Marilyn Berger

Marilyn Berger Hewitt (born August 23, 1935) is an American broadcast and newspaper journalist and author. She worked for newspapers including Newsday, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and hosted local television news programs in New York City.

Early life and education Berger was born in New York City, on August 23, 1935. She attended Cornell University, where she received her bachelor's degree, and then Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she received a master's degree.

Career Newsday and The Washington Post Berger worked as a foreign correspondent for Newsday on Long Island from 1965 to 1970 where she covered the United Nations and followed, from there, every hour of the six-day war in the Middle East. She also reported from Czechoslovakia during the springtime of Alexander Dubcek. From there, she moved on to The Washington Post, where she became a key player in the Watergate scandal. Berger reported that Richard Nixon White House staffer Ken Clawson had bragged to her about authoring the Canuck Letter, a forged letter to the editor of the Manchester Union Leader that played a large part in ending the campaign of Senator Edmund Muskie. She reported on the Cold War arms race and China, where she provided insight into the last days of the Cultural Revolution, and covered Middle East diplomacy often from the vantage point of the Kissinger shuttle. Later, at The New York Times she wrote obituaries of world figures including Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Yitzhak Rabin, Simon Peres and Teddy Kollek. It was while she was in Ethiopia that she came upon a sick and homeless boy, whom she later helped raise in her home, as Danny Hodes. They remained married until his death in August 2009. The couple had no biological children, but in 2009 (shortly before Hewitt's death), they became guardians of a boy Berger had met in Ethiopia.