Theasa Tuohy

Any and all of it. It's a wonderful life. I did stories on vicious gang members from Detroit, once covered the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., interviewed Weeb Ewbank in his home when he was coach of the NY Jets, only reporter ever allowed into Abbie Hoffman's home when he was the scourge of the FBI. Had lunch with a member of the British parliament, did a phone interview with a New York looter from my desk in Detroit. No one could figure out how I could have such contacts, but the details were so vivid and accurate the paper stripped it across the top of Page One. I leaped out of a moving car to catch up with Bobby Kennedy, and still have the grainy news clip of me standing next to him on a campaign platform taking notes. I spent hours with the French sculptor Jacques Lipchitz in his studio in Hastings. I accidentally ended up covering the Oklahoma City bombing because I was in town to celebrate my mother's birthday when the explosion occurred. When I was at the Detroit Free Press I did profiles on William F. Buckley, Gloria Steinem, Arthur J. Goldberg, former Supreme Court justice, UN ambassador, and secretary of labor. For the Associated Press, I wrote about my mother who was an aviator in the late 1920s. The list goes on.

On and off for many years. I began when I was working for the Op Ed page at Newsday and found a book called “Big Story” in the slush pile. It was a 598-page, abridged version of a study by Peter Braestrup with the subtitle “How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington.” I can still remember sitting up in bed that first night and studying it, mainly the 1968 map of central Saigon with locations of all of the press offices marked. When I went to Saigon many years later, I had a copy of that map. And when a guide pointed out what he called the opera house, I was stunned. It can't be, it's the National Assembly Building. He laughed. That's what it was in 1968.