David Adamson
Telegraph correspondent who reported on Kurds and Kennedys
DAVID ADAMSON, who has died aged 90, was a foreign correspondent for the Telegraph titles who was on the spot on June 6 1968 when Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Embassy Ballroom in Los Angeles.
He had watched the presidential candidate arrive and was 10 yards away from him when three shots were fired by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian immigrant. Adamson saw a campaign worker cradle the dying man’s head as someone pressed a rosary into his hand and Kennedy’s wife Ethel knelt by her still conscious husband.
Kennedy died later in hospital, and the following day Adamson reported that the widows of Robert Kennedy, John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, were to accompany the body on the presidential plane to New York.
The son of a dentist, David Peter Grant-adamson was born in Oxford on November 8 1927. He was educated at Bloxham’s School before joining the Royal Marines in 1944. He was in training when the war ended.
Adamson worked for the Oxford Mail before moving in 1957 to The Telegraph where a news editor sent him to Stornoway to cover protests against a new ferry service from the mainland for the Sunday paper. His interview with a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church was cut short when the man realised that the story would be published on the Sabbath.
Adamson was sent to cover the build-up of the French fleet in Toulon as the Algerian crisis unfolded, then the riots in Paris, where he climbed on the roof of a bus shelter to get a better view, only to be ordered down by a gendarme. When he objected that he was a British journalist the officer beat him with his baton.
Adamson’s geniality reassured most of those he encountered, however. With his reputation established, he was switched to Bonn, then to Tehran and South America.
In 1962 he obtained permission to visit Kurdish tribesmen fighting Turks, Persians and Arabs in the mountains of Iraq. From Istanbul, he set off to find the Kurdish nationalist leader, “Mullah” Mustafa Barzani by truck, then horseback.
When he finally reached the Kurdish headquarters he achieved a scoop by finding Frank Gosling, a captured British geologist, whose freedom he obtained. But the Kurdish leadership was riven by factionalism and Barzani proved an unforthcoming interviewee. In his book, The Kurdish War (1964), Adamson concluded that a separate Kurdish state was a long way off.
Also in the early 1960s he was sent to Africa to report on colonial independence movements. Before Ian Smith’s regime in Southern Rhodesia declared UDI in 1965 he took the precaution of bringing out his family and buying a house in Salisbury, which afforded him some protection against being expelled – a fate that befell several other foreign journalists.
In 1967 Adamson was posted to the Washington office where he reported on protests against the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings.
After returning to Britain, in 1978 he was appointed diplomatic correspondent, with the duty of attending afternoon briefings at the Foreign Office and accompanying ministers on foreign trips. On the road he was generous in sharing information with rival reporters and could be relied upon to offer sage guidance to younger colleagues. He left the paper in the late 1980s.
Adamson also wrote books about Mayan society and climate change. In The Last Empire (1989), he recounted the stand-off between Commonwealth leaders and Mrs Thatcher over her opposition to sanctions on South Africa.
He married, in 1958, Barbara Wall. She survives him with their son and daughter, and a stepdaughter.
David Adamson, born November 8 1927, died December 11 2017