Christopher Dickey, Longtime Foreign Correspondent, Dies at 68

Brian Williams, in an on-air tribute on MSNBC, said Mr. Dickey, who regularly appeared on that channel, was “one of those great and curious storytellers who seemed to know just about everything and everyone.”

Mr. Dickey’s range as a writer and reporter was evident in the seven books he published. His first, “With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua” (1986), recalled his days covering conflict there. He wrote nonfiction books about foreigners in Arabia in 1990, counterintelligence efforts by the New York Police Department in 2009 and, in 2015, an Englishman’s role in the Confederacy during the Civil War. He also published novels in 1997 and 2004.

In “Summer of Deliverance,” published in 1998, Mr. Dickey, born in 1951, offered a brutally honest memoir of growing up as the son of James Dickey, the former poet laureate who wrote the best-selling novel “Deliverance.” Describing his struggles to cope with his father’s alcoholism and abusiveness, he explained that he had become a foreign correspondent partly to get far away from home. His mother, Maxine Dickey, died in 1976, when she was 50.

“Dickey has done a remarkable job of picking his way through a minefield of emotions, knitting together a dangerous present and a painful past,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times wrote in a review.

A graduate of the University of Virginia, Mr. Dickey began his international reporting career in 1980 with The Washington Post covering Central America; he later moved to the Middle East. He covered Egypt and France for Newsweek, and he worked in Paris for The Daily Beast until his death.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/business/media/christopher-dickey-dead.html