Sydney, Australia – Kate Webb, a pioneering journalist whose powerful reputation was forged on the front lines of the Vietnam War and who roamed Asia for nearly 35 years covering coups and strife from India to the Philippines, died Sunday. She was 64.
Webb, who made the news in 1971 when she was captured in Cambodia and held prisoner by North Vietnamese troops, succumbed to bowel cancer in Sydney, her brother, Jeremy Webb, told The Associated Press.
“There wasn’t a story that she ever covered poorly, but it was her war reporting that drove her and incidentally turned her into an icon of her generation,” said Alan Dawson, a colleague of Webb’s at United Press International during the war years.
The New Zealand-born, Sydney-trained Webb first went to Vietnam in 1967 and spent more than six years covering the war for UPI, building a reputation for brave, honest reporting and insightful writing.
After the war’s end, she worked throughout Asia for UPI and later Agence France-Presse, covering some of the region’s biggest stories from South Korea to Afghanistan and a half-dozen other countries, as well as Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
After covering the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia in 1998, she retired from journalism in 2001, saying she felt “too old to keep up with front-line reporting, and that was the only kind I liked.”
Webb, who lived the hard-drinking, chain- smoking lifestyle of her journalistic generation to the hilt, lived in relative seclusion on the Hunter River north of Sydney.
Webb was born in 1943 in New Zealand and moved with her family to Australia’s capital, Canberra, as a child. She graduated from Melbourne University and became a cub reporter at the tabloid Daily Mirror in Sydney.
She quit at age 23 and went to Vietnam, ending up with UPI. She was one of the few women to cover the war full time.
In April 1971, she was among six people captured while covering a battle in Cambodia. Webb was given up for dead after officials said a body they found and cremated was probably hers. But after more than three weeks, she emerged from the jungle.
