 He was one of 25 (out of 200) reporters selected for the prestigious Ford Foundation Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University in 1967.He has been chased down by a Soviet helicopter gunship in Afghanistan (he was there twice, in 1982 and 1985), plus held up and robbed by leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, and shot at in Cambodia.In January 1996, Atkinson covered the presence of U.S.