The Press: Old Orient Hand

The best daily newspaper in Thailand is edited by a wiry, wearily patient American named Darrell Berrigan. An expatriate newsman and longtime resident of Bangkok. Berrigan got his newspaper last year through an orientally inscrutable tactic—he wrote a magazine article charging that Thailand's chief cop, General Phao Sriyanond, was also Thailand's biggest opium smuggler. General Phao was impressed. With characteristic Thai logic, he apparently reasoned that any newsman intimate enough with the country's boatmen, taxi drivers, prostitutes and businessmen to put together such a report would make an ideal editor. Phao hired...