BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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Thursday, June 05, 2003
A worthy sendoff for a great
journalist. Hundreds of people turned out this morning at the JFK
Library for a memorial service for the Boston Globe's
Elizabeth
Neuffer, who -- along with
her translator, Waleed Khalifa Hassan Al Dulaimi -- were killed in a
car accident in Iraq on May 9.
I did not take notes -- somehow it
would have seemed disrespectful -- but I can report that it was
dignified, emotional, and fitting for someone whose foreign
correspondence represented the best that the news media can
offer.
Editorial-page editor Renée
Loth presided over a program that included remembrances by editor
Marty Baron, former Ambassador Swanee Hunt, staff reporters Farah
Stockman and Anne Barnard, retired Globe staff member Susan
Trausch [Correction: Trausch is still employed as an editorial writer for the paper], foreign editor Jim Smith, and Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha
Power, who -- like Stockman -- credited Neuffer with starting her on
her journalism career.
Especially moving was a tribute by
her longtime companion, Washington-bureau chief Peter
Canellos.
The Reverends Ray and Gloria
White-Hammond opened and closed the service, which was held in a huge
anteroom, a wall of windows behind the speakers, with Boston Harbor
and the city skyline barely visible amid the fog and mist.
Neuffer's friends put together a
memorial book called Remembering Elizabeth. It closes with
this handwritten note:
To Whomever Finds
This:
This is being written at the end
of 1999 -- and at the beginning of a new millennium. It is also
the end of a century, what has been one of the bloodiest centuries
ever seen -- despite the incredible advancements mankind has made
in science, the arts, and medicine. As a foreign correspondent for
The Boston Globe -- which hopefully still is a newspaper
that publishes in New England! -- I had some part in seeing some
of this bloodshed while reporting on wars in the Gulf, Bosnia, and
Rwanda. I would hope by the time you find this note, wars are
extinct. But if they are not, please think again -- and stop them.
I'd like to think the next millennium will be one in which people
are not killed -- or prejudiced against -- because of their race,
ethnicity or religion. In fact, all of us in 1999 are counting on
you to ensure the future is one of peace. Please make it
so.
Elizabeth
Neuffer
posted at 2:18 PM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
