Barrie Dunsmore

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Barrie Dunsmore covered foreign affairs for ABC News for thirty years, reporting from Washington and abroad on the foreign policies of seven U.S. presidents. He traveled with them overseas and was a regular on the planes of their secretaries of state. From 1965-95 he reported from well over one hundred countries on virtually every major international event—from summits to wars to diplomatic shuttles. From the height of the Cold War to its end, he was most often ABC News' reporter-on-the-scene: when Israeli troops captured the Suez Canal in 1967; when Saigon fell in 1975; when Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981; when U.S. and Soviet top officials met; when SCUD missiles were falling on Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War in 1991.

As ABC's senior foreign correspondent from 1984-91, Dunsmore focused on events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as the Iron Curtain began to disintegrate. Throughout 1989 he was present at the dramatic moments in the fall of communism in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Sofia and in Berlin, where he reported live for ABC News Nightline the night the wall began to come down.

Dunsmore had a worldwide scoop on the Soviet invasion of Afganistan in 1979 and was the first to report the normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations. He also did the first U.S. television report on the destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil.

He received an Emmy for his coverage of the 1973 Mid-East War. He was given the Overseas Press Club Award for his reporting on the Sadat assassination and its aftermath in 1981. In 1995, the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University awarded him its Weintal Prize for excellence in diplomatic reporting.

In 1995, he became a fellow at the Shorenstein Center of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His extensive study on the potential consequences of live television coverage of war, The Next War-Live?, was published by Harvard in 1996. Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School, described it as "exactly the kind of balanced, thoughtful and probing analysis of which the school can be proud."

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