Stockton befriended Jeremy, and Jeremy in turn told Kate that he liked Stockton better than the boyfriends she had in Australia because he made her “terribly happy.”
Stockton’s tour in Vietnam was coming to an end during the summer of 1969. He asked her to marry him. It wasn’t his first proposal; Kate had previously refused when Stockton was stationed in Vietnam, and there was no immediate chance of his return to the US. She was dedicated to her career. Webb felt she was riding a wave, “surfing in and out, sometimes a little ahead, sometimes a little behind the headlines. Front page adrenalin kept [me] on the crest.”
But after a year of dating, of emerging from her deep loneliness and feeling joy in Stockton’s companionship, she gave in and said yes. In the end, she “was relieved to have finally surrendered” to a man, even if it meant she would be moving to the United States and giving up all that mattered professionally to become an army wife who put her husband’s career above all. There would be no room to establish herself in a country where she was a foreigner and within a profession where women were having to file lawsuits to be given jobs half as exciting as hers in Vietnam.
Webb resigned from UPI and packed her bags in the autumn of 1969 for the move to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
When she and Stockton arrived in the United States, Kate called her sister, who was living in New York where her husband was posted as a diplomat at the United Nations. It was the beginning of the General Assembly, and Rachel was surprised to hear from her sister.
“We’re here—we’re getting married,” Kate said over the phone. Rachel asked to speak to Stockton. She told him one thing: “You have to treat my sister well.” She was worried, as always, about Kate. Stockton said he would.
When Webb arrived at Fort Bragg, she walked into a full-blown nightmare. Stockton was married. He had lied all the way through their affair. Worse, Stockton pretended nothing was wrong; he said they would marry after his wife agreed to a divorce. He kept Webb hidden in a hotel room, where she waited, going over their time in Vietnam, asking herself how she could have been so oblivious.
For days, Stockton went to his job at the base as if all was well and then returned to the hotel late at night, wearing his dress uniform. He would tell her to be patient. But soon Kate heard him on the telephone telling his wife he was away on field exercises. She knew it was over.
Soon enough, Stockton said good-bye to Webb. He had chosen to stay with his wife and was abandoning Webb in a foreign country with nothing.
She felt as if she were dead. Not sad or broken, simply dead. Rachel wanted to help, but “there was not a lot of communication with Kate at that point.”
She had one goal: return to Vietnam and the world she had been persuaded to leave behind. She pleaded with UPI to give her work, anywhere, so she could earn enough money for a plane ticket back to Saigon. They found her a job in Pittsburgh where she spent a long northern winter. She befriended Vietnam vets in bars, which she knew was strange. The cold was intolerable after years in the tropics. The stories she wrote were pedestrian. Bored, she studied Chinese with a private tutor. She steeled herself to survive, nothing more. After the three deaths early in her life—Vicki and her parents—Webb had created what she called her method of living through sorrow. “I just cut off each part of my past life. No regrets.” Now she attempted to cut off Stockton, and she drank to help the shell harden. She described this phase as searching for “my quiet soul.” In fact, she was hiding from her own despair.16
Escape came when the war exploded again.
In May 1970, President Nixon ordered the American invasion into Cambodia. He went on live television to announce the incursion, as he called it, saying it would be short and lead to the end of the Vietnam War. He said this would be accomplished by American and South Vietnamese troops finding and destroying the headquarters of Vietnamese communism inside the Cambodian border.
Students across the United States were angry, appalled, furious; Nixon had been elected to end the war, not expand it. They carried out the largest student protest in American history. Expanding the war to get out of Vietnam sounded like double-talk. At Kent State in Ohio, national guardsmen fired live ammunition into a crowd of protestors. Four students were killed, and nine were injured. A searing photograph of a young woman crying beside her murdered friend became the symbol of American youth outrage. A few days later, policemen killed protesting students at Jackson State in Mississippi. On the campus, the Vietnam War had turned National Guard soldiers and policemen against their own.
UPI sent Webb from nearby Pittsburgh to cover the Kent State disaster. She reported with a sense of urgency and wrote her way into the good graces of the wire service. Two weeks later, she was on an airplane to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, taking the number-two job in the new UPI bureau. She was a local hire and had to pay her own ticket, which she did without complaining. Where better to recover than the war and witnessing more suffering?
The student protestors were right to be suspicious. The war in Cambodia lasted five years and ended in catastrophe. Kate Webb, who covered the debacle, became a legend.
CHAPTER NINE
Where Does the Story End?
ON HER OWN IN NEW YORK, FRANKIE FITZGERALD REMAINED a journalist and wrote occasional articles about Vietnam while she completed her book. A particularly meaningful piece was her review of Last Reflections on a War by Bernard Fall for the magazine Commentary. She lauded the collection of his essays published after his death and demonstrated why his voice mattered.
Twice a refugee, Fall “took nothing for granted,” she wrote. His books and articles reflected his sympathy for soldiers, both the guerillas fighting for their independence and the French fighting for their lost world. The Americans, Fall wrote, seemed lost with their “abstract theories unrelated to the local situation.”1
But writing in New York City with its temptations and distractions was proving close to impossible even for the highly disciplined FitzGerald—especially with her social and family obligations and the perpetual shadow of her mother. She applied for and won a residency in the fall of 1969 at the MacDowell Colony, the renowned artists’ retreat in rural New Hampshire. She wanted nothing more than absolute silence and found it in her cottage surrounded by woods and meadows. She likened it to a “beautiful desert island… silence and time for the most unadulterated form of concentration.”2
FitzGerald had returned to a life of privilege.
She met her next beau at MacDowell, the author Alan Lelchuk.3 So much for unadulterated concentration. Lelchuk was writing his first novel—American Mischief—and was considered a bright young talent and something of a protégé of Philip Roth.4 A Brooklyn-born intellectual, Jewish, bearded with a mop of long, unruly hair, Lelchuk was nearly the absolute opposite of Ward Just. Yet as she had with Just, FitzGerald fell for Lelchuk within a few days of meeting him. She agreed to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the end of her MacDowell residency and live in his dilapidated apartment at 6 Centre Street, about five blocks from Harvard Square. Lelchuk welcomed her with the warning that he was not a man of money: he was living on the low salary of an assistant professor at Brandeis University. They shared expenses. “We moved her out of New York in my station wagon and she lived in my apartment with my makeshift furniture. She got the big study; I used the little one. All I cared about was my desk.”
FitzGerald had made her escape. Her new lifestyle was the closest she ever got to counterculture, though FitzGerald did want the apartment painted. She chose the colors, and Lelchuk hired some students to do the work, surprised at the difference the paint and some basic house cleaning made.
Physically, Cambridge had changed little since FitzGerald graduated seven years earlier. Harvard Square, Lowell House, and Memorial Hall still defined the university as they had for decades if not centuries. Socially and politically, though, it was a different world. FitzGerald had landed in a city and community that now considered Vietnam of paramount importance.
The
antiwar movement had taken hold on campuses across the country and Harvard was no exception. As early as 1966, Harvard students had protested the presence of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when he refused to publicly discuss the war when he visited. After he addressed a small, private group, hundreds of students blocked his exit. As a compromise one student was allowed to ask a question: Why is the United States killing so many Vietnamese civilians? McNamara answered cryptically: “I was tougher then. I am tougher now.” No one understood what he meant.
The editorial board of the Crimson student newspaper wrote an apology to McNamara for the disruption.
The next year, as the American involvement grew, any sheen of good manners among the antiwar students disappeared. They blockaded a representative of Dow Chemical Company, which was responsible for producing poisonous napalm for the US military. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, the campus grew more militant still. The university administration agreed to student demands to add Afro-American studies to the curriculum and to reduce the status of the military’s campus Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program to an elective.
In the spring of 1969, just before FitzGerald moved to Cambridge, antiwar students broke into University Hall, and expelled eight deans, and spent the night rifling official files and occupying the building. The next morning Harvard president Nathan Pusey called in the police and state troopers. Jean Bennett, a student inside the occupied building, said each of the troopers “seemed a giant; each cradled a hungry baton.”
After twenty-five minutes of “clubbing and bloodshed,” the students were evicted. Nearly two hundred were arrested. Frank Rich, a student who would become an award-winning critic and writer, witnessed the eviction. “The arrival of police in military formation, helmets glinting in the Yard’s lights, was terrifying. The screaming, the trampling, the blood on the steps that followed would set off not just a strike but months of angry debate and aimless seething among students and faculty.”5
To their critics, these Harvard students were elite cowards protected from the draft who refused to fight for their country. The students argued back that they were protesting because they didn’t want anyone to fight in the Vietnam War.
The women in the protests were now truly Harvard students. Unlike FitzGerald’s class, young women at Radcliffe now received degrees from Harvard College. A few Radcliffe women wore white armbands on their graduation robes to signify opposition to the war.6
FitzGerald’s class was among the last to be connected to the hidebound era of the 1950s, when the college had banned wearing pants, much less jeans, on campus and encouraged limited aspirations. One of FitzGerald’s classmates wrote that her goal upon graduation was to “give lovely dinner parties with wonderful conversations.” Living close to campus, FitzGerald was fully aware that she was breaking with the expectations of her gender and class again.7
With the work ethic of her Puritan ancestors, FitzGerald devoted her days and many of her nights to her book. She didn’t skimp on cigarettes or exercise, jogging on the streets of Cambridge in all weather. And she told herself that her goal was doable and made sense: “The war kept going on and on, and I kept getting more and more furious, and I thought I would have to write a book about it. It wasn’t a career choice. It was a desire to tell people what the place was like, what the Vietnamese are like, and what the US was doing in Vietnam. That’s all.”8
Besides Peter Davison, the publisher, her manuscript was edited by Robert Manning, who had been the editor and champion of her seminal Atlantic magazine piece, and Michael Janeway, an old friend and one of FitzGerald’s classmates who moved in the same social circles.
Writing a first book is daunting no matter how talented or organized or imaginative the author. FitzGerald’s routine was circumscribed. She worked at her desk in her home study. She did research in the Widener Library at Harvard. She went back to her desk to write letters to experts. Then she repeated the routine.
FitzGerald identified China, Vietnam’s first overlord, as the main impetus behind Vietnam’s centuries-long struggle for independence and as the country that would always be at the forefront of Vietnam’s worries. She positioned the Americans as the latest in a parade of powerful foreigners disrupting the lives of the Vietnamese. It was a dramatic departure from the way anyone else saw the war. Her historical reach was unheard of at the time when even American experts, as well as journalists, chronicled the Vietnam War as primarily a conflict that grew out of the 1950s clash between the West and communism, with a head nod toward the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the defeat of French colonial rule. Her editors at the Atlantic Monthly were worried.
Lelchuk was not. Even though he knew next to nothing about Vietnam, he regularly read her pages as they came out of her typewriter. “First rate quality. She is extremely smart and wrote beautiful prose. But she would get these nasty notes from her editors and didn’t know if she was doing well.”
Lelchuk, who was busy writing his novel, told her he was appalled by their harshness. “I said this is wrong and dumb. When she got hammered, I would say they’re wrong. You’re better than they are.… I think the way they treated her at the Atlantic Press was male chauvinism at its finest: without proclaiming she’s a woman and she can’t do this, they wrote to her in a way they wouldn’t write to a man.”9
Another letter from Davison epitomized Lelchuk’s point.
He wrote: “So far in our working together on this book, I have suggested that you keep working and regard the completed material as first-draft only. I now begin to see I was wrong. The present material is pre-first draft; it has not yet got to the point where an editor can do anything with it. It is so rough, so lacking in clarity, that all we can do is throw up our hands.
“Frankie, you have to solve the problem of articulating the Vietnam problem, both in the organization and the style of your book. I think you have a lot of work to do before solving it. If you believe you should keep forging ahead before you solve it, simply to cover the area you want the book eventually to cover, by all means do so; but when that is done, I am afraid you have another task ahead of you that is at least as daunting.… Yours ever, Peter.”10
This was Davison’s assessment two years after FitzGerald began the book. Lelchuk was furious and told her she should change publishers. FitzGerald listened. She considered Lelchuk very supportive: “I sort of went under his wing.” But she stayed with Davison. She doubted any other publisher would be interested in her book no matter what Lelchuk said. She felt loyal to the editors who were working hard on her manuscript, no matter how disparaging their comments. “They were very involved with the war. They had this one book under their control. Really, they were close to me.”
After the death of Paul Mus, FitzGerald asked John McAlister to be the Vietnam expert to review her manuscript. He wrote that he was disappointed “that the brilliant and profoundly impressive FitzGerald style” was missing and detailed in five pages how he thought it could be recovered.11 In a subsequent letter, he was supportive and offered to help her organize the material. He always added friendly notes. “Excuse me for being so grim. Hope to see you soon. Love, John.”12
She also turned to Professor Richard Solomon, a China specialist at the University of Michigan, who commented on her draft pages, suggesting she “do more with a description of how the foreign presence (American) dislocates the indigenous (South Vietnamese) power situation.”13
With each critique, FitzGerald reexamined and sometimes reshaped sentences and chapters. She clarified and reorganized large chunks of the material, but the substance and the overall narrative arc never truly changed. Like nearly every writer, she was willing to rewrite drafts until she uncovered the polished manuscript she knew she could write.
That didn’t mean her doubts disappeared. Over the ensuing months and years, she routinely wondered if her book would ever be published or would be noticed if it were.
FitzGerald was under other pressure. Henry Kissinger, who had become the nationa
l security adviser for President Nixon, telephoned her several times. He said he heard she was writing a book on the war and wanted to explain his policies. With Professor Popkin, she visited Kissinger in January 1970. She hoped to convince him to end the clandestine CIA Phoenix Program that targeted civilians rather than soldiers in the hunt for supporters of the Viet Cong. US and South Vietnamese soldiers were permitted to torture during interrogations and to assassinate Vietnamese civilians suspected of ties to the Viet Cong. By the time of her visit, some twenty thousand civilians had been murdered.
She made her argument to Kissinger in person and received the predictable answer: “Of course, he didn’t agree.”14 Four months later, she wrote to him after the US invasion of Cambodia. Again, she argued against US policy. Kissinger answered:
“Dear Frankie: Thank you for writing. It is not the time now to discuss what happened. But when this is over I would like to see you and talk and see what healing is possible. Warm regards, Henry A. Kissinger.”15
Even in Boston she dutifully fulfilled family and social obligations. Her mother came to visit, and Lelchuk felt he was under scrutiny, that Marietta Tree was judging whether he was worthy of her daughter. He later remarked, “There was always a kind of tension for Frankie, spoken or unspoken, about being a socialite’s daughter and being an intellectual.”16
At Christmas Lelchek and FitzGerald flew to her family’s villa in Barbados where Lelchek met Ronald Tree. “The social demands were constant,” he recalled.
Somehow FitzGerald completed her manuscript. It had grown to four hundred well-written and well-argued pages divided into three sections—the Vietnamese, the Americans, and the Saigon government—followed by a conclusion.
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