TD Allman, a free-spirited journalist who challenged American mythmaking with personal, timely reporting for five decades on topics as diverse as the Vietnam War and contemporary Florida, died May 12 in Manhattan. He was 79 years old.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, said his partner, Chengzhong Sui.
In March 1970, as a 25-year-old freelance journalist, Allman, accompanied by two other reporters, walked 15 miles through the mountains of Laos to report for The New York Times on Long Cheng, a secret CIA base that was being used to fight. against the communist revolutionaries of the Pathet Lao and their allies, the North Vietnamese.
“At the end of the paved runway were three Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopters,” Allman reported. “His presence is believed to be one of the reasons why the United States is trying to keep Long Cheng a secret. The Jolly Green Giants are considered proof that the United States bombs not only the Ho Chi Minh Trail but also northeastern Laos.”
Those words were typical of a style in which 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 pointed out with finger. against the misdeeds of the United States or against others who abuse power.
His career took off after specializing in reporting in Laos and Cambodia toward the end of the Vietnam War, contributing to The Times and The Washington Post from the peripheries of the war and reporting on the American bombings that killed farmers and destroyed rice fields, but that without military import.
A Time magazine dispatch about a massacre carried out by troops of the US-allied Cambodian government found its way into the US Library’s “Reporting Vietnam” volume. In The New York Review of Books in 1970, Noam Chomsky, always a supporter of engaged journalism, called Mr. Allman “one of the most informed and enterprising American correspondents currently in Cambodia.” In 1989, Harrison E. Salisbury, a renowned Times war correspondent, called Allman “bold and daring” and “remarkable.”
Allman would ride Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat’s small plane across the desert, watch Soviet President Boris Yeltsin strip naked in front of a crowd in Siberia, meet Libyan leader Muammar el-Gaddafi in his bunker, travel with farm workers who they evade death squads in El Salvador and, in April 1989, witness the uprising in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square from their hotel balcony.
He could exasperate editors with his strongly held opinions and lavish way with an expense account. But he brought reports that were observed and felt.
“Tim was good on the ground in dubious republics while covering their leaders like Arafat, Sihanouk and Gaddafi,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalled in an email, referring to Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s former king and prime minister. . “He spent a good amount of time in Haiti, at which point we became concerned that we had lost him to the spirits there. Regardless of the difficulties, he always returned with rich operatic epics that were memorable. And expensive.”
Allman had a second career as a book writer, focusing on American foreign policy and Florida, where he was born. Reviews here were mixed, with critics sometimes citing it for overwriting.
Reviewing his book “Miami: City of the Future” in The Times in 1987, critic Michiko Kakutani noted that his writing could be “portentous and melodramatic” at times, but wrote: “It is in the passages based on the specific aspects of the report and story that ‘Miami’ is most illuminating. Allman presents us with an eclectic gallery of Miami characters.”
However, Central European scholar Timothy Garton Ash dismissed Allman’s 1984 tirade against American foreign policy, “Unmanifest Destiny,” as “fat, rambling, and passionate” and “an exercise in American self-flagellation.”
And Allman’s 2013 history of Florida, “Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State,” which set out to debunk the myths Floridians tell themselves about their state’s ugly racial and economic history, dating back to massacres of Native Americans. Americans to white supremacy. to sordid land grabs, was vigorously attacked by Florida boosters.
Allman explained his approach to an interviewer: “I never go into a story with preconceived notions. Whether it’s Laos, where my career began, whether it’s Miami, Colombia or the Middle East. I just go and experience the place. “That’s how I operate.”
That practice was evident in a March 1981 cover story for Harper’s magazine about repression and insurgency in El Salvador at the height of American support for the far-right regime there. Allman allowed his sensitivity to guide his reporting, opening up to what he saw and heard, to evocative effect.
“No matter how diligently one searched for meaning,” he wrote, “he found only terrified and hapless people: battered women, barefoot, without food or medicine for their malnourished children; landless, unemployed and illiterate men and boys fleeing for their lives from the “security forces” of their own national government; mutilated bodies on the side of the road.”
When he suddenly encountered the insurgent peasants he had been searching for, he wrote: “The whisper of the trees became a whisper apart from the trees.”
There were many other similar situations in which Mr. Allman cheerfully put himself in harm’s way.
“I admired him for his courage and quick tongue,” Jonathan Randal, a former Washington Post correspondent, said in an email, describing Allman as “funny, irreverent, insightful and opinionated.”
“He cultivated a kind of eccentric, petulant personality that accompanied his acerbic pen.” Mr. Randal said.
Timothy Damien Allman was born on October 16, 1944 in Tampa, Florida, the son of Paul J. Allman, a U.S. Coast Guard officer and later a maritime school instructor, and Felicia (Edmonds) Allman, an antiques dealer. He was five years old when the family moved to Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, where Mr. Allman grew up and attended school.
He attended Harvard University, where “I did nothing but smoke and drink and write, and I didn’t learn anything,” he remembers his partner, Mr. Sui, telling him.
After graduating in 1966, he joined the Peace Corps largely to escape the draft. Allman was assigned to a village in Nepal, which was his initiation into a world of “hardship and suffering” that he knew nothing about, as he grew up as a “middle-class American,” Sui said.
With the Vietnam War still raging when Allman left the Peace Corps, he was hired by an English-language newspaper in Bangkok. American journalists noticed him, Sui said, and his career was launched.
He was proud of that period in Indochina, Sui said, where he “went to the killing fields in a jeep” and saw “people buried alive.”
Allman went on to report from more than 80 countries. His latest project was “In Deep France: The Long Story of a House, a Mountain Village, and a Village,” a book to be published in August about his house in southwestern France, the village in which it is located, and the deep connections he discovered there with France’s immemorial past.
In addition to Mr. Sui, who met Mr. Allman more than 20 years ago while Mr. Sui was completing his Ph.D. At Columbia University, Mr. Allman is survived by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Pamela Allman. He lived in France and New York.
“He was a man of tremendous courage,” Sui said. “I would definitely face it. TD doesn’t give in. He is not a negotiator. And he had the best charm.”