Richard Beebe Dudman (May 3, 1918 – August 3, 2017) was an American journalist who spent 31 years with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during which time he covered Fidel Castro's insurgency in Cuba, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the Watergate scandal, the Iran-Contra scandal, the Khmer Rouge, and wars and revolutions in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Far East.
In May 1970, he was captured by the Viet Cong and held captive in Cambodia, an experience he wrote about in his book Forty Days With the Enemy.
[3] A few days after his release, he and his wife hosted a young Bill Clinton who was working in Washington for the summer as part of Project Pursestrings.
[4] In December 1978 he was a member, along with Elizabeth Becker and Malcolm Caldwell, of the only group of Western journalists and writers invited to visit Cambodia since the Khmer Rouge had taken power in April 1975.
[5] On his last day as Washington bureau chief, in 1981, he ran up Connecticut Avenue to cover the shooting of President Ronald Reagan.