Charles Fenyvesi, who left Hungary as a refugee after the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising (in which he was a student participant) and edited the political-insider gossip page, Washington Whispers, for U.S. News & World Report, died November 3, 2024, at a hospice center in Los Angeles. The cause was complications from dementia, said his daughter, Malka Fenyvesi. Charles (Karoly) was born November 23, 1937, in Debrecen, Hungary.
Prior to matriculating at Harvard College (Class of 1960 and a member of Kirkland House), Charles prepared at Toldy Gymnasium in Budapest. He received his A.B. cum laude, concentrating in Social Relations, in 1960, while he served as an assistant to Professor Clyde Kluckhohn researching medieval history. He received an M.A. in Philosophy in 1962 from Madras University in India.
Descended from Jewish forebears who were traders and farmed land in northeastern Hungary, Mr. Fenyvesi cultivated instead an early interest in journalism. Returning to the US from India, Charles edited various publications including The National Jewish Monthly and served as Washington correspondent for the Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz before joining The Washington Post as a staff writer contributing a weekly garden column, “The Ornamental Gardener”, for nineteen years and scores of features and op-ed pieces. He was also a feature writer for the now-defunct Foreign News Service in New York, and worked for Near East Report, a newsletter on the Middle East.
He worked a dozen years at U.S. News & World Report beginning in the mid-1980s. While in charge of the magazine’s Washington Whispers column, he partnered with staff journalists to gather news scoops of vital national and foreign affairs interest: who was in line for secretary of state, for example, or news about revolution in Romania that would topple the Ceausescu regime. But he told C-SPAN that the most popular item the column featured during his tenure involved the revelation of President George H.W. Bush’s contempt for broccoli.
Charles also freelanced for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic.
His books included “Splendor in Exile: The Ex-Majesties of Europe” (1979), about banished kings; “When the World Was Whole” (1990), a chronicle of Hungarian history told through the lens of his own family’s story; and “When Angels Fooled the World: Rescuers of Jews in Wartime Hungary” (2003). He also wrote “Trees: For Shelter and Shade, For Memory and Magic” (1992).
In 1965, Charles married Elisabeth Kelemen, a weaver and textile conservator known by Lizou.
