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Former Globe editor remembers Anthony Shadid

The Angle

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 18, 2012|By James F. Smith

Journalist Anthony Shadid died, apparently of an asthma attack, yesterday… (AP Photo/Bill O'Leary,…)

The phone rang early on Easter Sunday morning in 2002. Charles Radin, the Boston Globe’s Jerusalem bureau chief, told me the news: our reporter Anthony Shadid had just been shot in the shoulder while covering clashes in Ramallah in the West Bank. We knew only that Anthony was alive but badly wounded. He was being treated in a crowded, chaotic Palestinian clinic.

I had been the Globe’s foreign editor for all of a month. Anthony had traveled to Israel from his base in our Washington bureau to help Radin cover the worsening intifadah and Israeli crackdown. Anthony got into Ramallah with Said Ghazali, the Globe’s Palestinian reporter, through a maze of Israeli checkpoints. Anthony was shot as he walked down the center of a deserted street, apparently hit by an Israeli bullet; he and Said were wearing flak vests with the letters “TV” taped on them to declare themselves journalists.

Globe editor Martin Baron and I worked with Radin to negotiate safe passage for Anthony out of the West Bank and back to Israel. We involved embassies and consulates and State Department contacts.

But Anthony refused to come out of the West Bank without Said. He feared that Said would face grave danger from Israeli soldiers if left on his own. It took many hours to arrange for them both to come out together. Missteps followed that left their ambulance ducking gunfire on the way out. Anthony finally made it to the safety of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, where Baron visited him a day later.

It took time to realize how grievous the wound was. The bullet went in one shoulder, tumbled a half-inch from his spine and out the other shoulder. He had 12 dangerous shrapnel fragments embedded in him. By the time I met him in Washington when he was able to return home a couple of weeks later, he was still in much pain.

But he was already back at work. With his arm in a sling, Anthony wrote a gut-wrenching account of what he had seen in Ramallah. His 5,300-word piece in the Boston Globe Magazine ran on May 12, 2002 — just six weeks after he was shot — full of lyrical accounts of the Palestinians he encountered. He wrote sparingly about his own injury, devoting only enough space to it to explain what it said about life in the West Bank.

That article foreshadowed the quality of work that would distinguish Anthony’s next decade of extraordinary reportage, from Lebanon to Egypt to Libya to his final reporting trip in Syria that ended with his death yesterday at the age of 43.