SCRIBE: 30 Years as a Foreign Correspondent in America

Marino de Medici came to Washington in December 1960 to cover political events in the capital for a news agency and four years later he became the U.S. correspondent of a prestigious newspaper of his hometown, il Tempo of Rome. He held that job for 23 years but his insatiable curiosity brought him not just to every US state but to many countries around the world, from Latin America, where he covered coups d’état, to Asia where he interviewed many leaders and reported tumultuous events including the Vietnam conflict as a war correspondent in 1968. Just like a scribe of Roman times who scrupulously annotated the life of the empire, the author saw the history of another empire, America, flow before his eyes as he traveled extensively to cover the dramatic changes of the nation from the days of the civil rights struggles to the end of the Cold War brought about by extraordinary personal negotiations between President Reagan and Secretary Gorbachev. His personal interviews included US presidents, Pinochet, Ferdinand Marcos, Muhammed Ali, and Werner von Braun to name just a few. Over three decades he covered such varies subjects as Charles Manson and Patty Hearst, Chicago 1968, the Civil Rights Movement, the Hippies and Eurocommunism. The inquiring spirit of the Roman scribe offers a different take on thirty years of American history as seen by an outsider who became absorbed in chronicling the American story as a privileged insider. At the time he left Washington for his retirement in Virginia, he was Dean of Foreign Correspondents.