You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  The only woman editor in Saigon came to Webb’s rescue. Ann Bryan, the editor of Overseas Weekly, was known to have an open door for young reporters. She was not easily intimidated. Earlier, she had successfully sued Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to overturn a ban on her paper, and she had helped push back General Westmoreland’s proposed ban on women on the battlefield. Bryan gave Webb assignments and then filled out the necessary paperwork for her to become an official reporter on MACV’s list, with the full rights that implied. The credentials were a lifesaver for another reason. Webb’s tourist visa was running out; as a newly accredited reporter, she could stay as a resident in Vietnam.7

  Her work for Bryan led to piecemeal assignments from UPI. Most of these were requests for “hometowners” from smaller newspapers across America who wanted feature stories about local boys serving overseas. The UPI staff reporters happily handed over those assignments to Webb, whose reporting was so thorough one soldier thought she was investigating him for an offense he had committed back home.8

  At UPI, Miller began to appreciate Webb’s abilities. When former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy visited neighboring Cambodia in November 1967, he commissioned Webb to be the number-two reporter on Kennedy’s semiofficial trip. In many ways, Webb was ideal.9 French was still the second language of Cambodia, and Webb was fluent. She traveled on a British Commonwealth passport, a major asset since Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk routinely refused to allow American journalists into the country. Cambodia was officially neutral, and Sihanouk was terrified of the American war spreading into his country.

  Ray Herndon, UPI’s Singapore correspondent, was to be the lead reporter and would cover the news of the day. Webb covered the awestruck crowds who followed Mrs. Kennedy; she described her elegant wardrobe when she visited the prince at the royal palace in Phnom Penh and fed elephants from a balcony. She was alongside when Kennedy traveled to Siem Reap to tour the temples of Angkor Wat.

  In a sign of what was to come, Herndon quietly left the official party and investigated secret Vietnamese communist sanctuaries inside Cambodia’s eastern border. He and AP reporter George McArthur found a battalion-sized NVA base that was used to target American soldiers in Vietnam. Sihanouk said the base was Cambodian and used to train guerilla fighters. Within one year, the US would secretly bomb that area.10

  Webb also wrote freelance articles on South Vietnamese politics that were so well sourced they were censored in the South Vietnamese press. She teamed with a BBC reporter to interview Truong Dinh Dzu, the popular peace candidate challenging Nguyen Van Thieu in the South Vietnamese elections. Dzu was expansive in his critique of Thieu, and to Webb’s horror, he was charged and convicted of libel for his remarks in the interview. He was sentenced to hard labor but later released.

  But even with extra assignments, Webb was living what she called her “hungry shoe-string” life, still eating street food and at times forgoing real soap.

  Only after the Tet coverage did UPI hire her and officially put her on the local staff. The perennially second-place wire service needed her talents full-time; Webb became the first and only woman in the bureau and was paid just enough to quiet her worries about money.

  Coverage of the massive Tet Offensive was grueling and difficult in part because it was so unexpected. As a full-time local staffer, Webb was assigned to the Saigon area to cover the evacuation of dependents of the diplomatic corps and America’s stepped-up bombing of the North. Webb finally did fly to Pleiku in the Central Highlands, where casualties were high on both sides and the NVA was executing Vietnamese considered puppets or Americans whom they deemed imperialists.

  As Tet wound down, Webb was put into rotation to cover combat. It was a historic first for any wire service in any war. It was never officially noted, but from the moment her byline appeared in American newspapers, Webb became a role model and talking point for American women agitating to be sent to Vietnam. The AP held to its policy of no women in war zones until 1972, when, like the New York Times, officials thought the war was nearing its end. However, the AP forbade the women reporters to cover combat.

  Webb struck her UPI colleagues as fearless, even though she claimed the contrary. Her first time reporting from the field was outside Cu Chi with the Twenty-fifth Army Infantry Division. “It was one of those long walks in the sun with a couple of mortar attacks, a couple of people dying of heat exhaustion.… These kids [American soldiers] were mostly 17, 18-year-olds off the street. What struck me about that was how inexperienced most of the troops were.”

  Then she wet her pants when a mortar landed nearby. When she was asked if that battle was the first time she had seen anyone die, she answered no: “I’d seen quite a lot of people die before that.”11

  That was an exaggeration that obscured the grim truth of three deaths that had led her, circuitously, to Vietnam.12

  WEBB WAS BORN into a prominent New Zealand family. Campbell West-Watson, her grandfather, was a Cambridge-educated English cleric sent to New Zealand, where he became archbishop and was honored by Queen Elizabeth.13

  Webb’s English-born mother, Caroline West-Watson, was raised as a teenager in New Zealand but returned to England for graduate studies at the London School of Economics, a rare woman student at the time. She was intrigued by modern politics and traveled as a New Zealand delegate to a conference in Kyoto to discuss Asia’s incipient independence movements. She attended debates on similar issues at the League of Nations meetings in Geneva. Then she got married.14

  The 1932 wedding of Caroline West-Watson to Leicester Chisholm Webb, a promising young journalist and college lecturer, was a major New Zealand society event. Webb was already marked as a future leader. Educated at Canterbury College in Christchurch and Cambridge University in England, Webb was a lecturer in history at Canterbury and wrote his first book on government in New Zealand. During World War II, he worked at the Economic Stabilization Committee, and in peacetime he was appointed head of the New Zealand Marketing Department. Somehow, he managed to continue writing on contemporary issues.15

  In the small world of the region, Webb’s work was noticed by neighboring Australia. He was recruited to head the new political science department at the Australian National University in Canberra.

  Catherine Merrial Webb, always known as Kate, was born in 1943, the third of four children born to Leicester and Caroline Webb and their second daughter. Theirs was a rarified household: their mother read Latin for pleasure, and their father was regularly interviewed on the Notes on the News national radio program, discussing national and international affairs. In photo albums the four children—Nicholas, Rachel, Kate, and Jeremy—play in English-style gardens, ride ponies, and glide on rowboats, squinting into the harsh Australian sun.

  Church and Sunday school were de rigueur, and education was an absolute priority. Kate excelled in academics, the best of her siblings. Languages and the social sciences came easily. Her passion, though, was drawing and painting, one reason she was considered eccentric. She was also the good child, the least likely to act up.

  Although their parents held back on physical affection—no hugs or kisses—they inculcated their children with their deeply held views. At dinner, their mother and father explained why Australia and New Zealand needed to accept that their larger community was Asia and how they should support independence for their Asian neighbors and not side with the European colonial nations. Just as often, their father would discuss the meaning of the ecumenical religious movement and its belief in the dignity of all peoples and races. They were progressives by the standards of the times, although her daughters noticed that Caroline suffered for having given up her career to raise the children and support her husband.16

  In 1956, Leicester Webb was given a year’s paid sabbatical to study the politics of postwar Europe. He and Caroline budgeted carefully to bring their two daughters with them for a rare educational opportunity. Their two sons had to attend a local Australian boarding school in their absence.
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  The Webb itinerary was enviable: Naples, Rome, Paris, London, and Oxford with a side trip to Germany for Kate and her mother. At thirteen years of age, Kate had decided she wanted to read German philosophy in college, which required learning the language. Leicester focused his European research on the strength of communism in postwar Italy. Kate concentrated on art, sketching, and keeping an epistolary journal, writing letters to an imaginary friend she christened Raoul. In her first letter from Naples—Napoli—she wrote about the “poverty, people in ruins, shacks and grass huts all piled up.” In Rome “Daddy hurried off after breakfast to work in the library and Mummy, Rachel and I caught a bus for San Silvestro.” The three went on to the Roman Forum, but the highlight was the Borghese Gallery—“600 lire to get in and there were really lovely pictures by Titian, Raphael, Caravaggio… I was awfully thrilled to see a really lovely Botticelli… but the real cracker was a brown ink and silver paint sketch by Leonardo.”17

  Paris meant a ride up the Eiffel Tower—“a most wonderful experience ever”—and cafés where Kate sketched waiters with platters of food and French diners eating with animated reverence. As she did at home, Kate went on long evening walks with her father while in Europe, asking him questions and soaking up his full attention.

  The Louvre was her touchstone. She wrote to Raoul: “Rachel and I skipped the Italian stuff. Hundreds and hundreds of famous artists rolled before us… there were miles we didn’t see.… Suddenly we were in an impressionist room. Wow!!! I just about went nutty. There were Daumiers, Van Goghs, Gaugins, Lautrecs, Manets, Monets, Renoirs, Cezannes, Degas and billions of others. Each was a masterpiece.”

  Young Kate had an appreciation of the impressionists far ahead of the more conventional tastes of 1957. In her drawing of the impressionist room Cezanne was given pride of place.

  England was a whir of castles, the London Underground, and Westminster Abbey. In Germany, she daily worked on translating Aida with her German tutor, Frau Ringel, before her nightly bath. During a pilgrimage to Goethe Haus, she learned her favorite philosopher had been very rich.

  And then the perfect year abroad ended. Her sister, Rachel, stayed on in Italy as an au pair, and the rest of the family returned to Canberra.

  Kate entered high school with hopes of plunging into art and painting. The girls in her new class, who were uniformly bubbly and outgoing, viewed Kate as out of place with her intensity and seriousness.

  Kate stuck to art but at the price of becoming an outcast and loner. She worked hard at school, avoiding her classmates, whom she considered shallow. Even at home, she was becoming an introvert.18

  Luckily, she found a friend in Vicki Fenner, a neighbor who rode on the same bus to school. Vicki was the daughter of Professor Frank Fenner, a prominent microbiologist and a colleague of Leicester Webb at the university. The two girls began walking home together and discovered they were both deeply alienated from school. Soon Vicki and Kate were reading poetry about the futility of life. With hormones raging, they dug deeper into the darkness. They fed each other’s despair until they saw no way out.

  They decided that suicide was the answer.

  One Sunday afternoon, Kate slipped into her home and stole her father’s hunting rifle and some ammunition. She met Vicki at a storm drain in their Red Hill neighborhood. Vicki stood in the water, leaned against the barrel, and fired directly into her forehead, collapsing after one shot. Her face was cratered and covered in blood. Kate looked on in shock. Then she turned and ran.

  Her brother Jeremy was at home when Kate came crashing through the kitchen door, “screaming yelling, distraught, ripped apart.”

  “Papa took control immediately,” he said, “and made Kate describe what had happened. Papa zoomed down to Vicki’s father and told him. He kept saying no—that’s not possible. They went off up the hill to see Vicki and Kate stayed with mother. Kate was now in complete shock, not saying anything. An ambulance was called. The police detectives arrived.”

  Vicki Fenner died in a hospital two hours later.

  The police charged Kate with homicide. She had provided the weapon and ammunition knowing her friend intended to commit suicide. Leicester Webb nearly collapsed in the witness box testifying on Kate’s behalf during the initial hearing.19

  He hired first-rate lawyers who argued that Kate had tried to stop Vicki at the last minute, asking her to reconsider, saying: “Think, think.”

  Her lawyer argued this proved Kate had turned against the idea of a double suicide since Kate had also refused to write a suicide note. Vicki had. She left a suicide note in her bedroom for her parents saying: “Life is not worth living.”20

  An Anglican bishop testified in favor of bail for Kate, saying she needed to be with her Christian family who loved her. A detective said Kate had told him she was “acting in good faith and assisting a friend.” The judge granted fifteen-year-old Kate her freedom on a bail of 200 pounds, while the family fought the murder charges.

  Kate stopped speaking to anyone. To her brother Jeremy she became the “ghost who walks.”

  Caroline Webb wrote urgently to her daughter, Rachel, in Italy. “Come home right away to help your sister, maybe she’ll talk to you.”

  Rachel arrived to find her parents in a standoff, refusing to talk to each other. “It was really vicious. Our whole family life was turned upside down. Father had stopped working to defend Kate.”

  After six weeks of unrelieved tension, the court dropped all charges against Catherine Webb.21 But the damage was done. A grief-stricken Professor Fenner wrote a wrenching letter to the family blaming Kate for his daughter’s death. Over the years he softened, and in his memoirs, Fenner said that he agreed with the court’s opinion. Kate was not to blame. But that didn’t mitigate his loss. Vicki’s death, he wrote, had been “the most tragic episode” that he and his wife had experienced.22 By then Fenner was the most highly decorated and awarded Australian scientist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  The family rallied around Kate and tried to devise strategies to comfort and heal her. An Anglican nun was brought to counsel Kate, who had effectively remained incommunicado. The nun failed to convince Kate to open up, so she switched tactics and had Kate design and sew curtains, to bring out her creative spirit and bring her back into the world. Kate was given no other medical care or counseling.

  She didn’t want to speak about Vicki Fenner, but the story was on everybody’s mind. So Kate stayed away from everyone. The whole city seemed to know about the suicide and had an opinion about Kate. Her friend Marianne Hill convinced Kate to go to the movies; Kate arrived wearing an outlandish black hat that she refused to remove lest she be recognized.

  Somehow, her parents, sister, and brothers quietly steered Kate back to high school and real life. She left home to begin studies at the University of Melbourne and began to let go of her fears. Compared to stuffy Canberra, the college atmosphere was cosmopolitan, almost electric. She ate yoghurt for the first time and learned to love modern music. She made lifelong friends; she scandalously rode on the back of motorcycles. She majored in philosophy and became attached to the philosophy of libertarianism as well as the professor who taught those courses. She was happy.

  She was visiting school friends when she was awoken late on the night of June 23, 1962. The police telephoned with the impossible news that both of her parents had been killed in a traffic accident on a highway in Tasmania.

  Kate was weeping uncontrollably when she arrived at her sister Rachel’s home. “We were all like stunned mullets. We weren’t a hugging family. We managed to hold it together.”23

  The university sent chancellors to Rachel’s home to help organize their parents’ papers and sort out an infinite number of issues, keeping the two sisters busy.

  On the day of their parents’ funeral, much of Canberra came to a standstill. The cortege for the caskets of Caroline and Leicester Webb stretched for miles. The pews of St. John’s were overflowing, but the family barely heard the eulog
ies. They were so profoundly in shock. After the burial, Jeremy moved in with Rachel and her young family, while Kate went back to university in Melbourne. Rachel was worried about her sister. It had been only four years since Vicki Fenner had killed herself. But Kate insisted she wanted to return to classes.

  In what became a dark habit, Kate sought refuge in her work. She drank so much coffee to stay awake she fell ill with caffeine poisoning. Nonetheless, she graduated with honors, earning a philosophy degree. She thought art might offer rewarding employment and enrolled in the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney, the ultimate metropolis in Australia. From the start, she was disappointed, telling Rachel she felt the teachers were oriented toward the men and ignoring her. She left midway through her course after she broke a stained-glass window and needed to earn money to pay for the damage.

  Rachel stepped in with a practical suggestion for Kate: she should contact Douglas Brass, an old friend of their father who was the editorial director of the popular Mirror newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. Brass was happy to help the youngest daughter of Leicester Webb. He told Kate she was hired as a secretary. Kate couldn’t type. Brass went one better and offered her a position as a news cadet, essentially ferrying news copy from one desk to another and learning the ropes by watching reporters in the newsroom. Women were rarely allowed into the newsroom, even as apprentices. Instead, women reporters were usually confined to the women’s section, where they still wore white gloves to work.24

  Journalism was familiar to Webb. Her father had begun his career as a reporter and had many friends in the field, including Brass. The newsroom was exciting and comfortable. As a cadet, she was sent out on the street to do the legwork for staff reporters, mostly on the police beat. Webb paid off her art school debt but decided art school was a bore compared to her life at the Mirror.

  She was helping with the police beat when Lyndon Johnson made a state visit to Australia in October 1966. Australia was one of the few American allies supporting the US in Vietnam and had sent two battalions to fight in the war. Most Australians were thrilled—Johnson was the first sitting president to visit the country—and waited hours to greet his motorcade. There were opponents of the war, especially among the young who saw no reason to fight an American war. Several hundred students waving antiwar placards broke through a police barricade and blocked the streets. Some threw red paint at the presidential limousine. The activists were carried away by police and condemned as militants. Webb, who had been sent out to follow the huge crowds, became intrigued by the angry students and the war.