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Part newsman, part showman, Von Wiegand brought to foreign correspondence a Sunday-supplement excitement that never waned. When the Hearst papers chartered the Graf Zeppelin in 1929 for a global flight, Von Wiegand, at 55, was as eager to ride it as he was to rush to Manila early in December 1941, at 67, sensing another war. And when war broke out, Karl von Wiegand stood so close to it—at the end of Manila's Pier 7 during a Japanese bomber attack—that concussion permanently damaged the retinas of both eyes. Captured later by the Japanese in company with Lady Hay-Drummond-Hay, another Hearst journalist, he was held only briefly and was released because of ill health.
Last War. It was Von Wiegand's last war, but far from the end of his career. In 1945, he flashed a perceptive alarm to the West about the "Red Russian tidal flood . . . The war has loosened upon Europe the most powerful imperialistic force since Napoleon—totalitarian, Communist Soviet Russia." Eyesight failing, he roved restlessly about his old international haunts, a derring-do journalist, lost in the geopolitical maze of another era. In 1959, from New Delhi, he sent up another rocket: "Soviet Russia and Red China reportedly have agreed in Peiping to divide the globe north of the Equator into two areas of Red operations."
Last April, fiddle-footed as ever, he flew out of the Sahara, chasing down one more story from the Far East. But the hunt was over. Stricken with pneumonia in Tokyo, he was rushed by plane to a hospital in Zurich, his summer home. There, Karl von Wiegand died last week at 86, the last of his breed, a legend somewhat larger than life.