Remembering John McBeth, 1944-2023

I first met John McBeth during South Korea’s long summer of tear gas and set-piece street battles between students and riot police in 1987. It was early in Korea’s long struggle for democracy. I was a new visitor to the country. He was already a well-known journalist. I went to his office at the Far Eastern Economic Review, where he was the bureau chief, not sure what to expect.

He asked me what I wanted and I rattled off a string of mutual friends and colleagues. With his deep Kiwi accent, he offered me a chair and gave generously his time as he filled me in on the Korea story for an hour or more. The advice was helpful but the friendship that grew from that encounter over the years was a rare treasure.

The last conversation I had with John in Jakarta shortly before he died started with him telling me about his brutal and unforgiving illness. He hoped to hang on for a couple of more years but he took the diagnosis at face value, explained it without emotion, and then the conversation moved on to stories, as it always did with McBeth. We discussed the coming 2024 Indonesian elections, speculated on the health of the powerful cabinet minister Luhut Pandjaitan, and made plans to get together with a few friends after he finished his radiation therapy.

For many journalists, the death of McBeth really does feel like the end of an era. Not only did he cover many amazing stories – from Cambodia’s tragedy under the Khmer Rouge to breaking the news of North Korea developing a nuclear bomb. He traveled widely to cover the Philippines when we were both based there for a short time and he was on hand for the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta in 1998 and the downfall of Suharto. In everything he did, he took journalism seriously and tried to impart his values to readers and younger reporters.

The son of a New Zealand farming family, he began his career in 1962 on his hometown paper, the Taranaki Herald, before moving to the Auckland Star in 1965. In 1970, he boarded a cargo vessel and headed for Fleet Street, but the ship literally ran aground in Jakarta and McBeth stayed for awhile before moving to Bangkok and joining the Bangkok Post.

He eventually landed a job with the Far Eastern Economic Review, which at the time was almost the publication of record for the region – opinionated, thorough and sometimes impenetrably complex. He was with the Review in Bangkok, Seoul, Manila, and finally Jakarta until the magazine began its decline toward closure in 2009.

In Bangkok, he met and later married one of Indonesia’s best journalists, Yuli Ismartono, and the two became something of a media power couple, sought after for their views on regional politics and the state of journalism. They were a good match.

He wrote two books. In 2011, he published Reporter: forty years covering Asia. Then in 2016, he published The Loner: President Yudhoyono’s decade of trial and indecision, a book about the 10 years that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono spent as president of Indonesia. Both are recommended readings.

Up until his final days, John’s passion for journalism was never far from the surface. He insisted, quite correctly I believe, that much of modern journalism, with its reliance on Google search and other technological tools, had lost the art of interviewing people, developing sources, and traveling to find out about places in the news.

To the end, McBeth was still breaking stories, writing about new things, and tracking the complex politics of Indonesia. He was always among the best journalists covering the country and he did it one source at a time. He called lots of people to ask about something he had heard, to check back or to look for a tip. “Talking to people is the only way to really know what is going on,” he would tell other reporters. He could be a scold at times, certainly, but he was also right.

John held to a Gold Standard among good journalists: he never betrayed or revealed a source. Having been a source of his as well as a colleague at one time, I knew I could trust him to both get the information right and keep my name out of it. Ultimately, people talked to John because he had earned their trust.

I am proud to have known John McBeth and to have been counted among his friends. I miss him.

A. Lin Neumann is a former Asia-based journalist and editor. Since 2015, he has been the Managing Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia.