Derek Williams dies after decades filming the frontlines of Asia

Longtime CBS News cameraman Derek Williams, who spent four decades covering some of Asia’s most pivotal events, from the Vietnam War to the Tiananmen Square massacre, died July 22. He was 79. Williams died Wednesday, according to his family. He had been living with Parkinson’s disease and was recently diagnosed with cancer. Susan Zirinsky, former CBS News president and president of See It Now Studios, recalled that Williams was “everything — the mate you would want in any war zone.” She described him as “intuitive,” “a great cameraman,” and said “he saw things coming before they came.” “Most of all Derek was a great human — a group of us were privileged to be on a frequent email of his world today — each email was like a visual portrait that he might have shot if covering a story,” Zirinsky said. “My last email from him was July 2nd. Hard to imagine a world that doesn’t have Derek’s humor and vision and humanity in it. I miss the emails already.” “I’m deeply saddened to hear of Derek Williams’s passing,” CBS News veteran Dan Rather said in a social media post. “He was one of the bravest and a great CBS News cameraman. The images he captured beautifully told the story of a dangerous world — from the Middle East to South Asia and beyond. He was also a great man.” Williams began his career with a three-month trial working for CBS in Hong Kong. “I remember that night going back to the hotel and I couldn’t sleep, I was feeling sort of ill, and I felt, is this right? Is this how I want to spend the rest of my life, almost being a vulture?” Williams told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2017. “I was doing sound with a very professional German cameraman, who just said, ‘Hey, you’ll used to it. You know, you’ll get a rhino-skin in this job,'” Williams said in 2017. Williams went on to be a cameraman working in Asia for 40 years, and also covered the first Iraq War and massacres in Beirut. Allen Pizzey, former CBS News foreign correspondent, recalled Beirut in 1982, saying “Chaos the order of the day.” “A CBS newbie nobody, who knew next to nothing about TV, was foisted on Derek Williams. With patience and his ever-present humour, Derek tutored me how to go about making air, and more important, stay safe while doing it,” Pizzey, who spent 36 years at CBS News, said. “We worked together — although not often enough — for the next several decades, in similar garden spots. If it ever wasn’t fun, I can’t remember the occasion.” Pizzey said Williams “was as fine a man, mentor and friend as he was a cameraman. That’s another way of saying the best.” In June 1989, Williams and CBS News correspondent Richard Roth were detained by Chinese authorities during the Tiananmen Square massacre. They would eventually be released, relatively unharmed. As Saigon’s fall became imminent, Williams told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he married his Vietnamese girlfriend after intelligence officers warned him the city would soon collapse. He said he used poker winnings to bribe a registry office to open on a Sunday for the wedding, then convinced New Zealand Embassy staff — who were scrambling to evacuate — to issue his new wife a passport the next day. Williams had been living in California with his wife since leaving Asia, but as his health declined, he returned to New Zealand to be closer to family. Keith Kay, a former cameraman and producer in Vietnam, said Williams was “a joy and privilege to work or play with.” “I felt lucky to have him in my life,” Kay said. There was a palpable wave of grief as the news spread around the world, not just among veteran groups like the Vietnam Old Hacks and the William Boot Society, but also younger generations of journalists Williams had mentored and regaled with tales of journalism past in his inimitable and sonorous cut-glass Kiwi English. “CBS News cameraman, Emmy winner, Peabody winner and one of the founding partners of AsiaWorks,” said Marc Laban, who visited him early in the final month, referring to a Bangkok-based news organization that Williams co-founded in 1996 after his CBS retirement. “Derek covered some of the defining events of the late 20th century, and did so with a courage and quiet decency that set him apart.” “I’m deeply saddened to hear of Derek Williams’s passing,” Dan Rather, the CBS News anchor for 24 years, posted. “He was one of the bravest and a great CBS News cameraman. The images he captured beautifully told the story of a dangerous world — from the Middle East to South Asia and beyond. He was also a great man.” Denis Gray, a former longtime Bangkok bureau chief with The Associated Press, said: “I knew Derek since the Vietnam War and was with him on other assignments. Two things stand out in my memory – he never seemed to lose his cool or his sense of humor and he never bragged about his many exploits in the field. It was just his job.” Derek Paul Williams was born in New Zealand just after World War II to the Rev. Philip Williams, an Anglican vicar. With no interest in university but good grades in physics, he trained as a sound technician with the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in Invercargill and Wellington before moving in 1971 to the CBS News bureau in Hong Kong, where he was based until 1989 before he moved to Bangkok. Arriving in Asia dressed in polyester, Williams soon acclimatized. He was almost immediately dropped into covering the refugee exodus from Bangladesh to India. He went on to cover student riots in Tokyo, the last years of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the Thammasat University student massacre in Bangkok in October 1976, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Beirut and the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s, ‘People Power’ in the Philippines in 1986, China’s Tiananman Square in 1989, and Operation Desert Storm in 1991. In 1975, his exploits included getting the chargé d’affaires to crowbar a passport out of a trunk at the New Zealand embassy so he could extract his new wife Hà on one of the final flights out as Saigon fell. When the Soviets invaded Kabul in late 1979, Williams teamed up with a Turkish film crew comprising Ufuk Ur and the late Hami Sami. They all ended up under house arrest in the Inter-Continental Hotel Kabul along with Hugh van Es, the late photographer, who was on assignment from Time magazine, and Robert Reid, then of AP. The arrestees conspired to help the Baltimore Sun’s Bradley K. Martin avoid the police who wanted to arrest him, too, according to Martin, who is now Asia Times associate editor. Reid told Asia Times that during such “moments in time” when they were sharing assignments “Derek’s infectious good humor made the experiences not simply tolerable but entertaining and unforgettable.” In Beijing, during the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, Williams was arrested at gunpoint with CBS correspondent, Richard Roth, marched off to the Great Hall of the People and interrogated on a school chair at dawn inside the Forbidden City. “They and other fellow foreign arrestees were released later that day after signing confessions and releases absolving the Chinese government of any blame in their arrest,” van Es’s wife Annie wrote. “Derek flew back to HK, was met by his wife Hà, Hugh and Annie van Es and the whole Hong Kong press corps at Kai Tak airport and headed, of course, straight to the FCC for his staple Shepherd’s Pie and not-so-staple cognac to calm his nerves.” Derek Williams is survived by his wife Hà, sons Vũ and Dzũng, grandson Niko, and siblings Pip, Chrissie and Tim, who were by his side during his last days. A wake will be held at the FCCT on Sunday August 2 from 4 pm. Please contact info@fccthai.com for Zoom access. Hà and Tim will carry his ashes to Bangkok to be scattered into the Chao Phraya after Buddhist rites. This obituary has been compiled largely from those produced by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, CBS News and New Zealand’s Asia Media Centre.