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IT’S A RAINY AFTERNOON in June 1962 when I arrive in Saigon, my worldly possessions packed in two beat-up suitcases. I’m grateful for the Saigon job. At 27 years old and on my second year with The Associated Press, I’d worried that my career was all washed up after I was expelled from Indonesia by local officials angry over my forceful reporting. My employers trust me enough to send me to a story of far greater interest to the AP’s nearly 2,000 newspaper clients.
I am a small-statured person, and some suggest that I compensate for it with a pugnacious attitude. Maybe so, but I have learned in the years I’ve been a reporter that a shrinking violet doesn’t get the story.
The tree-lined streets, outdoor cafés and striking French provincial architecture of Saigon still earn it the “Pearl of the Orient” label popular during the many years of French colonial control. It’s a much more Americanized city than others in Southeast Asia, with young, crew-cut military advisers on leave in civilian clothes crowding the bars and hotels.
Although I arrive under the impression that this country is being sucked inescapably into a war, it turns out that whole families of Americans are settling in for long stays. The dependents of the diplomats, senior military personnel, civilian aid agency workers and think-tank consultants, they’re arriving by the hundreds from the United States and they are taking over the comfortable homes abandoned by the French middle class a decade earlier. Near my hotel, I see American schoolkids loitering in a bookstore trading comics.
I pick up a pamphlet at the American Embassy that advises the new arrivals to bring necessary items unavailable here, including “card tables with additional round folding tops, seating six or nine, available at Sears, $6.95; ice cream freezer, hand operated, Sears, $10.97; playing cards forbidden to be sold here; picnic equipment with portable ice chests; folding aluminum tables; Thermos jugs; beach umbrella (two and one-half hours to beach),” along with other items.
On the Rue Pasteur, I meet Malcolm Browne, the AP bureau chief, in his tiny office, tapping on an old Remington typewriter. I ask him what’s up with all the civilians in town, and he says, “There’s a war going on, that’s for sure, but the authorities don’t want anyone to hear about it. So they pretend things are normal.”
Browne is a striking figure, tall, blond hair casually combed, with an engaging smile. Born in New York City, he graduated from Swarthmore College with a chemistry degree and as a draftee in the mid-1950s drove a tank for the U.S. Army in Korea. He was soon assigned to Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, a job that that hooked him on journalism. He was hired to cover South Vietnam for the AP in 1961.
Browne is nobody’s fool. He tells me of an incident a few months earlier when, while dining at the riverside Majestic Hotel, he saw a U.S. Navy transport ship docking across the street, its decks packed with Army H-21 workhorse helicopters, popularly known as “flying bananas” because of their unusual shape. He called an embassy aide for official comment because imports of such specialized military equipment are forbidden under the 1954 Geneva Agreements governing the end of the French colonial war. The American official arrived at the restaurant, and stood beside Mal looking across the street. “I don’t see anything,” the official said, and walked off.
Mal sees my perplexed expression and explains, “That embassy guy would prefer that I didn’t report it. America is doing much more here than it publicly admits. The Kennedy administration is attempting to muzzle every American here because of the political fallout from a military program that is turning into a secret war.”
“Did you write the story?” I ask Mal.
“Of course,” he says, laughing.
A few months earlier Mal had discovered that American pilots were flying combat missions against the communist Vietcong in Skyraider bombers provided to the South Vietnamese as training planes.
He hands me a pamphlet he has written, a dozen pages of copy paper stapled together, covering subjects ranging from field gear and war coverage survival tips to the artful handling of inside news sources, both Vietnamese and American. It is Browne’s manual for successfully covering a secret war. If the military had anything similar it would be classified!
This is the best journalism instruction I have ever received, I tell myself as I read it. The most inspiring passage is Browne’s definition of a war reporter’s role. “The job for the newsman, as we see it, is simply to cover all the news as fairly and as completely as possible. Our concern is not what effect a given piece of news will have on the public. Our concern is to get the news before the public, in the belief that a free public must be an informed public. The only cause for which a correspondent must fight is to tell the truth and the whole truth.”
I am aware that the name Saigon is just beginning to register with an American public more familiar with datelines like Havana and West Berlin and Seoul on critical foreign policy issues. News from the capital of a small Southeast Asian country half a world away is evoking little interest among Americans who would identify the Soviet Union as the prime offender in the Cold War. And the troubles of a beleaguered band of young journalists are hardly likely to make the headlines.
An international peace conference in Geneva in 1954 gave North Vietnam to the communists after the conclusive defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu earlier that year. The status of the south was left in doubt. The administration of President Dwight Eisenhower removed any doubt where America stood by authorizing some public and much clandestine support for the survival of South Vietnam as an independent, pro-American state.
John F. Kennedy inherited a worsening political and military situation in South Vietnam when he became president in 1961. The country was threatened by an active communist insurgency amongst the rural population and was poorly governed by a Vietnamese family hierarchy that was losing support not only of the population, but also of the American diplomats and military officials who had originally put it in power.
Playing for time, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson to Saigon to explain that South Vietnam was essential to American policy. In an over-the-top endorsement, Johnson publicly described President Ngo Dinh Diem as “not only the George Washington, the father of your country, but the Franklin Roosevelt as well,” and declared that success in Vietnam would keep the United States from having to fight the communists “on the beaches of Hawaii.”
At the same time, a worried Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Ambassador Frederick Nolting as he left to take up his post in Saigon in 1961 that “the way things are going out there we’ll be lucky if we still have a mission in Saigon six months from now,” a comment Nolting mentions in his autobiography.
At a White House meeting, the president told Nolting that he backed the Saigon government, and, as Nolting told me later, “the outcome of your mission depends on finding out for us what kind of man Diem is.” But Kennedy was already toying with the idea of a military solution, initially cloaked as a counterinsurgency effort but rapidly emerging into the open as an American war plan.
Ambassador Nolting campaigned to convince Washington that Diem was worthy of support but he was unexpectedly challenged by the visit of an influential figure who had formerly championed the Vietnamese leader’s abilities. In the first week of December 1962, I’m invited to meet with that visitor, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, at his suite at the downtown Caravelle Hotel. My colleague Malcolm Browne is there, along with David Halberstam of The New York Times and Neil Sheehan of UPI.
Mansfield and his aides insist on assuming the role of reporters, questioning us voluminously on our impressions of the situation and revealing their own ambivalence about American policy. Ambassador Nolting later complains that our critical observations unduly colored the delegation’s negative assessment of South Vietnam—especially Mansfield’s opinion, expressed to President Kennedy, that Diem had wasted the $2 billion that America had spent there. But we were simply telling the Senate visitors things we’d been writing for our news organizations.
The cover (page i of 25) of The Associated Press Short Guide to News Coverage in Vietnam for staffers and stringers covering the Vietnam War, composed in January 1963 by AP Saigon Bureau Chief Malcolm Browne (1931–2012). The 25-page primer, originally written for Horst Faas and Peter Arnett, provides detailed guidance on all aspects of war coverage, including how to move with troops, how to discern accurate information from propaganda and, most importantly, how to stay safe. (AP Photo/AP Corporate Archives)
Page 1 of The Associated Press Short Guide to News Coverage in Vietnam, dated Jan. 25, 1963. It advises:
…Coverage in Viet Nam requires aggressiveness, resourcefulness, and, at times, methods uncomfortably close to those used by professional intelligence units. You can expect very little help from most official sources, and news comes the hard way….
Good luck. You’ll need it.
(AP Photo/AP Corporate Archives)