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| T.D. Allman (photo: Cheng Zhong Sui) |
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T.D. Allman, "a free-spirited journalist who challenged American mythmaking in pointed, personal reporting over five decades on topics as varied as the Vietnam War and contemporary Florida," died May 12, the New York Times reported. He was 79. His "colorful reporting from all over the globe--for Harper's, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, National Geographic and other publications--combined close observation with sharp conclusions that often pointed the finger at U.S. misdeeds or at others abusing power."
"Tim was good on the ground in dodgy republics as he covered their leaders like Arafat, Sihanouk and Qaddafi," former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalled. "He spent a good amount of time in Haiti, at which point we worried that we had lost him to the spirits down there. Regardless of the hardships, he always returned with rich, operatic epics that were memorable. And expensive."
Describing Allman as "funny, irreverent, insightful, opinionated," Jonathan Randal, a former Washington Post correspondent, told the Times that he admired Allman "for his courage and his quick tongue.... He cultivated a kind of foppish screwball persona to go along with his acerbic pen."
After graduating from Harvard in 1966, Allman joined the Peace Corps in order to avoid the Vietnam War draft. He broke his first big story in 1968 when he exposed the CIA's secret war against the Communists in Laos. His dispatches led to Congressional investigations in the U.S., and he went on to document the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia, then helped rescue massacre victims there during the Pol Pot regime. He later was briefly kidnapped in Beirut and witnessed first-hand the events in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. As foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair, he interviewed the likes of Yasser Arafat, Boris Yeltsin, Helmut Kohl, and Manuel Antonio Noriega.
Allman was also an author, writing books that focused on American foreign policy and on Florida, where he had been born. His first book, Unmanifest Destiny, critiquing America's approach to foreign policy, was published in 1984. It was followed by Miami: City of the Future (1987), Rogue State: America at War with the World (2004), and Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State, which was published by Grove Atlantic in 2013 and longlisted for the National Book Award.
His last project, In France Profound: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People, will be published this summer. It explores his house in the southwest of France, the village in which it is located and the deep connections he discovered there with France's past.
Grove Atlantic executive editor George Gibson said, "I feel honored and privileged to have worked with Timothy on In France Profound, which we will publish this August. As a writer, he could make connections nobody else would even imagine, and his prose has a special clarity. He would have relished bringing his beloved French mountain town of Lauzerte to life in the promotion of In France Profound, something we will now do in his honor."
"He was a man of tremendous courage," his partner, Cheng Zhong Sui, told the Times. "He would definitely face it. T.D. doesn't yield. He's not a negotiator. And he had the best charm."