Christopher Wren: Veteran Journalist, Ethan Allen Biographer, Dies at 89

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“Over three decades, he reported from Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and elsewhere and wrote well-received books based on his reporting, including one about his globe-trotting cat,” The New York Times obituary remembering Christopher Wren recalls.

The former journalist, writer, and Vermont Historical Society Trustee passed away in February at the age of 89 at his home in Thetford, VT.

“A longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times who often reported from countries hostile to Westerners, notably the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War and Iran during the hostage crisis,” the paper said.

He covered the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the Vietnam War during the nearly decade he spent at Look magazine. Wren joined The Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1973. “Within nine months of being hired by The Times, he leveraged the Russian he had begun studying at Dartmouth College to land a posting to the Moscow bureau,” according to The Times.

He headed The Times’ news bureaus in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg; covered the United Nations; and reported from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and Canada. He retired from The Times after nearly twenty-nine years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor.

Wren then taught at Princeton University and Dartmouth and joined the Vermont Historical Society and served as a trustee for the organization from 2006 to 2009. He was also a member of the publications committee until 2018.

Vermont Historical Society editor Alan Berolzheimer said that “Chris brought both his high-level journalism experience and his experience as an author to our Publications Committee deliberations about potential book projects and made substantial contributions in that regard.”

In 2018, Wren published Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution, in which he noted “I value the Vermont Historical Society as one of this nation’s finest—and friendliest.”

In the book, he overturned the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys as ruffians who joined the rush for cheap land on the northern frontier in the years before the Revolution.

Wren highlighted Allen’s failure to enlist in the Continental Army even as he raced Benedict Arnold for the famous seizure of Britain’s Fort Ticonderoga. He noted how Allen and Arnold loathed each other and that General George Washington, leery of Allen, refused to give him troops.

In a botched attempt to capture Montreal against specific orders of the commanding American general Philip Schuyler, Allen was captured in 1775 and shipped to England to be hanged. Freed in 1778, he spent the rest of his time negotiating with the British but failing to bring Vermont back under British rule.

Based on original archival research, Wren’s account was groundbreaking in its portrayal of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War and a major American myth.

Photo: Christopher Wren in 1974, the year he became Moscow bureau chief (The New York Times).

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