Bill Stewart (journalist)

Life and career

Stewart, originally from West Virginia, was a 1963 graduate of The Ohio State University. While at Ohio State, Stewart was active in many extracurricular activities including the Student Senate and the Sphinx honorary society, as well as a member of the Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity. He came to ABC News from WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. An experienced foreign correspondent, Stewart's assignments included coverage of the Iranian Revolution in February 1979. He had been in Nicaragua for ten days reporting on the civil war between the American-backed Somoza dictatorship and the leftist Sandinistas.

Death

On June 20, 1979, Stewart was traveling in a press van in the eastern slums of the capital city of Managua with his camera and sound crew when they were stopped at a roadblock run by the Nicaraguan Guardia (lit. Guardia Nacional, or National Guard), the main force of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The van was clearly marked as a press vehicle as a precaution, which had become standard practice as the insurgency and revolution increased in intensity. On the previous day the government newspaper Novedades had run an editorial describing foreign journalists as "part of the vast network of communist propaganda".

Stewart and his 26-year-old Nicaraguan interpreter, Juan Francisco Espinosa, exited the vehicle and approached the barricade. Stewart presented official press credentials issued by the office of the Nicaraguan president. When they were a few meters away from the soldiers, cameraman Jack Clark spontaneously began filming from inside the van. A guardsman ordered the men to separate, and Stewart was ordered first to kneel and then to lie face down on the ground. A soldier approached Stewart, kicked him once in the ribs, then stepped back and shot him behind his right ear, killing him instantly. Juan Espinosa had been shot to death off-camera by a different soldier, apparently before Stewart was killed, after he approached the guards to ask their permission for an interview. The driver of the ABC van, Pablo Tiffer López, would later testify that a soldier remarked of Stewart, "I'm sure he's no journalist. He's a dog." He also testified that when the soldiers realized they had killed an American journalist they commanded the crew to report that a Sandinista sniper was responsible.

Stewart was 37 years old. He was survived by his wife, Myrna, and his parents. His body was retrieved by his crew and flown on an Air Force C-130 from Nicaragua to Panama, then transferred to an airplane sent by ABC and returned to the United States. Stewart was buried in Ashland, Kentucky.

Impact

The footage of Stewart's killing was smuggled out of the country by his crew and sent to New York. The three major American networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—ran the footage in their evening news broadcasts and repeatedly rebroadcast the clip in the following days. Millions of viewers in the United States and worldwide reacted with shock and outrage towards the Somoza regime. All three networks protested the killings by withdrawing their personnel from the country, with only CBS leaving a single correspondent to cover the conflict. President Jimmy Carter issued a statement describing the murder as "an act of barbarism that all civilized people condemn."

Shortly after the killings, the Nicaraguan national guard reported that they had arrested Corporal Lorenzo Brenes ("Brenis" in some reports), the corporal responsible for Stewart's murder, and that he would be "brought before legal officers". Brenes, who had been in command of the roadblock, testified before a military tribunal that he had not witnessed the shootings. He said that Stewart's killer was a "Private González" who was killed in combat later the same day; this elicited audible reactions of disbelief from the international press corps when announced at an official news conference. Brenes testified that the private, whose first name he claimed not to know (but was later reported as "Pedro"), related to him that he had killed Stewart "because he tried to run away". The ultimate fates of the Guardia soldiers responsible for the killings of Stewart and Espinoza are unknown due to the chaotic demise of Somoza's military regime. Somoza fled Nicaragua for Miami on July 17, and the regime was overthrown on July 19, 1979, less than a month after Stewart's murder.

Under Fire

A fictional version of Stewart's murder was told in the 1983 film, Under Fire, starring Gene Hackman, Nick Nolte, and Joanna Cassidy. Hackman's Alex Grazier and Nolte's Russell Price are amalgamations of Bill Stewart's life and career as a journalist and war correspondent. In the film, Stewart's death is presented differently: Hackman's character is shot in the chest while standing up, and his death is captured in a series of still images by Nolte's character, who escapes from the scene in a hail of gunfire. As in Stewart's case, the images are shown to television audiences around the world, and the public outcry signals the end for the embattled Somoza dictatorship.