William Beecher, who as a New York Times reporter exposed President Richard M. Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and later won a Pulitzer Prize at the Boston Globe, died on February 9 at his home in Wilmington, N.C. He was 90.
His daughter Lori Beecher and son-in-law Marc Burstein confirmed the death.
President Nixon ordered the bombings, codenamed Operation Menu, in March 1969 in response to increased attacks by the North Vietnamese Army and South Vietnamese guerrillas based in Cambodia, a neutral country. The campaign was so secret that even Secretary of State William P. Rogers didn’t know about it.
Mr. Beecher’s article about the bombings, which appeared on the front page of The Times on May 9, 1969, said that about 5,000 tons of ordnance had been dropped on Cambodia in the previous two weeks alone.
He also noted that while there were no plans for a major land incursion, “small teams” of U.S. reconnaissance forces were infiltrating Cambodia “to ensure that accurate intelligence can be obtained to provide the bombers with ‘lucrative’ targets.” “
The article sparked an immediate response from the White House. Within two weeks, Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., a deputy to Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser, asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to tap Mr. Beecher’s phone to find out who had leaked the information to him.
The decision to tap his phone, along with those of 16 other journalists and government officials, was the first demonstration of the Nixon administration’s willingness to use legally questionable means to obtain information or silence critics.
Mr. Beecher was already and continued to be a nuisance to the government, with information about arms control plans and spy flights over China, all based on well-informed sources within the government.
To many people’s surprise, he left the Times in 1973 to work for the Defense Department as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. He returned to journalism in 1975 as a correspondent for The Boston Globe, where he covered international affairs.
He was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1983 with a 56-page article on the state of the nuclear arms race – a late-career achievement he wore lightly.
“Winning a Pulitzer Prize didn’t hurt, but I didn’t tell news sources that I won,” he told The Harvard Crimson in 2005. “I wouldn’t say it made a big difference. ”
William Beecher was born on May 27, 1933 in Framingham, Massachusetts to Gertrude and Samuel Beecher. His father was a grocer.
He studied government at Harvard, where he worked as a features editor for The Crimson and as a campus correspondent for The Boston Globe. He graduated in 1955; His classmates included David Halberstam, J. Anthony Lukas and Sydney H. Schanberg, all of whom would also go on to distinguished careers as reporters for The Times.
He received a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School and then spent two years in the Army before joining The St. Louis Globe-Democrat’s reporting staff.
He married Eileen Brick in 1958. She died in 2020. In addition to his daughter Lori, he is survived by three other daughters, Diane Beecher, Nancy Kotz and Debbie Spartin; and 10 grandchildren.
Mr. Beecher moved to Washington in the early 1960s to cover the Supreme Court for the Wall Street Journal and then moved to the Times in 1966.
During the war he made five trips to Vietnam. While traveling with Mr Haig, their helicopter was shot down over the Mekong Delta, but all survived with only minor injuries. On another, he learned that his wife was having twins, news relayed to him by his traveling companion, Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
After his stint at the Boston Globe, Mr. Beecher served as Washington bureau chief for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and as public affairs director for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He also wrote eight novels, a memoir and a cookbook, and taught journalism courses at the University of Maryland in retirement.
Many successful reporters recognize their life’s mission early on. But Mr. Beecher said he found this late in his college career.
“I thought I was going to study either journalism or law,” he told The Crimson. “I thought I might get bored in law school, but I knew I wouldn’t get bored in journalism.”
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2024-02-19 01:18:36
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