Richard Critchfield, newspaper reporter and author, was born March 23, 1931 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Raised in Fargo, North Dakota, and Seattle, Washington, he experienced a heightened interest in foreign people and places during a family trip to Paris, Bavaria, and Italy in 1950. This interest was to grow and become a major influence on his later career. In 1953, he graduated from the University of Washington with a major in Far Eastern studies, and then served with the Army in Korea from 1953 to 1955.
Though Critchfield had written and drawn cartoons for his college newspaper, his real involvement with journalism began in 1955 when he was hired by the Cedar Rapids Gazette published near his mother's home in Viola, Iowa. In 1956, he went to the Cedar Valley Daily Times, Vinton, Iowa, until his acceptance that same year at the Columbia School of Journalism. He received his M.S. in June 1957 and, after writing his thesis on editorial cartoons and cartoonists and considering becoming a cartoonist, decided to stick to news writing and obtained his first major journalism job with the Munroe News Bureau, Washington, D.C. The Bureau served the Farm Journal magazine, the Deseret News and Telegram, and several other papers.
Critchfield left Munroe in March 1958 for three terms of graduate study at the universities of Innsbruck and Vienna. During vacations, he taught English at a Hungarian refugee center in Linz, Austria. A 1959 trip around the world roused Critchfield's further interest in the Far East, and on his return to the U.S., he studied Indian history for one quarter at Northwestern University, then left to teach journalism at India's University of Nagpur.
At Nagpur, Critchfield continued earlier attempts at writing fiction, spent the summers tramping the Himalayas with resultant articles appearing in the Christian Science Monitor, and achieved fame as the central figure in an incident which bore evidence of being a Communist propaganda exercise. After being charged with anti-Indian activities, particularly with drawing an offensive political cartoon, Critchfield was relieved of his teaching position amid hints that he secretly worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The 1962 Chinese invasion of India's northern borders interrupted Critchfield's plans to return home. He seized his opportunity, gained a retainer from The Washington Star, and wrote as a special correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. With the war's end that winter, Critchfield briefly returned home, then freelanced his way through Egypt and Turkey and back to India. In January 1964, he found himself the only U.S. reporter in Kashmir when religious and political riots broke out there among the Moslem residents. His coverage led to an offer from the Star to join their staff and an assignment
in May to Vietnam.
With temporary absences to cover Nehru's funeral, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, and, occasionally, Chinese activities from Hong Kong, Critchfield covered the Vietnam War from May 1964 to December 1967. At first concerned more with the military aspects of the war, Critchfield won the Overseas Press Club award for “best daily newspaper reporting from abroad in 1965” for a series on the Marines. However, he soon became more immersed in the political intrigue he found and gradually evolved the theories later published in his book The Long Charade. The book, written during a 6-month leave of absence from the Star and published in 1968, pointed out what he felt were major American misconceptions about the war and the Vietnamese leadership. Critchfield contended that several Republic of South Vietnam leaders, including then Premier Ky, were members or allies of the secret Dai Viet party and were actually working for their own control of South Vietnam, rather than defeat of the Communist forces. The real problem of the war was political subversion and only by purging the northern-born Dai Viets could the U.S. hope to create a popular-based and potentially successful government for South Vietnam. The book created an uproar abroad but a disappointing lack of reaction in the U.S.
From June 1968 to September 1969, Critchfield headquartered in Washington, reporting on labor and national politics, part of the time as the Star's #2 White House correspondent. His continuing interest in foreign people, now developing into more of an anthropological interest, led to another leave of absence, 1969-1971, during which he studied the population explosion, the agricultural “green revolution,” and the upheaval experienced by people facing related rapid cultural change. Financed partly by a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Fund, Critchfield lived with five different families in different countries using them as case studies of the problems faced by their cultures. His observations from the Punjab, Java, Mauritius, Iraq, and French North Africa were published by the Fund as eighteen reports, 1970-1971, and were later condensed into a book entitled The Golden Bowl Be Broken (Indiana University Press, 1973).
September 1971 found Critchfield back at the Star as a special projects writer, working on articles which tried to relate policy and issues to the lives of ordinary people. However, it was clear the Star did not intend to send him overseas again, which was where his main interests lay, so Critchfield explored possibilities in academic anthropology studies or grant support for further research like that for The Golden Bowl Be Broken. In July 1972 he began a tour financed by the Ford Foundation.
During the years 1972-1978 Critchfield spent time in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, the Mid-East and Africa, living in small villages, participating in the daily routine of the villagers and concentrating on the problems of his previous book. The character of his work was somewhat changed because the Ford Foundation which provided financing was primarily interested in newpaper and magazine articles on the lives and problems of villagers in the Third World, rather than books or the pure studies done earlier for the Alicia Patterson Fund. In fact, these were Critchfield's most active years as a freelance journalist (the most profitable being 1978), in which he started and then consolidated his relations with the Economist and the Christian Science Monitor. In 1974, Critchfield began a study in Egypt which eventually resulted in the book Shahhat, An Egyptian, published in November, 1978, by Syracuse University Press.
The Ford Foundation project included two rapid tours of Asia, one in 1973 and the other in 1978, during which he did short studies on the technological and agricultural advances in these villages. The difference between the two was striking. While the 1973 tour had left him pessimistic, by 1978 there had been spectacular breakthroughs in birth control and agricultural modernization in most of the countries he had studied. Critchfield was greatly encouraged by the villagers' capacity to solve their problems of food shortage and people surplus by harnessing technology. Because of these studies, the Monitor proposed his work for a Pulitizer prize in 1973 and again in 1979.
In 1977, before his second tour of Asia, Critchfield was able to spend time in Latin America, studying villages in the mornings, and reading in anthropology in the afternoons. This was a time of taking stock, comparing his findings to those of anthropologists and formulating his own theories of “the universal peasant culture.” Based on this reading and his experience over the years, Critchfield eventually wrote two long studies for American Universities Field Staff. In 1978 Critchfield began to prepare a new book, Villages (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981), which is a summary of his ten year study of the Third World culture.
The preparation and promotion of Villages kept Critchfield busy for most of 1980-81. He worked on the expansion of his studies to include the all-important East Asian, Confucian, Japanese leadership in developing regions, plus updating Mexico and doing a short village study in Sri Lanka, the last country in Asia he had not yet visited. In 1981, he also did a short village study in Kenya, some interviewing, and a cross-country lecture tour of the U.S. to promote the book. By the end of 1981, Critchfield had completed thirteen village studies outside of the U.S., an average of one per year since 1970.
Upon winning the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1981, the majority of Critchfield's time during the years 1982 and 1985 was spent on a new study. Critchfield examined his own family past and projected his study as a “Manuscript on Cultural and Agricultural, Rural-Urban Change in 1880 to 1940 as Seen in the Life of an American Family.” It served as both a continuation and departure from his village work. The final outcome of this project was the book, Those Days (Doubleday, 1986). Critchfield's writings about the Third World were largely based on dialogue with the villagers with whom he lived, but he based this American story on interviews, mostly done with elderly people. Those Days is a history of Anne Williams Critchfield (1887-1982), as set down by her and other family members in 1959-1960, with brief additions by her in 1981-1982, supplemented by many interviews. As in his village writings, Critchfield desired to show how man's culture, defined as a ready-made design for living handed down from father to son, is decided by how he gets his food. The central idea advanced in Villages was that village life was not only vital in itself, but is still the fundamental basis of all civilized behavior, including our own. The story line in Those Days seeks to illustrate an era in American cultural history, the sixty years leading up to World War II, in which all the characters have been caught up in circumstances beyond their control, captives of their time and culture. Upon completion of Those Days, Critchfield undertook another cross-country tour to promote it.
Presently, Critchfield is working on a new book to be coauthored with Norman E. Borlaug on world rural technological and cultural change and how to save the family farm in America. Critchfield himself will be writing the book, but it will be based on extensive interviews with Dr. Borlaug. He plans to do research in the Mid-West and another rapid tour of Asia to get up to date on previously done research in the Third World. The projected publishing date is early 1989.
