Wesley Pruden, JWR contributor for nearly two decades, dies at 83

Wesley Pruden, an ink-stained newspaperman who rose from a teenage copyboy in Arkansas to pugnacious columnist and editor in chief at The Washington Times, where he helped make the newspaper a favorite of conservatives, died July 17 at his home in Washington. He was 83.

The cause was a heart attack, said Corinna Metcalf, his companion of 50 years.

Genteel and soft-spoken, with a fondness for fedoras and seersucker suits, Pruden played an "outsize part" in "defining what the Times should be and remains," Christopher Dolan, the paper's president and executive editor, wrote in a staff memo.

Pruden joined The Times four months after its founding, in 1982. . . . The newspaper's devoted readers were said to include President Ronald Reagan, and its circulation peaked around 100,000.

Top editors, including Pruden, insisted that the paper's ideological tilt was limited to the editorial and opinion pages. But The Times was widely viewed as a conservative newspaper, with the Columbia Journalism Review once writing that the publication was "like no major city daily in America in the way that it wears its political heart on its sleeve."

Pruden joined The Times as chief political correspondent, soon became a columnist, and in 1992 was promoted from managing editor to editor in chief. He steered the publication for 16 years and took on an emeritus role in retirement, contributing to editorials, editing opinion pieces and continuing his twice-weekly column, "Pruden on Politics."

A punchy, defiantly abrasive columnist, Pruden described Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008 as "everybody's candidate for b---h-in-chief."

The next year, he wrote a column scorning President Barack Obama's bow to Emperor Akihito during a state visit to Japan. In his column, condemned by liberal commentators, Pruden wrote that Obama "likely knows no better," adding: "He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream."

During his years leading the newsroom, Pruden espoused an editorial policy of "puncturing politically correct pomposity" and avoiding what he described as "victim stories" about "people who were mistreated or think they were mistreated." ("Get a life," he advised them.) He also experimented with a new weekend edition and national weekly, in an effort to build a wider audience.

Pruden stepped down from The Times in 2008 and continued writing his column until his death. His most recent piece, published Monday, urged President Donald Trump to "stand aside and watch" as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., sparred with a group of first-term liberal Democrats whom Pruden dubbed the "four horseladies of the Apocalypse."

"The speaker had let some of her freshmen have their head," he wrote, "and now they're getting too big to spank."

The oldest of three children, James Wesley Pruden Jr. was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on Dec. 18, 1935.

The younger Pruden started a newspaper at his middle school and joined The Arkansas Gazette as a high school junior, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. He studied at Little Rock Junior College - now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock - before turning fully to journalism, working at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee, and then the weekly, now-defunct National Observer in Washington.

Pruden covered national politics and the Vietnam War before serving as a foreign correspondent at The Observer. He departed around 1976 - by some accounts, he was forced out amid allegations that he manufactured quotes for his stories - and spent the next several years trying to write and publish a long satirical novel about Vietnam.

He reportedly joined The Times after exhausting his savings and in 1991 received the H.L. Mencken writing award from The Baltimore Sun for his columns. That year, he became the paper's de facto top editor upon the resignation of Arnaud de Borchgrave.

Pruden's marriage to Ann Rice Pulliam ended in divorce. In addition to his companion, a Times contributor who writes under the name Corinna Lothar and lives in Washington, survivors include her son Alex Metcalf of Los Angeles; a sister; and two grandchildren.

In an obituary for The Times, Pruden was recalled as a hands-on editor who banned overused words like "controversy" and "quip" and challenged his writers to always keep readers engaged. He once critiqued a long story, former Times reporter Audrey Hudson recalled, by saying: "Sominex is not in the business of publishing newspapers, and we should not be in the business of putting people to sleep."

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Pruden's archives is found here.