Creating "The New Face of War": Malcolm Browne and the Bobbs-Merrill Company

During its heyday, the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis stood as the largest publishing house located west of the Allegheny Mountains, releasing works from such varied authors as James Whitcomb Riley and Ayn Rand. In April 1964 Bobbs-Merrill’s editor in chief,William Raney, working out of the firm's New York office, sought to add another author to the firm’s list.

On a recommendation from a friend, Raney wrote a young Associated Press reporter, Malcolm W. Browne, AP’s bureau chief in Saigon, South Vietnam, to gauge his interest in producing a book about his experiences in that war-torn country. Browne had been in South Vietnam since November 1961 and had spent more time there than any other American correspondent, earning the title of the dean of the Saigon press corps.

Raney’s correspondence proved timely. In early May Browne learned that he and David Halberstam of the New York Times had shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their articles about the war and the coup that had toppled the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Browne proved to be quite enthusiastic about tackling a book about the Vietnam conflict. “Viet Nam is, of course, a news hot spot in which America is fighting a war,” Browne wrote Raney. “As an advisor over there told me recently, ‘It ain’t much of a war, but it’s the only one we got.’ In fact, it is a very important war, the importance of which goes far beyond the trickle of casualties incurred by Americans so far.”

Browne had received international attention with his photographs of the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, protesting the supposed anti-Buddhist policies of the Catholic-dominated Diem administration. The journalist’s time in the country had led him to believe that the conflict there threatened to “put our system to its toughest test since World War II. As Spain’s civil war of the 30s was the precursor to World War II, I think Viet Nam is the forerunner of a long, ugly campaign we shall have to wage in Africa, Latin America and the rest of Asia. Our enemies have said so, and there is no reason to doubt them.”

As Browne later explained to former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., in a letter asking him to contribute a forward for his book, he did not intend the work to be “an ax-grinding opus,” nor a historical account. “It is built mostly on vignettes and my own body of personal experience in the field,” he told Lodge.

For the next six months, while still reporting about the war for the AP, Browne worked on his book, turning in a completed manuscript to Bobbs-Merrill in October 1964. In his stories for the news service, Browne noted that specific images—the smell of battle, the experience of a single soldier or guerrilla, and the sights and sounds of a hamlet at war—had more effect “on readers than generalities, however well reasoned.”

While traditional news writing depended upon a “pyramid” style, proceeding from the general to the specific, Browne said it was sometimes “more effective to reverse the order, leading the reader into a complicated situation almost through a succession of pointed anecdotes, all depending mainly on images.” As he had discovered with his images of Quang Duc’s fiery death, “photographs carry more of an initial impact than words.”

Browne told Raney that although he hoped to impart to readers the “feel” of Vietnam and its problems and did not intend to merely put together a collection of “impressions thrown together under one cover.” He wanted to cover such potential topics as “Women in Viet Nam and the Phenomenon of Madame Nhu,” “Making Foot Traps for Fun and Profit,” and “Opium as a Social and Political Force.” Browne suggested as a title “The New Face of War,” which Bobbs-Merrill settled on for the book. “Beyond informing,” Browne noted, “I want it to be a book that will be interesting to read, even when and if the Viet Nam crisis is resolved.”

The new kind of war Browne wrote about included fighting not merely by weapons but through politics, diplomatic blackmail, propaganda, and terror—methods that had unsavory connotations in the minds of Americans, who were not used to involvement in a conflict in which “nice guys finish last.” He pointed out that the “experiences of most of America’s military tradition” seemed to be inapplicable for what soldiers faced in Vietnam, including ambushes, sniping, and boobytraps. “The only glory anyone is likely to get out of it is the satisfaction of carrying a bundle of human enemy heads, suspended by wires stuck through their ears,” Browne concluded. “There will never be the handing over of a sword by a beaten general to his victor. If there is victory, the fighting will merely die down to a few isolated incidents.”

The contract Browne signed with Bobbs-Merrill on May 7 called for him to provide a manuscript of 80,000 to 90,000 words on or before October 1. The publishing firm paid Browne an advance of $1,000 upon signing its contract, followed by an additional $1,000 upon delivering his manuscript, and established a royalty rate of 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies sold; 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies sold; and 15 percent on all copies sold thereafter.

In addition to writing the book, Browne also selected several photographs for inclusion. Unfortunately, even though he had taken most of the photos while on assignment for the AP, the organization’s photo division, Wide World Photos, charged him for their use, totaling $312.50, a bill Browne grudgingly paid.

Because Browne had contributed so much to paying for the images, Bobbs-Merrill paid to produce the book’s index—cost, $140. “According to our standard contract,” Geoffrey C. Ryan, a Bobbs-Merrill editor, wrote to Browne, “this is an expense to be borne by the author, but we never anticipated your going for so much on the photographs.” Ryan also noted that the firm was also able to waive the indexing fee because True magazine had recently agreed to pay $5,000 for a 23,000-world excerpt for its May 1965 issue. “This sort of thing is not only good for the money involved in the deal itself, but it has tremendous promotion value and helps the sale of books,” Ryan wrote Browne.

Browne faced a few challenges trying to complete his manuscript. By late September, he had written approximately 45,000 words and could have “easily” finished the rest in “one week of solid writing,” but instead had to deal with “one damned crisis after another, including a coup, dangerous rioting that nearly demolished my office, a pickup in the Viet Cong war, etc., etc. ad nauseum.” 

Due to his busy schedule working for the AP, he had to request a month extension on his deadline—a request Bobbs-Merrill approved. In the process, Browne learned that his editor, Raney, had been found dead in a New York hotel room. Police listed his death as an apparent suicide, with a medical examiner ruling that Raney’s death had been the result of an overdose of “an unidentified toxic substance.”

After finishing his manuscript, Browne discovered that Bobbs-Merrill had made unfortunate choices on whom they sent galleys in the hope that they would “say all kinds of wonderful things about the book so that we can quote them in publicity releases and ads, etc.,” as Ryan explained to Browne. The firm had sent galleys to Halberstam, who had a book about Vietnam of his own to promote (The Making of a Quagmire); columnist Joe Alsop; U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam Maxwell Taylor; and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

“Halberstam . . . was and is a tough competitor of mine (in view of his reporting here and his competitive book) with whom I have never been on friendly terms,” Browne wrote Ryan. “If he says anything nice it will be only to show he is a good sport, but this is fairly unlikely.”

Browne described Alsop, a firm supporter of America’s involvement in Vietnam, as “a personal enemy of mine,” adding that in Alsop’s junkets to Saigon he had charged him, “among others, with ‘selling out the United States’ and bringing down the pillar of our defenses in Southeast Asia, Ng Dinh Diem.” The bitterness between the two newsmen would, Browne said, “eclipse even an instinct toward being a good sport, which I doubt Alsop would display in any case.”

While Browne knew Taylor well, they had also “crossed swords fairly often,” Browne noted. He did not believe that the new ambassador would enjoy his “implied praise” for his predecessor, Lodge. “As for McNamara,” Browne wrote, “who I also know, the entire book is, in a certain sense, a criticism of his handling of the war in Viet Nam from its inception.”

Browne offered some alternatives for Bobbs-Merrill to consider, including Homer Bigart of the Times, a veteran war correspondent who had also covered Vietnam, “and for whom I have the highest respect,” and Bernard Fall, a renowned expert on Indochina. Browne’s other suggestions included Secretary of State Dean Rusk and U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield, “who has repeatedly defended me and some of my colleagues on the Senate floor.”

Bobbs-Merrill agreed with Browne’s suggestions. One of those suggestions, Mansfield, paid off, with the senator writing the reporter that he had read the book’s proofs with “great interest,” as Browne had successfully “drawn a graphic and illuminating picture of the war in Viet Name and your book cannot but be useful to those who seek to understand and aid that unhappy country.”

Released by Bobbs-Merrill on April 26, 1965, The New Face of War shared the stage with Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire. The two books were often reviewed together, and reviewers, particularly those who were journalists themselves, pointed out how the two newsmen became unpopular with U.S. officials by digging up material that contradicted the optimistic view they were trying to present to the public about the war’s progress.

Not surprisingly, opposing viewpoints appeared, especially regarding Halberstam’s effort. Veteran war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who had spent time in Vietnam for his own book, Vietnam Diary (1963), in a review for the Chicago Tribune, complained that Halberstam’s fundamental attitude in covering the war seemed to be “that something must be wrong rather than right with it.” Tregaskis also included a much harsher quote from an unnamed embassy official calling Halberstam a “young punk who’d never seen a war before and thought it should always go well. He just didn’t know about wars. It didn’t seem to occur to him that in all our American wars in the past, we had to run a little short of absolute complete democracy for the sake of winning.”

Instead of Halberstam’s book, Tregaskis recommended Browne’s work as “a more temperate example of the new books on Viet Nam.” Although Pulitzer Prizes awarded in previous years had often been “inept,” Tregaskis noted that when the committee split the award, honoring Halberstam, “they gave the other half to Browne—a safe and sensible bet.”

Initially, The New Face of War did well for Bobbs-Merrill, selling approximately 7,500 copies by July 7, 1965, out of the 12,000 it had printed. The firm’s chairman, Howard Sams, had been so impressed by Browne’s book that he sent sixty copies to his friends in the business world at his own expense “in the belief that his book is of supreme importance at the moment.” (Sams mailed an additional ninety-three copies, again at his own expense, in September.)

As time passed, however, Browne came to believe that Bobbs-Merrill had been slow in paying him his owed royalties and had not done enough to promote the book, particularly when it came to selling it in Vietnam. In February 1966 Browne wrote Robert Amussen, Bobbs-Merrill editor in chief, that a Vietnamese book dealer he knew had offered a few copies of his book for sale and they always sold out in an hour or so.

“There will soon be one quarter million American servicemen here, all vitally interested in the war in Viet Nam,” Browne wrote Amussen. “I can’t help feeling this would be a very substantial and profitable market if only the books were brought into the country some how. I get dozens of requests a week personally, and all I can suggest is that families back in the States ship them. I really wish this could be looked into, especially since there are growing numbers of Vietnamese book stores in Saigon specializing in American books.”

Although Bobbs-Merrill produced a revised edition of Browne’s book in 1968, he never seemed satisfied with his relationship with the firm, believing that the first edition had “virtually no paid advertising, and its success resulted wholly from good reviews and general interest in the subject.” He probably would not have been surprised by a quote made by a former Bobbs-Merrill publisher, David Laurance Chambers, who had noted: “One of the trials of life is the necessity of constantly showing an accommodating spirit to authors.”