Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting

Preface

ix Preface History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. Maya Angelou, at Clinton presidential inauguration, 1993 November 8, 1960. Brisk gusts descended with the twilight hour as Sam Lubell and I entered Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan, headed for the news studio of the National Broadcasting Company (nbc). We were geared up to assess the soon-to-arrive ballots cast in the presidential election between Democrats Senator John Kennedy and his running mate, Lyndon Johnson, versus Republicans Vice President Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge. I cradled a dog-eared cardboard box of notes Sam and I had handwritten during the campaign to record his pioneering doorbell-ringing technique of interviewing voters. My one-time professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and now my boss, Sam was a big name in political journalism, thanks to his syndicated newspaper columns and award-winning book.1 His reputation prompted nbc to contract him to predict accurately the winner of what proved to be the nation’s closest presidential race up to that time and to do so ahead of the computers pitted against him by the other two network stations. Throughout the night I answered phone calls bringing us latest results of voting in selected precincts where we had earlier conducted interviews. By matching the phoned-in results with our earlier statistics, Sam beat the other networks’ computers to project accurately that Kennedy would win the popular vote. Not in my wildest dreams did I then imagine that these four politicians would influence so profoundly what would happen in Vietnam—or even that I would be in Vietnam. Yet Kennedy was x preface president when I arrived there, Nixon was when I left, and Lyndon B. Johnson was sandwiched between them, with Henry Cabot Lodge twice serving as U.S. ambassador to Saigon. May 2001. I was one of some four dozen combat correspondents whose work had been selected for an exhibit designed to trace 148 years of war reporting starting with the Crimean conflict of 1853. Displayed at the Freedom Forum’s Newseum in Washington dc, these “War Stories” illustrated “how correspondents deal with the challenge of reporting the facts of war accurately,” especially when their coverage contradicts official pronouncements (as mine had done). I was also among those included because of my seven continuous years of reporting on the Vietnam War, from 1962 to 1969, longer than any other Western journalist up to that time. In addition, based on my series of dispatches from and about the siege of the beleaguered Khe Sanh outpost, the Christian Science Monitor in 1969 had nominated me for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. I remember chuckling as I read the nomination letter. “Most of Beverly Deepe’s readers presume she is a man—for her beat in Vietnam is rough, tough and dangerous,” Monitor managing editor Courtney R. Sheldon told the Pulitzer Prize committee. “Yet Miss Beverly Ann Deepe, who hails from little Carleton, Nebraska, has been reporting the war and political developments from Saigon and military outposts such as Khe Sanh for seven years now. She holds her own with hosts of masculine correspondents—and asks no favors.”2 The “War Stories” exhibit, accompanied by photographs and a North Vietnamese trenching tool I had sent, was organized by experts selected by the Freedom Forum.3 The exhibit was on display from May to November 2001, bracketing the cataclysmic hijacking of four airliners on September 11 that resulted in the leveling of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, destruction of parts of the Pentagon just miles from the Newseum , and the deaths of nearly three thousand civilians. Those horrifying attacks set in motion a chain of global events that ultimately prompted me to write these memoirs. preface xi Why Another Book about the United States and Vietnam I began to write these memoirs forty-some years after leaving Vietnam and three years after retiring from teaching and researching journalism and communications. I was spurred by sensing that the U.S reaction to 9/11 had begun to degenerate in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the neighboring countries into another bloody, agonizing Vietnam-like experience. I became painfully aware that many shortcomings in U.S. policy and actions that I had noted in my reporting from Vietnam were arising again nearly a half century later in another part of...