Malcolm Wilde Browne was born on 17 April 1931 in New York City. Browne, a graduate in chemistry, started his journalistic career when he was drafted during the Korean War. In Korea, he was assigned to write for the Pacific edition of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. In 1959, he joined Associated Press and worked in Baltimore until 1961, when he was appointed chief correspondent for AP in Indochina and moved to Saigon in South Vietnam. He was one of the first American journalists to cover the war in Vietnam. His insightful reporting earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1964, which he shared with New York Times correspondent David Halberstam.
In 1965, ABC television offered him a position as chief correspondent for Indochina. Unsatisfied with TV reporting, Browne left ABC after only one year to spend a year in New York as an Edward R. Murrow fellow of the Council of Foreign Relations. In 1968, he was appointed correspondent for The New York Times for South America. Subsequent assignments were in South Asia (1971), Eastern Europe (1973), and other regions. When he returned to New York in 1977, he switched to science writing. After serving as a senior editor for Discover magazine, he returned to The New York Times in 1985, and covered the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Malcolm Browne died on 28 August 2012 from complications related to Parkinson’s disease, with which he was diagnosed in 2000.
