Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died at the age of 91.
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 entered hospice on Saturday while suffering from prostate cancer.
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 on 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 noise of a missile strike rattled the airwaves. As he continued to speak, air raid sirens blared in the background.
“I think that destroyed the telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They’re hitting downtown.”
It wasn’t the first time Arnett got dangerously close to the action.
Peter Arnett reports from Baghdad interviewing Saddam Hussein on February 28, 1991. – Fairfax Media Archives/Getty Images
Fighting in Vietnam
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 the soldier 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 would begin thus: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer, and a battalion commander. But Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster would die like 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 of five in Egi chose the dusty jungle path.”
Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining The Associated Press as its Indonesia correspondent.
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 he would find himself in, while also 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 near a medic or radio operator because they are among the first the enemy will shoot at, and if you hear a shot coming from the other side, don’t look around to see who shot because the next one will probably hit you.
He would remain in Vietnam until the capital Saigon fell to communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975, and 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.
Baghdad, Iraq: Veteran American journalist Peter Arnett during a live broadcast for CNN from the Al Rashhed Hotel during the Gulf War on February 21, 1991. – Kaveh Kazemi/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A cable news star
After the war ended, 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, 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 — this 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 bigger 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.
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