Christian Scientist, he raised his sons in the faith, which would lead to a career-long affiliation for Harsch as a reporter. Joseph Harsch studied history at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he received a master's degree in 1927 after writing a thesis on the Hundred Years' War. Later, he traveled to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he received another master's degree from Cambridge University in 1929. Later that same year, Harsch went to work as a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, D.C. in Washington, D.C. covering Herbert Hoover as the magnitude of the economic crisis began to unfold, and was still there when Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal with measures to counteract it. In 1939, Harsch was in London when Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany. It was the beginning of a number of first-hand accounts of events that shaped history. His reporting from Berlin at the start of World War II made him the first journalist to cover the conflict from both the Allied and Axis sides Harsch also reported from the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 when the Allied forces made their advance, and in the early years of the so-called Cold War, Harsch correctly predicted that the Iron Curtain would eventually fall along with the Soviet bloc. His own newspaper reported in his obituary that "He seemed to be everywhere, or at least everywhere something important was happening."

Joseph C. Harsch married Anne Elizabeth Wood, the daughter of retired United States Navy Rear Admiral Spencer S. Wood, and maintained a home in Jamestown, Rhode Island. The couple had three sons and remained married for 65 years, before Anne's death in 1997.

On the evening before Harsch's 93rd birthday and a month before his death, he married Edna Raemer, his editorial assistant of 25 years. The $1,000 award for his work with the Liberty Broadcasting System cited Harsch's "consistently excellent and accurate gathering and reporting of news by radio". In 1965 he was made an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE Hon).