>> welcome, everybody. .i'm the deputy executive director and i would like to welcome the guests, media. to discuss the new book which is a biography of the famous journalist with me tell you a

little bit about her before we start the discussion. lindsay is british and started life as a worker in latin america and africa and progress to journalism and i remember coming across first of all because of the reporting from rwanda on the genocide in 1994 and i think you were one of the few english-language reporters at the very beginning. lindsay halindsey had a strong n broadcasting she has covered most of the big stories of 15 to 20 years including accomplice in much of the middle east into the bureau chief in china.

this book gives you an incredibly detailed and i'm not going to say sympathetic but at the same time a very famous journalist that shows the wonderful agreement as a reporter. we are very lucky to have with us two of the childhood friends who grew up as some of you know in long island on oyster bay and started a career in journalism and then for those of you who don't know what it is, it was a

wire service that rivaled a p. and it was a good school i worked as a correspondent for the news agency. she eventually moved to the sunday times of london which at that time had just been acquired by murdoch and was a big deal in the uk. there were several other newspapers that appeared for the rifle into the sunday telegraph and the fact dave a big splash to the news stories. she was a star on that newspaper. a little introduction to the talk. i know that lindsey has said some of her remarks in the

context of the broad risks that journalists face. marie is exceptional in that she went to places when other people pulled out. most journalists today wouldn't even be allowed by their survivors to do what she did but she did it anyway. without further ado, i want to ask lindsey to talk a little bit about the biography and the first thing i'd want to ask for me you said the work and start at the point in the book where she is injured covering the story in sri lanka. come back to her early life because i think i would like to start with an incident which defined her for many people

although many of us here including myself new or before this happened. maybe you can start by telling us why that happened. >> mary was already famous when she lost the sight in her eye. the eye patch became part of her and it became an emblem of her bravery but also but also she had reconciling the brave, bold famous eyepatch somewhat tedious

to read a short passage to tell you how this happened. she had bad dreams for many years but nothing prepared her for the nightmare that plagued her. it is exactly as she heard in that in sri lanka. these are her choices.

the decision will determine whether she lives or dies. she cannot roll back time nor could she push it forward. it is held in the government territory and ran into the army patrol as they crossed. marie dropped to the ground as the bullets went past but her escorts went back to the jungle back the way they had come. she lay there for about half an hour alone and petrified before making her fateful decision. journalists, american journalists she shouted with her hands up and suddenly the pain

was so bad she could barely breathe. as she fell she realized the blood was trickling from her eyes and she felt a profound side is that she was going to die. in the desperate hope she shouted doctor. they yelled at her to stand up and removed her jacket but somehow she managed to stumble forward. tim freezes into this conflict. the old man in the basement in chechnya the back of his head blown off by russian rockets. the body of the president in a

suit. the young palestinian woman that she watched die from gunshot wounds in beirut and the human body down and broken. the energy routed until she was terrified and safe in her own bed grabbing the next night. that gives you some idea of the extremes she went through. that is one of the reasons it is called extremist and if it is something she wrote. it told the stories of people who live in the extremists going through the unendurable tissue people what happens but that is how i came across her. always braver than the rest of

us and got the best stories and made the rest of us feel just a little bit ashamed. you do not do that you give a full picture of her life so i would like to reflect on that by talking about the first half of the book with you about the growth of grew up in a catholic family one of five children on long island and then maybe we can get some information from you who knew her then. how did her upbringing affect her as an adult would she take to these places?

>> a couple of things. one is that she was incredibly bored i and oyster bay in long island. she had a very stable background and she loved her family, she had a great family. the oldest of five children she was rebellious. there was a game they played as kids. there was a sal hill at the bacf their house. they had a branch they would climb out among it right to the ends where iend where it might u might fall. she was a rebel something of a

rebel with a cause she was always out trained to do something about the environment and then one of the entries in her diary i laugh. do either of you have any memories that your time that you would like to share with us? >> to talk about beingyou talk g rebellious at that point. that is a memory i have and many

knew we were going to get out of there but she really knew it. when i think back on her in those years she knew at that point even if she wasn't possibly verbalizing its it took me a little while longer to recognize those qualities that this wasn't the place i wanted to spend my life but she was always independent and we are very active i remember going to protests with her marching down the town streets and she was always a little more clear-sighted escaping high school and going to brazil as a first step in that direction like getting out of school a little early.

the >> she never bothered to go back to school because she had already done all the rest of it and had become a national merit scholar. one of the things that is very important at this point and again, she is a rebel she goes out and ge gets drunk and they break into a -- they had a lot of fun with marie. and then he said to me we would do that. but any time she was around she was always reading her school books and studying. so, she had a good mixture of the adventurist nature, rebellion, but she always studied. and again that makes for a great

journalist, somebody who doesn't take no for an answer, someone who wants to be out there that is always reading. >> apart from interviewing witnesses like you, can you explain how you got access to these experiences as a young woman? >> she kept diaries o for her le from the age of 13 right up to just before she was killed at the age of 56. she left and some of these notebooks are of descriptions of people and places that some of the more intimate about her personal life and thoughts and feelings in one of the things that's interesting is the way she does something exceptional they are very careful and detailed. she knew when she was doing something other journalists for not doing. she kept a very close record and

left these journals to her last boyfriend and there's also the executor of her well and the sunday times and they very kindly gave the access. i suppose the real moment for me writing this is when i was on long island i went to her home and her family kindly let me go to the basement and pull out the boxes of papers they had. in one of the boxes i found a little white plastic covered by area that had been locked with a key and i couldn't find the key anywhere so i sliced through it. as i opened it, my heart jumped because i thought no one looked at that since marie lofted to mediate the age of 14. and this was a diary that had all of the stuff about the rebellion. she was 13-years-old.

a lot about everybody is wearing shorts to high school. i am not sure i' i want to but y must. [laughter] a very deep analysis of who sat next to him on the bus and which the way in which girl. she offered god her entire record collection if he would make a boy just like her. it didn't work. [laughter] at least for 20 pages. she adored him. there was no sign that he even noticed her which is the way that it is when you were 13. >> [inaudible]

i remember she is rebellious but also had a good framework from a good family and this strong i don't know if it is exactly catholic or whatever, but a strong idea of right and wrong for sure and that guided her in a lot of ways she was always involved in projects and things that were on the right of advancing things. it was all kind of cutting-edge at the time but she was always involved and i think that her dad was kind of instrumental in mac they were a political family. so there was always that sort of political framework she was dealing with as well but a strong idea of right and wrong. hispanic on the one hand absolutely but she really needed to rebel against him and he was very progressive politically but not at all in terms of the

family. he was a patriarch. he didn't like his little girl doing some of the things this little girl was doing and they clashed. his death when she was 19 i think was a very significant moment in her life because she thought she would have time to repair the roof of her father and of course she never did because he died. she wrote in a letter the rest of her life would be spent trying to make her proud of him and in a way it was. >> that comes with mom strongly in the book. can you talk a little bit about what you think motivated her to get into journalism and how she got into journalism?

>> she studied nonfiction writing on the great world war ii journalist who wrote the fantastic book hiroshima which is a very short book that tells the story of five people in hiroshima after the bomb had stopped and it's not about the strategy or weaponry or the politics. it's about these people people's in the atomic aftermath. so she remembered her coming out and saying that is what i want to do i want to tell these big stories in a human way and she always said that it was the best book ever written on the war and many of us would agree with that and so that is what happened at yale and you can't get straightened into doing wha whau want to do so she time freelancing and got a job that

she liked. it's a great journalism you get to interview the guys at the new york city police and all that. then she got a job at upi and ended up in paris and from paris she got a visa to libya and this was in 1986 on the eve of the reagan bombing on the eve when he was about to bomb tripoli and benghazi. it was well known he would tend to give interviews and the younger and prettier the better and she fit into that category and was kind of creepy. telling us about it many years later she often tells the story he was always putting his hands on her knee and she interviewed him on several occasions that at

particular point in this one occasion he put out a little white dress and green shoes for her and she said i'm not going to wear that. but she always loved clothes. that was a theme in the book. she would always describe what people wear in great detail and of course gadhafi was a complete gift with his gold lizard skin shoes and sometimes the full military and all the crazy metals and again it's all in the copy that she proved that in the diary, every tiny detail of what he was wearing but this made her famous because she interviewed him and then the bombing happened and this was a huge story. suddenly she was no longer in anonymous newswire copy writer. she was a brave woman who interviewed that mad dog of the

middle east. she interviewed him on the eve of the bombing. >> with that, she leveraged that to get a job at the sunday times. >> she got to go to beirut and at that point it was the most dangerous city in the world. she was very insecure come in her early 30s she was a news agency journalist and the suddenly she would send it off and there's a lot about technology in the wa and the wad to do things and now she was writing to the sunday newspaper you can't be writing the same as it is coming out in the daily papers, so this is one of the

things you have to do something that gets you something different and something better. we are in beirut and there was a militia besieging a refugee camp and they bribed the commander for one minute and in that one minute they would run across the no man's land into the camp there were snipers everywhere and are not completely sure he's told a priest paper that you've got one minute to get across this rough ground, but they didn't and landed in the camp. it is famous ther as a scottishe

who was the only source of information to the outside world. it is like sending sos messages every day. i remember we were all glued to what was happening and there was a part they would pick them off and the women went out and she was coming back in as she was shot. the story about this woman whene was in her early 20s and just a short bit of her description as he was dying on the operating table. her hair was clotted blood and

seemed younger now. her body was soft and shapely and she wore to tiny gold earrings. someone cleaned out the handful of dirt that she clenched. i think that is a pretty extraordinary description. and this incident have a huge impact on her. the 21st of she spends there had a huge effect and this was because her story had an impact. the militia was sponsored by the leader of syria. within three days the siege had been lifted and it was partly because of that story. the image of the young woman

lying there with her blood seeping into the dirt never the less, [inaudible] the earrings with similarity to what she'd given her sister years later she would talk about that day in the campaign about the harbor and the fear that she saw him on the palestinians. she was proud her story be leaving it had made a difference. every sunday newspaper journalist she had the time to get right in the middle of whatever situation she was reporting on. a variation on the famous photographers if your pictures are not good enough you are not close enough. others might remain at the margins firing from safety but not very. she would get up close. she wouldn't write about herself, but her journalism would be distinguished by the intensity of her personal experience. and i think that story and that young woman are tremendously influential and that was the

commitment which she felt about telling the stories of the victims of the war. the piece is entitled the war on women. it wasn't about the scum it was a picture in her story had an impact. >> to that point, one of the things she had to battle at the time you would know this from your own experience coming up. the fact was very different sensibility and did she bring something to the reporting because a lot of male colleagues at the time were into the hardware and the strategy in not necessarily the story of one individual person. >> sometimes it is hard to know what defines the approach to reporting based on gender or not based on gender. certainly she was one of the

boys. she could drink the boys under the table. that was useful. the reason she got in this because she had the stamina to drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes until three in the morning with his aide night after night and that is what she did. and of course they loved a bit of e-mail company. but also being a woman that helped. she wasn't very interested in whether it was a t. 52 tank. she believed very strongly that reporting was about people. it's about people's lives. i know mail correspondence nowadays who would agree and look at her way of doing things but she also wrote a piece once she was very celebrated for her reporting and in 1999 there was a referendum on independence in

indonesia and then the militia sponsored by the indonesian government started to run rampage around the islands and people fled to the u.s. compound and she was in the un compound with other journalists and it became more and more dangerous. editors pulled their journalists out and she was left with two dutch journalists. and there's a funny story about this because she didn't consult her foreign editor before. she called him afterwards and said sure, and by the way i am staying. the others are pretty much gone it is just us. where have the men gone, and she said they fall left. i guess they don't make men like these used to purchase such a comment that is unfair because they happen to know there were two journalists who happen to be

men would've gone into the hills with the guerrillas which was just as brave. 18 other people have also stayed as volunteers. it was a very brave thing to do and she was very celebrated when she came out that she wrote a piece and said i couldn't leave because i had shared these people's food and i thought i would be abandoning them. i couldn't do it. she didn't feel that her bravery had anything to do with it. but her reporting had anything to do with it apart from one thing, one other story. when she is corresponding as we all do, she always has lace or

silk underwear on underneath. that was marie. she managed to get back to the hotel at some point after it was the end of that crisis where she's abandoned and had to run to the compound and she found much to her amazement that they looted her underwear but not the jacket which was still there. >> one of the things you mentioned is the impact that she had and i remember the time of her death one of the things that was quoted was from a church where she talked about bearing witness. can you elaborate a little bit by what she meant? >> every year now we have a

service to commemorate journalists that have lost their lives and 2010 was the first year we had that and it's one of those memories i have which i will never lose. i was in the congregation and she had on her cocktail dress slightly too short for church and with her eye patch and glasses to read. she mulled over a lot of these issues with his bravery and what his bravado. we have to take risks but sometimes it is also for other people like the local journalists and peopl the people work with. what is our responsibility there and also saying the nature of the war doesn't change. it's still about victims and consequence and people trying to survive and the women and

children. even how people get interested in looking at droned shortage and that is what she meant about bearing witness. she meant you have to be there and if you as a journalist or not there then you are not bearing witness and you are not telling the story. that was her strength. >> i have a couple more questions and then i will open up. you knew her at the later half of her life but in researching and writing this book are your feelings towards the marie that you knew as an adult any different than getting to know her as a complete individual? >> there were times in researching this book i got so

angry with her. she was a stepmother at one point in her life and not a very responsible one. there's a story about where she left her stepfather at a party and that's the point i just i had to go for a walk like how could you do that. there were other parts i couldn't work out what was true and what was sent. i suppose what i didn't understand completely us how vulnerable she was. of course i saw her drunk on a couple of occasions but i didn't realize how big of a problem

alcohol was for and also i knew she suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder but the extent, i didn't know and i think it comes down to this people often ask journalists like me who do international affairs how difficult is it to be out there in these situations and then come home. there is an adjustment but i don't think that was the real issue. she had a great life and circle of friends. it was this image of herself and then there were moments she didn't feel like that person. she felt vulnerable and frightened and i think losing sight in her eye and she had to

face up. >> one final question from me. you mentioned a big part of the book and film that just came out. she went back, she had a story she started to go out but she went back. why did she go back? this is why i wrote the book. there were four of us and we were discussing being smuggled in to report and the three of us said it's too dangerous and she

said anyway, it's what we do so off she went with her photographer and this was a difficult journey like having to crawl through a storm drain. physically i don't think i could have done it. they get in and she goes to the basement. the point is they said the only people here are all terrorists and she writes a story about where the women and children were sheltering in the she went to the clinic where they are going surgery on people with no anesthetics. then she went and wrote the story and it was an incredible story and everyone assumes that was it, she was in and she was

out and spend the nex then the , she was back in. then i got a message from her. so i called her into the first thing i said is what are you doing bite if you go back in and she said it's the worst we've ever seen. i said okay but what is your exit strategy and she said that's it i don't have one we are working on it now and hours later she was killed. she went back because she was committed to the story and i think she felt she was abandoning the people in a way she refused to abandon. she felt guilty that she was

abandoning them. and you can say that that is when you blur the line between yourself and the people you are reporting on. if i say it was a mistake, she didn't even live to tell the tale, she was killed. but that was the point where she stepped over the line and paid for it with her life. >> i think that it's is a goodt and the conversation. we have a microphone to please take the microphone. >> have you got any questions? come on. >> there's a few in the back. >> one of the things you mentioned is the freedom and the chairman should the sunday paper was this drive to get something that isn't being reported.

how does that compare our house that expanded in the modern news environment where it is so fast to publish and what does that mean for all journalists but especially freelancers? >> she knew the story couldn't hold. they were trying to find a journalist and those that were made according to the sectors that her sister had brought with him to help with the accountability law firm which is a kind of nonprofit work that

was combined into what led to her death so that is one example of the danger. the landscape is changing all the time and now you have so many short things online but it's not going to be as it was in those days. certainly with the change in the landscape and newspapers not making so much money anymore and closing down their bureau that means a lot of the kind of reporting is now being done by freelancers and they do not necessarily always have

insurance and this is where this comes in because they are helping freelancers both with risk assessments and training and many things they need on the ground and the other point that's important to make us increasingly people are reporting their own stories and there are several other correspondents have been killed in the war in syria but fewer than ten and more than 100 syrian journalist so that's another important thing to remember. >> i'm glad you raised that.

i see some other hands for questions. >> when you are talking about the decision to go back to make me think bacmademe think back td earlier when she was in lebanon covering the story -- >> i think you should hold the microphone closer. >> i work for tv. [laughter] >> in 1987 when she was in lebanon and covering the siege there of the palestinian camp. a couple of days after that led to the siege and because they were back at the time. so do you think in your reporting of the book that is

something that was a possibility of a similar outcome that motivated her to go back and is that something more generally that you think continued to motivate her reporting? >> she was motivated by having an impact and i think one of the things you see in the book is how much less of an impact the kind of reporting she was doing had over the duration of her life and this is something that is significant for all of us doing this kind of work. the days when a story like that would have an impact and desist all sorts of reasons not least we have those that don't care and the whole international political situation has changed and bee then the different pleta

of media so you don't have the same importance. i supposed to counter that though because although i feel her death has made no deception, you captured the attention for a while into the shower al-assad continued exactly as he has done but now we have an example whicf which is the killing of jamaal and it's been so shocking that it's had an impact. now the senate finally noticed your country is supporting the saudis in this brutal, vicious, cruel war in jenin and start a protest about it. even in britain there are some strings and that is because of the possibility so i find that

really interesting because i had kind of despair or work having any kind of impact and now we have a strange irony that it's had an impact. >> i feel sad in a way because there is tremendous reporting on what's going on it's just like water off a ducks back as far as the administration is concerned that the on the one journalistsy strangled and dismembered. i find it very sad. i see that we have a question in the back. >> a lot of the work we've been doing actually comes from what's happened in hearing you talk about running across the field in sri lanka and thinking about

do you think she thought perhaps that was going to be her shield, but it was her superpowers were? >> i don't know if the answer. i don't know that she thought because she was a foreigner that she would have been a protecti protection. we are talking about bombardment, aren't we, about artillery strike. the artillery strike that were coming in every few seconds at that point. sure enough not only was it not a protection as suggested. >> that's funny because since then what we see with the bigger picture is in the 70s and 80s you were an american

journalist and a lot of conflict areas and also access as you've said in this book to others that flipped on its head and is a shield to she became a target and that is the question now for most. >> there are many different themes in the buck when people asbook when peopleask me what iy it's about war and love and sex and death but apart from that it's about the art of journalism and what's happened in those years and it goes from being an american journalist and foreign and to making you a target and that is the story of her life. >> is not a follow-up that i have a question. >> i've wondered how if you can talk more about how she

influenced a generation of the female reporters there is that network of journalists and i just wonder how her work has had so many other female journalists particularly. >> she was influential in the sense that when she started to work for the sunday times, she had come from a formulaic way of telling the story. you would say this reporter saw and she didn't use that. it wasn't that she was running by herself i feel so terrible about it. but it was nice office and it was an immediacy so she put herself in the story. now this is very commonplace. everybody does that now but they

did and when she started to do it but then it's also this issue of blurring the boundaries and in fact there was an article written i think in 2002 about this new kind of journalism spearheaded which was about not remaining in the refugee camps to interview the refugees but comingoing to the place they wee coming from. and i think that influenced a lot of the journalists men and women, but certainly she had her icons and she has to carry around a copy of the face of w war. i did that also for a while, and i like to think that it's a collection of her articles as well and i like to think of them

carrying that around on the fronfrontline and certainly shes very kind to young journalists. in the research of this book i came across so many. she gave me some money when i was broke up or she left the sense that wha that what i filee sunday times if that was my big break. so that's what she did. we found a small project and what you're tryin we are tryings provide support for journalists for whom there's often a lot of obstacles, not getting sent on the interesting articles, family

object in your work, not getting training and safety equipment. we do mentorship from safety programming and counseling and i'd like to think she would like this in her name coming up in the middle east. >> [inaudible] the story is of a specific time and there's a different type of war correspondent charismatic in

a wathe way that it's fading. >> this is the danger of the generation that is the most exciting. but my generation imy generatiot exciting. [laughter] or looking back on a generation and seeing those people having incredible characters. however i think one of the reasons she is worth writing about this because she does represent this particular time. it's a time when there was a huge interest in overseas for in which we know very little. and now they are retreating from the world there isn't the same

amount of interest and that is where the demand is. in the end it didn't take a difference. she could cite a particular ca case. she'd be beat and i believed even if she doesn't make a difference, ignorance is the worst thing. they should never be able to say we didn't know what was going on. yes you did know because we told you, marie told you what was going on. that to me is this the kind of it. but as everything fragments, you have more and more different online outlets and people get murdered between the opinion and reporting and there is so much doubt cast over what we would report. i do think that the era of the

great swashbuckling journalist who gave the best parties in london and all the politicians in paris and all the rest of it i'm afraid i do think that air is over. >> i would have to respectfully disagree. [laughter] >> as long as there's going to be conflict that's going to be someone that says i need to go and be a witness and tell the tale. it's very commonplace to have that opinion about whatever field the beatles were the best band or whatever. [laughter] there's always someone down the road carries on that tradition. i don't know if this is a dare question but i'm kind of curious if you think that murray was more willing to put herself in

harm's way later in life after the sri lanka and i know she wanted to have children, but she didn't have a stable relationship she had alcoholism problems. do you think a lot of those personal issues about her to careless about her own personal safety clicks the >> i think that is a really good question. there are many people on the ine sunday times were some who think she should have been taken off the road after she lost the sight in her eye because they feel she was too vulnerable and arguably she was disabled with only one i. she didn't want to do that because she defined herself by the work she did. i think most of us who do that kind of reporting define ourselves by what we do and many

struggle to get that balance and if you don't have a healthy home life it becomes more difficult to maintain the balance and that would certainly be true of very serious arguably her judgment was impaired and arguably she didn't care enough, but i certainly don't think she had any kind of death wish or that she thought she was going to die because she sent before she went back and asking for the contact for the woman who does these us for iran said she was sitting there thinking about the next trek so i know that she didn't think i'm going to make a -- i'm going to my death.

another thing it's about the extremes in her personal life as well. spi >> any other questions? >> you've eluted although we haven't gone into so much detail on the high personal cost of the profession. how much was the profession and how much was her and what would that mean in your advice to the female journalists going into the profession? >> the road to four in kurdistan

and male or female is littered with broken marriages. it doesn't make any difference if you're a man or a woman it is difficult to keep a relationship going and that's just how it is. i think there's much more understanding now of the dangers of substance abuse but there it is alcoholism or drug taking or so on. there was one occasion we were in front of an audience to.