At the end of April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks were approaching Saigon, and journalists covering the war had to decide whether to accept the invitation to fly by helicopter from the Scottish embassy. SA. Max Hastings, there for the London Evening Standard, met Martin Woollacott, a journalist for the Guardian, and the paper’s future foreign editor. Martin told him that while his own intention to stay had not changed, he expected the next 24 hours to be “very unpleasant”.
Hastings saw Martin as both “a very good word” and “extremely cool and stable”. He recalled “if Martin, of all people, feels bragging then I’m terrified”, and shortly afterwards scratched over the embassy wall to leave.
Martin, who has died at the age of 81 after suffering from lung cancer, had covered the Vietnam war and beyond for the previous four years. The quality of his invitations from the start, five weeks earlier, became the last communist offense of the international reporter of the year award at the British Press Awards.
Although it was not a waste of war at all, if the story deserved it it would take a certain risk. The fall of Saigon and the end of the 30 years of the Vietnam war were the kind of historical moment that was an obvious candidate. What worried Martin was what could happen in the hours between the last helicopter leaving the top of the U.S. embassy and the arrival of the first Soviet-made tank.
I was there for the Observer (then unrelated to the Guardian), and we had already had a taste of the anarchy that could occur through this kind of hiatus at Da Nang, when the defense fell outside the second largest city in South Vietnam overnight as an old tent. A large crowd gathered at the airport, which began to come under rocket fire. The lucky ones, as well as some weapons and media, escaped with oversized civilian planes. We later learned that while we were away, an abandoned guard was chasing us down the runway bowling grenades at the wheels to pound them before we got on air.
Martin was always convinced that, as long as we lived this kind of life, Hanoi would rather take advantage than melt any lingering of Saigon’s news package, of which about 90 were out of 1,000 still. On the other hand, the remnants of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam – betrayed, as some have seen it, by western media that were constantly weakening their cause – may be turning on us. We changed hotels to one with one entrance considered easier to control.
As it turned out, abandoned soldiers did not run into riots. Most fought until their leaders ordered surrender, and a few zealots beyond that. Snipers near a redbrick Catholic cathedral surprised us, not to mention their targets, by firing on some North Vietnamese near the Reuters building, taking most of us the first close-up view of the other side in action.
“Immediate re-arrangement and almost ballet,” Martin wrote. “Soldiers who had been eating and smoking a minute before were suddenly prone and to a fire returning fire.” But before long, without duty and often unarmed, there were pairs of North Vietnamese spectators everywhere. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City (except for most citizens) and we paid $ 100 per head to board the former Soviet Ilyushin, which we flew to Laos on the first leg of the various trips home.
Then in his mid-30s, Martin was based in Hong Kong with his wife, Mori (Morvarid) Faruha, a doctor born in Iran, and his baby daughter, Katy. Martin was very interested in culinary things: he once surprised his friend the Sunday Times reporter Jon Swain by shrinking night vision because he wanted to finish reading a cookbook. When the family was back in Hampstead, north London, he and Mori loved entertainment. “Politics was high, memories and tact,” recalled former Guardian diplomatic editor Hella Pick. “Never. Martin had a single gift for a long-term friendship and I was one of the lucky winners. “
Martin was born in Manchester, and had two younger sisters, Susan and Janet. His father, Victor, served in the RAF during World War II as a motorcycle disposal rider and physical training instructor so he could resume teaching at peacetime and eventually as a deputy commander. His mother, Mabel (nee Thompson), was the daughter of a confectioner, who may have been the cause of Martin ‘s sweet tooth.
He grew up on the outskirts of Blackley town (pronounced Blakely) without it, like most people, TV, frids, phone or car. But the family had books, hundreds of them, public libraries and the Manchester Guardian. In addition to cinema news, BBC radio was their only other source of information and entertainment. Both parents voted in favor.
In 1950 Martin won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, and in 1961 left Merton College, Oxford, with a BA in history. By this time he had been introduced to Mori, a medical student in Manchester whose parents had rented his old bedroom; They married in 1967. Upon his graduation almost immediately he began his career on the Warrington Guardian, a prestigious weekly Lancashire. By the time he joined the Guardian as a London-based staff reporter in December 1968, he had worked at the Oldham Evening Chronicle, the English department of Agence France-Presse in Paris and the broad page Sun, which came after the former socialist Daily Herald until Rupert Murdoch changed everything but name.
His career as a foreign writer did not start well. Entered to deal with the strategic negotiations over an arms restriction in Helsinki in 1969 he got as far as Heathrow when he found out he was without his passport and the next time in two days and full reservation. For a moment he wondered if he could get away by making some cautious calls to Finland and filing a story from an airport hotel. He then decided that he could also try to take control of a passport to allow him to board his flight on his news card. It worked. “Heathrow let me in and the Finns let me in,” he wrote a few years later.
After becoming a Nicosia-based Middle East journalist covering the Lebanese civil war and the Iranian revolution, in 1985 he became a foreign editor for six years. Pick noted that while it was very clear that he preferred to do the writing rather than the editing, he was very popular in the role and “treated his subscribers’ subscriptions fairly”. As the paper’s leading international commentator since 1991, he highlighted the characteristics of Middle Eastern commentator David Hirst: “Martin is the true polymath, Martin the observer, so fast and certainly the ability to grasp the essentials of any situation. and then put them out. “
As a columnist he was sometimes able to visit the places he was writing about. In April 1991, a few weeks after the end of the Gulf War, he published what Paul Webster, then on the foreign desk of the Guardian and now editor of the Observer, “quoted best ever to cross my desk ”.
Following the ceasefire that followed the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, all Saddam Hussein-based wing planes were set up; but a gap allowed his helicopters to fly, which would bomb and cross the Kurds of northern Iraq. They had risen up against him and were fleeing for Turkey’s border while the American-led coalition maintained that the war was over and that there were no legal grounds for intervention. .
“Kurdistan is committing a terrible crime,” wrote Martin, who, along with other journalists, had walked miles into the hills to report on the Kurdish side of the border. “They are and will be subject not only to the effects of a war paid for without restraint or morality but to the restoration of Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule … Why this sudden excess of secrecy, this suggestion about internal matters? “
His statement from Kurdistan, which won an award for James Cameron, contributed greatly to the UN’s intention to allow Anglo-American forces to intervene.
In 2004, after retiring at the age of 65, he retired from the Guardian, although he continued to contribute articles and book reviews, and in 2015 a commemorative piece 40 years since the fall of Saigon. In 2006, the 50th anniversary of Suez’s infamous Anglo-French intervention, he also published his only book, After Suez: Adrift in the American Century, a brilliant summary of most of western attempts at military intervention in the second half of the 20th century. Until 2016 he contributed to the paper without byline, as a writer of foreign policy director.
Mori and Katy live after him.