Reading those memories of legendary journalist Christopher Dickey, written through longtime correspondents and The Daily Beast, is to attend a master class in the art of publishing and reporting. We hope that, through his words, Chris’s reminiscence will continue to motivate a new generation of hounds to follow suit, venture and see the wonderful occasions that shape their time on this planet, and inform the rest of us. with fair and superbly told stories.
“I’m you now.”
It’s rare for a journalist to get a call from an editor just to ask how he’s doing. It’s the first call I got from Chris Dickey. In February 2014, Kiev Independence Square was covered in flowers, candles and monuments. People were walking around, mourning the deaths of protesters killed a few days earlier. I’m covering the uprising. Chris asked me if I was okay. Then he said, “Now I’m your editor. Try keeping a diary of small details. Describe the smells. I knew right away that I was in good hands.”
The decade I spent with Newsweek in recent years was a mess of concepts that failed to do, history. Now he had a dream foreign editor. We have worked on projects in 23 countries. Chris edited my copy every week for six and a half years. Every time I wrote “go” in a box or “do good” in a story, my wings grew. I’m sure all my colleagues felt the same way.
Chris made sure he checked me in during the war at the Donbass, made sure he was safe and told me to write first-person accounts. It wasn’t until later that I knew writing was the cure to see the trauma everywhere. He liked to write my homage to the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, talked about his own father’s poetry and asked me about the lyrics of the songs my father had written.
I had the opportunity to spend a few days with Chris in Ukraine, appearing in Kiev, presenting him to the local editors and intellectuals. His stories on this subject in San Salvador and the Middle East were invaluable. I just need to take notes.
Chris taught me to summarize many stories in an undeniable concept and to feel strong by my own understanding of a story: “Say what you mean,” he pleaded with me. There was an environment around Chris that made you need to go back to your computer and write. Dozens of other people now say Chris was a mentor to them. How did you manage to bring back your own difficult stories, write seven brilliant books, edit our copy and raise a wonderful generation of hounds at the same time? Our global is less brilliant without Chris. I hope that over time, and in your memory, we will all be informed to be more patient, kind, attentive, elegant and elegant.
Chris wrote me an email for his last night. It’s in reaction to a launch. He said, “Keep reporting, leave what you know, when you know it.” I’ll do exactly what he said.
Anna Nemtsova is a Moscow-based Daily Beast correspondent. His paintings have also been in The Washington Post, Politico, PRI, Foreign Policy, nbcnews.com, Marie Claire and The Guardian. She is the 2012 Persephone Honey Scholar and the 2015 winner of the prestigious IWMF Courage in Journalism Award.
The first time I met Chris, in a greasy spoon diner about a block away from The Daily Beast’s offices in Chelsea, he told me a story about his time in Iraq. He’d been sent by Newsweek to cover the early days of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and he was onto a major scoop. How was it, he asked, that everyone who turned up to Paul Bremer’s interminable press conferences did so covered in a thick film of dust and sand and grime, no matter how hard they tried to keep their attire clean—everyone, of course, except for Paul Bremer. The leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority was always tricked out in pristine and pressed suits and so surely there must have been a functioning dry cleaner somewhere in occupied Baghdad. Chris investigated and Chris hit paydirt. Bremer, he archly informed me, had been sending his clothes out to be laundered in next-door Jordan, all while touting the virtues of nation-building and democracy-installation at the end of a bayonet in Mesopotamia. Well, it may not have been Pulitzer-worthy stuff, but it was an unmistakable portent of how things would fare in that war, one of many Chris covered over a remarkable 40-year career.
The last time I spoke to Chris (and here I mean how to communicate the outdated way: a verbal exchange over the phone, not a text message or an email), recited the total amount of “A Shropshire Lad”. The best word of reminiscence. I had told him that he was doing a long essay about A.E. Housman, a poet I discovered strangely who captured our time of “social distance” greater than others. Without any other incentive, the distribution lines are now even darker than “blue hills remember” or “When I was twenty-one.” Because of who his father was, Chris naturally grew up immersed in verse and prosa. But it also belonged to a generation and a cup of American journalist, I imagine it as the Murray Kempton of Parisian exile, who discovered the merit in memorization through the center and who can begin an essay on, for example, an Al Qaeda bombing. quoting Eliot or Auden. Here’s another indelible reminiscence of my expensive friend and mentor: the Daily Beast’s foreign affairs editor recorded several poems through Auden at his little-visited workplace in New York. Earth, get a guest of honor: Christopher Dickey rests.
Michael Weiss is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror and The Menace of Unreality: How Russia Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money. He lives in New York.
Chris Dickey’s visits from his home in Paris to the Daily Beast headquarters in New York allowed the newsroom to slow down a bit. First, there was the closet: would you wear an elegantly trimmed suit, with a corner of Hermes silk coming out of your pocket? Or a 100-pocket khaki vest, the favorite genre of war correspondents in the 1980s?
These were the two options, and the one you chose was enviously highlighted by our jeans and hoodies. Chris is the most glamorous and adventurous user who has ever walked among us.
I don’t do our first interactions, however, at one point I let it be known that I dreamed of following in his footsteps, with a foreign correspondent who crossed the global story telling stories, learning languages and covering ancient moments, but how?
At that point, 10 years ago and now, there are few answers to that question. Journalism had a very different box than it had entered four decades earlier as the Washington Post and then Newsweek correspondent. He had adapted smoothly, using blogs, television and all social media platforms to tell stories. But he knew how difficult it was to set foot on him, so he sat gracefully with me, and a young journalist, for hours, in his office, at lunchtime, in an aperitif, to offer recommendations and ideas. He seemed to have all the time in the world for us.
“What does a long lunch look like with Chris Dickey?” A colleague texted me one day. “It’s so prolific. You can write a new song every day and write on your blog, broadcast on TV and write an e-book about your downtime.”
“I know, ” I replied.
“And he knows EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING.”
“He literally everything about everything.”
When I published abroad, I talked to Chris. Regardless of the country, he had already been there and had observed his bloodiest and triumphant moments with his own eyes. On his way to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he told me that he saw then-dictator Mobuto Sese Seko fall into the hands of the armies of long-term dictator Laurent Kabila. He and some other correspondents left their hotel in Kinshasa, chartered a canoe and paddled across the Congo River to the parallel capital, Brazzaville, in the Republic of congo. Naturally, they opened a bottle of champagne for the ride.
When I won a grant to report on the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, Chris told me that when former King Hussein was looking to speak to the press, he was summoning him from Paris on a personal plane. Upon arriving in Amman, he would be taken to have an audience with the ruler of the Hashemite kingdom.
On the way back from an initial mission, he had just left a border crossing when Chris sent a WhatsApp suggestion: “Notice how it smelled, sounded and savored everything. I told him I would, that he had thousands of hidden images as memories. Images, he says, are limited. “A smell, a taste that is literally or intellectually recognizable has an absolutely different effect. I once led to a war zone with Joan Didion in El Salvador…»
He stopped there, obviously appreciating the drama.
“And there was a middle-aged Salvadoran woman who was looking to get home. When Didion wrote about it, he recalled that the woman had left the slight smell of Arpege in the taxi … There, at the breaking point of the war. I can’t tell. But I can’t forget the impression he left me a little when I read it.
He finished the story with a clue: “Read your Savior eBook and dedication.”
I did, and there his name, of course. Chris covered the El Salvador War in the 1980s, helping to spread the lifestyles of CIA-backed death squads that terrorized the country. Even more famous, in his spare time, he took guest Joan Didion on a primary tour.
When I first went to El Salvador, I no longer applied for The Daily Beast, but I was still talking to Chris. He had interviewed and photographed the frank Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed for his human rights crusades and canonized as a saint only about 40 years later. He asked me for a T-shirt with Romero’s face, which abounds.
A few weeks ago, I discovered a strange postcard at a thingefial store in Oregon. The symbol showed a giant Romero puppet raised above a crowd of faithful in a box somewhere in Etats-Unis. I hadn’t spoken to Chris for a year, but I sent him a disjointed note, telling him he was learning the banjo. and despite everything, we had to take a look at the notorious scene from his father’s film Deliverance, which I imagined was an excellent quarantine in Paris, and that he hoped he would re-edit my stories someday soon.
I don’t know if he ever had it, and I wish I could send many more. He would write that his recommendation was for the good fortune of a generation of journalists, that no one else so completely incarnated the ideals of journalism, that the way he lived his life, never mocking glamour and adventure, was inimitable, and that the global would lose part of his color without him.
Nina Strochlic is one from National Geographic. She is a former journalist and researcher for The Daily Beast.
Chris guided me and made me a bigger person. When I started contributing to The Daily Beast in 2015, it was far from excellent. Chris gave me the opportunity to make mistakes, be informed and practice the right thing. It made me feel very vital and also made me a more confident person. I’m honored to have met you. I just can’t, it’s over. It’s very heartbreaking. We were in touch for hours before the unhappy news came up. I didn’t know that the words of thanks he had sent me for an article he had submitted would be the last words I would get from him.
Chris, you meant a lot to me. By giving me the opportunity to tell Africa’s maximum outdoor life stories, it has given Africans the chance to be heard. If you just take a look in northeastern Nigeria, you’d see women and young people in IDP camps who feel safer where they live because you’ve given them the chance to tell their stories. I still don’t forget the day you took the time to make a percentage of the images and tell the story of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls because, as you told me, you were looking to draw more attention to their situation. That was who you were, a great guy who was willing to help you.
Chris, I will miss you and, as you have done for those you loved, he will light a candle and pray for your soul. Rest in peace, my mentor!
Philip Obaji Jr. is the founder of 1 GAME, a defense and crusader organization fighting for the right to education for disadvantaged youth in Nigeria, in northeastern Nigeria, where Boko Haram prohibits Western education.
Much has been said and written about Christopher Dickey’s impressive career as a journalist, his travels around the world, his vigilance and insight, his vision and his spirit. For me, Christopher embodies all that and more.
I met Christopher in 2008 in Kuwait, where we were invited to speak at a convention on “The Influence of Western Media on East-West Relations.” At the time, he had just returned to Amsterdam after five years of living and running in Israel and Palestine and Chris, Newsweek’s foreign publisher. With a shared history in the Middle East, there is an instant connection. We had a lot to talk about and observations to share.
I did not forget one night, despite Kuwait’s strict alcohol laws, when a black van with polarized glass stopped and blocked our way to the place where we, the speakers, were about to leave. After some confusion, the idea of a kidnapping crossed my brain, became transparent that it was an invitation to be taken to an unknown place, where alcohol would do it generously.
When I was pregnant, I turned down and, instead of leaving me alone, in solidarity, Chris stayed with me. We ended up talking all night. Constantly fascinated, he would pay attention to his stories from that moment on. This would become the advent of a friendship-and-painting relationship that would be strengthened year after year.
Shortly after we were taken home, Chris asked me if I was interested in writing for Newsweek. At first, temporarily, I began to write under his careful and careful direction. Slowly but surely, Christopher has a formative presence in my paintings and in my life. Yours has one of the “voices” that influence the “window” through which you look at the world.
With each of the articles I wrote, and with the criticisms I formed, it has become a more internal voice that scrutinized me, making me look at the subjects from more angles, varied perspectives, emphasizing the weak problems, until ” I perceive well. It’s as if your voice is added to the neural path formula that compares the key problems to avoid or where to move forward.
Regularly, whenever there was a wish or a wish, he would simply touch the base, meet, send a letter, talk on the phone or SMS, and Christopher was there, answering the call, interested, curious, present. It would be a safety net.
Perhaps it was the kind of security he lacked in his childhood, which led him, unwaveringly, to become a pillar for others. I felt lucky to be one of the souls in his orbit.
In 2011, we interviewed Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders for Newsweek. The search for a year, to our surprise, yielded results; He agreed to contact us. It was at a time when white-haired politicians were doing incredibly well in the polls. He was a tough man. He hadn’t spoken to any Dutch press for more than a year, so some had an expected effect. In the exercise to The Hague, we discussed the strategy. Chris said we shouldn’t attack him in his views, because that would be exactly what he expected and he’d have his answers ready. There was nothing to gain. However, if we had a friendly conversation, I might not be prepared.
Wilders’ secretary gave us 15 minutes to get in the way. But when it came when our time was up, he overlooked Wilders and the verbal exchange continued. Half an hour later, Wilders, with a little irritation, sent her out of the room until, 50 minutes later, Christopher ended the interview by saying “we had to catch a train.”
Wilders’ story was a success, discussed in all major Dutch media. Koos Breukel, the photographer who took the picture of the canopy, sent us a small memory of the day, to “hang on the Christmas tree”. “Hah” Chris wrote, “You can see we were looking not to be too close to him!”
Privately, our friendship is growing, too. My daughter Nuri was born the year Christopher and I met and she has temporarily become an additional granddaughter, at least because of her experience. Fundamental family for Christopher. He adored his wife Carol and mother Madeleine, his much younger sister Bronwen, his son James and his wife, as well as their children. Everyone was close to her center and she and Carol effortlessly made my daughter feel like part of the group.
Just as easily as I had taken under his wings in Newsweek, he took me when he notified Newsweek-The Daily Beast and when he chose The Daily Beast.
Over the years, a trail of terror passed through me when I imagined a world without Christopher. He worked too hard, he rarely took a hundred steps, never stopped. His impulse was a force of nature not to stop, however, I wondered if his body could be kept quick with his curious mind.
Imagining life without him meant looking at a life considerably dulled down, it was not a trail of thought I wanted to linger on.
Death to me personally had never been as close as in the winter of 2014, when I contracted pneumonia. Chris, of course, was conscious and remained in close contact. When I started healing, he wrote to me about when his lungs caught fire. “I had pneumonia at Christmas 2003 and I never experienced anything like this. The fact that I’m on vacation in Dubai with my son hasn’t taken any steps forward. And that same winter, a young woman I knew had pneumonia and it plummeted. a comma, which triggered a series of horrific occasions recorded in Joan Didion’s two books, Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. The first one, along the way, you deserve to read it. This is one of the most beautiful and realistic death trials I know.
“The adjustments of life quickly, the adjustments of life instantly,” Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thought, “they invite you to dinner and life as you know it ends. Since Chris’ death, life as I know her is over.”
I put those words in shape in Calabria, in southern Italy, where the sky is intensely blue, the earth is dry, but abundant, and the waters are vast and deep. I take a look to combat Christopher’s sudden and absolute absence from this world. It is a forced and direct consciousness that will inevitably have to be imposed soon. But I don’t need to know yet. The sky of Calabria is a deep blue. Goodbye, my dear friend.
Nadette De Visser, from Jeruzalem / Quds, writes from Amsterdam on problems of culture and conflict.
Last Wednesday morning, I got a notification on Instagram: “Chris Dickey liked your picture.” The veteran journalist had given a symbol to a photo he had taken on a beach in La Coruña, northwest of Spain. Then I remembered I owed you an email. But I never controlled sending it. A few hours later, the sad news of his sudden death came from his home in Paris.
Every piece I did with Chris was a master’s degree in journalism. When jihadist risk hit Europe, Chris contacted us all in combination in long email chains because he was looking for the most productive data possible. He would retire to translate my texts faithfully. He advanced my articles. Even when my ideological technique didn’t fit with yours, I was rigorously respectful in translation and subtly funny when I needed to reorient some of my silly thoughts.
Two weeks ago, I told him that the University of Barcelona had detected that coronavirus that was already circulating in the city’s water more than a year ago. I introduced myself to write an article about it for The Daily Beast. He said he didn’t consider it a story to them at the time. However, he added: “But I’m interested in taking a look at the study, sending me a link.” He’s a journalist Christopher Dickey. Although he was not going to publish the story, he sought to know the source firsthand.
I admired everything about Chris. From his columns in The Daily Beast to his Instagram feed, where he also proved to be the perfect photographer with a specific sensibility to capture the daily soul of cities like Paris and New York. His rigorous and entertaining style, discreetly ironic, and his way of directing and riding with character and freedom, have allowed the Beast to have those years one of the most productive foreign sections in the world. The not unusual note in all his activities was love. He liked journalism: telling someone something, learning it, touching it, feeling it, then writing it or discussing it as a TELEVISION expert, on MSNBC, CNN or France 24.
He put that same hobby in the reprinting of his father’s twilight poems, the well-known James Dickey. When I was given a copy of Death and Daylight, with a glorious preface to Chris, I understood his sensibility better, he went from father to son: “Of one total thing. Show me the sea, / Second son, for the only time: the only time. All. True God, roll. Wheel.”
“James Dickey composed immense, charming and impressive images,” I wrote at the time in Diario Las Americas, “that shake the soul, the imagination and awaken us from the boredom of summer, on the afternoons of August, to perceive the living in our lives.” I now realize that you can feel the same when you look at the paintings of Chris, who, in a postside gesture to his father’s poems, died on July 16, the day of a sailor, when the world Catholic celebrates the patron saint of the sea, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Shortly after his death, Twitter was flooded with lovely messages. Everyone pointed out Chris’ kindness. This isn’t a cliché. Essentially a great man. One of the few people who can make anyone who come into contact with him an older person. Journalist Tessa Miller told an anecdote that defines it well. In 2015, when she became ill and entered the hospital, she won weekly photographs in her candle mail that Chris lit for her in churches around the world, a total of 37 candles!
I am convinced that the candles of these 37 churches will now eliminate darkness from their path to eternity.
Itxu Daaz is a Spanish journalist, satirist political writer and nine books on topics as varied as politics, music and smart devices. He is a contributor to The Daily Beast, The American Spectator, The Daily Caller, National Review, The American Conservative, The Federalist and Diario Las Americas in the United States, and a columnist for several Spanish magazines and newspapers. He has also been an advisor to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports in Spain. Translated through Joel Dalmau.
They took me to Chris in December 2013. At the time, I had no idea that we would end up publishing many texts on China, Hong Kong and other parts of Asia over the next six and a half years.
Chris has controlled bringing motivating power to what can infrequently be quite a dark job. He sought to see the story as widespread as he could; and if I had to look at it from another time zone, then I would do my best to listen to the other people who were there. The smell of a position or event, Chris told me more than once, makes other people not to deeply forget it. And only the other people who were there can offer that description.
I will meet the marginals that Chris and I share when we work on texts: anecdotes about dictators and statesmen, observations on art, lectures on which he would summarize in a few words and still gives me a lot to think about. All of this has made the sad conditions a little less sad. Handy, even.
Chris fascinated by how the word “give me freedom or give me death” was used in 1989 in the Tiananmen protests in Beijing, and now in Hong Kong, giving words renewed meaning more than two centuries after being uttered in 1775 in Virginia. One of the last things I did for him to order a calligraphic interpretation of the date in Chinese. I controlled to send the virtual record to Chris a week before he died, and I think he enjoyed it. But the brush piece now rests on my shelf, frameless, its fate lost.
Brendon Hong is the pseudonym of a longtime collaborator of The Daily Beast in Hong Kong.
I enjoyed running with Chris on stories, adding the week of his death (which is still so crazy), because not only did I know his rhythm, but he knew and had noticed the world. The rhythm of it. You trusted him and his correspondents trusted him. Type Chris and meticulous, beneficiary for all editors and in particular young editors, a mentor for so many people. He sought help putting stories on the page. He sought to highlight the writers and provide the unrest and stories that fascinated him, and to him. He was an editor who was also a writer, and enjoyed and appreciated intelligent writing, therefore lucky if he can write for him.
Chris was also one of the best hounds I’ve ever met, the archetype of the foreign correspondent. The ties were tight, the shirts flawless, the ties perfectly knotted. After seeing you, you imagined Chris going to an elegant restaurant or personal club to get the last plate of a spy or diplomat. I felt a general scratch when I was in the office. He was brilliant, funny, dry and authoritarian. It was a constant wonder to me that Chris wasn’t British because he seemed so much “British” than I was.
Chris also knew the importance, the ethical importance, of what the stories conveyed to the reader. He knew how valuable and fragile the world was, so he was so disgusted by despots and dictators (and also liked to write about them). I’d noticed the war and horrible things. And, as his Instagram showed, he saw a good appearance everywhere. I think it’s important: as ugly as the global can be, and as ugly as many stories he had to cover and edit from others, he appreciated everything that made the world sing: a charming construction on the facade of a fast food restaurant. , lives and individual moments captured in the streets, charming and unforeseen ephemeral moments.
I edited Chris’s Play Daily Beast 2018, written after the death of actor Burt Reynolds, on the set of Reynolds’ 1972 film Deliverance, founded on his father James Dickey’s 1970 novel. The film has fascinated me, and Chris had already written a memoir about his complex relationship with his father with a name that focused it (Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son, 1998). This is this piece from 2018; his sense of detail and sensitivity, his revelations and observations are to me one hundred percent Chris.
Tim Teeman is an award-winning editor and editor at the Daily Beast and in In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Teacher. Prior to joining The Daily Beast, Tim was an American correspondent for the Times of London. Tim has won prestigious awards for his paintings with the Los Angeles Press Club, New York Press Club and the LGBTQ Journalists Association (NLGJA).
I met Christopher Dickey practically in 2016. I lived in Berlin and Chris entrusted me with some of my first journalism duties, to report on Germany for The Daily Beast. By next year, he would run and quote his emails all the time, telling my roommates that “I should leave him as soon as possible,” that “the lawyer does it with his fine comb” and that it was essential “keep digging.” I was so excited. Being an independent correspondent can be precarious and stressful, however, Chris has laughed at each and every task so he doesn’t have to give them up. He added very special things to a copy during the review. Reading his comments on a draft occasionally led me to believe that he was smiling at himself while writing a devastating retreat, either from a protagonist or from a mistake on my part. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to be informed of him and so unhappy that I could never meet him in a genuine life.
Josephine Huetlin is an independent correspondent in Berlin.
Chris was an aspiring collector of skill. No wannabe or journalist was too humble to give him his time, to give them a chance.
This is how I was under the impression that it was a new logo, damaged in Cairo, Egypt, around 1992. I had a minimum of writing to delight in a DC newsletter, and only enough Arabic to pass. It gave me the opportunity to deposit a copy in Newsweek, which he perfected in a brilliant prosa that weaved from several foreign firms.
And he gave me what I as my first official Newsweek/Washington Post mission, to consulting firm Lally Weymouth around Cairo for a few days of conversations, before Chris arrived from Paris for Mubarak’s key interview. And… I screwed up.
He had arranged the interviews, but still did not perceive that he had to protect an air-conditioned car and a professional driver, worthy of the prestige of a wonderful news figure like the inimitable Lally Weymouth. Instead, I put Lally, in her Chanel suit with Prada or similar heels, in an air-conditioned and battered Cairo taxi in the middle of Egypt’s meteoric summer.
She used it gracefully, even when I pulled her out of the cab and crossed a busy two-lane road and climbed the Department of Foreign Affairs’ steep front slope in her immaculate suit and heels worthy of her next maintenance. with the foreign minister.
I shared my mistake with Chris; I kindly joked about being too “REI” for my own good, and from Paris he picked up the phone and called someone who knew someone (because he knew someone in almost every single country he can name), and he located an air-conditioned limousine in Cairo. Gently and gently softened everything, saving his apprentice’s fledgling career as a foreign correspondent.
The clips he helped me collect would help identify real fides that helped build a lifelong career that spans foreign policy. When I reprinted after several years with CBS News, Chris once again returned to my editor at the Daily Beast, perfecting and reconditioning my stories in stories that jumped off the page, while setting an example for all of us by writing his own wealth. reported articles Arrange passionate dispatches.
Thankful forever. Hey, Chris. We’re coming to you.
Kimberly Dozier is a TIME magazine contributor and CNN global affairs analyst. She has conflicts in the Middle East and Europe, and a national security policy in Washington, D.C., since 1992, first as an award-winning correspondent for CBS News and then as an AP intelligence editor.
“If the world’s largest article is published and deposited in the forest, it is not a wonderful article. For anything to be valued, it will have to be read: the interaction between the reader and him is the obligatory alchemy for magic. It is important ; you want what you write to be read by someone.
What is a smart story? Don’t ask yourself, “Can I write this?” Ask yourself, “Would IArray need to read this?” If that’s the first thing that would happen on a crowded homepage, that’s the story we need. Christopher Dickey, pontifying about writing in a Parisian café in 2019
When we started using Google Docs in the Daily Beast, I saw Chris edit our story with concern and admiration. You may only see your invisible hand moving words, scratching sentences, moving paragraphs, adding comments, and rarely things didn’t get radically ahead in the process. Sometimes the settings were so sophisticated that I would never have seen them if I hadn’t seen them happen.
I know I’ll be chased by Chris, but in a smart way. I’m going to have his voice in my head. There are other people in your life who are like this, they never actually die; They’re gone.
I hear the voice of my most productive friend Michiel Brandt, like Jiminy Cricket, as I am on the verge of a dark moral decision. I hear Detective Chiaki Sekiguchi’s voice when I press for an answer or when I think about moving away from anything that’s too hard to deal with. And I realize that for the rest of my life, when I write, whether for The Daily Beast or some other book, I hear Christopher Dickey’s clean, sound voice, asking me, “What do you mean here?”
When I took my daughter to France for her 17th birthday, we had lunch with Chris and, of course, we drank wine. The interaction and jokes between them were very funny, especially since Chris treated her like an adult. And she liked it. Last year, I also took my son to New York and had brunch with the legendary editor Chris and The Daily Beast, Lauren Hardie. Chris talked to everyone as equals and listened. This has encouraged us to accept truth and respect, even among teenagers. And Ray, who was 15, but was already taller than me, said after we left, “It’s really great.” De Ray, there are probably no major words of praise.
I once spent six hours drinking and talking to Chris at a small bistro near his space and I felt like it had only been an hour. He told stories as well as he wrote. Few people do not forget it, however, Chris was one of the few hounds in the United States who warned the world that intelligence about the Iraq war had been cooked and that the total effort would be a homeless man. They didn’t make a movie like Shock and Awe about Chris, but I was surprised and inspired to read his canopy for Newsweek. If the world had listened, we could have prevented thousands of deaths and a trillion dollars of waste.
I never had a mentor as an English journalist. I spent the first 12 years and a part of my life writing in Japanese for a Japanese newspaper. I had the right teachers and I still see my editor at the time, who still talks to me like he’s a well-meaning amateur who knows how to write but deserves to bring him a cup of coffee when he comes back from the canteen. It took me a while to get used to writing on The Daily Beast. Chris was very patient, once he wrote to me: “Writing in two other languages, especially in other IS languages, is unsettling to say the least. And it’s not just the language. The taste of journalism is very different. But you’ve done a wonderful job and there’s a lot of appetite for news about your appearance of the world. Your story was in the five most sensitive places yesterday. Kindly, Chris.
Chris understood the team combinations and the importance of camaraderie in a sophisticated way that other people wouldn’t mind. For almost five years, my top productive friend Mari Yamamoto and I wrote in combination for The Daily Beast. Infrequently we joke in the still very macho and xenophobic society that is Japan, that the two, a Japanese and a Gaijin, accumulate to fit a Japanese. In complex stories, two heads are occasionally larger than one. The fact is, it’s not an equivalent task. Sometimes, Mari makes the most of the paintings and I am just for the walk and vice versa. The fact is, Chris understood this and would adjust the signature accordingly. Sometimes he’d even come back to us. Maybe he recognizes our styles as fingerprints. “Tell Mari, this paragraph is hard and hard.”
It’s a little thing. The only other people in the world who realize that are Mari and I, but Chris understood that, in a society, giving credits where the credits are due means a lot.
Chris enjoyed France and I also love the country. Since 2016, I have published 3 e-books. And one of the joys of touring e-books or attending e-book festivals in France was spending time with Chris. Like any intelligent Japanese traveler, he would bring a souvenir and as Chris enjoyed alcohol, he regularly japanese whiskey. Before The costs of Suntory Hibiki skyrocketed and when they were still promoting 17-year-old mini bottles of Hibiki at low cost (I killed this market, sorry), I brought you a full bottle. I brabably enjoyed it. In turn, he tried to teach me to appreciate intelligent wine, without success. I brought plum wine for Mrs. Dickey; told me she liked it. I hope she did.
I have an incredibly smart bottle of whiskey I was going to bring to France for Chris this year. I don’t know what to do with it, however, Chris would really argue that the whiskey was meant to be and not tacit, and more shared with someone else. If I can ever leave Japan, I’ll drag him into the Daily Beast offices and toast the world’s most productive publisher ever.
Chris was never too critical, but he rarely praised then, when he once replied: “Brilliant piece, Jake. I’m still about 30 minutes from my PC, but I’m not going to make any significant adjustments and I don’t have any questions.” This has been a great validation.
Jake Adelstein has been a research journalist in Japan since 1993 and works as an editor and representative in Japan and the United States. He is also an advisor to NPO Polaris Project Japan, which fights human trafficking and the exploitation of women and young people in the sex trade. He is the vice president of Tokyo: an American reporter on the police coup in Japan and The Last Yakuza: A Life In The Japanese Underworld.
I was surprised and saddened to be informed of Chris’ sudden death. My center goes to his wife and circle of relatives and the whole circle of Beast’s relatives. He was by far the most productive editor I worked with, for the old school in the most productive sense of the word: elegant, literary, incredibly expert but confident enough to let his writers write. His enthusiasm for the global and why these stories are vital are reflected in each and every note and in each and every edition. I only met him once in person, on a rainy summer day at a random brewery on the Upper East Side. Over the course of a drink, he told me about his time covering what he liked to call the Holy Land. My last piece for him was a deep dive into the story of an Israeli gangster, Palestinian security forces and the strange case of a stolen horse. I gave him a long speech explaining the big blows, because who else Dickey can just “understand, ” you know? His answer in one line: “I love it. Can you leave her in the morning? May your memory be a blessing.
Neri Zilber is an Eastern policy reporter and deputy member of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy.
No editor I’ve worked with has done more than Chris to become a journalist and writer.
Although we never met in person, he was there for me for six years, in a position to jump on Skype or WhatsApp to the paintings of a story or check my safety. He taught me how to tell stories differently, to make strangers feel familiar, to make occasions remote so that readers can relate and captivate them, and to show me how to use color to demonstrate nuance in the news.
Chris has noticed me through wars, revolutions and repression across the Middle East, becoming a great journalist every step of the way.
He took me for the first time after I told him coldly about the student protests opposed to the coup while living in Cairo in 2014. From there, either in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon or anywhere else, Chris there for me.
He was patient and dedicated, open to a new angle or a new concept when training me to exploit the stories of American readers.
“There’s a genuine reporter there, Jesse, and we’re going to take it away from you,” Chris told me to call the Gaza War in 2014 when we were going to and we were coming to a setup. The line was cut twice when Israeli airstrikes shook my apartment in Gaza City, however, Chris kept reminding me until we finished the discussion, generating what turned out to be one of the most vital stories we did in the war.
From watching me when I was alone and under bombardment to dark and funny discussions desperate for global occasions and looking for a silver turn, Chris was a true mentor and friend. Above all, it helped me locate my voice as a journalist and I thank you for never s searching to get the genuine journalist out of me.
Chris, whether he’s a legend and a type editor who raised his reporters, I’m going to miss him so much.
Jesse Rosenfeld has been a Canadian journalist in the Middle East since 2007. His paintings have been published with The Nation, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Le Monde Diplomatique, Toronto Star and National among others.
Chris cared deeply. He knew the limits they can face. He was just like, “Are you okay?” even if it’s not a story. I just checked in. An unforgettable quality was his sense of “delay”. Chris redefined it. In fact, there were none, though there might have been an explanation for why to rush. Chris has moved away from the term by politely saying “how are you doing?” There are countless attributes that few people can have, like Chris, that have given the trust … and simply the joy of writing. For Carol and her family, you shared Chris with us through all hours, day and night, we called Chris wherever we were.
Ingrid Arnesen has covered major political and humanitarian crises around the world for CBS News, ABC News and CNN, the wars in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. She won the Columbia-Alfred I.Dupont Gold Award and the Edward Murrow Award for her Haitian policy in 1994.
For decades in this business, I can count on less than ten hands than the number of very smart publishers I’ve had. Chris was definitely the best. Creative, open-minded, behind you, brought things up when he said he would, he knew what he was looking for and what he didn’t want. I asked the right questions and accepted the answers. A real rarity. He is also a talented editor and thinker, as few publishers are. It has been an honor to have a couple of lines with him from the first deposit for him before the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in February 2018. The last time I wrote for him a week ago, I don’t forget what, just that he asked some questions, he gave some clues about what might work, made me make another piece of the others, as he insisted. Demanding, gifted, on your side. Can we communicate better about an editor?
Donald Kirk is a journalist and several books on Asian affairs, and adds Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine and Okinawa and Jeju: Bases of Discontent.
It’s rare in life that we meet our heroes. In fact, it is said that it is better not to know them at all. Lesever his legends turn out to be inferior to the truth. But that wasn’t the case with Chris Dickey.
For years before we met, I studied Chris’ notorious exploits as a war correspondent in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua. His paintings, especially with the Contras, which remains the most productive e-book I know of its kind, served as inspiration and exhortation while covering part of the same land I had traveled in Latin America. So I felt very fortunate to meet him in 2015 and very revered to enroll in a World Desk that included so many talented and intrepid journalists. For his part, Chris has more than a good reputation in his legend.
As for his great dexterity, his generosity as a mentor, I can only echo the moving tributes accumulated here. Chris actually had a poet’s ear for language. And a base of probably endless wisdom, worthy of the Renaissance type he was. Blessed also with compassion at the height of his insight. Always check your presence on the ground. Always involved in your safety. Always ask the right questions to “advance the narrative,” as he would say. His final grade came here just a few hours before his death, and he was so full of editorial wisdom.
What began about five years ago as a correspondence of paintings still became a friendship. I felt a wonderful privilege to hear the stories of your epic travels. Since his formative years with his illustrious father, James, whose poetry and fiction I have also admired for a long time. And his sensible reflections on art, history and politics.
A few weeks ago, in a verbal exchange about the ongoing struggle opposed to repression and tyranny in many parts of the world, Chris wrote all that I would like to share. A quote that turns out to eliminate the darkness of a sharp philosophy through years of fieldwork:
“I think it is very unlikely that someone will spend much time in countries where there are large disparities between excessive poverty and blatant opulence without feeling known to those who fight for justice.” – Chris Dickey
Good luck, Master. Long and long, we’re going to miss you.
Jeremy Kryt is a correspondent for The Daily Beast and his paintings have also made the impression in Sierra Magazine, The Huffington Post, In These Times and Earth Island Journal, among others. He graduated from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and Indiana University.
As the editor of World News for The Daily Beast, Chris conveyed his incalculable wisdom as a journalist and his unusual sense as a writer. As an editor, he gave us his patience. He gave us his time.
That’s why this copy is your editor, and this correspondent is your hero.
He once told me, convincing me to pass after a war zone, that no story is worth dying for. It was, of course, ironic because Chris spent most of his career covering war zones long after moving to Paris in 1990.
Chris has helped many of us tell our stories. And then he corrected our grammar. For the rest of my life, I will reread the editorial consultant I would send with a little frustration to all his writers every few months as a great reminder.
Of his writers, Chris demanded anger and elegance: scholarship and urgency. You had to succeed in that indescribable thing in you. And finally, when this story was written. When all your questions were answered. Chris could even say “well done.”
Then he asked for a definitive rewrite, in time to record the morning.
The last time I saw Chris Dickey, the last time I saw him, on a platform across the tracks from the Paris metro. Me in town and we meet for lunch. I told Chris about a novel I wrote and how I stayed.
His eyes lit up and he said, “There’s a position you want to see.”
Chris took me to this difficult-to-understand museum called the Museum of Romantic Life. In fact, this position hooked the points. He helped me get where I needed to go.
Chris spent much of his free time taking Paris, wandering through its streets and locating photographs that no one else could. Many of these photographs can be discovered @csdickey.
It comforts me that a man who has spent much of his life covering a crash has discovered such catharsis collecting the gentleness of this ancient city.
As we walk out of the museum, we walked through the Moulin Rouge. Ignoring the traps of his many clichés, Chris pointed to the subway plan. He explained that we would move in opposite directions.
“I have an idea, ” said Chris in his own way. “Through the tracks, I’ll take a picture of you and one of me.”
The pictures didn’t go so well, especially mine. But now it occurs to us that each of us is waiting for an exercise that takes us in two other directions.
Will Cathcart is a journalist and editor in Tbilisi, Georgia, covering geopolitics and culture for The Daily Beast, CNN, Foreign Policy and others. He is a former media adviser to the president of Georgia.