Preorders Available for Malcolm W. Browne Biography

The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World examines how the most unlikely of war correspondents, Malcolm W. Browne, became the only Western reporter to capture Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc’s horrific self-immolation on June 11, 1963. Quang Duc made his ultimate sacrifice to protest the perceived anti-Buddhist policies of the Catholic-dominated administration of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem.  

Browne, the thirty-two-year-old head of the AP’s bureau in Saigon, had been tipped off about the demonstration the evening before and was the only Western reporter on the scene to photograph the horrific event. Browne’s powerful images were edited and distributed from the New York office to AP member newspapers in the United States and around the world. 

The reaction was immediate. Although Browne noted that millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, his pictures possessed “an incomparable impact.” A group of clergymen in the United States used the photograph for full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post decrying American military aid to a country that denied most of its citizens religious freedoms.

Biographer Ray E. Boomhower’s The Ultimate Protest explores the background of the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam in the spring of 1963 that led to Quảng Đức’s self-sacrifice, as well as the worldwide reaction to Browne’s photograph, how it affected American policy toward Diem’s government, and the role the image played in the violent coup on November 1, 1963, that deposed Diem and led to his assassination.

The book also delves into the dynamics involved in covering the Vietnam War in the early days of the American presence and the pressures placed on the journalists—Browne and his colleague Peter Arnett from the AP, David Halberstam from the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan from United Press International—there to "get on the team" and stop raising doubts about how the war was going. Browne and Halberstam shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their reporting from Vietnam. 

Finally, the book looks at Browne’s early life, his decision to enter the journalism profession, his work in Vietnam for ABC Television, leaving Vietnam, becoming a foreign correspondent for at the New York Times, and his eventual return to South Vietnam in 1975 to report on the country’s fall.

Preorders for the book, which will be published on March 15, 2024, by High Road Books, an imprint of the University of New Mexico Press, are now being accepted. Click here to preorder.

 

 

The Return of the Artists: Harry Davis Jr., Garo Antreasian, and Indiana Art

Since its establishment in 1894, the American Academy in Rome has, been home to visiting scholars and artists from the United States seeking support and inspiration for their work. During the heady days of Rome’s liberation by Allied forces in June 1944, one of the academy’s former students, Harry A. Davis Jr. of Brownsburg, Indiana, a combat artist with the U.S. Army’s Eighty-Fifth Infantry Division, working under the supervision of the U.S. Fifth Army’s Historical Section, made his way to what had been his art studio just a few years before.

A graduate of Indianapolis’s Herron School of Art, Davis discovered that everything in his studio was just as he had left it, including his paintings and personal effects. He also found that his worst fears about the colleagues he had left behind had not come to pass. Although showing “distinct signs of having suffered from a lack of food,” his friends at the school “were all alive, happy to see Americans again.” With his company bivouacked on the grounds of a nearby estate, the sergeant was able to make several trips to the academy, “each time taking some of my ration of candy, for they had no sweets for several years,” in addition to other supplies.

Half a world away, another Hoosier and future Herron graduate, Garo Antreasian, a member of an Armenian family that had escaped the Turkish Genocide and made a new life for themselves in Indianapolis, sailed the Pacific Ocean aboard LST 790 (Landing Ship, Tank) as a combat artist with the U.S. Coast Guard. After delivering supplies for the invasion of the Philippines, Antreasian and his shipmates endured the hell that was the Battle of Iwo Jima, including undergoing attacks from Japanese kamikaze pilots. Antreasian, the son of a tailor, had to do double duty while on his ship, serving as a gun controller at any time battle stations were called. “There was certainly no time to draw—only time to observe and respond for the firing of the stern guns,” as well as “everything on and off the ship as far as the eyes could see and as much as my mind could absorb and retain,” Antreasian recalled.

Antreasian jotted down what he had seen and remembered in a small notebook he kept in his pocket. “These notes and my memory were invaluable when I could finally begin painting, usually long after we had departed the scene of action,” he said. Antreasian would retreat to his studio, located below decks in the forward gun munitions locker. There, under the glow of a hundred-watt bulb and a constant heat of more than a hundred degrees in the tropical climate, he stripped to his waist and set out to do his artwork. Often, his sweat dripped onto his paintings.

The son of an itinerant minister, Davis, like Antreasian, endured less-than-ideal circumstances to pursue his art while overseas. Coming across some Italian women harvesting a wheatfield, he attempted to capture the scene on canvas. In a letter to his family, he noted:

My easel was at times a chair, while again, a tripod arrangement upon which the canvas was hung. At no time was I able to get suitable lighting conditions, working in a tent, sitting on my cot. The canvas for my painting was originally shielding some soldier from the elements, a salvaged shelter half, a half-section of the small pup-tents. . . . Vibrations in the air were strong enough that the canvas quivered like a drum struck with a heavy blow.

 Davis compared what he and his fellow combat artists did with another profession— historian. “We saw things as they were and we put them down, very much as a Historian would record the events that occurred,” he recalled. “Some of my drawings had to be very factual and maybe they are not art but I feel they tell the story.”

As for Antreasian, he lamented losing some of his work due to wartime censorship. After completing several paintings and drawings, he packaged them to transfer along with his ship’s mail to the flotilla’s command ship. There censors and press officers examined them “to determine what spin to attach to individual pieces before transmitting them to Washington.” Several paintings Antreasian had completed showing the deadly Japanese kamikaze attacks against U.S. ships at Iwo Jima had been destroyed by the censors, deeming it “unwise for the public moral to be confronted by news of such unimaginable behavior.” He learned what had happened to his creations only after the war’s end.

Upon the completion of their military service, both artists returned to Indiana and set about to make their mark on the state’s artistic heritage—as teachers at Herron (Davis taught there for more thirty years; Antreasian for sixteen years) and through their art. Antreasian stayed in Indiana until 1964, when he took a post as a professor at the University of New Mexico’s art department, earning accolades for helping to revive lithography in the United States through his work with the Tamarind Institute. “I’ve devoted my life to art and its teaching,” Antreasian recalled, “to me it represents a daily challenge—a challenge to express successfully that which I feel deeply and visualize in my mind’s eye.” He left behind in the Hoosier State a series of important public-art projects, including murals at Indiana University, a mosaic floor at the Holcomb Observatory at Butler University, and a mosaic mural of Hoosier favorite son Abraham Lincoln at the Indiana Government Center.

Davis had a successful teaching career as a professor of painting and drawing at Herron. He also continued to paint, producing more than 500 works featuring endangered historic buildings throughout the state. “Most of the work is because I feel a need for it,” Davis said. “Somebody ought to record it. The old landmarks are disappearing so fast.” David Russick, director of the gallery at Herron, who organized an exhibition of Davis’s works in 2006, pointed out that the Hoosier artist “painted buildings the way many portrait painters do people. He captured the spirits of the buildings, not just the brick and mortar.” As Davis’s wife, Lois, a fellow painter, remembered, her husband “just fit in with the Hoosier picture—not fancy.”

Both Hoosiers displayed an aptitude for art at an early age. “Ever since he was old enough to hold a pencil,” Davis’s father told a reporter, “he has been drawing likenesses of people.” Although local schools offered neither art nor manual training courses, the senior Davis noted that his son filled their house with “model stage coaches, airplanes, and boats of beautiful craftsmanship which he did just to satisfy the creative urge and to amuse himself.” 

Mildred Smith, who taught Davis Latin at Brownsburg High School, remembered that for an open house at the school he drew a large picture for her classroom depicting Roman chariots and charioteers. “I thought it was the most wonderful painting,” said Smith. “I wanted to keep the picture, but that little stinker wouldn’t give it up.”

In 1933 the young Davis entered the Herron School of Art at 1701 North Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis, supporting his education by winning several scholarships. It was a time of great changes for the school that came about under the leadership of its director, Donald Mattison, a New York artist and teacher. Faced with budget troubles and a declining enrollment, Mattison trimmed the Herron faculty and altered the school’s curriculum so that during their first three years students followed a similar course of study with an emphasis on a firm grounding in drawing, composition, and painting.

During their fourth year, students could pick a specialization, including painting, sculpture, commercial art, or teaching. Promising students were able to win scholarships for a fifth year of postgraduate training. “The art school must become the clearinghouse wherein those found unfit for professional work are eliminated,” Mattison observed. “Cold facts, as to proficiency must be recorded and ranked by percentages. Authoritative recognition of the true professional student must exist and adequate instruction must be provided for the deserving students.”

As a boy, Antreasian developed twin passions—reading and drawing. “To draw,” he recalled, was something he “accepted unthinkingly as a natural function of self, no different from blowing my nose or putting on my clothes.” One of his grade-school teachers, Helen Earhart, who had attended art school, became the first person to encourage him to begin to think about art “as more than just something that was fun to do.” She talked to his parents about encouraging their son’s protentional, and Antreasian’s father took him to Indianapolis’s best art store, the Lieber Art Emporium, to buy an oil painting set, housed in a fine rosewood box. “That tiny, polished box became the equivalent of Citzen Kane’s sled Rosebud,” Antreasian remembered. In addition to painting, he drew objects from observation, including “coaster wagons, shoes, hats, toys, houses and kitchenware,” and by doing so became aware of “the problems of perspective and proportion.”

Antreasian continued to grow as an artist while at Arsenal Tech High School, where he came under the tutelage of teacher Sara Bard, whose forte was watercolors, often exhibiting her work at the National Academy. Antreasian noted that the training at the school was done with a “professional attitude,” and he and other students were encouraged to reach such art journals of the time as the Magazine of Art, Art News, and Art Digest.

Bard also tasked her students with exploring projects outside of their normal interests. Noticing some old lithography equipment, she assigned Antreasian and a few of his fellow students to see what they could accomplish. They plodded ahead through “trial and error” and “great agony,” Antreasian remembered. “Throughout a whole year, I don’t think we produced one print, but we were hooked from that point.” At the time, the art of lithography—the process of drawing images on polished limestone with a grease pencil, wetting the stone, applying ink that clings to the grease, then using a press to imprint the image from the stone onto paper—had nearly “ceased to exist” in the country, he said, with “little reliable literature in English . . . available, and equipment and teaching resources were scarse.”

Fortunatley for Antreasian and his friends, they discovered a commercial printing house in Indianapolis, Oval and Koster, which specialized in large posters and calendars. “As luck would have,” Antreasian noted, “Mr. Oval was a genial old gentleman, who had apprenticed as a child in Germany and who was quite fond of relating his early experiences in the medium.” The old lithographer kindly answered all of the boys’ questions. “He was a good man and sensed the hunger of our quest,” said Antreasian, “and after several visits he agreed to meet us frequently at the factory on Saturday monrings to answer our questions.” Thereafter, Antreasian viewed lithography as a “magical ‘something’ that kept tantalizing me because I never could get my hands on the real story. Consequently, something about my inner being and wanting to know kept me reaching to grab a hold of something that was just beyond my grasp.”

When Antreasian entered the Herron, he discovered that while the school still had lithography equipment, it had discontinued classes on the subject. Mattison allowed him the freshman to use the equipment in the evenings and on weekends and “just to fool around.” Antreasian learned all he could, piecing together information by studying print collections at several museums. “I simply had to know,” Antreasian recalled. “By hard-headed stubbornness, a lot of strenuous effort, and countless trivial errors, I was able to slowly find my way.”

Graduating from Herron in 1948 following his war service, Antreasian joined the school’s faculty, adding printmaking courses to its curriculum. Married on May 2, 1946, to Jeanne Glasscock, and with a young son, David, born soon afterward, he realized his family could not survive financially on his meager teaching salary and income from his paintings and prints. Antreasian began painting murals for hire, with his first, depicting major landmarks in Indianapolis, finished for the new WFBM television studio, in 1952.

The popularity of this mural (today located at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis), led to other projects, including an invitation from Indiana University in Bloomington to produce what came to be six murals about the history of the university above its Wright Quad Building’s large dining hall, a space covering more than a thousand square feet. The murals covered the years 1820 to 1850, 1850 to 1900, 1900 to 1920, 1920 to 1938, the modern concept, and the mid-twentieth century.

The assignment presented several challenges. As he explained:

To begin with, the work had to be done on site. Because of its height, a special scaffolding was necessary for me to execute the paintings. There was no simple way for me to back away to view the accuracy and progress of the work. As work began, it proved necessary to climb up and down the scaffolding ladder quite frequently to check the clarity of details from floor levele. These adjustments often required enlargement of drawing or exaggeration of color.

He noted that he and the graduate students from IU’s Fine Arts Department who assisted him worked even while meals were being served in the dining hall below them. Antreasian said that many people would be “surprised how many good suggestions we got from students who inspected the murals while they ate.”

Months before starting work at IU, Antreasian studied the university’s history in order to decide what and who to depict. He examined photographs, talked to numerous school officials, and read books. “One of my most difficult problems was to gather information about buildings that no longer exist,” Antreasian told a reporter. “I usually was able to find plenty of written material on these buildings, but to find information that would depict them was something else.” Finished with his studies, the artist spent six months drawing exact miniatures of the murals to guide his painting. With the work started, Antreasian spent three days a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—in Bloomington until the work was done.

Antreasian also had to devise new paint formulations to ensure the mural’s permanence, working with the Permanent Pigments Company to formulate “a paint customized to my requirements. The rest is history: this was the beginning of the Liquitex brand of acrylic paints.” Antreasian began his work in September 1956 and completed the murals in April 1957. Antreasian estimated that using Liquitex cut down on the time spent painting the murals by more than 30 percent—quite a saving on a work that contains fifty-seven different scenes and 110 figures.

The artist’s final public-art projects came in 1958 and 1959. One of these efforts, designing the terrazzo atrium floor—titled Zodiac—for the Holcomb Observatory on the Butler University campus, went smoothly and received wide acclaim. The other project, a regional competition to design a mural for the entry hall at the Indiana State Office Building around the theme of Abraham Lincoln’s youth in the state, using as inspiration his quote, “Here I grew up,” tested his resolve.

Antreasian’s concept for the mural centered on a series of vignettes featuring, as he noted, “a pensive Lincoln in various activities, floating supplies down the Ohio River, studying on horseback, practicing oratory in the bushes, and as a towering mature statesman.” The artist connected these locations by using the flow of the Ohio River between Pigeon Creek and the Anderson River. He also decided that instead of using paint, the mural should be a mosaic built from glass tiles imported from Murano, Italy, eventually numbering more than 300,000 pieces in eighty-seven different hues in its finished form (seventy feet by twenty-five feet) at a cost of $35,280.

(A Herron graduate, Ralph Peck, completed the mosaic mural’s fabrication, working on it at his Mooresville, Indiana, studio. According to an article in the Indianapolis Star, he and an assistant affixed the glass tiles to the “reverse side of a drawing made on a large roll of paper. This ‘cartoon’ was cut into sections, which were carefully coded and later affixed to the marble wall with mortar.” It took a year for them to do so.)

In addition to the technical challenges of fixing the glass pieces to a “honey-colored travertine [marble] wall,” Antreasian nearly became a victim of political infighting between different gubernatorial administrations. The Antreasian mural and a bronze Lincoln statue by Herron instructor David Rubins had been approved by a State Office Building Commission originally appointed by Republican governor Harold Handley. A new administration under Democratic governor Matthew Welsh objected to the project’s cost, believing the money should be spent on social-welfare programs. A. Reid Winsey, an outraged member of the jury that had been responsible for selecting Antreasian and Rubins, wrote the governor that “beautiful buildings demand the decorations indicated. The mural mosaic and the Lincoln statue which we selected would be a credit to any building and any state, and I feel that cutting cultural corners like this does much to throttle art in Indiana.”

Eventually, Antreasian said, he and Rubins prevailed and the statue and mural were installed. Antreasian added that “unsurprisingly,” Governor Welsh “took all of the credit for the art projects during the dedication ceremonies.” What is not known is if this controversy played any role in Antreasian’s decision to leave Herron for the art department at the University of New Mexico in 1964. (It should be noted that his salary at New Mexico more than doubled what he had been making at Herron.) Earlier, in 1960, Herron had given Antreasian a year’s sabbatical so he could work with printmakers June Wayne (founding director) and Clinton Adams (associated director) to begin the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles; Antreasian served as its technical director. With Antreasian’s expertise to draw upon, the institute moved to the University of New Mexico in 1970, where it remains. In 1971 Antreasian, with Adams, co-wrote The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art and Techniques, the definitive work for lithography.  

Before his death at the age of ninety-six on November 3, 2018, Antreasian had returned to Indianapolis in 1994 for a major retrospective of his work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, titled: “Garo Antreasian: Written in Stone.” The museum had received a 650-piece archive from the artist. At a lecture for the exhibition, Antreasian, who had retired from teaching in 1987, told those in attendance that people often asked him where his ideas came from. “Consciously, I’m aware of many sources, but on a subconscious level I haven’t a clue what triggers a particularly significant moment over many others.” Reflecting about his career, he described it as “a fulsome life, and a lot more fulfilling than hanging around shopping centers.”  

When he mustered out of military service on November 23, 1945, Davis had returned to Indiana, earning a faculty position at Herron, where he remained until his retirement in 1983. A former colleague praised him as knowing how to “get the best out of his students. He wasn’t a soft touch. He wasn’t easy. Art was his life.” In 1948 he married Lois Peterson, a fifth-year student at Herron. “We quickly became good friends,” Lois remembered, “but I didn’t take any of his classes. He likes his students neat and dislikes walking into someone’s palette and getting paint on himself. If I had been in his class that might have happened because I’m a messy painter.”

For a time in the 1950s, the couple lived in Brownsburg and Davis, uncertain about his art and the market for it in Indianapolis, decided to supplement his teaching income by building houses. He abandoned that trade, but it left him with a strong understanding of how such structures are put together. He used this knowledge to capture on canvas the state’s historic urban architecture. Davis found himself drawn to structures possessing a wide range of shapes and the correct combination of lightness and darkness.

Davis likened his building paintings to capturing a man’s portrait. “As in the face of a man, the features of a building are enhanced, the forms strengthened and given depth by proper lighting,” he told a reporter. As in the portrait of an older person, the “lines and blemishes that come with age add character to the countenance. Some structures are more handsome than others merely because of the arrangement of shapes, just as in a human face. The weathering of many a storm, and survival against the elements, can add greatly to the fascination of an old building.” Indianapolis art critic and fellow Herron faculty member Steve Mannheimer praised Davis’s architectural paintings, calling them “perfectly measured moments of this time and this place. They are art about and completely from his and our immediate reality. They preach no moral other than the calm practice of observation.”

Until his death at age ninety-one on February 9, 2006, Davis, and Lois, produced art while working out of separate studio spaces in their two-story, shingle home on North Washington Boulevard in Indianapolis’s Warfleigh neighborhood; Davis converted the garage into his workspace, while Lois did her painting for a time in a basement studio, later moving to an upstairs bedroom. “We comment a lot on each other’s work,” noted Lois. “He will tell me what is wrong with my painting or if he looks at it and doesn’t say anything then I know it just isn’t right. He’s very careful about what he says. He will ask me for help and quite often I can pinpoint something and help him too.”

Davis was meticulous about his paintings, taking photographs of the building beforehand and making detailed sketches of the work to come. It took him anywhere from a few days to several weeks to finish a painting. He took photographs of the completed work, as well as making sure to keep careful records of where it was exhibited, any prizes it had won, and to whom he sold it to. “He loved to paint. Without it, he would have been lost,” Lois said after his death.

Talking with a reporter about his work, Davis noted that some in the art world believed he underpriced his paintings. “Maybe I do,” he agreed, “but a large part of the satisfaction to an artist is not the price, but the knowledge that other people are able to see his work.” Davis also believed that artists should never retire but must continue to paint “until they are unable to lift a brush, seeing and gathering more and more ideas to include in their work.”  

". . . the glories of peace": Richard Tregaskis in Japan

The Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport plane emblazoned with a white star along its sliver fuselage and “Bataan” printed on its nose glided in for a landing at Atsugi Airfield near Yokohama, Japan, on the afternoon of August 30, 1945. With his trademark corncob pipe clenched between his teeth and clad in aviator sunglasses, General Douglas MacArthur climbed down a ramp wheeled up to the plane.

As MacArthur ambled down the steps, the general was serenaded by a band and cheers from paratroopers from the Eleventh Airborne Division, the soldiers who had secured the airfield formerly held by Japanese kamikaze pilots determined to give their lives for their emperor. President Harry Truman had recently appointed MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, giving him the job of overseeing the occupation of the conquered country and directing him to “exercise your authority as you deem proper to carry out your mission.”

Shaking hands with General Robert Eichelberger, head of the Eighth Army, MacArthur, as newspapermen and photographers (some American and many Japanese) swarmed around him, commented: “Well, Bob, it’s been a long road from Melbourne to Tokyo, but as they say in the movies, this is the payoff.” MacArthur also took time to compliment the band’s performance, telling its leader that it had been “about the sweetest music I’ve ever heard.”

As MacArthur and his party, all unarmed at the general’s orders, pushed on from the airfield to Yokohama in a motorcade along a road lined with thousands of Japanese soldiers providing security, more transport planes landed at Atsugi. One passenger, Richard Tregaskis, who had followed members of the Military Government Section from Manila in the Philippines to a muddy base in Okinawa and now on to Japan itself on behalf of the Saturday Evening Post, had trouble believing what was happening. “The nonchalance of this peaceful invasion seemed astounding,” Tregaskis wrote. “I’d been flying with the B-29’s on bombing runs, and on Admiral [William “Bull”] Halsey’s torpedo planes, too recently to realize that the war was over, that all this could happen here.”

Although one of the passengers on Tregaskis's plane jokingly objected that he wanted to return to the United States, most were absorbed in sightseeing, sitting in “awed silence, now, straining to see everything,” Tregaskis reported. As someone pointed out something on the ground to a man sitting next to him, others were quick to try to rush to see what it was. Tregaskis compared it to a “mass nerve response like the craning of necks at a football game or automobile race, when something exciting is happening.”

Only two weeks ago, the countryside would have been “spitting fire” at any American planes overhead, but today Tregaskis’s plane landed without incident alongside aircraft bearing the Rising Sun emblem. Setting foot on the concrete taxiway with his tired companions, Tregaskis recalled something an enlisted man with the Military Government Section, Corporal Vincent A. Livelli, a typist from Brooklyn, New York, had said to him in Manila: “Military government follows the glories of victory with the glories of peace.”
The speed and uncertainty of the end of the war in the Pacific had dampened any riotous celebrations in the Philippines. Tregaskis arrived at MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila shortly after the Japanese news agency, Dōmei, had released a statement on August 10 from the Japanese Foreign Ministry announcing the country’s capitulation. 

What followed, noted Tregaskis, was a period of hopeful waiting that soldiers called “the big sweat,” which seemed to drag on for years. “Nobody was sure just when—or if—he should begin celebrating,” he remembered. “It was like the first day of the double-headed V-E Day in New York; unsteady, uneasy, with people milling about and not knowing just what to do, not being sure, half waiting for the official handout on peace, half wanting to celebrate now.” Peace had caught everyone off guard, just as had the start of the war for the Americans with Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor nearly four years before.

Although the moment did not seem climatic or clear-cut, it did provide inspiration for Lieutenant Colonel Carl Erickson, the acting head of the Military Government Section (shortened to Milgov in Tregaskis’s Post articles) at MacArthur’s headquarters. Erickson, the executive officer for Brigadier General William E. Crist, who was hurrying back to the Pacific from a visit to Europe to review the occupation there, controlled a tiny staff—two other officers and five enlisted men, all of whom had been snatched away from the Philippines Civil Affairs Unit and assigned to the new section. “If Military Government had to be flown into Japan the next day, this tiny detachment, with whatever other officers could be gathered, borrowed or stolen from other outfits, would have to take over the entire job of administering the central government of Japan,” Tregaskis reported.

With the “air thick with plans” for just how to rule over occupied Japan, Tregaskis secured Erickson’s permission to spend the next few weeks tracking the detachment’s unsteady progress from Manila to Tokyo. Uncertainty and improvisation became key parts of the unit’s existence as it waited for reinforcements; Erickson had been promised, Tregaskis wrote, that 230 men with specialized training were on their way from the United States, dispatched with “No. 1 air priority.”

In the meantime, those assigned to the section displayed remarkable skills at scrounging for needed supplies and office space for the new men. Livelli, who had told the correspondent that he had “never felt closer to history,” found a Japanese phrase book produced for Filipinos during Japan’s occupation of that country by one of the invaders’ propaganda agencies. The only linguist during the detachment’s early days, Livelli, who spoke French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, had, in just a few days spent reviewing the phrase book, had mastered some elementary Japanese language characters, including those that indicated “keep off,” Tregaskis reported.

Others on the staff, however, remained more interested in returning home than in participating in the grand adventure awaiting them in Japan. Like many who were still serving in the military, they anxiously tried to figure out where they stood in the “point system” instituted by the U.S. War Department to determine the order of demobilization. The higher the points they had amassed—for such items as time served, where they had served, decorations earned, and number of dependents—the sooner they could expect to be discharged to see their families again.  

Day by day, Tregaskis observed the Military Government Section grow with “the rapidity of a jungle plant in the monsoon season,” taking up space in new offices in another wing of the building. Crist joined his new command, full of lessons he had learned from his European sojourn and determined to avoid the pitfalls he had observed. “It’s inexcusable to make the same mistakes again,” he told Tregaskis, especially since he and his men were on a twenty-four-hour notice for travel to Japan or other occupied zones, including Korea.

The wallboard partitions that marked the boundaries of the detachment’s office in Manila’s city hall expanded as officers, most fresh from Civil Affairs Training schools in the United States, and rookie enlisted personnel joined the staff. It made for a colorful sight, said the reporter, who saw in the building a “motley ensemble of Navy and Army garb, a mixture of colors and patterns which indicated that the officers who would be supervising the government of Japan had been hastily gathered from many sources to be flung into the emergency situation.”

Tregaskis noticed a trend toward mollifying harsh American attitudes about the Japanese occupation. Instead of a strict military government along the lines of the one established in Germany, as had originally been projected, he saw a shift toward “indirect control,” using the existing Japanese government bureaucracy to run the country, overseen, of course, by MacArthur as supreme commander. Crist gave similar welcoming remarks to all new members of his detachment, letting them know that their initial function would be advisory. “We want to avoid disrupting Japan too much,” the general warned his troops. “Above all we must carry out orders. The commander is given tools. He is responsible for the results. We don’t tell him how to use his tools. That’s up to him. It’s up to the commander to use you, or you, or you, or use me, as he sees fit.”

The “tools” that joined Crist’s command were usually older than ordinary line officers, Tregaskis noted, and their “faces carried interesting marks of character, of developed individuality.” They were men of so many specialties that Erickson, who had been told he would be remaining in Manila and not joining the section in Japan, referred to them humorously as “entomologists and anthropologists.” Their specialties included public safety, finance, banking, public health, public safety, public works, industry, and law.

Those who had to stay in the Philippines were jealous of those selected for service in Japan, remembered Tregaskis, who also would be traveling to the defeated foe’s homeland. “We were envied not only for the chance to see the country with the first occupying forces; but also because the military government office in the City Hall was becoming almost mammoth; and like any expanding organization,” he said, “it was obscuring individuals in its expanding folds.” One of the captains left behind lamented to the correspondent: “With colonels all around, what can a mere captain do?”

Upon his appointment as supreme commander, MacArthur had been determined to formulate his own policies and implement them through Emperor Hirohito and the imperial government, running a conciliatory occupation. Unlike Germany, which had been divided into zones for the different Allied Powers (United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union), the United States, despite Russia’s late entry into the fight, controlled Japan except for token British and Australian troops stationed in Hiroshima. There was an Allied Council for Japan, which consisted of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and the United Kingdom, meant to advise MacArthur, but the general ignored it, noting that as supreme commander he was the “sole executive authority for the Allied Powers in Japan.”

The general intended to use his unchallenged power to reform the country, to bring it “abreast of modern progressive thought and action” by eliminating its military power, punishing its war criminals, building a proper structure of representative government, modernizing its constitution, giving Japanese women the right to vote, releasing political prisoners, establishing a free press and labor movement, separating church from state, and liberalizing its education system. “It was true that we intended to destroy Japan as a militarist power. It was true that we intended to impose penalties for past wrongs,” MacArthur recalled. “But we also felt that we could best accomplish our purpose by building a new kind of Japan, one that would give the Japanese people freedom and justice, and some kind of security.”

The principles MacArthur planned to follow during the occupation were the same ones, he added, “which our soldiers had fought for on the battlefield.” MacArthur strove to turn Japan into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberalization of government from within.”

The Military Government Section’s departure from Manila was “a masterpiece of hurry-up-and-wait,” according to Tregaskis, with the U.S. Army playing its old game of ordering someone to be at a rendezvous hours early “so as to allow plenty of time to get there yourself.” The trip involved plenty of discomfort and misery, but the members of the Military Government Section he accompanied endured the hardships with good cheer. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Livelli said as the group waited and waited for the flight to take off from Nichols Field in Manila. A dancer in civilian life, Livelli surprised Tregaskis by sharing that he would be filling his time reading James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, as he was interested in the book “from a philological point of view.”

Another of his companions related to Tregaskis that when he had first joined the army he used to complain quite a bit about its inefficiency. After being in the military for a time, however, he “decided they got things done somehow, so I decided they must be right. Now, I just take it.” Lieutenant Melville Homfeld was probably the most anxious among the group’s members to reach their destination, the port city of Yokohama, located south of Tokyo. When Homfeld entered the army, his wife had also volunteered to serve, joining the Red Cross. She had been assigned to the hospital ship USS Benevolence, which was supposedly anchored in Yokohama Harbor. “Homfeld was very vehement about wanting to see her again,” Tregaskis reported. “In fact, when he talked about the possibility of finding her in Yokohama Harbor, he let out something like a cowboy whoop.”

After a miserable two days at a mosquito-plagued tent camp on Okinawa, Tregaskis set off for the last leg of his trip on a plush C-54E transport plane, equipped with comfortable reclining seats and an electric plate on which the passengers could brew cups of hot coffee. “All around us, on our flanks and ahead, silver specks of other C-54’s, inward bound for Japan, dotted the sky,” Tregaskis wrote. The passengers sat in “awed silence, straining to see everything” as the plane made its descent into Atsugi airfield.

After parking at the end of a long line of C-54s, Tregaskis and his companions climbed down to the tarmac and were met by an American paratrooper in a jeep, who radioed to seek transportation for their party. Unfortunately, the truck that arrived only took them as far as a barnlike wooden hangar located a few yards away to play the army waiting game again. “It was fitting, after all, that we should end our journey to Japan as we had begun it—waiting,” Tregaskis said.

For the next two weeks, the members of MacArthur’s Military Government Section moved slowly, establishing their offices in Yokohama’s customhouse. Tregaskis helped to make signs for the various departments—General Aid, Secretary of Labor, Medical, Finance, Resources, and Public Safety, among others. The correspondent also joined Major Cecil Tilton, Crist’s assistant, and Charles Thomas, a civilian financial adviser, on a trip to the city’s main shopping district to purchase guidebooks and Japanese-English dictionaries. “We found no stores, only piles of rusty iron wreckage, many shacks made out of salvage, and one or two locked and bolted concrete buildings,” said Tregaskis.

Stopping for water for their dilapidated car at a Japanese garage, Tilton asked the proprietor where he could buy books, but discovered there were no bookstores in the city; the nearest ones were in Tokyo. Homfeld had better luck, making it to Yokohama Harbor, boarding the ship on which his wife served, and having a joyous reunion.

Unfortunately, the days soon fell into a deadly dull routine of paperwork and more paperwork. While exciting events were happening elsewhere—the formal Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, for example—military government soldiers “worked long hours in the stuffy confines of their Yokohama customhouse office, from eight-thirty a.m. until eleven o’clock at night,” Tregaskis recalled. “And because the high policy was to be cautious and to center responsibility only at the very top, most of the recommendations, instructions and plans prepared by Milgov had to be rewritten, redone.”

Orders for running the country, Tregaskis noted, came from the supreme commander, MacArthur, directly to the emperor or his representatives, then through the Japanese government’s or civil service’s usual channels. “Our Milgov people were only to advise, check up and make reports,” he wrote.

The military government staff did jump in to assist Lieutenant General John R. Hodge’s Twenty-Fourth Corps, which had been ordered to occupy the southern portion of the Korean peninsula, annexed by Japan in 1910. The occupiers were now gone, and, because there were not enough trained men to take over, and there existed infighting among Korean nationalists seeking power, “real Military Government by outsiders—Americans—would have to be provided,” Tregaskis wrote. Crist’s section in Japan had to produce proclamations for Korea that then needed to be translated into Korean. That proved to be a problem, the correspondent noted, as the unit possessed a Japanese interpreter section, but it had no Korean translators. “However, men who could write Korean were discovered in the Psychological Warfare branch, and the job was done,” Tregaskis wrote.

Things did not improve for the Military Government Section when it moved its operation from Yokohama to Tokyo along with MacArthur’s headquarters, which established itself in a six-story insurance building that became known as the Dai Ichi (Number One) building. The military government staff rode on the “vertebra shattering road between Yokohama and Tokyo” to its new offices in a grimy building that was part of the Japanese Forestry Department.

Instead of preparing to help govern the country, however, the officers and enlisted men Tregaskis had come to know were blindsided by a decision from MacArthur’s headquarters (Order 170) creating the Economic and Scientific Section. This new department took over “not only some of the functions but even some of the personnel of the Military Government Section,” he reported. “It seemed evident to many of the Milgov people that this would be only the first of a series of slices into the physical structure of its organization.”

One officer, whose name Tregaskis kept secret for fear his superiors might punish him for his honesty, said his unit had become “a hollow shell” and complained that those who had been trained for their jobs at a cost of thousands of dollars were now in limbo; it seemed as though the Military Government Section would be “liquidated,” with the supreme commander exercising his authority through the Japanese government. MacArthur’s statement that he expected to maintain only a skeleton military force, approximately 200,000 troops, only confirmed Tregaskis’s belief that the occupation was “going to proceed on a cut-rate—for the Americans basis; that the policy of playing with the soft pedal was going to be continued indefinitely.”

Underlying Tregaskis’s reporting on the situation was his own frustration at losing his ongoing access to a story he had been working on for the past few months, and in the process becoming close to several members of a unit that seemed to be vanishing before his eyes. Also, there still existed bitter feelings among some Americans about the war and how severely Japan should be punished for what many saw as reprehensible conduct.

In a Gallup poll taken during the later stage of the war, only 8 percent of Americans had favored rehabilitating and reeducating Japan (13 percent had agreed with the option “Kill all the Japanese people”). Tregaskis reflected some of that animosity against the enemy in his articles for the Post. Writing about the move from Yokohama to Tokyo, the reporter noted that enlisted men and junior officers from military government “had been assigned to dirty quarters in business buildings, with picayune sanitary facilities.” This had caused “understandable growling,” with the Americans wondering: “Who won the war, after all? Why aren’t we in the best buildings in Tokyo?” Also, racial prejudice still marred relations between occupiers and the occupied. 
 
To gain some insight into what the future might bring for military government, Tregaskis arranged interviews with two of MacArthur’s top advisers—Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, the general’s military secretary and head of the general headquarters’ Psychological Warfare Section, and General Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff. Fellers, whose department’s name had been changed, “in line with the prevailing trend toward euphemism,” Tregaskis noted, to Information Dissemination Section, said to the reporter that the Japanese government had been “100 per cent not only co-operative but subservient.”

Tregaskis reminded Fellers that he had heard some people in the United States had been critical of what they viewed as “too much softness” when it came to handling Japan. But Fellers warned that if the Americans were too firm, the Japanese would view it as betraying agreements made before their unconditional surrender, including promises that the existing state structure would be maintained. There were also several liberal reformers in Japan who might be able to steer the country toward democracy. The liberals had been beaten down by the militarists who controlled the country in the past and needed to be encouraged to emerge and lead, noted Fellers, who had urged MacArthur against putting the emperor on trial as a war criminal. “The plan is practical,” he told Tregaskis, “and we’re going to let them do it.”

In his discussion with Tregaskis, Sutherland confirmed that Crist’s section would be dissolved and its functions absorbed by other departments, who would make reports to the supreme commander. “We’ll do the same thing with Military Government people that we’ll do with the (fighting) divisions—we’ll release ’em,” Sutherland told the reporter. “They were originally set up for a combat landing, like the divisions. They should be considered as divisions. We’re using those who are needed and releasing the rest—and some of those being released are inevitably going to be high-powered people. It can’t be helped.”

Tregaskis realized that MacArthur was sensitive to the call from many Americans, tired of war and its costs, for the government to send troops home and cut inductions into the armed services (the size of the U.S. military had been reduced throughout 1946, falling from 12 million to 1.5 million). In early 1946 wives of servicemen had organized “Bring Back Daddy” clubs to pressure Congress to speed up bringing their husbands home. Soldiers overseas had also organized protests lambasting plans by the War Department to slow demobilization. Tregaskis could not blame MacArthur “for a policy of expediency when the American people seemed to indicate they didn’t want to follow through either—that they didn’t want to send more boys and dollars to go out and police the world; at least, not until another war came along!”

With the Military Government Section reduced in importance, Tregaskis ended his “Road to Tokyo” series for the Post, returning to the United States to report and write for the magazine for the first five months in 1946 about how veterans were handling their return to civilian life.

Tregaskis, who had been covering the war for the past four years, had his own transition issues, including such simple problems as finding replacements for his size fourteen military issue footwear. Like most men who had been discharged from the army, navy, or marines, Tregaskis was “glad to be alive at the end of the war, to have both arms, both legs, both eyes and both ears; to be reasonably sane; and, immediately, to be able to get something to eat, to be able to bathe in warm water, to sleep between clean sheets.”

Coming from Tokyo, which had been “thoroughly poor, starving and devastated,” Tregaskis viewed his first port of call, San Francisco, as “a pleasant dream.” He went on “an innocent orgy” of window shopping, haunting department stores and making the circuit of hamburger stands, restaurants, and used-car emporiums. “It was a wonderful privilege,” he noted, “to be alive in this country where everyone in the ragamuffin remainder of the world would like to live; where everyone, comparatively, is wealthy.”

Our Man in Saigon: The AP's Malcolm W. Browne

The call woke Malcolm W. Browne at 2:30 in the morning on September 18, 1964. He stumbled across his apartment, located above his Associated Press office at 158/D3 Rue Pasteur in Saigon, South Vietnam, to answer. It was from one of his police sources, who informed the AP’s bureau chief that there had been a fight at the docks involving Americans and he might want to visit the scene.

Browne dressed in  hurry and drove to the docks in the office’s Land Rover, painted bright red with white signs in Vietnamese and English reading “Bao Chi,” identifying it as belonging to a member of the press. Once there, he learned that four seamen from Guam had been in a fight with some South Vietnamese Rangers and police; one sailor had been wounded in the throat but had survived. Browne returned to his office, wrote his story, and took it to the telecommunications center to send it to the AP office in Tokyo, Japan, for distribution to member newspapers in the United States. He finally made it back to his bed at 3:50 a.m.

The newsman woke again at 7:15 a.m., showered, and ate his breakfast of a bowl of Wheaties and a cup of strong, black coffee. Finished, he walked downstairs to the cramped AP office, which always looked to him “more like a command post than a news agency office.” Filing cabinets dominated one wall, while others were covered with floor-to-ceiling sector maps of the country with plastic overlays on which the staff kept track of important battles. 

Located near Browne’s desk was the field gear he could grab at a moment’s notice for a dash to the airport to board a helicopter when word came about a new firefight. He skimmed the morning newspapers, then told one of his colleagues to cover a meeting at nine that morning involving Major General Duong Van Minh with civilian politicians organizing a new advisory council. Browne also made sure to book a call to Tokyo from the AP office for later that day on the office’s lone cracked, green telephone. At 8:40 a.m. Browne telephoned a U.S. military spokesman seeking any new developments in the conflict with North Vietnam. What slight details he received from the tight-lipped official he cabled to Tokyo.

By 8:45 a.m. Browne was back in the Land Rover for a meeting with a Vietnamese student organizer, Ton That Tue, seeking his reaction to the formation of the new national council. Tue expressed his dissatisfaction with the new council to Browne, who also learned that the students would probably hold off on any new street demonstrations for now. 

The call from Tokyo came through at 11:17 a.m. and Browne dictated dispatches from himself and his colleague. He was off again a half-hour later, leaving the office to cover a demonstration ten blocks away involving dentists demanding a repeal of an old government decree denying them needed dental materials. The strike appeared to be related to general strike plans of several labor organizations.

Returning to his apartment at 12:30 p.m., Browne ate lunch, consisting of a sandwich, a glass of milk, and more strong coffee. He did not stay alone long; five minutes after beginning to eat, he welcomed a police source, who shared with him new leaflets from the Viet Cong being distributed around Saigon at night. “Text was interesting to me but apparently not newsworthy, so did not file,” Browne recalled. He finished his lunch.

At 1:00 p.m. Browne went to see Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, whom he believed might be a good subject for a feature story. He waited outside Thao’s office for an hour, then was finally ushered in for “a long and instructive talk. I have known Thao for three years and we talk frankly.” Upon his return to his office, Browne wrote a dispatch to send to Tokyo, scheduled to be transmitted at 5:15 p.m. but which had to be at the telecommunication center by 4:00 p.m.

After writing his Thao article, Browne phoned “an unofficial military source” and heard that six U.S. servicemen had been wounded in the past two days in various actions. He also checked with another official on a United Press International report that Viet Cong activity had been on the rise. “Official denied any noticeable upturn in activity,” Browne reported. He covered all this in one story and added a small piece on the new German ambassador presenting his credentials.

At 4:00 p.m. Browne had time to read his mail, including a letter informing him that his grandmother had died. He also wrote four or five business letters, mainly in connection with money and staff matters. An hour later, he checked with student leaders on the outcome of their latest talks with the government and filed a fresh lead on his article. A spokesman from the U.S. embassy called Browne at 5:20 p.m. to describe Ambassador Maxwell Taylor’s activities during the day, including talks with Vietnamese officials and religious leaders. “Spokesman will not say what they talked about,” noted Browne. “File this as an add to unrest story.”

At 6:30 p.m. he checked the night’s edition of the government’s news agency bulletin but found nothing newsworthy. Five minutes later, a government spokesman called the AP office to let Browne know of a press conference scheduled for the next morning; Browne assigned the story to others in the office. He also cabled Tokyo asking the staff there to call the Saigon office if they did not hear from the office by 10:00 a.m. the next day.

After showering and a quick change of clothes, Browne went to dinner at 7:00 p.m. with the director of a Saigon radio station whose son had just been returned to him after being kidnapped. “This man is my friend, and I’m sorry about kidnapping,” Browne wrote. Back to the office by 8:35 p.m., he received a tip reporting that troops from Cambodia had invaded South Vietnam. “I check for 30 minutes all best qualified sources, determine report is untrue,” he noted.

Shortly after 9:00 p.m., a representative from one of South Vietnam’s smaller political parties stopped by the AP office inviting Browne to an upcoming press conference. He thanked the man and said he would try to send someone if possible. At 9:30 p.m. the AP staff heard a loud explosion outside. Browne checked all his sources and discovered that what they had heard was “merely artillery on a routine firing mission outside” the city. Relieved, Browne and his staff talked about the next day’s schedule.

At 10:00 p.m. Browne, trying to shower, had to step out to answer a call from a U.S. intelligence source wanting to be briefed on what he had heard from Vietnamese students that day. A few minutes later, a Japanese correspondent called Browne also seeking an update on any newsworthy items. “I say nothing much happened,” Browne recalled. “This is approximately the 40^th call of day from correspondents, principally American and Japanese, wanting to know what is going on, and I am in a bad temper because these people never give us anything in return. In fact, 90 per cent of their news is rewritten from the AP file.”

Browne received his final telephone call of the day a little after 11:00 p.m.; it came from a police source letting him know that three suspected Viet Cong had just been arrested in Saigon’s fifth precinct. The suspects carried with them “some interesting documents.” Browne concluded that the information was not worth filing anything about. After finishing off another bowl of cereal, he finally gets to bed. “Unpleasant and unproductive day which left too many loose ends dangling,” he decided. Just another day at the office.

 

 

 

 

A Murder in Michigan: John Bartlow Martin and The Morey Case

On a cool Saturday evening on September 15, 1951, a young medical student, Christian Helmus, was driving with his wife and another couple to their home near the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Helmus saw something in the street and, after dropping off the women, returned to the scene with his male friend after midnight. They were confronted by the body of a woman laying almost in the middle of the street beside the rear fender of a parked car. Checking her pulse, Helmus discovered she was still alive, but only barely; he called the police.

Arriving at the scene, Lieutenant Walter Krasny remembered that the woman moved her head from side to side, “sort of in a rocking motion, and mumbling from the mouth. Couldn’t make out what it was. The victim, a thirty-four-year-old nurse named Pauline Campbell, who worked at Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital, died a few minutes after the police had arrived. An unknown assailant had crept up behind Campbell while she walked home from work and viciously smashed her in the skull with a heavy rubber mallet. “It was a sadistic type of murder,” Krasny said. “He just kept hitting.” The crime sent shockwaves through the quiet college town (home to the University of Michigan campus), with police believing the crime had been committed by “a maniac.”

Residents were stunned, however, when, a few days after the murder, police were tipped off that three teenagers from the nearby town of Ypsilanti—Bill Morey III, Max Pell, and Dave Royal—had committed the crime, with Morey striking the fatal blows. As a reporter noted, the boys “had no felony records. They came from good families. They were nice-looking boys, well-spoken, neat, mannerly.” A jury eventually found Morey and Pell guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced them to life in prison (Michigan did not have the death penalty at that time) without the chance for parole, while Royal was convicted of second-degree murder and received a twenty-two-year-to-life jail sentence. Morey’s father’s reaction to the news, “I can’t believe it—I just can’t believe it,” reflected what many parents thought at the time.

The shocking case drew the attention of a freelance writer uniquely qualified to probe what had happened—John Bartlow Martin. Although he never consciously set out to specialize in crime, Martin had developed a fascination with the subject during his early days as a freelancer producing articles for such sensationalist true-crime magazines as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime. As his career advanced to writing for such prestigious publications as Harper’s magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, he continued to write about crime, criminals, and prison.

Investigating crime offered Martin an opportunity to write about people in crisis and their problems. Crimes, he discovered, did not happen by blind chance—something caused them. “Sometimes the matrix is social, sometimes psychological, most often both,” he said. “Writing about an individual criminal case, then, offers also an opportunity to write about a whole society. Crime in context.” In researching and writing about such cases, as well as other tragedies, including a coal mine disaster in Centralia, Illinois, Martin had come to believe that “our society does not always work as well as it ought,” and that what really mattered to a storyteller was the “individual man, the woman, the child.”

For some time Martin had wanted to do a careful study about a murder involving a teenage suspect. He checked into several of these apparently senseless cases of slayings over a period of years and in each one it did not take him long to discover “that the thing wasn’t really senseless at all, that there was some clear reason assignable if one took the trouble to look—but the reason was so unusual, so special, that it deprived the story of what it ought to have above all else: Wide applicability.” For example, he noted that sometimes a newspaper reported that the youth came from an average, respectable home, but in digging further the mother turned out to be an alcoholic, the father a criminal, or the home was in a slum neighborhood. It was the not the fault of the newspapers, said Martin, as they had to work fast and print what information they could find. “It is for this very reason that I think a magazine or book writer in the fact field can perform a useful service: by coming along after the event has occurred, he gains perspective and can see the event whole,” he said.

Martin investigated and dropped several cases, looking for one that involved young men “in whom any one of us might recognize our own children; parents in whom we could recognize ourselves.” Only then could a single case have a wider application, he added, getting at some of the “fundamental problems and weaknesses of our world as a whole, and more especially of the way our world rears its children.”

When he learned about the Morey case, Martin traveled to Ann Arbor, as it “seemed to be what I was looking for—a crime readily explained by none of the standard ‘causes’ of ‘juvenile delinquency,’ a crime that by all the rules should not have happened but did happen.” (This was a few years before actor James Dean put the issue of teenage angst on the nation’s consciousness with his performance as troubled youth Jim Stark in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause.) It turned out to be one of the most difficult stories Martin ever covered, not in a technical sense, but personally. “I have children of my own,” noted Martin. “I know a lot of other kids not very different from Bill Morey. I know a lot of parents not very different from his parents.”

Martin and his friends, when young, had also done some of the stupid and dangerous things Morey had done—drink alcohol before they legally could, drive around recklessly in cars looking for excitement, and base their actions on the opinions of others in their age group. “The story rather frightened me,” Martin said. Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti were by no means unique towns, and the teenagers who lived in those communities were not different from thousands of others in cities across the country. “We all think it can’t happen here, not in my town; but it sure can, it happened in Ann Arbor,” he noted.

Ordinarily, in conducting his legwork for such a story, Martin would have chosen to interview the boys’ parents last, but he realized if they, especially Bill Morey’s parents, refused to talk to him freely, he had no story. He decided to approach the Moreys first, traveling to Ypsilanti by bus and from there on foot to the Moreys’ home on a quiet and shady street. Both parents were reluctant to talk to Martin. By this time the trial had concluded, their son was in prison, and they did not want to relive what they had endured. However, as Martin noted, they were reliving what had happened every day, as they “dated everything in their lives as ‘before this happened’ or ‘after this happened,’ this terrible event, the murder.” He explained to them that he was not trying to write a sensational story, but instead “a thoroughgoing study for a serious magazine [the Post] that would try to discover why it had happened.”

As Martin noted in his four-part series in the Post, although no final answer might be found for the question, “Why did they kill?” perhaps an understanding could be reached by getting at the facts of the case. “All is not,” he added, “cannot be, darkness and mystification.”

Martin shared his own experiences as a sometimes wayward youth and his and his wife Fran’s lives as parents of a young daughter. After a time, the Moreys began to respond to Martin’s gentle nudging, with Mrs. Morey nodding her head to what he was saying and volunteering information about her son. For an hour and a half they talked about Bill, as they still called him, and Martin decided not to press them on anything. Upon leaving, he asked if he could return the next day; they agreed and the three of them talked for two hours, “and the day after that for four hours, and the following week for more,” Martin recalled.

Subsequently, Martin spent weeks talking to the Moreys, to the families of the other two boys jailed for the crime, their schoolteachers, friends, the lawyers defending the boys, a psychiatrist (Doctor O. R. Yoder) who believed Bill had a “psychopathic personality,” and the boys themselves while they were in prison. Martin’s articles also examined the differences between Ann Arbor, the quiet college town, and where the boys had lived, Ypsilanti, which he described as “a blue-collar town turned upside down by the war.”

The war had drawn thousands of “hillbilly” workers from Kentucky and Tennessee to Ford Motor Company’s massive Willow Run bomber plant, and after the war they had gone on “relief and turned Willow Run into a slum,” wrote Martin, with their children running wild, smoking marijuana and drinking. “Ypsilanti and the automobile with its roaring exhaust became characters in the story,” he said. As prosecuting attorney Douglas K. Reading told Martin: “I don’t know why this murder happened, but I can see a part of the picture, I think. Night after night they’re out driving around, drinking beer, getting in a little trouble. They talk big. There aren’t many who will ever do a damn thing. But there is always one who will do it—and by looking at him, you can’t tell him from the others.”

In his concluding piece in the Post, Martin pointed out how hard the case had been to understand, especially given the grief and guilt felt by the boys’ parents and the difficulty in obtaining reliable information from the teenagers involved, as they seemed to inhabit “a world of their own” and were exceedingly loyal to one another. “I never really answered the question of why—why they had killed. Why?—to a reporter, it is the only question that matters and it is the only question he can never really answer,” said Martin.

Although bitter about the way their son had been treated by local newspapers, by police, and by the prosecution during his trial, Mr. and Mrs. Morey, too, had no final answers for what their son had done. When Martin had asked him why his son had killed the nurse, Bill Morey Sr. had quietly responded: “I couldn’t tell you. It is a mystery.” Civic leaders in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor agreed there existed no more juvenile delinquency in their towns than in most communities, Martin reported. “If this is true, then adult Americans have little notion of what their children are up to—and this is by no means unlikely,” he noted.

The series about the case in the Post prompted numerous letters to Martin, and worried parents in suburban communities across America made stronger efforts, he reported, to cooperate with school officials, civic leaders, and police “in the hope they can find out what is wrong with their own towns and thus, possibly, prevent the same thing from happening again.” Martin expanded what he wrote into book-length form, published by Ballantine Books in 1953 as Why Did They Kill?

Martin’s book received strong reviews upon its release, with Croswell Bowen, a writer for TheNew Yorker specializing in crime, in his critique for the New York Times, describing Martin as “probably the ablest crime reporter in America” and saying the book was “as smooth and gripping as a first-rate novel.” Why Did They Kill? continued to  receive praise from critics in the years to come, especially with the release in 1966 of Truman Capote’s best-selling book In Cold Blood, which examined the vicious murder of Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of their children in Holcomb, Kansas, by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, who were found guilty and hanged for the killings.

First serialized in The New Yorker, Capote’s book received strong support for its literary achievement. “It seemed to me,” Capote said in an interview with the New York Times, “that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘non-fiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He went on to say that very few “first-class creative writers” had ever bothered with journalism, except as a sideline, “something to be done when the creative spirit is lacking, or as a means of making money quickly,” and dismissed journalism as “unbecoming to the serious writer’s artistic dignity.”

Over the years questions have arisen about Capote’s veracity and his claims that the book was “immaculately factual.” Although The New Yorker ran Capote’s articles, its editor, William Shawn, had been concerned about how Capote could be so certain of what had been said in private conversations he had no part in. Shawn later expressed regrets at having published the articles in his magazine. At the time of In Cold Blood’s publication as a book, some writers, including Kenneth Tynan and Ned Rorem, criticized Capote for profiting off the death of two people and not doing enough to save Hickock and Smith from their fate.

Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic denigrated Capote’s work, saying it was “ridiculous in judgment and debasing of all of us to call this book literature,” and spoke for many of the anti-Capote critics by instead recommending Martin’s book as a cut above In Cold Blood. “His 131-page book,” Kauffman said of Martin’s Why Did They Kill? “is superior to Capote’s in almost every way, makes some attempt to answer the question in its title, and is devoid of any suspicion of conscious self-gratifying aggrandizement into Literature.”

Other critics, however, preferred Capote’s work, with Joseph Haas writing in the Chicago Daily News that he read Martin’s book “with respect and pleasure,” writing that it displayed all the virtues of the best modern news writing—accuracy, responsibility, thoroughness, and interpretation. However, Haas added, Why Did They Kill? suffered from a host of limitations. “It tends to pedestrian prose, pat pop-sociological conclusions, uninspired organization and a shortage of perceptive insight. It lacks the substance of art: rich in facts, it is poor in truth,” he wrote. Haas and other Capote supporters may have faulted Martin’s literary skills, but few people ever disputed his facts.

Postscript: In 1970, at the age of thirty-seven, Morey was granted parole and released from prison after Michigan governor William G. Milliken commuted his life sentence (Royal had been paroled in 1962 and Pell in 1967).