| From the Editor |
By Ann G. Bertini
Photos of Otto DoellingWho likes Japanese gardening, once did an Egyptian wall painting, studied journalism with a future KGB spy and killed off Martin Bormann in print?
His name is Otto Doelling, and he retires at the end of this month after a 43-year AP career, including 15 years as a foreign correspondent.
With AP's news operation relocated to West 33rd, Doelling was nostalgic as he stood in the empty newsroom of 50 Rock.
He likens the longevity of his AP career to a marriage. “Through thick and thin,” he says. “I’m old fashioned. I don’t believe in divorce.”
From Auschwitz and war crimes trials and the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, to the Iranian Revolution and the 1978 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, Doelling has seen his share of major stories. Later, as a World Services executive, he compiled and edited AP's 1998 "Handbook for International Correspondents."
The son of German immigrants, Doelling’s parents settled in the Bronx and emphasized English at home. Though he studied German in school, his skill with the language was honed during his stint as a U.S. Army officer in Germany.
An Army ROTC graduate of City College, he was stationed in Gelnhausen, east of Frankfurt-Main. It was during that time that he met and fell in love with Ingrid Wicht.
“I went with a few Army buddies to a German Mardi Gras dance,” says Doelling. “I was drawn to a blonde in a ‘bird of Paradise’ costume. I had come dressed as an American wearing a crew cut. I asked her to dance and, contrary to expectations, she agreed.”
Doelling says he knew he wanted to write for a living and that journalism was one way to do it. After service in the Army, he got his first reporting job with the Gainesville Sun in Florida. From there he was accepted to Columbia's graduate journalism program. Among his 1959 classmates were future AP President and CEO Louis D. Boccardi and Soviet spy-in-the-making Oleg Kalugin, who was elected class president, as a lark, and later rose to the rank of major general in the KGB.
With his degree, Doelling earned a job with the Army Times in Frankfurt, also affording him the chance to marry Ingrid. Two years later the Army Times’ editorial office in Frankfurt closed and the Doellings returned to the States.
AP's Albany, N.Y., bureau chief Norris Paxton, who had hired the likes of future AP leader Wes Gallagher, gave Otto Doelling his first AP job. He was a newsman in Albany and then a correspondent in Syracuse where he covered the first speech by Richard Nixon after Nixon's loss of the California gubernatorial election (when he told reporters they wouldn't have Richard Nixon "to kick around" any more). After a hallway interview with the future president, Doelling wrote a scoop that, contrary to his prediction, Nixon was planning to reassert his voice in the Republican Party.
After a stint on the Foreign Desk, Doelling got a call from then-Director of Personnel Keith Fuller who asked if he was prepared to go back to Germany. His response was simply, “At what time?”
Back in Frankfurt, he covered war crimes trials and later, as news editor for Central Europe in Bonn, the dissident movement in then-Communist Czechoslovakia. He was the only agency reporter at a news conference finally confirming the death of Martin Bormann, Hitler's top aide whose fate had been a mystery since he fled Hitler's bunker near the end of World War II. Doelling's newsbreak, based on the government's positive identification of Bormann's skull and dentures found buried near a rail line in Berlin, coincided with a much-publicized book claiming that Bormann was alive and well in Brazil. AP President Wes Gallagher, who was visiting Frankfurt at the time and had been bureau chief in Berlin right after the war, quipped to Doelling, "I see you killed off Bormann -- again." The story swept the international play.
Doelling was the night slot editor during the Munich Olympics hostage crisis that ended in the death of nine Israeli athletes. He recalls German television reporting in error that the hostages had been rescued, then retracting and suddenly going off the air. Doelling went on to cover eight more Olympic summer and winter games.
It was also in Germany that Doelling realized his aesthetic side. While based in Bonn, he had the sudden urge to do an Egyptian wall painting on a 15-foot slab separating two levels of his living room. “It took about three years to complete. Right after I finished, I was mysteriously reassigned to Cairo,” Doelling wrote in a 1991 30th service anniversary letter.
He served briefly as Cairo bureau chief before taking over as Nicosia-based chief of Middle East Services in 1977. In Tehran in 1979, he covered the climax of the Iranian Revolution, from the departure of the Shah to the triumphant return of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini and the executions of the Shah's leading generals. He returned to the United States in 1980 and served as UN correspondent for seven years before being named to the World Services department.
Doelling's creative urge struck again back in the States. He developed an interest in Japanese gardening and promptly created one in his New Jersey backyard. In fact, Doelling admits, it remains a long-held fantasy of his to study with the masters in Japan's world-renowned Kyoto gardens. But, he acknowledges, he'll probably scale down that fantasy and settle for recreating another garden when he and Ingrid relocate to Seattle where their two adult children, Christine and Marco, now live. (July 22, 2004)