Vietnam War correspondent back at the Caravelle
HO CHI MINH CITY – War correspondent Peter Arnett, winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam, returns to Saigon May 6-10, as the Caravelle Hotel celebrates the 50th Anniversary of its opening.
Arnett, who filed more than 3,000 dispatches from Vietnam as an Associated Press correspondent, will keynote an anniversary celebration at the hotel May 8.
“More than any other member of the foreign press corps, Peter Arnett opened the door to an honest appreciation of what was happening on the ground in Vietnam during the war,†said John Gardner, general manager of the Caravelle Hotel.
“From the rumblings of wider war in 1962 to the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Arnett worked tirelessly to make sure there was clear flow of information issuing from the quagmire of that conflict. That so much of this information emanated from the Caravelle is part of what we’re celebrating this spring.â€
Arnett won later fame as a CNN reporter, covering conflict from Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. He interviewed Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora in March 1997, and is perhaps best known for his Emmy-award winning coverage from Baghdad during the first Gulf War in 1991.
A native New Zealander, Arnett first arrived in Saigon June 26, 1962, to begin work on a story that would last 13 years.
On his first night in the country, he checked into the Caravelle Hotel, then open less than two years and already making a name for itself as a preferred watering hole of the foreign press corps.
“Because the Caravelle is so closely associated with the foreign press corps, and because Mr. Arnett’s relationship to this city is nearly as long as the hotel’s itself, we were really keen to have him come back after all these years,†said Martyn Davies, general director of the Caravelle.
In 1998, the landmark Caravelle Hotel was completely refurbished and complemented by a new 24-story tower. Today, the Caravelle ranks as one of the country’s most prestigious hotels. Its rooftop bar is one of Saigon’s most popular, as it was during the war.
Arnett later wrote a memoir that detailed his experiences in Vietnam. That book, “Live from the Battlefield,†was selected as one of the New York Times’s ‘Notable Books’ of 1994. Today, Arnett teaches journalism at Shantou University north of Hong Kong.
Ian Jarrett
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