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Chris Dickey (1951 – 2020)
By
Published: Jul 19, 2020
Category:
Beyond Classification
The news that Chris Dickey had died suddenly in Paris sucked the air out of me, as it did for a number of my crowd. People who do words for a living and a life sent me emails, delivering the news and little more; like me, they were stunned and silent. Friends who followed his Instagram photos — the last taken hours before his death — sent me their favorites. And Brian Williams mourned a colleague and friend.
It’s possible his name is unfamiliar to you. Think back to the death of Princess Diana and the days you spent glued to CNN — Chris was the correspondent in the tunnel. You saw him in the first Iraq war and after 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. And all the time he was writing: books, articles for Newsweek and, for the last few years, The Daily Beast, where he was the Paris-based foreign editor. There were many scoops. Awards. And the kind of recognition that matters most, the admiration of your peers. John Avlon, a former editor of The Daily Beast, said that he had once asked Chris if he had read Joan Didion’s book “Salvador.” Chris responded without pretense: “Yes. It’s dedicated to me.”
He made friends out of sources, family out of colleagues. Behind the scenes, he was the kind of editor who was a mentor. “He was the best lunch date in the world; the one to call when you needed a bar, a restaurant, a discreet hotel anywhere on earth,” a colleague has recalled. This story, from a Newsweek colleague, could be echoed — and possibly topped — by others: “I spent the better part of a week in Cairo, on the press junket for a freelance travel story. He picked me up at dawn each day for a set or two of tennis while it was still cool enough to play at the vintage Sporting Club on Gezira Island in mid-Nile.” As a friend noted, he was never averse to the second bottle of wine; he knew his way around an expense account. And through it all, Chris had a rock-solid marriage; over 40 years, he and Carol warmed every room they entered.
The slug on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s colorful remembrance on the Daily Beast is ICON. One anecdote suggests why:
I met Chris in 1997 when he was the Paris editor for Newsweek and I was a new hire in Rome. We covered a lot of Italy stories together and he would come to Rome and meet high-level sources and diplomats he happened to know here on the side of whatever else we were doing. When we covered the CIA’s capture of an Egyptian cleric off of a street in Milan, I was chasing down phone numbers while he was already having an aperitivo with the source I was trying to track down. “Yes, I’m sitting here with Chris,” I recall an Italian secret service agent telling me on one occasion when I finally got the number. I could hear Chris chuckling in the background. “We’ve been waiting for you to call. Why don’t you meet us?”
Chris and I didn’t see one another often, but we were friends, and for me that was a merit badge, because he defined the category I care most about: remarkable reporting and supremely gifted writing. His work could fill an encyclopedia, and he was always working on at least two projects, but he never seemed rushed, he seemed to manufacture time. Wherever he was, whoever he was with, that’s where he wanted to be.
One personal story, if I may. In 2004, when Butler was in diapers, I published a review of one of his novels. I was nervous about praising a friend, because mutual backslapping is what happens far too often in this game, but in reading his nailbiter of a thriller and looking forward to praising it, I learned a lesson that would be confirmed over the years: One reason I like my friends who are writers is because they’re just so damn good.
A month before the publication of my Mary Meyer/JFK novel — 16 years after that review, a few dinners in Paris and a lunch or two in New York —I asked a great many writers for a blurb. The Christmas holidays were upon us; I wasn’t surprised that emails went unanswered. Chris responded:
I have read everything I can find about the Mary Pinchot Meyer case in the last few months and talked to Nina Burleigh and Peter Janney about their books. Even went walking on the towpath and checked out the various residences. Was going to write something in October for the anniversary of the murder — it seems to me the quintessential conspiracy story — but I got overtaken by breaking news. So I look forward to reading the book but have no doubt your approach blending fact and fiction is the best. In addition to the blurb, maybe I will use your book as a peg to write that piece for the Beast!
Then… silence. But on my publication date, there it was: 3,000 words about Mary in the Daily Beast, quoting my book and writing a line I could extract as a blurb. And much more: taking readers through the entire story of the murder, the books about Mary, and the mystery that’s never been solved.
Chris emailed me to say that the piece got 100,000 clicks. I replied: “Guess who reads Beast? Clearly: the NYTimes books department. How do I know? This morning they called my publisher and asked to have 2 copies messengered over.”
And then the Times reviewed my book… twice. The work Chris put into that piece, and its perfect timing, and his kindness to a fellow writer — of all the good things that may happen for my book, this will always be the story I tell about Chris.
Chris was the standard bearer of a kind of reporting that has long been endangered and is now nearly extinct, so the suddenness of his death is — I can think of no other metaphor — like a piece of writing that ends in mid-sentence, as if the writer went out to lunch and never came back. Like so many deaths now, Chris’s death seems unfair. Chris was as good as it gets — as a writer and as a human —- and we lose him, yet Dick Cheney lives on.
For comfort, I looked for a poem. And found this, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Death takes us by surprise,
And stays our hurrying feet;
The great design unfinished lies,
Our lives are incomplete
But in the dark unknown,
Perfect their circles seem,
Even as a bridge’s arch of stone
Is rounded in the stream.
Alike are life and death,
When life in death survives,
And the uninterrupted breath
Inspires a thousand lives.
Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still traveling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.
So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.
I so hope those last two lines are true.
