Tales of Two Fine Fellows

Foreign correspondent Peter Ross Range's career has taken him many exotic places--Europe Japan and Vietnam, to name a few.

And his personal love of travel has taken him to even more exotic places: while in college, he "hitchhiked" from Germany to India on an overseas trip that included a voyage to Kuwait aboard a Norweigan tanker.

But this semester, Range's career has led him to a slightly less exotic milieu--Harvard's Institute of Politics (IOP), where he is one of six visiting fellows.

Range, who was Time magazine's Saigon bureau chief during the last seven months of the Vietnam War, is currently leading an IOP study group titled "War, Peace and the Press: Journalism and the New World Order." The study group, he hopes, will draw upon his personal experiences to give students a realistic view of the role of the press in time of war.

Range recalls how the Vietnamese would not allow reporters near battles after the American evacuation. This provided him with little close-up exposure to battle. But the battle scenes which he did witness, he says, left a deep impression on him.

"You don't have to see a lot of people blown up," Range says. "One or two is enough to tell you that war is a horrible, horrible thing and that almost anything else is better."

Although Range had already traveled widely, he says, the effects of war on Vietnam came as a shock to him.

"I thought I was very worldly," Range says. "I thought I knew something about poverty. But when I got to Saigon, it was much worse than I had experienced before."

"Gradually I learned to enjoy Vietnam," Range adds. "It's a wonderful, beautiful country with some beautiful old French colonial architecture, wonderful food and wonderful people. But it takes you a while to connect with all that when at first you're hit in the face with all the poverty and with all the smells and with the country falling apart."

Range notes that the immediacy of the television coverage during the Gulf War was an improvement over media coverage from the Vietnam War because it gave people "a sense of the war and its enormity."

But the press coverage of the recent Gulf War was much more heavily controlled by both the Iraqi and American governments, Range notes. "People need to know the consequences of war," he says.

According to Range, governments traditionally use the wartime press as a pawn, to send messages back and forth. But the immediacy of coverage during the Gulf War changed the role of the press somewhat, Range says.

"When CNN made history on the night of January 16 with their continuous live reporting from Baghdad, they were in a certain sense players because the U.S. military could watch CNN and judge instantly the partial success of the operation," Range explains. "That's never happened before."

Accidental Tourist

Range says that he began his career as a foreign correspondent "by accident."

"I was wandering around Europe in 1967," he explains. "I had a pregnant wife, and I suddenly realized I had to make a living."

Range, who had graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in German, was hired by Time magazine as a stringer in Berlin. His career began covering the student uprisings in Berlin in June of 1967.

"I stood only about 20 or 40 feet away from a student named Benno Ohnesorg, who was killed by a policeman," he recalls of his early days as a correspondent.

"I was only a few years older than the students, so naturally I related very strongly to what they were doing," says Range, himself a "veteran" of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty.

Since then, Range has served as White House correspondent for U.S. News and World Report and as senior articles editor for Playboy.

Although Range had been back to Germany since his work there as a reporter, his first return visit to Berlin itself came only a month before the wall fell.

"Nothing had changed in 19 years," Range says. "It was still very scary. There were secret police everywhere."

Range also had the opportunity to return again to Berlin a month or two after the wall was torn down. "I felt very emotional because it's just a great city, but it was a city that broke your heart because of that wall," says Range, who first visited Berlin as a college student only three months after the wall was constructed.

Sharing Experiences

In his study group, Range has been applying his experience with overseas reporting to deflate romantic notions of the allegedly glamorous lives of foreign correspondents.

"My romantic model before I became a journalist was Hemingway in Paris--work a couple of hours in the morning, drinks before lunch, long nap in the afternoon and dinner with lots of friends," says Range.

Although Range says he soon found out that being a foreign correspondent involved more hard work than romantic adventure, its appeal is not completely unfounded.

"You do have a ringside seat to history, and you do have exciting people to talk to," he says.

In addition, Range's career has allowed him to do one of the things he loves best--travel. In addition to working for Time in Berlin and Saigon, Range spent many years freelancing--a job which took him on several trips to Europe and Japan and on one commercial assignment around the world.

"I love foreign cultures. I love foreign languages," says Range, who speaks French and German. "I don't like to travel as a tourist. I like to travel as a journalist because it's your job then to become expert about wherever you are."

Among Range's other passions are spending time with his two sons, playing tennis, reading and cooking. And he is quick to add that he cooks a mean pecan pie