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About Joe Alex Morris Jr.

Joe Alex Morris Jr. was a member of the Harvard class of 1949. He inherited an interest in international news from his father, who had served as foreign editor of United Press International and then the New York Herald Tribune.

After working as a local reporter at The Hartford (Conn.) Times and Minneapolis Tribune, Morris went abroad, taking a number of assignments in Europe and then the Middle East with UPI, the New York Herald Tribune, Newsweek, and finally the Los Angeles Times.

The Middle East was his journalistic home for 25 years. In February 1979, Morris and other western journalists were in Tehran covering one of the final events of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. In a clash at an Iranian airfield on Feb. 10 between forces loyal to the government and those committed to the Ayatollah Khomeini, Morris was struck in the chest by a bullet. He was 51 years old.

In the fall of 1981 he posthumously received the Nieman Fellows' Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity.