Status Updates From Reporting Vietnam: American...

As this volume is drawing toward its close, I'm finding some of the most thought-provoking pieces. I just read Jeffrey Blankfort's lengthy piece for Ramparts in 1969, which really stands out. He found a small town in the Appalachian region of Ohio where a startling number of young men had died in Vietnam, then simply talked to all the families and wrote the profile. A powerful group portrait of American trauma.

This section of the book includes an excerpt from The Selling of the President about how the legendary documentarian Gene Jones was hired by the Nixon camp to produce TV commercials and how cynically the team manipulated those messages to play on Americans' emotions concerning the war's many tragedies.

This is really a remarkable collection. I just read an excerpt from Tom Wolfe about U.S. pilots flying over North Vietnam. I had forgotten Wolfe's ability to take us inside the lives of people with his often breathless narratives. This reminded me very much of "The Right Stuff."

This section includes an excerpt from Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, which I recall at age 13 in 1968 when my father brought home a copy. I do recall looking into the book, then, and not liking what I thought of at the time as disorienting and hard to read, not to mention self indulgent. Now, reading this excerpt 55 years later, I'm astonished that it won both a Pulitzer and National Book Award.

This 2-volume Library of America set really is a mini-library of journalism published during the Vietnam War. I've now finished a section excerpted from New Yorker correspondent Jonathan Schell's 1968 book, "The Military Half: An Account of the Destruction ..." What is so remarkable about such texts is that Americans continued the senseless destruction of Vietnam for years beyond these truths being widely known.

The original reporting in this volume is astonishing. Just read Frank Harvey's casual reporting on the mass defoliation of Vietnam in which an officer proudly locks defoliant off his fingertip to demonstrate that "it's not poison." Then, the legendary Martha Gellhorn reported for Ladies Home Journal on the thousands of child casualties our forces caused. Astonishing that American opinion did not turn more quickly.

I'm doing a good deal of other reading and research as I am reading this collection of original reporting. One thing to bear in mind, if you do dive into this collection, is that even the top reporters who wrote these pieces in the first place later realized there was a lot they did not know. So it takes a discerning eye to read this material.

I am struck by how harrowing and prophetic the reporting was from Vietnam, far worse than movies about Vietnam make out. And still our nation's leaders kept pouring more men and resources into a conflict we should never have undertaken. Tragic.

Surprising to me how early in our Vietnam buildup American media was publishing really accurate journalism about how much of a mistake this war was for America. A U.S. News collection of letters from an American pilot in 1963-64 is starkly prescient about what was unfolding over there.

Absolutely fascinating collection of American journalism as our nation's involvement in Vietnam intensified. What's tragically clear from the early reporting dating back to 1959 is that we never should have invaded this country and tried to conduct this war. Anyone who cares about the quality of American journalism would enjoy these remarkable pieces.