by Peter Arnett
The Associated Press I know well, having covered the Vietnam War for the news organization from 1962 to the Fall of Saigon in 1975. It never let me down in all those years, and in this project, too, the editorial, photographic and research staff willingly provided the necessary assistance to meet our tight deadlines. The AP’s Digital Publishing Specialist Peter Costanzo was my primary contact and he was unfailingly supportive. I relied on Chris Sullivan, editor of AP’s National Reporting Team, for daily commentary and consultation as we moved through the assignment chapter by chapter. Valerie Komor, Director of Corporate Archives, has long been a custodian of the reportage and memorabilia of her news organization’s Vietnam era, and her help—along with the expert assistance of Processing Archivist Francesca Pitaro—was invaluable.
I am thankful for the enthusiasm and commitment of the staff and management of RosettaBooks, the leading independent ebook publisher, which worked with the Associated Press in bringing this project quickly to fruition. CEO Arthur Klebanoff, well experienced in handling earlier historical works on the Vietnam War, was personally involved from the beginning. I appreciated his insights and encouragement, as I did with Rosetta’s associate publisher-at-large Roger Cooper who, in early discussions, inspired me to weave my own experiences into the historical fabric of the Vietnam War. Essential to the project’s completion were others in the experienced Rosetta team: production manager Hannah Bennett, production editor Jay McNair, and design associate Brehanna Ramirez.
Particularly helpful to me in this project were acquaintances in the Vietnamese diaspora who settled in the United States after the communist victory ended their hopes of establishing a democratic South Vietnam. A friend of many years, Nguyen Ngoc Linh, provided me valuable insights into the difficult readjustment required by those who appreciated America’s open arms in welcoming them here, but still dream of what could have been in their former homeland. The Information Minister at a critical time, Hoang Duc Nha, provided me with a vivid account of his dealings with Henry Kissinger and President Nguyen Van Thieu which helped clarify the political confusion of the last years of the war.
My own family, long accustomed to my absences at war fronts over the years, encouraged me from the beginning to accept this project, knowing that of all the conflicts I have covered, the Vietnam War was the most influential personally and historically. My son Andrew, a journalist himself, made perceptive appraisals of the written material I emailed him regularly, while my wife Nina and daughter Elsa were closer at hand and always supportive.
Appendix
Appendix A
Peter Arnett:
An Oral History
Jan. 30, 2006
The Associated Press Oral History Program
Interview conducted by Valerie S. Komor, Director, AP Corporate Archives
KOMOR: Good afternoon, Peter. I’m here with Peter Arnett at the headquarters of The Associated Press; it is Monday, January 30th, 2006, and Peter and I are going to chat about his time at The Associated Press. But, Peter, tell me first, where were you when you became a stringer for the AP? Was that your first job at the AP?
ARNETT: Yes, I was a reporter for the Bangkok World newspaper in Bangkok from 1958 to early 1960. And during that period, when really there was very little interest in Asia from the part of the United States, very few AP reporters were in Asia at that point. There was one reporter at the AP bureau, Tony Escoda was his name, a Filipino-American, really bright young man, and he employed me to do some stringing work. When he couldn’t get out of the office, he’d call me, and I would do stories on the political situation; occasionally interviewed visiting celebrities. And was—that’s where I really began my association. 1958.
Two years after that, early in 1960, I went to live in Vientiane in Laos, because the Bangkok World newspaper had started a Sunday newspaper called the Vientiane World. They were trying to develop a market in Vientiane, which is the capital of Laos, which had a large American community at that point, a couple of thousand diplomats, military people. It seemed to be a, a, you know, a potential market, certainly, for advertising and readership. So I agreed to go up to edit this paper in Vientiane. It turned out that I was one of two reporters who lived there; there was an AFP correspondent and me. There was no one else. Whereas in Bangkok, which was a much more flourishing city, it was commonplace for reporters to come through; there were reporters based there. Little Laos had no one, even though at that time, Laos was becoming the center of attention for the United States. In fact, when President John F. Kennedy was elected, and had a—his first long meeting with Dwight Eisenhower, the outgoing president, Eisenhower reportedly told him, you know, “Don’t worry about Vietnam. Laos is going to be the center of your problems. Because Laos—the communist Chinese are building a road through the northern area; you’ve got a communist revolutionary group called the Pathet Lao that are developing, and we’ve got a pro-American military government in Vientiane that you have to support.” So, even though it was becoming the center of attention within the U.S. government, generally it was looked upon as sort of a quiet, lost little place. And it was there in Laos where I further cemented my relationship with the AP, because I was the AP correspondent there, they didn’t have any local person. So they called upon me to cover events for them. There weren’t a lot of events, but when they did happen, they would message me, and I would cover the initial newsbreaks, and if necessary, they’d send in correspondents from Hong Kong or Bangkok or Tokyo, depending on how big the story got. But I would be the first, you know, the first source that they would use.
KOMOR: And how long did you do that, Peter?
ARNETT: I was there for the rest of the year, basically. And the operation of the Vientiane World, plus the U.S. political military operation was to end later that year, because there was a coup d’état by a disaffected battalion commander of the royal Lao military. His name was Captain Kong Le; he had a paratroop battalion. He hadn’t been paid for months; he got so angry that he pulled a coup d’état in Vientiane, and took over the government. Even though I had known Kong Le, and drank a few beers with him [laughs] earlier that year, he called me in and said, “Well, the Vientiane World is financed by the CIA; get out of town.” It wasn’t financed by the CIA, but the CIA assistant station chief’s wife worked for the mag—for the publication as a gossip columnist. So, they were half right. So I left at that point. Now, that coup d’état also solidified my relationship with the AP. Because—Vientiane, Laos, was the back of beyond in terms of communication in 1960. There was a post office with a very tenuous phone connection to the outside world. But when the coup d’état came, that phone connection stopped. Now, in earlier crises, we’d been able to go to the U.S. Embassy and use their transmission lines to get at least, sort of, a small paragraph or two out. But because of this coup d’état, the embassy was very embarrassed; they were frightened; they wouldn’t let us in the embassy. So I had no recourse but to file my story in Thailand where you had post offices in the border region, which is just across the Mekong River from Vientiane, that we could file our stories. You could pay them money, and they would telex them. But you did have the Mekong River as a barrier, it was a mile across. Part of it was sandy; part of it was open current. So I just took off one morning with the AP story, swam across the river…
KOMOR: Where did you put the story while you were swimming?
ARNETT: Hitched a ride on a truck, from the little village across from Vientiane to Udorn, which was about 60 miles south. Filed the story, and got a beat. I remember the San Francisco Chronicle had a headline on Page 3, “The First Dispatch From the War-Torn Laotian Area” by Peter Arnett, and I don’t—I did that in successive days, but I started taking news stories for The New York Times, because they had arrived; for a couple of other papers, plus AP. And I think that impressed the AP, as certainly my derring-do. It also impressed the AP senior executive for the area, a man called Don Huth, who ran the Southeast Asian operation out of Singapore. So Don, whom I’d bump
ed into a few times, a few months later talked to me, and asked me if I was sort of interested in getting more permanent employment. And I did have mixed feelings at the time, because I sort of returned to my dream about going to Fleet Street. And this was reinforced by having met various British correspondents who had come through: The Daily Mirror, the Daily Express. And they were just gung-ho, party guys. You know, they—whereas American journalists were serious, looking for the facts, these Britishers…
KOMOR: Did not appeal to you. They, they appealed to you.
ARNETT: Yeah, they wanted to tell colorful stories, and they, and they—and I sort of figured, “Hey, this is sort of more my style.” So, I remember asking one of them from the Daily Express, a man who I’d gotten to know because I had been also stringing for the Daily Express, I asked him about recommending me to the paper in London. Because I said, “I want to go to London; I’ve saved some money, and I want to work for the Daily Express.” And he said, “Sure, I’ll recommend you.” But he says, “You know what’s going to happen? You’ll go to London. They’ll hire you. And if you’re really good, after five years, they’ll send you right back here. Why leave? Stay here.” And on that advice, I looked around for work, and ultimately got the offer from Don Huth to go to Indonesia, midyear in ’61, to be the correspondent in Indonesia for the AP. It was a local hire arrangement; I was being reasonably well paid by local standards. But it was sort of a local hire, so on that basis, for example, I paid my own fare down to Jakarta. The AP wouldn’t come up with the money. What I actually did, I got a ride on Thai Airways and wrote a puff piece for their magazine to cover the cost of the fare. Just one other story I’ll tell you in Vientiane, Laos. I mentioned earlier, I was the only correspondent. The only—one of the two reporters, the other being a Frenchman. This occasioned sort of requests from both Reuters and UPI, who were competing with the AP, for me to help them out. I didn’t have any particular, you know, strong relationship with the AP, they would pay me for whatever I sent. And I felt at the time, “You know, I need the money,” and so I made an arrangement with Reuters and UPI that if something came up, I would file for AP first. Then I would file for Reuters, a little more. And then finally, if I had the time, I’d send something for UPI. But I felt, you know, that my loyalty was primarily with the AP, they’ll get the first break. They’ll get 10 minutes to use the story. And so, I remember on one occasion, when Prince Souphanouvong, who was then the communist leader, later, by the late ’70s, he became president of Laos, because the Pathet Lao ultimately won the Laotian war. But he escaped from prison. And early hours of the morning, when I learned about it, I filed two or three paragraphs for the AP: “Urgent: Souphanouvong Escapes.” Big beat. Then I filed a little more detailed for Reuters, but, you know, later in the morning, and then finally, for UPI, I sent a little more. So, next day, I got three messages back at my headquarters at the, at the Constellation Hotel, which was where the reporters would hang out when they came to town. And the first was from the AP, which is, “Thanks, you [were] 10 minutes [ahead] of Reuters, congratulations.” And Reuters messaged me, “You were late on breaking development, but ultimately made up with detail,” and the third from UPI said, “Thanks for helping out.” [Laughs] So, I never did that again. But it was—I was sort of taking care of everyone. Of course, when I joined The Associated Press the next year, my loyalty was totally…
KOMOR: Was totally…
ARNETT: To the organization.
KOMOR: And when did you arrive in Saigon? Do you remember the day?
ARNETT: I flew to Saigon on June 26, 1962, on what I presumed would be a temporary assignment. At that point, Vietnam was a very small-bore involvement for the United States. When I got there, there [were] maybe 5,000 military advisers, spending maybe a million dollars a day. But in different countries around the world, in 40 or 50 other countries, there were American advisers, as many as 500 or a thousand, helping friendly governments organize their armed forces. And the Kennedy administration was still very concerned about Laos. In fact, there was a—Averell Harriman, then a special ambassador for the Kennedy administration, had gone to Geneva and organized a deal with the Laotian authorities, the three ruling factions, that basically neutralized Laos, and allowed a coalition, sort of left-wing government to take over. By moving Laos out of the way with this political solution, the US Government was clear to concentrate all its efforts on saving South Vietnam from communism. And this didn’t happen until, say, mid-’62, so Vietnam was still on the back burner. So, I went to Vietnam presuming to be a temporary assignment. I had visited Vietnam earlier, as a tourist, in 1957, when I’d first got to Southeast Asia with my then-girlfriend Myrtle. And after the pleasures and fun in Thailand, and in Cambodia, where you had Buddhist people, you know, seemingly easygoing and pleasant, going into Vietnam was, it was then a war zone. The French had been fighting there for a decade; there was barbwire everywhere; there were, there were block houses with troops. And the population of Saigon in the marketplaces and around the hotels seemed very negative and difficult. With good reason at that point, they’d been sort of involved in conflict, you know, since the 1930s—occupied by the Japanese, reoccupied by the French, you know, fighting the French. So when I was asked to go back there in ’62 I figured, “Ahh. It’s sort of an imposition.” But, if the AP wanted it, I would do it, but I much preferred the more friendly climes of, you know, Bangkok or Cambodia or Singapore, or even Indonesia. There was also the issue of Malcolm Browne, who at that point, as far as the AP people in the region were concerned, was something of a intellectual bore. Why? Mal was like Ivy League, from Swarthmore College, with a degree in chemistry. And no one else in the AP—none of the Americans in the AP had been to a school like that; most of them, if they’d gone to college, were from the Midwest. I hadn’t been to college; I’d come right out of high school into the news business. And Mal was somehow distant with people who had visited; he sort of kept his own counsel. He was this tall, six-foot-three blond, sort of, detached attitude. And he wrote very long pieces for the AP. Thousands of words—two or three thousand words long about his adventures going out with Vietnamese troops, going to the highlands. And to the disgust of many AP people in the region, they would run on the wire. Why did they run? Because Wes, who was taking over as president at that point, adored Mal; figured out that, you know, he was adding immensely to, you know, the value of the AP report by writing these pieces, and fully supported him. But the regular AP guys are saying, “What’s a 3,000-word story doing on the wire?” So, for all those reasons, I felt that, you know, life with Mal may not be easy, because he was so very different from other AP people I’d worked for.
KOMOR: Do you—was Mal more or less on his own by the—when you arrived? Was it a—or was Horst [Faas] already there?
ARNETT: Now, when I arrived—I arrived in Saigon from, from Bangkok. The same day Horst arrived, but he came in from Laos. So, we missed each other at the airport, but we ended up in, in the Caravelle Hotel together. I had not met Horst prior to that time. He had taken over from the, the AP photographer for the region, Fred Waters, who was a beloved figure, you know, a pleasant drunk who took an occasional picture, but, one of the boys; one of the holdovers from World War II and Korea. As were most of the AP staff out there at the time. But Mal Browne represented something new, Ivy League, intellectual.
KOMOR: Right.
ARNETT: A bore. A man who is not prone to go drinking with the boys very much.
KOMOR: Did you like Mal?
ARNETT: So, all I had heard was the scuttlebutt, that somehow Mal was a downer. And this was something like, the new AP, and, particularly from a man like Fred Waters, the AP photographer who had been in Saigon but whose job was now lost because Horst was brought in, you know, and Horst was brought in because of his energetic coverage of Africa and Germany, and he’s a very brave, bold, smart man. So, the old guard was starting to shift, and Horst and Mal represented that. And I was sort of an appendage, brought along. I got on imme
diately with Mal, because I enjoyed his, his intellect. You know. He didn’t talk about drinking and girls all the time; rarely of the time. He was into the story. He gave me fascinating documents and books to read about the Viet Cong and the, the history of the war. You know, he was very productive; wrote superb analyses. And allowed me to go and do what I felt I needed to do. Now, he would give me guidance; in fact, he did the wonderful, the wonderful, how would you call it? The wonderful memo that he wrote, the, the—what we call…
KOMOR: Well, the, the bureau manual.
ARNETT: OK. He wrote the wonderful bureau manual, basically for me. He wrote it before I got there. Because he figured at that point in time, June of ’62, that the war was starting to build up to a degree that most journalists didn’t understand. So Mal put together that bureau manual, to prepare. And this was Mal. So I got into the bureau; he said, “Hello.” We chatted a little; he gave me the bureau manual and says, “Go and read that, and see you tomorrow.” And the bureau manual was wonderful, it gave advice about what cocktail parties to go in, in Saigon; who to believe in the embassy; what parts of the cities to go for different things. And then, of course, the battlefield; how to conduct yourself under fire. One wonderful example was he said, “If you’re in a paddy field, crawling through the grass with the troops, and you hear gunfire, don’t put your head up to see where it’s coming from, because you’ll be the next target.” Wonderful stuff like that. That was Mal, I, I mean, who else in the AP would have ever bothered doing that kind of manual at that time? So, I read the manual, and I found that Mal encouraged me to do enterprise reporting; to travel to the highlands and around the place. He—we shared responsibility for the daily news product, you know, covering the obvious events that had to be covered; the press conferences, the visits, the battles. But we fared, and within a few months, I think we were part of a wonderful team. I mean, he didn’t argue with me; I didn’t argue with him. And I really understood that he was, you know, he was—he was doing the kind of journalism that I hadn’t realized existed. Demanding accountability of the local officials and government. You know, the intellectual capability he showed in researching, you know, what—not just what motivated the enemy, but weapons used. You know, he had, he had important skills that made his, you know, his stories come alive. That’s why they were being used on the AP, not just because Wes Gallagher favored him. And I picked up on that, you know, from the beginning. Because I really—I was like a sponge, sucking in all this information. New Zealand, and Australian, and Thailand journalism; provincial, cautious, noncontroversial. But here was Mal Browne, who had covered the civil rights movement in the South as a young reporter; who’d covered the Bay of Pigs and had been to Cuba, coming to Vietnam and saying, you know, “The ambassador, the generals have to be accountable.” At the press conference he’d ask difficult questions. You know. He would write stories [laughs], you know, pointing out the discrepancies in the official picture. And he would—and he had a great writing style. So I really modeled myself on Mal. And—for the next four years, because he did stay in—running the bureau until 1965. And to this day, he remains a great pal. In fact, I try to see him whenever I can, but I, you know, still respect him enormously. And he’s had a great career, of course, later with The New York Times. But that was my beginning. Now, in addition, I was so fortunate to be part of an influx of very bright young American journalists. David Halberstam came a few weeks after I was there; he moved in, working out of the Saigon AP bureau. One reason, because The New York Times usually worked out of AP, because of the close relationship, and secondly because he had a personal relationship with Horst Faas from coverage in the Congo, the previous year. So he knew Horst very well; in fact, they got a house together; shared the house. And also, there was Stanley Karnow, who became, you know, the great historian of the Vietnam War, but who worked for Time magazine. He was a frequent visitor out of Hong Kong. And Neil Sheehan, who was then a young UPI reporter, who would hang around, and there was just a handful of us. We’d have coffee together. There was no big partying there; there was no big drinking. You know, we weren’t—this was a different sort of crowd. You know, they, they were just enjoying being part of what they figured was a very significant story, and it became significant very quickly, with a series of major battles in the countryside, where the Viet Cong emerged as a, quite a formidable force, plus the deterioration of the ability of the president of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, to maintain control. And you had a rising Viet Cong movement, guerrilla movement, then you had an angry Buddhist movement that, that opposed this Catholic dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem. And the story quickly morphed into, you know, the most significant one in U.S. foreign policy, and remained that way, really, for the next decade. So I was sort of cushioned by this group of brilliant young journalists. And I learned from them; I’m a quick study. [Laughs] But I learned from them, and I really admired them, and to this day they remain friends of mine. Halberstam, Sheehan and Karnow, you know, I really, I was so lucky to fall into the hands of such bright people. Because our lives are shaped by our mentors and my mentors happened to be journalists my own age. And I quickly learned to believe in what they believed in, you know, information; the truth of it; the worth of taking a risk—the importance of taking risks for information, to tell the truth. And this attitude pervaded a successive wave of reporters coming to Vietnam. In the AP, you had a whole group of—John Wheeler came a few years into the war, and then Richard Pyle, and so many others, that I could go through a whole list.