Hank Burchard, Post reporter and newsroom gadfly, dies at 85

He was a roving correspondent in Virginia and later wrote about outdoor life.

July 16, 2025
By Matt Schudel

Hank Burchard, a Washington Post journalist who was a roving reporter in Virginia and scoured backwoods, museums and dusty attics for lyrical and often humorous pieces on the outdoors and modern art for the paper’s Weekend section, died July 14 at a sister’s home in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He was 85. ... The cause was liver cancer, said his daughter Karen Burchard.

Mr. Burchard joined The Post in 1965, at a time when the paper was expanding in ambition under the leadership of Benjamin C. Bradlee, who went on to become executive editor. ... As a crop of young reporters began arriving at The Post with Ivy League degrees, Mr. Burchard — a college dropout and rugged Army veteran with a deep knowledge of firearms — seemed like a throwback to an earlier, more rough-and-tumble era.

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When the staff occupied a new building in the early 1970s, Mr. Burchard recalled to Post columnist John Kelly in 2015, Bradlee “was determined [it] was going to be all clean and sparkly. They were going around, and if your desk was messy, they would come with a bag and clean off the desk and put the bag somewhere and make you beg for it. I thought that was not the spirit we ought to have, so I did little minor subversive acts, trying to make the place more homey, more free-style.”

His desk was next to that of Carl Bernstein, who later gained acclaim for his coverage of the Watergate scandal. ... The two reporters put up a net and played ping-pong on their desks, despite the grunting disapproval of Bradlee. Mr. Burchard used a label maker to affix out-of-context captions to photographs around the newsroom. Citing a phrase from a wartime speech by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, one caption read: “The news from France is very bad.” ... Years after leaving The Post, Mr. Burchard owned up to a prank in which he inscribed the metal pipes over three urinals in a men’s restroom with politically incorrect designations. The least desirable spot was marked “Copy Editors.”

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Henry Crossby Burchard Jr., the youngest of five children, was born July 25, 1939, in Washington and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. ... His father was a government clerk, and his mother, Blanche Tabor, was one of the first female physicians in the Washington area, with a private practice in Arlington from 1929 to 1983. ... Mr. Burchard graduated from Arlington’s Washington-Lee High School (now Washington-Liberty) and attended George Washington University for two years while also working for the old Northern Virginia Sun. In his late teens, he infiltrated the headquarters of the American Nazi Party in Arlington, becoming the secretary and driver for the leader, George Lincoln Rockwell. Mr. Burchard alerted the FBI of his efforts. A decade later, Rockwell was assassinated by one of his followers.

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Survivors include his wife of 64 years, the former Janet Callaway, of Arlington; three children, Karen, Laura and Mark; and two sisters. ... “I tell you,” Mr. Burchard told Kelly in 2015, reflecting on his career, “I sometimes wake up in the night and think, ‘Damn, they paid me for this?’ I went from hot type and carbon paper right through the whole computer thing, and it was just a blast.”

By Matt Schudel
Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004. He previously worked for publications in Washington, New York, North Carolina and Florida.