Vietnam War Bibliography:

The Media

Anthony A. Adams, “A Study of Veteran Viewpoints on TV Coverage of the Vietnam War,” Journalism Quarterly, 54 (Summer 1977).

Owen Andrews, C. Douglas Elliot, and Laurence I. Levin, Vietnam: Images from Combat Photographers. Washington, DC: Starwood Publishing, 1991. 106 pp. Said to be a good collection of photos from the National Archives.

Robert Sam Anson, War News: A Young Reporter in Indochina. New York: Simon & Schuster: 1989. pb New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. 317 pp. Anson went to Indochina as a reporter for Time in 1969.

Michael J. Arlen, Living Room War.  New York: Viking, 1969.  242 pp.  I believe this is a collection of pieces originally published in the New Yorker.

Michael J. Arlen, The View from Highway 1: Essays on Television.  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.  293 pp.
A collect on of essays, some dealing with the coverage of the Vietnam War, originally published in the New Yorker between September 1974 and December 1975.

Peter Arnett, Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 463 pp. About half of this excellent book is devoted to the many years Arnett spent covering Vietnam for the Associated Press; he was there almost continuously from 1962 to 1970, and intermittently thereafter until 1975.

Peter Arnett, "Tet Coverage: A Debate Renewed", Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1978, pp. 44-47. A review of Braestrup's Big Story, pointing out that the generalizations about media misbehavior in this book are not well supported by the details.

Peter Arnett, Joe Galloway, Zalin Grant, Wallace Terry, and Stanley Karnow, "Reporters On The Front Lines: Careers Forged In Danger", in The VVA Veteran, October/November 2000. Transcript of a panel session at an April 6-8, 2000, symposium "Rendezvous with War," sponsored by Vietnam Veterans of America and the College of William and Mary. There are brief introductory remarks by moderator Marc Leepson.

Laura Longley Babb, Of the Press, by the Press, for the Press (and others, too); A Critical Study of the Inside Workings of the News Business, from the News Pages, Editorials, Columns, and Internal Staff Memos of The Washington Post. washington, D.C.: Washington Post, 1974. vi, 246 pp.

Karen M. Bacus, "The Rhetoric of the Press: Newspaper Treatment of Richard Nixon's Major Statements on Vietnam, 1969-1970." Ph.D. dissertation, Speech, University of Kansas, 1974. 159 pp. 75-17568. Deals with the New York Times and Washington Post. Very critical of the New York Times.

Tad Bartimus, Denby Fawcett, Jurate Kazickas, Edith Lederer, Ann Bryan Mariano, Anne Morrissy Merick, Laura Palmer, Kate Webb, and Tracy Wood, War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters who Covered Vietnam. New York: Random House, 2002. xxvii, 291 pp. Introduction by Gloria Emerson. I have seen this listed as having been edited by Jurate Kazickas, but the book simply lists that authors in alphabetical order, with none singled out as editor. There is a lot of emphasis on the last years of the war.

Milton J. Bates, et al., eds., Reporting Vietnam. New York: Library of America, 1998. Part One, American Journalism 1959-1969. xiii, 858 pp. Part Two, American Journalism 1969-1975. xii, 857 pp. An anthology made up mostly of substantial articles, with Michael Herr's book Dispatches also included.

James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media. Boston: Twayne, 1987. x, 264 pp.

Gordon Baxter, 13/13. Vietnam: Search and Destroy. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1967. 120 pp. Introduction by Chet Huntley. Photos and commentary by a journalist who usually worked on radio and TV in Beaumont, Texas. Both Baxter's text and Huntley's introduction are strongly pro-war.

Edward Behr, Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent's Life behind the Lines.  New York: Viking, 1978.  xvii, 316 pp.  Behr became Newsweek's Hong Kong bureau chief in 1966.  Pp. 239-87 give a quite interesting description of his experiences covering Vietnam, intermittently from 1967 to 1971.

Nicholas O. Berry, Foreign Policy and the Press: An Analysis of The New York Times' Coverage of US Foreign Policy. New York: Greenwood, 1990. xix, 164 pp.

Tim Bowden, One Crowded Hour: Neil Davis, Combat Cameraman. Sydney, Australia: Collins, 1987. xi, 436 pp. Davis first went to Indochina in 1964, an Australian (Tasmanian) photojournalist working for Visnews. Spent much of the period 1964-1975 there, focusing a lot on ARVN rather than US operations in Vietnam, a lot on Cambodia in the 1970s. The book includes long quotes from Davis: a lot of letters he wrote to his aunt, a few diary entries, a lot of things he told Bowden while Bowden was working on the book in the 1980s. Unfortunately Davis died in 1985.

Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 2 vols. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977. xxxvii, 740, x, 706 pp. One-volume abridgment New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. xviii, 613 pp. Updated one-volume abridgement (there is a new Introduction, and four pages of additions and corrections at the end of the volume) Novato, CA: Presidio, 1994. xviii, 613 pp. A very detailed study, with great amounts of documentation. Some of Braestrup's generalizations about the misdeeds of the media are not supported by the details he presents. See hostile reviews by Peter Arnett and Noam Chomsky, listed in this section.

Peter Braestrup, Battle Lines: Report of the Task Force on the Military and the Media. New York: Brookings Institution/Priority Press Publications, 1985. vi, 178 pp. I would expect this to say a good bit about Vietnam, but I haven't seen it.

Fred Branfman, "The Media in Vietnam: Lessons for the Future." Undated (probably 1975, perhaps 1976), unpublished paper. 15 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University. Argues that the media were much too inclined to accept the U.S. government viewpoint on Vietnam.

Dean Brelis, photographs by Jill Krementz, The Face of South Vietnam. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 250 pp. The text, pp. 1-112, is by Brelis, who was in Vietnam as a correspondent for NBC from August 1965 to August 1966. The photos, pp. 113-244, are by Krementz. Photo captions, with dates, are pp. 245-50.

David Brinkley, David Brinkley : 11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, 1 Moon Landing, 3 Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other stuff on Television and 18 Years of Growing up in North Caroliona. New York: Knopf/Random House, 1995. 273 pp. Brinkley was the very influential co-anchor of the NBC News until 1970.

Malcolm W. Browne, Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter's Life. New York: Times Books, 1993. xv, 366 pp. Memoirs of a very good journalist who covered the early part of the war for AP.

Peter Brush, "What Really Happened at Cam Ne?" Vietnam Magazine, August 2003. Reporting by Morley Safer, of CBS, showing the 1/9 Marines burning peasant homes in the village of Cam Ne, near Danang, caused a major controversy. The text has been placed online at HistoryNet.com.

Larry Burrows, Vietnam. Introduction by David Halberstam. New York: Knopf, 2002. 243 pp. A collection of photos. Burrows, one of the best press photographers of the Vietnam War, was killed covering the Laotian Incursion of 1971.

Edward Burton, The Swedish-American Press and the Vietnam War. Göteborg, Sweden: Department of History, University of Göteborg, 2003. x, 324 pp. A doctoral thesis, published by the university that granted the degree. So far I have only found time to skim this, but it looks good.

Susan and Bill Buzenberg, eds., Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism: The Memoirs of Richard S. Salant. Boulder: Westview, 1999. xvii, 326 pp. Salant was President of CBS News from 1961 to 1964 and 1966 to 1979. He died in 1993, leaving behind a huge manuscript, which the Buzenbergs spent several years revising and editing down to manageable size. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.

Louis J. Campomenosi, III, "The 'New York Times' editorial coverage of the American involvement in Vietnam, 1945-1965: A case study to test the Huntington thesis of the existence of an oppositional press in the United States" (Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane, Political Science, 1994), 710 pp. DA9503868.

CBS Television Network, "The Changing War in Indochina: The Widening War in Laos and Cambodia." Documentary broadcast February 16, 1971, with Charles Collingwood as the chief correspondent. Transcript printed in Congressional Record, March 1, 1971, pp. S2167-S2171. The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Dickey Chapelle, What's a Woman Doing Here? (A Reporter Reports on Herself). New York: Morrow, 1962. 285 pp. (See also biography by Ostroff, below.)

Noam Chomsky, "The US Media and the Tet Offensive", Race & Class, vol. XX, no. 1 (1978), pp. 21-39. A review essay on Braestrup's Big Story, very critical of Braestrup.

David Cort, The Sin of Henry R. Luce: An Anatomy of Journalism. Secaucus, NJ: L. Stuart, 1974. 481 pp.

Walter Cronkite, A Reporter's Life. New York: Knopf, 1996. viii, 384 pp. Cronkite was anchorman of the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981; he was sometimes said to be the most trusted man in America. Unfortunately the book has neither chapter titles nor index. The Vietnam War is on pp. 240-265; President Nixon's relations with the press are on pp. 221-224.

Van M. Davidson, "A Journey to Geneva, A Vietnam Memoir." 2001. One of the alterations marked in by hand on this unpublished draft was to change the title, previously "Souvenirs de Guerre, 1970-1971." Davidson was the information officer for Delta Regional Assistance command, from July 1970. He regarded journalists as enemies, and remains very critical of them. The book consists mostly of his letters to his wife. The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University, in parts: pp. 1-45, pp. 46-99, pp. 100-149, pp. 150-167.

James Deakin, Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House, and the Truth. New York: Morrow, 1984. 378 pp. (needs to be checked; I don't actually know this deals with Vietnam).

Herman H. Dinsmore, All the News that Fits: A Critical Analysis of the News and Editorial Content of the New York Times. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969. 376 pp. An attack on the New York Times, by a man who had worked for the paper for many years. I have only taken a brief glance at the book; it looked pretty silly. A selection of the Conservative Book Club.

Hedley Donovan, Right Places, Right Times. Holt, 1989. 448 pp. Donovan was editor in chief of the Time, Inc., publications, from 1959 to 1979.

Erik Durschmied, Shooting Wars: My Life as a War Cameraman, from Cuba to Iraq. New York: Pharos, 1991. 330 pp. Also published under the title Don't Shoot the Yanqui: The Life of a War Cameraman, London: Grafton, 1990. 330 pp. Memoirs of a BBC combat cameraman. Much of the book deals with Vietnam, where Durschmied spent a great deal of time starting in 1962.

Edith Efron, with Clytia Chambers, The News Twisters. Los Angeles: Nash, 1971. pb New York: Manor, 1972. A very important study if valid, but I am suspicious of it.

Lawrence Allen Eldridge, "Chronicles of a Two-Front War: The African-American Press and the Vietnam War." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2002. 434 pp. AAT 3047849. The full text is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."

Virginia Elwood-Akers, Women War Correspondents in the Vietnam War, 1961-1975. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988. ix, 274 pp.

Gloria A. Emerson, Winners & Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War. New York: Random House, 1977. x, 406 pp.

Edwin Emery, “The Press in the Vietnam Quagmire,” Journalism Quarterly, 48 (Winter 1971), 619-20.

Edward Jay Epstein, News from Nowhere: Television and the News. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism. New York: Vintage, 1975. xii, 232 pp. Includes (pp. 210-232) "The Televised War," originally published as "Vietnam: What Happened vs. What We Saw: We Lost Our Innocence," in TV Guide, September 29, October 6, and October 13, 1973.

Horst Faas and Tim Page, eds., introduction by David Halberstam, contributions by Peter Arnett, Tad Bartimus, Nguyen Khuyen, John Lawrence, Richard Pyle, Pierre Schoendoerffer, Neil Sheehan, Jon Swain, and William Tuohy, Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina. New York: Random House, 1997. 336 pp.  A very impressive collection of photographs of the First and Second Indochina Wars, by photographers of the United States, France, Vietnam (both sides), and other nationalities who were killed covering the war.  Includes the names, and biographical sketches if the information is available (for many of the Vietnamese it is not) of all the photographers known to have been killed covering the war.

Horst Faas and Helene Gedouin, Henri Huet: "J'etais photographe de guerre au Vietnam. Paris: Editions du Chene (Hachette), 2006 (forthcoming). Huet was one of the best photojournalists of the Indochina Wars. Born in Dalat, of mixed French-Vietnamese parentage, he grew up in France. He returned to Vietnam during the First Indochina War, initially as a French Army photographer. He later worked for UPI, then for AP. He was killed in a helicopter crash on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1971.

Oriana Fallaci, Nothing, and So Be It: A Personal Search for Meaning in War. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Francis Faulkner, "Bao Chi: The American News Media in Vietnam, 1960-1975". Ph.D. dissertation, Mass Communications, University of Massachusetts, 1981. 823 pp. AAT 8110327.

Jackie Walker Flowers, "'Life' in Vietnam: The Presentation of the Vietnam War in 'Life' Magazine, 1962-1972." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of South Carolina, 1996. 309 pp. DA 9637115.

Max Frankel, The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times. New York: Random House, 1999. x, 546 pp. Frankel was, among other things, chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times 1968-1973.

Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy. London: Verso, 2004. x, 304 pp. The bulk of the book criticizes the New York Times for its support of the Iraq War, but there is one Vietnam chapter, with considerable discussion of Tonkin Gulf.

Fred W. Friendly, Due to Circumstances Beyond our Control. . .  New York: Random House, 1967.  xxvi, 325 pp. One chapter describes the disputes between Friendly and the top management of CBS over coverage of the Vietnam War, which led to Friendly's resignation as President of the News Division in February 1966.

Gary Paul Gates, Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News.  New York: Harper & Row, 1978.  pb New York: Berkley, 1979. 466 pp.

Lyn Gorman, "Television and War: Australia's Four Corners Programme and Vietnam, 1963­1975." War and Society 15:1 (May 1997). "Four Corners" was a current affairs program broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Gorman apparently (I have not seen the article) says that the program was not so supportive of the Vietnam War as most commentaries on the role of the Australian media during the war would have led one to expect.

Lyn Gorman, "Australian and American Media: From Korea to Vietnam." War and Society 18:1 (May 2000).

Phil G. Goulding, Confirm or Deny. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. By the man who became the Pentagon's chief press spokesman about the beginning of 1967.

Katharine Graham, Personal History. New York: Knopf, 1997. ix, 642 pp. Katharine Graham inherited her position as publisher of the Washington Post on the death of her husband, but became a great publisher, notable for her role in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate affairs. The book won a Pulitzer.

Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam Inc. New York: Collier, 1971. Reprinted, with a new introduction by Noam Chomsky, London: Phaidon Press, 2001. 224 pp. A collection of photos. Griffiths, who covered Vietnam with the Magnum photo agency 1966-71, was strongly hostile to the war.

Henry A. Grunwald, One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country. Doubleday, 1996. 672 pp. Managing editor of Time, 1968-1979.

David Halberstam, The Powers That Be. New York: Knopf, 1979. 771 pp. pb New York: Dell, 1980. 1071 pp. An examination of the American media, focused on Time Magazine, CBS, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Has a great deal on the coverage of the Vietnam War.

Daniel C. Hallin, "The Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. This splendid study of how the war was covered by The New York Times from 1961 to 1965, and by the major television networks from 1965 to 1972, cannot be recommended too highly.

William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Max Hastings, Going to the Wars. Macmillan, 2000. pb London: Pan Books, 2001. xxii, 399 pp. Hastings, a British journalist (and now also a major military historian) first went to Vietnam briefly in 1970, for BBC Television and the London Evening Standard, covering the Cambodian Incursion among other things (pp. 69-94). He returned to cover Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam for a while in 1971 (pp. 97-115). He was in South Vietnam again 1974-75 (pp. 196-233). Very anti-Communist but not very pro-American. He has some interesting things to say about the nature of television journalism.

Martin F. Herz, with Leslie Rider, The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972: Images and Reality in Vietnam. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. xiii, 103 pp. Very critical of the press.

Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century. New York, 1994.

Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xv, 346 pp.

Neil Hickey, "Ten Mistakes that Led to the Great CNN/Time Fiasco." Columbia Journalism Review, 37:3 (Sept-Oct 1998), pp. 26-. The "Tailwind" story.

Marguerite Higgins, Our Vietnam Nightmare. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. vi, 314 pp. By a hawkish war correspondent.

Joyce Hoffmann, On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo (Perseus), 2008. 439 pp.

Haney Howell, Roadrunners: Combat Journalists in Cambodia. Boulder: Paladin Press, 1989. x, 282 pp.

John L. Jessup, ed., The Ideas of Henry Luce. New York, 1969.

Ward Just, To What End: Report from Vietnam. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. xii, 209 pp. The author was a correspondent for the Washington Post in Vietnam. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.

Kathleen Kearney Keeshen, "Marguerite Higgins: Journalist, 1920-1966." Ph.D. dissertation, Journalism, University of Maryland, 1983. 472 pp. AAT 8412020. Higgins, an experienced war correspondent, sided with the U.S. government, against reporters critical of the way the war was being run, in 1963.

William V. Kennedy, The Military and the Media: Why the Press Cannot be Trusted to Cover a War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. 184 pp.

David Kennerly, Shooter. New York: Newsweek Books, 1979. Kennerly became Saigon bureau chief for UPI in 1971.

James Keogh, President Nixon and the Press. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1972. 212 pp. Keogh had spent most of the 1960s as assistant managing editor (then briefly executive editor) of Time magazine, later briefly been President Nixon's chief speechwriter.

Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering, The Kennedy Crisis: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Donald Kirk, Tell it to the Dead: Memories of a War. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975. xiv, 215 pp. Enlarged edition Tell it to the Dead: Stories of a War. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. 306 pp. By a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

Philip Knightly, The First Casualty. From Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. 465 pp.

John Kobler, Luce: His Time, Life, and Fortune. New York, 1968.

Daniel Allan Koger, "The Liberal Opinion Press and the Kennedy Years on Vietnam: A Study of Four Journals (The New Leader, The Reporter, The New Republic, The Nation)." Ph.D. dissertation, Journalism, Michigan State, 1983. 171 pp. AAT 8400583. The New Leader and The Reporter were hawkish, The Nation was dovish, and The New Republic shifted toward dovishness during the course of the Kennedy administration.

Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. xii, 508 pp. A columnist for the New York Times.

Arthur Krock, In the Nation: 1932-1966. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. xvii, 455 pp.

Arthur Krock, The Consent of the Governed and Other Deceits. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. 309 pp.

James Landers, Weekly War: Newsmagazines and Vietnam. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. 298 pp. A study of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. The full text of the Ph.D. dissertation from which this is derived (The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2000, 332 pp., AAT 9996862) is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."

John Laurence, The Cat from Hué: A Vietnam War Story. New York: Public Affairs, 2002. 850 pp. Laurence covered the Vietnam War for CBS 1965-66, 1967-68, and 1970. This looks like an important and valuable book. Transcript of Laurence's extended discussion of his book on the C-SPAN show "Booknotes," January 20, 2002.
Memo to authors and copy editors: Laurence uses a very good system I have not seen before, which should be used in some other books: Quotes based only on his memories are in single quotes 'like this'. Quotes for which he has contemporary records, not just old memories, giving him more confidence that he is reproducing the words exactly, are in double quotes "like this."

Mark Atwood Lawrence, "Mission Intolerable: Harrison Salisbury's Trip to Hanoi and the Limits of Dissent Against the Vietnam War." Pacific Historical Review, 75:3 (August 2006), pp. 429-459.

Jongsoo Lee, "Network Television Documentaries from 1964 to 1984 in a Changing Historical Context." Ph.D. Dissertation, Journalism, U. of Minnesota, 1994. 309 pp. DA9508950

Ernest W. Lefever, TV and National Defense: An Analysis of CBS News, 1972-1973. Boston, VA: Institute for American Strategy, 1974. I have not seen this book, but statements I have seen quoted from it looked biased and inaccurate.

Jerry Lembcke, CNN's Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam's Last Great Myth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. xviii, 217 pp.

Richard Glenn Lentz, "Resurrecting the Prophet: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the News Magazines." Ph.D. dissertation, Journalism, University of Iowa, 1983. 993 pp. AAT 8327402. Analyzes the way King's career and actions were covered by Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.

Catherine Leroy, ed., Under Fire: Great Writers and Photographers in Vietnam. Foreword by Senator John McCain. New York: Random House, 2005. xvi, 172 pp.

Jacques Leslie, The Mark: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995. 305 pp. Leslie arrived in Saigon at the beginning of 1972, an inexperienced and ignorant junior reporter for the Los Angeles Times, strongly anti-war. He learned fast, and was quite good by the time he was expelled from Saigon around mid 1973. He served in Cambodia in late 1973 and again in 1975. An introspective book, with a lot of detail about the personal lives of journalists.

Life Magazine was still an important publication in the 1960s. Published in a large format (13.5 by 10.5 inches) and famous for its publication of high-quality news photography, it had been founded (like Time) by the very anti-Communist and very influential publisher Henry Luce (see biographies by Herzstein, above, and Swanberg, below). It published frequent articles on Vietnam. For example:

Jim G. Lucas, Dateline: Viet Nam (rev. ed.). New York: Award Books, 1968. Locas arrived in Vietnam as a reporter for Scripps-Howard in January 1964.

Henry R. Luce, the politically conservative publisher of the magazines Life (see above) and Time, was the most powerful single man in American journalism in the 1940s and 1950s, and remained very influential until his death in 1967. See books by Baughman, Cort, Halberstam, Herzstein, Jessup, and Kobler (above) and Swanberg (below).

Hugh Lunn, Vietnam: A Reporter's War. New York: Stein and Day, 1985. By an Australian who arrived in Vietnam in 1967 as a reporter for Reuters.

John R. MacArthur, "Witness in Hanoi." Columbia Journalism Review, 35:5 (Jan-Feb 1997), pp. 49-. About Harrison Salisbury's reporting from Hanoi at the end of 1966.

Don McCullin, Don McCullin. Introduction by Harold Evans, essay by Susan Sontag. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. 296 pp. An Englishman, McCullin was one of the major war photographers. Photos taken in Vietnam (1965, 1968) and Cambodia (1970, 1975) make up a bit more than a tenth of the book.

J. Fred MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1985.

Capt. Terry McDonald, USCGR, "The Media and the Military: Time for Peaceful Co-existence?" Air Force Times, 15 August 1973. The text, incorporated into a lesson plan for use in March 1974 at the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance, has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Mike McGrady, A Dove in Vietnam. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. The author arrived in Vietnam in 1967 as a reporter for Newsday.

Thomas Michael McNulty, "Network Television Documentary Treatment of the Vietnam War, 1965 to 1969." Ph.D. dissertation, Journalism, Indiana University, 1974. 264 pp. 74-22780. Compares ABC with CBS.

Michael Mandelbaum, "Vietnam: The Television War", Parameters, March 1983.

Robert W. Merry, Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop--Guardians of the American Century. New York: Viking, 1996. 644 pp.

Jeffrey Meyers, Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. 368 pp. Sean Flynn, son of the famous actor, covered the Vietnam War as a freelance photographer, and disappeared in Cambodia in 1970.

Dale Minor, The Information War. New York: Hawthorn, 1970. 212 pp. pb New York: Tower, 1970. 251 pp.

Susan D. Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat. New York: Basic Books, 1989. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.

Charles Mohr, "Once Again--Did the Press Lose Vietnam?" Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1983, pp. 51-56.

Helen "Patches" Musgrove, Viet Nam: Front Row, Center. Garden Grove, CA: Patches Publishers. An ad for this book says Ms. Musgrove covered the war for over six years; hostile both to the Communists and to the "khaki mafia" within the US military.

Major General Nguyen Bao Tri, ARVN, Minister of Information & Open Arms, Government of Vietnam; Barry Zorthian, Minister Counselor for Information, US Mission, Vietnam; and Col. Rodger R. Bankson, USA, Chief of Information, MACV; "Memorandum for Correspondents: Rules Governing Public Release of Military Information in Vietnam (Effective 1 November 1966)." 6 pp. The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Benjamin P. Norris, "Transnational Perception, an Ideal Typical Approach: An Examination of Ten Influential American Journals of Political Opinion Concerning their Image of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and its Allies, 1954-1973." Ph.D. dissertation, Political Science(?), University of Pittsburgh, 1976. 398 pp. DAH76-25941. From the abstract I get the impression this is overly theoretical.

Roberta Ostroff, Fire in the Wind: The Life of Dickey Chapelle. New York: Ballantine, 1992. xvii, 408 pp. Chapelle was a war correspondent from WWII until she was killed in Vietnam in November 1965. Her coverage of Vietnam in 1961 and 1962 was very hawkish.

Tim Page, Page after Page: Memoirs of a War-Torn Photographer. New York: Macmillan, 1988. 238 pp. Page, an Englishman, arrived in Vietnam early in 1965, but had had some previous experience in other parts of Southeast Asia.

Tim Page, The Mindful Momement. Thames & Hudson, 2001. 240 pp. Page has selected the best of his photos from Indochina, taken both during and since the war.

Frank Palmos, Ridding The Devils. New York: Bantam. An incident on the outskirts of Saigon, May 1968, in which Viet Cong regulars killed four of a group of five journalists. Palmos was the one survivor.

Oscar Patterson, "The Vietnam Veteran and the Media: A Comparative Content Analysis of Media Coverage of the War and the Veteran, 1968-1973". Ph.D. dissertation, Mass Communications, University of Tennessee - Knoxville, 1982. 254 pp. AAT 8303712. The abstract refers to media coverage of the war but not of the veteran, and is confusing about the findings.

Oscar Patterson III, "An Analysis of Television Coverage of the Vietnam War," Journal of Broadcasting 28:4 (Fall 1984).

Oscar Patterson III, "Television's Living Room War in Print: Vietnam in the News Magazines," Journalism Quarterly, 61:1 (Spring 1984).

Douglas Porch, "“No Bad Stories”: The American Media-Military Relationship," Naval War College Review, LV:1 (Winter 2002).

William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War. New York: Random House, 1995. xii, 546 pp. Press coverage of the early stages of the Vietnam War, 1961-63.

Richard Pyle and Horst Faas, Lost Over Laos: A True Story of Tragedy, Mystery, and Friendship. Foreword by David Halberstam. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo, 2003. xxiv, 276 pp. Photographers Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kent Potter, and Keisaburo (Keizaburo) Shimamoto were killed in the crash of a helicopter in Laos on February 10, 1971, during Lam Son 719.

Michèle Ray, The Two Shores of Hell (trans. by Elisabeth Abbott). New York: McKay, 1968. (Original: Des deux rives de l'enfer. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1967.) By a French journalist who went to Vietnam in 1966, observed various American units, and was then captured by Communist forces in January 1967 on Road 1 in Binh Dinh.

James Reston, Deadline: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1991. xvii, 525. Reston was Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times. Note: Reston's papers are held by the University of Illinois Archives.

Chalmers M. Roberts, First Rough Draft: A Journalist's Journal of Our Times. New York: Praeger, 1973. ix, 356 pp. Roberts was a reporter for the Washington Post from 1949 to 1971. His discussion of Vietnam is based on the years he spent covering the policymakers in Washington. He passes off in a paragraph (p. 250) the few months he spent in Vietnam, in 1967.

Mitchel P. Roth, Historical Dictionary of War Journalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. xi, 482 pp.

Peter Sager (trans. from German by Ian Tickle), Report from Vietnam. Berne: Swiss Eastern Institute, 1968. 112 pp. Report, favorable to the US, by a journalist who visited South Vietnam and other countries of Southeast Asia, March to May, 1968.

Morley Safer, Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1990. xv, 206 pp. pb New York: St. Martin's, 1991. xix, 328 pp. Safer was a CBS reporter in Vietnam during the war. Most of this book is based on a return visit to Vietnam in 1989, but it includes important information about the war; see for example his discussion of the 1965 Cam Ne incident (chapter 12) and his interview with Pham Xuan An, a Communist agent who worked for Time magazine during the war (chapter 23).

Harrison Salisbury, A Time of Change: A Reporter's Tale of Our Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. xiii, 352 pp. Memoir by one of the senior reporters of The New York Times. A considerable portion of this book is devoted to the controvery that arose over his reporting from Hanoi at the end of 1966, when he was in a position similar to that of Peter Arnett in Baghdad in 1991. Salisbury's book on his trip to Hanoi can be found under North Vietnam. (See also article by Mark Atwood Lawrence, above.)

Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times. New York: Times Books, 1980. x, 630 pp. A study of The New York Times and its policies, including much about Vietnam (especially the Pentagon Papers).

Harrison Salisbury, "Image and Reality in Indochina." Foreign Affairs, 49:3 (April 1971), pp. 381-394. The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Sam Sarkesian, "Soldiers, Scholars, and the Media", Parameters, September 1977.

Neil Sheehan, review of Mark Lane's book and a huge review essay, both focusing on the question of atrocities, The New York Times Book Review, December 27, 1970, and March 28, 1971, respectively.

Neil Sheehan, "The Role of the Press," Naval War College Review, LI:1 (Winter 1998) (reprinted from the February 1971 issue).

Richard F. Shepard, The Paper's Papers: A Reporter's Journey through the Archives of The New York Times. New York: Times Books, 1996.

Stuart W. Showalter, "Coverage of Conscientious Objectors to the Vietnam War: An Analysis of the Editorial Content of American Magazines, 1964-1972." Ph.D. dissertation, Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, 1975. 173 pp. 76-8108.

BGeneral Winant Sidle, Press Briefing, Saigon, 27 February 1968. Mainly discussion of the rules about what can be revealed to the press about the results of enemy attacks on US bases. The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Melvin Small, Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, September 1994. x, 228 pp. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.

Howard K. Smith, Events Leading Up to My Death: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Reporter. New York: St. Martin's, 1996. x, 419 pp. Smith, liberal on domestic issues but a hawk on Vietnam, was co-anchor of the ABC Evening News 1969-1975.

Carl Sorensen, As I Saw It: How a TV Cameraman Covered News in Bygone Days. San Jose, New York, and Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice (iUniverse.com), 2001. ix, 230 pp. Sorensen, a Dane, began working for CBS in 1964. Pages 37-78 are devoted mostly to his work as a CBS cameraman in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; he was in those countries intermittently between January 1966 and 1970.

Ron Steinman, Inside Television's First War: A Saigon Journal. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002. 262 pp. Steinman was NBC bureau chief in Saigon from April 1966 to July 1968.

Colonel Harry G. Summers, "Western Media and Recent Wars." Military Review, 66:5 (May 1986), pp. 4-17.

Jon Swain, River of Time. New York: St. Martins, 1997. pb New York: Berkley, 1999. xiv, 281 pp. Swain, a British journalist, was a correspondent for Agence France-Presse (AFP) first in Cambodia, then in South Vietnam 1970-72, and a free-lancer, mostly in Vietnam, 1973-75. He was in Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. His account focusses mainly on his life as a journalist (with a lot about opium and women), much of it after the war ended. But it contains useful information about the war.

W.A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire. New York: Scribner, 1972. xiii, 529 pp. This biography of Henry Luce, the politically conservative and very influential publisher of Time and Life, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Wallace Terry, "Time's Frank McCulloch: In the Eye of the Hurricane", in The VVA Veteran, December 2002. This is Terry's interview with McCulloch, who was Saigon bureau chief for the Time-Life News Service from early 1964 (when it was a one-man operation; he replaced Charlie Mohr) to 1967 (when it was a large team).

Wallace Terry, Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007. 375 pp. Includes a number of journalists' accounts of the Indochina War: Terry himself (of Time magazine), Ed Bradley of CBS, Carl Rowan, Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender, Tom Johnson of the New York Times.

A. Trevor Thrall, "War in the Media Age: The Government/Press Struggle from Vietnam to the Gulf." Ph.D. dissertation, Political Science, M.I.T., 1996. 361 pp. The full text is available online.

Nu-Anh Tran, "South Vietnamese Identity, American Intervention, and the Newspaper Chính Luan [Political Discussion], 1965–1969." Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. I, nos. 1-2 (February/August 2006), pp. 169-209.

Liz Trotta, Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Ms. Trotta, of NBC, became in 1968 the first woman network TV correspondent assigned to Vietnam. She was and is pro-war, and criticizes journalists who took an anti-war attitude.

William Tuohy, Dangerous Company. New York: William Morrow, 1987. 395 pp. Somewhat over 100 pages of this are devoted to Vietnam, where Tuohy was a reporter starting at the beginning of 1965, first for Newsweek and later for the Los Angeles Times.

Kathleen J. Turner, Lyndon Johnson's Dual War: Vietnam and the Press. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ix, 358 pp.

Garrick Utley, You Should Have Been Here Yesterday: A Life in Television News. New York: Public Affairs, 2000. xvi, 285 pp. A moderate portion of this book deals with Utley's coverage of the Vietnam War as a correspondent for NBC. He arrived in Vietnam in July 1964, and stayed to about the end of 1965; this is covered on pp. 29-74. There is other Vietnam-related material from his 1968 and 1975 experiences in Vietnam, and work elsewhere related to the war, on pp. 83-85, 102-112, and 157-169.

Rosemary Johanna van Es, "Canadian 'Chivalry' in Vietnam: The Press Coverage." Ph.D. dissertation, Sociology, McMaster University, 1996. 375 pp. DANN13690.

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is a huge collection, holding recordings of the evening news broadcasts of the major networks from August 1968 onward, and of other news and news-type broadcasts for some more recent years.

Lawrence Voix, "La guerre du Vietnam à travers la télévision française," in Christoper Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, eds., La guerre du Vietnam et l'Europe, 1963-1973 (Bruxelles: Bruylant/Paris: L.G.D.J., 2003), pp. 271-286.

Kurt Volkert and T. Jeff Williams, foreword by Bernard Kalb, A Cambodian Odyssey and the Deaths of 25 Journalists. Lightning Source, 2001. 304 pp. Deals with how 25 journalists were killed covering the war in Cambodia in 1970, and Volkert's efforts, long afterward, to recover some of the bodies.

Betsy Wade, ed., Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Homer Bigart. Fayetteville: Arkansas University Press, 1992. xxv, 240 pp. Not a lot of Vietnam material: 24 pages written in Vietnam in the first half of 1962, plus one 1971 article on the trial of Lt. Calley.

Denis Warner, Reporting Southeast Asia. (Australia): Angus and Robertson, 1966. Warner's views tend to the right.

Matthew A. Wasniewski, "Walter Lippmann, Strategic Internationalism, the Cold War, and Vietnam, 1943-1967." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of Maryland, College Park, 2004. AAT 3139091. 664 pp. Lippmann was a very influential political columnist.

Kate Webb, On the Other Side: 23 Days with the Viet Cong. New York: Quadrangle, 1972. Account by a UPI reporter who was captured by the Viet Cong in Cambodia, 1971.

General William Westmoreland, "A Commander's View of the War in Vietnam." Speech to the Associated Press Mananging Editors Luncheon, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York, 24 April 1967, followed by question-and-answer session. 11 pp. speech, 10 pp. questions and answers. The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Marion Williams, My Tour in Vietnam: A Burlesque Shocker. New York: Vantage, 1970. By a black female journalist.

James Willwerth, Eye in the Last Storm: A Reporter's Journal of One Year in Southeast Asia. New York: Grossman, 1972. xii, 178 pp. The author was a reporter for Time in Southeast Asia, 1970-71. The book is short and episodic, and deals more with what it was like to be a reporter in Vietnam and Cambodia than with the war itself.

Clarence R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War. New York: Norton, 1993. 272 pp.

Oral histories for many important figures of the 1960s have been collected by the LBJ Presidential Library. Some of these have been placed online at an Oral History Collection Web page at the LBJ Presidential Library. Far more of them have been placed online in the Lyndon B. Johnson Oral History collection at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia. If you are hoping to find online an oral history not specifically mentioned in the listing below, check the Lyndon B. Johnson Oral History collection first; its holdings are by far the most complete. Among the journalists and public affairs officers whose oral histories are included in these collections are:

For the role of the media up to 1964: See the books by Browne, Halberstam, Mecklin, and Tregaskis, in the section Temporary Peace and Renewed War, 1954-1964.

Go to Congressional Committee documentation on the Media

The Pentagon Papers Case

Floyd Abrams, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment. New York: Viking, 2005. 336 pp. Abrams was one of the attorneys who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, which is covered in the first two chapters (pp. 1-61) of this book.

Thomas S. Blanton, ed., The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Audiotapes (The Nixon Tapes and the Supreme Court Tape). National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book Number 48. This compilation of material, published online, includes transcripts and actual tapes (streaming audio) of President Nixon's telephone conversations about the release of the Pentagon Papers when they first began to be published, the secret briefs (redacted) that the government filed with the courts arguing that release of the Pentagon Papers would cause dire harm to national security, and other related materials. Index.

James D. Carroll, "Confidentiality of Social Science Research Sources and Data: The Popkin Case." PS 6:3 (Summer 1973), pp. 268-280. Sam Popkin was briefly jailed in November 1972 for contempt of court, when he refused, citing the First Amendment, to answer questions before a grand jury investigating the publication of the Pentagon Papers. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text online.

Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002. x, 498 pp. I strongly recommend this memoir, by the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media.

Daniel Ellsberg et. al., "The Pentagon Papers: A VVA Symposium", in The VVA Veteran, 22:6/7 (June/July 2002) pp. 24-30, 42. Interesting and thoughtful comments on the issue of leaking. Most of this is Ellsberg's keynote speech at a symposium held at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., in June 2001, and Ellsberg's responses to questions from the audience. There are brief introductory remarks by Jim Doyle, George Duggins, and Marc Leepson.

Leslie H. Gelb, "The Pentagon Papers and the Vantage Point." Foreign Policy no. 6 (Spring 1972), pp. 25-41. Gelb, who headed the group that wrote the Pentagon Papers, discusses the writing process, and discusses Lyndon Johnson's memoir The Vantage Point in relation to the Pentagon Papers. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text online.

Leslie Gelb, oral history. Gelb headed the group that wrote the Pentagon Papers. From the oral history collection of the LBJ Presidential Library, placed online in the Lyndon B. Johnson Oral History collection at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia.

Facts on File, Editorials on File, vol. 2, no. 12, June 16-30, 1971, pp. 695-797, The Pentagon Papers.

John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds., Inside the Pentagon Papers. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xii, 248 pp. This has been very favorably reviewed.

Chalmers M. Roberts, First Rough Draft: A Journalist's Journal of Our Times. New York: Praeger, 1973. ix, 356 pp. Roberts was a reporter for the Washington Post from 1949 to 1971. He played a crucial role in the Washington Post's publication of material from the Pentagon Papers in 1971 (pp. 319-24).

David Rudenstine, The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. x, 416 pp.

Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. 414 pp.

Martin M. Shapiro, ed., The Pentagon Papers and the Courts: A Study in Foreign Policy-making and Freedom of the Press. San Francisco: Chandler, 1972. ix, 131 pp.

Sanford J. Ungar, The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the Pentagon Papers. New York: Dutton, 1972. 319 pp.

Sanford J. Ungar, "The Pentagon Papers Trial" (available online to subscribers), The Atlantic Monthly, November 1972, pp. pp. 22-34.

Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg. New York: Palgrave (St. Martin's), 2001. xi, 692 pp.

For the actual texts of large portions of the Pentagon Papers go to The Pentagon Papers

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Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised July 18, 2008.