He’d memorized the names, and in his desk files inside the Pentagon, he’d take care to remove any marks indicating a source. Hoffman was also highly protective of his sources, keeping a little notebook of phone numbers - but no names, she said. Go, hit the hallways and make the rounds and talk to people in person.” She said his “guiding principle was ‘go there.’ Don’t sit at your desk or wait for the phone calls or make phone calls. “He’d be chatting with some official and they’d have something on their desk, and he’d read it, memorize it and have a good story.” “I don’t think some people knew about how good he was at reading things upside down,” Hoffman said. Lisa, who also covered the Pentagon as a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service, said she learned the tradecraft of journalism by listening to her dad at dinner, and the stories he would tell. Reflecting on his career, she said, “He really loved it, and I loved it through him.” When he retired, he gave boxes of his reporting files to the National Defense University for research. On Monday, Lisa Hoffman said that as she was going through his things, she found some of the many letters he wrote to her from the war. Truly a legend,” said Robert Burns, a retired AP national security correspondent. “He was a giant among Pentagon reporters. taxpayer dollars were going down the drain in theft, bribery, waste and money manipulation.
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He and Hugh Mulligan were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for their series of stories on profiteering and corruption in South Vietnam, revealing that hundreds of millions of U.S. After moving on to the AP, he covered seven administrations, including extensive time in Vietnam covering the war. Hoffman began his career as a radio reporter in Boston covering boxing matches from the front row, dodging flying droplets of blood. She said he “always marveled at his lifelong good luck and left at peace, with no regrets.” After retiring from the AP, he served as the chief spokesman and policy adviser to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.Īccording to his daughter Lisa Hoffman, he died of melanoma at at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 24. Well known within the Pentagon, Hoffman was recalled as a tough, enterprising, ethical and tireless reporter who spent nearly 40 years in the news business, including 36 with the AP. Hoffman, a longtime Associated Press reporter who covered the Defense Department for more than two decades and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for an investigation into the black market in Vietnam has died.
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