Fred Hiatt will be missed

WASHINGTON -- When someone dies suddenly and far too soon, one of the tragedies is never having the chance to tell them what they meant to you. So, I’ll never get to tell Fred Hiatt how deeply I respected him or how he changed my life.

I first met Fred in 1996, when I was a young staffer for Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, R-N.C.

Fred had just joined The Washington Post’s editorial page, and we bonded over our shared love for the freedom movements in Central and Eastern Europe. I was the son of a Polish freedom fighter, and he had just returned from a stint as The Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, in which he had covered the collapse of Soviet Communism and its aftermath.

He was always genuinely interested in points of view he did not share -- and in sharing those points of view with Post readers. At his urging, The Post published op-eds from Helms opposing the creation of the International Criminal Court and the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and supporting the tightening the Cuban embargo, among many others. These were not reluctantly published pieces; Fred asked Helms to write for The Post. The North Carolina senator was the bête noir of the foreign policy establishment, but Fred felt it was important for readers to hear from him and understand his thinking. In my nearly seven years at the committee, we never once got a similar request from the New York Times.

We kept in touch when I joined the George W. Bush administration. After I left the White House, I published a book defending the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program and penned an op-ed laying out evidence that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had been fully briefed on the techniques but had not objected. I sent it to Fred and his deputy, Jackson Diehl, and asked whether they would consider it for publication. Not only did they agree to run the piece, but Fred also asked me to write a weekly column.

That was Fred’s commitment to diversity of opinion. He didn’t hire me despite my holding heterodox opinions, but because of it. He didn’t agree with me -- quite the opposite, he authored passionate editorials condemning the CIA program. But he wanted The Post to publish well-argued opinions from all sides, even opinions with which he vehemently disagreed.

That commitment took on added importance during the Trump era. Fred authored a searing editorial declaring Donald Trump unfit for the presidency. Yet when Trump was elected, he made sure that The Post’s opinion pages contained columns defending and explaining the president’s policies. That did not sit well with some of The Post’s left-leaning readership.