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Edward Samuel Behr
Edward Samuel Behr (7 May 1926 - 27 May 2007) was a foreign correspondent and war journalist, who worked for many years for Newsweek.
Born in Paris, his parents were of Russian-Je...view moreEdward Samuel Behr (7 May 1926 - 27 May 2007) was a foreign correspondent and war journalist, who worked for many years for Newsweek.
Born in Paris, his parents were of Russian-Jewish descent. He had a bilingual education at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and St Paul’s School, London. He enlisted in the British Indian Army on leaving school, serving in Intelligence in the North-West Frontier from 1944-1948, rising to acting brigade major in the Royal Garhwal Rifles at the age of 22. He then took a degree in history at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
His early career as a reporter was with Reuters in London and Paris. He then became press officer with Jean Monnet at the European Coal and Steel Community in Luxembourg from 1954-1956. Later he joined Time-Life as Paris correspondent, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s often covered the fighting in the Congo, the civil war in Lebanon as well as the Indo-Chinese border clashes of 1962. He wrote about the unrest in Ulster, the fighting in Angola and the Moroccan attack on Ifni, the Spanish enclave in West Africa.
Behr was often in Algeria, and in 1958 published The Algerian Problem. Written when the war was far from over, and going back a century or more over the background, it was considered a fair assessment of a problem which many Frenchmen reckoned no foreigner could possibly understand.
Returning to India for Time magazine, Behr served as bureau chief in New Delhi, travelled in Indo-China, then moved to the mass-circulation American magazine Saturday Evening Post as roving correspondent. In 1965 he went to Newsweek, the weekly news magazine owned by the Washington Post Company.
Behr turned gradually from a career in war reporting to writing books and making television documentaries, including award-winning programmes on India, Ireland and the Kennedy family.
Behr died in Paris in 2007 at the age of 81.view less