Louis Heren

In 1946 Heren returned to The Times and was made a foreign correspondent. He made his mark covering Indian independence in 1947, creating a furore in Britain and India with graphic eyewitness accounts of communal massacres in the Punjab. He also heard rumours of another plot to assassinate Gandhi, so he joined his weaving workshop in order to get a scoop (he was unsuccessful as the assassination happened elsewhere).

Heren was later posted to Israel where he posted the first news reports about the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also served in Beirut, Jordan, Korea, Vietnam, Egypt, Singapore, India, and Germany.

One of Heren's earliest jobs was in Vietnam during the early days of American intervention in the late 1950s. He is widely accepted amongst as the inspiration for the Thomas Fowler character in The Quiet American by Graham Greene. The author was a guest of Heren and his wife Patricia on their houseboat in Singapore.

In 1961, he became chief Washington correspondent (later American editor) of The Times. He developed a profound understanding of and sympathy for the United States over a decade of intense political and social upheaval. By-lined in The Times from 1965, he became an influential and popular commentator on American affairs in Britain. He was the first to alert the world that President John F. Kennedy had sent US combat troops to Vietnam. He accompanied Rev Martin Luther King Jr. on several of his Freedom Rides. His friendship with President Lyndon Johnson gave him a unique insight into the developing tragedy of US involvement in Vietnam. He was close to Johnson, sometimes staying up late, drinking whisky in the Oval Office, and he was a guest at the president's Texas ranch. Exceptionally, in 1968, he flew back to Washington from California where he had been covering the presidential primary. That night Patricia was awoken by Heren shouting and thrashing about, in the throes of a nightmare. Shaken awake, he described his vivid dream in which he fought back a hostile mob with his portable typewriter, desperately trying to protect presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. She switched on the radio and together they heard the news of Kennedy's assassination. In the same year, Heren was awarded one of the first John F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his book The New American Commonwealth, which likened the US Administration to a medieval court, with the president surrounded by a coterie of unelected, powerful advisors.

Heren remained in Washington, D.C. until 1971. It was his last overseas foreign posting before he was promoted to deputy editor and foreign editor under William Rees-Mogg at The Times.

Despite the difficulties of running a newspaper in the 1970s, he nurtured many notable talents, including Robert Fisk, Peter Hennessy and Paul Vallely. With his independent, earthy and instinctual style, he was't always happy within the confines of the editorial offices. In 1979, he oversaw the joint interviews, in The Times boardroom, with Sir Anthony Blunt after he was unmasked as the Fifth Man in the Cambridge Soviet spy ring. Heren drew fierce criticism from some newspapers after it became known he had asked for kippers to be brought in from a nearby smokehouse for Blunt's lunch. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the paper, Heren was the staff choice as Rees-Mogg's successor, but was passed over in favour of Harold Evans. He retired in 1981 after 48 years with The Times. "I loved my paper as a soldier loves his regiment," he declared.