At the beginning of 1941, Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of "The New York Times", was impressed so by his assertiveness in ferreting out news that he offered Lawrence a position as one of the bureau's reporters. In his twenty years with "The Times", the 1940s byline, "By William H. Lawrence" and, in the 1950s and 1960–61, "By W. H. Lawrence" appeared over coverage from World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War. His battlefront reporting took him to Okinawa, Guam, Japan and Moscow, where he was assigned as a war correspondent in 1943 and, during the immediate postwar period, continued to file stories from such diverse locations as Poland, the Balkans and South America. In January 1944, he was part of the delegation of Western correspondents who visited the graves in Katyn forest at the invitation of the Soviets. Between 1950 and 1953, he spent months in Korea covering the war and interviewing soldiers in a series of personal human interest articles which appeared in "The Times".