* Marvin L. Stone; U.S. News & World Report Editor

Marvin L. Stone, 76, who edited U.S. News & World Report for nearly a decade beginning in the mid-1970s. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, Stone began his journalism career as a police reporter in Huntington, W.Va., moving on to a wire service and then magazine reporting. His journalism career spanned 40 years and included coverage of four wars and stories filed from 35 countries. From London in 1951, Stone was the first to report that the Soviet Union had developed the hydrogen bomb. In 1955, from Hanoi, he covered the final days of the French war in Indochina. He and two other American correspondents were aboard the plane that dropped the last paratroopers at Dien Bien Phu before it fell to Ho Chi Minh. In Europe, Stone covered the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Later, he wrote about the birth of the space age, writing “Man in Space,” a book in the Doubleday science series. As the third editor of U.S. News, from 1976 to 1985, Stone introduced four-color photography to the magazine and was credited with opening editorial opportunities for minorities. From 1985 to 1989, he was deputy director of the United States Information Agency in the Ronald Reagan administration. Born in Burlington, Vt., Stone attended Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., and Columbia University’s School of Journalism. He won dozens of awards, including a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and three honorary degrees, and served as director of the National Press Foundation. He was named to the Washington Journalists Hall of Fame in 1990. On Monday of cancer at his home in Falls Church, Va.