{"id":67367,"date":"2024-06-06T20:19:09","date_gmt":"2024-06-06T20:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/06\/t-d-allman-assertive-globe-trotting-journalist-dies-at-79\/"},"modified":"2024-06-06T20:19:09","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T20:19:09","slug":"t-d-allman-assertive-globe-trotting-journalist-dies-at-79","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/06\/t-d-allman-assertive-globe-trotting-journalist-dies-at-79\/","title":{"rendered":"T.D. Allman, Assertive Globe-Trotting Journalist, Dies at 79"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"550\" src=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/06\/07\/multimedia\/07allman-print1\/05allman-01-mzcg-facebookJumbo.jpg?fit=1050,550&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"T.D. Allman, Assertive Globe-Trotting Journalist, Dies at 79\" title=\"T.D. Allman, Assertive Globe-Trotting Journalist, Dies at 79\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">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 on May 12 in Manhattan. He was 79.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His death, in a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, his partner, Chengzhong Sui, said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In March 1970, as a 25-year-old freelance journalist, Mr. Allman, accompanied by two other reporters, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1970\/03\/06\/archives\/secret-usrun-base-deep-in-laos-seems-placid.html\" title=\"\">walked 15 miles over the mountains in Laos<\/a> to report for The New York Times about Long Cheng, a secret C.I.A. base that was being used to fight the communist Pathet Lao revolutionaries and their allies, the North Vietnamese.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cAt the end of the paved runway were three Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopters,\u201d Mr. Allman reported. \u201cTheir presence is believed to be one of the reasons the United States tries to keep Long Cheng secret. The Jolly Green Giants are regarded as proof that the United States bombs not just the Ho Chi Minh Trail but northeastern Laos as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Those words were typical of a style in which Mr. Allman, in colorful reporting from all over the globe \u2014 for Harper\u2019s, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, National Geographic and other publications \u2014 combined close observation with sharp conclusions that often pointed the finger at U.S. misdeeds or at others abusing power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His career took off after he made specialties of reporting in Laos and Cambodia toward the end of the Vietnam War, stringing for The Times and The Washington Post from the war\u2019s peripheries and reporting on American bombing raids that killed peasants and destroyed rice paddies but that had no military import.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A dispatch for Time magazine on a massacre by U.S.-allied Cambodian government troops made it into a Library of America\u2019s \u201cReporting Vietnam\u201d volume. In The New York Review of Books in 1970, Noam Chomsky, always partial to engaged reporting, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/1970\/06\/04\/a-special-supplement-cambodia\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">called Mr. Allman<\/a> \u201cone of the most knowledgeable and enterprising of the American correspondents now in Cambodia.\u201d In 1989, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1993\/07\/07\/obituaries\/harrison-e-salisbury-84-author-and-reporter-dies.html\" title=\"\">Harrison E. Salisbury<\/a>, a renowned Times war correspondent, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1989\/08\/27\/books\/oh-what-a-lovely-war.html\" title=\"\">called<\/a> Mr. Allman \u201cbold and brassy\u201d and \u201cremarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Allman would go on to ride in the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat\u2019s small plane across the desert, watch the Soviet president Boris Yeltsin strip in front of a crowd in Siberia, meet the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi in his bunker, trek with farm laborers dodging death squads in El Salvador and, in April 1989, witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square in Beijing from his hotel balcony.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He could exasperate editors with his strongly held opinions and his prodigal ways with an expense account. But he brought back reports that were observed and felt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cTim was good on the ground in dodgy republics as he covered their leaders like Arafat, Sihanouk and Qaddafi,\u201d the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalled in an email, referring to Norodom Sihanouk, the former king and prime minister of Cambodia. \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Allman had a second career as a book writer, focusing on American foreign policy and on Florida, where he was born. Here the reviews were mixed, with critics sometimes citing him for overwriting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Reviewing his book \u201cMiami: City of the Future\u201d in The Times in 1987, the critic Michiko Kakutani noted that his writing could be \u201cportentous and melodramatic\u201d at times but <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1987\/04\/25\/books\/books-of-the-times-a-southern-magnet.html\" title=\"\">wrote<\/a>: \u201cIt is in the passages grounded in the specifics of reportage and history that \u2018Miami\u2019 proves most illuminating. Mr. Allman introduces us to an eclectic gallery of Miami personages.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The Central Europe scholar Timothy Garton Ash, however, was dismissive of Mr. Allman\u2019s 1984 diatribe against American foreign policy, \u201cUnmanifest Destiny,\u201d <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1984\/10\/07\/books\/the-military-fallacy.html\" title=\"\">calling it<\/a> \u201cfat, rambling and passionate\u201d and \u201can exercise in American self-flagellation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">And Mr. Allman\u2019s 2013 history of Florida, \u201cFinding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State,\u201d which set out to puncture myths Floridians tell themselves about the ugly racial and economic history of their state \u2014 from massacres of Native Americans to white supremacy to sleazy land grabs \u2014 was <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.cltampa.com\/news\/whose-history-12277184\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">vigorously attacked<\/a> by Florida boosters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Allman explained his approach to <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/miamirail.org\/fall-2013\/t-d-allman\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">an interviewer<\/a>: \u201cI never go into a story with preconceived notions. Whether it was Laos, where my career started, whether it was Miami, Colombia or the Middle East. I just go and experience the place. This is how I operate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">That practice was in evidence in a March 1981 cover article for Harper\u2019s Magazine about repression and insurgency in El Salvador at the height of U.S. support for the far-right regime there. Mr. Allman allowed his sensibilities to guide his reporting, opening himself to what he saw and heard, to evocative effect.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cHowever diligently one searched for significance,\u201d he wrote, \u201cone found only terrorized, hapless people \u2014 abused, barefoot women with no food or medicine for their malnourished children; landless, jobless, illiterate men and boys fleeing for their lives from the \u2018security forces\u2019 of their own national government; mutilated bodies beside the road.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">When he suddenly encountered the peasant insurgents he had been seeking, he wrote, \u201cThe rustling of the trees became a rustling apart from the trees.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">There were many other such situations in which Mr. Allman blithely put himself in harm\u2019s way.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI admired him for his courage and his quick tongue,\u201d Jonathan Randal, a former Washington Post correspondent, said in an email, describing Mr. Allman as \u201cfunny, irreverent, insightful, opinionated.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cHe cultivated a kind of foppish screwball persona to go along with his acerbic pen.\u201d Mr. Randal said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Timothy Damien Allman was born on Oct. 16, 1944, in Tampa, Fla., to Paul J. Allman, a U.S. Coast Guard officer and later an instructor at a maritime school, and Felicia (Edmonds) Allman, an antiques dealer. He was 5 when the family moved to Glen Mills, Pa., where Mr. Allman grew up and attended schools.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He attended Harvard College, where he \u201cdidn\u2019t do anything but smoking, drinking and writing, and didn\u2019t learn anything,\u201d his partner, Mr. Sui, recalled him saying.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After graduating in 1966, he joined the Peace Corps largely to escape the draft. Mr. Allman was assigned to a village in Nepal, which was his initiation into a world of \u201chardship and suffering\u201d that he had known nothing about, having grown up as a \u201cmiddle-class American,\u201d Mr. Sui said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">With the Vietnam War still raging when Mr. Allman left the Peace Corps, he was hired by an English-language newspaper in Bangkok. American reporters noticed him, Mr. Sui said, and his career was launched.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was proud of that period in Indochina, Mr. Sui said, where \u201che went into the killing fields in a jeep\u201d and saw \u201cpeople buried alive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Allman went on to report from more than 80 countries. His last project was <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/groveatlantic.com\/book\/in-france-profound\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cIn France Profound: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People,\u201d<\/a> a book to be published in August about his house in the southwest of France, the village in which it is situated and the deep connections he discovered there with France\u2019s immemorial past.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In addition to Mr. Sui, who met Mr. Allman more than 20 years ago while Mr. Sui was completing a Ph.D. at Columbia University, Mr. Allman is survived by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Pamela Allman. He lived in France and New York.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cHe was a man of tremendous courage,\u201d Mr. Sui said. \u201cHe would definitely face it. T.D. doesn\u2019t yield. He\u2019s not a negotiator. And he had the best charm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/06\/business\/media\/td-allman-dead.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 on May 12 in Manhattan. He was 79. His death, in a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, his partner, Chengzhong Sui, said. In March 1970, as a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/06\/07\/multimedia\/07allman-print1\/05allman-01-mzcg-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63356,63357,16,63358,2901,63355],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67367"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67369,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67367\/revisions\/67369"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}