We Chose to Speak of War and Strife: The World of the Foreign Correspondent

by John Cody Fidler-Simpson

From distinguished foreign correspondent John Simpson, a fascinating history of what it is to risk life and limb to bring home news of the troubled world.

In corners of the globe where fault lines seethe into bloodshed and civil war, foreign correspondents have, since the early nineteenth century, been engaged in uncovering the latest news and--despite obstacles bureaucratic, political, violent--reporting it by whatever means available. It's a working life that is difficult, exciting and glamorous.

These stories from the last two hundred years celebrate an endangered tradition. Where once dispatches were trusted to the hands of a willing sea captain, telegraph operator or stranger in an airport queue prepared to spirit a can of undeveloped film back to London, today the digital realm has transformed the relaying of the news--if the work of gathering it in the field has changed little.

We Chose to Speak of War and Strife brings us pivotal moments in history--from the Crimean War to Tiananmen Square and Sarajevo--through the eyes of those who witnessed them, and the astonishing tales of what it took to report them. Weaving in the history of the great correspondents who went before him, such as Alan Moorhead, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway and Charles Wheeler, and offering extraordinary accounts from Simpson's own lifetime on the frontlines, this is a deeply personal book from a master of the profession.

Genres: Nonfiction, War, Journalism, History, Memoir

384 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2017

About the author

John Cody Fidler-Simpson CBE is an English foreign correspondent. He is world affairs editor of BBC News, the world's biggest broadcast news service. One of the most travelled reporters ever, he has spent all his working life at the corporation. He has reported from more than 120 countries, including thirty war zones, and has interviewed numerous world leaders.

Simpson was born in Cleveleys, Lancashire; his family later moved to Dunwich, Suffolk. His great grandfather was Samuel Franklin Cowdery (later known as Samuel Franklin Cody), an American showman in the style of Buffalo Bill Cody, who became a British citizen and was an early pioneer of manned flight in the UK. Simpson reveals in his autobiography that his father was an anarchist. That didn't prevent him from getting a top-notch education: he was sent to Dulwich College Preparatory School and St Paul's, and read English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was editor of Granta magazine. In 1965 he was a member of the Magdalene University Challenge team. A year later Simpson started as a trainee sub-editor at BBC radio news.

Simpson became a BBC reporter in 1970. He describes in his autobiography how on his very first day the then prime minister Harold Wilson, angered by the sudden and impudent, as he saw it, appearance of the novice's microphone, punched him in the stomach.

Simpson was the BBC's political editor from 1980 till 1981. He presented the Nine O'Clock News from 1981 till 1982 and became diplomatic editor in 1982. He had also served as a correspondent in South Africa, Brussels and Dublin. He became BBC world affairs editor in 1988.

Reviews

[Fionnuala · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love nothing more than when a book is precisely what I was hoping it would be, and I found it here. This is an absolutely fascinating and incredibly comprehensive look at the history of the foreign correspondent, as well as a good look into how the job looks in modern times. It combines history and context with profiles of war correspondents past and present, with plenty of first-hand accounts. It's honestly just deeply interesting from the first page to the last, and has a lot of thoughtful insight on the evolution of the role, as well as the ethics of journalism in such complicated places. It also examines the future of the role, and manages to seamlessly cover several hundred years of detailed history abolsutely flawlessly. The subjects have been chosen very carefully, and create an effective microcosm from which the reader can get a real idea about a wide variety of related subjects, issues, and entire time periods and the cultures associated with them.

This is one of those books that I'd immediately recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject, but it's also one that I'd recommend if a person had no idea about it, perhaps hadn't really considered it at all, but was just looking for one of those books about a completely new subject that could grip a reader based on simple curisoity alone. It's definitely a book capable of that: the writing is well-paced and engaging, at times serious and reflective, at other times hilarious. It's got a great voice and a commanding grasp of the subject, and despite all the names and locations and dates it never once gets confusing or bogged down.

It's just a really, really brilliant piece of work, and a fitting tribute to the many people it profiles -- both those who have died in the pursuit of what they do, but also those who continue to risk their lives every day to bring news that the world needs to be aware of, but that plenty of people would prefer remained at a distance.

[Keen Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simpson traces the origins of modern journalism back to the early 1600s with Nathaniel Butter. He follows on with Henry Crabb Robinson and William Howard Russell, (who’s work took 19 days for it to reach London from the Crimea) and Henry Morton Stanley amongst others. It’s not just the men, we get a wonderful insight into women’s phenomenally powerful impact into the craft, with the likes of Clare Hollingworth (in spite of only being a journalist for a few days she managed to be the first person to report on the outbreak of WWII), Martha Gellhorn (who after being a stowaway managed to reach the beaches at Normandy to report on the D-Day landings). He also discusses more contemporary talents like Sue Lloyd Roberts, Kate Adie and the late Marie Colvin. We also see how the form has influenced some other important and powerful art forms such as Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Picasso’s “Guernica”.

He explores various interviewing techniques, with particular emphasis on WWII. He talks about Denis Sefton Delmer, who travelled on Hitler’s personal aeroplane during the 1932 election campaign and George Ward Price, who did interviews with Hitler and Mussolini. Simpson insists that, “Price is a perfect example of the journalist as moral eunuch. There have always been plenty of them.” He talks about Robert Fisk’s three ominous interviews with bin Laden in the 90s and more recently Jurgen Todenhofer’s phenomenally brave interview with fellow German Abu Qatadah in the city of Mosul, the IS capital. He also references briefer interviews with the likes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein, that feel all the more chilling in their shallow banality.

Simpson throws in a number of personal accounts too, like his bizarre encounters with Colonel Gaddafi “He broke wind energetically and with relish throughout the entire forty minutes of our meeting.” Or Robert Mugabe “I met and interviewed him seven times over the years, and always found it an unpleasant experience.” Some of his near death experiences in various war zones around the world make for genuinely riveting reading and really give a feel for the danger involved. His description of being accidentally bombed by a fatally incompetent American operation, resulting in the death of his young Kurdish translator is heart breaking. He then has to go onto tell the victim’s mother, still covered in her son’s blood.

He also raises some questions about Israel, talking about the suspiciously high number of complaints received about patently level headed reporting from various neutral correspondents. He cites the belief that many people are employed by Israel in order to make complaints against anyone who highlights the suffering their weapons inflict on civilians. He says, “If you are close to a phosphorous bomb when it explodes and inhale its fumes, they will continue burning your lungs and air passages for up to seven hours before you die.” The US sold this very bomb to Israel on the condition that they only used it against enemy soldiers. They used it repeatedly on innocent Lebanese civilians.

He also touches on the power of journalistic campaigning for justice, describing the frankly unbelievable case of Robert Jones, who spent over 23 years in a Louisiana jail for a murder that someone else had already been convicted for. He was jailed with more than a little help from Britain’s biggest selling daily newspaper, who labelled him with all sorts of horrendous names and has yet to apologise since his release.

“The less you tell people about the world, the less they will want to know about it, and the less demand there will be for it.” is Simpson’s summary of his thoughts about the majority of news coverage in the US. Like all courageous correspondents he certainly never shies away from being politically confrontational. He reflects on the US’s foreign policy, “The 9/11 attacks certainly led America to set aside some of the strongest principles which had long made it the champion of freedom-its opposition to torture and to imprisonment without trial, and its open welcome to immigrants, for instance. For Osama bin Laden that alone would have been a major victory.” He goes on further elsewhere, “Striking at countries which looked formidable but were in fact too weak to retaliate became a speciality of Republican presidents from Reagan to George W. Bush: it satisfied a desire to show that America was still strong, without actually incurring any great risk of retaliation.”

This is part biographical, part travelogue and part historical, an overall balance that Simpson pulls off admirably. This was a thoroughly absorbing read and in many ways is a love letter to the dying art of long form journalism and points towards other great writers and correspondents to read up on afterwards. An absolute joy to read.

[Atiqah Ghazali · Rating 5 out of 5]

We Chose to Speak of War and Strife: The World of the Foreign Correspondent
By John Cody Fidler-Simpson
Published by Bloomsbury
Goodread's Rating: 4.16/5
My Rating: 4.05/5

"At that time the Israelis dropped cluster bombs and phosphorus bombs, which were supplied to them by the US on condition they were solely for use against enemy soldiers, into the narrow streets of West Beirut. If you are close to a phosphorus bomb when it explodes and inhale its fumes, they will continue burning your lungs and air passages for up to seven hours before you die in agony. This things were observable, filmable facts, not biased opinions. Yet even in those days, long before the writing groups were established, there were complaints about our reporting of them. Nobody, as far as I know, suggested that I and my colleagues were making them up; it was simply that they were unpleasant to hear about, and reporting them did damage to Israel's image in the world.

The author who is currently a world affair editor at BBC has served for forty years as foreign correspondent since 1970, reported from more than 120 countries, including 30 war zones, and interviewed many world leaders, including Ghadaffi and Khomeini. As much as he tried to be neutral in this book, how could an Englishman be one when the wars benefits his country and allies?

"Robert Fisk of the London 'Independent' is one of the world's best known foreign correspondents, with a large and immensely faithful body of readers. He is completely fearless, openly and regularly attacking Israel and the Assad dynasty of Syria, père et fils, not from the safety of London or Paris or New York but from his flat in Beirut where he stayed throughout the civil war of the 1970s and '80s at times when very few Western journalists would venture there. He condemned the attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington in the strongest terms, and was also loudly right about the foolishness of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 - plus a dozen other American and British policies."

#MalaysiaMembaca

[Brian Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sadly, a better subtitle of John Simpson’s WE CHOSE TO SPEAK OF WAR AND STRIFE: THE WORLD OF THE FOREIGN CORRESONDENT might be “requiem for an informed society.” In his wonderful prose, John Simpson skillfully weaves historical accounts of foreign correspondent daring-do with those of contemporary correspondents, most of whom Simpson knows personally. And, of course, he has his own tales to tell as well. This book is destined to be a classic of journalism literature. Nevertheless, it’s sad because it documents the ending of not just a golden age in foreign reporting but also the agonizing and not-so-slow demise of pervasive high-quality journalism.

Simpson’s comment about James Gordon Bennett, “The power that having a lot of money and owning a newspaper confers is rarely good for a person’s character or judgment” (p.56) could well be applied to many others today. I don’t believe I’m alone in my pessimism. In the Afterword, Simpson notes: “the less you tell people about what is happening, the less they’ll know, and the less they’ll be interested in. The downward spiral gets progressively tighter and tighter until it vanishes altogether.” (p. 344)

But pessimism aside, Simpson recounts amazing stories from his colleagues and personal heroes. I put this book in the category of can’t-put-it-down; and polished off the 347 pages in three days while quite busy with other duties. It is THAT good.

[David Margetts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent insight into the life and operations of foreign correspondents across the ages. Clearly much has changed in terms of technology and media, yet the need for courage and tenacity as well as literary and communication skills remain vital in overcoming the obstacles of corruption, bureaucracy, geography, violence and politics. In many respects a glamorous role, yet clearly one in which the true correspondents must often face up to significant hardship and discomfort to 'get the news' in. For me the women portrayed in the book stand out, not just for their excellent reporting, but their ability to overcome the additional prejudice and discrimination that they face. Marie Colvin, Martha Gellhorn, Lyce Ducet, Orla Guerin, Kate Adie and Alex Crawford are inspirational and provide excellent examples of what can be achieved in what was and to some extent still is a male dominated world. Notably, Simpson also pays tribute to the less well known 'supporting crew' of fixers, translators, drivers and of course the cameramen who equally put themselves in harms ways to bring us the news. My only concern is that increasingly cost cutting and a change in demand is putting the correspondents and the news they bring 'at risk', and even the BBC is becoming 'dumbed down' in favour of national trivia... :(

[Raimo Wirkkala · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent primer on what it has long taken and meant (and should continue to mean) to report the news from some of the most dangerous places on the planet. Simpson's personal insights and experiences nicely complement the larger story of how the job is done by the very best who have ever done it.

[Vasco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The bad: nothing in specific.

The good: a memoir and "how-to" of how the foreign correspondent profession works and has worked throughout the decades. There are some thrilling stories as well as information on how the context limits or empowers each correspondent. Great read.

[Grace Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, to be examined with careful curiosity" - John Simpson, on choosing the content for his book (Lytton Strachey)

[Les Dangerfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always with John Simpson’s books, a well-written and highly readable survey of the experiences of foreign correspondents during the past 400 years, though with a strong focus on the past fifty or so during which he was also active in the field.

[Stephen King · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading parts of this book, which is a collection of stories and vignettes of the foreign correspondent - tracing the origins of the profession from the early 1600's.

[Mathias · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the BBC's most notable figures, John Simpson, writes this book about the world of the foreign correspondent. As one can imagine, it is superbly written and the author draws not only on his experiences but on those of his colleagues as well. A very interesting and thought-provoking book. Simpson also talks about the role journalism plays in our modern world of click bait and fake news. I particularly enjoyed the chapter about the roles journalists play in war zones. Overall, a very interesting read.

[Jo Stafford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating account, I admire John Simpson a lot. It also ends with a quote from Marie Colvin, perfect.

[Andrew Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

It reads like a greatest hits of journalism throughout history. Its ok, just not what I was expecting.