Last Updated: April 06, 2000
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An American Editor
Robert Rivard
Birthday: Nov. 17, 1952
Hometown: Born Petoskey, Mich.
Married: Monika Maeckle, an executive with Business Wire, 18-plus
years.
Children: Nick, 15, and Alex, 12.
Self portrait: Driven, energetic, curious, gregarious, optimistic,
confident, and, according to unnamed staffers quoted in The New York Times,
“complex.”
Bad habit: Reading when I should be sleeping.
Pet peeve: Spam e-mail and the inability of anyone to defeat
it.
Most dangerous story: Now that I’m older and smarter, I look
back and wonder why more of us weren’t killed covering civil wars and human
rights abuses in Central America during the early 1980s.
Best interview and why: A toss-up between the three most sinister
men I’ve ever met, all of whom communicated a pathology impossible not
to feel in their presence: Gen. Noriega at the height of his power in Panama;
Roberto D’Aubuisson, the ultra-rightist and godfather of the death squads
in El Salvador, and Nicaragua’s former Interior Minister and Sandinista
junta member Tomas Borge.
My newspaper’s strength: When you read the Express-News, you
know we are located less than three hours from the Mexican border with
one of the nation’s largest Latino populations. We reflect our city well,
I believe, and we are at our best with breaking news and the big
story.
Worst part of job: Losing our valued Mexico City correspondent,
Philip True, who was murdered in Mexico while reporting a story on the
remote Huichol Indians in December 1998. The case against the two suspects
lingers on with no end in sight.
Vacation spot: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico or my remote hunting
lease along the Texas-Mexico border near the small town of Comstock. Occasional
trains moving from coast to coast via El Paso go right by this vast canyon
country, which otherwise has hardly changed with time.
Books at bedside: Galleys of Stephen Harrigan’s “Gates of the
Alamo,” “The Peter Mathiessen Reader” and the “Audubon Field Guide to North
American Fossils.”
