One of the first calls we made when we started assembling a staff for The New York Sun was to a diminutive newspaperman in Brooklyn named Raymond Joseph, who, with his celebrated brother Leo, edits and publishes the largest Haitian newspaper anywhere, the Haiti Observateur. We offered him a weekly column in the Sun not only because the community of 300,000 Haitians who live in New York is a remarkably lively and engaged community, but because for decades we have been an admirer of Mr. Joseph for his personal courage and journalistic idealism. A career staff reporter of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Joseph was for 19 years under a death sentence issued by the Duvalier regime because of his broadcasts and writings against the dictatorship. In 1984, Mr. Joseph resigned from the Wall Street Journal, where he’d long worked as a reporter, so he could edit the newspaper he owned with his brother. After the Duvaliers were ousted, Mr. Joseph served as charge in Washington, but in 1991 he returned to the paper in Brooklyn. Although Mr. Joseph recognized the work against the Duvaliers of Jean Bertand Aristide, he issued early warnings against Mr. Aristide’s penchant for dictatorship. In the past two years, he kept readers of both the Observateur and the Sun well ahead of the curve of Mr. Aristide’s descent.

Yesterday, for second time in his life, Mr. Joseph was called to serve his country in an hour of crisis as its representative in Washington.

His colleagues at the Sun and his thousands of friends in New York couldn’t be more delighted for this 72-year-old hero of the democratic struggle.