She made her reputation during the Vietnam War, while working for United Press International. One of her contemporaries, Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Arnett, said “she was fearless as an action reporter, with a talent for the vivid phrase.”
To the local staff and stringers she later worked with in AFP bureaus throughout Asia, she was also an uncommonly generous and fiercely protective colleague with the highest professional standards.
For Kate understood better than most how much the international agencies depend on the knowledge, contacts and language skills of local journalists, who sometimes put themselves and their families at risk to uncover the stories the foreign press needs to survive.
Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 24, 1943, Kate Webb moved to Australia when she was eight years old.
After graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Melbourne in 1964, she took a secretarial job at a newspaper in Sydney but was made a cadet reporter because she had no shorthand.
In 1967 she paid her own way to Vietnam, to see the war at first hand. She arrived with no job, a couple of hundred dollars and an old Remington typewriter. She began freelancing for UPI and within four years she had become the agency’s bureau chief in Cambodia.
It was there that she herself became part of the news, when she and five Asian reporters – four Cambodians and a Japanese – were captured by North Vietnamese troops inside Cambodia on April 7, 1971. The incident has passed into the folk lore of modern war reporting.
Stripped of their shoes and forced to march through leech-infected, malarial jungle until their feet were “mush”, the group were interrogated and held for 23 days. Other groups of journalists who had been captured were killed or held indefinitely, but Kate wrote that she had been courteously treated.
Naturally unconventional and blessed with a strong sense of the ridiculous, she kept her sanity by standing on her head during rest stops. Her Japanese fellow captive helped allay stress by teaching her the Japanese tea ceremony.
Her ordeal gave her a new perspective on war. In her book On the Other Side: 23 Days with the Viet Cong, she wrote: “It added faces to what had been only shadows … The Viet Cong are human beings. They are soldiers and not much different from soldiers on this side. They have homes, and they have grouches and they have sore feet.”
By the time the captives were released, the cremated body of a young woman had been found, and it was presumed to be hers. A front-page obituary in The New York Times described Kate as a soft-voiced young “waif” in striped dress and sandals who proved a cool, incisive reporter when she put on combat boots, helmet and flak jacket to go on missions with troops.
“It was strange and embarrassing to see that,” she said.
She went on to cover the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the rise of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. After joining AFP in 1985, she witnessed the downfalls of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the first Gulf War, the conflict in Afghanistan, and the death of North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung – a story she broke – as well as many other events.
Kate Webb detested slip-shod journalism and reporters who cut corners or who were dishonest – and she made her feelings terrifyingly clear.
But she rarely harshly judged those who got their hands dirty and did their best. She would often offer less-experienced or even less-gifted colleagues suggestions and gentle encouragement.
Once, during presidential elections in Korea, a young journalist who had been sent from Hong Kong to help her, woke on the office couch where he was taking a short nap after she had driven him relentlessly for about 24 hours. He looked up to find Kate covering him with a blanket she had conjured up from somewhere, whispering ‘good job.’ She then went back to her keyboard.
When she retired in 2001, she told an interviewer she had become “too old to keep up with front-line reporting, and that was the only kind I liked.”
In 2005, she went off on her last paid job, as visiting professor at E. W. Scripps School of Journalism in Ohio University.
Thomas Crampton
Social Media in China and across Asia
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