Wallace Terry, the Vietnam War, and "Bloods"

Wallace H. Terry Jr., who served as deputy bureau chief for Time magazine in Saigon, had amassed an impressive record as a journalist. Hired by the Washington Post at just nineteen years old, he had been one of the few Black reporters assigned by a mainstream daily newspaper to chronicle the burgeoning civil rights movement in the South. He was there for the critical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and heard Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.’s stirring “I have a dream” oration. It seemed as the impossible could happen—King’s dream of one day in Georgia having “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners” being able to “sit down together at the table of brotherhood” could become a reality.

Those magnificent dreams of brotherhood, however, had been bathed time and time again in blood. Terry had to endure such tragic deaths as Medgar Evers, a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People official, gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of Jackson’s White Citizens Council, on June 12, 1963. Shortly before Evers death, Terry had visited him at his home, where the civil rights leader had treated the threats on his life as a badge of honor. “This is what you must face to get free in Mississippi,” Evers explained to the reporter, who had watched as a car driven by two white men attempted to run Evers down in front of the city’s NAACP headquarters.

While covering demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, Terry himself barely escaped with his life when the hotel he had been staying at had been bombed by segregationists. The worst was yet to come. On April 4, 1968, his friend and his eldest son’s godfather, Doctor King, had been shot and killed by an assassin in Memphis, Tennessee, where King had gone to support striking Black sanitation workers.

Terry heard the news about King’s death while on leave in Singapore, where he had made a home with his wife Janice and their children, Tai (King’s godson), Lisa, and David. Terry had gone to get a haircut only to discover his Chinese barber crying. When he asked him what was wrong, the barber said his tears were for King, whose life had ended too soon. “And I thought, ‘Even a Chinese barber in Singapore . . . and I began to cry, too,” Terry recalled. When, he wondered, might God decide to “lower the curtain” for good on his life?

Rockets and mortars fired by forces of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (commonly known as the Viet Cong) shattered Saigon’s quiet on May 5, leading Terry to believe that a new offensive against the South Vietnamese government and its American allies was at hand. This attack would later be known as the second phase of the Tet Offensive that had first been launched against targets throughout South Vietnam by the VC and the People’s Army of Vietnam on January 30. He huddled with his Time colleague John Cantwell, an Australian who spoke Chinese and loved Asia.

Terry remembered that Cantwell often played a whistle for the birds he kept at the villa the magazine used for its headquarters, hoping they would answer with their songs. The two men had grown close while working together. Terry recalled that one night at the Embassy Hotel where they lived, they went up to its roof with a bag of hamburgers and watched while rockets and flares lit up the city. “We decide this is one war we don’t want to lose our lives in,” Terry said. “For both of us, Vietnam is making less sense each day.”

To cover the renewed fighting, one of the Time newsmen had to attend a military briefing, while the other investigated the damage inflicted on Saigon by the enemy. When Terry told Cantwell to attend the briefing while he roamed the city, the Australian demurred, insisting that his friend should stay with Janice, who might be frightened. Terry agreed but warned his friend to avoid such particularly hazardous areas as Tan Son Nhut airport and Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese sector. Before Cantwell set out, other reporters—Frank Palmos, a fellow Australian; Bruce Piggot and Ronald Laramy from the Reuters news service; and Michael Birch of Australian Associated Press—asked him if they could ride along. Cantwell agreed and the reporters drove away in a Mini Moke, a small, open-top utility vehicle.

Unfortunately, Cantwell ignored Terry’s advice. Chasing after two U.S. helicopter gunships attacking an enemy force, he drove into Cholon, ignoring warnings from South Vietnamese civilians that enemy forces were in the area. Three armed men appeared from behind an oil drum as the journalists drove down a dirt road. Although the reporters had continually called out, “Bao chi. Bao chi [Press. Press],” the VC opened fire at point-blank range with rifles and an AK-47 automatic weapon. “He seemed to enjoy his work,” Palmos said of the insurgent who finished off the wounded reporters with his pistol. “Not only did he ignore all pleas of innocence, killing Westerners seemed to appeal to him. Some honour for him. No possible response for us. He had, in his mind, killed five Western enemies.”

Palmos pretended to be dead and waited until the gunmen had to reload their weapons to sprint away, using the other VC for cover. “I was absolutely bloody shaken,” he recalled. “I could hardly hold a notebook.” Commandeering a three-wheel pushcart, Palmos went about a mile until he came upon and Australian soldier, who “rode shotgun” with him until they made it to safety with U.S. military police. Terry remembered Palmos staggering into Time’s villa, “visibly shaken, his clothes torn,” and crying out that his companions had been killed. Terry knew that he had to risk his own life to learn what had happened to Cantwell. “I let him go there,” he remembered. “If he is alive, or dead or captured, I have to know. I owe him that.”

Zalin “Zip” Grant, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer in Vietnam who had worked with Terry in Time’s Washington, DC, bureau and had returned to the war zone as a correspondent for New Republic magazine, agreed to help. Grant had been skeptical about Palmos’s report, believing there was a chance some of the reporters had survived the attack. “Was he really sure the newsmen were all dead?” Grant wondered about Palmos. “How about if one or two were only wounded and lying in Cholon bleeding to death as we spoke?”

Terry and Grant decided to “go it alone,” embarking on a perilous and frustrating journey to discover their colleagues’ fate. Finally, with the assistance of American forces that had pushed into the area, they came upon the site where Cantwell had stopped his vehicle; they were all dead. “I am too overwhelmed to cry,” Terry said. “Laramy is sitting up in the Mini Moke, his arms still upraised. The others are on the ground. Their bodies are full of holes. Caked in blood. Covered in flies. Bloated from the heat. John has been shot twelve times.”

When an ambulance driver refused to help transport the bodies, Terry and Grant stacked the dead journalists in the back seat of their vehicle (another Mini Moke) as quickly as possible, realizing the VC might return at any moment. They did. A group of thirty Vietnamese wearing black pajamas ran by the duo, holding their fire but looking at the Americans with hatred on their faces. “Why don’t they kill us? Perhaps it is their rush to get out of the area,” reflected Terry. The only thing he could find on his friend’s body was the whistle Cantwell used to entice the villa’s birds to sing. Returning to his hotel, Terry gave the whistle to his wife and told her Cantwell had died. “We cry together,” Terry said.

Walking into a press briefing the next day, he was surprised to see newsmen start to clap. Terry looked around to see who might be behind him, but there was nobody there. “The applause is for me. And for Zip. And, I will always feel, for our comrades who died doing their job,” he recalled. The ghastly experience did have a positive outcome—it resulted in a lifelong friendship between Grant and Terry. The men found what many soldiers in Vietnam, Black and white, had shared while serving together in Vietnam: “A bonding took place, as much for us as it did for the soldiers who risked their lives to pull comrades out of the line of fire or out of burning helicopters.”  

 
The determination displayed by Terry in tracking down and recovering his comrades’ bodies had been a part of his character from the beginning of his journalism career, which included groundbreaking positions at his Indianapolis high school and college newspapers. His trailblazing in the profession continued at Time, where he became the first Black correspondent working for a U.S. news magazine. “It was an important event for black people to make this kind of breakthrough on the color line,” he noted. “I was becoming a national correspondent, the first among black people to represent the mainstream media.”

Upon his return from Vietnam, Terry needed all the resolve he could muster to bring to life his dream of writing a book that would draw people’s attention to the sacrifices made by Black soldiers during the war, which ended with the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975. He wanted his book to topple the conviction that “white soldiers are invincible and black soldiers are invisible.” The book grew to become “an absolute crusade,” Terry remembered.

Beyond telling the stories of the often-forgotten Black Vietnam veterans and the racism they faced while overseas and at home, Terry wanted to write about the conflict because, to him, there existed “no greater subject to write about than war because it’s the worst thing that we do to each other. Almost all the human emotions are involved in war; it’s the most desperate time for man.” Terry believed that war often brought out the worst in men, but also sometimes their best, especially compassion and love for each other regardless of skin color—a camaraderie forged in battle. “That’s the lasting message, the only positive message, about Vietnam,” he said. “The rest of it is nonsense. Foolishness.” Terry found it ironic that the closest America came to the kind of society King had dreamed about came during “the middle of a war he hated.” The newsman knew, however, the damage war did to a person’s soul: “You’re taking a descent into hell when you enter war.”

Terry faced a host of challenges during the more than a decade it took for him to get his book published, including dealing with the appalling memories of his time in combat. He remembered the pools of blood sloshing around his Mini-Moke from the bodies of the reporters crammed onto its rear seat, accompanying troops on dangerous night ambushes, and having a soldier’s leg come off when he grabbed it while trying to drag the wounded man to safety during a firefight. “I’d sleep with the TV on and guns by my bed and under it,” Terry recalled about his return home. “I’d take sleeping pills, but I still couldn’t sleep more than four hours.” Publishers told him there was only a limited market for books about Blacks written by Blacks. “I didn’t want to give up hope,” he told a reporter, “but I couldn’t see the light of day.”

After numerous rejections, Terry’s dream came true when Random House, in 1984, released his book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. It became a bestseller and today is considered a classic reflection on a war that divided U.S. society and cost approximately 58,000 Americans their lives. As Janice, who worked closely with her husband on the book, noted, its publication opened “the gates to knowledge about Black servicemen and their service and their bravery and their commitment to America.”

As for Terry, he hoped that Bloods would appeal to all races, believing that when a white man saw himself “in the experience of a black man, then I had done what I had always wanted to do as a journalist.” He especially wanted Americans to know there was nothing about the Black experience that “was not universal and human. If we understand that, we can live with each other in a much better way.” The book’s power has not diminished over time. For his 2020 film Da Five Bloods about five African American Vietnam War veterans, renowned director Spike Lee, who “read every book and watched every documentary” he could find about the war, had been especially impressed by Terry’s book that he assigned its reading to the film’s actors, which included Delro Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, and Chadwick Boseman.

Born on April 21, 1938, in New York City, Terry was raised in Indianapolis by his mother, Nancy, and stepfather, Frederick G. Schatz, whose interracial marriage had shocked both the Black and white communities in the city (she was Black, he was white). The manager of the Personal Arts Screen Process Printing Company, Schatz encouraged the young Terry’s early interest in journalism. “As far back as grade school I was editor of something,” Terry recalled.

His stepfather also urged him to rise above the racism he faced in Indiana’s capital city, where African Americans could not sit down and eat with white customers in local restaurants, register as guests in downtown hotels, or swim in public pools. If he had the money to see a movie, Terry had to sit in a segregated seating area in the theater’s balcony. While attending a prestigious local private school for a short time, he remembered that he and other students, after reciting “The Pledge of Allegiance,” had to sing “Dixie.” A classmate asked him why Black people wanted to be slaves. “No one was teaching anyone anything about black history or the black experience,” he added. Schatz’s untimely death from a heart attack at age forty-three stunned his stepson. “He had become my mentor,” Terry told a reporter years later about Schatz. “He was helping me figure out what to do with my life. I never replaced him.”

Terry attended Shortridge, the state’s oldest free public high school and known for its dedicated staff and its students’ academic prowess, especially when it came to writing skills. Located at Thirty-Fourth and Meridian Streets, the school sponsored the country’s first daily high school newspaper, the Shortridge Daily Echo, whose former staff members included such notable writers as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Dan Wakefield. Although weighing only 105 pounds upon entering the ninth grade, Terry played on the school’s freshman football team, suffering a broken wrist during a game. An English teacher suggested that it might be safer for everyone if Terry “wrote about sports instead of trying to play them.” He became the first Black editor of the newspaper, working on its Tuesday edition.

During the summer months, Terry’s parents helped him sharpen his skills by encouraging him to attend high-school journalism institutes, including ones at Butler College (today Butler University), Franklin College, Northwestern University, and Indiana University, where, he pointed out, the journalism building was named in honor of famed Hoosier World War II columnist Ernie Pyle. “That was one of the influences on me in wanting to be a war correspondent one day,” said Terry. “I thought there was no one like Ernie Pyle, except maybe Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane. Those writers had the greatest influence on my own writing.”

Terry graduated from Shortridge in 1955, racking up an impressive list of achievements that a local Black newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder, made sure to document for its readers. His many accomplishments included being the first Black to win the Indianapolis News’s Merle Sidener Award for journalism at Shortridge, the first to be named secretary-general of the Marion County Mock High School United Nations, the first to attend Northwestern’s high school journalism institute, and the first to win an award while attending the institute. Terry decided, however, to pass on an offer to attend Northwestern, wanting instead to “go to the best small college that I could get into and study the classics.”

Applying to several institutions, he picked Brown University, an Ivy League institution in Providence, Rhode Island, attending thanks to a U.S. Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. “My family did not have the money to send me to college, which meant I had to go where I could get the best financial aid,” Terry said. “Brown too had a daily paper [the Brown Daily Herald], and full of myself as I was, I was going to show them a thing or two.”

     

Visiting the Daily Herald’s offices during its freshman recruitment period, Terry announced to the newspaper’s staff that he would one day be its editor. Reflecting on his boldness, he said it delayed his admission to the newspaper’s staff. “I had to heel longer than anyone in history just to cool me down,” said Terry, who eventually became a reporter. The summer after his freshman year, he freelanced articles for the Indianapolis News, producing a series of articles relating his experiences on a two-month training cruise as a U.S. Navy midshipman aboard the battleship USS New Jersey. For his second summer at the newspaper, he carried coffee to publisher Eugene C. Pulliam’s office and wrote obituaries. He recalled that for many years he kept a photocopy of the first check he received from the News. Terry’s belief in his abilities, however, paid off when he took advantage of a constitutional crisis about school desegregation to achieve a scoop that landed him on the front pages of newspapers across the country.

On September 2, 1957, Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus had called out his state’s National Guard to block admission of nine Black students to Central High School in Little Rock, defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. To resolve the state-federal standoff, Faubus traveled to Rhode Island in mid-September to meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower at a U.S. naval base in Newport. Seeing an opportunity for a scoop, Terry tracked down the governor at his hotel in Providence. Borrowing a white jacket to pose as a hotel waiter, the college journalist made it past guards to Faubus’s room and knocked. “Congressman Brooks Hays opened the door and asked why I had come to see Governor Faubus,” Terry remembered. “I told him that I felt the students of this nation should know about the situation in Little Rock in detail, since it was they who were directly affected.”

Although Faubus declined to be interviewed at the time, he did talk to Terry and other representatives from Brown the next day. An enterprising wire-service photographer captured a smiling Faubus shaking hands with Terry. The photograph appeared in the New York Daily News under a headline reading, “Negro Reporter Gets A Fair Shake From Faubus,” as well as on page one of the country’s leading newspaper, the New York Times. According to Terry, his stepfather joked with him: “‘You’ve landed on the front page of the New York Times; you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to get there again.’ He was right.” The next year Terry won election as the Daily Herald’s editor in chief, becoming the first Black to serve in the post at Brown and in the Ivy League. Before his senior year, Terry worked at the Washington Post, where he “was treated like a regular reporter [and] paid union scale. That was phenomenal because I was only nineteen when they offered me the job.”

After graduating from Brown in 1959 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, Terry received a Rockefeller theological fellowship to the University of Chicago and became an ordained minister with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He missed journalism, however, and sought a part-time job in the field. “No one around Chicago would hire me because I was black,” Terry reported. “I didn’t want to work for the black press because I saw it as specialized. I believed I should work in the mainstream [media]. While I was interested in stories that related to blacks, I thought those stories also related to whites. They were American stories.”

Terry received pointed advice from Fletcher Martin, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter and the first Black to win a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, an honor Terry later received. Learning that Terry had worked the previous summer for the Post, Martin told him: “Son, it took me twenty years to get where you got to before you even got out of college. You don’t need to talk to me. You need to go back to the Washington Post.”

Martin called Al Friendly, the Post’s managing editor, asking him to hire Terry; Friendly did. After about a year with the newspaper, Terry became deeply involved in covering the civil rights movement. “To me it was the biggest story in the country. It was a story that I passionately cared for because it was going to affect me, my family, my children, and generations of black people to come,” he noted. He did a series of articles about the Nation of Islam, interacting with a charismatic minister named Malcolm X, as well writing about protest marches in the South.

Terry continued to cover the struggle for civil rights after moving from the Post to Time magazine, at the time the country’s top news magazine. He had been drawn to joining its staff by the large number of overseas correspondents it employed. Although his editors told him he would not be “pigeonholed into black reporting,” Terry demurred. After all, he had latched onto the beat as the best way to get off night rewrite at the Post. “I was damned sure going to get out of being a catch-all junior member of the Washington bureau for Time,” he recalled.

Making the civil rights movement his focus gave him the opportunity to work on several cover stories for the magazine, including profiles of such leaders as King and reports from the scenes of major riots in Watts, Harlem, Detroit, and Newark. “He got injured in New York, a brick got thrown off a roof into his chest,” remembered Janice. “It wasn’t directed at him, he just happened to be in the way of the brick being thrown off the roof.” The couple had met at a Howard University party in 1960 and married a few years later. At the party, Terry had proposed to Janice just minutes after meeting her, captivated that she knew his name from his byline. She later acknowledged: “I’m the type of person who reads everything. I read the back of cereal boxes. He didn’t know that.”

Terry had an opportunity for an overseas assignment in early 1967 when he suggested that the magazine do a cover article about Black soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Richard Clurman, Time’s chief of correspondents, called Terry to ask him to fly to Vietnam to help with the story. Terry accepted the assignment, believing that the attention President Lyndon Johnson had given to civil rights and his Great Society programs had been overtaken by a fixation about Vietnam. “The war was destroying the bright promises for social and economic change in the black community,” he said. “I was losing a great story on the homefront to a greater story on the battlefront.”

The piece, which ran in the magazine’s May 26, 1967, issue, pointed out that for the first time in the country’s history, Black soldiers were “fully integrated in combat, fruitfully employed in positions of leadership, and fiercely proud of their performance.” It seemed as if the U.S. military stood as a shining example when it came to race relations. “It was our first fully integrated war,” Terry observed. “It was democracy in a foxhole—the same mud, the same blood.” While Black-white relations were “in a slit trench or a combat-bound Huey” were years ahead of many communities in the United States, the article noted, there were problems, with racist graffiti from both sides emblazoned on the walls of latrines in Saigon and fights while off duty. But as a Black infantry officer told Terry: “With all the inadequacies and imperfections, the U.S. still offers more individual rights than any other country; it’s still worth dying for.”

Impressed by Terry’s work, Clurman asked him to return to Vietnam for a two-year stint in Time’s Saigon bureau, working as its deputy chief. Terry quickly accepted the assignment, as Vietnam represented “the biggest story in the world. And also in the back of my mind, I thought that I would write a book.” The correspondent’s two years overseas became “the most exhilarating and exciting years” of his life. “Maybe I got a rush from the danger and from the excitement,” Terry said years after his overseas assignment ended. “I went to where the action was because I felt that’s the only way I could fully tell the story.”

Terry knew he could be killed accompanying troops on dangerous search-and-destroy missions in the jungle or flying with pilots as they bombed enemy targets. Even reportedly safe rides on U.S. helicopters could be dangerous, as they could fall from the sky due to mechanical failures or by a single bullet from a VC soldier. Simple meals or drinks in Saigon could be deadly if the restaurant had been targeted by bombers. “Once I got into an area, even in the rear, if you’re there overnight you’re subject to enemy rocket and mortar fire,” he pointed out, “not to mention snipers, not to mention booby traps, land mines.”

During his time in Vietnam, Terry said he encountered a couple of “touchy situations where there was a prospect that we would be overrun, and I was handed a weapon by my escorts, and even told that if I didn’t want to be taken [by the enemy] I should use a grenade on myself. I don’t know if I’d ever do something like that. But there were indications that we were really in deep water.” He never fired a weapon, believing that his job involved watching what the soldiers were doing and trying “to keep a balanced head and be alert, keep myself alive, and pick up the flavor of what is happening.”

Janice often shared the dangers with her husband on her eighteen trips to Vietnam, staying for three or four days at a time and visiting major U.S. installations at Da Nang and Chu Lai. She remembered that her husband thought it was important for soldiers to see a female civilian. “I felt extremely honored to be there, to give them a moment of peace, to take their minds off of the war,” said Janice. Both Black and white soldiers treated her with great respect, almost “as if royalty was there.” Terry described her as “Soul Sister No. 1.” She remembered an occasion when a white soldier asked her if she would like some potato chips. When Janice assented, he returned, bringing with him enough potato chips to feed an entire outfit. 

Terry learned that racial relations among American troops in Vietnam had deteriorated from the hopeful story Time had published just a year before. After traveling all over the country, from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta, interviewing American forces, Terry saw that the gung-ho professional soldiers who had volunteered for service early in the war had been superseded by draftees who were much more cynical. “Replacing the careerists were black draftees, many just steps removed from marching in the Civil Rights Movement or rioting in the rebellions that swept the urban ghettos from Harlem to Watts,” Terry observed. “All were filled with a new sense of black pride and purpose.”

These soldiers, who called themselves “Bloods” and lionized Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton, were more willing to question the American presence in the war. As his Time article, “Black Power in Viet Nam,” pointed out, there were more incitements from white soldiers, including Confederate flags displayed on trucks and barracks, cross burnings, and Ku Klux Klan costumes. In response, said Terry, African American troops “raised their fists in black power salutes, had their handshakes, flew red, black and green liberation colors in battle and protected each other against racism.” He realized that the “spirit of foxhole brotherhood” he had seen in 1967 had vanished.

Terry set out to use the information he had gleaned in notebooks and tape cassettes to produce a book about the war, leaving his job at Time to do so. During his last few months in Vietnam, the magazine had agreed to let him go into the field to conduct research he could potentially use for his book. “I ended up surveying hundreds of soldiers,” Terry noted. “I asked them social and political questions: how they felt the war was progressing; were we doing it the right way; should we invade the north; what they thought of draft-card burners and the antiwar movement; what they thought of each other and the Vietnamese; were blacks being discriminated against.”

As he sorted through the material and wrote, Terry supported his family by serving as a consultant to the U.S. Air Force, teaching journalism at Howard, and working for an advertising agency. “When the book came out,” Terry recalled, “I thought I would have an enormous degree of leverage as a journalist. I thought I would be able to call my own shots.”

Terry wrote his more than 600-page manuscript as both a narrative and oral history, almost a “series of one-act plays or like a film script,” doing so because he wanted to protect GIs still in the service whose fiery comments might get them in trouble with military authorities. Terry could not find a publisher. Many of them rejected his manuscript because, he recalled them telling him, Americans did not “want to hear any more about Vietnam. They most certainly do not want to hear anything connected to blacks who were in Vietnam.” It became so bad that his children would “go to bed at night praying, ‘Dear God, please let my Daddy find a publisher because he’s driving us crazy,’” Terry remembered. “My wife suggested I publish the rejection notices as a book. She figured I had enough.”

David Terry recalled that some of his earliest memories where the sights and sounds of the war. The family’s home in Washington, DC, became like a safe house for Black veterans who wanted, and needed, to share their stories, as they were, as David remembered, people whose lives had been damaged and destroyed by their time in Vietnam. One of the men interviewed, army veteran Richard J. Ford III, confessed to Terry: “I really feel used. I feel manipulated. I feel violated.” Unburdening themselves to his father, David pointed out, became part of the Black soldiers’ healing process. Janice, who taught first grade and worked at other jobs as well, sought relief from the accumulated stress through reading, which had always been her “resource for peace and learning,” and neighborhood walks. She also sought peace by visiting the gardens at the nearby Washington National Cathedral. “Somehow the spirits guided me there,” she remembered.

Terry persisted. Finally, in 1982, Random House expressed interest in his work. Erroll McDonald, an editor at the publisher, however, suggested that instead of a narrative the book should be done as an oral history. Author and broadcaster Studs Terkel had experienced great success with his oral-history collections, including Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) and Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974). Although he respected Terkel’s work, Terry wanted to do something “distinctly different and innovative.”

Remembering a short-story class he took at Brown, Terry decided to use some of those techniques for his book, which he called an oral novella. “I decided I didn’t want to use a question-and-answer format; I did not want to get in the way of the narratives,” he recalled. “Essentially, the book would be a series of short stories placed in a progression that would give the impact and effect of reading a novel.” 
Each of the pieces included in Bloods had a beginning, middle, and end, plus flash-forwards and flashbacks. “I wanted each story to have a hook; when you started reading, I wanted you to feel like you couldn’t put it down once you were inside the first three or four paragraphs,” he said. Terry also thought that on every page the reader should be “moved to laugh or to cry or to feel that you’d gotten some information you never had before. There had to be something memorable on each page. If that wasn’t there, I felt I’d failed.”

McDonald had some helpful advice for Terry, telling him to make sure that each of the voices sounded grammatically different, or else they would read like New York Times articles. Incorporating this technique Terry believed, “gave an originality to each voice, since I didn’t physically describe these people or describe them in any other way either—they’re telling their own stories through me.”

From a list of fifty possible subjects, he featured twenty in Bloods, with the common thread among them being they were Black veterans talking about what they had faced during the war and after. “I sought a representative cross-section of the black combat force. Enlisted men, non-commissioned officers, and commissioned officers,” noted Terry. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Those with urban backgrounds, and those from rural areas. Those for whom the war had a devastating impact, and those for whom the war basically was an opportunity to advance in a career dedicated to protecting American interests.”

Janice believed that the experience had been cathartic for all those involved in the book. “It was sort of like talking to your therapist,” she told a reporter for The Ringer. “They knew Wally and they trusted him, and that’s how they opened up so easily for him.” The secret in being a good oral historian, Terry pointed out, involved gaining the confidence of his subjects and asking the right questions. “Remember, you’re talking to people about their innermost lives,” he said. “Often you’re asking them to describe things that they have been trying to forget, or actions they’ve committed they’re not especially proud of.”

Bloods achieved for Terry what he had set out to accomplish, eventually serving as the basis for a program by the PBS television series Frontline and adapted for the National Public Radio program “All Things Considered.” What touched Terry the most, however, was the reaction to his book from Vietnam veterans. “One black soldier I talked to called me a ‘Blood,” he reported. “He said I’d become one of them.” For several years after the book’s release, he kept the story alive by traveling around the country, talking to high school and college students, in a program that evolved from a lecture or reading into more of “a one-man show or a one-man play.”

The depiction of Blacks in such well-known films as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), which won the Best Picture Oscar at the fifty-ninth Academy Awards; Full Metal Jacket (1987); and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) angered Terry. “Hollywood had the chance to right the big lie about black soldiers, but it only succeeded in perpetuating it. Platoon shows black as lazy, implying that they have to be pushed to fight or that they lack leadership ability,” he explained in an interview with People magazine. “That is contrary to the war I covered for two years and have studied and written about for 20 years. It’s a slap in the face.”

Terry died on May 29, 2003, from a rare, undiagnosed vascular disease. Janice noted that he had been plagued with a persistent cough that resisted treatment. “One day at noon when I arrived to take him to a scheduled appointment with his doctor, he suddenly collapsed as he was putting on his coat,” she remembered. “An ambulance quickly took him to the nearest hospital where he was immediately put on a respirator and sedated into a medically-induced coma.” He never came out of the coma.

Before his death, Terry had been deep into a planned two-volume work about African American journalists, eventually published in 2007 as Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History. The book featured Black correspondents from World War II, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. One of the reasons he decided to do the book was because an acclaimed tome about the role of foreign correspondents he considered for use in his journalism class at Howard included the mention of a British journalist who claimed that he had rescued the bodies of four reporters killed by the VC. “I knew the story was a lie because I was there, and he wasn’t,” said Terry. He wondered why he had not been cited for what had been “a major and very dangerous event” in his life: “Was it because I was black?” 

Terry hoped his book might fill a hole in the history of journalism for college courses, but also be of interest to general readers who “would like to hear about major events in American history as seen through the eyes of a special breed of professional observers,” including such notables as Carl Rowan, Ethel Payne, William Raspberry, Barbara Reynolds, Bernard Shaw, and Ed Bradley. Despite her grief, Janice, a year after her husband’s death, went through his files and saw his manuscript through to publication.

The shadow of the Vietnam War continued to loom large in Terry’s life. He compared the conflict to the U.S. Civil War, seeing it as a subject Americans would “go back to and back to and back to. We’ll never get away from it.” It was a war he believed could not be romanticized, seeing it as “too ambiguous. But we’ll be writing about it forever. And the best books, the best films, are probably yet to come.”
 
 
 
 
 
 

Malcolm W. Browne and the Fall of Saigon

Commissioned by the U.S. Navy on September 20, 1969, the USS Mobile, a Charleston-class amphibious cargo ship, had over its lifetime been deployed several times to aid American forces in South Vietnam. The ship’s more than 600-man crew, however, could not have imagined the hundreds of refugees who frantically sought sanctuary on their ship as part of the last-ditch helicopter evacuation—codenamed Operation Frequent Wind—of Americans and their at-risk Vietnamese allies.

Two of the thirty-three newsmen who eventually found shelter on the Mobile were from the New York Times, Fox Butterfield and Malcolm W. Browne. “It was almost like abandoning a dying friend,” recalled Browne

Browne left Saigon on April 29, 1975, aboard a U.S. helicopter for a rendezvous with the ships of Task Force 76, on station approximately eighteen miles offshore in the South China Sea. “In the end,” he remembered about the evacuation, “it was hard to decide who had behaved worse on balance—Vietnamese or Americans. The savagery and bitterness of the final weeks turned normally enlightened, fine people into mad dogs, robbing corpses, cutting throats to improve their own chances of survival.” But Browne also witnessed “blazing sparks of real nobility, often in people from whom one would have least expected in normal times.”

After years of bloodshed, the end had come for South Vietnam. American combat forces had left the country as the result of a peace accord signed in Paris on January 27, 1973. Taking advantage of the agreement, the North Vietnamese government resupplied its army and launched a major offensive at the beginning of 1975. That March five North Vietnamese divisions, supported by tanks and artillery, struck the Central Highlands.

South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu, made a disastrous decision to withdraw Army of the Republic of Vietnam forces from the northern two-thirds of the country to establish a defensive line to protect the Mekong Delta, Saigon, and the southern coastal cities. As ARVN units withdrew, panic ensued. Traveling on buses, trucks, ox carts, motorcycles, bicycles, and by foot, retreating soldiers and their families clogged the roads. Military sources informed Western newsmen that nearly 400,000 people were using Route 7 to escape from Pleiku, with the column stretching all the way to the coastal city of Tuy Hoa. Hue fell on March 25 and by Easter Da Nang had been taken by the advancing Communist forces, who embarked on an ambitious campaign to capture Saigon before the expected May rains.

When Browne arrived in Saigon in March 1975 to report about the renewed North Vietnamese offensive, he initially breezed through police checks at the airport. His entry had been noticed, however, by the South Vietnamese government’s Information Ministry, which issued an arrest warrant for him. These were dangerous times for foreign newsmen. On March 15 Saigon police had shot and killed Paul Leandri, deputy bureau chief for the French news agency Agence France Presse, after questioning him about the source of one of his stories. Because of Leandri’s death, “arrest warrants were being taken seriously,” Browne noted.

James Markham, the Times’ Saigon bureau chief, met Browne near the newspaper’s office on Tu Do Street and drove him to hide out in the home of a U.S. Embassy official for a couple of days. “It was a ridiculous situation,” Browne recalled. It did give him the time he needed to call in some favors with sympathetic officials in the South Vietnamese government, who squashed the arrest warrant. “Nothing came easy in that country,” he noted.

The help from the U.S. Embassy came despite the hostility Graham Martin, who had been the ambassador in South Vietnam since August 1973, felt for the Times. One of Browne’s predecessors from the newspaper (probably David K. Shipler) had written some articles that had infuriated Martin—so much so that the ambassador refused to ever see Browne. At one point Martin had gone as far as to claim that the Times’ editorial page possessed “a deep emotional involvement in the success of North Viet Nam’s attempt to take over South Viet Nam by force of arms.”

One of the first stories Browne explored upon his return involved rumors he began to hear from sources that Thieu had decided to withdraw troops from most of the northern two-thirds of the country. “The area left to be defended would be the rich and populous southern part of the country, or everything south of a line running roughly from the Cambodian border at Tay Ninh in the west, to Phan Thiet on the South China sea,” he reported. “In addition, the Government would try to hold a narrow coastal strip northward at least to Da Nang, and Hue if possible.”

Browne’s dire report put him at odds with Markham, who had had a source in American intelligence telling him that although the situation seemed serious, ARVN soldiers could hold out against the North Vietnamese, at least for the short term. The two reporters argued but agreed to discuss the matter later. “That was the last I ever saw of Jim,” Browne noted. Markham decided to take his family and leave Vietnam, taking a flight to Hong Kong.

As the North Vietnamese offensive rolled on, it became harder and harder for the Times bureau to cover the news, as there “were no telephone links to any of the places that we needed to be in touch with,” Browne said. To travel around the country more easily, the Times bureau chartered its own plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron, which came with a daredevil pilot named Rocky. Browne discovered that Rocky was willing to “fly almost anywhere, even inside territory occupied by the North Vietnamese.”

After South Vietnamese troops abandoned Hue on March 25, Browne traveled to Da Nang, located just south of Hue, and discovered that the panic had spread there. Picking up a Honda motorcycle at the airport, Browne gave a ride to an ARVN colonel, dropping him off at his home. “I’ve got to get them out,” the officer told Browne. “That’s all that matters. The Americans have abandoned us and the war’s over.”

As North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon, Browne and Butterfield had to abandon using their chartered aircraft in favor of a car owned by the Times’ bureau for short trips to the front lines. “During some of these I came closer to getting killed than at any time during my Indochina combat experience,” said Browne.

On an excursion to a besieged government outpost at Xuan Lo with Newsweek reporter Ron Moreau, Browne became concerned that something seemed wrong. He pulled the car over, stopped, and he and Moreau walked to a nearby shady grove. There, they used binoculars to scan their surroundings. “Seconds later a barrage of well-aimed mortar shells began bursting all around us,” Browne noted. “Flat on our bellies, we endured several minutes of bombardment as steel splinters from the shells whined past our bodies.”

As North Vietnam’s forces continued their advance, Thieu’s government prohibited its citizens from leaving. Browne remembered that an expert on such matters informed him that it was harder for a South Vietnamese to leave the country, even in normal times, than “for an East German to leave the Communist bloc.” U.S. news organizations in South Vietnam, however, worked in secret to evacuate those of its Vietnamese employees who wanted to flee; the Times alone, he noted, had thirty it wanted evacuated. 

They were able to leave thanks in part because of a “black airlift” run by the Central Intelligence Agency, through its airline, Air America. “The news community was just one of many beneficiaries; thousands of others, including Vietnamese military, police and government officials and their families were also taken to safety,” Browne said. Deciding who should stay and who should leave tore some families apart, he noted, with some people sacrificing themselves to save their loved ones, while others, in panicked fear, decided to leave without their wives and children.

Browne relied on his Vietnamese wife, Le Lieu, who joined him in Saigon, to counsel the refugees about the problems they might confront in the United States. He also worked closely with another reporter, H. D. S. “David” Greenway of the Washington Post, which had a neighboring office to the Times’ bureau, on what Greenway described as a “Scarlet Pimpernel operation” to smuggle those Vietnamese employees eligible to escape. 

While the U.S. Embassy turned a blind eye to the operation, the news organizations still had to worry about having police arrest those trying to leave from Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base. “Several times a day he and I would don ties and jackets with airline tickets protruding prominently from our jacket pockets,” Browne remembered. “Using our two cars, we would load up as many refugees as we could carry, drive them to the airport, and explain to the cops at the gate that some of our Vietnamese friends were seeing us off as we departed for America.”

Once they made it past the police, most of whom, he noted, were so downhearted about what was going on that they “weren’t really doing their job very well anyway,” they would go to the passenger terminal and then to the cafeteria for a drink. “Finally, when we had made certain that the airport MPs and civilian police were not watching us,” he said, “we would lead our little flocks outside and sprint the last hundred yards to the entrance of Air America’s sprawling compound.”

Eventually, the police caught on to the scheme and on one trip turned back Browne and Greenway’s attempt to get out two male employees whose families had already been evacuated. “We shamelessly decided to play the colonial card,” Greenway recalled. “We went back, dressed up in suits and ties, and sat in the backseat while one of our Vietnamese drove the car. Seeing a Vietnamese driving two Americans, especially dressed in suits in the backseat, seemed right and proper to the guards so they waved us through, never suspecting that it was the chauffeur who was about to board a plane for Clark Field in the Philippines.” It worked, and they did it again for the second employee.

On April 28 Browne could hear artillery fire less than a mile from his office. He and Butterfield were close to exhaustion. They had been working twenty hours a day “like automata,” Browne remembered, dodging bullets, writing articles, and “trying to act human, all of it more by inertia than any remaining act of will.” Realizing what might happen to Le Lieu even though she was a naturalized American citizen, he encouraged her to leave; two of her brothers and their families had already left, while two of her older brothers and her widowed mother decided to stay. She was able to obtain a seat on an Air Viet Nam 727 aircraft leaving for Hong Kong.

At around noon Browne received a telephone call at his office from Le Lieu telling him that her flight had been delayed due to mechanical problems. He advised her to grab a taxi and return “before it was too late, since North Vietnamese tanks, I knew, were already moving into a former GI recreation compound on the outskirts of the city.” Le Lieu passed the information to the airliner’s crew; five minutes later, the flight was in the air. “The Vietnamese flight crew never even had time to say goodbye to the families they were leaving, some of them forever,” Browne said.

Le Lieu had escaped from the chaos just in time. The next morning, Butterfield reported that Saigon underwent one of the heaviest rocket attacks of the war. By 6:00 a.m. he had counted approximately 150 rockets hitting Tan Son Nhut and the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters adjoining the air base, he recalled. The attack killed two U.S. Marines, Corporals Charles McMahon Jr. and Darwin Lee Judge, who became the last American ground casualties of the war.

From his downtown office, Butterfield could see the rockets “bright red flashes,” as well as “long streams of tracer bullets” fired by the government’s helicopter gunships. He tried to use the bureau’s car to travel to the zoo to grab pictures of Vietnamese selling provisions—steak, beer, frozen orange juice, and Sara Lee cakes—supposedly looted from an American commissary. Unfortunately, Butterfield could not get the car to start.

Waking in his room at the Caravelle Hotel, Browne could see that large parts of the city were aflame. Days before, U.S. correspondents had been warned by embassy officials to listen to the radio for a weather report with a forecast of “One hundred five degrees and rising,” followed, remembered Greenway, by a Bing Crosby recording of “White Christmas.” The newsmen were then supposed to report to designated assembly points scattered throughout the city. At about 11:00 a.m. a CBS employee informed Butterfield that the embassy was “pulling the plug” and the evacuation was on.

Browne and Butterfield wanted to stay in Saigon to report on the North Vietnamese takeover and the beginning of a new era in the country. Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, however, had ordered them to get out. “There was no ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,’ but the word was getting around anyway,” Browne remembered. Earlier that morning he had called to check on members of the North Vietnamese delegation, who had survived a shelling by their own side. “I cannot tell you how grateful we are for you asking, especially considering the circumstances,” a Communist representative told the reporter. “We hope you all get through this somehow.”

The next few hours were a whirlwind for the Times reporters, including gathering what belongings they could carry. Bowne only had time to stuff into his backpack a few shirts, a suit, a tie, twelve pairs of red socks, and a souvenir penguin tie clip he had picked up while on a trip to McMurdo Station in the Antarctic. For protection, he donned a vintage World War II–era German helmet he had purchased at a New York war-surplus store and a flak jacket. The outfit reminded Butterfield what an iconoclast his colleague could sometimes be.

The two Times reporters hustled from the hotel to their designated evacuation point to wait for a seat on a U.S. Army bus. “The first, near the Saigon navy base, was empty,” Butterfield remembered. “A second one on Gia Long Street was jammed with other correspondents. The door to the building and embassy housing complex was locked, so the anxious evacuees had to wait outside, attracting a huge crowd of Vietnamese, some of whom joined the Americans.” The bus ride proved to be an adventure. Normally a fifteen- to twenty-minute trip, it took more than an hour for the driver, a private contractor who did not know his way around Saigon, to arrive at their destination, the Defense Attaché Office at Tan Son Nhut, Butterfield noted.

As the evacuees got off their bus, they saw a South Vietnamese C-119 gunship take off from the base to hit targets near the city. “Just after we had taken our eyes off it there had been a loud explosion,” he recalled. “Only a cloud of black smoke remained.” An enemy missile had struck the aircraft, and it crashed near Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon.

With rockets continuing to hit the base, marine guards armed with M-16 rifles and mortars exchanged small-arms fire with the North Vietnamese. Guards moved the evacuees into the large DAO building, which, fortunately, had a reinforced roof. Several thousand people jammed into the building’s long and winding corridors, including “nervous looking Vietnamese men, women and children, Vietnamese generals and their families, and embassy secretaries,” wrote Butterfied. “Everywhere there were suitcases that their owners had abandoned when told that there would be no room for them aboard the helicopters.”

Divided into groups of fifty, the evacuees had to run about seventy-five-yards (“it sure seemed longer,” noted Butterfield) to the waiting Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters, their rotors whirling as they awaited their passengers. “The evacuees would leave the bunker and, to avoid the shelling and firing, they would run in sort of serpentine pattern out to where the helicopter was standing, run up the ramp on the rear deck and the helicopter would take off immediately, in some cases with firing from the rear machine gun and climb as fast as possible,” Browne noted.

Because the evacuation helicopter’s rear loading ramp remained open to provide a good field of fire for its machine gun, Browne had an excellent view of the city below as the craft turned to the southeast. Although he often hated what he described as “the evils of the place,” he discovered that his “roots were deeper in Indochina than any other place in the world, and I was crying like a school boy when I said my last goodbyes.”

At about 4:15 p.m. the helicopter carrying Browne and Butterfield touched down on the Mobile’s stern flight deck; they were two of the approximately one thousand Americans and six thousand Vietnamese evacuated as part of Operation Frequent Wind. Upon exiting the helicopter, the newsmen were confronted by gun-toting marines and sailors, who seemed surprised to see the bedraggled journalists; they had expected to be confronting “mutinous South Vietnamese soldiers,” Butterfield remembered.

All those who boarded the ship, whether American or Vietnamese, he added, had to submit to “a rigorous screening process—two searches, a medical check-up and registration.” Navy and marine corpsmen provided aid to those who had been injured in the evacuation, including children, hundreds of whom, Butterfield reported, suffered from boils, fevers, and seasickness. “A few soldiers and civilians had lacerations from rocket wounds at Tan Son Nhut,” he said. “Some elderly Vietnamese collapsed from nervous exhaustion.” To Butterfield, those refugees seeking medical attention for themselves or their family members represented, to him, another example of the “unreasoning faith that many Vietnamese still have in America. Despite the hatred and contempt that some Vietnamese have displayed toward all foreigners . . . many others have never lost faith in America’s power to save them.”

Looking out to sea as the sun set, Browne described what he saw stretched out before him as looking like a “version of hell.” As far as the eye could see, the ocean was filled with burning fishing boats. Vietnamese living along the coast had begged, borrowed, or stolen any vessel they could get their hands on to sail out to the American fleet. They burned their boats for two reasons, said Browne, including denying their use by the North Vietnamese and “as a gesture of faith” that they would be rescued by the Americans. “These fine wooden junks had cost a fortune, in some cases the savings of poor fishing families, now destitute, their life savings going up in flames,” he noted.

Browne also remembered that helicopters flown by South Vietnam Air Force pilots were appearing over the fleet at the rate of about one every minute. Butterfield remembered that the choppers “appeared on the horizon flying in like a flock of fireflies.” He observed more than a dozen land on the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier, while others looked for a spot on any ship they could find to land on.

Three choppers landed on the Mobile, with all eventually heaved overboard because of a lack of space. “Each time one of these machines landed, a few seconds would elapse while its crew and passengers got out, and then the American sailors would heave the Huey overboard to make room for the next one,” Browne noted. “We watched hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of choppers thrown into the South China Sea that evening, but we refugees were thinking mostly of the people we had left behind.”

Navy and marine cooks in white aprons fed rice and noodles mixed with chicken to the 800 Americans and Vietnamese who took shelter on the transport. “Some Navy men carried Vietnamese children around the decks on their shoulders, and the children played with the sailors’ beards,” added Butterfield. Chief Maurice Ring, who stayed up for two days to cook for the refugees, told the reporter he did not mind having to do the extra work. “What makes us angry is when the United States stands by and does nothing to keep our word,” Ring said. “After Vietnam, who is going to believe us any more. First Vietnam, then it will be Israel, then the United States itself.”

After almost four days on the Mobile, Browne and Butterfield were among the journalists to climb aboard another helicopter to be transferred to the USS Blue Ridge, the command ship for the evacuation. One evening on the Blue Ridge they heard over the ship’s loudspeakers the daily prayer: “Dear Father, you have safely brought us through another trying and frustrating week. Forgive us when we complain about our troubles.”

Browne missed witnessing North Vietnamese tanks crashing through the gates of Saigon’s Independence Palace on April 30. Walking down a Saigon Street that morning, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press came across a convoy of Russian-made Molotova trucks crammed with North Vietnamese soldiers. “A few local Vietnamese are standing near me,” Arnett recalled. “They are staring, speechless.”  

Arnett ran to his office, burst through the door, and shouted to bureau chief George Esper: “George. Saigon has fallen. Call New York.” Checking his watch, Arnett marked the time as 11:43 a.m. As for Browne, he did not learn that the war had finally ended in a Communist victory until arriving with some other evacuees in Manila. It took him years, he admitted, to “come to terms with the trauma those last days of the war left me,” and he preferred to forget what had happened during that “cruel April.”

 

Journalist Malcolm W. Browne Biography Published

Now available from High Road Books, an imprint of the University of New Mexico Press, 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, 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 Quang Duc’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.

Boomhower is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. His books include The Soldier’sFriend: A Life of Ernie Pyle; Dispatches from the Pacific: The World War IIReporting of Robert L. Sherrod; and Richard Tregaskis: Reporting UnderFire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam.

 

  

Benjamin Harrison: The Death of a President

The illness that took the life of former President Benjam Harrison came as a surprise to him and his family. Harrison had seemed "perfectly well" on the morning of March 6, 1901, took his usual walk, and told his wife Mary that he planned on going to the law library the next day to research a case he expected to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

On the morning of March 7, the couple had breakfast and Harrison had gone up to his library to finish reading the morning newspaper. About a half-hour later, she heard her husband call out to her "in rather a startled voice." Mary tracked her husband down in his library, where she found him sitting before a fire. "I am having a dreadful chill," he told her. At once Mary gave him some quinine and whiskey and went to telephone a doctor (Doctor Henry Jameson), who arrived in just fifteen minutes.

Jameson immediately gave Harrison some nitroglycerin, and upon hearing what he had been given, the former president said, "the greatest heart stimulant!" As Mary left the room she heard him say, "I think, this is very serious." Alarmed, Mary wanted Harrison to retire to bed, but he said, "not yet." The doctor remained for a while, then gave Mary directions and said he would return in a short time, telling her that as soon as she could she should put Harrison to bed.

Harrison went to bed. "For a few hours he was easy, and I lay by his side smoothing his head, as he so loved to have it," Mary wrote, "and he talked to me in a loving way, and those two hours of precious memories I would not part with for anything in this world."

"I was most anxious," Mary wrote her daughter Elizabeth, "but never thought then that this was the beginning of a fatal illness which would robe me of my beloved one." Dr. Jameson returned in a couple of hours and was at the home several times that day.

On the afternoon of March 7 Harrison complained of a pain in his side, and the doctor told Mary it was "intercostal neuralgia. All afternoon and night I made and kept on flaxseed poultices, but it was only temporary relief."

A Doctor Dorsey came to sleep at the Harrison home in case he might be needed, but "this was only a precaution," said Mary, "as I felt, I wished a doctor at hand." Dorsey was not needed during the night, and with Harrison no worse the next morning, Dorsey left for his office.

Shortly after Dorsey left, however, the pain in Harrison's side grew worse, and Mary sent for Doctor Jameson, who came and gave the former president a shot and stayed until the pain was relieved.

The doctors seemed to fear that Harrison suffered from pneumonia from the beginning. Jameson asked Mary if she wanted to have a nurse on hand, and she declined. Hearing this, Harrison said, "if it does not wear you out--dear, I do not want to do that!" Mary responded that it would not tire her out, "I will take care of you," and so she did. However, on Friday, March 8, she realized she needed assistance and told the doctor to get a nurse; she arrived Friday night.

Although Harrison's pain in the side had disappeared, his left lung became affected, said Mary, and from that time she became "very, very anxious. . . . It seemed as if I could not stand it. I could not believe that God would take him from you and me who loved him so."

As news broke that Harrison had been struck ill, concerned citizens rallied to provide treatments for his "grippe" (influenza) and neuralgia as he lay bedridden at his Indianapolis home.

Private William Butler of New York wrote that instead of staying in bed, Harrison should "get a quart can of tomatoes and stew them in a frying pan" and eat as much as he could, salted to suit his taste, along with a slice of bread. Butler added: "I cook a pound of the prunes each day and eat a few every time I look at them after they are cooked."

Chris Metz of New York said he had suffered from neuralgia and nothing could give him relief except "hot water, drawing it up through the nose, Taking it up with both hands as hot as I could bear it, changing the water to keep it the same temperature."

Mrs. A. L. Laimbeer of New York wrote that her treatment involved flannel, "wrung out of the hot, or very hot, water, placed over the lungs, changed every fifteen minutes. Have the flannel double-large enough to cover the lungs, place a dry one over the wet, wring out quite dry. The moisture penetrates and softens. Then the cough throws off the mucus. Tear up an old soft blanket-is better than new flannel. Give one cup of milk porridge every hour."

Philo S. Armstrong of Milford, Ohio, advised taking 6 to 10 onions, chopping them very fine and mixing them with rye meal and enough vinegar to make a paste, simmering for 10 minutes. "Apply in cotton bag, to the chest as hot as patient can stand it, and apply one after another."

A Chicago man said Harrison's doctor should "blister his lungs with crouting oil-all over the lungs-lay a linen cloth-dry until it works-then remove dry and lay over a time-cloth oiled with sweet oil-leave until well. Also, he noted, "Keep breast covered with pad of cotton and also the back-if this Blister has 12 hours to work. Please trust to me it will save his life, it will loosen up his lungs, so he can rise the phlegm that clogs the Lungs. I saved the life of my son that was dying with Pneumonia-after the Dr. gave him up, by blistering him."

On Saturday, March 9, Mary believed another nurse was needed for her stricken husband, and one arrived on Sunday, March 10. "He talked with me and seemed sometimes a little better, but his lung did not clear up and the doctors were anxious," Mary wrote Elizabeth. Elizabeth came into Harrison's sickroom several times a day to visit her father. Mary recalled that Harrison would take Elizabeth's hand but he could not talk much. He did always smile at her and said several times, "I would give $100, if I could take a walk with you today!"

Despite these suggestions, doctors in attendance thought it best to administer oxygen to Harrison on Sunday, March 10, and from Sunday evening until a few moments before his death, Mary recalled, it was given to him almost constantly.

Harrison 's health worsened on Monday evening March 11 and through that night and Tuesday, March 12, his mind wandered, said Mary, and he talked of public affairs and about a book he had been reading. Harrison seemed troubled about some public affairs, and Mary said to him, "dear, don't worry over these things, they will all come out right. He would rouse himself and say 'I cannot get these things out of my mind, you do not know how many things are passing through my mind."

Early Tuesday morning Mary felt that her husband was much worse, as his breathing was more difficult and "his nervous condition serious. I broke down and felt there was not hope. Dr. Jameson felt the disease was progressing and we could do nothing to arrest it."

At about noon on March 12 Harrison took his wife's hand and kissed it, "and I asked him if he knew me, his wife, he answered yes, and from that time he spoke to no one and did not seem conscious." Harrison died at about 4:45 p.m. on March 13.

Jameson said that he had never "seen such courage in a dying man." His patient's constitution was remarkably strong "for a man of his age, and it joined with his tremendous will power to retain life in the body. It seemed at times that by sheer force of mentality the patient was able to shake off the delirium that was conquering him."

According to a report in the Indianapolis News, within a few minutes after Harrison's death was made known, the flags on many downtown buildings were "run down to halfmast" and by the morning after "this token of respect is general. Flags so displayed appeared first on the masts of the United States arsenal, the Federal building, the State House, the court house and were followed by like tributes of respects from many business houses."

On March 16 pallbearers took Harrison’s body from his home to lay in state in the rotunda at the Indiana Statehouse and was visited by thousands of his fellow citizens, including surviving members of his old Civil War regiment, the Seventieth Indiana.

“There were not many of these veterans—less than a hundred—but each one stood for a little group lying somewhere beneath the friendly sod,” reported the Indianapolis Journal. “Doubtless memories of other fallen comrades than the one upon whose face they looked mingled with those evoked by the sight of their leader lying pale and cold and majestic in death, for there was not a dry eye in the group and many a bent form shook with the depth of emotion only age can feel.”

With President William McKinley in attendance, funeral services were held the following day at First Presbyterian Church, with burial to be at Crown Hill Cemetery alongside the grave of his first wife, Caroline. Also gathered for the services were former members of Harrison’s cabinet, the ex-president’s family members, and numerous U.S. senators and state governors. In his proclamation announcing Harrison’s death, McKinley has praised his fellow Republican for his “extraordinary gifts as administrator and statesman. In public and in private life he set a shining example for his countrymen.”

Indianapolis newspaperman Hilton U. Brown served as one of the pallbearers, along with Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley, and remembered that they all wore tall, silk hats for the occasion and Harrison’s body had been “encased in a metallic casket, “very heavy, as we pallbearers realized in going through the front door of the General’s house with our burden. But with the aid of the undertaker we succeeded in reaching the funeral car without incident.”

Brown also had the rare experience of hearing commentary from Riley, whose only votes he ever cast were said to be for Harrison, upon the prayer offered at the service by a visiting clergyman—humorous comments about the minister’s remarks that had his fellow pallbearers “shaken with dismay and suppressed laughter.”

Hoosiers everywhere mourned the loss of what then Indiana governor Winfield T. Durbin called the state’s “most distinguished citizen,” and all public businesses were closed for the day of Harrison’s funeral and all flags were placed at half-mast.

Among the many tributes published about the former president, one that stood out was offered by his biographer and best-selling author Lew Wallace. “He had every quality of greatness—a courage that was dauntless, foresight almost to prophecy, a mind clear, strong, and of breadth by nature, strengthened by exercise and constant dealing with subjects of National import, subjects of world-wide interest,” Wallace said of his longtime friend. “And of these qualities the people knew, and they drew them to him as listeners and believers, and in the faith they brought him there was no mixture of doubt or fear.”