Hartman grew up in Morristown, N.J., and graduated from the University with a degree in English. His thesis was titled “The Friend in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” After a few short stints as a Broadway publicist and reporting positions at the New York Daily News, a Puerto Rican newspaper and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Hartman joined the Associated Press, where he would spend his next 62 years.
Hartman led AP bureaus in Madrid, Paris, Budapest, Brussels and Frankfurt during a tumultuous time in Europe. In 1978, Hartman returned to Washington, reporting from AP’s foreign desk on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund till his retirement in 2006.
“I could have retired at 65, but the idea of retiring at all has always been something I dreaded,’’ Hartman said in a 2005 profile in Princeton Alumni Weekly. “It seems to me, given the longevity of people these days, that to retire at 65 is a dead-end deal.’