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Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism, 1959-1975
Now in paperback comes a unique collection that captures a dramatic and controversial war and the brilliant generation of American journalists who reported it. Includes a new Introduction by Ward Just.
853 pages, Paperback
First published June 5, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 10, 2023
During the Vietnam War, our journalists were prophetic
I spent a long time reading this hefty volume of journalism from the Vietnam War, because as a lifelong journalist myself I often paused to check other sources on the context of these reports and to learn more about the careers of these reporters. The names in this volume might not mean much to younger readers these days, but they are my own mentors from a distance: giants in the field. The great Martha Gellhorn is in this collection with an absolutely prophetic piece that, if Americans had heeded, we might have ended this war years earlier. Jonathan Schell, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne and so many others are in this volume. This book also contains selected breaking-news reports as well that mark milestones, including the text of Walter Cronkite's famous 1968 broadcast questioning the war on American network TV.
As I have read (or in many cases re-read) the pieces in this book, I am recalling this important wave of reporting that was so revealing and riveting. I'm thinking here of Tom Wolfe's haunting description of the lives of pilots bombing North Vietnam and Daniel Lang's horrific reporting about one group of five GIs who went rogue and became premeditated murderers, which Lang reported for The New Yorker and later was issued as a book and made into a film.
What is astonishing is that this consensus of reporting did not pierce the armor plating of Johnson's inner circle so that he could turn the tide and back down. Parallel to reading this book, I have been watching once again Ken Burns' lengthy Vietnam documentary for PBS and it's obvious Johnson yearned for a way out but that inner circle almost without exception kept insisting that he stay the course and even send more men.
The journalists did their jobs, in some cases at mortal peril as they did so. Many journalists were killed in Vietnam. But nobody back home seemed to be listening until far too late in the terrible conflict.
For anyone, today, who wants to understand the Vietnam conflict, this volume may not be the best starting point. These journalists all had flaws in their reporting, because they had no access to resources like private recordings of Johnson with his colleagues, for example. Sometimes, these reports got details wrong because they could not pierce the iron walls of the CIA. So reading this book requires context and cautionary double checking along the way.
However, as a resource book for journalists, this is a very inspiring volume and I hope others will dip into its pages to learn about some of the giants of our vocation.
I spent a long time reading this hefty volume of journalism from the Vietnam War, because as a lifelong journalist myself I often paused to check other sources on the context of these reports and to learn more about the careers of these reporters. The names in this volume might not mean much to younger readers these days, but they are my own mentors from a distance: giants in the field. The great Martha Gellhorn is in this collection with an absolutely prophetic piece that, if Americans had heeded, we might have ended this war years earlier. Jonathan Schell, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne and so many others are in this volume. This book also contains selected breaking-news reports as well that mark milestones, including the text of Walter Cronkite's famous 1968 broadcast questioning the war on American network TV.
As I have read (or in many cases re-read) the pieces in this book, I am recalling this important wave of reporting that was so revealing and riveting. I'm thinking here of Tom Wolfe's haunting description of the lives of pilots bombing North Vietnam and Daniel Lang's horrific reporting about one group of five GIs who went rogue and became premeditated murderers, which Lang reported for The New Yorker and later was issued as a book and made into a film.
What is astonishing is that this consensus of reporting did not pierce the armor plating of Johnson's inner circle so that he could turn the tide and back down. Parallel to reading this book, I have been watching once again Ken Burns' lengthy Vietnam documentary for PBS and it's obvious Johnson yearned for a way out but that inner circle almost without exception kept insisting that he stay the course and even send more men.
The journalists did their jobs, in some cases at mortal peril as they did so. Many journalists were killed in Vietnam. But nobody back home seemed to be listening until far too late in the terrible conflict.
For anyone, today, who wants to understand the Vietnam conflict, this volume may not be the best starting point. These journalists all had flaws in their reporting, because they had no access to resources like private recordings of Johnson with his colleagues, for example. Sometimes, these reports got details wrong because they could not pierce the iron walls of the CIA. So reading this book requires context and cautionary double checking along the way.
However, as a resource book for journalists, this is a very inspiring volume and I hope others will dip into its pages to learn about some of the giants of our vocation.
March 23, 2013
Some of these pieces are very powerful. Others show how journalism is often, in the end, an ephemeral art.
One passage I highlighted on the horror of the war, from a 1967 New Republic story.
"But the newest weapon of them all, and in its own way, the most incredibly impressive for all its civilian normality, was an assemblage of perhaps 80 bulldozers, in many cases airlifted into the midst of the jungle by huge 'Skycrane' helicopters or the somewhat smaller 'Chinooks.' Their job was simple: eliminate the jungle once and for all. By the third day of the battle, huge yellow scars had begun to be clearly visible in the deep jungle green as the bulldozers began to plow down the jungle as if some insane developer were suddenly hell-bent on covering Vietnam with Levittowns or parking lots. Such Viet Cong hideouts or tunnels as there were, either were crushed or their exits bulldozed shut, for in many cases the adversary (as well as civilians) hiding in the tunnels disappeared in their deepest recesses rather than surrender. 'Tunnel rats,' American soldiers specially picked for their small size and equipped with gas projectors and what looked like flamethrowers, sometimes penetrated for hundreds of meters into the burrows, looking for what was said to be a veritable 'subway' crossing the whole Triangle. It was never found and perhaps never existed.
"Inexorable, the bulldozers bit into the countryside, cutting huge swaths of cleared land right across the Triangle. They were followed by flamethrower tanks and teams on foot, destroying the felled trees with fire. And not only the trees: every human inhabitation within the beaten zone, be it an isolated hut which may have been used by the Viet Cong, or a whole little hamlet inhabited for years by charcoal kilners -- non-white Saigon cooks with charcoal almost exclusively -- went up in flames. There was one day toward the end of the week in which the air was totally still and the sky as transparently fresh and pure as on a spring day in America. Yet as I joined a new unit within the Triangle by helicopter, the whole sky, literally in a 360 degree circle, was framed in by perfectly straight black columns: the earth was being scorched on the whole perimeter of the Iron Triangle. And the town of Ben-Suc was among them."
One passage I highlighted on the horror of the war, from a 1967 New Republic story.
"But the newest weapon of them all, and in its own way, the most incredibly impressive for all its civilian normality, was an assemblage of perhaps 80 bulldozers, in many cases airlifted into the midst of the jungle by huge 'Skycrane' helicopters or the somewhat smaller 'Chinooks.' Their job was simple: eliminate the jungle once and for all. By the third day of the battle, huge yellow scars had begun to be clearly visible in the deep jungle green as the bulldozers began to plow down the jungle as if some insane developer were suddenly hell-bent on covering Vietnam with Levittowns or parking lots. Such Viet Cong hideouts or tunnels as there were, either were crushed or their exits bulldozed shut, for in many cases the adversary (as well as civilians) hiding in the tunnels disappeared in their deepest recesses rather than surrender. 'Tunnel rats,' American soldiers specially picked for their small size and equipped with gas projectors and what looked like flamethrowers, sometimes penetrated for hundreds of meters into the burrows, looking for what was said to be a veritable 'subway' crossing the whole Triangle. It was never found and perhaps never existed.
"Inexorable, the bulldozers bit into the countryside, cutting huge swaths of cleared land right across the Triangle. They were followed by flamethrower tanks and teams on foot, destroying the felled trees with fire. And not only the trees: every human inhabitation within the beaten zone, be it an isolated hut which may have been used by the Viet Cong, or a whole little hamlet inhabited for years by charcoal kilners -- non-white Saigon cooks with charcoal almost exclusively -- went up in flames. There was one day toward the end of the week in which the air was totally still and the sky as transparently fresh and pure as on a spring day in America. Yet as I joined a new unit within the Triangle by helicopter, the whole sky, literally in a 360 degree circle, was framed in by perfectly straight black columns: the earth was being scorched on the whole perimeter of the Iron Triangle. And the town of Ben-Suc was among them."
August 29, 2017
This is the condensed paperback version of the two-volume Reporting Vietnam hard-back set produced by Library of America. I read the second volume in hardback several years ago, but couldn't find volume 1, so I read this paperback version instead. Not that it matters. What matters is that this may well be the best single non-fictional account of the American experience in Vietnam that anyone has produced so far. What makes it so powerful is: (a) the broad range of voices and writers; (b) the breadth of the coverage--from the jungles of South Vietnam to the White House, from the Phu Bai barracks to the streets of Hanoi; and (c) the immediacy of the writing. Remember, most of this is journalism written in the moment and for the moment, so that, in contrast to traditional histories, the writer doesn't know how the story ends (but of course we, the readers, do). Vietnam divided our country in ways that we still haven't overcome and that continue to play out every day in our culture and our politics. This book by itself won't heal those divisions, but it will give us a much better understanding of why the wounds cut so deep, which may be a first step towards healing.
February 13, 2017
This will fulfill the category of reading a book that takes place more than 5,000 miles from here, for the 2017 Book Riot challenge. Reporting Vietnam is one of the harder books I've read, and not just because it is more than 800 pages. It's a compilation of stories, mostly from war correspondents covering the Vietnam War. This is actually volume 2 of a two-part series, and covers the end of the war and some of the aftermath. Some of the stories deal with the controversies on the homefront (of course May 4 at Kent State is covered) but the bulk of it are stories in Vietnam, from the cities to the front lines. Just about every view one can think of -- from President Lyndon B. Johnson to American officers to Vietnamese officers, to those fighting for North Vietnam, to the soldiers on the front line, to Vietnamese civilians, to those supporting the war, to those against the war effort. There's even a column from Sen. John McCain and his experience as a POW. Probably the most moving were the dispatches from Michael Kerr, who was embedded with one unit. The stories pull no punches, and offer a first-hand account of the despair, tragedy and controversy this war produced. For those researching this time period, Reporting Vietnam is an invaluable resource.
December 17, 2023
An incredible anthology covering the war from plenty of angles. Some of the writing is straightforward journalism, harrowing in its immediacy; others are the works of the literature of war, written by the New Journalists.
August 26, 2018
Excellent. So many points of view all coming to one conclusion. How hindsight works. How we learn nothing from the past.
July 4, 2012
Excellent selection of works of the period that accurately documents the events of the period. Nothing romantic or emotional, no jingoistic patriotism or cliched remarks about people or events.
A good documentation of what happened and the participants.
"Fair and balanced" before that cliche became.....cliche.
A good documentation of what happened and the participants.
"Fair and balanced" before that cliche became.....cliche.
May 23, 2012
Still making my way through this real time collection of the major journalists reporting from Vietnam. It's like a prism with light and insight refracted through so many angles...what a war, so ill-begotten - an orphan even while it was prosecuted...and to "save" the South we bombed the ____ out of it, displacing millions upon millions.
Read
September 2, 2016Interesting take on the "journalism" that came from that hell hole. I found it too self-serving and inaccurate to be an enjoyable read. My copy is littered with sarcastic remarks and angry denials of the "truth" of the journalism coming from that conflict.
March 7, 2015
read mostly for my bachelor's thesis--
absolutely amazing. fantastic first-person accounts. maybe the best work in its specific genre--
check it out.
absolutely amazing. fantastic first-person accounts. maybe the best work in its specific genre--
check it out.
Read
December 19, 2016This shows how a war really should be covered but hasn't been since. It includes many stories about the war at home, too, without which there'd be no understanding "Vietnam."
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews