LOS ANGELES — Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who dodged bullets and bombs for decades to bring eyewitness accounts of war to the world from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91 years old.
Arnett, who received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work. Coverage of the Vietnam War to The Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew Arnett said. He suffered from prostate cancer.
“Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation – fearless, fearless, 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 AP's war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 and is now AP's chief United Nations correspondent.
As a news correspondent, Arnett was known primarily to fellow journalists as he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975. However, in 1991, he became something of a household name after he broadcast live news for CNN from Iraq during the first Gulf War.
Although almost all Western reporters left Baghdad in the days before the US attack, Arnett remained. As rockets rained down on the city, he broadcast live on his cell phone from his hotel room.
“There was an explosion right next to me, as you may have heard,” he said in a calm voice with a New Zealand accent, moments after the loud boom of a missile strike boomed across the airwaves. As he continued to speak, air raid sirens blared in the background.
“I think it destroyed a telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They're hitting the city center.”
This wasn't the first time Arnett had gotten dangerously close to a fight.
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 the officer stopped to read a map.
“As the colonel peered at him, I heard four loud shots: bullets pierced the card and entered his chest, inches from my face,” Arnett recalled during a conversation with the American Library Association in 2013. “He fell to the ground at my feet.”
He began his obituary for the fallen soldier: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer and a battalion commander. But Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster was destined to die like a gunslinger. Perhaps it was the Colonel's insignia on his collar, or the map he held in his hand, or simply chance that the Viet Cong sniper picked Eyster out of the five of us standing on the dusty jungle path.”
Arnett arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining AP as a correspondent in Indonesia. The job didn't last long after he reported that Indonesia's economy was in shambles and the country's angry leadership kicked him out. His expulsion was just the first of several controversies he would become embroiled in, as well as a historic career.
In 1962, at the AP's Saigon bureau, Arnett found himself surrounded by a huge group of journalists, including bureau chief Malcolm Brown and photo editor Horst Faas, who together won three Pulitzer Prizes.
In particular, he credited Brown for teaching him many survival techniques that helped him survive in combat zones for the next 40 years. Among them: Never stand next to a medic or radio operator, because they are one of the first people the enemy will shoot at. And if you hear a shot from the other side, don't look around to see who fired it, because the next shot will most likely hit you.
Arnett remained in Vietnam until the capital Saigon fell to communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975. Just before those final days, AP's New York headquarters ordered him to begin destroying bureau documents as coverage of the war dried up.
Instead, he sent them to his apartment in New York, believing that someday they would acquire historical value. They are now in the AP archives.
Arnett remained with 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 battles 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 a memoir, Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones.
Arnett left CNN in 1999, a few months after the network withdrew an investigative report he did not produce but had reported, alleging that the deadly nerve gas sarin was used in the desertion of 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 the U.S. military's military strategy. His remarks were condemned at home as un-American.
Following his firing, television critics for the AP and other news organizations suggested that Arnett would never work in television news again. However, within a week he was hired to report on the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he took a job as a journalism teacher at Shantou University of China. After retiring in 2014, he and his wife Nina Nguyen moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.
Peter Arnett was born on November 13, 1934 in Riverton, New Zealand. He was first introduced to journalism when he took a job with the local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after leaving school.
“I didn’t really have a clear idea of where my life would take me, but I remember that first day when I walked into the newspaper office as a staffer and found my little desk, and I really had a — you know — extremely good feeling that I had found my place,” he recalled in an AP oral history in 2006.
After several years at The Times, he planned to move to a larger newspaper in London. However, on his way to England by ship, he stopped in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
He soon began working for the English-language Bangkok World newspaper and then for its sister newspaper in Laos. There he made connections that led him to AP and spent his life covering the war.
Arnett is survived by his wife and children Elsa and Andrew.
“He was like a brother to me,” said retired AP photographer Nick Ut, who covered the Vietnam battle 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 journalist Audrey McEvoy contributed to this report.
