Pulitzer Prize-Winning Correspondent Peter Arnett, Who Reported on Vietnam, Gulf Wars, Has Died

Los Angeles: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Peter Arnett, who spent the world dodging bullets and bombs while covering eyewitness accounts from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91 years old.

Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew Arnett said. He had prostate cancer.

Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation; a brave, fearless, beautiful writer and storyteller. Edith Lederer, who served as an AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 and is now the AP’s chief correspondent at the United Nations, said her reporting in print and on camera will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come.

As a cable service correspondent, Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists when he covered Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975. But in 1991, he became a household name after broadcasting live updates for CNN from Iraq during the First Gulf War.

Although nearly all Western reporters fled Baghdad in the days before the US-led offensive, Arnett remained. When missiles started falling on the city, he broadcast live from his hotel room on his mobile phone.

“There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard it,” he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice, moments after the loud sound of a missile strike shook the airwaves. As he continued speaking, air raid sirens began to blare in the background.

“I think this knocked out the telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They are attacking the center of the city.”