T.D. Allman, a free-spirited journalist who for more than 50 years challenged American myth-making with incisive, personal reporting on subjects as diverse as the Vietnam War and modern-day Florida, died in Manhattan on May 12. He was 79 years old.
His partner, Sui Chengzhong, said he died of pneumonia in hospital.
In March 1970, as a 25-year-old freelance journalist, Allman walked 15 miles into the mountains of Laos with two other reporters to write a story for The New York Times about Long Chiang, a secret CIA base used to fight the communist Pathet Lao revolutionary army and its North Vietnamese allies.
“At the end of the paved runway were three Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopters,” Allman reported. “The presence of the helicopters is thought to be one of the reasons the U.S. is trying to keep Long Chen secret. The Jolly Green Giants are seen as evidence that the U.S. is bombing not only the Ho Chi Minh Trail but also northeastern Laos.”
Those words were typical of Allman's style as a colorful reporter from around the world for Harper's, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, National Geographic and other magazines, combining rigorous observation with sharp conclusions that often condemn American wrongdoing and others who abuse their power.
His career took off after he specialized in reporting from Laos and Cambodia in the final days of the Vietnam War, reporting from the fringes of the war for The Times and The Washington Post, and reporting on American bombing raids that killed farmers and destroyed rice fields but had no military significance.
His Time magazine articles about the massacres perpetrated by U.S.-allied Cambodian government forces are included in the Library of America's “Vietnam Report.” In a 1970 New York Review of Books article, Noam Chomsky, who always favored aggressive reporting, called Allman “one of the most knowledgeable and enterprising American correspondents currently in Cambodia.” In 1989, Harrison E. Salisbury, a prominent Times war correspondent, called Allman “bold, daring” and “brilliant.”
Allman went on to fly across the desert in Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's small plane, watch Russian President Boris Yeltsin disrobe before crowds in Siberia, meet Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi in his bunker, walk with farm workers fleeing death squads in El Salvador and witness the Tiananmen Square riots from a Beijing hotel balcony in April 1989.
Although he sometimes irritated his editors with his strong opinions and tendency to spend money, he returned with reports of what was observed and felt.
“Tim excelled on the ground in dangerous republics, including interviewing leaders like Arafat, Sihanouk and Gaddafi,” former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalled in an email, referring to Cambodia's former king and prime minister Norodom Sihanouk. “He spent a great deal of time in Haiti, at which point we worried he might have been left behind by the ghost of Haiti. Despite all odds, he always returned home with a memorable, lavish, operatic epic — and expensive one at that.”
Allman pursued a second career as a book writer focusing on American foreign policy and his native Florida, where he received mixed reviews, with critics sometimes saying he wrote too much.
Reviewing Allman's book, Miami: City of the Future, in The Times in 1987, critic Michiko Kakutani noted that Allman's writing was at times “ominous and melodramatic,” but wrote that “Miami is most illuminating in its reportage and historical detail. Allman introduces us to a diverse cast of Miami characters.”
But Timothy Garton Ash, a scholar of Central Europe, scorned Allman's 1984 book, “Unmanifest Destiny,” a scathing critique of American foreign policy, calling it “wordy, incoherent and passionate” and an “act of American self-flagellation.”
And Allman's 2013 history of Florida, “Looking for Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State,” which sought to dispel the myths Floridians tell themselves about the state's ugly racial and economic history, from the genocide of Native Americans to white supremacy to vile land grabs, was fiercely attacked by Florida advocates.
In an interview, Allman explained his approach: “I never go into a story with any preconceived ideas, whether it's Laos, where my career began, or Miami, Colombia, or the Middle East. I just go and experience the place. That's the way I do it.”
That habit was evident in a March 1981 cover story in Harper's Magazine about repression and rebellion in El Salvador at the height of U.S. support for the country's far-right government. Mr. Allman reported according to his own sensibilities and opened his mind to what he saw and heard, to stirring effect.
“No matter how hard we search for meaning, all we find are terrified and unfortunate people: malnourished children left without food or medicine, abused and barefoot women, landless, jobless and illiterate men and boys fleeing for their lives from the 'security forces' of their own government, mutilated bodies by the roadside,” he writes.
When he suddenly came across the peasant rebels he was searching for, he wrote, “the rustling of the trees became a rustling away from the trees.”
There were many other situations in which Allman would have willingly put himself at risk.
“I admired his courage and quick-talking nature,” former Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randle said in an email, describing Allman as “funny, irreverent, insightful and opinionated.”
“He'd developed a kind of nerdy, quirky persona that suited his caustic writing,” Rundle said.
Timothy Damien Allman was born on October 16, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to Paul J. Allman, a U.S. Coast Guard officer and later a maritime school instructor, and Felicia (Edmonds) Allman, an antiques dealer. When Allman was five years old, his family moved to Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, where he grew up and attended school.
He attended Harvard University but “did nothing but smoke, drink and write; he learned nothing,” his partner Sui recalled him saying.
After graduating from college in 1966, Allman joined the Peace Corps, primarily to avoid the draft. He was stationed in a village in Nepal, and it was his first step into a world of “hardship and suffering” that was unknown to him, as he had grown up “as a middle-class American,” Sui said.
When Allman left the Peace Corps, the Vietnam War was still ongoing, but he was hired by an English-language newspaper in Bangkok. Sui said an American reporter noticed him, and his career took off.
Sui was proud of his time in Indochina, saying he “went in a jeep to the killing sites” and saw “people buried alive.”
Allman continued to travel to more than 80 countries, and his final project, “Deep France: A Long History of a Home, a Mountain Town, and a People,” is due for publication in August, and is about his house in southwestern France, the village it is in, and the deep connections he discovered there to France's ancient past.
Allman, who Sui met more than 20 years ago while he was getting his doctorate at Columbia University, is survived by his brother, Stephen, and sister, Pamela Allman, who lived in France and New York.
“He was a very courageous man,” Sui said. “He would definitely stand up for it. TD would not give in. He was not a negotiator. And he had the ultimate charm.”