By Paul Ehrlich
Paul Anderson, longtime United Press International correspondent and Thailand bureau manager, passed away peacefully on August 23 in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Nancy, by his side. He was 84.
Paul was, above all, a journalist in the finest tradition: curious, intrepid, deeply engaged with the world around him, and committed to telling the story accurately and vividly.
His career took him across some of the most consequential places and moments in modern Asian history. A veteran foreign correspondent and bureau editor for United Press International (UPI), Paul built his reputation as a reporter who understood that the biggest stories were often found not only in official statements and financial markets, but in the people and places behind them.
“Paul Anderson and I were comrades-in-arms,” said former OPC President Bill Holstein.
“We served together on the UPI foreign desk in New York in the late 1970s. As soon as Jimmy Carter normalized relations with China’s Deng Xiaoping late in 1978, we were positioned to serve the American media’s resurgent interest in post-Vietnam War Asia. UPI transferred us to Hong Kong within a month of each other in early 1979.”
“I returned to the United States in 1982 after a stint in Beijing but Paul remained committed to staying in the field,” Holstein added. In his early forties, Paul was appointed UPI’s manager for Thailand, based in Bangkok, where he directed coverage of Thailand and Indochina. It was a demanding assignment in the early 1980s, as wars, refugee crises and political upheaval continued to reshape the region.
“Paul was UPI bureau chief when I was hired in 1982,” said former UPI correspondent and Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand board member John Hail.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better boss. He was a professional, an expert at navigating the delicate politics of deadline-driven wire service journalism. Getting it right and getting it first, hopefully before our worthy competitors at AP.”
He later returned to Hong Kong, where in the late 1980s and early 1990s he served as an Asia-Pacific news editor and bureau leader, covering a remarkable period of change. He was there for the 1986 People Power revolution in the Philippines, the 1987 “Black Monday” stock-market crash, and the 1989 pro-democracy protests.
“For me, Paul Anderson was an original ‘Quiet American.’ Unflappable in covering crises, he could type at machine-gun speed and would churn out a story at an incredible rate,” recalled Michael Keats, UPI’s News Editor for Asia and the Pacific, who was both Anderson’s and Holstein’s boss when they first arrived in Hong Kong.
“Paul loved his job as a foreign correspondent, traveling to foreign lands and being able to cover various world-shattering events, like the assassination of Indira Gandhi, or a one-on-one interview with Bill Clinton,” said Nancy, his wife of 41 years, who was born in Shanghai.
Anderson and Nancy returned to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in December 2005 to take care of his aging mother. They moved to Seattle in 2017. “Paul possessed a very dry sense of humor; was witty, well read, liked whimsical things and was extremely intelligent,” said Nancy. “And being a scribe for more than 40 years, Paul kept up with both world and local news.”
Anderson was born on September 27, 1941, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He attended the University of Tulsa and completed two years of graduate work in history at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Anderson’s wish was to be cremated, Nancy said, with his ashes scattered on the peaceful Olympic Peninsula in Washington State’s Pacific Northwest.
Aside from wife Nancy, he leaves his daughter Gillian Marie Anderson, and rescue dog Katie.