The reporting of American correspondents in Vietnam in this period is a celebrated story, and it’s told with verve by the late William Prochnau in his atmospheric book, Once upon a Distant War. David Halberstam of the New York Times, Neil Sheehan of UPI, and Malcolm Browne of the AP are the remembered triumvirate. Browne arrived shortly after the Truehearts did, Sheehan and Halberstam in mid-1962. Their fearless critical reporting of the American war effort and the embattled regime became one of the journalistic legacies of this period. In real time it influenced decision-making in Washington. They were journalistic heroes, but they were not the first.

When Nolting and Trueheart arrived in 1961, the resident New York Times correspondent was scarcely a lapdog. He was Homer Bigart, a crusty old newsman who had reported with distinction from both theaters of World War II and from Korea, where his work won a Pulitzer Prize, and from many another war zone during the 1940s and 1950s—including Vietnam, where he impressed the visiting Congressman [John F.] Kennedy.

Bigart was a short-timer in Vietnam this time, six miserable months for him, but he was a hero to the younger reporters and “had established skepticism as the rule of thumb.” One visiting pundit called him “one of the great shit detectors” of the profession. It was Bigart who, despite his evanescent tour, coined one of the most memorable lines of the period. In a humorous ditty he composed to get a giggle from a Times colleague, his slogan to describe US policy in Vietnam was: “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” (Diem, pronounced ziem, makes the rhyme smoother.)

John Mecklin, the new public affairs officer in Saigon, parsed the phrase to describe the syndrome: “Failure became unthinkable. . . . We were stuck hopelessly with what amounted to an all-or-nothing policy, which might not work. Yet it had to work, like a Catholic marriage or a parachute. The state of mind in both Washington and Saigon tended to close out reason. The policy of support for Diem became an article of faith, and dissent became reprehensible.”

I gathered early on that Bigart was not a favorite in the Nolting household, for I heard his name being taken in vain—by the two younger daughters, Frances and Jane, then in their early teens, and surely echoing their parents. At first I was confused, not having heard the name Homer Bigart before. But I knew what “bigot” meant, and that’s what the word sounded like in Virginian. I thought they were calling him one. This animus may have been my first inkling that journalists could be pests or much worse, and also my first inkling that they were part of our world in Saigon, too, and not always in harmony with it. It may have been my first awareness of journalists as people.

Their fearless critical reporting of the American war effort and the embattled regime became one of the journalistic legacies of this period.

Nolting, Trueheart, Mecklin, and the others found that they were expected to manage the unmanageable: the American correspondents reporting things as they heard and saw them. The presidents of the United States and South Vietnam, and their entourages, were being driven crazy by their reporting. They thought it was inaccurate. They thought it was tendentious. They thought it was simplistic. But at least some Americans knew it was accurate.

A bad-news story datelined Vietnam would prompt a “rocket” cabled from Washington demanding explanations, or a protest, or the disciplining of reporters. One embassy officer, exasperated by the instructions to correct the behavior of journalists, said it was like “trying to tell a New York cab driver how to shift gears.” Equally impossible demands on the embassy might come from the presidential palace a half mile away. Diem could never shake the idea that the American journalists spoke for the US government; after all, most of the press in Vietnam spoke for the Vietnamese government.

While strenuously denying that, and reminding Diem about press freedoms and public opinion, US diplomats also had formal responsibilities to the American correspondents, who were being frustrated by the US military over access to battle zones or hassled by Vietnamese secret police for reasons unknown. The journalists in Saigon were accredited, like diplomats. Their presence in Vietnam was at the sufferance of the Vietnamese government, which was tested early and often.

In March 1962 Bigart’s visa expired, and the government declined to renew it. His offense, it transpired, was a lighthearted paragraph in a miscellany that (like “sink or swim”) the Times didn’t even print. But Vietnamese government censors routinely reviewed the newsmen’s dispatches, lifted from the telegraph office and translated for palace approval before being okayed for transmission. The paragraph was this: “Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu will be going abroad soon. However, reports that she will be absent for several months have been discounted as wishful thinking by government sources.” 

The other journalist being thrown out was thirty-three-year-old François Sully, the Newsweek stringer. Sully was French and had been in Vietnam for fifteen years. Just a short time before, he had reported on Operation Sunrise, one of the early stages of the much-vaunted strategic hamlet program. Touted by Vietnamese and American officials as a means of protecting the hamlets from the Viet Cong, the program was described by Sully as forced relocation. The magazine ran pictures he took of villagers’ homes being torched by the army.

A bad-news story datelined Vietnam would prompt a “rocket” cabled from Washington demanding explanations, or a protest, or the disciplining of reporters.

When he ran into Nolting thereafter, the ambassador asked him, “Monsieur Sully, why do you always see the hole in the doughnut?”

“Because, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, there is a hole in the doughnut.”

Nolting, and Trueheart too, would have liked nothing better than to be rid of these nettlesome journalists. But the ambassador did his duty. On March 27 he went to Diem to protest, warning Diem these expulsions “could do nothing but harm to our mutual efforts.” In Nolting’s telling, after pouring out his grievances against Bigart and Sully and their “derogatory and insulting” coverage, the president ordered the visas renewed.

Expecting gratitude from Bigart for this stay of execution, instead Nolting got invective. The notoriously irascible Times man told Nolting he’d been desperate to leave Vietnam for a long time, and “his expulsion would have made his exit sensational.” Nolting responded, or perhaps just wished he had, “perhaps, he, too, would have to ‘sink or swim with Diem’ a while longer.” The war with the resident American press, of course, would only get worse.

Bigart left anyway of his own accord soon after, and not quietly. In his closing dispatch for the Times, he described Diem as “secretive, suspicious, dictatorial” and predicted that inevitably the United States would have to consider the option of “ditching Ngo Dinh Diem for a military junta.” His last paragraph was just as pessimistic about the war effort: “No one who has seen the conditions of combat in South Vietnam would expect conventionally trained United States forces to fight any better against Communist guerrillas than did the French in their seven years of costly and futile warfare. . . . Americans may simply lack the endurance—and the motivation—to meet the unbelievably tough demands of jungle fighting.”

His last paragraph was just as pessimistic about the war effort: “No one who has seen the conditions of combat in South Vietnam would expect conventionally trained United States forces to fight any better against Communist guerrillas than did the French in their seven years of costly and futile warfare."

In his last days in Saigon, Bigart “got into his cups” with the columnist William Pfaff, who was passing through that summer on a reporting tour of the region. Bigart told Pfaff that Nolting was “the sorriest excuse for an ambassador he had seen in twenty years of overseas reporting.” In passing this conversation along to a colleague, Pfaff said Bigart regarded embassy people as “Clerks, clerks, clerks.”

Bigart left Saigon, a place he hated and an assignment he found beneath his station, on June 30, 1962. If Nolting and Harkins thought the worst was behind them, that’s because they hadn’t yet met his successor, David Halberstam.

"Lies, Lies, Lies"

The Times of Vietnam, the only newspaper I read closely in those days, was a bizarre window into the soul of the Ngos, and the subject of regular hilarity and occasional alarm in the Trueheart household. Thanks to the Times of Vietnam, ever since I have had a template of a state-controlled press.

The country’s only English-language newspaper was owned and run by an American couple, Gene and Ann Gregory, who’d been in Saigon for longer than Diem had been in power. Ann Gregory was especially close to Madame Nhu. She had become in essence her English-language editor and speechwriter. Gene Gregory, who went on hunting trips at Nhu’s mountain lodge, ran the business side and was mixed up in Ngo family-protected local business schemes that he marketed in the news pages of the Times. As open collaborators with the regime, the Gregorys were not part of the expat scene in Saigon.

The real American journalists were contemptuous of the paper, while reading it closely. When his editors in New York suggested he file a feature about the Times of Vietnam, David Halberstam cabled back: TO DO ANYTHING AT ALL ACCURATE ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE WOULD BE LIBELOUS AND TO DO ANYTHING NON-LIBELOUS WOULD BE TOO CHARITABLE. As the UPI man in Saigon, Neil Sheehan had to do farcical double duty servicing the Gregorys as local clients of the wire service. He had to cajole them to sign up for Bugs Bunny comic strips and collect on their unpaid bills, while enduring such classic headlines as “UPI LIES, LIES, LIES.”

Thanks to the Times of Vietnam, ever since I have had a template of a state-controlled press.

While attacking the US government regularly, the paper, oddly, sought to be useful to the American community in Saigon. It ran church and movie listings, flight and radio schedules, American baseball scores, comings and goings of ambassadors, generals, and other US officials, Peanuts and Dennis the Menace and Beetle Bailey. The residents of Gia Long Palace received the paper’s most lavish coverage, as did the activities of the Catholic Church: entire papal encyclicals were reprinted on successive pages in very small type. The paper’s primitive Sunday magazine regularly extolled Madame Nhu’s Women’s Solidarity Movement and her pet projects. One cover story in 1963 depicted a girl in humble dress holding a rifle in a rice paddy: “typical and atypical, modest and self-confident, fun-loving and serious—the daughter of counsellor and madame Ngo Dinh Nhu.” This was seventeen-year-old Le Thuy (Beautiful Spring), a pal of the younger Nolting daughters ever since their arrival two years before.

Looking back now on my daily reading matter, on microfilm at the Library of Congress, I am mystified anew by this crude product, and by the reader the Gregorys conjured. Two-inch wire copy items were flung into the paper with abandon: “Prince Philip Is 42.” “Hotel for Fish Opens.” “Surgeons Give Boy New Ears.” “Malta Faces Uncertain Future.” “Increasing Baldness among American Women.” “German Cuckoo Clock Popular in Afro-Asian Countries.” “Sex Life of Eel Unusual.”

Perhaps too long gone from the United States, the Gregorys had an affinity for curiously inane locutions; when an American astronaut completed a perfect ocean return from space in May 1963, the banner headline on page one of the Times of Vietnam was: “Cooper Down Right on the Bazoo.” Kevin Wells, a student at the American Community School we attended, never forgot a local society-page item about the marriage of two diplomats, unnamed. The wedding, the Times of Vietnam reported, “was consummated on the embassy lawn, much to the delight of the assembled guests.”

Excerpted from Diplomats at War published by University of Virginia Press ©2024