Azadeh Aalai, "Media Depictions of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars." Ph.D. dissertation, Applied Social Psychology, Loyola University of Chicago, 2008. AAT 3340150. xii, 224 pp. Looks at The New York Times and Time magazine, 1964-68 and 2003-7. After a brief skim, my reaction was negative, but the analytic approach is different enough from the ones to which I am accustomed that I cannot be sure my negative reaction was justified.
Anthony A. Adams, “A Study of Veteran Viewpoints on TV Coverage of the Vietnam War,” Journalism Quarterly, 54:2 (Summer 1977), pp. 248-53.
Joseph W. Alsop, with Adam Platt, "I've Seen the Best of It": Memoirs. New York: Norton, 1992. 495 pp. Alsop, a Cold-War liberal, was a very influential syndicated columnist. Unfortunately this book deals mainly with events up to 1963, although there is still enough to be interesting about events from 1964 onward, when Alsop was one of the most important hawks in American journalism, first pushing very hard (enough so to annoy Lyndon Johnson) for escalation of the Vietnam War, and then asserting very loudly that the United Stats was winning the war.
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 collection 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.
George Arthur Bailey, "The Vietnam War According to Chet, David, Walter, Harry, Peter, Bob, Howard and Frank: A Content Analysis of Journalistic Performance by the Network Television Evening News Anchormen, 1965-1970.". Ph.D. dissertation, Journalism, University of Wiscondin - Madison, 1974. AAT 7321142. xiv, 435 pp.
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.
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.
Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century. New York: Knopf, 2010. 531 pp.
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.
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.
LT Kimberly Ann Cochran, "Press Coverage of the Persian Gulf War: Questions of Policy Beyond the Shadow of Vietnam." M.A. Thesis, National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School, 1992. vii, 105 pp. Vietnam is pp. 48-60; Desert Shield/Desert Storm is pp. 70-92.
Columbia Journalism Review published two articles relating to the way the press covered the The 1968 Chicago Demonstrations:
Edwin Diamond, "Chicago press: rebellion and retrenchment." Columbia Journalism Review, VII:3 (Fall 1968), pp. 1-17.
Jules Witcover, "The press and Chicago: the truth hurt." Columbia Journalism Review, VII:3 (Fall 1968), pp. 5-8.
Commentary. In the 1960s Commentary, edited by Norman Porhoretz and dominated by New York Jewish intellectuals, was a left-wing magazine, critical of the war. It later shifted to the right, and Podhoretz became one of the founders of "neoconservatism." It published relatively few articles about the Vietnam War during that war. A sample:
Beverly Woodward, "Vietnam and the Law: The Theory and Practice of Civil Challenge." 46:5 (November 1968), pp. 75-86. Considers the issues in cases like that of the "Boston Five" (Dr. Benjamin Spock et al.), who had violated the law in protests against the war.
Alexander M. Bickel, "The Constitution and the War." 54:1 (July 1972), pp. 49-55.
Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., "The Question of War Crimes." 54:6 (December 1972), pp. 85-92. Notable for Bishop's statements (pp. 88-89) that "The fighting in Vietnam has been unusually dirty, and the record of the American forces seems to me much worse than it was in World War II or the Korean War" but "the record of North Vietnam and the Vietcong is much worse."
Commonweal. This Catholic magazine was suprisingly willing to criticize the war. But it did not consistently oppose the war. A sample of articles:
Ronald Steel, "De Gaulle on Vietnam," LXXXV:5 (4/26/64), pp. 141-43. Steel advocated neutralization as a solution to the war, but did not seem to have thought much about what a "neutralized" Vietnam would mean to the Vietnamese.
Editorial, "North Vietnam's Bloody Nose," LXXXV:19 (8/5/64), pp. 559-60. Endorsed the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in connection with the Tonkin Gulf incidents, but feared further escalation.
Michael Novak, "Intrigue in Vietnam: Caging the White Dove," LXXXVII:3 (10/20/67), pp. 72-74. Criticized the RVN's criminal proceedings against Truong Dinh Dzu, the runner-up in the 1967 presidential election.
William V. Shannon, "Strategy and Morality," LXXXVII:16 (1/26/68), pp. 489-90. Endorsed U.S. war aims.
William V. Shannon, "Viet Cong Escalation," LXXXVII:20 (2/23/68), pp. 612-13. Downplayed the significance of the Tet Offensive, strongly supported the U.S. war effort.
John Galloway, "The Tonkin Affair," LXXXVII:22 (3/8/68), pp. 682-85. Discussed recent revelations about the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964.
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.
Walter Cronkite and Don Carleton, Conversations with Cronkite. Austin, TX: Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Univesity of Texas, 2010. 300 pp. An oral history.
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.
Robert J. Donovan and Ray Scherer, Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. (xi, 357 pp.?) Both authors had been Washington correspondents, Donovan for the Los Angeles Times and Scherer for NBC.
Corydon B. Dunham, Fighting for the First Amendment: Stanton of CBS vs. Congress and the Nixon White House. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. xiii, 233 pp. Foreword by Walter Cronkite. Mainly deals with the controversy over the 1971 documentary "The Selling of the Pentagon," but has some discussion of Vietnam.
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.
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.
Herbert Gans, Deciding what's news: a study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Pantheon, 1979. xvii, 393 pp. 2d ed. Northwestern University Press, 2005.
Gary Paul Gates, Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. pb New York: Berkley, 1979. 466 pp.
Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. xiii, 327 pp. Reprinted, with a new preface, 2003. xxv, 327 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.
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.
David Halberstam, "The Death of Supply Column 21," Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2006. As an example of the role of the media in Vietnam, Halberstam uses not one of the stories he covered himself, but a story that Peter Arnett covered in 1965.
Daniel C. Hallin, "The Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. viii, 285 pp. A 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.
Daniel C. Hallin, "The Media, the War in Vietnam, and Political Support: A Critique of the Thesis of an Oppositional Media." Journal of Politics, 46:1 (February 1984), pp. 2-24. Text available to subscribers on JSTOR.
William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. xi, 362 pp. An abridged version of the two volumes titled The Military and the Media listed under U.S. Army Publications
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.
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.
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.
Herbert G. Klein, Making It Perfectly Clear: An Inside Account of Nixon's Love-Hate Relationship with the Media. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980. xiii, 464 pp. Klein was communications director in the Nixon White House.
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."
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.
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. (See study by Flowers, above.) 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 below). It published frequent articles on Vietnam. For example:
"Vietnam: Build-up on the Border." 57:8 (August 21, 1964), pp. 26-31. In the aftermath of the Tonkin Gulf incidents, the ARVN prepares for a possible PAVN invasion across the DMZ; photos from North Vietnam; pilots, "Heroes of the Gulf of Tonkin," on the aircraft carriers that carried out the U.S. retaliatory airstrikes of August 5, 1964.
"4 to 1 Isn't Enough." 58:5 (Feb 5, 1965), p. 40. A short item on infiltration from North to South Vietnam, and threats of increased Communist attacks in the region.
"Vietnam: The War Turns North." 58:7 (February 19, 1965), p. 4. Editorial supporting U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam.
Bill Mauldin et. al., "Critical Turn in Vietnam." 58:7 (February 19, 1965), pp. 30-35. The attack on Pleiku [said to have been carried out by men who "came down from the north on a planned mission to do the job", which I very much doubt], the arrival of Hawk missiles at Danang, and the departure of dependents of U.S. personnel in Vietnam.
"Vietnam: Blows, Counterblows, Waits." 58:8 (Feb 26, 1965), pp. 28-33. The Flaming Dart air strikes against North Vietnam, an attempted coup in Saigon, the Viet Cong attack on Qui Nhon.
"The Delta". January 13, 1967, pp. 22-31. Placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
"A Document as Valuable as Divisions." 62:13 (March 31, 1967), p. 4. A short, very optimistic editorial about the new Constitution of the Republic of Vietnam.
"Photos and Letters Upstage the Guam Show." 62:13 (March 31, 1967), pp. 26-27. Aerial photos released by the Defense Department, showing the way the North Vietnamese took advantage of the Tet bombing halt, February 8-12.
Hugh Sidey, "Jet Extension of the Oval Office." 62:13 (March 31, 1967), p. 28D. A not very respectful comment on President Johnson's handling of his conference with RVN leaders on Guam.
Lee Lockwood, "North Vietnam Under Siege," April 7, 1967. Lockwood was the first American photojournalist allowed into Hanoi during the war.
"America's On-Scene Explainer of the War in Vietnam: The Mark of Zorthian." 62:19 (May 12, 1967), pp. 51-55.
Richard B. Stolley, "The Secret Fight for Gus Herz." 63:3 (July 21, 1967), pp. 22-29. Gustav Crane Herz was Chief of Administration for AID in Saigon from 1963 until February 2, 1965, when he was kidnapped by the Viet Cong, who later warned that if the RVN executed Nguyen Van Hai (a Viet Cong agent involved in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, March 30, 1965), Herz would be executed in retaliation.
Major J. E. Longhofer, "An Analysis of the Psychological Necessity of Censorship in Combat Zones" Thesis, Master of Military Arts and Art and Science, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth, KS, 1970. x, 197 pp. Critical of the behavior of the press in Vietnam. Looks particularly at the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Ap Bia Mountain ("Hamburger Hill").
Look was a large-format popular magazine, published bi-weekly. At least in the issues I have surveyed, the articles related to Vietnam tended to take a long view; Look tended not to publish articles dealing specifically with what had happened in the war during the two weeks since the previous issue had gone to press. A sample:
Senator Pierre Salinger, “Our Stake in Southeast Asia,” Look, 28:21 (10/20/1964), pp. 44-49. A ringing endorsement of the domino theory.
“Fighting with the Vietcong,” Look, 32:2 (1/23/1968), pp. 62-63. Photos and very brief commentary by Roger Pic, a photojournalist who had recently spent three weeks with the Viet Cong in Tay Ninh province.
Lucian W. Pye, "Portrait of the Vietcong,” Look, 32:2 (1/23/1968), pp. 64-65.
Eugene J. McCarthy, "Why I'm Battling LBJ,” Look, 32:3 (2/6/1968), pp. 22-29.
Gereon Zimmerman, "What Makes Dr. Spock March,” Look, 32:4 (2/20/1968), pp. 73-84.
Kenneth T. Young, "The Hidden Problems in Negotiating with Asia's Reds,” Look, 32:5 (3/5/1968), pp. 17-19.
Jim G. Lucas, Dateline: Viet Nam (rev. ed.). New York: Award Books, 1968. Lucas 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, Brinkley, 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.
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. xxv, 644 pp. Joseph Alsop, whose column written for the Washington Post was also syndicated in almost two hundred other newspapers, was one of the most important and influenctial hawks in American journalism.
Dale Minor, The Information War. New York: Hawthorn, 1970. 212 pp. pb New York: Tower, 1970. 251 pp.
Charles Mohr, "Once Again--Did the Press Lose Vietnam?" Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 1983, pp. 51-56.
Roger Mudd, The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Telivision News. PublicAffairs, 2008. 432 pp.
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.
Chester Pach, "From Vietnam to Iraq: The First Television War and Its Legacies," in Lawrence Sondhaus and A. James Fuller, eds., America, War and Power: Defining the State, 1775-2005 (Routledge, 2009).
Chester Pach, "'We Need to Get a Better Story to the American People': LBJ, the Progress Campaign, and the Vietnam War on Television," in Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank, eds., Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), pp. 170-195.
Frank Palmos, Ridding The Devils. Sydney and New York: Bantam, 1990. ix, 214. 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).
Press List of Correspondents Accredited to MACV. Issued monthly by the Information Advisory and Accreditation Division (IAAD), MACOI. The issue for February 1972 has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
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.
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.
Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. The New Press, 2009. 247 pp. Ramparts started as a Catholic literary magazine, but became a leftist political magazine.
Thomas Rid, War and Media Operations: The US military and the press from Vietnam to Iraq. Abingdon and New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2007. The chapter on Vietnam is relatively short, pp. 53-63.
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.
Chalmers M. Roberts, The Washington Post: The First 100 Years. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. xiii, 495 pp.
Laura Roselle, Media and the Politics of Failure: Great Powers, Communication Strategies, and Military Defeats. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 190 pp. Looks at the way the US and Soviet governments tried to spin military failure in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively, through their media (especially TV). Says the similarities are surprising, for two such different systems.
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 veteran journalist and an assistant managing editor of the New York Times, aroused a storm of controversy by his reporting from Hanoi in December 1966 and January 1967.
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.
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.
Harrison E. Salisbury, Behind the Lines: Hanoi, December 23, 1966 - January 7, 1967. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. x, 243 pp. pb New York: Bantam, 1967. 214 pp. Chapters IX-XI and the first page of Chapter XII, and Chapters XX-XXI have been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.
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 Hanoi in a position somewhat similar to that of Peter Arnett in Baghdad in 1991.
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.
[See also Harrison Salisbury oral history, below.]
Sam Sarkesian, "Soldiers, Scholars, and the Media", Parameters, September 1977.
Sydney Schanberg, Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2010. 242 pp.
Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. xii, 333 pp. Schorr, a correspondent for CBS during the Vietnam War, dealt mostly with domestic politics, so this memoir does not have much to say about Vietnam, but I believe it says more than his more recent memoir Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism (2001).
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.
C. L. Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles: Memoirs and Diaries, 1934-1954. New York: Macmillan, 1973. xvi, 1061 pp. Cyrus L. Sulzberger was chief foreign correspondent of the New York Times from 1944 to 1954; he would be a very influential foreign affairs columnist for decades afterward. Includes a significant amount on Indochina.
C. L. Sulzberger, The Last of the Giants. New York: Macmillan, 1970. xv, 1063 pp.
C. L. Sulzberger, An Age of Mediocrity: Memoirs and Diaries, 1963-1972. New York: Macmillan, 1973. xii, 828 pp.
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.
Gary C. Tallman and Joseph P. McKerns, "Press Mess: David Halberstam, the Buddhist Crisis, and U.S. Policy in Vietnam, 1963." Journalism & Communication Monographs 2:3 (Fall 2000), pp. 109-153 (of which pp. 144-153 are endnotes).
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.
Seymour Topping, On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent's Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. xv, 435 pp. Includes considerable discussion of the Pentagon Papers case.
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 female 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.
"Valley of Death," documentary broadcast on CNN, June 7, 1998. Operation Tailwind began September 11, 1970, when a SOG Hatchet team of 16 Americans and 110 Montagnards was landed by helicopter in southern Laos near the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A documentary broadcast on CNN June 7, 1998, said that Sarin nerve gas had been used in the operation, and that killing Americans who had defected to the Communist forces had been among its goals. CNN later retracted these allegations.
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.
Jane Kirtley, "Tailwind Lessons", American Journalism Review, 24:4 (May 2002), p. 70.
Jerry Lembcke, CNN's Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam's Last Great Myth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. xviii, 217 pp.
April Oliver, "The Wrong Lessons", American Journalism Review, 21:6 (Jul/Aug 1999), pp. 52-55. One of the producers defends the show.
Susan Paterno, "An Ill Tailwind", American Journalism Review, 20:7 (September 1998), pp. 22-31, 80.
Perry Smith, "The Lessons of Tailwind", American Journalism Review, 20:10 (December 1998), pp. 45-47.
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.
William S. White, The Making of a Journalist. University Press of Kentucky, 1988. 248 pp. As a syndicated columnist, White was remarkably hostile to Hanoi in the late 1960s. But he had had a long career; there might not be much about Vietnam in a memoir of this length.
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:
Elie Abel. Worked
for NBC in New York, Washington, and London, 1961-1969. Describes how the Vietnam War was discussed
in elite circles; not much about actual policy.
Joseph
Alsop (a nationally syndicated columnist)
Stewart Alsop
(a nationally syndicated columnist)
Peter Braestrup
(who reported from Vietnam for the Washington Post)
John
Chancellor (NBC's chief White House correspondent 1964-65, and director of the Voice of America 1965-67)
Chester
R. Huntley. Chet Huntley, co-anchor of the NBC evening news.
Frank
McCullough. McCullough took over the Hong Kong bureau of Time Magazine, which handled
coverage of Vietnam, at the end of 1963; his first visit to Vietnam was in January 1964.
Don
Oberdorfer, part 1,
part 2
Barry Zorthian was public affairs officer at the US Embassy, Saigon, from 1964 to 1968. He seems to have
done four interviews for this program in the early 1980s. I have not located Interview I online.
Interview II,
Interview III,
Interview IV. Mr.
Zorthian also did another oral history years later.
The text is copyright by,
and has been placed on-line in, the
Virtual Vietnam
Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University. (I believe the discussion
of Walter Cronkite's coverage of the Tet Offensive, on p. 124, is inaccurate.)
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
Alyssa Adams, ed.,
Eddie Adams: Vietnam. New York: Umbrage Editions, 2008. 223 pp. Eddie Adams, a photojournalist
who worked for the Associated Press, covered the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968, and also covered the "boat
people" fleeing Vietnam in 1977. This volume contains many of Adam's photographs, accompanied by a narrative
written by Adams' boss in the Associated Press, Hal Buell.
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.
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.
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.
Hal Buell,
Viet Nam: Land of Many Dragons. Dodd, Mead, 1968. 142 pp. Mostly photographs;
text summarizes the history of Vietnam and of the war. Buell headed the photographic section of the
Associated Press.
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.
Jean-Pierre Dannaud, Guerre morte. Saigon: Société
Asiatic d'Éditions, 1954. Reprinted Paris: Pensée Moderne, 1973. A photo
book, not paginated, on the First Indochina War.
Leo J. Daugherty and Gregory Louis Mattson,
Nam: A Photographic History. New York: Metro Books, 2001. 608 pp.
New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004. 608 pp. A huge tome, with a lot of text, not just pictures.
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. 191 pp. 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.
Donald M. Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon, and J. Michael Wenger,
The Vietnam War: The Story and Photographs. Washington, DC:
Brassey's, 1999. 192 pp.
Sean Flynn, son of the famous actor, covered the Vietnam War as a freelance photographer. I
believe he was working for Time when he and another freelance photographer, Dana Stone
(working for CBS) were captured by Vietnamese communist forces while travelling on Highway 1 in
Svay Rieng province, eastern Cambodia, early April 1970. They were later executed by the Khmer Rouge.
Jeffrey Meyers,
Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. 368 pp.
Perry Deane Young,
Two of the Missing: A Reminiscence of Some Friends in the War. New York: Coward, McCann
& Geoghegan, 1975. 254 pp. Rev. ed. with a new chapter added: Two of the Missing:
Remembering Sean Flynn & Dana Stone. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2009. 296 pp.
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.
Mark Jury,
The Vietnam Photo Book. New York: Grossman, 1971. 160 pp. New York:
Vintage, 1986. 160 pp. Jury was a roving photojournalist for USARV, July 1969 to July 1970.
Mark Jury,
"'It Made Me Who I Am': John Olson's Enduring Images of Tet." VVA Veteran, 30:2 (March-April 2010), pp. 32-33. John Olson,
drafted, got himself assigned as a photographer for Stars & Stripes; he covered the fighting both in Saigon and in Hue
during the Tet Offensive.
David Kennerly,
Shooter. New York: Newsweek Books, 1979. 269 pp. Kennerly
became Saigon bureau chief for UPI in 1971, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his photography of the Vietnam War.
Life Magazine published a lot of good photojournalism during
the war; see above.
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.
Michael Maclear (text) and Hal Buell (photo editor),
Vietnam: A Chronicle of the War [on title page] or Vietnam: A Complete Photographic History
[on cover]. New York: Tess Press (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers), 2003. 736 pp. This large and
very impressive volume
combines the text of Michael Maclear's book The Ten Thousand Day War with more than 2,000 photographs
and maps, most of which came from the files of the Associated Press.
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.
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.
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.
Brigitte Tison,
Sud-Vietnam 1973: Un pays, des enfants et la guerre.
Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Éditions Alan Sutton, 2005. 127 pp. A
photo book with captions. Dr. Tison was director of "le centre Terre des Hommes-France
de Saigon," a charitable institution caring for children,
in 1973. The photos are good, and quite diverse; street scenes, children, and
Montagnards, but also temples, imperial tombs, etc. But the comment on the back cover about
the sound of B-52s taking off every day from the Saigon airport does not fill me with confidence.
"An Unlikely Weapon - The Eddie Adams Story." Documentary film, 2009. About the Pulitzer Prize winning
photographer (see above under Alyssa Adams).
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.
Ben Bradlee [Benjamin C. Bradlee],
A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures. New York: Touchstone (Simon & Schuster), 1995. 514 pp. Bradlee
was executive editor of the Washington Post. There is one chapter on the Pentagon Papers, only a little
discussion of other aspects of the Vietnam War.
Geoffrey A. Campbell,
The Pentagon Papers: National Security versus the Public's Right to Know. San Diego, CA:
Lucent Books, 2000. 112 pp. Intended for young readers.
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.
D.J. Herda,
New York Times v. United States: National Security and Censorship. Hillside, NJ: Enslow, 1994. 104
pp. Intended for young readers.
Susan Dudley Gold,
The Pentagon Papers: National Security or the Right to Know. New York: Benchmark Books, 2004. 144
pp. Intended for young readers.
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.
Kenneth W. Salter,
The Pentagon Papers Trial. Berkeley, CA: Editorial Justa Publications, 1975. xii, 123 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.
Robert F. Turner,
Myths of the Vietnam War: The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered. New York: American Friends of Vietnam,
1972. iv, 55 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.
Next section:
Propaganda and Psychological Warfare
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011,
Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised June 14, 2011.
Photojournalism and Photo Books
The Pentagon Papers Case
For both partial and complete versions of the actual text of the Pentagon Papers, go to
The
Pentagon Papers