Journalist Malcolm W. Browne Biography Published

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

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

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

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

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

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

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