Robert Sam Anson, Famed War Correspondant And Writer Of Sag Harbor, Remembered For Compelling Work

Robert Sam Anson, a highly respected reporter and magazine writer who had lived in Sag Harbor for decades, died on November 2 at the age of 75. The cause was complications of dementia, and because of that disease he had been living in a home in Rexford, New York.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Mr. Anson was raised by his maternal grandparents, Edith McConville Anson and Sam B. Anson, an editor and publisher of several Cleveland-area newspapers. A graduate of a Jesuit prep school and Notre Dame, Mr. Anson was, at only age 24, a war correspondent for Time magazine, covering conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia, preferring the front lines and hardly aware of the bullets flying around him. As he chronicled in the book “War News,” Mr. Anson frequently traveled over dangerous roads where some of his colleagues had been killed or kidnapped because such adventures were “a means where every day you could test yourself, your willingness to push the limits. And God knows it was fun, not just the doing of it, but the recounting of it later at cocktail time, where everyone claimed the closest call.”

His exploits included being captured by North Vietnamese troops in 1970. One day, alone in a remote area, Mr. Anson’s car was suddenly surrounded by rifle-waving Vietnamese, who ignored his protests that he was a journalist. They dragged him from the car to the side of the road and tossed him a trenching tool so Mr. Anson could dig his own grave. When it was deep enough, a soldier ordered him to stop: “I passed him up the trenching tool and closed my eyes. I felt the heel of his foot against my chest, pushing me against the edge of the hole, then the coldness of his AK being pressed against my forehead. I began saying the Hail Mary. Above me I heard the metallic click of a weapon being locked and loaded.”

Fortunately for the petrified correspondent, his captors relented and chose to keep him as a hostage. Published in 1989, the memoir “War News” was the last of Mr. Anson’s six books.

After returning from Southeast Asia, he was drawn to the trenches of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, only to be invited by the senator to write his authorized biography. Over the next five decades, Mr. Anson became a jack-of-all-trades, freelancing for high-profile magazines and trying his hand at co-hosting a TV talk show for New York City’s WNET with fellow journalist Ken Auletta.

“Here is how I would describe Bob versus me in an interview,” said Mr. Auletta. “If I saw the official I was interviewing was not telling the truth, I would say, ‘But on September 14 you said the opposite of what you’re saying now. How do you square that with what you’re saying today?’ If Bob Anson were conducting the same interview he’d confront the official this way: ‘You’re lying!’”

In his tribute to Mr. Anson published last week on the Vanity Fair web site, David Friend writes, “I first got to know Anson’s work when I was an upstart reporter at Life, devouring his penetrating exposés and profiles in Life (on subjects as diverse as Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent and the cryptic disappearance of Jim Thompson, one of Bangkok’s most famous expats), The Atlantic, and Esquire. (His 1981 Esquire cover story on the life and death of the National Lampoon’s Doug Kenney is considered a classic.) Anson also wrote political columns and investigative pieces for New Times, the crusading magazine of the ‘new left’ —edited by Anson’s former Time colleague and lifelong friend Jonathan Z. Larsen — that was a hotbed for rising talents such as Frank Rich, Nina Totenberg, and a score of others.”

Over the years, Mr. Anson also was a contributing editor at Manhattan, Inc. and Esquire, ran Los Angeles magazine, wrote a column for The New York Observer, and was, according to a profile in The Los Angeles Times, among “the last of a breed of broad-shouldered, bare-knuckled, ’70s magazine journalists who will chopper into any hellhole on Earth and come back with an epic story.” Described by The New York Times as “a bear of a man who resembled the actor James Coburn,” Mr. Anson wrote mostly for Vanity Fair, where he was a contributing editor for more than two decades. “Mr. Anson’s byline promised vigorous writing, vivid scene-setting and insight into complicated, sometimes difficult men, of whom he was one.” Among those he profiled were the director Oliver Stone, who at the time was making his controversial movie about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; Tupac Shakur, in a piece written after the rap star’s death; David Geffen, the music mogul, who allowed Mr. Anson a glimpse into his kaleidoscopic life; Bill Clinton in his post-presidency; the imprisoned Green Beret captain Jeffrey MacDonald; and the about-to-be imprisoned music impresario Phil Spector.

“The thing about Bob was that he was both vulnerable and imposing at the same time,” Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair, was quoted in the New York Times obituary. “The wild man of his youth — and he was really out there — gave way to a journalist of towering bravery and ingenuity. Bravery isn’t just about launching yourself into a war zone — although he did that. It’s also the stories you’re willing to take on. Bob was especially brilliant covering the dark side of the male psyche.”

According to David Friend, to many of his friends and colleagues at Vanity Fair, Mr. Anson “was beloved for his camaraderie, compassion, and spirited intensity. A burly, soft-hearted bear of a man, he illuminated many a Vanity Fair party, as writer Marie Brenner puts it, with ‘his gleaming smile and that blond-white shock of hair.’”

He made a similar impression on his Sag Harbor friends, including Paul and Myrna Davis. “We met Robert and Amanda when they moved to Sag Harbor in the ’80s and became good and lasting friends,” recalled Ms. Davis. “He was a formidable story-teller and never boring. His Airstream was the best writing studio ever.”

She was referring to the trailer nicknamed “Bambi” on Mr. Anson’s Sag Harbor property that served as his writing studio. “It was from its quiet recesses that he would peck out his clear-eyed, fearless prose, no holds barred, story by story, day after day, year upon year,” Mr. Friend wrote.

There was time for a social life in Sag Harbor, too. “I first met Robert Sam at the American Hotel the first night I was out here,” remembered the editor and poet Anthony Brandt. “My wife-to-be brought me here on a Friday and that night was the night of the week when the journalists and other newspaper and magazine types met at the big round table under the moose and gossiped, and I wound up sitting next to Robert Sam, who wanted to know what I did for a living. Sensing what was coming, I said, hoping to put him off, ‘I write,’ and he said, ‘Who for?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m writing for The Atlantic now but also American Heritage, but it’s a tough way to make a living.’ He was taken aback. ‘I’ve tried to get into The Atlantic for years.’ Round one to me.”

Mr. Brandt continued: “But we became friends and he was a good friend, quite loyal, a competent cook, and an excellent writer. If he went after a story he really went after it, interviewing everybody even remotely connected to it, and his stories were always consequential and interesting. Aside from my wife, he was the best pure reporter I ever knew. I saw him as a force of nature, someone I would not want as an enemy, but also not as tough as he pretended to be.”

Mr. Anson was married three times, his last wife being Amanda Kyser, with whom he had moved to Sag Harbor almost 40 years ago. He is survived by two sons, Christian Anson Kasperkovitz and Sam Gideon Anson, and a daughter, Georgia Grace Anson. Sam Anson told Vanity Fair, “He spent most of his 75 years on this earth in the orbit of New York and his happiest were in Sag Harbor, where he became a mainstay of the community of writers who took root here.”