Sacked from Newsweek
A legitimate story, the wrong patch, and a career that vanished without a clean firing
Journalism isn’t a genteel profession. It’s a trade where careers turn on timing, turf, who feels threatened — or whatever.
Starting with AP in Saigon, I spent twenty years in the business, worked for three organisations, and got sacked from two — including Newsweek, where I was technically a stringer but felt relatively safe as a Special Correspondent. After the usual budget cuts, the real end came in 1989, when I flew to Hong Kong to bring Kim‑Dung home from her UNHCR contract and suggested a story on the sudden influx of northern Vietnamese refugees. It was a legitimate story, I had the access, and I’d covered Indochina for years. I was confident I could deliver it.
Kim‑Dung had gone up to Hong Kong on a six‑month UNHCR contract, working as an interpreter in the overcrowded refugee camps. The influx was almost entirely northerners — people fleeing not politics but poverty — and Hong Kong was locking them up behind barbed wire in half‑a‑dozen grim camps. The work was miserable. Chinese bureaucrats treated the Vietnamese with open disdain, and UNHCR lawyers were left arguing refugee claims that Hong Kong officials had already decided to reject nine times out of ten.
I’d already suggested the story to Newsweek before flying up, but in late May 1989 I arrived for our twentieth anniversary and bring Kim‑Dung home early. Hong Kong was in turmoil: thousands of Vietnamese arriving by boat, anti‑refugee protests for the first time, and the Democracy Movement boiling in Beijing. The magazine’s Asian editor Melinda Liu was up there covering the Tiananmen build‑up, leaving the Hong Kong office running on fumes — staffed by a young American temp named Robina who didn’t know a thing. The story would be on overwhelming situation in the camps, with insider material from Kim-Dung’s work, and point to the Geneva conference. It should have been straightforward.
Instead, it detonated.
I was also trying to wrap up my Australia guidebook for a Hong Kong publisher, shuttling between Lantau and Causeway Bay with my portable Compaq, but assumed New York — with whom I’d always dealt directly from Sydney — would take the refugee story. The young temp at Newsweek passed along a couple of government contacts. I started making calls, and when an NBC crew I met at the FCC said they were interested in the refugee influx, I joined them on a Marine Police interception run, with Kim‑Dung hired as interpreter. It was a strong TV story and good material for mine. Confidently, I cabled New York suggesting it for the following week’s edition, with a cc to Melinda Liu.
New York stayed silent all week — no routine yes or no, nothing. Then on Friday came the blast from Bob Rivard — Newsweek’s Chief of Correspondents, a man I very rarely dealt with, since almost all my interactions were with the Newsdesk and the International editors. His cable hit like a brick. I was told to “stay on vacation.” I was warned not to represent myself as Newsweek if I was “pursuing publication elsewhere.” And then the clincher: “Beyond the aforementioned reason,” he concluded, “Melinda is in charge of our coverage and should approve such a step, especially if any representations by you on the story make it problematic for either Melinda or Robina to pursue the story at a later date. Regards, Bob.” The tone was accusatory, petty, and unmistakably hostile. After ten years of loyal work, it felt like a knife in the back. I’d clearly stepped on Melinda’s patch.
That same weekend — late on Saturday, 3 June — Tiananmen Square blew sky‑high. PLA troops and tanks rolled into the crowds, gunfire echoing across Beijing as the Democracy Movement was crushed. Correspondents were still flying in to reinforce the Beijing bureau, but they didn’t call on me. Hong Kong went silent. I was still reeling from Rivard’s cable, long walks on Lantau Island. Totally despondent. The ground had shifted — for China, and for me.
Just like back in ’78 with the AP in Sydney, I sensed an ending. The Friday cable had done its work. I flew back to Sydney with Kim‑Dung, trying to put Hong Kong behind me and finishing the guidebook. But I was now totally demoralised and unenthusiastic about a job that had seen me published week after week for ten years. I wrote Rivard a careful, factual letter — just how it had happened and how dismissively I’d been treated.
It took him weeks to reply, always off travelling somewhere. When he finally did, the tone was cooler but still distant. He held out the prospect of an Asia correspondents’ meeting later in the year — a vague gesture toward normalcy, as if Hong Kong might be smoothed over in a conference room. “I think you overreacted to my cable and read into it inferences that were wholly unintended,” he explained. “I did want to discuss this and other issues with you at greater length, and I hope we will have the opportunity to do so later this year somewhere in Asia. Sincerely, Bob.” So, I’d overreacted, eh?
By mid‑October, with my mother planning another summer visit to Australia, I called the Newsdesk as I regularly did and was finally put through to Newsweek’s Chief of Correspondents. A perfunctory greeting. Friendly enough. I didn’t bring up Hong Kong but asked about that Asia get‑together he’d mentioned. What was he planning?
“Well, that’s not really going to happen,” Bob Rivard said. “But if you were there, this is what I would say.”
He launched into a quick riff about “re‑examining” Newsweek’s Asia coverage — maybe shifting people around and rationalising its Special Correspondents, bloody stringers after all, including me in Sydney. Oh, so I’m getting fired, I thought. “We’re still looking this over,” he said, “but that’s what we’re thinking at this stage.” More than once he said Newsweek wasn’t getting its money’s worth out of Australia and that my story ideas “don’t deserve much space.” Melinda was coming back for consultations and I was welcome to call her. (Sure thing, mate.) He wrapped up by saying he was aware of my “affinity and bond” with Newsweek — people liked me, no one was denigrating me — but they had big decisions to make, and “a handshake as generous as possible” was “absolutely essential.”
That was the job then. What now? I was finished. Angry. Fired up. I called Richard Steele, my closest and longest supporter at Newsweek, who hadn’t heard but wasn’t surprised. Money was tight. Cuts everywhere. Bonn. Stringer payments slashed. Besides, he muttered, “Rivard loves to fire people.”
Rivard later claimed I had initiated my own termination. I didn’t dispute it. All that mattered now was the pay-out. I was finished. No more work. Nothing.
And that’s how my journalism career ended — not with a clean firing, just a bureaucratic disappearance. Next stop: the Old Saigon Vietnamese Restaurant.
