NEW YORK – Reid G. Miller, who traveled the planet as an intrepid worldwide correspondent for The Related Press and developed a repute as a supportive editor and unswervingly loyal boss throughout the hardest of breaking-news moments, has died. He was 90.
Miller died early Thursday in his sleep at his residence in Sarasota, Florida, the place he had been preventing congestive coronary heart failure, stated his son, G. Clay Miller of Brooklyn, New York.
In his 43-year AP profession, he bore witness to and reported on among the late twentieth century’s most momentous — and typically most violent — occasions from Washington to Central America, East Africa to South Korea. Alongside the way in which, he survived a deadly explosion in Nicaragua, lined the genocide in Rwanda and spearheaded the discharge of a kidnapped colleague in war-ravaged Somalia.
“He liked the sense of journey — dwelling overseas, overlaying moments in historical past,” Clay Miller stated. “A few of the most intense zones had been among the ones he talked about most whereas I used to be rising up.”
Miller, a local of Medford, Massachusetts, began at AP in his early 20s with a part-time job in Phoenix in 1956. He held reporting and management roles in Salt Lake Metropolis, Pittsburgh and Miami — and in the end Washington, the place he turned assistant bureau chief, was a mainstay of the bureau softball workforce and helped elevate a era of reporters.
“Reid embraced me, as he did all newly arrived D.C. AP add-ons,” stated Merrill Hartson, a longtime buddy and colleague. “I discovered a person whose humorousness was Johnny Carson’s, whose stolid and considerably stern dedication to efficiency might typically evoke ideas of Gen. George Patton, and whose suave, sartorially appropriate and Alpha-man comportment was way more usually reassuring and comforting than gruff and intimidating.”
After Washington, Miller went to Central America to be roving correspondent throughout a lot of the Eighties — a time when regional flareups and U.S. interventions made the world a deadly place to report from.
On Could 30, 1984, Miller and a bunch of reporters had been in southern Nicaragua interviewing the counterrevolutionary Eden Pastora, often known as “Commander Zero,” when a bomb went off of their midst. Miller was badly wounded and 4 of Pastora’s males and three journalists had been killed, together with Linda Frazier, spouse of Miller’s AP colleague Joseph B. Frazier. No perpetrator was ever discovered.
A day later, from a hospital in close by Costa Rica, Miller filed a first-person dispatch in regards to the bombing.
“I used to be … making an attempt to get my tape recorder to work. It had obtained moist throughout the boat experience. I had simply given up on the tape recorder and was beginning to step into the tight circle to take notes when there was a blinding explosion that knocked me again about 10 ft right into a wall. … I crawled into an adjoining room and located myself on the open entrance of the constructing. I slid down a 2-by-4 brace to the bottom, then rolled right into a shallow slit trench that had been dug close by.”
Miller recovered and returned to the sphere. Three years later, he was invited to take part in army workout routines with the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels often known as the Contras. This was his sardonic evaluation: “Having spent just a few days lately overlaying an actual battle and some extra overlaying a make-believe battle, I can inform you this: I most popular the mock battle. It was extra thrilling. And the meals was higher.”
After Central America, Miller was named AP bureau chief for East Africa, based mostly in Nairobi. From there, he would cowl one of the vital harrowing occasions of his profession — the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He additionally lined the growing societal breakdown after famine and clan warfare in Somalia, the place his colleague Tina Susman was kidnapped in 1994. Miller spearheaded the negotiations to safe her launch, and he or she was freed after 20 harrowing days.
“In contrast to a variety of the older and way more skilled correspondents, Reid by no means made me really feel like an outsider or like somebody who hadn’t earned the appropriate to be overlaying the world’s largest tales,” Susman stated Thursday. “I used to be one of many few feminine reporters on the scene on the time. However to Reid, I used to be a colleague who deserved as a lot respect and collegiality as anybody.”
Miller completed his profession because the information cooperative’s South Korea bureau chief, based mostly in Seoul. When he retired in 1999, he left behind dozens of journalists scattered throughout AP who remembered him as somebody who, whereas bringing again the information for the world, nurtured careers on three continents.
“Reid Miller was the boss all people liked — and the boss that many AP staffers wished they’d,” stated Edith M. Lederer, now the company’s chief U.N. correspondent. “He had that tremendous reward to take heed to everybody rigorously, get throughout what he wished finished by no means elevating his voice, be very encouraging in tough conditions and ship kudos for nice tales.”
“He in some way established an esprit de corps amongst us that persists to today,” buddy and former colleague Marty Merzer wrote after a 2020 reunion of AP Florida employees.
Along with his son Clay, Reid Miller is survived by his spouse, former AP Pentagon reporter Pauline Jelinek; a daughter, Kimberly Matalon of Miami; one other son, Reid G. Miller of Gainesville, Florida; three grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren. Additionally surviving is a brother, Randall Humpling of Barstow, California.
A number of years in the past, Miller penned a profile of his personal profession for Connecting, a publication written by and for former AP staffers. His piece ended with an emphatic assertion from him, and so will this one:
“Would I do it yet again? In a heartbeat.”
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