John McWethy, a retired national-
security correspondent for ABC News, had moved to Boulder last fall to retire and relax after working the trenches in foreign wars and Washington politics.
He was killed Wednesday in a skiing accident at Keystone Ski Resort.
Witnesses said McWethy, 61, was skiing fast when he lost control in a turn on the intermediate Porcupine trail and slid chest first into a tree.
Len Ackland, co-director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism, was a friend of McWethy’s for 30 years. He had received an e-mail from McWethy that morning asking about getting together for dinner.
“He was a very humble guy,” Ackland said. “He didn’t talk about himself much. He was the kind of journalist who didn’t want to be out front. It was always about the story, not about him. He was the kind of guy you enjoyed sitting down to have a beer with.”
McWethy is survived by his wife, Laurie Duncan, and two sons, Adam, 28, and Ian, 24.
Duncan was with her husband at the time of the accident. She described him as a good skier who had found a home in Colorado.
“He loved it here,” she said Wednesday evening. “I think he loved the beauty of its nature, the open spaces, the wildlife, everything.”
McWethy was a correspondent for ABC News from 1979 to 2003, according to a biography posted online. During his career, he won five Emmy awards, a Dupont Award and an Overseas Press Club Award.
He was in the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, when it was hit by a hijacked passenger plane and, in the aftermath, was the network’s primary reporter in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He also had covered a slate of wars from the battlegrounds.
“If he was writing about a war, he went to war,” Ackland said. “If he was writing about a war in Somalia, he wanted to go to Somalia.”
Another close friend, Michael Krepon in Washington, spoke through tears Wednesday night. He said that in e-mail exchanges, McWethy had expressed the peace he had found in Colorado after leaving journalism.
“He was a tough-as-nails reporter with a very big heart,” Krepon said. “If anyone had a reason to be an egotist, it was John, but there was no trace of it in him.
“He had ordered his life to off-load the things he was quite good at but didn’t enjoy doing. He was focused only on things that he found enjoyable and meaningful, one of which was going out in the snow.”
Since retiring in 2003, he had continued to act as a special correspondent for ABC and was a senior adviser to the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., since 2005. He had been the moderator for a news and terrorism program sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, National Academies of Science and Radio Television News Directors Foundation since 2004
McWethy was the White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report from 1977 to 1979 cq and the magazine’s science editor from 1972 to 1977 cq. He wrote for the Congressional Quarterly from 1970 to 1972.
McWethy grew up in LaGrange, Ill., graduating from Lyons Township High School in 1965. He graduated from DePauw University in 1969 and later received his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174
