The Overseas Press Club was founded in March 1939, six months before the outbreak of World War II. Yet Europe was already boiling with war news. Having already been handed Sudetenland, on March 15 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s army took over the rest of Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. On March 20 Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded that the Lithuanians hand over a German-speaking piece of their country. The next day Hitler told the Poles to cede to him the city then known as Danzig (now Gdansk) — or else. Their failure to do so was one pretext for the furious assault on Poland in September, 1939.
On April 1 the Spanish Civil War came to an end with the victory of Gen. Francisco Franco — and mass reprisal shootings of the Republican losers began. In Asia, Chiang Kai-shek was still battling the Japanese in a conflict that started in 1931 with Japan’s takeover of Manchuria.
All of this meant that swarms of reporters were pouring in and out of conflict zones. Yet, when they returned to the U.S. they had no place to go to relax and tell each other war stories. Wire service reporter Charlie Ferlin decided to take action. First, he and a couple of buddies covering Europe met at Rocky’s bar in Greenwich Village, where they agreed to send penny postcards to other overseas reporters, inviting them to discuss formation of a new club. On April 2, 1939, nine reporters met at the Algonquin Hotel and formally launched the Overseas Press Club.
They were guests at the famous Round Table, favorite meeting place of some of New York’s best-known writers, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Alexander Woollcott.
Two of the founding members of the OPC were women: Irene Corbally Kuhn and Fay Gillis Wells, who was not only a globe-trotting reporter, but one of the first news broadcasters and an aviatrix.
The founding nine members would expand to 125 within a year, to 2,000 by 1959 and peak at 3,300 in 1961, by which time the club would occupy a large building next to Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. The OPC was a favorite gathering place, eatery, watering hole and jazz venue for every journalist in town, whether or not they had ever applied for a passport.
In 1940 the OPC staged its first annual dinner, with a guest list that included Herbert Hoover — by then an ex-president. In the following decades dinner speakers and guests at the OPC’s sometimes twice-weekly programs would include Presidents Harry Truman and John Kennedy, deposed Russian premier Alexander Kerensky, Fidel Castro, Golda Meir, Jordan’s King Hussein and the Shah of Iran. In more recent times they’ve included such diplomats as Henry Kissinger, Richard Holbrooke and, tonight, U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, Samantha Power, herself once a foreign correspondent in the former Yugoslavia and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her book on genocide, A Problem from Hell.
The OPC’s most important function, of course, is to honor the work of our fellow journalists, who, more than ever, risk their lives to bring us first-hand reports from dangerous places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Congo. In 2013 more than 100 reporters, photographers and other media workers were killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the first two months of 2014 10 more fell in half a dozen countries, including Pakistan, Iraq and Brazil. We honor them tonight by lighting a candle in their name to burn throughout the dinner.
PRESIDENT’S AWARD
Each year, we choose one of our number for a special honor: the President’s Award for a lifetime of achievement in international journalism. I am privileged to present the award to Bob Simon, longtime correspondent for CBS News and for the past decade a prolific producer of fascinating stories for that network’s 60 Minutes. In his 47 years as a reporter, Bob has covered more than 30 overseas conflicts. He has won 25 Emmys, four Peabody awards and five Overseas Press Club awards.
Bob, a native of the Bronx, started his peripatetic overseas career in 1969, when he was assigned to CBS’s London bureau. He covered Biafra’s war for independence and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where he was beaten by a Protestant mob in Belfast. In 1971 he was dispatched to Vietnam, where he won one of his OPC awards for his coverage of a North Vietnamese offensive. He was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975, and won another OPC award for his radio dispatches in the final days of the war.
A CAREER STARTED IN LONDON
Bob’s next assignment was to the Middle East, and that region has been a focus of his career ever since. He covered the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in 1977. Later he would be on the front lines for the first Palestinian intifadah, and he was there when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995. In between, he did some national reporting and election coverage in the U.S. But when a foreign crisis hit—in the Falklands, in Lebanon, in Guatemala and El Salvador—it was often Bob who got tapped to wade into the fray.
No surprise then that when the first Persian Gulf War broke out in 1991, Bob was there with his CBS crew. Like many journalists who covered the conflict, he was frustrated at the severe restrictions imposed on the media by the U.S. military. So on his own Bob crossed into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait from Saudi Arabia He was doing a stand-up report when the Iraqi military captured him and three crew members. They were tortured and starved for more than a month before being released, and nearly died when the prison where they were held was bombed. Simon described the incident as “the most searing experience of my life,” and, after his release, wrote a book about the experience called Forty Days.
Since 1996, Bob has done most of his reporting for 60 Minutes, with a focus on southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. One of his more memorable pieces concerned the so-called Lost Boys, Somali youths who fled the civil war in their country, ending up in camps in northern Kenya. A lucky few hundred were sent to the United States, and Simon has reported on their sometimes difficult new lives in two 60 Minutes segments. So, congratulations to Bob Simon on his President’s Award. No one ever deserved it more.
Congratulations too to the OPC’s own Sonya Fry, who will retire as executive director of the club after tonight’s dinner. Sonya has been Ms. OPC for 20 years, and has kept the club running smoothly through financial crises that could have ended its existence. It sometimes seems that everyone in the world of international journalism knows Sonya, and we will miss her hard work and effervescent charm.