Peter Arnett, best known for his live television reporting from Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991.and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the Vietnam War, died Wednesday in Newport Beach, his family announced. He was 91.
Arnett wrote more than 2,000 stories from Vietnam for The Associated Press, mainly eyewitness accounts of major battles between American forces and the North Vietnamese army, according to a biography prepared for a 2016 conference on the Vietnam War at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.
Arnett won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1966. David Halberstam described Arnett as “the best reporter of the whole Vietnam War” in his book “The Best and the Brightest.”
Arnett was among the last of the Western reporters in South Vietnam when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army.
Following a 20-year career with The AP, Arnett joined CNN in 1981, a year after it began broadcasting. He said he changed from print to television because he felt television news was taking over from traditional print coverage as the primary means of news delivery.
Arnett covered wars and civil disturbances in Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa during his 18 years with CNN, including broadcasting live telephone from the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad as the coalition forces began their attack during Operation Desert Storm on Jan. 17, 1991.
As the fear of terrorism grew in the 1990s, Arnett kept returning to Afghanistan. He was the first western journalist to conduct a television interview with the arch-terrorist Osama Bin Laden, in a cave in the terrorist stronghold of Tora Bora.
Arnett, who lived in Fountain Valley, died from prostate cancer, his daughter Elsa told The New York Times.