Mrs. Anne O'Hare McCormick, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, died yesterday at 6:50 P.M. in Doctors Hospital, which she entered as a patient on May 11. Her age was 72. She had lapsed into a coma in the late afternoon and did not regain consciousness. At her bedside were her husband, Francis J. McCormick, and a sister, Mrs. Paul Gill of 7 Gracie Square. Another sister, Mrs. James B. McCalley of Havana, also survives. Mr. and Mrs. McCormick made their home in the Carlyle Hotel. Anne O'Hare McCormick's wise reportorial pen recorded and interpreted history in the world's most turbulent times. As a peripatetic correspondent, she brought light without heat to her readers out of increasingly complex national and international politics. She was as much at home in the chancelleries of Europe as she was on the shell-pocked Greek mountainsides, and equally at home in the cratered desert of Israel as in the vast auditoriums during a national election campaign. In whatever part of the shrinking world her dateline put her, the sound, pungent reports of her conversations and observations won universal praise. Mrs. McCormick's keen analysis and interpretation were crisp and markedly free of fuzziness and guesswork. In her early work for The Times in the Twenties she astutely recognized, long before most of her colleagues, the coming power of Mussolini. Although partisan spokesmen disagreed with the views she set down thrice weekly in her editorial-page column "Abroad," and in her editorials on the two other days of her work week, none ever failed to pay her tribute for sharp reporting and "coolheaded analysis of the news." In the course of her brilliant newspaper career she became the expert the experts looked up to. Although she had no formal, professional training for newspaper work, she schooled herself for years before filing her first cable. The stature of her work was such that only a year after she joined the editorial page staff of The Times in 1936 she won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. She was the second woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She was born in Yorkshire, England, of American parents, Thomas and Teresa Beatrice O'Hare. She was brought to America as an infant and was reared in Columbus, Ohio, where she was educated in private schools and in the College of St. Mary of the Springs. She received her only journalistic experience, before she began her association with The Times in 1922, as associate editor of the weekly Catholic Universe Bulletin in Cleveland, a publication on which her mother, the poet, was once woman's page editor. Young Anne O'Hare began her preparation for her future career in earnest as the wife of Mr. McCormick, a Dayton engineer and importer whom she accompanied on frequent buying trips to Europe. Abroad, she studied every country they visited, absorbing a mine of information that was to stand her in good stead later. Occasionally, Mrs. McCormick wrote a few pieces for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. In 1921, on the eve of another trip to the Continent, she sent a timid note to the late Carr V. Van Anda, then managing editor of The Times, asking if she might send him some dispatches from abroad. Mr. Van Anda replied: "Try it." She did and impressed him, particularly with her judgment of Mussolini, when she wrote: "Italy is hearing the master's voice." Other correspondents were then giving him the brush-off as a posturing lout. She was hired. Since that time she lived and moved with the world's most influential people, culling for a growing army of readers the events that were to rock and reshape the world. In June of 1936 she joined the editorial staff of The Times, the first woman to serve as a regular contributor to its editorial page. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, president and publisher of The Times, told Mrs. McCormick, when he invited her late in 1935 to join the editorial board: "You are to be the 'freedom' editor. It will be your job to stand up on your hind legs and shout whenever freedom is interfered with in any part of the world." After her initial success with the Mussolini story, she brought to the pages of The Times the personalities and thinking of De Valera, Leon Blum, Hitler, Stalin, Venizelos, Dollfuss, Stresemann, Schusnigg, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Korean conflict, the United Nations and the whole gamut of American-European and American-Asian relations were her "beats." Modest to a fault, the short but energetic Mrs. McCormick traveled not only to the capitals of the world for her news but to the shops, farms and homes of the world's little people who were so frequently the vulnerables in the play of power politics. She had the uncanny knack of being where the news was breaking, but to hear her tell it she just "bumped into a few" as the crises were popping. Mrs. McCormick seldom took notes. Instead, she listened carefully, absorbed facts and figures and drank in the mood of persons and places. This was later reduced to neat, clear typed prose. She eschewed note-taking because "it makes people too cautious," and her manner was always quiet, intelligent, penetrating. She treated important figures as human beings, and for this they admired and respected her, always aware of the solid grasp she had on the world's knottiest problems. After Stalin's death, as Soviet provocation increased and tension mounted, Mrs. McCormick saw clearly the way to meet this Communist provocation and wrote: "It is tiresome to repeat it all the time, but the truth is that there is no way to meet provocation save to increase the strength and imperviousness of the stone wall it aims to pierce. Unless they have lost Stalin's sense of caution, the new Soviet rulers cannot be 'provoked' into total war, and the West cannot allow itself to be goaded into reckless action. Since the aim of our policy is to build up the force and cohesion that would discourage warlike adventures on the other aide, we cannot afford to be diverted for a moment from our supreme task by pit shots and braggart dares. "The supreme task is to hold the free nations together." In the course of her life, a host of honors, both journalistic and academic, came to Mrs. McCormick. She received honorary degrees from many universities and colleges, including Columbia, Fordham, Ohio State, Dayton and New York Universities and Elmira, Manhattan, Middlebury, Villanova, Lafayette, Smith, Wellesley, Mount St. Vincent, Wilson and Rollins Colleges and the New Jersey College for Women. Among other awards, she received "The New York Evening Post Medal, 1934; the American Woman's Association Medal, 1939; the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Medal of the Woman's Roosevelt Memorial Association, 1941, and the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Social Science, 1942. Other honors included the Siena Medal of Theta Phi Alpha, 1944; University of Notre Dame Laetare Medal, 1944; International Altrusa Distinguished Service Award, 1945; Women's National Press Club Achievement Award, 1945; Chi Omega National Achievement Award, 1946; Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal, 1950, and the William the Silent Award for journalism, 1952. She was the author of "The Hammer and the Scythe," published in 1928, a book that described her experiences during two trips to the Soviet Union. She also held membership in a number of societies, including the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. Mrs. McCormick also was a delegate to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Conferences in 1946 and 1948. Among the tributes to Mrs. McCormick last night was the following from President Eisenhower: "I have just been informed of the tragic passing of Anne O'Hare McCormick. Mrs. McCormick was a truly great reporter, respected at home and abroad for her keen analysis and impartial presentation of the news developments of our day. "She will be greatly missed by all the members of the newspaper profession and the hundreds of thousands of readers who followed her column in The New York Times." Mr. Sulzberger said: "With the death of Anne McCormick, a brilliant, sensitive mind and a warm and gracious heart is taken from the world. The extent of her interests, her keen analysis of events, her buoyant spirit, her depths of perception. . .the clarity of style with which she presented her views of the changing scene, all contributed to placing her in a unique position to serve her fellow man. This she did untiringly until the end. Those who knew her, loved her. Those who read her writing relied upon her."