He spent more than sixty years writing for the Christian Science Monitor and at the time of his departure from his stationing in London he was named as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE Hon).
Joseph Harsch studied history at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he received a master's degree in 1927 after writing a thesis on the Hundred Years' War.
Later that same year, Harsch went to work as a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, D.C.[1] At the outset of the Great Depression, Harsch was a newly hired young reporter at the Monitor[3] in Washington D.C. covering Herbert Hoover as the magnitude of the economic crisis began to unfold, and was still there when Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal with measures to counteract it.
On his way to the Soviet Union during a stopover in Hawaii, Harsch and his wife were asleep when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began.
During the capture of Albert Speer in Glücksburg Castle (Speer was Adolf Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War Production) Harsch translated for a British officer leading the arrest and he reported of the capture of Karl Dönitz in a hospital of Mürwik (Muerwik), who was the head of the Flensburg Government.
Because of his background in London, Harsch was hired by the BBC when influential broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing gave up his post with the weekly radio program American Commentary.
In 1953, Harsch shifted his allegiance to NBC, serving as a news analyst for four years before returning to London as the senior European correspondent for the network.
[7] The $1,000 award for his work with the Liberty Broadcasting System cited Harsch's "consistently excellent and accurate gathering and reporting of news by radio".