Richard Engel ‘92, Reporting on the Global Picture from Abroad
“Understand that there is a larger world out there, and they’ve got to explore it.” Calling in from the middle of a warzone in Eastern Ukraine, Richard Engel asks high school students to “look…at [their] own country from the inside out” and “realize that [they] are participants in this world.” From his days as a Riverdale student, Engel was interested in international relations, travel, and experiencing other cultures. After graduating from Stanford, this passion took Engel across the world, working as a freelancer for seven years and then climbing the ranks as a correspondent for various global outlets until he became Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC News in 2008.
As a Riverdale student, Engel remembers “really fond memories…particularly of the Upper School.” He involved himself in both school and outside-of-school swim teams. Swimming offered solitude: “[W]hen you’re looking at the bottom of the stripe on the bottom floor, there’s nobody to talk to.” Lacrosse offered camaraderie, the spirit of belonging to a team.
A “transformative” moment came during Engel’s junior year at Riverdale when he took the entire year off from school to study abroad in Italy through the American Field Services program. The program, designed for American students who want to study overseas, connected Engel with an Italian host family. Engel never looked back after this cross-cultural experience, making the most of his “first opportunity to look at the United States from the outside in.” He explains that this new “perspective intrigued me very much, and I’ve more or less been doing [this] ever since.”
Back on the Hill Campus, Engel remembers a senior year Civilization Culture class he recalls as his favorite RCS course. Interdisciplinary in scope and depth, the course merged bits of philosophy, music theory, and history, mirroring the current Integrated Liberal Studies course for seniors.
Once he graduated from Riverdale, Engel traveled to Palo Alto, California, to attend Stanford University, where he studied international relations. Engel wanted to be a journalist from a very young age but “had a very romantic notion about it.” When he was thirteen or fourteen years old and visiting Morocco with his family, he first came into contact with international journalism because a copy of the International Herald Tribune, a short format newspaper that summarized global events for English speakers abroad, was placed under the door of their hotel room.
Engel dug into the articles, fascinated by different cultural events and letters to the editor from different parts of Africa and Europe when his mother turned to him, saying, “You know, I can see you working there one day.” Engel and his mother were on the same page. “I immediately had this vision of myself sitting behind a typewriter in Paris, writing stories, and looking out on the Sorbonne,” he expresses.
After graduating college, Engel became an independent freelance writer who produced articles and radio reports worldwide. He got his start moving to a poor district in Cairo, bringing only 2,000 dollars in cash. Aided by his proficiency in Arabic, Engel attempted to send stories to whoever would take them back to the United States. He was the editor of a local English-language newspaper before the war in Iraq broke out in the early 2000s. When it looked like the United States would invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, Engel traveled there, reporting as a freelancer and witnessing the “shock and awe” firsthand. After the initial invasion, NBC News hired Engel as a full-time correspondent.
“I’m in a very lucky place that I get to be in the front car in the train of history as it moves along,” Engel says, referencing how “privileged” he has been to work internationally for NBC News over the last 20 years. Since spending many years in Iraq, he’s covered virtually every major international conflict, including the fallout from the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the current war in Ukraine.
In Iraq, Engel spent a lot of time traveling in Humvees with American troops. During the Arab Spring, he moved around with rebel factions and pro-democracy protesters. Currently, in Ukraine, Engel is positioned in the frozen trenches on the front lines of the conflict while trying not to get hit by incoming artillery. While abroad, Engel is hosting a special On Assignment series on the conflict, which presents the challenge of producing a documentary on an unfolding conflict in a volatile area. Instead of going “back to the studio and put[ting] it all together and polish[ing] it over the course of a year, this was gathered in the field and made while it’s fresh and served out now.” His work can be summed up on a human level: “The whole point of the whole endeavor is to go in and talk to people and find out what’s going on, based on what the story is,” Engel explains, describing how journalism intrinsically affirms human connections.
Seeing the effects of war up close and personal has brought Engel a different perspective. “I think of war as like a giant car crash,” he remarks. He furthers, “What do you see in that moment? Twisted metal, maybe someone is injured, maybe someone else was killed, maybe ambulances are rushing to the scene. Maybe they’re not.” Engel thinks of war as a larger manifestation of that tiny split second. “Instead of two cars crashing together, you have two societies slamming into each other.”
Engel has covered his share of dangerous areas, and, in 2012, he was even kidnapped for five days in Syria. Speaking bluntly about this reality, Engel comments, “Well, I do get scared, and fear is a part of it.” He urges the importance of trusting one’s gut, recognizing that “if you’re afraid, it might be for a good reason.” According to Engel, the solution to this fear comes from planning. Acknowledging the importance of precautions, Engel comments, “Know the route…where you’re going. Make sure your vehicles are in great shape. Make sure you have all the supplies [and] a medical kit. So fear allows you to take precautions and to plan and work out the logistics, and a lot of this job is logistics.” He views fear as healthy, clarifying all the planning viewers may not see on screen: “We don’t just walk up to a frontline area.”
Asked about his childhood role model, Engel explains, “When I was a kid, I had more of a cartoon image of what a foreign correspondent would be, this kind of composite character that was more in my head than any one individual.” Years later, Engel’s life adventures may similarly seem unbelievable. However, his work in the international press, which innately requires broadcasting the stories of real human experiences into millions of Americans’ living rooms, asks Americans to view the United States as part of the larger global picture.
