Funeral services were pending Thursday for 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.
Arnett, who lived in Fountain Valley, died Wednesday in Newport Beach, his family announced. He was 91.
Arnett died from prostate cancer, his daughter Elsa told The New York Times.
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 via telephone from the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad as the United States began its bombing attack during Operation Desert Storm on Jan. 17, 1991.
“I walked through the halls of the Al Rashid Hotel and I said, `God, I’m the only journalist here,” Arnett said in a 2018 interview with The Interviews: An Oral History of Television.
“I’m reporting on America’s greatest enemy, and I’m able to talk about it to an audience, not just in Atlanta, Georgia or Washington, D.C. — the whole world is watching. Where else would I ever want to be?”
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 left CNN in 1999 after reaching an agreement with the network after it retracted and apologized for a joint report with Time he narrate that contended that American forces in Vietnam had used the lethal nerve gas sarin. Arnett maintained he did little work on the report.
Arnett was fired by NBC in 2003 for claiming on Iraqi state television that the war plan of the American-led coalition against Iraq was failing.
Born Nov. 13, 1934 in Riverton, New Zealand, Arnett began his career on The Southland Times newspaper in Invercargill, New Zealand.
In 1994, Arnett wrote his autobiography “Live from the Battlefield,” which received much critical praise and was named a Book of the Year by The New York Times. Lee Winfrey wrote in the Philadelphia Enquirer, “Peter Arnett is one of the greatest war correspondents of all time. He has now written one of the best autobiographies ever wrought by anyone in his dangerous trade.”
Arnett later wrote “How I Interviewed Osama Bin Laden” in 2007 and a memoir on the Vietnam War “The Fall of Saigon,” in 2015, coinciding with its 40th anniversary.
In Queen Elizabeth II’s honors of 2006, Arnett was named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to journalism.