LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world eyewitness accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91 years old.
Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of 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 – bold, fearless and a beautiful writer and storyteller. His print and on-camera reporting will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come,” said Edith Lederer, who was the AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-1973 and is now the AP’s United Nations correspondent.
As a television correspondent, Arnett was best known to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975. He became a household name in 1991, however, after providing live updates for CNN from Iraq during the first Gulf War.
While almost all Western reporters fled Baghdad in the days before the US-led attack, Arnett stayed. As rockets began raining down on the city, he broadcast a live account on his cell phone from his hotel room.
“There was an explosion right next to me, you may have heard,” he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice, moments after the loud boom of a rocket rattled the airwaves. As he continued to speak, air raid sirens blared in the background.
“I think that took out the telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They’re hitting downtown.”
Reporting from Vietnam
It wasn’t the first time Arnett got dangerously close to the action.
In January 1966, he joined a battalion of American soldiers trying to defeat North Vietnamese snipers and was sitting next to the battalion commander when an officer stopped to read a map.
“As the colonel looked at it, I heard four loud shots as the bullets tore through the map and chest, inches from my face,” Arnett recalled during a talk with the American Library Association in 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”
The obituary of the fallen soldier began thus: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer, and a battalion commander. But Lt. Col. George Eyster was going to die a rifleman. It might have been the colonel’s rank leaves on his collar, or the map he held, or just a whimsical chance that the living would be picked from that Viet Cong. dusty jungle trail.”
Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining the AP as a correspondent in Indonesia. That job would be short-lived after he reported that Indonesia’s economy was collapsing and the country’s angry leadership fired him. His expulsion marked only the first of many controversies in which he would find himself embroiled, while making for a historic career.
At the AP bureau in Saigon in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable roster of journalists, including bureau chief Malcolm Browne and photo editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.
He credited Browne in particular with teaching him many of the survival tricks that would keep him alive in war zones for the next 40 years. Among them: never stand next to a medic or radio operator because they are among the first the enemy will shoot. And if you hear a shot coming from the other side, don’t look around to see who fired it because the next one will probably hit you.
Arnett would remain in Vietnam until the capital, Saigon, fell to communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975. In the run-up to those final days, AP headquarters in New York ordered him to begin destroying the bureau’s records as a cover for the war.
Instead, he shipped them to his apartment in New York, believing they would someday have historical value. It is now in the AP archives.
A cable news star
Arnett remained at the AP until 1981, when he joined the fledgling CNN.
Ten years later, he was in Baghdad covering another war. Not only did he report on the frontline fighting, but he 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 he did not prepare but told, alleging that the deadly nerve gas Sarin was used against American soldiers leaving Laos in 1970.
He covered the Second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic in 2003, when he was fired for giving an interview to Iraqi state television in which he criticized the US military’s war strategy. His remarks were denounced at home as anti-American.
After his firing, TV critics for the AP and other news organizations speculated that Arnett would never work in television news again. Within a week, however, he had been hired to report on the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he received a journalism teaching position at Shantou University in China. After his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the southern 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 local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after high school.
“I didn’t have a clear idea of where my life was going to take me, but I remember the first day I walked into the newspaper office as an employee and I found my desk and I had—you know—the enormously delicious feeling that I had found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral history.
After a few years at the Times, he made plans to move to a larger paper in London. On his way to England by ship, however, he stopped in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
He soon worked for Bangkok World in English, and later for its sister paper in Laos. There he would make the connections that led him to the AP and a lifetime of war coverage.
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 remained his friend for half a century. “His death will leave a big hole in my life.”
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AP reporter Audrey McAvoy contributed to this report.