Thera— In the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this past week, Peter Bergen was all over my YouTube feed detailing CNN’s March 1997 interview in Tora Bora with Osama bin Laden. It immediately brought to mind a time in my life when I knew the late, great, hard-driving, Pulitzer-winning Arnett, who died at the end of last year at 91. Arnett and his wife, Nina, would come up to NYC once in a while from their home in McLean, Virginia, to visit their son Andrew, with whom I was close friends at the time. Arnett had a teaching gig during the peak of the “rise of China” in the late 2000s at Shantou University, founded by billionaire Li Ka-shing in Guangdong province, and he would come up north to his former Manhattan stomping grounds while home from China.
I was invited to come along for dinner on occasion, and I would pick his brain on everything from Saigon to Grozny. Once, at the Javits Center, he interviewed legendary Life photographer Bill Eppridge, who photographed my cousin Richard fighting in Da Nang as a young Marine in mid-1965 for the magazine’s cover. Our respective worlds overlapped in more ways than one. On one of these casual outings, Andrew, Nina, Peter, and I were all walking and talking in a light summer rain following a dumpling dinner, and I brought up the bin Laden interview he did with Bergen and a third Peter, the vaunted war cameraman Peter Jouvenal, whom I knew in passing from hanging out at his Gandamack Lodge in Kabul during the Karzai years.
Arnett told me a decent amount of the story he retells in his November 2018 interview posted above. I was thrilled to hear every minute of it and hung on every word. But he and I dwelling on any single topic for too long was a challenge because between us was a kindred spirit weaving together war, adventure, and unyielding curiosity.
It was like walking with an icon yet being treated as an equal. Eventually, Andrew and I lost touch, and Peter and Nina retired to a quiet life of comfort in California’s Orange County.
Two of my regrets from those get-togethers remain: never getting to ask about the Saddam Hussein interview and, much more relevant to this post, where is the complete, unedited March 1997 bin Laden interview? A side question might have been: Why isn’t the full edited story on CNN’s official YouTube account? Why does one have to navigate an obscure, amateur channel called KellyWurx Films to view the edited story? The CNN YouTube account only seems to host a 1:24 snippet of the interview in eastern Afghanistan.
Some years after my last outing with the Arnett family, New Zealand’s The Spinoff did a great piece on Arnett in the context of his tranquil post-war Southern California life (from which I snatched the photo above), titled “How Peter Arnett, the world’s greatest war correspondent, found peace at last.” Part of me wishes Peter Arnett were still with us to tell his first-hand account of his encounter with the then-soon-to-be most-wanted man on earth.