Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1969 (Part One) (Library of America) (Hardcover)

~ Milton J. Bates (Compiler), Lawrence Lichty (Compiler), Paul Miles (Compiler), Ronald H. Spector (Compiler), Marilyn Young (Compiler) "IT WAS a quite evening in the sleepy little town of Bien Hoa 20 miles north of Saigon, base camp for the South Vietnamese crack..." (more)
Key Phrases: flak sites, hamlet chiefs, hoi chanh, United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnamese (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the last few years, with the publication of such books as Jacques Leslie's The Mark and William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War, historians and former correspondents have been examining closely the role of journalism in the conduct of the Vietnam War. The two volumes of Reporting Vietnam offer a trove of material for such studies. Part One contains combat-front writing by journalists who are well known to students of Vietnam War history--Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam, Frances FitzGerald, Bernard Fall, Neil Sheehan, Ward Just, and Zalin Grant among them. The hefty volume--which runs the gamut of journalistic genres, including hard news, analysis, profiles, think pieces, and interviews--covers the home front as well, from which the likes of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe have their say.

The collection opens with a fairly dispassionate account from Time magazine reporting the deaths of the first U.S. military advisors in 1959; it ends with the complete text of Daniel Lang's long New Yorker piece, "Casualties of War," the basis for Brian De Palma's controversial movie of the same name. In between are accounts of battles on the streets of Chicago and the Central Highlands, studies of the rise of black-power militancy on the ever-changing front lines, and perceptive portraits of ordinary soldiers on both sides of the war. Among the book's many highlights is Neil Sheehan's memoir of his change from hawk to dove as the war progressed. "I have sometimes thought," he writes, "when a street urchin with sores covering his legs stopped me and begged for a few cents' worth of Vietnamese piastres, that he might be better off growing up as a political commissar. He would then, at least, have some self-respect." Such changing views, we can now clearly see, helped shift public opinion in the United States against the war. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

It is probably not possible to boil down the Vietnam conflict into a pocket-size distillation, but the editors of this thorough and well-chosen collection of reporting and writing have made a worthy attempt. From a vivid Time magazine account of the deaths of several U.S. advisersAwhich packs a wallop in a mere three paragraphsAon through exemplary work by David Halberstam, Peter Arnett and selections from the journals of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Michael Herr, these two volumes attempt to let every side have its point of view. Soldiers, commanders, scribes and protesters all give their own versions of the hellish fighting and its ramifications. The collection also sheds light on how much the newsgathering business has changed since that time. The accounts hereAexcept perhaps for those rooted in the burgeoning "new journalism"Aare based more in fact than in spin, making one wonder how today's reporters would chronicle those bygone events. Readers may gloss over some of the analysis and editorializing, much of which is rooted in its own time. But when Halberstam profiles John Paul Vann, a high-ranking officer who saw that the U.S. effort in Vietnam was doomed; when U.S. News & World Report offers in-the-thick-of-it commentary from pilot "Jerry" Shenk; and when Tom Wolfe chronicles Ken Kesey's appearance at Berkeley in his own inimitable fashion, then suddenly it's "Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there," as Herr writes. This book will help readers understand better what it was like to live through that tumultuous period of American history. Maps, 32-page photo insert. BOMC main selection. (Oct.) FYI: The Vietnam Reader, edited by Stewart O'Nan and also out in October, from Holt, is a wide-ranging anthology of fiction and nonfiction, songs, photography and poetry about the war, little of which overlaps with the above two volumes. ($15.95 paper 800p ISBN 0-385-49118-2).
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 858 pages
• Publisher: Library of America; First Edition edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883011582
• ISBN-13: 978-1883011581
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #235,109 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nam, March 2, 2002

By	Jimmy E Ayala (Glenview, IL, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A test of good reporting is the feeling that you were there after you have read the last sentence. Good reporting often translates into great literature, i.e. Hemingway, Crane, Twain. Some of the writing here is near great literature.

Pick up volume one and read "Death In the Ia Drang Valley," by Specialist 4/C Smith. Smith's story is reporting at its finest. Go to Ward Just's Reconnaissance, about the Central Highlands. Then go read the one about Con Thien, and the one about Dak To. This is good reporting.

And read Michael Kerr. He is in volume two. If you have ever read his book, Dispatches, you read the short version of what is surely the best words in the best order about Vietnam. Volume two offers the extended version of that haunting book. There are chapters here found no where else. As you read you will find yourself in Khe Sahn, Hue, Phu Bai, and DaNang. This is great writing.

These two volumes are required reading for those of us who were there and for those of us who were not there. The reporting is great. The writers are all Vietnam era writers. Halberstam, Alsop, Karnow Sheehan, Fall, Arnett, Fitzgerald. Some are easy to read. Some make demands on the reader.

Read these volumes for the quality of the writing. That should always be one of the reasons why you pick up a book. The journalism is solid.

And then read for the feeling of being there. I was "in country" from 1967 to 1968. When I am reading Kerr, I am back in Phu Bai walkimg through the wire out on patrol.

The only other book that puts you there is David Douglas Duncan's War Without Heroes. And that is a book of black and white combat photographs taken at Khe Sahn and Con Thien..

I own a lot of books by The Library of America. These two volumes are among the best by that publisher.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Contemporary accounts contains truth if you look for it, September 3, 2000

By	William Peschel (Hershey, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Reading this collection of Vietnam-era reportage from The Library of America is a stark reminder of the lasting power of the written word. Has it really been nearly a quarter-century since the black and white images of the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American Embassy faded from our television screens? Grenada, Panama, Iraq -- three wars and God knows how many humanitarian efforts (Somalia, Yugoslavia, did I miss any?)

Yet, the power of memory is such that it doesn't take much to bring it all back. Dipping into these compilations of writings about Vietnam -- the original reportage and memoirs in the Library of America volumes and the best of everything else in "The Vietnam Reader" -- shards of long-forgotten memories were struck just by reading the names of towns and villages. Khe Sahn, Haiphong: The words sound so completely alien, as if they had been coined by H.P. Lovecraft. They trigger memories of tracing the S-curve of the countries on maps in the newspapers, seeing the photographs in Life magazine -- for me, the 1960s will always be remembered as a series of black and white freeze-frames from the magazines, with color reserved only for the more silly stories found in the back of the book -- and hearing them recited on TV in the stentorian tones of Walter Cronkitethe who would recite the weekly casualty figures, printedon screen before the national flags, like baseball scores, while the family ate our meat loaf and mashed potatoes and waited for Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom to come on at 7.

Time has passed and in this media-drenched age, so much history has been created, screened and absorbed over the past quarter-century. Vietnam and Cambodia became a backwater in the American consciousness, flaring up from time to time in response to specific, finite events such as the debate over Agent Orange, the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the screening of "Platoon" and "The Killing Fields," and the debate over draft evasion by Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich.

For those of us who were not there, who can view the war almost dispassionately, it is this lack of intervening history that makes these books so powerful and painful to read. This is a chronicle of a nation marching deeper and deeper into a war that the journalists there saw as early as 1965 -- about 150 pages into two volumes that total more than 1,600 pages -- could not be won the way it was being run. Historians will probably argue eternally if it could have been won at all. The repressive and corrupt South Vietnamese government could not win enough "hearts and minds" of the people to defeat the Viet Cong, and an invasion of North Vietnam could have triggered a Korean War-style invasion from China. It took nearly a decade for the United States to find the way out of that bloody tunnel and another two decades before full diplomatic relations were reestablished.

The casualty figures fly beyond the mind's grasp: 58,000 Americans killed, 4,400 South Koreans, 500 Australians and New Zealanders, 180,000 Cambodians (with another million perishing under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978), a half-million South Vietnamese and an estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

"Reporting Vietnam" starts with Time Magazine's report on the first U.S. advisers killed in South Vietnam, then continues chronologically with the inevitability of the Zapruder film of John Kennedy's murder ride. It moves with reports from the field -- a report on a Viet Cong massacre in the Ca Mau Peninsula, Neil Sheehan's account on South Vietnamese troops refusing to fight in the battle of Ap Bac, to Joseph Alsop's profile of South Vietnam's president Ngo Diem, from the scenes in Washington of President Johnson and his advisers defending their policies to Tom Wolfe's account of Ken Kesey disrupting an anti-war rally in Berkeley and Norman Mailer's self-important essay about the March on the Pentagon.

Then there are the incidents, as bizarre as any recounted in "Apocalypse Now." The American-run television channel presenting the German opera "Hansel and Gretel" backed by the American Chamber of Commerce; Gloria Emerson reporting the idea by the head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, challenging his fellow CORDS members to participate in the 1971 decathlon comprising "bridge, tennis, gin rummy, volleyball, nautical sports, Chinese chess, winetasting, close harmony, etc." (Emerson, who had spent two years in the field as a correspondent, quoted and commented on Richard Funkhouser's memo: "`It is always open house here at Bienhoa for competitors,' Funkhouser wrote, in that playful spirit so many of us in Vietnam really lacked.")

With respect to the Vietnam veteran who reviewed this collection, it should be pointed out that this is not a history book. It is a collection of contemporary articles, and as such there's nothing an editor can do to juice them up. The books are not meant to be read from front to back either. It is by dipping in and out that you can find rewarding reading.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Compilation!!!, May 31, 1999

By	ceppm (London, UK) - See all my reviews

For somebody who doesn't knew too much about Vietnam, this is a great beginning. Most of the articles success in give me a different view of the war. Some of them are pretty long and other ones give me the feeling that is quite repetitive. But because these are journal articles, the writing style is very simple (with the exception of a couple of them) and easy reading.

I can imagine that most of the people will want more articles from the "real action" of the war but the political analysis (which is the focus of most of the articles) is also an important aspect of every war so this book give me a lot of knowledge about it.

I think it would be better if the notes would be printed as footnotes rather than endnotes, this way it would be easy to follow them.