Covering a Coup: Malcolm W. Browne in Saigon

The first sign of trouble came on a clear Friday afternoon, November 1, 1963. Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, had been “empty and silent” for the traditional noon siesta when Malcolm W. Browne, Associated Press bureau chief, received a tip from a source at the U.S. Embassy. He learned that rebellious Army of the Republic of Vietnam troops had surrounded the central police station and the country’s naval headquarters on the riverfront was also under siege.

 
Browne drove his office’s Land Rover at “breakneck speed” to the navy compound. He ignored the base’s security guard, traveling past him for a half block until he heard yelling and the unmistakable sound of someone “chambering a round in his carbine.”
 

Uncertainty reigned, however, until 3:00 p.m., when Browne and his staff heard planes roaring over their office. With the AP office located only a short distance from the Gia Long Palace, the official residence for President Ngo Dinh Diem, “the combined sound of the strafing and heavy antiaircraft guns was shattering,” Browne remembered. An incoming shell came close to hitting the journalist as he tried to get a better view of the action, but a guard loyal to Diem saved Browne’s life by pulling him through a hole in a wall to safety.
 
Edwin Q. White, who had come from AP’s Tokyo bureau to bolster the staff, dispatched the first bulletin describing the heavy gunfire at the presidential palace and reports about ARVN troops in full battle gear deployed throughout the city. In his article, delivered out of the country with the assistance of the American and South Korean embassies, White predicted that the firing could well signal the start of a military coup against Diem’s government. “Marines in battle dress with heavy weapons and artillery surrounded national police director headquarters about 1350 [1:50 p.m.],” he wrote. “Other police headquarters throughout city were taken over by marines, apparently without resistance.”
 
As White remained at the office, Browne, Roy Essoyan (from AP’s Hong Kong bureau), and Bill Ha Van Tran set out to discover what was happening. “We did a lot of walking, running and crawling, machinegun fire and shrapnel snapping just overhead,” Browne recalled. “There was action everywhere, and no telling where the fire was going to come from next.”
 
The gunfire grew more intense as the sun set. Browne and his colleagues were able to identify where the hotspots were and which units “were clearly on the offensive against government troops and which ones were trying to counter-attack. So, it was pretty confusing. The whole city was divided up into a patchwork of different loyalties and different uniforms and plenty of shooting.”
 
The AP bureau’s “indefatigable” messenger, Dan Van Huan, sidestepped numerous firefights, said Browne, risking his life to keep messages flowing to White at the AP office. “We all think it will be nice to get back to the relative peace and safety of the normal war operations against the Vietcong,” joked Browne.

Rumors, plots, and heralds from above absorbed the attention of Saigon residents in the days leading up to the coup and even afterward. Conspirators seemed to be everywhere, scheming away in each other’s homes, in nightclubs, and in the countryside. “Everybody knew that something was coming,” Browne recalled.
 
Browne even wrote an article, sent over the AP wires, about a rumor that the Vietnamese expected the sun to start revolving strangely in the sky. Large crowds of office workers, shoppers, and strollers jammed into the city’s central markets, only to be scattered by the police. He reported that the sun’s abnormal motion was supposed to be the sign of a Buddhist miracle. Officials were suspicious about the rumor, believing it had been spread “as a test, to see how fast crowds could be assembled at key places in the city,” he added.
 
When mutinous ARVN units finally struck on November 1, plots and counterplots continued rose and fell. Rebel officers sometimes lied to their men about the true purpose of their movement into the capital. A colonel admitted to newsman Stanley Karnow of the Saturday Evening Post that he told his platoon leaders the police “were plotting to overthrow Diem and we were going to save him.” A mystified paratrooper asked his commander who they were supposed to fight and received the answer: “Anyone who opposes us is the enemy.”
 

Confusion also marked attempts by rebel forces to convince government supporters to join their cause. Browne uncovered the story of Captain Ho Tan Quyen, Diem’s naval commander, whose schedule that day was supposed to include an official dinner commemorating his birthday. Early Friday Quyen had been summoned to report to general staff headquarters by Major General Duong Van Minh, one of the key coup leaders. “Quyen drove to the headquarters near Saigon airport, where he undoubtedly met military commanders who were to lead the successful coup later in the day,” Browne reported.
 
Declining to join the rebellion, Quyen sped from the scene in his car toward Bien Hoa, hoping to rally loyalist forces. “Several jeeps and a civilian car were seen following Quyen outside the city,” wrote Browne. “The pursuit continued for eight miles outside city limits, and ended when a burst of submachine gun fire riddled Quyen’s vehicle. His body was laid out in the road and then taken away in a civilian car.”
 
That afternoon Quyen’s staff learned of his death from a revolutionary naval officer, who called upon his colleagues to surrender. Fighter aircraft attacked ships docked nearby, and the craft responded by blazing away at the airplanes with their deck guns, downing one plane, Browne reported. “But about 15 minutes later,” he added, “the naval command staff agreed to give in, and signed a document pledging loyalty to the revolutionaries.”
 

As Browne rallied his AP staff to cover the coup, two of his top men, reporter Peter Arnett and photographer Horst Faas, both away from Saigon, did all they could to get to the capital. Returning to South Vietnam after a trip to Cambodia on an Air Vietnam passenger jet, Arnett recalled that the plane had flown into Vietnamese airspace at 3:00 p.m. when he felt it starting to veer away from its destination. “I banged on the pilot’s cabin door and my fears were confirmed by the captain, who was talking with an air traffic controller; a coup d’etat was in progress; bombers were in the air over Saigon, blasting the Presidential Palace,” Arnett remembered. “I would miss the biggest story of my life because Tan Son Nhut Airport was closed to all traffic.”
 
Thinking fast, Arnett argued with the pilot, pointing out that the aircraft “had a right to land on its own soil” and raising terrible fears about the fate of the crew’s families amid the chaos. Arnett’s arguments worked, and the plane’s captain guided his craft to a safe landing.
 
An airline bus took Arnett most of the way to the AP office before its driver lost his nerve and made his passenger disembark. “Gunfire roared and ricocheted around me,” Arnett recalled. “I could see soldiers firing from upper-story windows at the Gia Long Palace. Our three-story office and apartment building had been turned into a fort with soldiers firing their weapons at the palace across the street, protecting themselves behind makeshift sandbagged emplacements in the parking lot and the first-floor balcony outside my apartment door.”
 
Bursting into the AP office, Arnett saw White, known by his colleagues as “unflappable Ed,” calmly puffing away on a cigar while typing; the rest of the staff had left. “The others are at the Caravelle [Hotel] and I’m holding the fort, which is something I’ve said plenty of times in the past but for once is true,” White told Arnett, who took advantage of a lull in the fighting to make his way to the Caravelle.
 
White remained at his post until 6:30 p.m. when, as Browne noted, “he decided things were getting a little too hot.” Later that night, a shell hit an M48 tank parked in front of the AP’s office, igniting the tank’s ammunition and causing it to burn throughout the night.
 
When he arrived at the Caravelle, Arnett discovered Browne and Essoyan on the hotel’s upper floors, where they had a spectacular view of the fighting going on at Gia Long and the barracks housing its guards. “The rumors and the speculation of months past were coming true before my eyes and I watched it all with a glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other,” Arnett remembered.
 
As it grew dark, Browne saw tracers and shells streak through Saigon’s skies, with many hitting the palace, while others fell short, bringing down power and telephone lines. Leaving the hotel as the battle continued to rage, Arnett came upon children running around collecting spent cartridges from the sidewalks, two U.S. soldiers who stopped him to ask directions to the nearest bar, and two drunk Americans walking near the National Assembly building, one of them loudly complaining, “Tell them to knock that off, they’re scaring everybody.”
 
Walking to the Rex Hotel, which housed American troops, Arnett found its officers mess crowded with soldiers, who had been warned by authorities to stay off the streets. “They were whiling away the time rolling dice or playing the slot machines,” he noted. Later, on a suggestion from Browne, Arnett made his way to the U.S. military mission, where he stayed for the rest of evening. He even received a briefing about the coup from an American intelligence officer, “a rare display of generosity toward the media,” Arnett recalled. The official had been impressed by what he had seen from the anti-Diem forces, telling Arnett that it showed that the Vietnamese could “run a pretty good war if political considerations are removed.”
 
While Browne and Arnett tried to stay safe in the embattled city, Faas was in Ca Mau, on a patrol with South Vietnamese Rangers. A U.S. adviser accompanying the Rangers heard a report on his radio telling him to prepare to pull his forces from the field, as a coup had broken out. “Oh shit,” Faas remembered saying, “I’m two hundred miles away from Saigon and that’s the story that’s developing and I’m down here in Ca Mau. Get me out of here as quickly as possible.”
 
Faas hooked up with Steve Stibbens, a Marine photographer for Stars and Stripes, and they were able to get tickets for a flight to Saigon. Unable to land there because of the fighting, the plane diverted its flight to the port city of Vung Tao, located about sixty miles southeast of Saigon. Faas and Stibbens commandeered a jeep from the Vietnamese and drove as fast as possible to the capital, getting there after the newly established 7:00 p.m. curfew.
 
Dressed as he was, in a helmet and makeshift uniform, Faas discovered he had little trouble passing through roadblocks or driving around rebel units scattered throughout the city. Finding the AP office empty, he remembered feeling guilty about being late for such a momentous story.
 
Shortly after midnight, Saigon “became still and dead as a city under the plague,” Browne reported. Downtown streets seemed deserted, and the guns fell silent. The lull allowed a dinner-jacketed headwaiter at a leading hotel, White wrote, to calmly seat a few guests, laughingly explaining to them that “service might be [a] little slow because some restaurant help had left.” A dog’s loud barking betrayed “stealthy movement in the shadows,” Browne observed. “No lights showed from inside the waiting palace.”
 
At about 3:00 a.m., intense gunfire broke out, with large shells from distant artillery hitting a building behind the telecommunications center. Browne could also see tanks moving through the streets, slipping “across the main boulevards from the west and from the riverfront, taking up positions just outside the palace walls.”
 
The final assault on the palace began at 4:00 a.m. “The blast of cannon, machineguns and rapid-fire pieces blended into a continuous roar,” he reported. “The dark shapes in the streets spat clouds of green, yellow and blue fire, and great blobs of red flame marked the exploding shells. Buildings near the palace became infernos, and answering fire from the palace set two armored vehicles afire.”
 

Finally, at 6:37 a.m., Browne recorded, the drained, grimy palace guards surrendered, hoisting a white flag, which was greeted with “a thunderous cheer” by the rebel forces. Faas followed as Vietnamese marines stormed into the palace, smashing chandeliers, tearing down Diem’s portraits, and firing their weapons, though there was no need to do so as the opposition had collapsed. By 9:00 a.m. Faas decided he had taken enough photographs and turned his attention to finding a place to develop his film.
 
With the AP office’s darkroom out of action (the power and telephone lines were out), Faas went to a local photo shop, scaring the store’s staff when he burst through the front door in his makeshift uniform. He used the store’s equipment to develop approximately twelve photographs. With the photos in hand, he walked to the Post, Telegraph and Telephone office to transmit his work with the assistance of an employee he knew, Madame Binh.
 
Talking to Binh, Faas learned that he was the first photographer to arrive, beating his colleagues. “They had mistakenly believed that the post office, because it was occupied by troops, had been closed; it hadn’t been closed. The troops went through it,” he recalled. “The coup troops made a few propaganda broadcasts, occupied it with their people, but the personnel continued as normal.” By 4:00 p.m. a line opened and Faas was able to send his photographs to the outside world. “I happened to be a hero when I thought I would be almost fired,” he remembered.
           
 

The Magazine and the Writer: Harper's and John Bartlow Martin

While living in the Hubbard Woods neighborhood in Winnetka, Illinoi in the early 1940s with his young wife Fran, freelance writer John Bartlow Martin, who made his living writing for true-crime magazines at two cents per word, made an important reconnection with a friend from his days as a student at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, Francis S. Nipp, an English teacher earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago.
 
Nipp, who Martin called “a natural editor,” and his wife, Mary Ellen, became frequent weekend guests at the Martins’ home. The couples listened to music—Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton, and especially Louis Armstrong—and the two old high school friends talked obsessively about writing.
 
Martin had begun to grow tired of the true-crime genre, which he once referred to as “monsters and ogres and fiends in human form.” In addition to introducing him to serious classical music, Nipp convinced Martin to become a regular reader of The New Yorker and encouraged him to start thinking about submitting “serious nonfiction” to one of the country’s most prestigious magazines, Harper’s.
 
Although it had a small circulation (109,787 in 1940) and offered its contributors paltry fees (usually $250 for articles) in comparison to other magazines, Harper’s reached a vital audience, what one of its editors described as “the intelligent minority” of opinion makers in the United States, “the thinking, cultured reader who seeks both entertainment and an enlarged and broadened point of view.”
 
By the late 1930s the magazine’s subscribers could look forward to contributions from such noted writers as Elmer Davis and John Gunther, as well as monthly columns from historian Bernard DeVoto, “The Easy Chair,” and E. B. White, “One Man’s Meat.” Frederick Lewis Allen, himself a best-selling author, who took over as Harper’s editor in October 1941, said the magazine under his watch intended to print within its pages “the exciting, the creative, the lustily energetic, the freshly amusing, the newly beautiful, the illuminating, the profound.”
 
Martin’s entry into this world came about as the result of a bungled espionage operation in the United States by Nazi Germany’s military intelligence organization, the Abwehr. On the pitch-black night of June 13, 1942, four men left a German U-boat and paddled their rubber dinghy to land on a beach near Amagansett, Long Island, south of New York City. The men were saboteurs sent by the German high command to infiltrate American society and, using high explosives and incendiary devices, wreak havoc on vital war-related installations on the East Coast.
 

Known as OperationPastorius, named in honor of the first German immigrant to the United States (Franz Pastorius), the bold plan also included a landing by another four-man team on June 17 at Ponte Verda Beach south of Jacksonville, Florida. The daring venture disintegrated in rapid fashion; by June 27 the Federal Bureau of Investigation, tipped off by one of the saboteurs, George John Dasch, had arrested the members of each team and had recovered $174,588 of the $175,200 in U.S. currency given them to finance the operation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that the Germans were to be tried before a military commission. They were all found guilty and sentenced to death, but Roosevelt commuted Dash’s sentence to thirty years and gave another conspirator who had cooperated with authorities, Ernest Burger, a life sentence.
 
Two of the eight doomed German agents were American citizens, including twenty-two-year-old Herbert Haupt, a worker at the Simpson Optical Company who had lived in Chicago with his parents on Fremont Street and had attended Lane Technical High School. During his youth his parents, especially his father, Hans Max, who had served in the German army during World War I, taught him to love Germany more than the United States.
 
Haupt had been considered as a bit of a playboy by his fellow saboteurs and after landing in Florida had gone on a shopping spree, buying a three-piece suit, a Bulova watch, silk handkerchiefs, and several pairs of shoes. He made his way to Chicago with thousands of dollars entrusted to him by his team members and tried to resume his old life there, only to be apprehended by the FBI.
 
Writing a query letter to the editors of Harper’s in early December 1942 about doing an article on Haupt, and what happened to his parents and other relatives who helped him (they were tried and convicted of treason), Martin said the story could be seen as a tribute to the FBI’s excellent work, and that he had access to transcripts of the court’s records. “This really is a fantastic story of how treason is nurtured,” Martin wrote.
 
He went on to call it an “unbelievable true story of a youngster who grew up in a middle-class family on Chicago’s North Side, was taken from a factory job and hauled by chartered plane and blockade runner more than halfway around the world to the Reich, was trained, with typical German thoroughness, in the methods of the saboteur, and returned to betray his country, and, failing, brought death to himself and his family and his friends.”
 

Eight days after sending his letter, Martin received an answer from Allen personally, who said the Haupt article seemed to be a “very promising possibility and we hope you give us a chance at it.” Allen went on to warn Martin not to make too much of the story’s moral or play up the dramatic and “fictionizable” aspects of Haupt’s youth and background. “Simply and clearly told,” Allen wrote, “with considerable sharp detail, it ought to be continuously interesting and impressive in its total effect. Of course you can do some pointing of the significance of the story; the great danger, I should think, would be of doing too much.”           
 
At this point in his career, Martin did not yet really know how to write a serious fact piece for a national audience. His story on Haupt relied mainly on newspaper clippings, trial transcripts, and a certain amount of atmospheric writing that resulted from legwork he had done for his true-crime articles in German neighborhoods on Chicago’s North Side, where Haupt grew up. “I plead ignorance,” he said. “Later I became almost obsessed by being thorough in my research, and I always piled up high mountains of notes from interviews and documents and legwork on atmosphere that I could not use. But at that time I knew nothing of this and, I fear, wrote several pieces for Harper’s mainly from clippings.”
 
Martin admitted he probably did less legwork on the Haupt article than he had done on many of his pieces for Keller’s true-crime magazines. Considering the speed at which newspapers operated, and the frequent inaccuracies they therefore contained because they sometimes were written by inexperienced reporters, Martin said it was a “miracle” he never had to answer a charge of libel or had any of his facts successfully challenged in his early work for Harper’s, which also included a piece on the young members of Chicago’s Polkadot Gang that robbed several taverns and killed an off-duty policeman.
 
Martin had the good fortune to have as his editor Allen, who spent considerable time offering him suggestions for improving his Haupt manuscript before its publication in the magazine’s April 1943 issue. Allen told Martin to alter his beginning, adding a reference to the initial landing of the saboteurs, “something everybody remembers and which will arouse sharp interest,” and asked him to cut some of Haupt’s pro-German sentiments, as they were too repetitive.
 
There were a few other queries and revisions he wanted Martin to review, but overall Allen said he did not believe there was anything that needed extensive revision. After seeking approval from the Office of Censorship, which Allen believed would not be a problem, as the trial was public, he said the magazine would send Martin a check for $250. Martin wrote Allen back approving the new lead, saying it “sharpens the story and hammers home its significance.” He ended his letter by noting his appreciation for the publication of his article and expressing the hope they “could click on another one before too long.”
 
Harper’s became so interested in Martin and his work that he eventually traveled to New York to meet with Allen and his associate editors—Russell Lynes, George Leighton, John Kouwenhoven, Jack Fisher, and Eric Larrabee. Martin was impressed by this group, particularly Allen, whom he described as “a slight man, so slight he looked almost frail, with sparkling eyes and a ready laugh, a wise man with an endlessly inquiring mind.”
 
Martin had read Allen’s classic book on America in the 1920s, Only Yesterday, and he eagerly learned about how to write from the way Allen edited his stories, “cutting, tightening, endlessly tightening, and pointing up.” Martin never forgot one of Allen’s pronouncements: “Never be afraid to address the reader directly, to write, ‘As we shall see,’ or ‘Let us first study the slum itself,’” something Martin often did in his later multi-part articles for the Saturday Evening Post.
 
Impressed by the work Martin had done on the Polkadot Gang article, Leighton proposed that he begin writing articles about what the editor called “crime in its social context,” taking one of his fact detective cases, expanding the piece with additional facts, getting rid of the fake detective work, and developing “the lives and social backgrounds of the criminals and their victims.”

Subsequently, crime became for Martin a way to write about his fellow human beings and their place in society. He also learned that East Coast editors felt out of touch with the rest of the country, and often asked Martin about what people cared and thought about in the Midwest. “Just as farm boys yearn to go to New York, so do New York editors yearn to know what’s on the farm boy’s mind,” he said. “Sometimes they sounded almost anxious.” As he talked to them, some of the parochial concerns he had began to fall away and Martin developed a different view of the country’s problems and politics. “From editors I got something more valuable than editing—insight and perspective,” he noted.
 

The leisurely, often luxurious trips Martin made from Chicago to New York by railroad in the 1940s remained firmly etched in his mind for years to come. For the sixteen-hour trip, he had his choice of two trains—the Twentieth Century Limited, operated by the New York Central Railroad, or the Broadway Limited, run by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Martin remembered:
 
“You went down to the railroad station and waited at the gate with the crowd and, when the gate opened, walked through clouds of steam alongside the long train, all Pullman cars, and found your numbered car, and the Negro Pullman porter in white uniform asked your space and, hearing it, called you by name and took your bag and led the way to your roomette, the tiny antiseptic room with its grey steel walls, its gleaming chrome washbowl that popped out of the wall, the heavy windows with their rounded corners, the spongy upholstery, the rust-colored blankets lettered PULLMAN, the little shoebox with a door in the aisle so the porter could get your shoes and shine them during the night and replace them gleaming in the morning.”
 
Once he had stowed his bags, Martin retreated to the bar car so he could sit with a drink and watch through the window as the heavy industrial sights of northwestern Indiana faded into the flat plains of the northern part of the state. By the time dinner was served, the train had made its way to Ohio, the state where he had been born.
 
After dinner, served on tables draped in white tablecloths and decorated with shining silverware and a bud vase with a single rose, he retired to his room to work for a time on his portable Remington Rand typewriter, usually preparing a memorandum or an outline for a story to share with an editor. “I would go to the bar car for a nightcap then back to my room,” said Martin, “pull the bed down feeling it brush my pajamas, then squeeze into bed and snap off the lights and lie in bed watching the night, listening to the soft clickety-clack of the steel wheels on the steel rails in the night, sleeping.”
 

When Martin arrived in New York, he headed for 59 West Forty-Fourth Street, the location of the Algonquin Hotel, where he always stayed, at first because of its writers’ tradition (the hotel hosted the famed Algonquin Round Table of wits, including Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale, and George S. Kaufman), but later because he loved its “Edwardian elegance and came to know its staff and its owner and manager.” Martin also preferred the Algonquin because of its location—the hotel was within walking distance of almost anywhere he needed to go to pursue his writing career. “Virtually the whole United States communication system was crammed into a postage-stamp-sized patch of midtown Manhattan,” he noted, including Harper’s offices on Thirty-Third Street.
 
Martin hit his stride in conducting true heavy-fact legwork for a story he did for Harper’s on the wartime mood in Muncie, Indiana, which had a reputation, thanks to studies done in the community by sociologists Robert Stoughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in 1924 and 1935, as being the quintessential midwestern city.
 
For his article, “Is Muncie Still Middletown?” Martin traveled to the smoky factory town and interviewed at length union leaders, factory workers, businessmen, farmers, politicians, soldiers, college professors, and average people eating in cafeterias. “From several I drew their life stories. And repeatedly I asked: ‘What do you hear people talking about these days?’ This was the heart of my story—what Midwesterners were thinking about in wartime,” he said. Martin also believed a writer could get a more accurate sampling of public opinion through personal, lengthy interviewing than by “so-called scientific public-opinion polling.”
 
 

Death in a Cold Place: Burial on Attu

To recapture Attu in the Aleutian Islands from the Japanese in June 1943, U.S. military forces suffered extreme casualties, losing 549 dead and another 1,148 wounded—ranking, in proportion to the troops engaged, as one of the costliest battles waged in the Pacific theater, second only to the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Robert L. Sherrod, a war correspondent for Time, shared the human cost of the Aleutian battle with the magazine's readers in an article, “Burial in the Aleutians,” published in the June 28, 1943, issue. The article examined how those who fell were laid to rest on Attu.

For most of a night, caterpillar tractors towed trailers over the valleys and plateaus between Attu’s high peaks, bringing 125 dead Americans to be buried in the Little Falls Cemetery—named for a nearby waterfall and one of two graveyards on the island.

Most of the dead had been killed in a Japanese banzai charge and had been “horribly mangled by bayonets and rifle butts,” Sherrod wrote. (The Americans who collected their dead with “tight-lipped calm,” later vomited as they gathered for burial the 1,000 Japanese who died in the attack.)

The sudden influx of bodies had overwhelmed the graves registration company, which augmented its numbers by dragooning clerks and truck drivers for burial duty. “Their reactions are sober,” said Sherrod. “There is no excitement at this scene of wholesale death.”

Perhaps trying to offer solace to families who lost loved ones in the Aleutian campaign, Sherrod wrote:

“No nation handles its casualties as carefully as we do. The 125 who lie in rows at the edge of the crude cemetery were examined meticulously. A medical officer (Captain Louvera B. Schmidt of Salem, Ore.) recorded the cause of death and the number and type of wounds as each body was unclothed. Members of the graves registration company cut open each pocket and placed the personal effects of the dead in clean wool socks for dispatch to the quartermaster depot at Kansas City. One identification tag has been left on each body, the other nailed to the cross which will be placed above the grave until a larger metal plate can be stamped. The graves are laid out in perfect geometrical pattern; they have been charted so that no mistake can be made in locating any body.

Three sets of fingerprints were made from the hands of each dead man. One set stays with the man’s military unit, two will be sent to the Adjutant General in Washington [D.C.]. (If a soldier’s “dog tags” are missing and his personal effects carry no absolute identification, his body is not buried until some men from his unit have made positive identification.

After fingerprinting, the bodies were carried through the identification tent and wrapped in khaki blankets tied at three places: around the neck, the waist and the feet.”
 

Bulldozers dug the graves because there was no time nor labor available to dig them with shovels. “The bulldozers plow back & forth until a space seven feet deep has been scooped out,” Sherrod said, “which is long enough to place eight bodies 18 inches apart. Then into the collective grave small one-foot deep individual graves are scooped out by shovel. Thus, each man lies with seven of his comrades."

Three chaplains conducted the burial service, singing verses of “Rock of Ages” over the clanking and chuffing of dozens of tractors working on the muddy roads and beaches a few hundred yards away. Sherrod noted that Lieutenant Colonel Reuben E. Curtis, a Mormon from Salt Lake City, Utah, opened his khaki-colored Bible and read: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. . . . O God, great and omnipotent judge of the living and the dead, before whom we all are to appear after this short life to render an account of our works, lift our hearts, we pray Thee.”

Close by the graves, two buglers closed the service by playing “Taps.” The chaplains placed their caps back on their heads, Sherrod reported, and the graveyard bulldozer "huff puffs again, pushing mounds of cold Attu earth over the khaki-clad bodies of eight U.S. soldiers."

A young lieutenant spoke for many on Attu when he said, after looking at the bodies lined up for burial at the cemetery’s edge, “I wonder if those sons of bitches holding up war production back home wouldn’t change their minds if they could look at this.”

The War Horse: Malcolm W. Browne and the Gulf War

“My God, we’re going to die and I must pray!”
 

The Saudi taxi driver floored the accelerator and started chanting in Arabic as air-raid sirens wailed to mark the appearance of Iraqi Scud-B missiles, looking like “fireballs from Roman candles,” streaking over Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The taxi careened past a half-dozen wrecked cars, including a police vehicle, on its way to deliver its passenger, Malcolm W. Browne of the New York Times, to an air-raid shelter at the Dhahran International Hotel.
 
Arriving at the hotel, Browne discovered that its lobby, one of the few places open during such raids, was jammed with Saudis, “some wearing gas masks but most huddling in corners with their red and white head cloths tied over their noses and mouths” to ward off an expected poison-gas attack. The threat of Scuds armed with gas warheads alarmed everyone. “You can kill me with a knife or gun or bomb, and I won’t care, but I don’t want to die of gas,” a Saudi soldier, his voice muted by a bulky respirator, told the reporter.
 
Although Browne was close to turning sixty at the time, the Times sent the veteran war correspondent to the Persian Gulf in the winter of 1991. President George H. W. Bush had assembled an international coalition of approximately forty countries to face off against Iraqi forces, who had invaded and taken over the oil-rich nation of Kuwait in August 1990. The rules imposed by U.S. military authorities made the Gulf War “more difficult to cover” than anything Browne had experienced before, except for the Indian-Pakistan conflict in 1971.
 

During the month he spent in Saudi Arabia, Browne could not escape the feeling that the military had learned all the wrong lessons from its 1983 invasion of Grenada, a smashing triumph for American troops, all without the bothersome presence of civilian journalists. “It was impossible to altogether bar the Persian Gulf to the thousands of correspondents from many countries who poured in,” Browne noted, “but by confining newsmen to officially licensed tour groups called pools, the U.S. commanders achieved much the same thing.”
 
U.S. Defense Department officials also seemed fixated on avoiding the mistakes with the press they believed had contributed to the country’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam. Browne believed that an “anti-press cant” had been prevalent in American military journals and pronouncements since the war in Southeast Asia ended. Influential military officials, he noted, had “implied a causal relationship between two facts: that reporters were barred from on-the-ground coverage of the Grenada war in October 1983, and that Grenada has been America’s only unequivocal military victory since World War II.”
 
Shortly before the United Nations deadline of January 15, 1991, for Iraq’s forces to withdraw from Kuwait, Browne arrived in Saudi Arabia to join the approximately 1,200 correspondents and technicians covering Operation Desert Shield, the buildup of Allied troops in the Persian Gulf. He described the newsmen working in Dhahran and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as “by far the largest concentration of journalists assembled to cover any American conflict since World War II.”
 
Browne became one of the lucky few reporters (initially only 130; later raised to 192) to be part of the official pool system, whereby representatives from wire services, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio were assigned to ground, air, naval, and rapid-reaction units. All media members covering units in the field had to be escorted by a public affairs officer, who was present for all interviews. Reporters’ dispatches, videos, and photographs were available to all the media organizations accredited by the military. “In effect, each pool member is an unpaid employee of the Department of Defense,” reflected Browne, “on whose behalf he or she prepares the news of the war for the outer world.” Some of the journalists began to “feel more like draftees than civilians,” he recalled.
 
Assistant Secretary of Defense Pete Williams announced that news media not part of the official pools would be banned from forward areas and U.S. military commanders would “maintain extremely tight security throughout the operational area and will exclude from the area of operations all unauthorized individuals.” Browne said he had never witnessed such an attempt at controlling the press. He pointed out that in Vietnam, military authorities often concealed information “for reasons other than security, but correspondents were free to move about Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in private cars, commercial and chartered aircraft, and even by train. More than 40 correspondents were killed, but they succeeded in covering most of the major military developments fully.”
 
Browne had to fill out a detailed questionnaire asking for his blood type, religion (“important to the Saudis”), and his next of kin. He also had to sign a two-page agreement promising not to reveal military secrets and to submit everything he reported for a “security review.” While the agreement tried to reassure reporters that any “material will be examined solely for its conformance to the attached ground rules, not for its potential to express criticism or cause embarrassment,” Browne had his doubts.
 
Officials photographed and fingerprinted Browne and issued “a Saudi press badge, a Geneva convention card identifying me as a noncombatant accompanying United States forces and a steel dog tag embossed with the kind of information . . . useful to medics and graves-registration teams.” Unlike his early days in Vietnam, when he had to prowl the black market to outfit himself for combat, Browne noted that the U.S. military provided him with everything he needed, including a field jacket and pants, a sleeping bag, a canteen with a chemical-warfare cap, a durable backpack, gas mask with antidotes for nerve gas, and a chemical warfare suit with boots, goggles, and a helmet.
 
Being outfitted for the coming fray caused Browne’s blood to stir with the “heady prospect” of once again being near the front lines. “Recidivist war correspondents have difficulty explaining the thrill of anticipation of combat,” he mused. “We scarcely understand the feeling ourselves, or why it is that we are so powerfully drawn to combat, even against the revulsion most of us feel for the sights, sounds and smells of death.” 

Browne's zeal lessened, however, when he and other journalists assigned to his pool were taken by bus to an auditorium. While there, a U.S. Air Force “operational commander” gave a briefing. Before his talk, he informed the newsmen he wanted to let them know where they stood with each other. “Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” the officer said. “Your presence here can’t possibly do me any good, and it can hurt me and my people.”
 
Despite his unfriendly beginning, the commander went on to give what Browne, always a fan of aircraft, called “one of the most lucid and informative briefings on fighter tactics” he had ever heard. He wondered if the officer’s frostiness might have been a way to establish his credentials as a “bluff but honest leader of men, rather than as a Pentagon publicity seeker.”
 
In the years since he had reported from Vietnam, Browne noticed numerous changes in the methods by which his profession communicated from the field. Once used to waiting for hours to use a staticky radio phone line or bribing an official to use a slow telex machine, he viewed the technology available to him in 1991 as “simply amazing.” 

For example, reporters from the Times had in their hotel room in Dhahran a dish antenna a little larger than a toilet seat and a Honda generator in case the power went out. “It would have been just great,” he remembered, “except that we all were under the thumb of US censors, so nifty communications were largely canceled out.” He ended up writing his dispatches on a typewriter not much different than those used by reporters in World War II. It might have been for the best. As Browne noted, electronic emissions from a dish antenna could attract the deadly attention of air-to-surface high-speed anti-radiation missiles, if any were in the area.
 

On January 17, with Iraqi troops still in Kuwait, coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm, an air campaign against targets in Iraq, including its capital, Baghdad. For the opening of the air war, Browne had been assigned by the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Information Bureau to a desert air base from which F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters from the Thirty-Seventh Tactical Fighter Wing operated. Two squadrons from the unit flew thirty sorties against sixty Iraqi targets.
 
The wing’s commander, Colonel Alton C. Whitley, showed Browne and other reporters, including Frank Bruni of the Detroit Free Press, videotapes in which the F-117A’s had hit underground bunkers, command stations, microwave communication links, and other “high-value” sites. “The opening shot of the war against Iraq was a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb dropped into the AT&T Building in Baghdad near the bank of the Tigris River,” Browne reported. “The tape showed the bomb hitting the building squarely in the center, probably demolishing its communications nerve centers.”
 
The Stealth fighters also attacked one of the “presidential facilities” supposed to be used by Hussein. “The video tape shows the bomb flying right into a rooftop skylight and demolishing the structure,” Browne wrote. Returning from their missions, pilots at the base talked to the Times newsman about the stress they felt flying in combat: “Your heart beats faster, your mouth goes dry, and when you depart the target area you take a big gulp from your water bottle. Of course, you still have to find the refueling tanker on the way home, but the hardest part is over.”
 
As per regulations, a U.S. Army public information officer had cleared articles from Browne and Bruni and sent them on for transmission to pool headquarters in Dhahran. Three hours later, however, Colonel Whitley had second thoughts about the stories, changing some words and deleting others. “None of them appear to have anything to do with security,” Browne noted. “In Frank’s copy, the adjective ‘giddy’ used to describe the pilots, has been changed to ‘proud,’ and in my story, the words ‘fighter-bomber’ have been changed to ‘fighter.’”
 
Browne guessed that the air force had changed his description to fighter because it had been waging a battle with Congressional critics about its B-2 Stealth bomber and feared they might use such a description to scuttle the program. To meet their deadlines, both reporters agreed to the proposed changes if their copy was transmitted to pool headquarters via a fax machine. “This proves a forlorn hope,” Browne noted. He learned the next day that their stories had instead been sent to the home base of the Stealth fighters, the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, “where everything we wrote has been deemed a breach of security.” The pieces were finally cleared by the military twenty-four hours after they were written, making their “perishable” news “hopelessly stale,” he said. Browne considered it quite ironic because the dispatches portrayed the missions as brilliant successes.
 
As a print journalist, Browne faced another frustration during the conflict. He had to deal, as he had never had before, with the “overwhelming prestige” television enjoyed, especially the powerful live coverage provided from Baghdad by CNN reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Browne’s former Associated Press colleague Peter Arnett. “These reports rivet the attention of American servicemen,” Browne remembered. The ground crews at the airbase he visited eagerly watched the CNN reports.
 
Field commanders appeared to be bending the rules for television crews, Browne noted, and treated print reporters “as also-rans.” Censorship guidelines also worked against print journalists, who had to submit typewritten texts of their dispatches to field information officers and commanders for a security review, while television and radio reporters “could broadcast live without prepared texts, permitting them greater latitude,” said Browne.
 
Upon his return to the United States in early February, Browne, invited by U.S. Senators John Glenn and Herb Kohl, was one of the journalists who testified at a February 20 hearing held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on “Pentagon Rules Governing Press Access to the Persian Gulf War.” Browne expressed his concerns about the pool system, as well as the lack of direct access to American soldiers and to front-line areas. Newsmen, he pointed out, wanted to spend time with soldiers and marines, not to “spy on American military intentions, but to see how the troops are getting on in difficult circumstances. Today’s correspondents identify ourselves with the soldiers of our generation as strongly as Ernie Pyle did with the soldiers of his.”

Browne’s testimony, combined with articles he wrote and television appearances he made repeating his complaints, unleashed on him what he called “an avalanche of angry letters” that accused him and other journalists of undermining both the security and morale of soldiers in the field. One letter went as far as to describe the press as “not only anti-American but pro-Communist,” and suggested that the “so-called Fourth Estate should more properly be called the Fifth Column.”
 
Browne believed it was probably futile for him to remind those who wrote such angry letters that democracy itself depended “on a free people informed by honest journalists.” It dawned on him, Browne recalled, that honest reporting was “the last thing most people want when the subject is war.” And while Benjamin Franklin had observed that “there never was a good war or a bad peace,” his experience had taught Browne that in the eyes of many people, “there may never have been a bad war. War is thundering good theater, in which cheering the home team is half the fun.”

William McPherson: The Rise and Fall of a Pulitzer Winner

The name William McPherson cropped up while I was doing research for my planned biography of journalist and war correspondent Wallace Terry, author of the classic 1984 book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. Terry mentioned McPherson in an interview he did with Eric James Schroeder for what became the 1992 collection Vietnam, We’ve All Been There.

Terry told Schroeder that McPherson, with whom he had worked on the Washington Post, had called him after the publication of a cover story about Black soldiers in Vietnam he had contributed to for Time magazine. An editor at the time for the William Morrow publishing house, McPherson had told Terry: “Wally, you should write a book for us about the black soldier.” Terry demurred at the time, explaining that he did not have enough material for a book.

Trying to discover more about McPherson’s life, I learned that the native of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, had enjoyed a distinguished journalism and writing career that included serving as the longtime editor of the Post’s “Book World” section, winning the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and producing the critically acclaimed novels Testing the Current (1984) and To the Sargasso Sea (1987). “I’ve cared about words since I was a kid,” he reflected. 

McPherson felt fortunate at being the editor of “Book World” because it allowed him to select only the books that he wanted to review. “Generally speaking,” he added, “I didn’t review books that didn’t interest me. There was no reason I should pan a first novel that nobody was going to hear about, for example.”

I was delighted to come across a remark made by one of his friends about McPherson, who attended the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and George Washington University without ever bothering to earn a degree. McPherson, noted his friend, “never allowed degree requirements to stand in the way of pursuing his own interests.” Those interests included a short stint as a merchant seaman (“one of my attempts to try on a new identity and escape the world around me”) before finding work in Washington, DC, as a copy boy at the Post, where he quickly rose up the ranks to become a staff writer and travel editor.

According to a story in his hometown newspaper, McPherson had received the news about winning his Pulitzer after returning home from a vacation. He saw a Post envelope pinned to his front door. “I thought I’d been fired when I saw the envelope was from Ben Bradlee [the newspaper’s editor] and figured he didn’t want me to come to work the next day and find out,” McPherson told a reporter.

Bradlee, however, had written on the outside of the envelope indicating that the note enclosed should be read while “sitting down with a drink and a smile.” When McPherson opened the envelope, the note read: “Damned if you didn’t win a Pulitzer.”

During his days editing "Book World," McPherson displayed a deft hand when editing what went into the section. He had a list of common-sense, cogent ideas about editing. They included: 

"The writer comes first.

The editor must remain in the background, insignificant.

Take enormous care, and never be cavalier with copy.

Don't inadvertently edit in mistakes.

The best editing is the least editing.

Change no more than has to be.

Ask: Is this a real improvement or just a change?

Above all, read carefully. What may seem amusing may only be flip; arguments should be sound: points made must be meaningful."

McPherson never had the inclination to write a novel, hoping to avoid adding “another tree to the pulp mill.” While walking to work at the Post one day between Christmas and New Year’s in 1977, however, he received, unbidden, at the corner of Eighteenth and Q Streets, a vivid mental image of a woman on a golf course on a summer morning taking a practice swing. 

“I saw the river in the distance, I saw the leaves on the trees, I saw the dew on the grass, every detail,” he told a Chicago Tribune reported in 2013. “And then it was as if the camera was panning back . . . and I realized that this was being seen by a kid sitting on the steps of the country club. It sounds weird, but there was something sacred about that moment, something luminous, so much so that I was kind of awed about it. It hit me with such intensity and clarity that I thought, ‘I have to write this down.’”

At home in his office that night he decided to write down what he had seen in his vision. The result: Twelve single-space pages that grew over the next five and a half years into his first novel (Testing the Current), told through the perspective a young boy named Tommy MacAllister, who returned as the subject (now forty years old) in McPherson’s second novel (To the Sargasso Sea).

McPherson left his editor’s position at “Book World,” joining the newspaper’s editorial page staff, selecting what letters to the editor to publish and writing the occasional column. He decided he did not want to edit “Book World” any longer because he had learned “how hard it was to write a book, and I didn’t want to criticize other books.”

At the age of fifty-three, McPherson, in 1987, accepted an offer of early retirement from the Post, believing he could make a living as a freelance writer (he remained on the newspaper’s medical plan). For several years, he explored Eastern Europe, frequently writing about the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.

McPherson’s pieces about his time overseas appeared in such publications as Granta, Slate, The Wilson Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. “It was truly a great adventure, it changed my life, and it was a lot more interesting than thinking about what it cost, which was a lot,” McPherson noted. “There’d always been enough money. I assumed there always would be. (I think this is called denial.)”

The uncertain and often poorly paid life of a freelancer, bad investments, bad luck, and bad health, including a major heart attack, led to McPherson finding himself sitting on a park bench with only a quarter in his pocket and nothing in the bank. “It’s a very lonely feeling,” he shared in a moving, well-regarded 2014 essay titled “Falling” for the academic journal Hedgehog Review. “It gives new meaning to the sense of loneliness and despair.”

McPherson wrote his essay not to evoke sympathy from his readers, realizing he had acted the same as those who had won the lotter and squandered their newfound wealth "on houses, cars, family, and Caribbean cruises. But I hadn't won the lottery; I'd fallen under the spell of magical thinking."

McPherson, who died on March 28, 2017, due to complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia, had wallowed in despair for a time at his unhappy situation. He decided, however, that he had two choices—to die in misery or to persevere. McPherson thought of the last two lines of John Milton’s poem “Lycidas”: “At last he rose, and twitch’s his mantle blue: / To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.” He got up from the park bench, grateful to his college English instructor for “teaching me to study ‘Lycidas’ seriously and realize what a great poem it is and what that matters.”

Freelance Tips from John Bartlow Martin

With his ubiquitous horn-rimmed glasses, bow tie, and mild manner, John BartlowMartin looked more like a schoolteacher or a laboratory technician than a nationally known freelance writer. He believed more in hard work more than talent, once commenting, “Hell, I’m just a reporter.”

The Indiana-raised Martin had honed his observational skills as a gritty police, city hall, and re-write reporter on the Indianapolis Times in the late 1930s and as a regular freelance contributor to such true-crime periodicals as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime.

In the 1940s and 1950s Martin progressed to having his work appear frequently in the “big slicks,” the mass-circulation magazines printed on glossy paper with such famous names as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Collier’s, Esquire, and Harper’s. Martin transcended the conventions of the fact-detective magazine genre in his true-crime articles for national magazines, attempting to place the subject in its social context. He avoided “the artifices, the false suspense and phony emotion,” of typical reporting about crime, and tried to preserve “the narrative value of the stories rather than transforming them into dry case histories.” What remained were powerful stories that eschewed any contrived suspense for “the suspense of fine inevitability,” the type of suspense felt by those attending prizefights.

Martin became one of but a select few freelancers in the country able to support his family. A 1955 Time magazine article on the “ruggedly individualistic breed” of freelance writer estimated that out of the thousands who attempted to make a career in freelancing for magazines, only seventy or eighty managed a yearly salary of $10,000. 

When Martin hit his stride in his early freelance days writing stories for true-crime detective magazines, he churned out a million words a year, selling a third of them at two cents a word. By 1957 Newsweek magazine cited Martin as one of the highest paid freelance magazine writers in the country, estimating his income at $32,000 in a good year. “I like everything about free-lancing,” said Martin, “with the exception of the lack of security. Sometimes it’s four to six months between checks, and that creates problems for my grocer and everybody else.”

In his writing for the big-slick magazines, Martin produced long, detailed drafts of his articles in a large downstairs bedroom he converted into his workroom at his Victorian home in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, and a cabin retreat he owned on Smith Lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When asked where he was from, however, Martin always responded, “I’m from Chicago,” a city that often exasperated him, but for which he never lost his affection. Although invited several times to join the East Coast staffs of Life and the Post on a full-time basis, Martin preferred to remain in the place he knew best, the Midwest.

As a freelance writer (a profession he once described as “champagne today, crackers and milk tomorrow”), staying in the area he knew so well gave him a tremendous advantage. “The Midwest was where things happened, it was, almost, the locomotive of America,” Martin said. “And I as a writer almost had it all to myself, while in New York little happened and writers were scrambling all over each other.”

In March 1959 Martin received a letter from Jack Fisher, editor in chief at Harper’s, asking him for an article about the freelancing trade and his career as one. Martin declined Fisher’s offer, as he had other commitments to address, but the idea spurred him to jot down a few tips for those daring enough to embark on a career as a writer for hire. His guidelines include the following:

“Keep away—but not too far away—from liquor, women and politics.

Sit down in front of a typewriter and stay there.

Do not talk; listen.

Write only about things you love or detest; about nothing toward which you are indifferent.

Keep a schedule—any schedule.

Rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite.

Give yourself enough time.

Be sure.

Remember that the subject is everything, the writer nothing. Avoid the I. The subject, not you, matters.

You must believe what you write. And write what you believe. And write nothing else.

Keep a couple of ideas ahead so when an editor proposes a bad one you can counter with a good one of your own.

Writing gets harder, and so does legwork? Why? Because you see more. When younger, you see more clearly because you see less. When older, you see more and things become less clear—the man who 20 years ago would have seem thoroughly evil is now seen to be human too after all, and this must be taken into account too.”
 
 

John Bartlow Martin: A Writing Life

During the 1940s and 1950s one name, John Bartlow Martin, dominated the pages of the “big slicks,” mass-circulation magazines, especially the Saturday Evening Post, where he produced multipart articles on such provocative topics as mental illness, divorce, abortion, and desegregation in the South.

A former reporter for the Indianapolis Times, Martin, was one of but a few freelance writers in the country able to support himself from his work. His peers lauded him as “the best living reporter,” the “ablest crime reporter in America,” and “one of America’s premier seekers of fact” in a career that spanned nearly fifty years. What set him apart, however, was his deep and abiding concern with the common man in twentieth-century America. “Most journalists,” he noted, “make a living by interviewing the great. I made mine by interviewing the humble—what the Spaniards call los de abajo, those from below.”

Martin treated his freelance career as though it was a regular job, working from nine in the morning until five in the evening, with a half-hour break for lunch, from Monday through Friday; he took Saturdays off and spent his time on Sundays dealing with correspondence and “other accumulated afflictions,” as well as planning his work schedule for the upcoming week.

Pitching ideas to editors, and also receiving suggestions from them, Martin did not cover breaking news, preferring instead to bide his time. “I won’t touch a story when it first breaks because all the reporters are there, all asking questions trying to outdo each other,” Martin explained. “After that’s all over, I feel that I can get closer to it.”

Whenever he began his research, or “legwork,” as he called it, Martin felt afraid because he believed the people he would be interviewing “knew so much,” while he still knew so little about his assignment. Also, when he worked for a newspaper, he reasoned that he had the right to ask questions, because a newspaper “had an inherent right to keep the public record,” but as a magazine writer, he did believe he had that same privilege. “The only way to cure my hesitancy was to master the facts—to study the public record until I knew more about the case than anybody directly involved,” Martin said (one of his close friends described Martin as “fact obsessed”).

Spending anywhere from a few weeks to more than six months pursuing a story, he kept digging until he had all the facts he could gather, especially the human details that “made the bald facts real.” Writing and editing were important to a story, he later said, but “in the end everything depends on reporting.” There were times when he returned from a trip on a Saturday, repacked his suitcase, and left the next day on another assignment. Such commitment to his craft was necessary because a lot of bad reporting, he noted, stemmed from a writer’s reliance on only a single source.

Digging for the facts necessary to construct his stories, Martin developed a few tricks of the trade for interviews. Whenever possible, he tried to talk to a subject at his or her home, because the person would be “at ease there and the objects that surround him will suggest questions to you and remind him of details.” Although he always used a notebook, and spurned tape recorders, he usually kept the notebook out of sight when beginning an interview.

To get the notebook out of his pocket and start taking notes, Martin asked his subject a question requiring a number for an answer—“when were you born?” for example. “You should always try to establish an understanding, a sympathy even, with everyone you interview, even the villains; they’re not totally evil, only human, and what you want to discover is why they behaved the way they did,” he said. If a subject proved to be reluctant to talk, Martin often began relating his own experiences. “Tell him your story,” he said, “pretty soon he’ll likely tell you his.”

Martin preferred doing interviews face to face, not over the telephone, and always aimed at doing so for at least two hours “because you’ll waste the first 45 minutes, you’ll get your best stuff between then and 1½ hours, and you’ll waste the last half hour.” Martin realized he could not possibly collect all the facts on a subject, and even if it was possible nobody would publish the resulting story, as it would be too long. “A writer has to be selective,” he said. “Complete objectivity is impossible. He’ll pick the facts as he sees them and write them in the light of his own experience. That’s really all he can do.”

On his travels Martin usually went to his assignment, in spite of often feeling apprehensive about flying, via airplane, renting an automobile upon his arrival. He depended, however, upon hitting the pavement to get the material he needed. “If I’m doing a story on slums,” he told one reporter, “the best thing to do is walk around. . . . Any story is made on the street.”

Early on in his freelance career, Martin organized his material on three-inch by five-inch notecards. During his investigation of the Centralia, Illinois, minedisaster in 1947, however, he had to come up with something new due to the wealth of information he collected. For the article, eventually published in Harper’s, he went through his notes and documents, gave each a code number, and then numbered the pages. When he came across an item he wanted to use in the article, he typed it out, triple spaced, and keyed it to code and page numbers. “I then cut up the typing line by line into slips of paper,” said Martin. “I moved the slips around, arranging and rearranging them.”

When he had all the slips arranged to his satisfaction, he pasted them together, resulting in a long scroll that he rolled up, placed on his typing table, and consulted as he began writing, letting the scroll fall to the floor as he worked. When he came to the end of the scroll, he had his rough draft finished. Martin dropped this system when, years later, one of his scrolls measured more than 150 feet long, “running out of my room and out the front door and across the lawn.” He went back to organizing his research on note cards, this time using some measuring five-inches by eight-inches in size.

Martin pounded out rough drafts of his stories on a typewriter in his office, or “workshop,” as he referred to it, at his home, never by longhand or by dictation. Usually starting his work at about 8:45 a.m., Martin took a cup of tea with him into his office, closed the door, and worked until lunch, which often consisted of a bowl of Consommé or Consommé Madrilène and a tuna fish sandwich. Martin wrote quickly, on the average of fifty pages a day, sometimes finishing a story in the morning and starting another one that same afternoon. The room was often littered with notebooks, reference books, and memorandums dealing with the subject he was writing about.

Usually, Martin worked until nearly 5:00 p.m. He never ended a day “written out, with nothing more to say.” Instead, he made sure to finish by typing out a quarter or half page of notes about exactly what was coming next so the next morning he could take up where he had left off. Martin discovered that getting started on a story or a day’s work was the hardest part of his job.

Writing in the days before computers, word processing, and the easy storage of information, Martin made sure to make a carbon copy of everything he wrote, especially his rough draft. He did not keep the copy in his house, but secured it elsewhere, always worried about what might happen if a fire—the ultimate “nightmare” for a writer—ever broke out. (Martin knew of a writer who had worked for two years on a novel in a cabin in the Minnesota woods; the cabin burned down and, with it, the only copy of the novel.)

Tackling a rough draft of a story, Martin did what he called “heavy rewrite,” moving sentences and paragraphs around until few if any sentences from his rough draft survived until the final draft. He tried to cut lines he was “especially pleased with, doing the real polished writing on rewrite, not rough—in spite of all this the basic organization remains the same.” It took him as long to rewrite as to write the rough draft. Martin’s system worked for him, but realized other writers might have preferred a different way. “There is no ‘right’ way to write; there is only your way,” he said.

In constructing his stories, Martin concentrated on using what he called the “three C’s”—conflict, characters tightly related to conflict, and the controlling idea. “I sometimes made a conscious effort to get a fictional effect out of a fact story, inventing nothing, simply handling the material as a novelist might,” Martin said, adding he probably had always been “a frustrated novelist.”

Most of his stories went through as many as six rewrites. Writing, to Martin, was “more like carpentry than art.” He also considered writing to be a solitary profession, one reason it was “both so hard and so rewarding.” When he wrote his stories he imagined someone reading over his shoulder, an editor who, if he was tempted to “overwrite a sentence, or leave one loose, or collapse upon a cliché, or otherwise write something idiotic, the imaginary reader would frown; I would fix it.”