James Walker Benét

James Walker Benét (1914 – December 16, 2012) was an American journalist, author, and former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED. Benet was one of the last surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of American volunteers during the Spanish Civil War who fought for the Republicans as part of the International Brigades.

Benét was born in 1914 in New York City. His father, Pulitzer Prize winner William Rose Benét, founded the Saturday Review of Literature. His aunt, novelist Kathleen Norris, raised him in Marin County, California, after the death of his mother when he was a young child. Benet's uncle, Stephen Vincent Benét, was a writer and poet who won a Pulitzer Prize for John Brown's Body.

Benét graduated from Stanford University in 1935. He worked at The New Republic after college, before going to Spain to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He was a brigade combat soldier and ambulance driver from 1936 to 1937, later leaving Spain when the war turned in favor of Francisco Franco. In a 2012 interview with Public Radio International, Benét explained his reasoning for joining the war, "If the moment comes when it's the obvious right thing and somebody's got to do it, maybe it's going to be you...I always felt that I was on the right side of history in Spain."

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