David Jenkins graduated in Arts/Law from the University of Melbourne and was an Asia foreign correspondent for many years. He covered the wars in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for the Melbourne Herald and was the Jakarta correspondent in 1969–70. Awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study the communist insurgency in northeastern Thailand, he went on to run the Associated Press bureau in Vientiane during the final years of the Second Indochina War. After a four-year posting in Jakarta for the Far Eastern Economic Review, he wrote Suharto and His Generals: Indonesian Military Politics, 1975–83. Jenkins was foreign editor, and later Asia editor, of the Sydney Morning Herald and a senior research fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, Canberra.
