K. H. Bacon, an Advocate for Refugees, Is Dead at 64 (Published 2009)

Kenneth H. Bacon, a former journalist and Pentagon spokesman who devoted his last years to highlighting refugees’ problems and urging policymakers to find solutions, died Saturday morning at his summer home on Block Island, R.I. He was 64 and a resident of Washington.

The cause was complications of melanoma, his daughter Sarah said

Mr. Bacon, as an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, was the spokesman for the Defense Department during NATO’s campaign to end the violence in Kosovo in 1999. He then visited his first refugee camp during a trip to the Balkans with William S. Cohen, then the defense secretary.

“I had never seen refugees before, never fully appreciated the sheer magnitude of one million people leaving their homes and needing food, shelter and medical care and then one million people going back home after the war,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001.

“This fascinated me,” he continued. “I knew it was rare for the world to help refugees so completely, and I wondered if somebody could help give the same attention to the refugees in the Congo, Afghanistan and Sudan.”

Mr. Bacon became president of Refugees International, which advocates for assistance to save the lives of the world’s 41.9 million people who flee their homes to escape violence, either in their own countries or across borders. The organization also aids the 12 million stateless people living in limbo without citizenship rights.

Refugees International helps abandoned refugees receive food, medicine and education; helps displaced families to return home and helps stateless families obtain legal status. It also urges policymakers at the national and international levels to send peacekeepers to protect displaced people.

In a biography he wrote for the organization’s Web site, Mr. Bacon said the most important thing Refugees International does is push governments and the United Nations to overcome what he called the “commitment gap” that prevents the world from ending genocide, human rights abuses and wars.

Mr. Bacon wrote and spoke extensively about these issues. In remarks at the Brookings Institution in February 2003, just five weeks before the United States attacked Iraq, he suggested ways to reduce the number of refugees in a war, including choosing targets outside of urban areas.

In an article in Newsday in September 2003 he urged the United States to persuade France to contribute peacekeepers to Iraq, because of France’s success in peacekeeping elsewhere. At the time, many Americans resented France because of its strong opposition to the American attack.

Kenneth Hogate Bacon was born in Bronxville, N.Y., on Nov. 21, 1944. He graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy and Amherst College, where his father was a political science professor. He earned master’s degrees in journalism and business from Columbia.

In 1968 and 1969, he was a legislative assistant to United States Senator Thomas J. McIntyre, Democrat of New Hampshire. He then joined The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, where he worked for 25 years as a reporter, columnist and editor. From 1968 to 1974, he served in the Army Reserve.

Mr. Bacon had covered the Pentagon during the Carter administration and had come to respect William J. Perry, a senior official. When President Bill Clinton appointed Mr. Perry as his second secretary of defense in 1994, Mr. Perry asked Mr. Bacon to be his spokesman.

Mr. Bacon joined the Clinton administration as assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, and was promoted to assistant secretary in 1996. He served until 2001, becoming a familiar face on broadcast and cable television news shows donned in his signature bow tie.

Mr. Bacon is survived by his wife, the former Darcy Wheeler, and his daughters, Katharine and Sarah; his father, Theodore S. Bacon of Peterborough, N.H.; and his brother, Douglas A. Bacon of Concord, Mass.

To Mr. Bacon, being a refugee was something that could happen to anybody at any time.

“Even blue-blooded WASPs were refugees at one time; mine came over from England in 1630, fleeing debts for all I know,” he said.