Fred Emery (born 19 October 1933) is a British television presenter and investigative journalist, often for the BBC.

Early life

Fred Emery was born in south-west

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and Grea ...

. He attended

Bancroft's School Bancroft's School is a co-educational independent day school located in Woodford Green, London Borough of Redbridge. The school currently has around 1,000 pupils aged between 7 and 18, around 200 of whom are pupils of the Preparatory School an ...

in north-east London from 1944-51. He was head boy in 1951.

Career

Newspapers

Emery has had a distinguished career as a newspaper journalist. He served as a foreign correspondent covering the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam a ...

. During the 1970s he was Washington Bureau Chief for

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...

throughout the

Watergate scandal The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1974 that led to Nixon's resignation. The scandal stemmed from the Nixon administration's contin ...

. He would later write a detailed history of the scanda
Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (1994)
based on extensive interviews with key participants that according to the

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

"stands on its own as a comprehensive account of this century's most notorious political scandal." He also narrated an accompanying 5-part BBC documentary series. His archive from this research is held by Senate House Library, London.

''Panorama''

After leaving The Times, Emery was a presenter for the investigative current affairs programme'' Panorama'', working on various episodes from 1978-1992. He interviewed

Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime ...

1983 interview transcript
/ref> on 8 June 1983, on the eve of the 1983 general election. Among the episodes he presented was the controversial 1984 programme ' Maggie's Militant Tendency'. This episode would be the subject of a 1986 libel case brought by the Conservative MPs Neil Hamilton and

Gerald Howarth Sir James Gerald Douglas Howarth (born 12 September 1947) is a British Conservative Party politician. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Aldershot from 1997 until 2017, having been the MP for Cannock and Burntwood from 1983 to 1992. He wa ...

which the BBC would eventually settle.

References

External links