Overview
- He died on December 17 in Newport Beach at age 91 after entering hospice days earlier, according to his son Andrew Arnett.
- He won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for The Associated Press with ground-level coverage of the Vietnam War and remained in Saigon through its fall.
- He became widely known for live reports from Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War, staying on the ground and broadcasting by cellphone as airstrikes began.
- He secured rare, high-profile interviews with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden during decades of conflict reporting across multiple regions.
- His career drew controversy with CNN’s 1999 retraction of a Laos nerve gas report he narrated and his 2003 firing after an Iraqi state TV interview; he later taught journalism in China and retired in Southern California, and he is survived by his wife Nina Nguyen and their children Elsa and Andrew.