Reporting His early career as a reporter was with
Reuters in London and Paris. He then became press officer with
Jean Monnet at the
European Coal and Steel Community in
Luxembourg from 1954 to 1956. Later he joined
Time-Life as Paris correspondent, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s often covered the fighting in the Congo, the civil war in Lebanon as well as the Indo-Chinese border clashes of 1962. He wrote about the unrest in
Ulster, the fighting in Angola and the Moroccan attack on
Ifni, the Spanish enclave in West Africa. Behr was often in Algeria, and in 1958 published
The Algerian Problem. The book had the virtue of being written by a French-speaking outsider with some understanding of, and sympathy for, the positions of both the French and the Algerians. Written when the war was far from over, and going back a century or more over the background, it was considered a fair assessment of a problem which many Frenchmen reckoned no foreigner could possibly understand. The book was said to be compulsory reading at the
United States Department of State. Returning to India for
Time, Behr served as bureau chief in New Delhi, travelled in
Indo-China, then moved to the mass-circulation American magazine
Saturday Evening Post as roving correspondent. In 1965 he went to
Newsweek, the weekly news magazine owned by
The Washington Post. Operating from Hong Kong as Asia bureau chief, Behr wrote on China's
Cultural Revolution, secured an interview with
Mao Zedong and reported from Vietnam. The year 1968 turned out to be a hectic one for Behr: he was in
Saigon during the
Tet Offensive, in Paris for the student riots and in Prague when it was occupied by the Russians.
Biographies and television Behr turned gradually from a career in war reporting to writing books and making television documentaries, including award-winning programmes on India, Ireland and the Kennedy family. A notable production was
The American Way of Death, Behr's look at America's undertaking industry. Later came a documentary for
BBC1 on
Emperor Hirohito, and the three-part
Red Dynasty for BBC2 on the murders at the
Tiananmen Square and the developments in communist China that led up to the massacre. In his book
Hirohito: Behind the Myth Behr went into the debate about what the emperor knew about war preparations, about the
rape of Nanking, the
Bataan death march, the
Burma railway and
Changi prison. Behr's case was that Hirohito knew as long ago as 1931 – when his troops took control of
Manchuria in the putsch that became known as the
Mukden Incident – what his military chiefs were doing; that he encouraged it; and that he was fully aware of their preparations for the Second World War. In his book on the
Ceauşescus, Behr said that the couple established a dictatorship more Byzantine than Marxist–Leninist. The title,
Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, was a Romanian proverb. In 1987 Behr wrote a biography of
Pu Yi, the last emperor of China. The book, titled
The Last Emperor, was inspired by a conversation between Behr and the British film producer
Jeremy Thomas at the 1986
Cannes Film Festival, where
The Last Emperor (produced by Thomas) was shown. Behr wrote in the "Acknowledgments" section of the book that "[h]e asked me whether I would be interested in writing a book connected with the film. I said that rather than write a 'book of the film' I wanted to try my hand at a serious biography of Pu Yi and his life and times". He further thanked Thomas for enabling him to "meet the surviving dramatis personae in Pu Yi's life". In 1978 he published his memoirs. Memorably entitled
Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?, it was retitled for the American market as ''Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent's Life Behind the Lines''. In a thriller,
Getting Even (1981), Behr used his foreign correspondent experience. He was the author (with Sydney Liu) of
The Thirty-Sixth Way: A Personal Account of Imprisonment and Escape from Red China (1969), wrote a book on the musical
Les Misèrables and collaborated on another about the making of
Miss Saigon. He also wrote ''Thank Heaven for Little Girls: The True Story of
Maurice Chevalier's Life and Times'' (1993). He contributed regularly to American, French and British periodicals. ==References==