Mark Bowden

For other people named Mark Bowden, see Mark Bowden (disambiguation).

Mark Bowden (/ˈbaʊdən/; born 1951) is an American journalist and writer. He is a former national correspondent and longtime contributor to The Atlantic. Bowden is best known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, which was later adapted into a motion picture of the same name that received two Academy Awards.

Mark Bowden
Bowden in 2018
Born	1951 (age 72–73) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Occupation	Author
Education	Loyola University Maryland (B.A.)
Notable works	Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War; Hue 1968

Bowden is also known for the books Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001), about the efforts to take down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and Hue 1968, an account of the Battle of Huế.

Early life

Bowden was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1951. He graduated from Loyola University Maryland in 1973 with a B.A in English literature. While he was at college, he was inspired to embark on a career in journalism by reading Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Career

From 1979 to 2003, Bowden was a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. In that role he researched and wrote Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, both of which appeared as lengthy serials in the newspaper before being published as books. He published two books prior to these, Doctor Dealer and Bringing the Heat, both of which were based on reporting he originally did for the newspaper. He has since published twelve other books. Bowden wrote the 1997 Playboy profile of Donald Trump.

Bowden is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Men's Journal, Sports Illustrated, Air Mail, Business Insider, and Rolling Stone.

He has taught journalism and creative writing at Loyola University Maryland, and was Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Delaware from 2013 to 2017.

Former Florida State Seminoles football coach Bobby Bowden is his first cousin once removed.

Criticism

From June 2012 through March 2013, the legal blog Trials & Tribulations (T&T), which reports on California trials and legal affairs, ran a seven-part series titled "Fact Checking Mark Bowden's Curious Vanity Fair Article on Stephanie Lazarus". This series disputes elements of Bowden's July 2012 Vanity Fair article, "A Case So Cold It Was Blue". The author suggests that Bowden may have created quotes and states of mind of principals to fit his story, and questions whether the journalist had conducted relevant interviews or attended a single day of the murder trial of former LAPD detective Stephanie Lazarus, although this case was the centerpiece of his story.

Part VI of the series, published on T&T in October 2012, noted that Cullen Murphy, Bowden's editor at Vanity Fair, declined to comment on the record to the blog's author about the allegations related to Bowden's article. Part VII, published in March 2013, said that Bowden, who was not approached about the blog's allegations prior to their posting, had since declined to respond to questions posed by the website's blogger regarding his article. He has said that he welcomes questions about it from others.

Poynter Journalism School blog posted an extended analysis of the dispute by Craig Silverman, noting that Vanity Fair had posted a correction to the article, and that "the discrepancies [noted by T&T] don't amount to quote manipulation or a misrepresentation of what was said." Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy, in an e-mail to Poynter, said in part "the quotations used in Bowden's text correspond with relevant portions of the video. Some things are hard to make out, and there may be an occasional small variance, but a fair reading would conclude that the quotes track accurately and correctly capture the dynamic of the interrogation. There has been no distortion." Silverman closes by listing three takeaways for newsrooms, one of which is, "Whether or not you like the tone or approach taken by an outside critic, you still have a responsibility to examine claims of factual error or ethical malfeasance," and he notes further that it might have been easier for T&T and Vanity Fair to deal with the issue if they had spoken to one another directly.

Personal views

On coercive interrogation and torture

In the October 2003 issue of The Atlantic, Bowden's article "The Dark Art of Interrogation" advocated an official ban on all forms of "coercive" interrogation but argued that they should still be practiced in secret and should not necessarily be punished if revealed. Written more than a year before the violations of prisoners were revealed at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers, he wrote, in part:

The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter. Candor and consistency are not always public virtues. Torture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced. Those who protest coercive methods will exaggerate their horrors, which is good: it generates a useful climate of fear. It is wise of the President to reiterate U.S. support for international agreements banning torture, and it is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work. It is also smart not to discuss the matter with anyone.

If interrogators step over the line from coercion to outright torture, they should be held personally responsible. But no interrogator is ever going to be prosecuted for keeping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed awake, cold, alone, and uncomfortable. Nor should he be.

In The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson, Bowden's article was noted as a reference to the CIA's Project ARTICHOKE. This program developed physical methods that can be used during interrogations and Ronson noted that they can be brutal or fatal.

Future of the media

Bowden believes that young people are just as drawn to "deep" journalism as other generations of people have been. He said in March 2009: "Nothing will ever replace language as the medium of thought, so nothing will replace the well-written, originally-reported story, or the well-reasoned essay."

Awards

• Winner Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award for the best book of 2001 (for Killing Pablo)
• 1997 Winner, Overseas Press Club's Hal Boyle Award for "best reporting from abroad" (for articles published in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the Battle of Mogadishu
• 1999, finalist, National Book Award for Black Hawk Down
• Winner, Feature writing award from the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, 1987 (for Finder's Keeper's)
• Winner, Science Writing Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980
• Finalist, best newspaper writing, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1979 (for Life in the Projects)
• Winner, Maryland Library Association's Maryland Author Award for nonfiction writing, 2011 (for body of work)
• Winner, Gen. Wallace Greene Award for nonfiction writing, USMC Heritage Foundation 2018 (for Hue 1968)
• Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Award, History, 2018 (for Hue 1968)
• Finalist, The Andrew Carnegie Medal, Nonfiction, 2018 (for Hue 1968)
• Inductee, The Cybersecurity Canon 2018 (for Worm)

Publications

• Doctor Dealer. Reprint. New York: Grove Press. 2001 [1987].
• Bringing the Heat (1994; ISBN 0-679-42841-0)
• Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. Atlantic Monthly Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-87113-738-8.
• Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (1st ed.). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 2001. ISBN 978-0871137838.
• Our Finest Day: D-Day, June 6, 1944 (2002; ISBN 0-8118-3050-0)
• Finders Keepers: The Story of a Man Who Found $1 Million (2002; ISBN 0-87113-859-X)
• Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts (2006; ISBN 0-87113-876-X)
• Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-87113-925-2. OCLC 62738726.
• The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL (2008; ISBN 0-87113-988-X)
• Worm: The First Digital World War, (2011; ISBN 0-8021-1983-2); first covered by Bowden in "The Enemy Within", The Atlantic (June 2010).
• The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden, (2012 ISBN 0-8021-2034-2)
• The Three Battles of Wanat and Other True Stories (2016 ISBN 978-0-8021-2411-1)
• Hue 1968 (2017 ISBN 978-0802127006)
• The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation (2019 ISBN 978-0802147301)
• The Steal: Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It, co-authored with Matthew Teague. (2022 ISBN 978-0-8021-5995-3)
• Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore's Deadliest Gang Leader, (2023 ISBN 978-0802162427)

Adapted for film

• Article "The Joey Coyle Story" was adapted as Money for Nothing (1993)
• Black Hawk Down (2001)
• The True Story of Killing Pablo (2002), adapted as a TV movie
• Essence of Combat: Making Black Hawk Down (2003) (video)
• The True Story of Black Hawk Down (2003) (TV)
• Guests of the Ayatollah, adapted as a 2006 TV movie
• Stalking Jihad, adapted as a 2007 TV movie
• Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, to be adapted for a TV series on the Vietnam War, to be directed by Michael Mann

External links

• Mark Bowden at IMDb
• Works by Mark Bowden at The Atlantic
• Works by Mark Bowden at Vanity Fair
• Philly.com Biography: Mark Bowden
• Atlantic Monthly Biography
• Interview on Guests of the Ayatollah at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library on June 7, 2006
• Bowden discusses The Finish at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library on December 12, 2012
• The Dark Art of Interrogation, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2003 retrieved September 12, 2010
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • In Depth interview with Bowden, June 4, 2006