Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Peter Arnett dies at 91

LOS ANGELES

Peter Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Associated Press, died on Dec. 17 at the age of 91. He had been suffering from prostate cancer.

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 U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he broadcast a live account by cellphone from his hotel room.

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.

He credited Browne in particular with teaching him many of the survival tricks that would keep him alive in war zones over the next 40 years.

Arnett would stay in Vietnam until the capital, Saigon, fell to the Communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975. In the time leading up to those final days, he was ordered by AP’s New York headquarters to begin destroying the bureau’s papers as coverage of the war wound down.

Instead, he shipped them to his apartment in New York, believing they’d have historic value someday. They’re now in the AP’s archives.

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 not only reported on the front-line fighting but won exclusive, and controversial, interviews with then-President 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.

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. 

After his dismissal, 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.

Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.