Bangkok editor

MacDonald began his journalism career in Boston, working for the Advertiser, the Evening American and the Post before moving to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. During the Second world War he joined the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in the Pacific, and commanded an OSS unit in the Burma in the final months of the war, broadcasting Allied news into Japanese-occupied Thailand. He remained in Thailand after the war, creating the Bangkok Post with a polyglot staff recruited from Thais who had worked with him in the jungle, and Japanese from a detention camp, apparently the only people in Thailand who understood how to operate his printing press. During his eight years as editor, he often used the paper to promote democracy and free speech, writing a highly regarded “Postmen Say” column. Ousted from Thailand in the early 1950s by that country's military regime, he returned to the US where he managed a Cape Cod resort before becoming publisher and editor of the Marblehead Messenger in Marblehead, Mass., in 1966. AHe wrote two books, “My Footloose Newspaper Life” and “Bangkok Editor”, and died of a heart attack at his Marblehead home in May 2000.