T.D. Allman
American author
Died when: 79 years 209 days (954 months)Star Sign: Libra
T.D.Allman (born 1944) is an American author, historian, and journalist. "In 1968, at age twenty-three, T.D.Allman broke his first big story: the CIA's 'secret war,' against the Communists in Laos.
He accomplished this by listening to local people, then trekking over mountains to a clandestine CIA base, Long Cheng.The news in his dispatches spurred congressional investigations and protests in America, and he went on to document the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia.
He later interviewed Yasser Arafat, Helmut Kohl, Boris Yeltsin, and Manuel Antonio Noriega as foreign correspondent for the magazine Vanity Fair.
He has also written two best-selling, prize-winning books on Florida, and what events there reveal about the nature of America.
One of his books on foreign policy added the phrase "Rogue State" to foreign policy discourse.He also was the first to popularize the term "secret war" to describe clandestine U.S. involvements in foreign wars.
Author, broadcaster, and investigative analyst John Pilger on Allman and his approach: “The great American journalist T.D.Allman once defined 'genuinely objective journalism' as that which 'not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right.
Objective journalism is compelling not only today.It stands the test of time.It is validated not only by 'reliable sources' but by the unfolding of history.
It is reporting that which not only seems right the day it is published.It is journalism that ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.”
