TD Allman, the free-spirited journalist who for five decades challenged American myths with razor-sharp personal reporting on topics as diverse as the Vietnam War and contemporary Florida, died May 12 in Manhattan. He is 79 years old.
His partner Sui Chengzhong said he died in the hospital due to pneumonia.
In March 1970, Mr. Allman, a 25-year-old freelance journalist, accompanied by two other reporters, hiked 15 miles over the mountains of Laos to report for the New York Times about the CIA’s secret base at Dragon City. Used against the communist Pathet Lao revolutionaries and their allies the North Vietnamese.
“There were three Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopters parked at the end of the paved runway,” Mr. Allman reported. “Their existence is believed to be one of the reasons why the United States tried to keep Long Cheng a secret. The Jolly Green Giant was seen as evidence that the United States was bombing not only the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but also northeastern Laos.
Those words are typical of Mr. Allman’s colorful reporting from around the world — for Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, National Geographic and other publications Character – combines close observation with sharp conclusions that often point fingers.
Towards the end of the Vietnam War, he reported professionally from Laos and Cambodia, reporting from the war’s periphery for The Times and The Washington Post and covering U.S. bombing raids that killed farmers and destroyed rice fields, His career then took off.
A Time magazine report on the massacre by U.S.-allied Cambodian government forces is included in the Library of America’s “Reporting Vietnam” volume. In 1970, Noam Chomsky, who always preferred live reporting, called Mr. Allman “one of the most knowledgeable and enterprising American journalists currently in Cambodia” in The New York Review of Books one”. In 1989, Harrison E. Salisbury, the famed Times war correspondent, called Mr. Allman “bold, courageous” and “extraordinary.”
Mr Allman later flew across the desert in Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s small plane, watched Soviet President Boris Yeltsin strip in front of a Siberian crowd, and in Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s bunker Meeting, walking across a farm In April 1989, he was hiding from firing squads of laborers in El Salvador and witnessed the uprising in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square from his hotel balcony.
He could irritate editors with his staunch views and his profligate spending on expense accounts. But he came back with reports of what he had observed and felt.
“Tim did a great job on Cunning Republic, covering leaders like Arafat, Sihanouk and Gaddafi,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalled in an email. Referring to Norodom Sihanouk, the former King and Prime Minister of Cambodia. “He spent a lot of time in Haiti, and at the time we feared he had been lost to the ghosts there. Against all odds, he always came back with a rich, unforgettable operatic epic. And it was expensive.”
Mr. Allman’s second career was as a book writer, focusing on U.S. foreign policy and Florida, where he was born. Reviews here were mixed, with critics sometimes accusing him of rewriting.
Reviewing his book “Miami: City of the Future” in The Times in 1987, critic Michiko Kakutani noted that his work could sometimes be “ominous and dramatic,” but wrote: “Miami: City of the Future” ” proved to be a most instructive history. Mr. Allman introduces us to an eclectic gallery of Miami celebrities.
However, the Central European scholar Timothy Garton Ash dismissed Allman’s 1984 satire of U.S. foreign policy as “unclear destiny,” calling it “long and rambling.” And full of passion” is “American masochism.”
Mr. Allman’s 2013 Florida history book, “Searching for Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State,” aims to debunk myths about Floridians and educate themselves about the state’s ugly racial and economic history — from the treatment of Native Americans to of massacres to white supremacy to sordid land grabs — fiercely attacked by supporters in Florida.
Mr. Allman explained his approach to an interviewer: “I never come into a story with a preconceived notion. Whether it’s Laos, where I started my career, or Miami, Colombia, or the Middle East. I just go and experience it. place. That’s how I operate.
This approach was on full display in a March 1981 Harper’s Magazine cover article about repression and rebellion in El Salvador, at the height of U.S. support for the far-right regime in El Salvador. Mr. Allman allowed his emotions to guide his reporting, opening himself up to what he saw and heard to evocative effect.
“No matter how hard one searches for meaning,” he wrote, “one finds only frightened, wretched people—abused, barefoot women, without food or medicine for malnourished children; landless, unemployed, Illiterate men and boys fleeing their own government’s “security forces”; mutilated bodies on the roadside.
When he suddenly encountered the peasant rebels he had been looking for, he wrote: “The rustle of the trees became a rustle beyond the trees.”
Mr. Allman has been in situations like this many times, and he happily puts himself in harm’s way.
“I admired his courage and quick eloquence,” former Washington Post reporter Jonathan Randall said in an email, describing Allman as “funny, irreverent, insightful and opinionated.”
“He developed a flashy, eccentric persona to match his acerbic brushwork,” Mr. Randall said.
Timothy Damien Allman was born on October 16, 1944 in Tampa, Florida, the son of Paul J. Allman, a U.S. Coast Guardsman An officer and later a maritime school instructor, his father, Felicia (Edmonds) Allman, was an antique dealer. When he was five years old, the family moved to Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, where Mr. Allman grew up and attended school.
He enrolled at Harvard University, where he “did nothing and learned nothing except smoke, drink, and write,” recalled his partner, Mr. Sui.
After graduating in 1966, he joined the Peace Corps primarily to avoid military service. Mr. Sui said Allman was assigned to a village in Nepal, the beginning of a world of “hardship and misery” he knew nothing about growing up as a “middle-class American.”
When Allman left the Peace Corps, the Vietnam War was still raging and he was hired by an English-language newspaper in Bangkok. Sui said American reporters took notice, and his career began.
Sui said he was proud of his time in Indochina, where he “drove his jeep into the killing fields” and saw “people being buried alive.”
Mr. Allman went on to report from more than 80 countries. His final project is Deep France: A House, a Mountain Town and the Long History of a People, a book due to be published in August about his house in southwestern France, the village in which it is located, and the stories he lived in Deep connections to France’s ancient history are found there.
In addition to Mr. Sui, Mr. Sui met Mr. Allman more than 20 years ago while Mr. Sui was studying for his doctoral degree. At Columbia, Mr. Allman is survived by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Pamela Allman. He lives in France and New York.
“He is a very courageous man,” Mr. Sui said. “He’s definitely going to face it. TD has no payoff. He’s not a negotiator. He has the best charisma.
