Memorial services will be held Wednesday at the Washington Hebrew Congregation for David Lawrence, a syndicated columnist and founder and editor of U.S. News & World Report, who died in Sarasota, Fla. yesterday at the age of 84. Mr. Lawrence, a long time member of the Reform congregation, had specifically requested that memorial services be conducted for him there.
Burial services will be held at the same time Wednesday at the Episcopal Cemetery in Princeton, N.J. where Mr. Lawrence will be laid to rest beside the grave of his wife, the former Eleanor Campbell Hayes, who was Episcopalian. She died in 1969. Rabbi Herschel Matt, a Conservative rabbi from Trenton, N.J., will conduct the burial service.
Mr. Lawrence, born in Philadelphia, was raised in Buffalo. N.Y. and attended Princeton University. While in college, he served as campus correspondent for the Associated Press, beginning a career in journalism that spanned 60 years and was devoted largely to national politics as he observed it during the administrations of 11 presidents.
As a syndicated columnist, as editor of the U.S. Daily which he founded in 1926, the United States News, a weekly he founded in 1933, and U.S. News & World Report, founded in 1947, Mr. Lawrence was known for his extreme conservative views in national and international affairs. He was described by friends as a shy man in private and a “quietly devout” member of the Washington Hebrew Congregation.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.