Excerpt
from the 1961 Dateline for The George Polk Memorial Award 1960:
The George Polk Memorial
Award 1960
AWARD: Lionel Durand, ¸Newsweek’s
Paris bureau chief, died Jan. 14, 1961, in Paris of a heart attack. It was a
result of his being tear-gassed in Algeria, while covering riots
that had erupted in the Casbah.He’d gone there to interview Moselm leaders.
Among his last stories were “Algeria— You-You-You-You” and “Into the Eye of the Storm.”
“He died quietly in his sleep of a heart attack.” So ended “Epitaph—
A Reporter,” Newsweek’s account of Lionel Durand’s death. Duran, who for two
years was Newsweek’s Paris bureau chief, had lived life to the hilt. His interests
were legion, so were his talents. Counting Picasso among his intimate friends,
he was himself a painter of quality, a nimble guitarist, and fluent in six
languages. He could cover a Khrushchev press conference (as below) one day and bullfight
in Spain the next.
But the big story for Durand was always politics. One of the first to predict
de Gaulle’s return to power, Durand was still covering a part of the de Gaulle
story when he went to Africa to cover the Algerian war. He visited the Casbah
to interview Moslem leaders during one of the riots and was caught in a crossfire
as police tried to quell the disturbance. Though a tear-gas bomb exploded at
his feet he went, coughing and sputtering, half-walking, half-running, to file
his story from a cable office miles away.
He returned to the Paris bureau exhausted, the tear gas having added to
the strain of the previous months. Then, Friday night, January 13, his last
story written and dispatched, Lionel Durand went quietly to sleep for the last
time.