Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to deliver firsthand accounts of war – from the rice fields of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq – has died. He was 91 years old.
Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his international reporting on the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew Arnett said. He was suffering from prostate cancer.
“Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation – brave, fearless, and a great writer and storyteller. His reporting in print and on camera will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come,” said Edith Lederer, who was an AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972 and is now head of AP’s United Nations and AP’s 1973.
As a televangelist, Arnett was well known to his fellow reporters while covering Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975. He became a household name in 1991, however, after broadcasting live CNN updates from Iraq during the first Gulf War.
Although almost all Western journalists had fled Baghdad in the days before the US-led invasion, Arnett stayed. As missiles began to rain down on the city, he broadcast the account live from his hotel room.
“There was an explosion near me, you might have heard it,” he said in a soft, husky New Zealand voice after the sound of the rockets echoing through the air. As he continued to speak, a siren sounded in the background.
“I think that took out the communications center,” he said of another explosion. “They hit the center of town.”
It wasn’t the first time Arnett got dangerously close to the action.
In January 1966, he joined a US military force that wanted to drive out North Vietnamese invaders and was standing next to an army commander when an officer paused to read a map.
Arnett recalled when he spoke to the American Library Assn, he said: “When the colonel looked up, I heard four big guns as the bullets ripped through the map and entered his chest, a few inches from my face. In 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”
He began the speech of the fallen soldier like this: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer and an army commander. But Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster was going to die as a rifleman. Maybe it was the leaves of the colonel’s rank, or the map he was holding in his hand, or just a stray chance that Eyster chose the 50th Eyster in Viet. forest road.”
Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining the AP as its Indonesia correspondent. That job was to be short-lived after he reported that Indonesia’s economy was in dire straits and the country’s angry leadership fired him. His dismissal marked only the first of many controversies in which he would find himself embroiled, while undertaking a career in history.
Peter Arnett sits in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 18, 1963.
(Associated Press)
At the AP’s Saigon Bureau in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by an array of formidable reporters, including bureau chief Malcolm Browne and photo editor Horst Faas, among them the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes.
He particularly credited Browne with teaching him many survival techniques that would keep him alive in war zones for the next 40 years. Among them: Never stand near a doctor or a radio operator because they are among the first that the enemy will shoot at. And if you hear gunshots from the other side, don’t look at who shot because the next one might hit you.
Arnett would remain in Vietnam until the capital, Saigon, fell to communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975. In the lead up to those final days, he was ordered by AP headquarters in New York to begin destroying the office’s papers as coverage of the war went down.
Instead, he sent them to his New York apartment, believing they would one day have historical value. They are now in the AP archives.
Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly formed CNN.
Ten years later, he was in Baghdad organizing another war. Not only did he report on the front lines but he also won exclusive, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In 1995, he published the memoir “Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones.
Arnett resigned from CNN in 1999, months after the network retracted an investigative report that he did not prepare but related that the deadly Sarin nerve gas had been used to kill American soldiers in Laos in 1970.
He was covering the Second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic in 2003 when he was fired for giving an interview on Iraqi state television in which he criticized US military strategy. His speeches were condemned at home as anti-American.
After his firing, TV critics of the AP and other news organizations speculated that Arnett would never work in television news again. However, during the week he was hired to report on the war for channels in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he took a job teaching journalism at Shantou University in China. After retiring in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the California suburb of Fountain Valley.
Born on November 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Peter Arnett got his first exposure to journalism when he got a job at his hometown newspaper, the Southland Times, right after high school.
“I didn’t have a clear idea of where my life was going to take me, but I remember that first day when I walked into the newspaper office as an employee and found my little desk, and I had a feeling – very good that I had found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral history.
After a few years at the Southland Times, he made plans to move to a bigger newspaper in London. However, on his way to England by ship, he stopped in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
Soon he was working for the English-language Bangkok World and, later, for its sister newspaper in Laos. There he would make the connections that led him to AP and a lifetime of military integration.
Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.
“He was like a brother,” said retired AP photographer Nick Ut, who covered the Vietnam war with Arnett and became his friend for half a century. “His death will leave a big hole in my life.”
Rogers writes for the Associated Press.
