Peter Arnett, Pulitzer-Winning War Correspondent, Dies at 91
12/18/2025 3:05:00 PM
Peter Arnett was already an accomplished combat correspondent in 1966 when he embedded with an American infantry battalion tasked with routing out enemy snipers from a tunnel system near Saigon. Mr. Arnett was standing next to the unit commander when bullets tore through the map the officer was holding, hitting the colonel in the chest.
Medics ran up to bandage Lt. Col. George Eyster, a West Pointer who died the next day at a field hospital. Mr. Arnett wrote his obituary, which was among the scores of stories he filed from the humid jungle battlefields of Vietnam for more than a decade. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting that year.
Mr. Arnett stayed in Vietnam beyond the very end. When Viet Cong guerrillas entered the Associated Press bureau during the 1975 fall of Saigon, his boss Nate Polowetzky told him to get out of there. Mr. Arnett refused. “He told me, in effect, to go screw myself,” Polowetzky said.
The New Zealand native would go on to cover more wars (15 to 20, he said), including the Gulf War. He was one of the few Western reporters in Baghdad in January 1991 when allied missiles started raining down, reporting live from the city for CNN. He interviewed Saddam Hussein in the second week of the war, and in 1997, Osama bin Laden.
When Mr. Arnett asked bin Laden about his plans, the 9/11 mastermind replied: “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media. God willing.”
Mr. Arnett died Wednesday morning in Newport Beach, Calif., his daughter, Elsa Arnett, said in an email. He was 91. The cause of death was prostate cancer.
After arriving in Vietnam, Mr. Arnett was given lifesaving advice from colleague Malcom Browne: Lie prone under fire; look for cover and move toward it; do not get close to a radioman or medic because they are prime targets; and if you hear a shot, don’t get up tosee where it came from because the second shot might get you.
Mr. Arnett, one of the most famous journalists of his era, wrote gripping battlefield stories that transported readers sitting in their living rooms to the scene of the news.
The stories that won him the Pulitzer included a dispatch about an Army captain who watched helplessly as a Viet Cong machine gunner kept pummeling the body of one of his men, rolling it over and over. In a story titled “Everyone Knew the Americans Were Coming,” Arnett wrote on a failed U.S. mission aimed at hunting down Viet Cong fighters who easily got away.
Reporting on the Vietnam War forced Mr. Arnett to repress his human instincts. On one hot day at the Saigon market, Mr. Arnett watched a Buddhist monk squat on the pavement and douse himself in gasoline before flicking a lighter.
“I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away,’” Mr. Arnett recalled. “As a human being I wanted to. As a reporter I couldn’t. … If I had stopped him, the [South Vietnamese] secret police who were watching from a distance would have immediately arrested him and carried him off to God knows where. If I had attempted to prevent them doing this, I would have propelled myself directly into Vietnamese politics. My role as a reporter would have been destroyed.”
Instead, Mr. Arnett photographed the burning monk and dashed back to his office to write his story.
But Mr. Arnett’s eagerness to report entangled him in controversy. In the Gulf War, as one of the few Western journalists reporting from behind enemy lines in Iraq, he was granted access by Hussein’s regime to what officials said was an industrial plant that produced milk powder and was the only source of infant formula in Baghdad. It had been hit by U.S. bombs.
Mr. Arnett reported on CNN what he saw and heard, and went to bed. The next day, he learned that he had reported on “one of the most controversial stories of my career.” U.S. officials disputed the claim that the factory made baby milk powder and instead alleged it was used for the production of biological weapons protected by the Iraqi military. White House officials called him a “conduit for Iraqi disinformation,” while Rep. Laurence Coughlin (R-Pennsylvania) called him the “Joseph Goebbels of Saddam Hussein’s Hitler-like regime.”
Sen. Al Simpson (R-Wyoming) went so far as to accuse the brother of Mr. Arnett’s Vietnamese-born wife of being a Viet Cong operative. (Simpson later apologized, saying there was no evidence to prove that claim.)
Mr. Arnett kept reporting, showing the damaged buildings in the town of Al-Dour that Iraqi officials said had been hit by U.S. and allied bombs and had resulted in 24 civilian deaths.
“There was nothing in his tone that was judgmental, nothing that indicated sympathy for the Iraqis,” wrote Howard Rosenberg, the Los Angeles Times’ TV critic. “Without interpretation, he reported only what he said he saw, accompanied by the appropriate disclaimers regarding censorship.”
In 1999, Mr. Arnett left CNN after being involved in a story that alleged that the U.S. military had used deadly sarin nerve gas on deserting American soldiers during the Vietnam War. When a subsequent Pentagon investigation said there was no evidence of sarin gas ever having been shipped to Southeast Asia and disputed other key portions of the story, CNN retracted it.
Mr. Arnett faced further criticism in 2003, when he gave an interview to Iraqi state television.
“It is clear that within the United States there is growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces … help those who oppose the war,” he said.
The remarks sparked backlash from the administration of President George W. Bush and lawmakers from both parties. His employer, NBC, initially defended him, saying the remarks were “analytical in nature,” but eventually fired him, saying it had been wrong for Mr. Arnett to “grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV — especially at a time of war — and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions in that interview.”
Peter Gregg Arnett was born in Riverton, New Zealand, on Nov. 13, 1934.
He began his journalism career in his country of birth, writing for the Southland Times newspaper. Restless and bored, he left his home country seeking adventure. When he arrived in Southeast Asia, he decided to stay, enchanted by the “opium smugglers, revolutionaries and obscure little wars in obscure little kingdoms.”
He ended up reporting from Thailand and Indonesia before he arrived in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, he worked and competed with the other big-name journalists including David Halberstam and Marguerite Higgins.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the mid-1980s while CNN’s Moscow bureau chief. Mr. Arnett thought it was important that he should be an American citizen because he was representing an American news organization, according to his family. Mr. Arnett said in a 2015 interview that his U.S. citizenship “solidified my credentials to challenge American policy.”
“I was perfectly happy to be a New Zealander, and it wasn’t an issue in my work. The Associated Press and CNN were more interested in the journalism than the nationality,” Mr. Arnett said. He added, however, that there were “a lot of comments during the Gulf War” about his foreign origins.
“But the point was, I was an American. If I hadn’t been, it would have been a way to further discredit my journalism.”
He met Nina Nguyen Thu-Nga, a South Vietnamese woman, while covering the war. He married her and they had two children, Andrew and Elsa, before divorcing in 1983. His frequent and extended travels abroad were to blame, according to Mr. Arnett’s family. They remarried in 2006 and stayed together until his death.
Medics ran up to bandage Lt. Col. George Eyster, a West Pointer who died the next day at a field hospital. Mr. Arnett wrote his obituary, which was among the scores of stories he filed from the humid jungle battlefields of Vietnam for more than a decade. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting that year.
Mr. Arnett stayed in Vietnam beyond the very end. When Viet Cong guerrillas entered the Associated Press bureau during the 1975 fall of Saigon, his boss Nate Polowetzky told him to get out of there. Mr. Arnett refused. “He told me, in effect, to go screw myself,” Polowetzky said.
The New Zealand native would go on to cover more wars (15 to 20, he said), including the Gulf War. He was one of the few Western reporters in Baghdad in January 1991 when allied missiles started raining down, reporting live from the city for CNN. He interviewed Saddam Hussein in the second week of the war, and in 1997, Osama bin Laden.
When Mr. Arnett asked bin Laden about his plans, the 9/11 mastermind replied: “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media. God willing.”
Mr. Arnett died Wednesday morning in Newport Beach, Calif., his daughter, Elsa Arnett, said in an email. He was 91. The cause of death was prostate cancer.
After arriving in Vietnam, Mr. Arnett was given lifesaving advice from colleague Malcom Browne: Lie prone under fire; look for cover and move toward it; do not get close to a radioman or medic because they are prime targets; and if you hear a shot, don’t get up tosee where it came from because the second shot might get you.
Mr. Arnett, one of the most famous journalists of his era, wrote gripping battlefield stories that transported readers sitting in their living rooms to the scene of the news.
The stories that won him the Pulitzer included a dispatch about an Army captain who watched helplessly as a Viet Cong machine gunner kept pummeling the body of one of his men, rolling it over and over. In a story titled “Everyone Knew the Americans Were Coming,” Arnett wrote on a failed U.S. mission aimed at hunting down Viet Cong fighters who easily got away.
Reporting on the Vietnam War forced Mr. Arnett to repress his human instincts. On one hot day at the Saigon market, Mr. Arnett watched a Buddhist monk squat on the pavement and douse himself in gasoline before flicking a lighter.
“I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away,’” Mr. Arnett recalled. “As a human being I wanted to. As a reporter I couldn’t. … If I had stopped him, the [South Vietnamese] secret police who were watching from a distance would have immediately arrested him and carried him off to God knows where. If I had attempted to prevent them doing this, I would have propelled myself directly into Vietnamese politics. My role as a reporter would have been destroyed.”
Instead, Mr. Arnett photographed the burning monk and dashed back to his office to write his story.
But Mr. Arnett’s eagerness to report entangled him in controversy. In the Gulf War, as one of the few Western journalists reporting from behind enemy lines in Iraq, he was granted access by Hussein’s regime to what officials said was an industrial plant that produced milk powder and was the only source of infant formula in Baghdad. It had been hit by U.S. bombs.
Mr. Arnett reported on CNN what he saw and heard, and went to bed. The next day, he learned that he had reported on “one of the most controversial stories of my career.” U.S. officials disputed the claim that the factory made baby milk powder and instead alleged it was used for the production of biological weapons protected by the Iraqi military. White House officials called him a “conduit for Iraqi disinformation,” while Rep. Laurence Coughlin (R-Pennsylvania) called him the “Joseph Goebbels of Saddam Hussein’s Hitler-like regime.”
Sen. Al Simpson (R-Wyoming) went so far as to accuse the brother of Mr. Arnett’s Vietnamese-born wife of being a Viet Cong operative. (Simpson later apologized, saying there was no evidence to prove that claim.)
Mr. Arnett kept reporting, showing the damaged buildings in the town of Al-Dour that Iraqi officials said had been hit by U.S. and allied bombs and had resulted in 24 civilian deaths.
“There was nothing in his tone that was judgmental, nothing that indicated sympathy for the Iraqis,” wrote Howard Rosenberg, the Los Angeles Times’ TV critic. “Without interpretation, he reported only what he said he saw, accompanied by the appropriate disclaimers regarding censorship.”
In 1999, Mr. Arnett left CNN after being involved in a story that alleged that the U.S. military had used deadly sarin nerve gas on deserting American soldiers during the Vietnam War. When a subsequent Pentagon investigation said there was no evidence of sarin gas ever having been shipped to Southeast Asia and disputed other key portions of the story, CNN retracted it.
Mr. Arnett faced further criticism in 2003, when he gave an interview to Iraqi state television.
“It is clear that within the United States there is growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces … help those who oppose the war,” he said.
The remarks sparked backlash from the administration of President George W. Bush and lawmakers from both parties. His employer, NBC, initially defended him, saying the remarks were “analytical in nature,” but eventually fired him, saying it had been wrong for Mr. Arnett to “grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV — especially at a time of war — and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions in that interview.”
Peter Gregg Arnett was born in Riverton, New Zealand, on Nov. 13, 1934.
He began his journalism career in his country of birth, writing for the Southland Times newspaper. Restless and bored, he left his home country seeking adventure. When he arrived in Southeast Asia, he decided to stay, enchanted by the “opium smugglers, revolutionaries and obscure little wars in obscure little kingdoms.”
He ended up reporting from Thailand and Indonesia before he arrived in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, he worked and competed with the other big-name journalists including David Halberstam and Marguerite Higgins.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the mid-1980s while CNN’s Moscow bureau chief. Mr. Arnett thought it was important that he should be an American citizen because he was representing an American news organization, according to his family. Mr. Arnett said in a 2015 interview that his U.S. citizenship “solidified my credentials to challenge American policy.”
“I was perfectly happy to be a New Zealander, and it wasn’t an issue in my work. The Associated Press and CNN were more interested in the journalism than the nationality,” Mr. Arnett said. He added, however, that there were “a lot of comments during the Gulf War” about his foreign origins.
“But the point was, I was an American. If I hadn’t been, it would have been a way to further discredit my journalism.”
He met Nina Nguyen Thu-Nga, a South Vietnamese woman, while covering the war. He married her and they had two children, Andrew and Elsa, before divorcing in 1983. His frequent and extended travels abroad were to blame, according to Mr. Arnett’s family. They remarried in 2006 and stayed together until his death.