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.” 

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.”