By Lindsey Wray
In 1971, Edith Lederer, an Associated Press reporter based in San Francisco, bought an around-the-world plane ticket, using her saved-up vacation days to visit countries such as India and Thailand. But there was one place on her itinerary that she dared not tell her parents about: Vietnam.
Lederer, now the chief correspondent for the Associated Press at the United Nations, hadn’t seriously considered working abroad until her visit to Saigon. Unfortunately, the AP foreign editor at the time didn’t support this idea.
“He believed that women did not have what it took to cover wars and disasters and be foreign correspondents,” said Lederer. That’s why she was astounded in the summer of 1972 to receive a call from the president of the AP asking if she wanted to go to Vietnam.
“I could not pass up the opportunity to cover the biggest story of the day,” she said.
What began as a lucky break morphed into a career-defining moment for Lederer, the recipient of the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.
“It was the start of a lifelong learning process that still goes on,” Lederer, 65, said of her experience covering the war in Vietnam. She was the first woman assigned full-time to the AP staff reporting the Vietnam War.
Lederer’s nine-month stint in Vietnam was a bit of baptism by fire, but the lessons she learned were invaluable. “Vietnam really proved to me that I could cover these really big breaking stories,” she said. Lederer wrote about covering the Vietnam War in War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Who Covered Vietnam, which was published in 2002.
Lederer’s experiences in Vietnam also laid the groundwork for her future work as a foreign correspondent. Struck by the impact of war on innocent civilians, Lederer said she has always tried to write stories about all people affected by war, not just those in positions of power.
Writing and telling stories is something Lederer has always enjoyed. She grew up on Long Island and was the editor of her high school newspaper and a student newspaper at Cornell University, where she received her B.S. degree in 1963. After graduating from Stanford University in 1964 with an M.A. degree in communications, Lederer landed her first job in journalism: working for Science Service, a Scripps-Howard syndicate in Washington, D.C.
She quit after about a year and used a plane ticket she’d gotten as a graduation gift to leave the U.S. for the first time and travel to Europe for three months. “I fell in love with travel and the world,” she said of the trip. Lederer’s excursion also ignited an urge to travel more, which helped fuel her trip to Vietnam years later. “I still remember coming back from that trip being so exhilarated and not being able to read anything mundane or boring,” she said.
Upon returning, Lederer re-applied to several media outlets from which she’d previously been rejected, including the AP. In March of 1966, she was hired by the AP at a time when there were very few women covering hard news.
“I was lucky to be job hunting in the early years of the women’s liberation movement when there was a greater openness to hiring women,” she said.
Lederer started working in New York, where she covered assignments ranging from student riots at Columbia University to Robert Kennedy’s U.S. Senate campaign. In her more than four decades with the AP, she has worked on every continent except Antarctica covering wars, famines and political upheavals.
Shortly after she left Vietnam in 1973, Lederer went to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, she was assigned to Mexico City, and the following year she was named bureau chief in Peru, becoming the first woman to head a foreign bureau for the AP.
Lederer later moved to a post as chief of Caribbean services based in Puerto Rico. In 1978, she transferred to Hong Kong to help cover China’s move toward a Western-style economy. She also made a rare visit to North Korea and went to Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in December 1979, masquerading as a rug buyer. “They didn’t really expect women to be reporters,” she said, explaining her disguise.
At one point in 1980, however, it didn’t matter who she was pretending to be. On her way to a wildlife preserve in Afghanistan during a break from work, military officials at a checkpoint demanded her passport, holding a gun to Lederer’s head until a supervisor was called.
“That was a pretty harrowing hour,” she recalled, noting that she call still picture the official’s face.
From Asia, Lederer moved to East Africa and then to London in 1982, where she was based as she reported on a wide variety of assignments for more than 16 years. She helped cover the downfall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union. She reported on the conflict in Bosnia and ran the AP operation in Saudi Arabia before and during the first Gulf War. She was the first journalist to file the bulletin announcing the start of that war from a U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia in 1991.
Sometimes, Lederer said, covering conflict was like watching a movie. Though she saw warfare close at hand, she was usually at a safe distance. There were, of course, exceptions. In Northern Ireland in 1988, Lederer was covering a funeral of three members of the Irish Republican Army who had been gunned down a week earlier by British troops when hand grenades began exploding all around her. The culprit was Michael Stone, a supporter of the pro-British Protestant cause in Northern Ireland who killed three people and injured more than 50 at the funeral. Lederer immediately picked up her cell phone and started dictating a story to the AP.
Over the years, Lederer said she has noticed a difference in the way women and men journalists approach stories.
“Women have proven that they can cover big breaking news combat stories,” she said, “but because we live in a world where there is still no gender equality, women have a different perspective of the world than men do, and I think that women bring that perspective to reporting.” This means the ability to look at events with a broader viewpoint, she said, particularly their impact on women, children and minority groups.
Lederer’s own extensive global coverage set her up for a smooth transition to her current post covering the U.N. “One of the things that’s been fascinating about being at the U.N. for 10 years – having worked all over the world – is that I’ve been able to see for the first time how the major issues of the day play out on a global stage,” she said.
Lederer began working as the chief correspondent at the U.N. in 1998. Since then, she has reported on the diplomatic side of conflicts in Darfur, Iraq, Kosovo and Sierra Leone and other major global issues. In the future, Lederer is interested in stepping back to look at and write about some of these issues in an even broader context. And, if possible, she wouldn’t mind rounding out her continent count with an assignment in Antarctica.
Despite Lederer’s far-reaching travels, a long list of awards and her firsts as a woman journalist, she doesn’t necessarily see herself as someone who has forged paths for others. “I’ve never thought of myself as really being a pioneer,” she said, “because there have been women doing the things I’ve done for decades and going back for more than a century.”
But though she’s still sometimes taken aback, she said she’s humbled when younger reporters call her a role model.
“I’m honored to have helped inspire some young women to try and live their dreams as I’ve been able to live mine.”
Lindsey Wray is the IWMF’s communications coordinator.