T. D. Allman

Allman was born in Tampa, Florida, on October 16, 1944. “After Nepalganj,” as was later reported in the National Geographic magazine, “T.D. Allman exposed the CIA’s secret war in Laos, rescued massacre victims in Cambodia, became an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, survived a kidnapping in Beirut, a bullet in Tiananmen Square, and a balloon crash in Kathmandu while reporting from more than 90 countries.” He died on May 12, 2024, at a hospital in Manhattan, from pneumonia. ==Writing==

Allman's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, as well as in The Guardian, Le Monde, The Economist. His rescued massacre victims in Cambodia, led to his work being banned from The Washington Post. Later, as a contributing editor of ''Harper's'', he aroused further controversy when he predicted that the U.S. defeat in Indochina had opened the door to a new epoch of Pacific Rim success for American values and economic systems. He also rebutted claims that the Earth was running out of oil and predicted that U.S. cities, far from being doomed, were on the verge of a "Yuppie renaissance". His reports from Iraq and on the Colombian drug wars received wide attention, as have his profiles of figures such as Dick Cheney. ==Papers==

Harvard University's Houghton Library is the repository of the T.D. Allman archive. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College also hold some of his papers. ==Legacy==

In 1968, at age twenty-three, T.D. Allman broke his first big story: the CIA's 'secret war,' against the Communists in Laos. He accomplished this by listening to local people, then trekking over mountains to a clandestine CIA base, Long Cheng. The news in his dispatches spurred congressional investigations and protests in America, and he went on to document the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia. Author, broadcaster, and investigative analyst John Pilger on Allman and his approach: “The great American journalist T. D. Allman once defined 'genuinely objective journalism' as that which 'not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right. Objective journalism is compelling not only today. It stands the test of time. It is validated not only by 'reliable sources' but by the unfolding of history. It is reporting that which not only seems right the day it is published. It is journalism that ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.” The T.D. Allman Studentships, funded by the ChengZhong Focus Foundation, support ground-breaking independent research into past and present events. ==Works==

As author • Anatomy of a Coup, Glad Day Press, 1970 • • • • • In France Profound: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024) As co-author or contributor • Cambodia: The Widening War in Indochina • Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1968–1973 • Conservatism as Heresy: In Defence of Monarchy • Provence: An Inspired Anthology • The Florida Reader: Visions of Paradise • Spain: True Stories: The King Who Saved His Country • Why Bosnia? • Miami, the America Crossroad: A Centennial Journey • Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington’s War on Drugs. • These United States: Original Essays by Leading American Writers • Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print • Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA: From Prophecy to Protest In French • Un Destin Ambigu • La Floride : Cœur révélateur des Etats Unis, Paris: Garnier, 2019 (translated by Frederic Monneyron) In Spanish • Miami: La Ciudad del Futuro • El Hombre Mas Peligroso del Mundo == Notes ==