Ernest B. “Pat” Furgurson, a former Baltimore Sun national affairs columnist, Washington bureau chief and a Civil War historian who also held posts in Moscow and Saigon, died of heart failure Sunday at his Washington home. He was 95.
Born in Danville, Virginia, he was the son of Ernest B. Furgurson, a printer at the Danville Register and Bee, and his wife, Passie Ferguson. He was a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia University after attending Averett College in Danville.
He worked nights at the Associated Press in New York City, the Roanoke World-News and the Richmond News Leader before joining The Sun in 1956. His date of employment coincided with the day the essayist and critic H.L. Mencken died.
In a 2019 article in the American Scholar, he listed his ambitions — “get out of town, go to Washington, don a trench coat, chase wars.”
As a new hire he was a general assignment reporter and covered strip mining in Garrett County, illegal game hunting on the Eastern Shore and local politics.
He also boarded the foundering African Queen, a Liberian tanker that had been abandoned by its crew off Ocean City, and wrote of efforts to salvage the damaged ship.
Mr. Furgurson soon became a member of The Sun’s Washington bureau. He initially commuted to Washington and recalled catching a morning train with congressmen Eddie Garmatz and George Fallon to make it to the Capitol by 10 a.m.
He wrote of Richard Nixon’s defeat by President John F. Kennedy in 1960. He also covered the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the workings of the Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations.
“Pat was the ultimate wordsmith,” said Sun colleague Gilbert Lewthwaithe. “Growing up in Danville, he was sensitive to racial issues, but he was not an emotional writer. His experience was vast, nationally and internationally. He had strong opinions about race relations and humanity in general.”
“He was an acute observer of politics,” Mr. Lewthwaithe said. “And as an ex-Marine, he liked journalists who could hit the ground running and be speedy both on their feet and in their minds.”
He was a foreign correspondent at The Sun’s Moscow bureau and reported on the Vietnam War from Saigon.
He wrote the main story from the Republican and Democratic political conventions and began writing a column in 1969. He was named bureau chief in 1975 and by 1981 his column was syndicated. He retired in 1992.
Another colleague, Muriel Dobbin, said, “Pat was a superb reporter and a very good writer and was very funny as well. I think he introduced the world to the martini.”
“He was the kind of reporter who liked to go out drinking with cops. He could also be tough. He once yelled at me when I pronounced ‘Potomac’ wrong,” said Ms. Dobbin, who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. “Pat was very much a Southerner and could tell some very funny stories about Lyndon Johnson.”
After leaving The Sun, he wrote works of history and biography, including Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War. He also wrote for National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine and Mid-Atlantic Country.
Carl P. Leubsdorf, a Sun colleague who later became Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News, said, “Pat was cerebral and smart. Though he came out of the segregated South, he was a liberal.”
“Pat was a brilliant writer, a graceful writer. He said he had to write to know how he thought. His interests were so broad and his interests were so high — he set a terrific example in our bureau,” said Paul West, who also headed the bureau. “He was one of the greats of that era. He was the consummate gentleman and held himself to high standards. He showed us how it should be done.”
He was elected to Washington’s Gridiron Club in 1977 and was its historian from 1992 to 2002.
Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Cassie Thompson Furgurson, a retired Time magazine researcher; a daughter, Elisabeth Glyn Pogue, of Lake Ridge, Virginia; and three grandchildren. His son, E.B. Furgurson III, a former Annapolis Capital Gazette reporter who covered the killing of five of his newspaper co-workers from the back of his pickup truck, died in 2024.
Services are private.
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