When John Cooley '49 arrived at Dartmouth in the summer of 1945, he did not know that he would soon be leaving Hanover for foreign locations like Vienna, Morocco, Paris, London, and Beirut.
A distinguished journalist , Cooley has worked for ABC, NBC, The Christian Science Monitor, and the International Herald Tribune.
Yesterday, in an interview with The Dartmouth, Cooley reminisced about his career and stressed the need for greater international media coverage in a time of increasing globalization.
Dartmouth Years
Cooley did not experience a typical Dartmouth career. Although, he arrived at the College in an accelerated freshman program during the summer of 1945 he did not graduate until 1952.
At the College, Cooley participated in a navy training program, was drafted to the army at the end of his freshman year and was sent to Vienna for 10 months.
"That really changed my life, and got me overseas for the first time." Cooley said, noting that this was a trend that would continue for the rest of his career.
Cooley spent his sophomore year in Hanover, junior year in Zurich and then worked in Vienna for the US Embassy, before returning to Dartmouth to graduate in 1952.
According to Cooley, his first year at Dartmouth gave him an opportunity to experience what he called a "normal American college life," even amidst the war-time atmosphere, recalling being on campus when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945.
While at the College he wrote for The Dartmouth and the Jack O'Lantern and was a member of the Dartmouth Outing Club.
Reminiscing about his fun times at Dartmouth, Cooley remembered having huge fire hose fights in the dorms, one time resulting in the flooding of Russell Sage.
As a foreign correspondent
After graduation, he returned to Vienna to work for the US Embassy, but soon left the diplomatic corps for journalism, landing a job at a camp newspaper at an American air base in Morocco at the outbreak of the Korean War.
After that, he said he "cut his journalistic teeth" at the New York Herald Tribune, which is now the International Herald Tribune. Since then, he has reported for various news organizations from Paris, New York, Morocco, London, Beirut and Cyprus.
"The best job I've ever had was with the Christian Science Monitor," he said, referring to the thirteen years he worked for the paper reporting from Beirut.
Working as a foreign correspondent exposed Cooley to new people and new situations, he said.
Cooley described an incident during the Algerian war in 1961, where he was one of the several journalists who found himself in the midst of an attempted coup d'etat against French president Charles De Gaulle.
Cooley and other reporters managed to convince the rebels, who were a faction of the French army, to allow them to broadcast the news over the radio during the four-day take-over.
Eventually Cooley began working for radio news in addition to written journalism, including ABC and NBC radio networks.
Cooley has earned the Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship and the Carnegie Endowment International Peace Fellowship for his journalism achievements. Beyond journalism Cooley has written several books over the course of his career.
Views on Journalism
Cooley said that working as a foreign correspondent continually provided opportunities to travel and discover new and fascinating things.
He discussed the current trends in journalism and noted the "increasing concentration on domestic news to the detriment of foreign news."
"I'm afraid that some of the gatekeepers of the news are consciously pandering to what they think the public wants," he said, stressing that this is a self-fulfilling trend.
While he said the best way to begin a career in journalism is "the time-honored method of finding a war and going there," Cooley advised students interested in a career in journalism to try freelancing and self syndication -- offering out articles to news organizations in order to establish oneself as a writer. He also said that the Internet has emerged as a great resource for journalism.
Cooley will speak this evening at 7:30 in Rockefeller 3 on the consequences of the holy wars in Afghanistan, based on his latest book "Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism."
Cooley, currently a freelance writer for ABC radio, lives in Greece and is beginning an investigative story for television about recent terrorist attempts in the United States.
