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. Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for the AP, died Wednesday in Newport Beach surrounded by friends and family, said his son Andrew Arnett. He had been suffering from prostate cancer, reports the AP. As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the war's end in 1975. He became something of a household name in 1991, however, after he broadcast live updates for CNN from Iraq during the first Gulf War.
While almost all Western reporters had fled Baghdad in the days before the US-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he broadcast 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. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens blared in the background. "I think that took out the telecommunications center," he said. "They are hitting the center of the city."
It was not the first time Arnett had gotten dangerously close to the action. Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining AP as its Indonesia correspondent. That job would be short-lived after he reported Indonesia's economy was in shambles and the country's enraged leadership threw him out. His expulsion marked only the first of several controversies in which he would find himself embroiled, while also forging a historic career. At the AP's Saigon bureau 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. Arnett would stay in Vietnam until the capital, Saigon, fell to the Communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975.
Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly formed CNN. Ten years later, he was in Baghdad covering another war. He won exclusive, and controversial, interviews with Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. 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. Following his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley. Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.
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