EACH December, in a feature called “The Lives They Lived,” the New York Times Magazine has a treasure trove of information on remarkable people who passed away during the preceding twelve months.
CARRIE has a good post on a clinical psychologist she learned about in this year’s feature, a woman Carrie hadn’t heard of previously who did research on maternal depression.
THE most interesting people always seems to be the ones I’ve never heard of: today, I read about Australian journalist Kate Webb, who died in May of 2007 after already having been declared dead by the New York Times in 1971. (Above, Kate Webb is pictured in 1971 and in 2001, six years before her death at age 64 from bowel cancer.) What grabbed me was the Magazine’s description of her as arriving in Vietnam “at age 23 with a philosophy degree, a one-way ticket from Australia, a Remington typewriter, $200 in cash and a whiskey-and cigarettes voice so soft people leaned in to hear her[.]”
ON the Web site of the CBC’s As it Happens, I learned a lot more about Webb. It turns out her story is even more interesting than the Times’ feature suggested:
In her New York Times obituary, published in April 1971, correspondent Kate Webb was described as a “soft-voiced young ‘waif’ in a striped dress and sandals on the streets of Saigon,” capable of transforming herself into a “cool, incisive reporter when she put on combat boots, helmet and flak jacket” to report on the war then raging in Vietnam. The New York Times, her family, and the world mourned her death at the hands of Communist forces thirty-six years ago. But Ms. Webb stunned everyone when she emerged from the jungles of Cambodia alive, more than three weeks after she had been captured by North Vietnamese troops. Today, her death made international headlines for a second time — and another obituary appeared in the Times. Ms. Webb died on Sunday from bowel cancer. She was sixty-four.
Kate Webb was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1943. Her father, a political science professor, moved the family to Australia when she was eight years old. When she was just fifteen, she was charged with first-degree murder, after she handed a rifle to a schoolmate who then committed suicide. The charges were dismissed when Ms. Webb explained that she assumed the girl had been joking. Then, at eighteen, both of her parents were killed in a car accident.
Ms. Webb entered the then male-dominated world of journalism through a stained-glass window, so to speak. While making a living as an artist, she accidentally shattered a church window she’d been working on. So she applied for a secretarial post at The Sydney Daily Mirror to pay for it. But because she didn’t know shorthand, the paper recruited her as a reporter cadet. In 1967, armed with little more than a Remington typewriter and a yearn to have a “look-see” at the war, she paid her own way to Vietnam.
Ms. Webb quickly developed a reputation as a fearless and committed correspondent, willing to brave mortar and rocket fire to get her story, which, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Peter Arnett, she then told “with a talent for the vivid phrase.” She also gained notoriety as a reporter who typified the heavy-drinking, chain-smoking notions of her journalistic generation. But she dismissed descriptions of herself as hard-nosed and unemotional. “Hard people shatter,” she said.
In 1970, Ms. Webb took over as bureau chief in Phnom Penh for United Press International. The former boss had been killed in a Viet Cong ambush earlier that year. A little more than a year later, she was captured by guerrilla forces. By the time of her release, her family had already paid their respects with a memorial service, after a bullet-ridden corpse discovered in the region was identified as hers.
If you’re interested in hearing her soft, whiskey-and-cigarettes voice, you can listen to the CBC broadcast — scroll to the end of the segment to listen to Kate Webb taking questions at a press conference immediately following her release by the North Vietnamese in 1971.
The Magazine’s tribute to Webb ends with a nice image of the reporter in the last decade of her life:
When she finally retired from front-line reporting at age 58, she returned to Australia, where her family had lived since leaving New Zealand when she was a child. There, she tended her garden and sketched nature scenes. And on some nights, with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, and a rapt audience of friends and family, she told stories about a few of the places she had seen.
Wow! I’ve never heard of her either, but finding out about her was great!