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Edie Lederer has reported from every continent except Antarctica for the Associated Press for 41 years. She started in New York and San Francisco before being sent to Saigon in 1972 to cover the Vietnam War; she was the first woman AP assigned full-time to the Saigon bureau. In 1975, she was appointed Peru bureau chief and the first woman to head an international AP bureau. Lederer covered the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, went into Afghanistan in December 1979 masquerading as a rug buyer after the Soviet invasion; the 1991 Persian Gulf War; conflicts in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Somalia; and genocide in Rwanda. She is currently the APʼs U.N. bureau chief. Bulletin editor Aimee Rinehart spoke with Lederer recently about her reporting career during breakfast at the Ambassador Grill Millennium Hotel in New York City.
Breaking In to the News Business
When I joined the Associated Press in 1966, there were very very few women doing hard news, even on the New York City desk, which is where I started working.
I went to Cornell as an undergraduate and then to Stanford and got my masters in communications. I had thought of going in to the women’s end of journalism, but the 1960s was the era of the burgeoning civil rights movement, John Kennedy was elected, the Peace Corps was founded. I decided I was much more interested in doing hard news.
When I graduated I wrote a lot of letters, went to a lot of interviews and everybody said I didn’t have experience. I put an ad in Editor & Publisher to see if anybody would hire me, and the magazine made a mistake in the ad: my background is in psychology and they wrote physics, but as a result, I got offered a job by a Scripps-Howard News Service in Washington, even though they knew that I did not have a background in physics.
Getting Overseas
I didn’t get overseas for a while. I stayed in New York. One of the problems was the Associated Press didn’t have any American women foreign correspondents. That was because in order to be a foreign correspondent, you had to work on the foreign desk (now the international desk). The foreign editor refused to have any women on the foreign desk, which basically was an almost insurmountable hurdle.
I got transferred to San Francisco in 1968 and arrived the day Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. It was a very turbulent time. I spent from 1968 to 1972 in San Francisco and Sacramento covering Ronald Reagan. It was a very exciting period: the black power movement, the end of the hippie era, student protests.
In 1971 I had saved up a lot of vacation and I went with one of my friends; we got around the world tickets on Pan Am and went to Saigon. There was a big busy war going on, so you could fly into Saigon. It was a war I had been reading about for years and years and years, and yet when I got there it was so different.
Back in California, I’d still been agitating to go overseas, but as I said, there was a substantial roadblock. Out of the blue, in the summer of 1972, I got a call from the president of the AP, Wes Gallagher, asking if I wanted to go to Vietnam. I wrote my parents a letter and said this is the biggest story of the time and it’s an opportunity of a lifetime for me.
I didn’t really know what I would be covering. In Vietnam, journalists could go anywhere, there was complete freedom. One of the things that my female journalist predecessors who were in Vietnam in the ’60s did was they made sure that women reporters had those same opportunities as men. Nine of us co-authored the book War Torn (www.wartorn.net).
Wes Gallagher told me he really did not want me going out in combat. But, I did some. I went to Cambodia where the war was hot and heavy, twice, for reporting stints. I went to Laos, which was a den of espionage, because it was the one place that you had all of the key players: the Russians, the Americans, the North and South Vietnamese, the Chinese, everybody was there.
Covering the Iraq War
I would have covered the current Iraq War if I had not been posted to the U.N. in New York City. There was so much going on at the U.N. on the diplomatic side that there was no way that I was going to be able to go over. One of the great tragedies is because of the incredibly difficult security situation, American reporters in particular are severely limited from really doing the kind of in-depth reporting that I know that they’d love to be doing.
I know for a lot of them, it’s very very frustrating. Every decision to go out and actually try and do something is basically calculating a risk.
A lot depends on the news organizations you’re working for and what kind of restrictions they have. I haven’t been there myself so I can’t say this from first-hand reporting, but if you’re not embedded, your life revolves around your office which is usually where you’re living. It’s pretty confined and pretty restricting. For a lot of reporters it’s got a lot of built-in frustrations.
An Ever-Curious Reporter
I am and always will be an American but I’d like to think of myself as someone who has really had an incredible opportunity in life to try to understand how nearly 200 countries fit together and I’d like to think that someday, probably not in my life time, that they will learn to live together in peace. And I say this as somebody who’s covered a lot of wars and seen the real human suffering that wars do to people.
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Listen to our conversation 
She shared so many of her experiences as a reporter -- breaking in to "real" reporting, shattering glass ceilings and, seemingly at least to my eyes, all done fearlessly. It's because of her generosity, and the resolute belief that she can do anything she sets her mind to, that I have been given so many options and opportunities in the field of journalism.
I thank Ms. Lederer and other reporters and editors like her -- including power brokers like Wes Gallagher who gave women a chance to report. You've improved the reporting of news and helped to shape the industry for generations to come.