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…
This article was written by Harrison Smith and originally published on www.washingtonpost.com