Marquis Childs; Foreign Correspondent, Columnist

Marquis W. Childs, foreign correspondent, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, has died at age 87.

Childs, former Washington bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had been in failing health in recent months. A spokesman for the newspaper said he died Saturday at Children’s Hospital of San Francisco after lapsing into a coma at his retirement home there.

Childs reported from the front during the Spanish Civil War and World War II and covered virtually every major diplomatic development from 1945 until his retirement in 1974.

He began his career with the Post-Dispatch in 1926. He left in 1944 to take over “Washington Calling” when syndicated columnist Raymond Clapper died in a plane crash.

Ten years later, Childs returned to the Post-Dispatch and continued to write his column while covering national and world affairs. He was Washington bureau chief from 1962 to 1969, when he became contributing editor.

At his peak, his opinions appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

During his career he interviewed American Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Dwight D. Eisenhower and world leaders such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt’s Gamal Shawki Abdel Nasser, China’s Zhou Enlai and West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer.

Childs in 1970 won the first Pulitzer ever given for commentary.

He also wrote a dozen nonfiction books, among them the best-selling “Sweden: The Middle Way,” and three novels.