Rod Nordland’s journey from The Daily Collegian to the world’s most dangerous war zones defined a career of courage and compassion. An award-winning international correspondent, Nordland ’72 Com reported from more than 150 countries, covering conflicts and wars in such places as Vietnam, Lebanon, El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Photojournalist Gary Knight says it was an “amazing gift” to work with Nordland, who wrote “incredibly difficult, complex stories in some of the worst places in the world and rarely failed.” Knight says his former colleague and close friend was “an extraordinary and rare journalist” who lived for his craft and was a master at getting into places quickly and efficiently. For instance, in 1996, when eight climbers were killed on Mount Everest, Nordland left London and reached base camp in Nepal within about 24 hours. He survived an unsuccessful attempt by terrorists to take him hostage and spent two months inside Middle East terrorist camps—the latter of which resulted in a 1986 Newsweek cover story.
Nordland’s first paid reporting job was at his hometown paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. A few years later, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer in international reporting. He became Newsweek’s chief foreign correspondent in 1984 and joined The New York Times in 2009. He was honored by Penn State with both the Alumni Fellow and Distinguished Alumni awards.
Knight says Nordland was driven by a challenging upbringing, which he chronicled in his 2024 memoir, Waiting for the Monsoon. The book also explores his battle with glioblastoma, a brain cancer diagnosed in 2019. He died June 18, 2025, at age 75, and is survived by his wife, Leila Segal, and three children: Lorine, Johanna, and Jake. —Katherine O’Brien
Read Nordland's "Waiting for the Monsoon," a reprint of an essay that originally appeared in The New York Times, from our January/February 2020 issue.
