The cause was a heart attack, her daughter Ellen Horne said.
Mr Horne was born to Jews in Poland who were forced to flee soon after the German invasion in September 1939. He grew up in New York and, after a brief apprenticeship in journalism, joined the Post in 1958 as assistant city editor. He was fluent in Polish and German, and over the next decade served as editor on the global and national desks and with The Post magazine, then called Potomac.
He ran the Opinions and Essays section of Outlook from 1971 to 1982, then served as Deputy Editor until his retirement in 1997. He traveled to Warsaw to report on the fall of the communism in 1989 – an assignment which his daughter says was the pride of his career – but above all he guided other journalists in the field as they covered the dramatic last years of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold War.
Peter Osnos, a Post foreign correspondent who went on to found the publishing house PublicAffairs, said Mr Horne was “not a newsroom swashbuckler, but someone who exuded a quiet reserve, a thoughtful person on complicated stories”.
David Hoffman, the Post’s former associate editor for foreign news, described Mr Horne as a journalist who “embodied the era of the editor who was also a master specialist”.
“The correspondents were on the brink of tumult and change – and they couldn’t always see everything that was happening every minute – but they knew Al was the wind at their back, weaving in essential context, familiar with the players, lucid in the story,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman remembers working as a White House reporter in July 1989 and writing an article while on a trip to Poland with President George HW Bush. The article began: “President Bush stepped behind the weakening wall of communism tonight, paying tribute to the accelerating pace of change and declaring that Americans ‘have one burning wish: that Europe be whole and free”.
“It was speculative on my part,” Hoffman said, “based on what happened, and Al Horne put it right in the log as it’s written, because he saw it also. In November, the Berlin Wall comes down. That’s what was so special about him, he had a sensitivity towards foreign correspondents who discovered, observed, reported. Even if he was on the desk, he was at the alongside his pen pals, always attentive and engaged in the best possible story – and those were days when we had one good shot a day.
Alexander Douglas Horne, who used the AD Horne signature, was born Aleksander Einhorn in Warsaw on November 9, 1932. The family, which later changed their surname, settled in the New York borough of Queens, and his father resumed his career as an executive of an insurance company. His mother, a law graduate from a Polish university, became an office manager and accountant.
Mr. Horne was the editor of his high school newspaper and attended Williams College in Massachusetts on a scholarship. After earning a BA in American History and Literature in 1954, he worked for the Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Pittsfield, Mass., and served in the military before joining The Post. He edited the 1981 book “The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam”.
After his retirement, he spent about a decade working as a summer editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris and Hong Kong and maintained his health through sports. As he once summed up his abilities with a flash of wry pride: “I was able to play mediocre tennis until I was seventy.”
In 1960, he married Ann Hurd. In addition to his wife, of Washington, and daughter Ellen, of West Orange, NJ, survivors include six other children, Julia Patchan of Herndon, Virginia, Owen Horne of Lakeway, Texas, Libby Horne of La Crescenta, California, Jennifer Horne of Santa Cruz, Calif., Gary Einhorn of Takoma Park, Md., and Brian Horne of Portland, Oregon; and 11 grandchildren.
