Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture
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The 29th annual Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture was presented by New York Times correspondent David Rohde on February 4, 2010. Each year, the Morris Lecture recognizes an American overseas correspondent or commentator on foreign affairs.
Rohde is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who has covered the conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine and the Balkans. He also is the author of “Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II.”
While on assignment in 2008, Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban and held in captivity for more than seven months in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He escaped in June 2009 and wrote a five-part series about his experience for The Times. Rohde also served as his newspaper’s South Asia bureau co-chief in New Delhi from 2002 to 2005. He joined The Times in 1996 and worked as a reporter on the metropolitan desk for five years.
The Morris Lecture honors Joe Alex Morris Jr., a 1949 Harvard graduate who worked as a Middle East correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Morris was killed in February 1979 while covering the Iranian Revolution in Tehran. The Nieman Foundation awarded him the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity posthumously in the fall of 1981. The lecture series in his name, which was established by Morris’ family, Harvard classmates and friends, began at the Nieman Foundation the following year.