Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Peter Arnett dies at age 91. He spent decades dodging bullets and bombs, bringing testimony of war to the world from the rice fields of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq.
Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for AP’s coverage of the Vietnam War, died Wednesday in Newport Beach, surrounded by friends and family, said his son, Andrew Arnett. He entered hospice on Saturday suffering from prostate cancer.
Arnett is well known to most reporters as a wire service reporter who reported in Vietnam from 1962 to the end of the war in 1975. However, he became a household name in 1991 after delivering a live update on the first Gulf War for CNN.
Although nearly all Western journalists fled Baghdad in the days before the U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. He broadcast live from his hotel room on his phone as missiles began raining down on the city.
“As you may have heard, there was an explosion near me,” he said calmly in a New Zealand accent shortly after the loud noise of the missile strike echoed over the airwaves. As he continued speaking, air-raid sirens blared in the background.
“I think this destroyed the telecom center,” he said of the other explosion. “They’re hitting the city center.”
This isn’t the first time Arnett has come perilously close to action.
Peter Arnett interviews Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on February 28, 1991. – Fairfax Media Archives/Getty Images
vietnam war
In January 1966, he joined a battalion of American soldiers trying to defeat North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when he stopped to look at a map.
“As the colonel stared at it, I heard four loud bangs and the bullet went through the map and into his chest, inches from my face,” Arnett recalled in a 2013 speech to the American Library Association. “He fell to the ground at my feet.”
He would begin writing obituaries for fallen soldiers like this: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer and a battalion commander. But Lt. Col. George Astor died like a rifleman. It might have been because of the rank insignia on the colonel’s collar, or the map he held in his hand, or just a willful chance that the Vietcong sniper chose Astor out of the five of us standing on a dusty jungle trail.”
Arnett arrived in Vietnam a year after joining AP as a correspondent in Indonesia.
The job was short-lived after he reported Indonesia’s economy was in chaos and the country’s angry leadership ousted him. His dismissal marked only the first of many controversies he would find himself in while building a historic career.
In 1962, at the AP’s Saigon bureau, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable group of reporters, including bureau chief Malcolm Brown and photo editor Horst Faas, three of whom won three Pulitzer Prizes.
He gave Brown special credit for teaching him many of the survival skills that would enable him to survive in war zones for the next 40 years. Among them: Never stand near a medic or radio operator as they are one of the first the enemy will shoot at, and if you hear gunshots coming from the other side, do not look around to see who fired the shot as the next one may hit you.
He would remain in Vietnam until 1975, when the capital Saigon fell to communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels. In the final days, as war coverage wrapped up, AP headquarters in New York ordered him to begin destroying bureau documents.
Instead, he shipped them to his apartment in New York, believing they would one day have historical value. They are now in the AP archives.
Baghdad, Iraq: On February 21, 1991, during the Gulf War, veteran American journalist Peter Arnett broadcast live for CNN from the Al Rashhid Hotel. -Kaveh Kazemi/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
cable news star
After the war, Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly formed CNN.
Ten years later, he was in Baghdad covering another war. Not only did he cover the battles on the front lines, he also secured exclusive and controversial interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In 1995, he published his memoir “On the Field: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones.”
Arnett resigned from CNN in 1999, and months later the network withdrew an investigative report that Arnett had not prepared but instead narrated, alleging the use of the deadly sarin nerve gas on deserting U.S. soldiers in Laos in 1970.
In 2003, while covering the Second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic Channel, he was fired for criticizing the U.S. military’s war strategy in an interview with Iraqi state television. His comments were condemned domestically as anti-American.
After his firing, television critics from the Associated Press and other news organizations speculated that Arnett would never work in television news again. Within a week, however, he was hired to cover the war for television stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he taught journalism at Shantou University in China.
After retiring in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.
Arnett was born in Riverton, New Zealand, on November 13, 1934, and had his first exposure to journalism when he got a job at the local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after graduating from high school.
“I didn’t know exactly where my life was going, but I do remember when I walked into the newspaper office as a staffer and found my little desk, I did have a – you know – really wonderful feeling that I had found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral history.
After a few years at The Times, he planned to move to a larger paper in London. However, on his way to England by boat, he stopped in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
Soon he was working for the English-language Bangkok World and later its sister paper in Laos. There he made connections that would lead him to the Associated Press and a lifetime of covering the war.
Arnett is survived by his wife and children Elsa and Andrew.
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