William Holmes Honan (May 11, 1930 – April 28, 2014) was an American journalist and author who directed coverage of the arts at The New York Times as its culture editor in the 1980s.
[1] Honan held senior editorial positions at the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Saturday Review and The Villager, a weekly newspaper serving downtown Manhattan.
[1] After serving in the Army, Honan moved to New York City where he managed Ed Koch's early political campaigns and began a career in journalism.
[5] Serving as editor, Honan established himself as a crusading voice for reform against the Tammany Hall political machine and the automobile-centric visions of the autocratic urban planner Robert Moses.
[7] Bywater's 1925 book, The Great Pacific War, was a fictional account of how Japan might engage the United States in a theoretical future naval conflict and how the U.S. might respond.
As Honan points out in Visions of Infamy, both Japan and the U.S. adopted strategies that were remarkably faithful to what Bywater promulgated in his fictionalized war game.
The book chronicles the story of how the "Quedlinburg Hoard" - a cache of medieval treasures valued at over $200 million - disappeared in the Harz Mountains at the end of the Second World War, only to resurface 40 years later in a small Texas town.
In his capacity as chief cultural correspondent for the Times, Honan pursued a series of leads and discovered that an American soldier of the 87th Armored Field Infantry Battalion of the U.S. Army named Lieutenant Joe T. Meador had orchestrated one of the greatest art thefts in history at the end of the Second World War.