T. D. Allman

T. D. Allman (born 1944) is an American freelance journalist best known for his exposés of the CIA's "secret war" in Laos and for his later interviews with world figures (Yasser Arafat, Helmut Kohl, Boris Yeltsin, Manuel Antonio Noriega) as foreign correspondent for "Vanity Fair". He is credited with the coining of the phrase "secret war". He rescued massacre victims in Cambodia, which led to his work being banned from "The Washington Post". Later, as a contributing editor of "Harper's", he aroused further controversy when he predicted that the U.S. defeat in Indochina had opened the door to a new epoch of Pacific Rim success for American values and economic systems. He also derided claims that the Earth was running out of oil (the so-called energy crisis) and predicted that U.S. cities, far from being doomed, were on the verge of a "Yuppie renaissance". His reports from Iraq and on the Colombian drug wars received wide attention, as have his profiles of figures such as Dick Cheney.

He is a Harvard graduate (1966) and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. His first book, "Unmanifest Destiny", which grew out of his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, dealt with many of the problems of American nationalism that still affect U.S. foreign policy. Another of his books, "Miami: City of the Future", is considered the definitive work on the subject. He is also the author of "Rogue State" and "Finding Florida". He is the co-author of half a dozen other volumes, including several anthologies of war reporting.

Allman's writing has also appeared in "The New Yorker", "The New York Times", "Esquire", "The New Republic", "Rolling Stone", and "National Geographic", as well as in "The Guardian", "Le Monde", "The Economist", and many other overseas publications.

British film maker John Pilger on T.D. Allman: "The great American journalist T. D. Allman once defined 'genuinely objective journalism' as that which 'not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right. Objective journalism is compelling not only today. It stands the test of time. It is validated not only by "reliable sources" but by the unfolding of history. It is reporting that which not only seems right the day it is published. It is journalism that ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.' "