Fred Hiatt, Washington Post Editorial Page Editor, Dies at 66

“He has not only been generous to his staff, but also to me,” she said in an email. “I expected wise advice and serious mentorship from our conversation, and that came about, but not before he spent half an hour making me laugh with stories about outlandish writers.”

Frederick Samuel Hiatt was born in Washington on April 30, 1955. His father, Howard Haym Hiatt, was a medical researcher at the National Institute of Health at the time. When the elderly Mr. Hiatt became dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, the family moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where Fred grew up. His mother Doris (Bieringer) Hiatt attended a library school and co-founded a magazine that reviewed books for school libraries.

Mr. Hiatt went to Harvard, studied history, and worked for the campus newspaper The Harvard Crimson, where he met Ms. Shapiro. They graduated in 1977 and traveled the world together for a year and a half. He began his newspaper career with the Atlanta Journal and then moved to The Washington Star.

When The Star collapsed in 1981, Mr. Hiatt moved to The Post, where Ms. Shapiro was already a reporter. His first assignment was to cover the suburb of Fairfax County, Virginia; then he took over Virginia politics and the Pentagon. He and Mrs. Shapiro married in 1984.

Besides her, he is survived by his father; his three children Alexandra, Joseph and Nathaniel Hiatt; his brother Jonathan; his sister Deborah Hiatt; and a granddaughter.

Mr. Hiatt and Ms. Shapiro were both sent to Tokyo in 1987 as co-office directors; It was the first time The Post had sent a couple to share a job on an internship. “We shared a desk,” Ms. Shapiro said in an interview. “He sat on one side and I sat on the other. He would read my copy and I would read his. It was seamless. “

It worked so well that the newspaper moved them to a similar job-sharing meeting in Moscow, where they covered the fall of the Soviet Union.