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With the savvy of the foreign correspondent she once was, Samantha Power sized up the 430 people who gathered April 24 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan for the Overseas Press Club’s 75th Anniversary Awards Dinner and declared them “award winners and icons, living legends and legendary curmudgeons, truth tellers, and trouble makers, one and all.”

Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the keynote speaker (text of speech), joined the winners and icons who spoke that night of murdered, jailed, tortured or injured colleagues. “I, and my administration colleagues, are aware every minute of every day of how dangerous the world can be, and particularly for those like you who are trying every day to expose injustice,” she said.

Earlier, Kate O’Brian, president of Al Jazeera America and Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of The Associated Press, lit a candle in memory of journalists who died in the line of duty in 2013 and in honor of those injured, missing and abducted.

Power covered the Balkan conflict as a freelancer from 1993 to 1996 for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, The New Republic and others. She won a Pulitzer for a book that followed, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Today, she said, she had new responsibilities, including “to be taken to task by you, my former colleagues.”

Power addressed a question that has been circulating. “The question is: ‘What would the journalist Samantha Power say to the diplomat Samantha Power about country X?’ My answer is: it turns out the old and the new Samantha hang out together quite a lot; we talk about current events. Most of the time we don’t mind one another’s company. And if ever the old Samantha Power gets shy about complaining about something the new Samantha Power is doing or not doing, I can assure you that one of you will be there to pick up the slack.”

Bob Simon was among the icons present. A video of highlights from Simon’s career at CBS News made clear why OPC President Michael Serrill chose the veteran correspondent for the President’s Award. Simon, who has covered virtually every major foreign story in the last three decades, said the idea of a lifetime achievement award was a little frightening. Then, he went on to talk of the truly fearsome: firefights, bombings, protests and 40 days in an Iraqi prison.

“War is an intense experience and it changes you,” Simon said. He said he wasn’t sure if covering wars makes correspondents crazy or if “you are bonkers already.” It is humor, he said, “more than anything that keeps you sane.”

Simon showed that humor in accepting the award but he also had some harsh words for the profession. He said the news media should have done a better job investigating allegations that Iraq processed weapons of mass destruction before President George W. Bush ordered invasion. “Iraq was the stupidest war in American history,” he said.

The night was the highlight of the club’s jubilee year. Even the menu was special; chefs prepared modern adaptations of the oxtail soup, curried chicken and spumoni offered at the first OPC dinner in 1940. Dateline, the awards dinner magazine, presented the club’s history and the role of its members in international journalism over the past eight decades through images and essays contributed by correspondents and photographers associated with the club. Twenty-six blocks south of the banquet room overlooking Central Park, the club’s official color of blue illuminated the top of Empire State Building.

The dinner also marked the retirement of Sonya K. Fry after serving as 20 years as OPC executive director. She received a standing ovation from a crowd that included every president or a family representative of every OPC leader she worked with.

For the first time, one reporter received two OPC awards for a single story. Rakmini Callimachi earned both the Hal Boyle and Bob Considine awards for her work as AP’s West Africa bureau chief. Callimachi made OPC history by getting to Timbuktu days after French forces drove invading Islamists out of the remote Mali city. Under a pile of trash, she found an unprecedented trove of internal al-Qaeda documents that allowed her to detail how the terror group operates much like a multinational corporation, with expense reports, salary spreadsheets, public relation strategy and the equivalent of a human resources division. Callimachi joined The New York Times in March.

Tyler Hicks of The New York Times won the 2013 Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for his enterprise and courage covering the attack last September on the Westgate mall in Nairobi. Using a word repeated on center stage throughout the night, Hicks said it was “humbling” to have his name on a list with Capa legends that include his friend Chris Hondros, who was killed two years ago in a mortar attack in Libya. Hicks won a Pulitzer for the same work, which OPC judges described this way: “Every frame tells the story of a terrifying and dangerous situation.”

Winning feels good because it “strokes our inner child,” said Cam Simpson of Bloomberg News, winner of the Joe and Laurie Dine Award, but it also gives the incentive “to write another story or take another picture.” Simpson won for a series showing the grim life of workers who make Apple iPhones.

For his third time accepting the Thomas Nast Award for cartoons on international affairs, Kevin Kallaugher, the political cartoonist known as KAL, showed examples of his work as he gave thanks to the faces, policies and fumbles of world leaders that have kept him employed for decades at The Economist and The Baltimore Sun. The images began with a crayon sketch of Abraham Lincoln he made as a 6-year-old.

Although Reuters has won for photos in the past, the Malcolm Forbes Award was its first for reporting. A team headed by Steve Stecklow, detailed how Iran’s top religious cleric, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei amassed and controls a financial empire worth about $95 billion. Reuters pursued the story even though it was warned by sources within Iran that its investigation might derail attempts to reopen its Tehran bureau. Stecklow said the team was unable to do any on-the-ground reporting.

In the 1990s, Kerry Dolan was editor of OPC’s Bulletin but on this night she was a winner. Dolan, now a Forbes editor tracking the world’s wealthiest people, received the Morton Frank Award for revealing that while Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is one of the richest men in the world, he exaggerates his worth by several billion dollars in an effort to rank higher on Forbes’ list of global billionaires.

“What’s going on in the rest of the world matters,” said Charlie D’Agata, a CBS correspondent, in describing a message of the awards and the OPC. D’Agata led a team that won the David Kaplan Award for reporting from Tahrir Square in Cairo during a bloody crackdown by Egypt’s military regime.

OPC members Ric Esther Bienstock and Simcha Jacobovici were part of a documentary team from Associated Producers Ltd. for HBO Documentary Films that won the Edward R. Murrow Award for “Tales from the Organ Trade.” Bienstock and Jacobovici were also on a team that won the award in 2006.

Robert Nickelsburg, an OPC Board member, won the Olivier Rebbot Award for Afghanistan: A Distant War, a book that collects 150 of his color photographs spanning 25 years from before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan through the shrinking U.S. presence. Nickelsburg also served as photo editor for Dateline.

William J. Holstein, president of the OPC Foundation, once again guided the dinner to success in his role as dinner chair, making sure the room was filled to capacity. Robert Friedman of Bloomberg News served as head judge for the 22 award categories that garnered a total of 449 entries. Charles P. Wallace, an OPC Board member, served as editor of Dateline, which was designed by Nancy Novick. OPC intern Mariam Haris assisted Nickelsberg by researching photos for Dateline.

Lenovo sponsored the reception before the dinner and afterwards, the company presented winners with a Lenovo Yoga Tablet, which can be used as a laptop or a tablet. Daimler sponsored the Meet-the-Winners After Party. Lufthansa is the official airline of the awards.

Journalists are storytellers and a wondrous part of the OPC’s annual dinner is to hear the stories behind the stories. David Muir, weekend anchor of ABC News, kept the evening flowing in his role as awards presenter.