Now as a journalist on her own, FitzGerald began mixing in rarified intellectual circles at Felker’s magazine and, accompanied by various boyfriends, at Bob Silvers’s New York Review of Books.
Unlike these intellectuals, FitzGerald thanks to her father actually knew officials carrying out the war even if she was largely in the dark about what they were up to. Her father had doubts about the war’s effectiveness—he had told Robert S. McNamara that he relied on statistics too much—but he always defended the mission. Adlai Stevenson, her mother’s lover, dutifully supported Johnson’s Vietnam policies at the United Nations while privately arguing for a negotiated settlement. He was ignored. Her mother fell on the dove side of the debate. She knew no one actually fighting in the war.
Missing Europe, FitzGerald went on a vacation during the summer of 1965 and was in Greece when she received a cable from her mother telling her Stevenson had died of a heart attack walking down the streets of London with Marietta.
FitzGerald was stunned with grief. “Mummy was with him. He fell down on the pavement outside the American Embassy. She tried to give him artificial respiration,” she wrote in her diary. “What am I doing here alone in Athens.… We are all alone when people die away from us.”
Then FitzGerald added to her diary a disturbing and deeply private moment when Stevenson visited her in Paris: “that night in the park on the Ile de Cite when the Gov. [Stevenson] asked me whether he should propose to Mummy. We sat under the weeping willows and dangled our feet close to the water and listened to guitars. He kissed me on my mouth and wanted to hold my breasts. Then was horrified. How are things so necessary and so impossible?”22
Since her childhood, FitzGerald had had to absorb the deep disappointments and pain from the behavior of powerful adults in her life. For days she tried and failed to write a consoling letter to her mother.
That autumn FitzGerald attended a boozy dinner with her father in Washington at the home of Joseph Alsop, an influential conservative newspaper columnist.23 Alsop always dominated his dinners, peering over his round eyeglasses and challenging any and all to disagree with him. That night he praised the “nobility of the Vietnam War” and mentioned Frank Wisner as an example of a young lord of the Delta.
Frankie FitzGerald and the other young guests couldn’t disagree more, saying the war was a disaster.
Desmond FitzGerald sided with Alsop. He told his daughter and the other younger guests that they didn’t know what they were talking about, that they were “all wet.” American combat troops had been fighting a mere seven months and already Vietnam had provoked a rare but amiable disagreement between FitzGerald and her father. Desmond continued writing long, deeply affectionate letters to Frankie, but always from a distance, as he traveled the world for the CIA.
It was a few months later that Frankie, adrift after an affair with a married man had ended in heartache and with her mother still consumed by grief over the death of Stevenson, designed a trip to Southeast Asia that would include reporting stops in Laos and Vietnam. She expected her father to be pleased with her travel to a region he loved. But while he approved, he was clearly worried. He feared “dark forces” would discover she was his daughter and kidnap her. He told the embassy to avoid any mention of her relationship to him.
She collected letters of accreditation from the Village Voice and Vogue magazine. At a farewell dinner, he tried to seduce her. “Clay ‘got personal’ and I fended him off with beastly abstractions,” she wrote in her diary. “A pass was made. I shriveled—hating myself for shriveling and said: there are many ways to tell a lie.”24
In this way a woman of extreme privilege and attributes—wealth, status, intelligence, beauty, and sophistication—ended up competing in the grubby, dangerous, and wholly masculine world of the war correspondent. Before Vietnam, Frankie FitzGerald had never lived among the middle class, much less the poor. Her only experience of misery was that VIP tour of Africa with Adlai Stevenson, where she visited the apartheid ghettos of Johannesburg, South Africa. Yet she gave up her Manhattan apartment and Parisian jaunts to live amid Vietnam’s heat and disease, its refugee camps of mud, shit, and despair, and its corpses—corpses everywhere.
Without her advantages, it is hard to imagine how Frances FitzGerald could have beaten the odds against a woman becoming a war correspondent in Vietnam, enduring the snubs, the refusal to take her seriously or acknowledge her accomplishments. With the security of her family money, she didn’t have to scrounge for assignments to pay her expenses. With her upbringing among the elite, she was neither easily intimidated nor fooled.
It never crossed her mind that, if she had been a man, Time or Newsweek would have hired her, trained her, and sent her to Vietnam as a war correspondent. She didn’t dwell on the barriers she faced. They were so ingrained they seemed natural, inevitable. She knew Vietnam offered her an opportunity of a lifetime—graduating from writing occasional profiles for a small if promising New York newspaper to covering the most important story in the world.
FRANCES FITZGERALD’S POLITICAL awakening in Vietnam came in March 1966 during the Buddhist insurrection, just as it had for Catherine Leroy.
The monks were agitating against the South Vietnamese junta, and the year-old American takeover of the war. Their protests shook Hue, Da Nang, and eventually Saigon. Vietnamese dockworkers in Da Nang refused to unload American ships, resulting in a shortage of bombs. Demonstrations led by Buddhist monks stopped traffic and daily life in Saigon to protest the military junta ruling South Vietnam under the thumb of the Americans rather than a democratically elected Vietnamese government.
For foreigners, the sight of monks wrapped in scarlet robes leading thousands of protestors, some wielding truncheons, belied the one-dimensional view of pacifist Buddhism. The protests were centered in Hue, the cultural and political hub of Vietnam for centuries. At that time, it was also the country’s haven for intellectuals, nationalists, and political organizations.
For the Vietnamese, there was nothing exotic about monks, or even nuns, leading a political rebellion. Under the banner of mission civilisatrice, the French colonial government had tried to break the Buddhist hold on Vietnam’s culture. French priests converted a sizeable minority of Vietnamese to the Roman Catholic faith, and the French government rewarded Vietnamese Catholics with privileges and elite status in colonial society. When the French lost control of the country in 1954, the Buddhists expected to recover their primacy in South Vietnam. Instead, they watched as Diem, a conservative Catholic, led the new government. The Buddhists became the strongest critics of the Saigon government, not only for its close ties to Catholicism but for its corruption and for handing over power to the Americans. They were also anticommunists. Thich Tri Quang, an influential monk who led some of the protests, said he feared the communists would win “because this government is unpopular and always seems to do the wrong thing.”25 Buddhist protests had helped fuel the coup d’état against Diem in 1963. The Buddhist protests in 1966 seemed just as ominous.
Like Leroy, FitzGerald realized that the Buddhist uprising was a window into an unsettling truth about Vietnam, but neither woman was sure what it meant. Washington couldn’t understand the insurrection either. The military was saying the war was going well, so why were the South Vietnamese starting riots? President Johnson’s military commanders had assured him that the US would win the war, though they warned it might take longer than predicted. And American troop strength had increased ten times in the year after the US took over combat operations. Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak, commander of the US Marines in the Pacific, had said: “We are not only going to win, we are winning.”26
But the American takeover of the war effort and the endemic corruption it helped nurture in the South Vietnamese society exacerbated the clash between the Catholic regime and the Buddhist believers.
The month that FitzGerald and Leroy arrived in Vietnam, Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky, the head of the South Vietnamese junta, had flown to Honolulu to meet w
ith President Johnson for a hastily assembled conference. Johnson projected an air of confidence to distract from growing dissent among influential senators back in Washington who were holding hearings questioning Johnson’s dramatic escalation of the American war.
Ky was hoping for Johnson’s blessings to continue what had become unlimited spending on the war. A dapper flatterer, Ky said he would replicate Johnson’s Great Society in Vietnam with a new “social revolution,” giving Johnson the democratic talking points he needed. Johnson beamed and told Ky he spoke “just like an American.” Johnson gave Ky his approval.27
Given the assurance of American support, Ky returned to Saigon and mounted a brazen power play. He removed his rival Gen. Nguyen Chanh Thi, the popular military leader in Central Vietnam. The move blew up in Ky’s face. General Thi, a native of the region, was a hero of the region from the Central Highlands to the plains, the coast, and the city of Hue. He had the support of villagers, students, and Buddhists who called for a popular insurrection against Ky.
At the very moment that the Americans were ready to declare victory against North Vietnam and with the backing of a solid South Vietnamese government, Ky had ignited a battle within his own political base.
On the battlefields of Central Vietnam, Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops loyal to General Thi blocked the ARVN troops sent by Ky from entering their region. The US military had to break up what threatened to become a civil war between ARVN soldiers.
The junta convinced the Americans that the Buddhists were pawns of the communists who were really behind the revolt, propaganda that Cathy Leroy had initially believed. In fact, the communists were caught by surprise and criticized themselves later for failing to take advantage of such popular anger.
FitzGerald traveled with Ward Just to report on the Buddhists. While Leroy captured the visual horror of the political breakdown, FitzGerald went in search of answers or at least an outline of the implications of this confrontation.
She and Just grabbed seats on a military helicopter traveling from Saigon to the imperial city of Hue. A small detachment of Marines met them and was surprised to see her. They surrounded her, trying to talk to this blond American woman, and blocked her way to the jeep waiting to take them to the protests. FitzGerald kept her cool and smiled a wicked smile that Just rarely saw cross her patrician face.28
The two reporters interviewed the American and Vietnamese military directly involved in the standoff. FitzGerald filled her notebook with quotes about the underlying political rivalry that nearly became a full-scale battle between pro junta troops against rebellious pro General Thi troops.
They roamed the dynastic city, the elegant seat of Vietnam’s Nguyen dynasty, which evoked a culture and era that stirred FitzGerald’s curiosity. Surrounded by a moat, Hue’s citadel had the imposing air of an Asian fortified palace-city, with six major gates, several pavilions, and impressive gardens. Nothing in Saigon had prepared FitzGerald for this clearly Chinese-influenced citadel with elaborate carvings and halls expressing both serenity and power. She broke away from Just and lingered over the tombs and pagodas in the centuries-old former capital, wondering whether this Purple Forbidden City, as it was called, still held strong national political and spiritual meaning for the Vietnamese and how this filtered into the politics of the war.29
She left the citadel and roamed the city perched on the banks of the Perfume River. FitzGerald interviewed students protesting against Ky and then talked to the polished rector of a Catholic school. Further downstream, she found young men at the Hue yacht club about to sail boats on the river with no interest in the Buddhist uprising. This was her introduction to the layers of Vietnamese society foreign to Americans and unreported in newspaper stories of war. She didn’t need an interpreter; her nearly fluent French worked almost everywhere.30
Ward Just arranged for them to sleep that night on a sampan moored on the river, a gesture that confirmed their romance. Hue was far enough from the war and the cacophony of Saigon’s traffic and war machine that FitzGerald was surprised by the silence. They slept soundly and headed back to Saigon the next day. FitzGerald had the beginning of an article that analyzed the clash between the junta in Saigon and the Buddhists in Hue, considered the heart of Vietnamese culture, and what it meant for the American war. Her goal was to explain the social and political dimensions masked by the daily military reports.
IN SAIGON, FITZGERALD became a witness to the deep anger and frightening chaos of a massive Buddhist protest. The monks had been leading protests in Saigon streets, where police clubbed the protestors and knocked down monks. In a direct attack against the Americans keeping Ky in power, Buddhists strung banners across major boulevards in Saigon calling for an end to foreign domination of the country. Street gangs roamed and threatened violence.
She had been invited to the thirty-fifth birthday party of Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine with a PhD in economics who was a Pentagon aide stationed in Vietnam as an intelligence officer. He had helped draw up the initial bombing targets against North Vietnam.
When FitzGerald arrived at Ellsberg’s party, only a handful of guests had shown up, and they hadn’t touched the bottles of cognac or plates of food. Everyone was worried about an unexpected protest that had broken out in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon and the center of the country’s black market. Cholon was a world apart, a dense neighborhood of Chinese shops and villas shrouded in a reputation of mystery and greed, where merchants’ main interest was profiting from the war. The most common sounds were the clicks of a merchant counting on an abacus or playing the tiles of mahjong. Political trouble in Cholon was newsworthy.
Most of the guests had stayed home out of caution. Ellsberg told FitzGerald he was calling off the party. She should go home; the city was too dangerous.
She said, “Well, let’s go and see the protests then.”31 Without a thought, the few guests piled into Ellsberg’s jeep, and he drove toward the Xa Loi Pagoda, a major center of Buddhist dissidents. As they progressed, the crowds grew larger, shouting loudly against the Saigon government and the Americans. Ellsberg came across an American civilian contractor whose car had been overturned and torched. When he stopped to offer help, the crowds pressed close to the sides of the jeep. Ellsberg realized they would never reach the pagoda and headed back home, quickly, driving down a major boulevard. A white-gloved Vietnamese policeman directed them away from the masses down a narrow side street. But the crowd followed, raining pebbles on the jeep. Ellsberg thought, “We’ve had it.”
He looked at Frankie and was relieved that she seemed calm.32
In fact, she was very frightened; a white-knuckle fear burned underneath a stoic exterior. At that moment, a young Vietnamese man jumped in front of the crowd and onto the hood of their car. He shouted to everyone to move away, and they did. In this way, he skillfully cleared the way for Ellsberg to back out of the street, turn around, and drive off to the center of Saigon and to safety.
From that point on, FitzGerald sought out Ellsberg. He was the rare American official—civilian or military—who took her seriously, mulling over the war and her questions and answering as best he could. The longer she stayed in Vietnam, the more she appreciated the thoughtful conversations she shared with him. For his part, Ellsberg was surprised by FitzGerald. He knew her father—he had once briefed him on a top-secret study—and knew Desmond FitzGerald’s fingerprints were all over Vietnam. Yet Desmond’s daughter was the rare reporter who refused to define herself as a cold warrior dedicated to the US cause.
FitzGerald was not a reflexive fan of the US mission—unlike Ellsberg. She assumed her role was to report the facts and the truth with an eye toward what mattered and not automatically support the policies undergirding the American war. Her reporting led her to think about the nature of the war, neither justifying it nor opposing it.
She wrote her first article on the blue Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter she had carried from New York. She read and re-read her notes
from Hue and Saigon. She worked alone, without any guidance from an editor since her pieces were “on spec” with no promise to be published. The result was a highly original piece written in the style of an outsider, someone who asked different questions and admitted when she didn’t have answers.
She slipped the article in an envelope addressed to the Village Voice in New York and walked to Saigon’s post office to mail it. The ornate post office was across the square from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in the heart of the French quarter. With its domed ceiling and bustling central hall, the post office resembled the Gare d’Orsay railroad station in Paris. FitzGerald walked past the carved wooden telephone booths, bought a stamp at one of the windows lining the far walls, and mailed her article. No one was paying her expenses, so she resisted paying the exorbitant cable prices to get her article to the US faster. She trusted the transpacific postal system and waited to see if the Voice would print her article.
She need not have worried. “The Hopeful Americans & the Weightless Mr. Ky” by Frances FitzGerald was published in the Village Voice on April 21, 1966.
It began: “For American officials in Saigon the five-week political crisis has been a long and harrowing ordeal. No normal, healthy little coup, it has emerged slowly from beneath the surface like some fearful miasma to invade the dry safe world of diplomacy and war casualty statistics.”
She was unblinking in her description of the breadth of the crisis, telling readers of the Voice that it included “the resignation of General Nguyen Chanh Thi, the secession of Central Vietnam, the demands for elections and a civil government, the rising tide of violence and the new hostility to Americans.
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