Caryle Murphy, who earned a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait, died on Oct. 19 in Fairfax County, Va. She was 79. Her husband, Herbert Howe, said she died from viral pneumonia. Murphy famously got off her sickbed to cover the conflict for The Washington Post.
Caryle Murphy, whose intense, monthlong coverage of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 for The Washington Post — an assignment that ended with her escape to Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein’s forces — earned her a Pulitzer Prize, died on Oct. 19 in Fairfax County, Va. She was 79.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by viral pneumonia, her husband, Herbert Howe, said. In 2015, Ms. Murphy had been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and three years later received a lung transplant.
Ms. Murphy was The Post’s bureau chief in Cairo in late July 1990, when David Ignatius, the paper’s foreign editor, called to tell her there was reliable information that the Iraqis were likely to invade. At the time, she had a mysterious ailment that left her struggling to stay awake.
“I said, ‘Can you possibly get to Kuwait?’” Mr. Ignatius recalled in an interview. “She got off her sickbed and was one of the few correspondents from American journalism in Kuwait when the tanks rolled in.”