Arnaud de Borchgrave and his wife, Alexandra, were universally regarded as a “power couple” — not just in Washington, but in international circles as well.
Arnaud, who died in 2015 at age 88, was a whirlwind journalist who knew world leaders including Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and the Shah of Iran — as well as four U.S. presidents.
As the globe-trotting correspondent for Newsweek and later the editor of The Washington Times, he landed exclusive interviews with all of them and even found time to write a bestselling novel, “The Spike,” about KGB disinformation. Ronald Reagan was famously photographed reading the book on Air Force One.
Whether he was on the ground or jumping out of a helicopter, the master journalist was accompanied by his beloved Alexandra, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Sorbonne and herself an author. She was also a prize-winning photographer, and her shots made the covers of Newsweek, Paris Match, and other publications.
On Monday, the de Borchgraves’ papers and photographs were formally donated to Georgetown University in Washington.
For students as well as historians and authors, the words and insight of a couple deeply involved in many major events of the 20th century are available in the university’s Booth Family Center.
The scion of Belgian nobility and a World War II veteran, Arnaud de Borchgrave went to work for United Press International soon after his discharge. He was soon sending dispatches back from the turbulent Indochina before it was split in North and South Vietnam in the mid-1950s.
He reported on the U.S. sending its first wave of advisers to the anti-communist government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1960 and, when the Vietnamese situation heated up into a war with U.S. involvement, de Borchgrave was embedded with the troops and reporting to the world.
Much as C.L. Sulzberger’s diaries from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s in the critically acclaimed “A Long Row of Candles” foresaw World War II and the Cold War, de Borchgrave’s correspondence and dispatches predicted a Middle East that would become a tinderbox that exploded in the late 20th century.
He interviewed the Shah of Iran as he was having to apply increasing force on a people fed up with his reign, and his sessions with Sadat brought to life an Egypt that was expelling its Russian benefactors and finally ending a long blood feud with Israel.
“Once we took a cab from Cairo to Alexandria where Sadat was dedicating a ship [in the late 1970s],” Alexandra de Borchgrave recalled. “When we got to the shipyard, Arnaud told me to climb the ladder up to the dedication ceremony and talk to Sadat.
“When I got there, Sadat greeted me warmly and I said ‘Mr. President, Arnaud definitely needs to interview you.’
“He told me that both of us should come to his house at 3 that day. We did, and Arnaud got what he needed and I photographed it.”
Whether it is Arnaud’s notes and dispatches, the films of his numerous television interviews, or Alexandra’s photographs, the de Borchgrave collection is a welcome addition to Georgetown’s collection of private papers as well as a gift of classic “shoe leather journalism” to history.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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