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Topics
While America Slept - How Terrorism
Crept Up on Us in the ‘90s
Adventures of the first Woman Foreign
Correspondent
America’s Past, America’s Future -
What We Must Do After 9/11
How to Know the World, How to Know Yourself:
A Personal View From the
First Woman Foreign Correspondent
On the Trail of the Royal Cats of the
World - How I Began My
Investigations Into the “Reigning Cats”
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What do Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Anwar
Sadat, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez,
Eduard Shevardnadze, Juan Peron, Prince Sihanouk and American Presidents
Carter, Ford, Bush, Reagan and Bush have in common? They all have
been interviewed by foreign correspondent Georgie
Anne Geyer.
For nearly 40 years, Geyer has delivered distinctive commentary
from an impressive variety of foreign fronts. Based in Washington,
D.C., she wrote the “definitive biography” of Fidel Castro,
Guerilla Prince (Little, Brown and Co., 1991) and is the
author of Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship (The
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996). She is also the author of books on
Latin America, Russia and the Middle East; winner of numerous awards
for distinguished journalism; and commentator on public television’s
“Washington Week in Review.” She has also recently republished
“Buying the Night Flight: The Autobiography of a Woman Foreign
Correspondent,” now in its fourth printing.
Geyer’s intuition, supported by knowledge of five languages,
contacts worldwide and
voracious historical research, distinguishes her from other foreign
correspondents writing today. In her reports, Geyer strives for
a deeper analysis. She focuses beyond the surface events and the
next deadline to examine root causes of revolution and political
upheaval. Such depth of reporting doesn’t come easily, however.
Geyer was endangered by an airport bombing in Managua; has been
threatened with death by Guatemala’s White Hand death squad;
and was once jailed in Angola for predicting a Soviet-sponsored
coup against the Cuban-backed Marxist government.
Geyer’s analyses have a history of accuracy as well: She predicted
the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia; she was the first
to predict the guerrilla movements in Latin America in the ‘60s;
she wrote a book in 1975 that predicted that Mikhail Gorbachev’s
generation would be the one to seek rapprochement with the West
and changes in the country’s system; and in the summer of 1973,
she told the Israeli foreign minister that Egypt was about to attack.
(Egypt attacked that October.)
Although her reports are often dispatched from volatile arenas
of warfare and intense civil strife, Geyer maintains a woman’s
perspective. Her writings on foreign affairs appear three times
a week in approximately 100 newspapers across the country.
Geyer is a member of the Gridiron Club, the Chicago Journalism Hall
of Fame and the Council on Foreign Relations, and was the first woman member
of the prestigious Cosmos Club in Washington (after a long battle over women members).
She was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists’
Hall of Fame in June 2001. Also in 2001, she received the State
of Illinois’ leading award as an “Outstanding Illinoisan”
at the Illinois inaugural ball, as well as the Association of Former
Intelligence Officers’ Stewart Alsop Media Award. She has received
21 honorary degrees from universities and colleges, including one
from her beloved alma mater, Northwestern University.
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