Royce Augustine Hoyle III

Royce Augustine Hoyle, III, known to friends and family as Russ, died peacefully at his home on April 10, 2025, at the age of 77, surrounded by family. His passing came after a long fight with heart failure and related complications.

Russ was an accomplished journalist, editor, and writer. He was a writer and senior editor at Time Magazine, for which he traveled the world covering science, the environment, and foreign affairs. He edited and contributed chapters to the Gale Environmental Almanac (1993), a compilation of essays on environmental issues by prominent experts of the day. He was later the deputy Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, when it was the sixth largest Sunday paper in the country. He was also editor of The New Republic and the Hartford Advocate.

In the years after the 9/11 attacks, Russ applied his deep experience in print journalism to independent reporting and analysis of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, he published Going to War, a 500-page book laying out the political, diplomatic, and intelligence machinations that took the United States into the second Iraq War. In 2012, at the age of 65, he travelled to Afghanistan to assess the likely impact of the long-planned withdrawal of the U.S. military, embedding with U.S. forces at Forward Operating Base Masum Ghar in Northern Kandahar province. In these years, Russ published articles on foreign affairs for The Daily Beast, The Nation, and other publications, and was a visiting lecturer on the Iraq War at Trinity College.

Russ was born May 17, 1947, in Savannah, Georgia, to Alice Hulbert and Royce A. Hoyle, Jr. He spent his school-age years in Glencoe and then Highland Park, Illinois, attending North Shore Country Day School. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English.

Living in New York City in the early 1980s, he was re-introduced to his future wife, Ellen Gardner Howe, a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two had first met as high school classmates at North Shore Country Day School. They were married at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City on February 26, 1983, and started a family.

Russ was an avid sailor, outdoorsman, and tennis player. Russ loved few things more than sailing with friends and family on Penobscot Bay, near his summer home in Deer Isle, Maine. Always a voracious reader, he named his 34-foot Sabre Sophie after the beloved first ship in the Aubrey/Maturin novels written by Patrick O’Brian, one of his favorite authors.

In 2019, Russ and Ellen retired to the Washington, D.C. region to live close to their son and his family. He is survived by his wife; his siblings Harriette Tuttle and Rob Hoyle and their spouses and children; his son and daughter-in-law, Henry Hoyle and Laura Shen; and three grandchildren, Thomas, Benjamin, and Louise.

A funeral service will be held at St. David’s Church in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 14, at 10:30am.