To Tell the Truth

Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Lewis M. Simons’s recollects his 50 years as a foreign correspondent, one whose powerful stories contributed to transforming Asia from Vietnam War-era basket case to a global boomtown that today rivals the United States.

Simons’s investigative work led to the toppling of a dictator in the Philippines. He covered the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, bloody coups in Thailand, attempted genocide and societal collapse in Cambodia, and economic advance, decline and rebirth in Japan. He was expelled from India for his exclusive reporting on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s political misuse of the armed forces. Breaking his own strict rule against becoming personally involved with people whose stories he covered, he saved the life of a dying teenaged Tibetan Buddhist monk.

Simons molds the narrative of his lengthy, action-packed career from foxhole mud and backroom dirt. Layered with moments of tenderness and humor, as his camp-following family often accompanies him, the result is a masterful chronicle of war and murder; extreme poverty and suffering alongside repellent wealth and indulgence; wholesale larceny and ruling-class corruption—much of which escaped the scrutiny of other journalists. Readers who appreciate real-life historic drama will be enthralled.

Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis M. Simons began his career as a foreign correspondent in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. He saw the war through to the end, covering the fall of the neighboring states of Laos and Cambodia.Since then, he has reported on politics, economics, civil unrest and social conditions throughout the world, including India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh; Iraq and Iran; China, Japan, North Korea and South Korea, as well as the former Soviet Union. He was a staff correspondent for The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Knight-Ridder Newspapers and Time and wrote major stories for National Geographic.

In 1986, Simons and two colleagues at the San Jose Mercury News won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for exposing the billions that the Marcos family looted from the Philippines. “Your series made history,” wrote the late U.S. Representative Stephen Solarz. Columbia University cited the articles as among the fifty best in fifty years. Simons was also a two-time Pulitzer finalist, and has received numerous other journalism awards, including the George Polk and the University of Missouri’s Investigative Reporters and Editors. He was the Edward R. Murrow Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Simons’ op-ed and analytical articles have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Atlantic and Smithsonian magazines. His work also has appeared in USA Today, where he is a member of the Board of Contributors, and in online media, including The Huffington Post; The Daily Beast; Daily Kos; Yaleglobal.com and Columbia Journalism Review. He has been on ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, BBC and CBC.

He is the author of Worth Dying For: A Pulitzer Prize Winner’s Account of the Philippine Revolution, co-author with Senator Christopher S. Bond of The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam and a contributing author of half a dozen books on war and international affairs.

Simons served in the Marine Corps Reserve. He is married to fellow journalist Carol Simons. They have three adult children and reside in Washington, DC.

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