TD Allman, a freelance journalist who challenged American mythmaking in sharp, personal reporting over five decades on subjects as diverse as the Vietnam War and modern Florida, died May 12 in Manhattan. It was 79.
His death, in hospital, was caused by pneumonia, said his partner, Chengzhong Sui.
In March 1970, as a 25-year-old freelance journalist, Mr. Allman, accompanied by two other reporters, walked 15 miles over mountains in Laos to report for the New York Times about Long Cheng, a secret CIA base where he was being used to fight the Pathé Lao communist rebels and their allies, the North Vietnamese.
“At the end of the paved runway were three Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopters,” Mr Allman said. “Their presence is believed to be one of the reasons the United States is trying to keep Long Cheng a secret. The Jolly Green Giants are seen as proof that the United States is bombing not only the Ho Chi Minh Trail but also northeastern Laos.”
Those words were typical of a style in which Mr. Allman, in colorful reports from around the world — for Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, National Geographic and other publications — combined close observation with sharp conclusions that often they were pointing the finger. to wrongdoing by the US or others who abuse power.
His career took off after doing reporting stints in Laos and Cambodia toward the end of the Vietnam War, reporting for the Times and the Washington Post from war zones and reporting on American bombing that killed farmers and destroyed rice paddies, but no military Introduction.
An dispatch for Time magazine about a massacre by US-allied Cambodian government troops entered the Library of America’s Vietnam Report volume. In the New York Review of Books in 1970, Noam Chomsky, always partial to reporting, called Mr. Allman “one of the most experienced and enterprising of the American correspondents now in Cambodia.” In 1989, Harrison E. Salisbury, a noted Times war correspondent, called Mr. Allman “bold and brazen” and “remarkable.”
Mr. Allman continued to fly in Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s small plane, cross the desert, watch Russian President Boris Yeltsin strip in front of a crowd in Siberia, meet Libyan leader Muammar el-Gaddafi in his bunker, travels with farm workers escaping death squads in El Salvador and, in April 1989, witnesses the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing from his hotel balcony.
He could infuriate publishers with his strong opinions and profligate ways with an expense account. But he brought reports that were noticed and felt.
“Tim was good on the ground in troubled democracies covering their leaders like Arafat, Sihanouk and Gaddafi,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalled in an email, referring to Norodom Sihanouk, its former king and prime minister. Cambodia. “He spent a lot of time in Haiti, so we were worried we’d lost him to the spirits down there. No matter the hardships, he always came back with rich, operatic epics that were unforgettable. And expensive.”
Mr. Allman pursued a second career as a book writer, focusing on American foreign policy and on Florida, where he was born. Here reviews were mixed, with critics sometimes citing him as a replacement.
Reviewing his book “Miami: City of the Future” in The Times in 1987, critic Michiko Kakutani noted that his writing could be “figurative and melodramatic” at times, but wrote: “It is in the passages that draw on his particularities reporting and history that “Miami” proves most enlightening. Mr. Allman introduces us to an eclectic gallery of Miami personalities.”
The Central European scholar Timothy Garton Ash, however, dismissed Mr. Allman’s 1984 diatribe against American foreign policy, ”Unmanifest Destiny,” calling it ”coarse, rambling and passionate” and ”an exercise in American self-flagellation.”
And Mr. Allman’s 2013 history of Florida, ”Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State,” which aimed to puncture myths Floridians tell about their state’s ugly racial and economic history — from massacres of Native Americans Americans to white supremacy in despicable land grabs — was fiercely attacked by Florida boosters.
Mr. Allman explained his approach to an interviewer: “I never go into a story with preconceived ideas. Whether it was Laos, where my career started, whether it was Miami, Colombia or the Middle East. I just go and experience the place. That’s how I operate.”
This practice is demonstrated in a March 1981 cover story for Harper’s Magazine about the repression and rebellion in El Salvador at the height of US support for the far-right regime there. Mr. Allman allowed his sensibilities to guide his reporting, opening himself up to what he saw and heard, to evocative effect.
“As diligently as one searches for significance,” he wrote, “one finds only terrified, unhappy people—battered, barefooted women without food or medicine for their malnourished children. homeless, unemployed, illiterate men and boys fleeing for their lives from the “security forces” of their own national government. mutilated bodies by the side of the road.’
When he suddenly encountered the peasant rebels he was looking for, he wrote: “The rustling of the trees became a rustling apart from the trees.”
There were many other such situations in which Mr. Allman graciously put himself at risk.
“I admired him for his courage and his quick tongue,” Jonathan Randall, a former Washington Post correspondent, said in an email, describing Mr. Allman as “funny, irreverent, insightful, opinionated.”
“He cultivated a kind of sinister persona to go with his white pen,” Mr. Randall said.
Timothy Damien Allman was born on October 16, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to Paul J. Allman, a US Coast Guard officer and later a naval instructor, and Felicia (Edmonds) Allman, an antiques dealer. He was 5 when the family moved to Glen Mills, Pa., where Mr. Allman grew up and attended schools.
He attended Harvard College, where he “did nothing but smoke and drink and write and learned nothing,” his partner, Mr. Sui, recalled.
After graduating in 1966, he joined the Peace Corps to escape the military. Mr. Allman was assigned to a village in Nepal, which was his introduction to a world of “hardship and suffering” he knew nothing about, having grown up as a “middle-class American,” Mr. Sui said.
With the Vietnam War still raging when Mr. Allman left the Peace Corps, he took a job at an English-language newspaper in Bangkok. American journalists noticed him, Mr. Sui said, and his career took off.
He was proud of that time in Indochina, Mr. Sui said, where he “went into the fields in a jeep” and saw “people buried alive.”
Mr. Allman went on to report from more than 80 countries. His latest work was “In France deep: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People,” a book to be published in August about his home in southwestern France, the village in which it is located and deep connections which he discovered there with the immemorial past of France.
Except for Mr. Sui, who met Mr. Allman more than 20 years ago while Mr. Sui was completing a Ph.D. At Columbia University, Mr. Allman has a brother, Steven, and a sister, Pamela Allman. Lived in France and New York.
“He was a man of tremendous courage,” Mr Sui said. “He would definitely deal with it. TD doesn’t work. He is not a negotiator. And he had the best charm.”
