In addition to Vietnam, Lederer has covered the Yom Kippur War in Israel, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the 1991 Gulf War and the conflict in Bosnia. War reporting is an arena that she has thrived in, despite the difficulties and dangers.
As head of the AP’s operations in Saudi Arabia, she broke the story on the start of the first Gulf War. Although she liked getting the story first, this is not her most vivid memory of war reporting. That came when she covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the early 1980s. “It was about six months after the invasion and I was masquerading as a rug buyer. At a checkpoint, an Afghan who hated Americans held a .38 to my temple. Happily, I was in a car with a French female photographer, also masquerading as a rug buyer, and an Indian. They calmed him down eventually but it was dicey for a while.”
For journalists covering conflict for the first time, Lederer advises, “Keep your eyes and ears open. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Try to take good notes from more seasoned reporters who are willing to help you out.” Most importantly, she said, “If you’re debating whether to do something you’ve never done before, don’t do it until you get more experience and have a better idea of what you’re doing.”
It’s also critical that reporters learn as much as they can about the combatants, the history of the country where the conflict is taking place and the history of the conflict itself. “You can’t do a thorough job of reporting unless you understand the roots and history of the conflict,” she said.
Pushing Boundaries
Now the AP’s chief correspondent at the United Nations, Lederer arrived in Vietnam in 1972, the first woman assigned full-time to the wire service’s staff covering the war. Along with a cadre of other women who reported from Vietnam, Lederer pushed the boundaries of what women journalists could do. “My generation was probably the first generation of women who actually believed they could do anything … [Women] going into the workforce and climbing through the male-dominated establishment helped bring about a change, just as women reporters covering hard news and war in what was a very male-dominated newsroom proved that women could actually compete in the big leagues.”
The growth of television as a medium and the concurrent swelling of the feminist movement in the U.S propelled women into war reporting in Vietnam, she said. “By the time of the war in Bosnia, the majority of the press corps in Sarajevo were women. Right now in Iraq, a significant number of women are covering the war, and many of them don’t even think twice about it.”
War Lessons
Being shot at the first time is always memorable, Lederer remarked drily in a recent interview, but her most important memories have to do with the effects of war on civilians. In a chapter she contributed to War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Who Covered Vietnam (Random House, 2002), a book of reminiscences by nine women war correspondents in Vietnam, Lederer described what she and a photographer saw when they headed out to find some of the villages hit by rocket fire.
“As we walked toward the next attack site, we came into a clearing … .The last house was the saddest. A 20-year-old woman had been killed and her body was laid out on a wooden bed, covered with a straw mat, with two candles and sticks of incense burning (near it). A big crowd had gathered outside the house and neighbors, crying and wiping their eyes, walked in to see the body. I looked at the dead woman. She was a few years younger than I. Neighbors said she dreamed of marrying and having a family. I kept thinking to myself that she didn’t deserve to die, and it brought home to me for the first time how cruel and random war can be.”
Commenting on the memory, she said, “Looking back from a lifetime, I learned the value of life in a way I don’t think you do until you come face to face with death on a large scale. I learned what war does to people, often innocent people, and to nations. One of the things I never forget is that, according to United Nation statistics, the vast majority of victims of war are civilians and the vast majority of them are women and children.”
Freedom to Report
War coverage has changed in many ways since Lederer reported from Vietnam, but nothing beats the freedom American reporters had in that war. “The tools journalists have to use today—satellite phones and satellite cameras, for example—have certainly made filing a lot easier. We’ve seen how instant communications work,” she said.
“But, in terms of U.S. military encounters, we have not yet matched Vietnam for access. Reporters and photographers had open access to the battlefield. You could go down to the helicopter base and, if there was a seat empty, you could go to the front and stay for as long or as short a time as you wanted. There was this great freedom to report that I don’t think we’ve seen since.”