Boys in the Celebrityhood : Life After Baghdad for Peter Arnett and his CNN Colleagues, Bernard Shaw and John Holliman

“Weren’t you scared?”

“What’s Saddam Hussein really like?”

“What’s the inside scoop on Ted and Jane?”

Wherever Peter Arnett goes, the same three dumb questions are fired at him with the inevitability and precision of smart bombs.

He fields them at interviews, during speaking engagements, through the umpteenth handshake from fans and well-wishers, as he recounts the Persian Gulf War--the event that propelled the Cable News Network correspondent from mere veteran war reporter status to genuine celebrity.

Now a year since the first bombs began exploding around the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, Arnett is stateside, after gaining national attention--and some scorn--as the only Western reporter to remain in Iraq during all of Desert Storm, and the only one to score an interview during the conflict with Hussein himself.

What does one do after a war, exactly?

“It’s been a unique year,” says a good-natured Arnett, 57, who has taken time off from CNN to travel, write his memoirs and, yes, answer those questions.

“I certainly haven’t had time to laze around; I’ve been talking a lot about (the war) and writing about it. I’ve given interviews every day practically. The celebrity is a challenge. I find it as challenging as my job, speaking to live audiences and answering questions with any kind of authority. It’s not easy, but I feel it is just another aspect of my career.”

So, apparently, is collecting awards. Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his Associated Press coverage of the Vietnam War, will be on hand tonight at the 13th Annual ACE Awards--cable television’s answer to the Oscars. Scheduled to help Arnett accept ACE honors given to Ted Turner’s network for its Desert Storm coverage are fellow “Boys from Baghdad” Bernard Shaw and John Holliman, who, with Arnett, provided CNN’s arresting account of the first night of Allied bombing.

Although giving speeches and accepting kudos might sound dull after chewing the fat with Saddam, Arnett is happy to oblige.

“I guess it’s my turn to talk about the eternal verities of the news business,” he says, likening his current authority on media to that of Woodward and Bernstein, David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. “Every now and then some of us are shot up there to talk about what’s important (about the profession). Sooner or later I’ll get back to doing what I love most, which is reporting, and someone else can talk about it.”

Arnett has also used his limelight to answer those who accused him of being a mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein, among them Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.). In March, Arnett told the National Press Club he was “amused” at Simpson’s accusation, because months before the war began, “I was one of a handful of journalists in Jerusalem who were called to the U.S. consulate to be upbraided by Sen. Simpson and others,” Arnett said. “And why were we upbraided? The stories we were doing from Israel were very negative to Saddam Hussein.” (Simpson ultimately apologized.)

Arnett has also tried to clarify the now-infamous “baby milk factory” story, which he has said will “follow me wherever I go.” In Iraq, Arnett toured a bombed-out facility his guides insisted was a factory for making infant formula, despite claims by the Allies that the factory was used for biological weapons. His critics said Arnett was siding with the Iraqis when he said he saw no evidence to support the U.S. attack. Arnett has said he called it as he saw it.

“Of course there was a raging controversy,” says Arnett. “I felt it necessary in the first month to answer the critics, and I used the tours to discuss what went on.”

But he attributes his overall hero status to the public’s perception of the war. “There were no press heroes out of Vietnam,” he says. “When you cover a losing war it’s like fighting a losing war.”

In contrast, he says, Desert Storm “was quick, brutal and relatively clean, and it left everyone here with a positive feeling about the use of force ... for a good cause. All those who participated got a high profile out of it.”

Arnett certainly seems comfortable with the glamorous aspects of fame: In Vanity Fair’s December gallery of war heroes, alongside the imposing uniformed figures of H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin L. Powell, Arnett shows up in a decidedly non-serious pose--lounging by a hotel pool with his fiancee Kimberly Moore (they plan to marry this summer; she, also a journalist, is currently job-hunting in Washington).

As for Arnett’s colleagues, Holliman, scheduled to return from a December trip to Baghdad in time for the ACE Awards, remains a general assignment reporter at CNN and also does his share of public speaking, regaling audiences with tales of running through the Al Rashid in his underwear. Shaw, CNN’s Washington anchor, takes a different view of his heightened fame.

“It’s given me the problem of trying to salvage as much privacy as possible,” Shaw says. “I get speaking requests from all kinds of groups, and I decline 99% of them. I can’t possibly do my job, be a father and a husband and meet the needs of groups to come and make speeches to them.”

But Arnett, at least, feels the war got the public engrossed in the news, which has continued through such events as the Clarence Thomas hearings. “It’s not just the stories, it’s that people seem to be tuned into (news). It reinvigorates us as professionals,” he says. “That is part of what makes me popular on the lecture circuit.”

Well, that and the fact that he might know some dirt on Ted and Jane.

“The 13th Annual ACE Awards” airs Sunday at 6 p.m. on TNT.