Kate Webb was a New Zealand-born Australian war correspondent for UPI and Agence France-Presse.
23 Facts About Kate Webb
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Kate Webb earned a reputation for dogged and fearless reporting throughout the Vietnam War, and at one point she was held prisoner for weeks by North Vietnamese troops.
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On 30 March 1958, at the age of 15, Catherine Kate Webb was charged with the murder of Victoria Fenner, the adopted daughter of Frank Fenner, in Canberra.
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Kate Webb supplied a rifle and bullets to Fenner and was present when Fenner shot herself in what was intended as a Suicide pact.
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Kate Webb's parents were killed in a car accident in Tasmania when she was 18.
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Kate Webb graduated from the University of Melbourne, then left to work for the Sydney Daily Mirror.
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Kate Webb then worked for local South Vietnamese newspapers until Ann Bryan the editor of Overseas Weekly gave her assignments and arranged her MACV press accreditation allowing her to cover US military operations.
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Frank Fenner 8.
Kate Webb began receiving assignments from UPI and as a non-US passport holder and French speaker was assigned to report on Jacqueline Kennedy's visit to Cambodia in November 1967.
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Kate Webb was the first wire service reporter to reach the US Embassy in Saigon during the Tet offensive.
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Kate Webb's reporting of the Embassy attack led to her being employed full-time by UPI, initially as a gofer for Dan Southerland.
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Kate Webb earned a reputation as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking war correspondent.
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Kate Webb received work from UPI in Pittsburgh staying there into early 1970.
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Kate Webb described her experiences in a book called On the Other Side published in 1972.
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Kate Webb was reassigned to the Philippines as the UPI bureau chief in Manila.
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Kate Webb briefly returned to Phnom Penh in July 1973, reporting on the effects of continued US bombing on the country.
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Kate Webb then moved to Jakarta where she worked in public relations for a hotel and began a long-term relationship with John Stearman, an American oil engineer.
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Kate Webb returned to journalism in 1985 joining Agence France-Presse serving as a correspondent in Iraq during the Gulf War, in Indonesia as Timor-Leste gained independence, and in South Korea, where she was the first to report the death of Kim Il Sung.
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Kate Webb reported from Afghanistan, and later described an incident in Kabul as the most frightening in her career.
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Kate Webb finally escaped with the help of two fellow journalists, and hid out on a window ledge in the freezing Afghan winter, while the warlord and his men searched the building for her.
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Kate Webb returned to Cambodia in 1993 and made her final visit to Vietnam in 2000.
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Kate Webb wrote an essay for War Torn, a collection of reminiscences by women correspondents in the Vietnam War and taught journalism for a year Ohio University.
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Kate Webb was commemorated on an Australian postage stamp in 2017.
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Kate Webb is survived by a brother, Jeremy Webb, and a sister, Rachel Miller.