Joel Brinkley, who won a Pulitzer for a series on Cambodian refugees, dies at 61
WASHINGTON — Joel Brinkley, who followed his father, broadcast news commentator David Brinkley, into a journalism career and won a Pulitzer Prize for a harrowing series about Cambodian refugees after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, died March 11 at a hospital in Washington.
The cause, at age 61, was acute undiagnosed leukemia, which led to respiratory failure from pneumonia, said his wife, journalist Sabra Chartrand.
Mr. Brinkley’s main residence was in Palo Alto, Calif., where he taught journalism at Stanford University, but he had recently returned to Washington to work for a US government oversight agency that documents how billions of dollars in reconstruction money is spent in Afghanistan.
The return to Washington was, in many respects, a homecoming for Mr. Brinkley, who had grown up in the city and held reporting and editing jobs there during his 23 years with the New York Times.
After covering the Reagan-era arms-for-hostages scandal, he served a stint as a White House correspondent and then was named chief of the Times’ Jerusalem bureau.
He worked in Israel from 1988 to 1991, a period that included the first Palestinian uprising and the Persian Gulf War. As a Washington-based technology reporter, he later chronicled the antitrust trial against Microsoft. He also served as national security editor and retired from the Times in 2006 as a foreign-policy correspondent.
Mr. Brinkley then began his work at Stanford and became a weekly syndicated foreign- affairs columnist. Mr. Brinkley wrote scathingly about how the US Agency for International Development disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars in Afghanistan each year without assuring the money was properly used. He noted the agency’s ‘‘belligerent refusal even to acknowledge the problem.’’
His contacts in Washington and his skepticism toward the federal bureaucracy led to his hiring last year by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR.
‘‘We’re an audit agency, and sometimes our reports can be mundane,’’ said Gene Aloise, SIGAR’s deputy inspector general. He said Mr. Brinkley’s ‘‘crisp, clear, effective writing would grab audience attention.’’
Mr. Brinkley had not initially wanted to pursue a journalism career. Working for newspapers was merely a paycheck to support his post-collegiate ambitions as a novelist.
Within five years, at 27, he shared the Pulitzer for international reporting with photographer Jay Mather. They were working for the Courier-Journal in Louisville when they were tapped to cover a refugee crisis sparked by the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
Mr. Brinkley initially thought the assignment was a joke by a prankster editor. Until that point, the cub reporter had been mostly writing about a local school board, filing stories about achievement test scores and high-school yearbook sales.
For the Louisville paper, the connection to Cambodia was a local doctor who had gone to treat refugees. The paper was cash-flush at the time, he wrote, and his bosses wanted to spend all their money before the end of the budget year ‘‘or risk not getting as much the next year.’’
By the time Mr. Brinkley and Mather arrived in Southeast Asia in late 1979, Cambodia was in near-total disarray.
His series, called ‘‘Living the Cambodian Nightmare,’’ began:
‘‘Gaunt, glassy-eyed and possessionless, they crouch in the heat, hungry and diseased.
‘‘They wait in tight lines for hours to get today’s ration of food from international relief agencies: a bowl of rice gruel, two bananas, a bucket of brown drinking water.
‘‘They wait for doctors to heal them.’’
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