Peter Arnett, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, dies at 91
Renowned journalist who covered Vietnam to Iraq died in Newport Beach after a career spanning four decades with the Associated Press and CNN
LOS ANGELES — Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring eyewitness accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91.
Arnett won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Associated Press. He died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew Arnett said. He had been suffering from prostate cancer. “Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation — intrepid, fearless, and a beautiful writer and storyteller. His reporting in print and on camera will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come,” Edith Lederer, a fellow AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 and AP’s chief correspondent at the United Nations, said in a statement.
As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists for his Vietnam reporting from 1962 until the war’s end in 1975. He became a household name in 1991 after he broadcast live updates for CNN from Baghdad during the first Gulf War. While almost all Western reporters had fled the city in the days before the U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he delivered a live account by cellphone from his hotel room. There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard, he said, in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud boom of a missile strike rattled across the airwaves. They are hitting the center of the city.
In January 1966, Arnett joined a battalion of U.S. soldiers seeking to rout North Vietnamese snipers and stood near the battalion commander when an officer paused to read a map. Four shots rang out as bullets tore through the map and into the commander’s chest, a few inches from Arnett’s face, he recalled years later. He would begin the fallen soldier’s obituary with a line about Lt. Col. George Eyster, noting the contrast between rank and the rifleman’s fate. Arnett arrived in Vietnam a year after joining AP as its Indonesia correspondent, a post that ended when Indonesian leadership forced him out over reporting on the economy. His time in Vietnam would culminate with Saigon’s fall in 1975; the AP New York headquarters had ordered him to destroy the bureau’s papers as coverage wound down, but he instead shipped them to his New York apartment, where they now sit in AP archives.
Arnett stayed with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly formed CNN. Ten years later he reported from Baghdad, conducting exclusive interviews with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In 1995 he published 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 narrated, alleging that deadly Sarin nerve gas had been used on deserting 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 granting an interview to Iraqi state TV during which he criticized the U.S. military’s war strategy. His remarks were denounced back home as anti-American. After his dismissal, television 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 took a teaching post at China’s Shantou University. Following his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to Fountain Valley in Southern California. Born Nov. 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Arnett got his start in journalism at the Southland Times after high school, then moved to larger papers and networks as his career developed. He recalled in a 2006 AP oral history that the first day on the job gave him a sense of belonging to a profession he would pursue across continents.
Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew. Retired AP photographer Nick Ut, who covered combat in Vietnam with Arnett, said his death will leave a big hole in his life.
AP journalist Audrey McAvoy contributed to this report.