The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand expresses its deepest condolences to the family, colleagues and many friends of Derek Williams, an FCCT honorary life member and club stalwart who was a key player in the club’s move to the Maneeya Centre nearly 30 years ago.
Williams and his wife Hà moved from Thailand to the United States in 2017 to be closer to her family, their son and a grandson. His health declined with the onset of Parkinson’s, and in 2025 he relocated back to New Zealand, his home country. Early this year he was diagnosed with inoperable oesophageal cancer, and posted that he was not expecting to see Christmas.
Indeed, showing his characteristic courage and rationality, he opted for the assisted dying option in Christchurch on Wednesday. “Derek had a peaceful and gentle death this morning,” his sister Chrissie messaged.
There was a palpable wave of grief as the news spread around the world, not just among veteran groups like the Vietnam Old Hacks and the William Boot Society, but also younger generations of journalists Williams had mentored and regaled with tales of journalism past in his inimitable and sonorous cut-glass Kiwi English.
“CBS News cameraman, Emmy winner, Peabody winner and one of the founding partners of AsiaWorks,” said Marc Laban, who visited him early in the final month. “Derek covered some of the defining events of the late 20th century, and did so with a courage and quiet decency that set him apart. He was my business partner, my mentor and my friend. The world of broadcast journalism has lost a legend. I've lost something harder to name.”
“Derek was very much a mentor to me — not so much in the technical side of the trade, but in how to carry yourself and how to understand the story you were covering,” said Jason Bleibtreu, a Bangkok-based cameraman for many years who visited Derek in Christchurch in June. “We shared laughs and tears, and reminisced about the big stories and the small ones. When we talked about Mother Teresa, he told me he now understood her concept of the Home for the Dying — that he had reached that phase himself. I was grateful for the chance to tell him what he meant to me.”
“In 2008, when I was a hungry, aspiring, freelance video imposter with a Canon 5D in Afghanistan, I wrote to Derek, asking him for contacts at CBS in New York,” said Roger Arnold, a freelance cameraman. “It was a rather arrogant, foolish and naïve request. But the legend not only gave me the contacts — he wrote to the head commissioning editor to get me a meeting.”
“Uncle Derek. I’ve known you since I was four years old,” said Thailand’s Emmy-winning documentarian Pailin Wedel. “You have been a mentor, a supporter all my life. You had a knack for telling me exactly what I needed to hear to keep going in this career. You are missed already.”
“I’m deeply saddened to hear of Derek Williams’s passing,” Dan Rather, the CBS News anchor for 24 years, posted. “He was one of the bravest and a great CBS News cameraman. The images he captured beautifully told the story of a dangerous world — from the Middle East to South Asia and beyond. He was also a great man.”
“I will always remember Derek’s kindness and great encouragement,” said Jum Supattra Vimonsuknopparat, a producer with ABC News in Bangkok. “We often ran into each other in the hallway, and he could always tell when I was going through a hard time and say something that immediately cheered me up.”
Denis Gray, a former FCCT president and longtime Bangkok bureau chief with The Associated Press, said: “I knew Derek since the Vietnam War and was with him on other assignments. Two things stand out in my memory – he never seemed to lose his cool or his sense of humour and he never bragged about his many exploits in the field. It was just his job.”
“No matter the circumstances his positive spirit always shone through,” said Australian journalist Evan Williams. “By example, he taught me to be more respectful. Calling drivers ‘the minister of transport’ [was] just one humorous but important example. He was one of life’s true gents.”
Scott Heidler, formerly with Al Jazeera English, recalled one of his earliest Thai stories working with Derek: “[It] was running through my head on this shoot, here’s a photog who worked with 60 Minutes, covered the Tiananmen Square massacre – and I had him shooting a Thai celebrity chef. We did get a free meal out of it!”
Williams was born just after World War II to Rev. Philip Williams, the Anglican vicar of Queenstown, and his wife Jean. He was raised in Lawrence, Roxburgh, Waikouaiti (north of Dunedin) and Gore. With no interest in university but good grades in physics, he trained as a sound technician with the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in Invercargill and Wellington before moving in 1971 to the CBS News bureau in Hong Kong, where he was based until 1989 before he moved to Bangkok.
After leaving CBS, he co-founded AsiaWorks in 1996 with Marc Laban, Heather Kelly and David McKaige, effectively creating a major Asia broadcasting hub in the penthouse of the Maneeya, where the FCCT relocated after the Asian financial crisis. The company’s Rolodex overflowed after Laban and McKaige filmed Nate Thayer’s encounters with Cambodia’s genocidal Pol Pot along the Thai border in late 1997.
Arriving in Asia dressed in polyester, Williams soon acclimatized. He was almost immediately dropped into covering the refugee exodus from Bangladesh to India. He went on to cover student riots in Tokyo, the last years of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the Thammasat University student massacre in Bangkok in October 1976, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Beirut and the Iran-Iraq war in the early 1980s, ‘People Power’ in the Philippines in 1986, China’s Tiananman Square in 1989, and Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
In 1975, his exploits included getting the chargé d’affaires to crowbar a passport out of a trunk at the New Zealand embassy so he could extract his new wife Hà on one of the final flights out as Saigon fell.
When the Soviets invaded Kabul in late 1979, Williams encountered a Turkish film crew with “the unlikely names of Hami Sami and Ufuk Ur”. He ended up under house arrest in the Holiday Inn with Hugh van Es, who was on assignment to Time magazine. In Beijing, during the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, he was arrested at gunpoint with CBS correspondent, Richard Roth, marched off to the Great Hall of the People and interrogated on a school chair at dawn inside the Forbidden City.
“They and other fellow foreign arrestees were released later that day after signing confessions and releases absolving the Chinese government of any blame in their arrest,” van Es’s wife Annie wrote. “Derek flew back to HK, was met by his wife Hà, Hugh and Annie van Es and the whole Hong Kong press corps at Kai Tak airport and headed, of course, straight to the FCC for his staple Shepherd’s Pie and not-so-staple cognac to calm his nerves.”
In 2008, Williams filmed Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej in an interview by Selina Downes for Al Jazeera’s 101 East. When she touched on Samak’s infamous role in stirring up violence against the students at Thammasat University on October 6, 1976 – which left at least 46 people dead by the official count – the prime minister dismissed it as “dirty history”, and said only one person died.
“I filmed that interview and I had to restrain myself from jumping up and punching him on the nose,” Williams later recalled. “I had seen him at Sanam Luang the day before [the massacre]. He was driving a little Austin … and came out to visit the crowd.”
“He was such a regular at the bar, always perched on the stool near the balcony and open to chatting with younger hacks like us,” recalled Marwaan Macan-Markar, a former FCCT president and Nikkei Asia regional correspondent.
“The club was poorer for his departure, literally,” said Dominic Faulder, another former FCCT president and Nikkei Asia associate editor. “Derek was a living piece of history who contributed to some memorable club programmes. He occasionally muddled his Thai coups, but that’s understandable when you’ve seen so many. His loyalty to friends like Neil Davis and Bill Latch, who were killed in a failed coup in Bangkok in 1985, and colleagues like Somyot Pisapark, his longtime soundman who died of cancer in 2015, was a hallmark of his personality.”
At his valedictory evening at the FCCT in 2017, New Zealand Ambassador Ben King lauded the veteran Kiwi journalist: “You’re really a great package of New Zealand. Your adventure and your curiosity and your willingness to give things a go and look at things a bit differently are all great characteristics of our country. We have been very lucky to have had you as one of ours out here in this part of the world for decades.”
Derek Williams is survived by his wife Hà, sons Vũ and Dzũng, grandson Niko, and siblings Pip, Chrissie and Tim, who were by his side during his last days. Hà and Tim will carry his ashes to Bangkok to be scattered into the Chao Phraya after Buddhist rites.
A wake will be held for Derek Williams at the FCCT on Sunday 2 August from 4pm.
Please contact info@fccthai.com for Zoom access.
FCCT programmes with Derek Williams on YouTube ‘FCCT Events’.
1. Thirty Years On: The Killing of Neil Davis and Bill Latch
2. 10 October 2016 Witnesses to History Thammasat University Forty Years Ago
3. 12 May 2017 Derek Williams Farewell
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