Led AP Saigon bureau during VietnamWar
RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Journalist Richard Pyle, whose long and accomplished Associated Press career spanned the globe and a half- century of crisis, war, catastrophe and indelible moments in news reporting, died Thursday at age 83.
He died at a hospital of respiratory failure due to lung fibrosis and obstructive lung disease, said his wife, actresswriter Brenda Smiley.
Mr. Pyle was there when President John F. Kennedy learned of the Cuban missile challenge and when President RichardNixonwaved goodbye to the White House, when the World Trade Center’s twin towers came down and when a Pennsylvania nuclear plant almost blew up, when the last Americans walked out of Hanoi’s war prisons and when Desert Storm drove the last Iraqis from Kuwait.
Mr. Pyle was even there at age 75, dashing to the shoreline when Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger’s jetliner made its lifesaving splash- landing in the Hudson River in 2009, the year Mr. Pyle retired after 49 years with the AP.
In the end, Mr. Pyle was proudest of his Vietnam War coverage over five critical years, the last half as chief of the news organization’s Pulitzer Prize- winning Saigon bureau.
A journalist in the 1960s “couldn’t let this story go by,” he said. “It was the greatest story I’ve ever had.”
AP’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, on Thursday praised Mr. Pyle for the depth of his journalism.
“Richard Pyle never lost his passion for great stories and never lost his insistence on strong, probing journalism,” Buzbee said. “Years after he had retired, he buttonholed me at an event, wanting to know: ‘ Were we committed to the journalism? Were we keeping AP focused on strong reporting? Were we screwing it up?’ It’s people like Pyle who are the conscience of a news organization like The Associated Press.”
Former AP President Lou Boccardi described him as “a man for all seasons.”
“His career took him to distant places but we knew he would be at home anywhere,” Boccardi wrote. “He was an extraordinary guy who took pride in being anAP newsman and he made all of us better.”
Richard H. Pyle was 10 years old in 1944 when he reported the D- Day invasion of France, papering the walls of his suburban Detroit home with bulletins gleaned from the radio. By his college days he knew his calling. After two years in the Army, he graduated in journalism from Wayne State University in Detroit.
He first worked on a suburban newspaper, and then he joined the AP’s Detroit bureau in 1960. After stints at international editing desks in New York andWashington, he volunteered in 1968 to cover the conflict in Vietnam, where the gregarious, goateed Midwesterner joined an AP staff of stars, including writer Peter Arnett and photographers Horst Faas and Nick Ut, all Pulitzer winners.
The combat death of one colleague in 1971 would particularly weigh onMr. Pyle, by then bureau chief responsible for an entire staff. The AP’s talented Henri Huet and three other photographers were killed when a South Vietnamese army helicopter was shot down in a remote area of Laos. Their remains were beyond retrieval, but Mr. Pyle vowed to get there someday.
More than 20 years later he received a call from the Pentagon’s missing- in- action search teams, seeking information, and by 1998 a team was headed to the crash site, accompanied by Mr. Pyle and former Saigon photo chief Faas. They later described the mission in a book, “Lost over Laos.” No identifiable remains were found, but recovered shards of bone were interred at the Newseum, Washington’s journalism museum.