[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 2, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E923-E924]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              HOBART ROWEN

                                 ______


                         HON. HENRY B. GONZALEZ

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 2, 1995
  Mr. GONZALEZ. Mr. Speaker, I take this time to note the passing of 
Hobart Rowen, who died on April 13, at the age of 76.
  Hobart Rowen, as much as anybody, invented the craft of business 
journalism and economic reporting. He was, as Secretary of the Treasury 
Rubin noted, pre-eminent in his field. Hobart Rowen was more than a 
pioneer. He was a master in the field he helped create, 
[[Page E924]] which is the field of reporting on business as legitimate 
news, and the field of interpreting economic events as a matter of 
genuine public information. Rowen understood that economics is an 
academic field, but he also understood that economic events have 
enormous public importance, and need to be reported as issues of basic 
public concern.
  Hobart Rowen started as a copy boy at the Journal of Commerce, but 
soon became a reporter assigned to commodities. With the outbreak of 
World War II he was sent to Washington to cover defense expansion and 
how business responded to war mobilization. He served two years with 
the War Production Board, and in 1944 went to Newsweek magazine. Ben 
Bradlee, the fabled editor of the Washington Post, was also at 
Newsweek, and eventually, as editor of the newspaper, brought Rowen in 
to become financial editor.
  At the Post, Rowan supervised the paper's Sunday business section and 
expanded the daily business coverage, bringing that page into the real 
world of reporting and making its impact important to the community and 
to the nation's understanding of economics, economic policy and 
business regulation. At Newsweek, Rowen had done a widely admired 
column on business trends and economic issues, and he continued that 
work at the Post. Rowen understood the basic economic changes that were 
taking place, and how those would play out. He understood--and was the 
first to report--the forces that led to the closing of the gold window, 
which was the end of the Bretton Woods monetary arrangement, and that 
the dollar would be devalued. He understood--and was the first to 
report--the bungled economic policies that led to wage and price 
controls. And he understood the futility of palliatives like those 
controls, that basic economic issues must be addressed with realistic 
policies. This was not happening, and so he lamented how unrealistic 
policies were leading the nation toward ``slow but steady self-
strangulation.''
  And how right he was. Mr. Rowen foresaw the events that so discomfit 
us today: the slow fall in real income, the slow poisoning of the 
dollar resulting from a seemingly intractable trade deficit, the folly 
and virtual insanity of the Reagan era fiscal policy, and much else. 
Hobart Rowen was, in the words of Ben Bradlee, ``the first economics 
reporter of his generation who could go to a press conference about 
economics and know more than the guy who gave it.'' Hobart Rowen, 
largely the inventor of his craft, certainly did know his beat; he was 
a sure analyst, a fine craftsman and a first-rate reporter. His 
achievements earned a long list of awards, probably more than any other 
reporter in his field.
  I am an admirer of Hobart Rowen's work, and an admirer of him as a 
decent, honorable, thoughtful human being. He made immense 
contributions to the country, through the diligent and thoughtful 
exercise of a craft that truly was his own. I applaud his life and 
salute his achievements. His voice will be sorely missed.
               [From the Washington Post, Apr. 14, 1995]

                              Hobart Rowen

       ``Good writing on economic subjects need not be dull,'' 
     Hobart Rowen once wrote shortly after he joined the staff of 
     this newspaper, and he spent the next three decades daily 
     illustrating the truth of that declaration. He represented a 
     major development in the history of The Post, and of American 
     journalism generally, for he was among the first reporters 
     capable of explaining modern economics to lay readers and 
     illuminating for them the intellectual concepts that were 
     driving public policy.
       In a time when daily financial reporting tended heavily 
     toward the ups and downs of the stock market, Mr. Rowen wrote 
     about the world and the international forces that were 
     affecting jobs and incomes here. That was doubly unusual 
     because, in the 1960s, international economics was widely 
     regarded in this country even among professional economists 
     as a marginal subject. The United States dominated the world 
     economy and, the conventional wisdom held, the rest was a 
     minor specialty. That was true enough for the first 20 years 
     or so after World War II, but then that domination began to 
     erode and, as the country discovered in the inflationary 
     1970s, policy suddenly became much more complex.
       As a reporter, Mr. Rowen scored many coups. In the spring 
     of 1967, for example, he earned the memorable hostility of 
     the Johnson administration by quoting the warnings of a 
     ``high government official''--later identified as the 
     chairman of the Federal Reserve Board--that the costs of the 
     Vietnam War were going to rise far higher than the 
     president's current estimates. As Mr. Rowen knew, and as 
     later events showed, those warnings were more than adequately 
     justified.
       But his real contribution lay less in even the best of the 
     good stories and columns, taken one by one, than in the way 
     he redefined the job of reporting the news of economics and 
     finance. He stood at the junction of economic theory and 
     Washington politics, and with sophistication an energy 
     devoted himself to the job of explaining to readers what was 
     going on. He found that job absorbing, and he kept working at 
     it until his death yesterday at the age of 76.
     

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