Preorders Available for Wallce Terry Biography

In Wallace Terry: A Reporter’s Journey from Selma to Saigon to Bloods, award-winning biographer Ray E. Boomhower tells the story of a journalist who spent his life smashing barriers from childhood in Indiana, to an Ivy League education at Brown, to covering the civil rights movement in the in the Deep South in the 1960s, and finally to what he described as “the biggest story in the world” of his time, the Vietnam War. 

While in Vietnam, he captured the voices and experiences of Black soldiers, using the insights he gained to produce Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. The book remains a classic reflection of a war that fractured U.S. society and cost the lives of nearly 58,000 Americans.

Before risking his life on the frontlines covering the Vietnam War for Time magazine, Terry became deeply involved in reporting about the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States. “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,” said Terry. 

Working for the Washington Post, he wrote the first newspaper series about the Nation of Islam, interacting with Malcolm X, who sheltered him from harm when his stories upset some members of the movement. He also grew close to those who sacrificed their lives in the struggle for equality, including Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., who became godfather to Terry’s eldest son.  

Terry continued to cover the fight for civil rights after moving from the Washington Post to

Time, working as one of the first Black national correspondents to be hired in the overwhelmingly white mainstream media. Making civil rights his focus gave him the opportunity to report on such seminal events as the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, and the Selma to Montgomery marches. 

 

Terry got the opportunity for an overseas assignment in early 1967 when he suggested that the

magazine do a cover article about the contributions being made by Black soldiers fighting in Vietnam. During his two years covering the war, Terry conducted numerous interviews with Black fighting men—soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—that he later used as the basis for Bloods. He sought with his work to topple the conviction that “white soldiers are invincible and black soldiers are invisible.” Terry faced numerous challenges, including rejections from publishers who believed the public did not want to have anything to do with Vietnam or read about Black veterans from the conflict. Finally published in 1984, Bloods became a bestseller and remains a landmark work of military and oral history.

 

Boomhower has written the first-ever biography of a reporter whose name belongs with the greats in American journalism and an individual who lived a life filled with danger and betrayal, scoops and cover-ups, while immersing himself in events that changed the course of U.S. history.

Preorders for the book, which will be published on October 6, 2026, by High Road Books, an imprint of the University of New Mexico Press, are now being accepted. Click here to preorder.

 

The AP Reporter and the Buddhist Monk

While president John F. Kennedy was talking on the phone with his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 11, 1963, he suddenly, sharply, exclaimed: “Jesus Christ!”
 

The president’s outburst had nothing to do with his conversation with his brother. Rather, he was responding to a photograph splashed on the front pages of the newspapers just delivered to him. The photo showed 73-year-old Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc engulfed in flames on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam while sitting calmly—it seemed—in the lotus posture. 
 
The monk hoped that his drastic action might bring the world’s attention to what the Buddhists saw as the persecution against their religion by the Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Buddhist organizations had called for freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to assemble in public, and an end to the supposed Catholic bias in appointing government officials.
 
The photo, which had been captured on a cheap, Japanese camera wielded by Malcolm W. Browne, the 32-year-old head of the Associated Press’s bureau in Saigon, retains its ability to stop conversations. It stands as an enduring symbol of the power of protest and one of the iconic images from the Vietnam War, alongside two other photographs that have been burned into the collective American conscience—Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution,” his graphic photo of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being summarily executed at point-blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief and Nick Ut’s “Terror of War,” showing a naked, nine-year-old girl screaming as she runs down a road with her skin burned from a South Vietnamese napalm bombing that mistakenly hit her village.
 
Browne knew he would be facing unique challenges in his post for the AP when he first arrived in the country on a Pan American flight at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport on November 11, 1961. He had not dressed for the climate; he wore a heavy wool suit and a topcoat in the oppressive 96-degree heat that he attempted to deal with by smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, a habit he later quit.
 

Although the heat caused Browne to sweat like a pig and feel miserable, at the same time, he was “delighted to be there. . . . It was just a glorious place.” After accepting greetings from his Chinese-Vietnamese assistant, Bill Ha Van Tran, who said, “Welcome to Viet Nam, Mal,” Browne headed toward the immigration counter to have his documentation checked. Two photographers were on hand to snap his photo. With his blond hair, blue eyes, and standing six feet, one inches in height, he made an easy target. Tran told him that one of the photographers worked for a local English-language newspaper, The Times of Viet Nam, while the other represented the government’s secret police.
 
Adapting to his new surroundings, Browne switched into clothing better suited for field assignments—khaki chino pants, a sports shirt, a canteen and belt (making sure to bring along on assignments a bottle of water-sterilizing tablets), and sneaker-like canvas shoes, the same as those worn by members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (shortened to ARVN in press reports).
 
As the fighting grew more intense, he and other correspondents took to wearing “inconspicuous olive-green fatigues and boots with steel plates in their soles” to protect against the numerous booby traps scattered over the countryside. On any given day, Browne could arrive at his office “muddy and tired from a military operation in the countryside, hit the typewriter for a 300 or 400 word lead, shower and change into dinner clothes for some diplomatic dinner, then duck out before dessert to file a new lead or check out a tip.”
 
Browne discovered that U.S. government officials in Washington, DC, as well as those stationed in Saigon, appeared determined to reveal as little as possible about the United States’ growing involvement in the struggle—a situation Browne described as “America’s ‘gray war.’” Any mention of the word “combat” in connection with anything Americans did in South Vietnam “is avoided by all officials at any cost,” he reported. “Combat is a dirty word, despite the purple hearts awarded and ‘combat hours’ logged.”
 
In addition to facing stonewalling when it came to cooperation from U.S. officials, and pressure by such senior military leaders as Admiral Harry Felt, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, to “get on the team” and support American policy in the region (a situation that never seemed to get better), reporters were confronted with outright hostility and sometimes violent reprisals from Diem’s government, which had instituted tight controls over its own media and kept a close eye on what reporters from other countries had to say about its rule.
 
Vietnamese officials expected U.S. journalists to support their fight against the Communists from North Vietnam and their Viet Cong allies in the south without question. “You all act as if you were just spectators here,” Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s powerful, fierce sister-in-law, said to members of the foreign press. “Don’t you realize you are with us and we need your support?”
 
While the Saigon government regarded correspondents as “scabby sheep,” and treated them accordingly, Browne recalled that the Vietnamese people were “friendly and agreeable,” and reporters could cultivate private sources among them.
 
To overcome the obstacles placed in their path and present an accurate portrayal of the war, Browne advised, a reporter had to be aggressive, resourceful, and use, at times, clandestine methods “uncomfortably close to those used by professional intelligence units.” Correspondents could expect only “very little help from most official sources, and news comes the hard way,” he added.
 
As officials learned, however, the new AP reporter, as one of his colleagues pointed out, “had no fear of sticking his nose where it wasn’t wanted.” Much later Browne realized that he had been guided in his thinking about the war from his previous experience working as a laboratory chemist. “So when I got to Saigon,” he remembered, “I was resolved not to treat this as journalism but as a piece of observation that should be as accurate and as telling as possible, looking for the truth behind the truth.”
 
Browne won the respect of his colleagues in Saigon for his professionalism, as well as high marks from U.S. ambassador Frederick Nolting for his sensitivity to the “nuances of the Vietnamese situation,” especially compared to other newsmen in the country. As his AP associate Peter Arnett later observed, Browne was not “one of the boys” when it came to the often lively “social life of those years” that he, AP photographer Horst Faas, and David Halberstam of the New York Times sometimes indulged in. “There was a comradery that existed beyond news competition, a sense of ‘us against the world,’” Arnett recalled. “Mal Browne was an intellectual who could stand above it all.”
 
Those who spent time in Vietnam covering the conflict grew increasingly frustrated by urging from their superiors in New York and elsewhere to be more like the correspondents of World War II, especially beloved columnist Ernie Pyle of Dana, Indiana. Brown considered Pyle to be “a great and courageous reporter who made World War II come alive for Americans. But that was World War II, and this is Viet Nam, where I expect Pyle would feel utterly lost.” Pyle’s faith in the basic goodness of an American fighting man might have been “sorely tested,” Browne observed, by “policies that compel this decent GI to shoot aging women (or be shot by them).” The Hoosier reporter, too, would also come to know that the cliches of the past war “just don’t seem to apply here, and that’s why explaining things to the folks back home (who basically rely on cliches) becomes so difficult,” concluded Browne.
 
Browne remembered that he had not come to Vietnam “harboring any opposition to America’s role in the Vietnamese civil war,” believing that since Kennedy’s administration had allied itself with the Saigon government, it only seemed natural for U.S. servicemen to fight back if fired upon. The AP reporter, however, did have concerns about the Kennedy administration’s unwillingness “to fight openly, preferring instead to wage a shadow war,” keeping news of it away from the U.S. public. “If we Americans had nothing to be ashamed of, why not frankly acknowledge our role as belligerents?” Browne asked.
 
During his years covering the war (Browne left Vietnam in 1966, returned for the 1972 Easter offensive, and was there for the fall of Saigon in 1975), he discovered that there were “no unalloyed good guys in Viet Nam. There were plenty of bad guys on all sides, and everyone sometimes stooped to savagery when it suited them.” As Browne pointed out, liberal actress Jane Fonda was just as naïve in her idealistic views of North Vietnam’s motives in the war as conservative actor John Wayne was in his idealized opinions about the U.S. Special Forces, the Green Berets. “Neither of these extreme views corresponded to the shades-of-gray distinctions we newsmen saw,” Browne concluded.
 
The situation in Vietnam proved to be “unique in many respects,” Browne said, because it lacked some of the key features of most wars in history. There existed no front “to march off to, camera and typewriter tucked into a rucksack,” he learned. The front could be everything from a once-peaceful village bridge where he had stopped to buy pineapple one morning and where “the Viet Cong killed 20 militiamen in a little post last night.”
 
But, most of all, he viewed the front as a remote hut late at night where villagers gathered to listen as an intelligent man dressed in a peasant’s black attire recite from memory from the works of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese commander who proved years before at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu against the French that “a peasant militia with the proper indoctrination can defeat even a modern army. Browne came to share the opinion held by many who became regulars covering the war that there were those who “either listened to other people as to what the war was all about and those who went out and got muddy boots. I preferred the muddy boots.”
 
Browne’s time as a conscript in the U.S. Army, serving in South Korea after the conflict there had ended, had not only given him a basic understanding of reporting, but it had also educated him in ways that proved useful during his time immersed in a war zone. He knew how to handle weapons and had insight into how soldiers thought, spoke, and acted. “In a world more often shaped by the sword than the pen,” Browne emphasized, close familiarity with soldiers and how they performed their duties would be crucial for historians and journalists.
 

Another skill Browne learned while serving in South Korea that came in handy in Vietnam was photography. He had visited the post exchange and purchased an inexpensive Japanese single-lens-reflex camera that served him faithfully over the years. The other members of the Public Information Office staff guided him through the process of taking and developing photographs, all done in less-than-ideal conditions, as the chemicals they used to develop pictures often froze at night in their poorly heated hut.
 
The staff’s “daily darkroom routine” included thawing out the chemicals while they melted snow for shaving, Browne recalled. He discovered that having a camera handy compelled the person carrying it “into the heat of the action. If you’re writing text, you can fake it. But if you’re carrying a camera, there’s nothing in the world you can do to fake it, and so you get your boots muddy; you become part of the scene, and that is absolutely vital to writing a text that’s convincing and which contains the essence of whatever it is that’s going on.”
 
As AP’s bureau chief in Saigon, Browne made it his policy that all correspondents should take pictures whenever they could, and that all photographers should gather information to fashion into news dispatches. “To do otherwise would have spread our meager resources too thinly, and it was a formula that worked,” he recalled. After all, reporters could always take the information supplied by a photographer and churn out a respectable story, and photographers could a newsman’s “technically lousy picture” and improve it enough so that it was publishable.
 
Browne discovered that the one-room, ground-floor AP office in Saigon offered the same challenges as had his accommodations in Korea, especially when it came to photojournalism. A frequent visitor to the office, David Halberstam of the New York Times, remembered that the space “felt more like a converted closet than anything else; if there were two people there at the same time then it seemed overcrowded.” With space at a premium, the office’s only bathroom became a rudimentary darkroom in which to develop and print photographs for distribution to AP outlets around the world.
 
Despite these difficulties, Browne persevered and was ready in the spring of 1963 when South Vietnam was wracked by demonstrations from organized members of the Buddhist community. On the evening of June 10, 1963, he received a call from one of his sources, a monk, tipping him off about an important demonstration planned for the next day: “Mr. Browne, I strongly advise you to come. I expect something very important will happen, but I cannot tell you what.”
 
The monk delivered a similar message to all the resident correspondents in Saigon, advising them to be at a small pagoda off Phan Dinh Phung Street; his counsel was ignored by most. As a wire-service reporter, Browne, however, could not take any chances at being scooped by his competitors on what could be a major news story. Also, the monk’s previous tips to him to him had all been good.
 
“They [the Buddhists] were perfectly serious about doing something pretty violent,” he recalled. “In another civilization it might have taken the form of a bomb or something like that.” Browne realized that any “ghastly human sacrifice” by the Buddhists would be futile unless “the Western press—the only free press in the country—carried the word to the outside world.”
 
Browne set off early in the morning on June 11, accompanied by his AP colleague Van Tran. The AP men arrived at the pagoda at exactly 7:50 a.m.; services were to begin at 8:00 a.m. and, as Browne noted, the Buddhists were known for being extremely punctual. The monks had set up a few chairs inside the pagoda for the newsmen who, in addition to Browne and Tran, included Simon Michau of Agence France Presse and Nguyen Ngoc Rao, a Vietnamese working for United Press International. “Tran and I had the only cameras,” Browne recalled.
 
At nine o’clock the chanting stopped and the approximately 350 monks and nuns, as if they had practiced the maneuver beforehand, began to leave the pagoda. They lined up in the alleyway and proceeded onto the street, walking down it while arranged in three or four rows. Some of the marchers unfurled banners with slogans printed in Vietnamese and English that beseeched President Diem to honor Buddhists’ demands. A grey Austin sedan with three to four monks inside led the march, an innovation for such demonstrations, Browne noted. “It seemed strange to me at the time that the monks were now riding instead of walking,” he recalled.
 
When the procession stopped, the monks who had been in the Austin got out; one of them opened the car’s hood and pulled out a five-gallon gasoline can made of translucent plastic and filled, it appeared to Browne, with a pink liquid. Two younger monks accompanied an older member of their order, who Browne later learned was Thich Quang Duc. “He [Quang Duc] was resting his hands on their arms, and going over to the center of this circle,” Browne said. Sweat broke out on the reporter’s brow as he got his camera ready, anticipating that “a horror show was at hand.”
 
A monk placed a small, brown cushion on the pavement, and Quang Duc positioned himself on it, crossing his legs in the traditional lotus position. From his location—about twenty feet to the right and a little in front of Quang Duc, who kept his head slightly bowed—Browne watched as the monks assisting Quang Duc emptied all but about one liter of the liquid over the old man, “soaking his face, body, robes and cushion.” The monks stepped away from Quang Duc, leaving behind the container, which still had some liquid inside.
 

At 9:22 a.m. Browne could see Quang Duc’s hands move a bit in his lap as he struck a match. The newsman called out to Tran, who stood in a different part of the crowd, about twenty seconds before this happened. As Quang Duc lit the match, Tran appeared at Browne’s elbow. Recalling the incident, Browne said: “In a flash, he [Quang Duc] was sitting in the center of a column of flame, which engulfed his entire body. A wail of horror rose from the monks and nuns, many of whom prostrated themselves in the direction of the flames.”
 
While the flames engulfed Quang Duc, two monks brought out a cloth banner with the words (in English): “A Buddhist Priest Burns for Buddhist Demands.” A slight breeze sometimes blew the flames from Quang Duc’s face enough so that the reporter could see that his eyes were closed and “his features were contorted with agony.” Despite the pain, the monk, Browne noted, kept his upright position, his eyes closed, his hand folded in his lap, uttering no sound as the flesh melted from his body. “The reek of gasoline smoke and burning flesh hung over the intersection like a pall,” the newsman said.
 
Browne found himself “numb with shock” at the horrible scene. Witnessing anyone commit suicide or suffer a violent death “is always a hard experience,” he later noted. “You can get used to it in war, but there was something special about this. It was kind of a horror.”
 
Despite the grisly scene, Browne acted almost automatically, shooting several rolls of 35-mm, black-and-white Tri-X film. “The one thing that sort of keeps you going in war, or in times of crisis like that, is having something to do,” he pointed out. Trying to keep his mind off the ghastly sight, Browne kept thinking: “‘The sun is bright and the subject is self-illuminated, so f16 at 125th of a second should be right.’ But I couldn’t close out the smell.”
 
Although police had finally arrived, they appeared as stunned by what they were seeing as Browne had been, “running around aimlessly outside the circle of Buddhists.” About three or four fire trucks arrived, accompanied by riot police equipped with helmets and fixed bayonets. “The riot police charged down the street in a wave,” he reported, “but stopped short in confusion a few yards from the circle.”
 
As the fire trucks started to move down the street, several of the monks blocked them by throwing themselves in front of their front and rear wheels “so that the truck could advance only by rolling over them,” Browne recalled. The monks ignored the blasting of one of the horn and siren of one of the trucks as its driver vainly tried to get them to move out of the way.
 
One of the younger monks in the crowd used a portable, battery-operated loudspeaker to repeatedly proclaim, in Vietnamese and English: “A Buddhist priest burns himself to death. A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr.” Later, when questions swirled about whether the monk had been drugged, Browne recounted that while he could not swear there was nothing wrong with the monk, “he didn’t stagger as he walked to his place. He appeared calm, and exchanged a few words with the two monks with him, just before they poured the gasoline.”
 
Browne, when later asked why he had not interfered, pointed out that he probably could not have done anything to stop Quang Duc’s self-immolation, as the “monks and nuns had clearly rehearsed their roles for the ceremony many times, and had prepared methods for blocking interference,” as they showed when they used their bodies to keep the fire trucks from moving.
 
He divulged, however, that trying to stop what happened had not entered his mind. “I have always felt that a newsman’s duty is to observe and report the news, not to try to change it,” Browne stated. He believed it was his job as a journalist to take the pictures and get them and his story about the event to AP’s wire service as quickly and efficiently as he could. “It is difficult to conceive of any newsman acting otherwise,” Browne concluded
 
With the appalling ceremony completed, Browne knew that he had to get his photographs out of the country as soon as possible, realizing that doing so “was a very difficult thing to do in Saigon on short notice.” What mattered to him was to get the raw film shipped by air freight or some other way to the closest transmission point (AP’s bureau in Manila in the Philippines), since the image would not be subject to censorship at that point. Thinking fast, he sent Van Tran to the AP office with the film and instructed him to arrange for an airfreight shipment and schedule a telephone call to the news agency’s Tokyo bureau, in that order.
 
Van Tran was able to find a “pigeon,” a passenger on a regular commercial flight from Saigon, to carry the film to the Manila AP office, which had the facilities to send it via radio circuit to San Francisco, and from there to the news agency’s headquarters in New York for publication by its clients all over the world.
 
For Browne’s images to appear in AP member newspapers, they had to make, AP officials estimated, a fifteen-hour, approximately 9,000-mile journey over the news agency’s wirephoto system. The image used by most newspapers was a tightly cropped one showing Quang Duc engulfed in flames with the Austin and a small number of the monks in attendance in the background. Later, Browne’s full sequence, including an expanded view of the self-immolation, described by AP’s editors as “The Ultimate Protest,” became available for publication.
 
The initial burning monk image competed for space on front pages of U.S. newspapers with news stories and photographs of Alabama governor George Wallace blocking the entry of two Black students—Vivian Malone and James Hood—into the University of Alabama. Those newspapers worried about their readers’ reaction to the burning monk sometimes used Browne’s photo showing the Buddhist monks blocking a fire truck with their bodies.
 
The reaction was immediate. While millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Browne’s pictures possessed what the correspondent later termed “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. Vietnamese Buddhist leaders emblazoned the image on placards they carried during demonstrations. Officials in Communist China used the image for propaganda purposes, distributing copies throughout Southeast Asia and attributing the monk’s death to the work of “the U.S. imperialist aggressors and their Diemist lackeys.” 
 
When President Kennedy called Henry Cabot Lodge to the White House to discuss becoming the new U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, the president had on his desk a copy of the monk photograph. “I suppose that no news picture in recent history had generated as much emotion around the world as that one had,” Lodge noted.
 
Quang Duc’s sacrifice weighed on Browne, who died on August 27, 2012. “I don’t think many journalists take pleasure from human suffering,” he noted, but he did have to admit to “having sometimes profited from others’ pain.” Although by no means intentional on his part, that fact did not help, Browne noted. “Journalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,” he said. “Either way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.” 
 
There were other deaths that Browne witnessed in Vietnam—losses that became mere “footnotes” in the history of the war compared to the “theater of the horrible” that Quang Duc’s sacrifice represented for his cause. Browne, however, never forgot them.
 
 

The Knock: William Manchester & Robert Kennedy

The pounding on the door of Suite 1407 at the Berkshire Hotel in Midtown Manhattan reverberated throughout its two rooms early in the morning on November 16, 1966. The banging was loud enough to drive one of its occupants to dive under bedcovers to escape the din. The clamor also shook author William Manchester, who had been painstakingly reviewing a manuscript about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with Evan Thomas, his editor at Harper & Row publishers.

Manchester had been hand-picked by Robert F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy to write the definitive account of President Kennedy's death in Dallas, Texas, nearly three years before. The author had registered at the hotel under an assumed name. He did so hoping for some peace and quiet before sailing later that day on the RMS Queen Mary for a much-needed rest after working himself into a frazzle completing a book about the assassination. His hoped-for seclusion had already been ruined at what was to be a private breakfast with Thomas in the hotel’s empty dining room.

The freelance author was still exhausted after staying up all night in his suite’s living room using the tools of his trade—“pen pencils, erasers, galleys, memos”—assessing changes to the manuscript sought by the Kennedy family. Looking up from his menu, Manchester saw two men enter the room, walk over, and sit down at his table. They were Richard Goodwin and Burke Marshall. They had come to New York on Jacqueline Kennedy’s behalf to insist on further alterations to the manuscript—details she believed to be too personal to allow to be published.

Manchester could not believe Goodwin and Marshall had come, seeing their presences as “an intolerable intrusion.” Under pressure from the men to agree to the alterations sought by Jackie Kennedy, Manchester held firm. “I’ve been working all night. I’m very tired, I can’t cope with this now, and I think you’re trespassing beyond the borders of decency,” Manchester told them before indignantly stalking out of the room.

On the elevator on the way up to his suite, Manchester was surprised to hear from Thomas that he had not divulged his author’s whereabouts to anyone. With his suspicions aroused by Thomas’s comment, Manchester told his editor: “You, me, and my wife were the only people who knew you and I were going to have breakfast together—where we were going to have it, when we were going to have it,” An obviously upset Thomas pleaded to his author: “I didn’t betray you!”

Escaping back to the suite, Manchester and Thomas were interrupted by the commotion at door. They heard a voice cry out: “Bill, are you in there?” The voice belonged to the junior U.S. senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy. Whispering so Kennedy could not hear him, Thomas insisted to Manchester that he had to open the door and see the senator. “The hell I do,” Manchester countered. “I didn’t invite him, and I have nothing to say to him. Do you really think the former Attorney General of the United States is going to break down a door?” To Manchester, it seemed as if he had been trapped inside “a scene from some Grade-B movie,” recalled one of those entangled in the hullabaloo.

Eventually, Kennedy gave up and left, as did Thomas. A flustered Manchester phoned his longtime agent, Don Congdon, who called a lawyer. “Get Manchester on that ship as soon as possible,” the attorney advised. Congdon complied, accompanying his client, whose nerves had been fortified by a tumbler of straight whiskey, to the Queen Mary.

The agent and his client said their farewells at the bottom of the ship’s gangplank, with both believing Manchester was now safe. They were wrong. As he made his way to the liner’s deck, Manchester found himself confronted by CBS television broadcaster Bob Trout, who convinced him to answer few questions about the book. “Sleepless and full of alcohol, it is a wonder I didn’t disgrace myself,” Manchester remembered about the interview.

As Manchester looked out his stateroom’s porthole for a farewell view of the Statue of Liberty, he finally relaxed, believing, “at last, I would have a few weeks of peace.” Unfortunately, the peace he sought proved to be impossible to find on the way to the publication, finally in 1967, of The Death of a President.
 
 
 

Wallace Terry, Zalin Grant, and a Mission to Cholon

Viet Cong rockets and mortars shattered Saigon’s peace early in the morning of May 5, 1968. The renewed fighting led Wallace Terry, a Time magazine correspondent, to believe that a new Communist offensive against the South Vietnamese government and its American allies might be at hand. This attack became known as the second phase of the Tet Offensive, which had first been launched against targets throughout South Vietnam by the VC and the People’s Army of Vietnam on January 30.

Terry, the first Black journalist to cover the conflict for the mainstream media, quickly huddled with his Time colleague John Cantwell, a former weightlifter who spoke three Chinese dialects, loved Asia, and possessed a “little boy’s charm that belied the Mephistophelean arch of his heavy eyebrows,” Terry remembered.

The two men had grown close during their time together in the middle of a war zone. “In a sense, we are both outsiders who want to belong,” said Terry. He was delighted by Cantwell’s penchant for playing a whistle for the birds he kept at the villa the magazine used for its headquarters at Number 7 Han Thuyen, hoping they would answer with their songs. One night at the Embassy Hotel where they lived, the men went onto its roof with a bag of hamburgers, munching on them while rockets and flares lit up the city spread below them. “We decide this is one war we don’t want to lose our lives in,” Terry later said. “For both of us, Vietnam is making less sense each day.”

Cantwell shared with his colleague his fears about dying in the war. He had already survived a forced landing in a helicopter and had watched, horrified, as a soldier he was interviewing had his head blown off by an enemy bullet. Cantwell dreaded the effect his death would have on his wife and children in Hong Kong. “It would be bloody stupid,” Cantwell confided to his friend.

With a lull in the fighting, Terry had been looking forward to a visit from his wife Janice. After her arrival, however, fresh attacks broke out in Saigon. The Time newsmen discussed what their assignments should be. One of them would have to attend a military briefing, while the other roamed the city, investigating damage inflicted by the enemy. When Terry told Cantwell to go to the briefing while he took to the streets, the Australian objected. “No, man,” Cantwell told Terry. “Janice is here. She’ll be frightened. You should stay with her. I’ll go out.” 

Terry agreed but warned his friend to avoid such potentially hazardous areas as Tan Son Nhut airport and Cholon. Before Cantwell set out to roam the city, other reporters—Frank Palmos, an Australian; Bruce Piggot and Ronald Laramy from Reuters; and Michael Birch from the Australian Associated Press—asked if they could join him. Cantwell agreed and the journalists drove away in their Mini Moke at 8:20 a.m.

Terry’s advice to Cantwell went unheeded. Chasing after two U.S. helicopter gunships attacking a suspected enemy force, Cantwell drove down a dirt road directly into the VC patrol, who, according to Palmos, appeared to be holding the perimeter armed with Soviet-made weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle and a “burp gun,” a PPSh-4 submachine gun. “The burp gun and the AK47 pushed bullets for a full 10 seconds through the jeep,” recalled Palmo. “I jumped to the left, staggered about ten yards, pretending I was hit, then fell.”

When the gunmen began reloading their weapons, he jumped to his feet and dashed away, compelled to by the vision of a VC gunman who had finished off his wounded friends with a .45-caliber handgun. “He seemed to enjoy his work,” Palmos recalled. “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.” 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.

An exhausted Palmos, his clothes torn to shreds, made his way to Time’s villa. He staggered inside, crying out to all who could hear that his companions had been slaughtered. Although stunned by the news, Terry was determined to find out what had happened to Cantwell, even at the risk of his own life. “I let him go there,” he reminded himself. “If he is alive, or dead or captured, I have to know. I owe him that.”

Terry had help. Zalin “Zip” Grant, a South Carolina native and former U.S. Army intelligence officer in Vietnam, had worked with Terry in Time’s Washington, DC, bureau. “He was a tough soldier who became a tougher correspondent,” Terry recalled. “Hot-tempered but cool under fire, he doesn’t suffer fools.” The two men were, in a sense, opposites. “He is white; I am black. He was born in the South while I am from the North. He went to segregated schools while I was, finally, a product of integration,” noted Terry. “He favors Italian suits, drives a Porsche and chases pretty women. I dress Ivy League button-down, motor about in a Chevy and play father to a Brady Bunch.”

The newsmen shared, however, the same hopeful vision about race in America—dangerous opinions that prompted the South Carolina legislature to deride Grant as a traitor to the South and a “communist” for his support of integration. But to Terry, there was something “truly principled” about this white Southerner that drew the men together to become friends. Janice telephoned Grant at the Continental Hotel where he was staying and asked him to join her husband’s dangerous quest. Grant, who spoke Vietnamese, agreed to help find out what had happened.

Gulping down a shot of whiskey in a paper cup given to him by Terry, Palmos repeated his story for Grant, who did not fully believe what he heard. “Was he really sure the newsmen were all dead?” he wondered. “How about if one or two were only wounded and lying in Cholon bleeding to death as we spoke?”

Terry and Grant decided to head out on what became a perilous and frustrating journey to learn their colleagues’ fate. Deciding to take such a gamble was not out of character for Terry. Beneath his calm, professional demeanor lurked a self-confessed “roller-coaster fanatic” who loved riding  the dangerous, rickety ones constructed from wood. As a fellow reporter later said of Terry, “The man loves a thrill.”

The duo’s mission seemed doomed. The duo first tried to attach themselves to a U.S. Army unit headed for Cholon. The patrol had to halt when one of its tanks broke down, blocking a street for several hours. A Chinese photographer who knew the area offered to guide the reporters, but the eerily quiet streets unnerved the cameraman, and he dropped out. 

Stopping for help at a South Vietnamese police precinct, Terry and Grant came upon its commander, dressed from head to toe in combat gear, sitting down to enjoy his morning meal. “Here he was preparing to tuck into a leisurely breakfast,” Grant remembered, “while his precinct was being overrun by the Viet Cong. And—more to our point—while Cantwell and the others could have been bleeding to death.” An angry Grant tore into the policeman with a mixture of Vietnamese and American profanities. Remarkably, the commander did not react with anger. Instead, he offered to accompany the reporters, providing protection with an armored car.

Luck seemed to be with the reporters. It did not last long. The convoy only traveled for a few blocks. The commander decided it was too dangerous for his men to proceed. At 1:00 p.m. the Americans hired a yellow-and-blue Renault cab, whose driver agreed to proceed at a cost of $10 per block, “a king’s ransom,” noted Terry. The sound of automatic-weapons fire, however, stopped him in his tracks. “No amount of money is worth this,” the driver told them.

Grant and Terry forged ahead. “We start walking down the street side by side, like gunslingers on the way to the O. K. Corral,” Terry later wrote. “Suddenly it becomes so damn quiet.” They walked past a group of South Vietnamese paratroopers, who smiled at them from a doorway but said nothing. “This is impossible,” Grant told Terry. “The VC are everywhere. It would be suicidal.”

The newsmen drove back to the Time villa to regroup. “Central Saigon is surreal,” Terry recalled. “There is fighting going on a few miles away, yet here it is absolutely calm—almost lovely.” They resumed their quest at around 3:00 and were finally able to reach their colleagues, assisted by an American demolition team that had pushed into the area. Reaching the site where Cantwell had stopped his vehicle, Grant and Terry were devastated to discover that all the men were dead. “I am too overwhelmed to cry,” Terry reflected.

Terry saw Laramy sitting up in the Mini Moke, his arms still upraised, while the other reporters lay on the ground, their “bodies are full of holes. Caked in blood. Covered in flies. Bloated from the heat.” Both Grant and Terry estimated that Cantwell had been shot as many as seventeen times. “I want to touch John,” Terry remembered. “I want to tell him I’m sorry, that it should be me lying there instead of him.”

Realizing the VC might return at any moment, Terry and Grant stacked the dead journalists in their vehicle’s back seat as quickly as they could. “This is no time for a show of reverence,” Grant told Terry, who had been trying to gently place Cantwell’s body in the Mini Moke. “We’ve got to toss them in there and get out of here as fast as we can.”

Without warning, a group of thirty Vietnamese clad in black pajamas, clearly VC, 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,” Terry thought. The only thing he could find on his friend’s body was the whistle Cantwell used to entice the villa’s birds to sing: “It was all that was left of him.”

Upon returning to his hotel, Terry gave Cantwell’s whistle to Janice and told her the ghastly news about his friend’s death. “We cry together,” he remembered. Walking into a press briefing the next day, Terry was surprised to see the gathered newsmen start to clap. Perplexed, he turned to see who might be behind him but saw nobody. He realized: “The applause is for me. And for Zip. And, I will always feel, for our comrades who died doing their job.”

Initially, Grant believed that his mission with Terry had been futile. After the depression he experienced following Cantwell’s death lifted, however, and he reflected on what had happened, what he had tried to do with Terry’s help “made more sense to me than anything I’d ever done in the war.” Always nagging at the back of Terry’s mind was the awful thought that if Janice had not been visiting with him, he would have gone to Cholon instead of Cantwell or at least would have been with him to encounter the VC gunmen.

Cantwell, Piggot, Laramy, and Birch were not the first, or the last, reporters to lose their lives in Vietnam. According to Reporters Without Borders, sixty-three journalists were killed in the Vietnam War from 1955 to 1975. They came from the United States, South Vietnam, Singapore, Australia, Japan, England, Argentina, France, Laos, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

Terry estimated he lost twenty-two close friends, most of them journalists, during the war. Newsweek and Time photographer Bob Ellison died when his plane blew up at Khe Sanh. French photographer Henri Huet and British photojournalist Larry Burrows were killed in a helicopter crash over Laos. “Children toss a grenade into a friend’s jeep and blow him up,” Terry said. “Another friend’s Phantom [fighter jet] crashes in the North and he is never seen again.” 

Terry was lucky; he survived. Thinking of those who did not come back from the war, or were wounded or maimed, he said he related to them “as a father” might. Several reporters he knew, Terry recalled, never really got over the war.

The grisly experience did have one positive outcome—it resulted in a lifelong friendship between Grant and Terry. The men discovered what many troops in Vietnam, Black and white, had found while serving together. “A bonding took place,” said Terry, “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.” Although their mission had been in vain, it made sense to the men in entangled in the middle of a war that had made so little sense for such a long time.

Among the horrors of war, Terry had also been shocked to realize that America had achieved on the battlefield what Doctor Martin Luther King had dreamed about—sons of slaves and former slaveholders could finally gather at the same table. “We found a better vision of ourselves and of our nation,” Terry believed. “We became more than friends. We became as brothers.” For Terry, that was a lasting message, in fact, the “only positive message, about Vietnam. The rest of it is nonsense. Foolishness.”
 

A Shooting War: Margaret Bourke-White & Richard Tregaskis

Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White had undergone a nerve-racking day near the front lines dodging enemy shells that whooshed into the surrounding hillsides and whistled over the roads in the Italian countryside about two hours outside of Naples in November 1943.

That evening Bourke-White returned to the Thirty-Eighth Evacuation Field Hospital, set up near the hills bordering Cassino Valley, to continue her work photographing the heroic doctors and nurses who cared for the badly wounded American soldiers.

One of the hospital staff expressed surprise at seeing her on her feet and walking, saying, “We expected to see you about now, but we thought they would be bringing you on a stretcher.” Asking what he meant, Bourke-White learned that a well-known war correspondent had been brought in wounded to the field hospital just a few hours ago.

Curious who the journalist might be, Bourke-White went over to the new patient’s bedside and discovered that it was her colleague, Richard Tregaskis, the author of the best-selling book Guadalcanal Diary. Tregaskis had been brought in with a serious skull wound nearly identical to one she had previously witnessed and photographed, and the reporter had been operated on by the same doctor, Major William R. Pitts of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Pitts had carefully removed approximately twelve bone fragments from Tregaskis’s brain, driven in there by shrapnel that had penetrated the front of his helmet. Visiting Tregaskis, Bourke-White remembered that she had joked to the lanky International News Service reporter: “I suppose you don’t have to be six foot six to reach up and stop a shell, but probably it helps.”

Hearing Bourke-White's remark, Pitts had chimed in to claim that the one thing that had helped Tregaskis most was the fact that he had “a scalp like a bulldog—all corrugated. It made a sweet closing, sort of fell together.”

As for Tregaskis, robbed for a time of his speech and suffering from partial paralysis along the right side of his body, he could only remember that Bourke-White snapped some photographs of him lying in his cot, his head swaddled in white bandages. 

“She wanted me to smile and I tried several times, but the right side of my mouth resisted,” he said. “Something like a grin resulted, but it felt lopsided, and the eyes were out of control.”

Just two months later, the journalists met again. They ran into each other at a North Africa airport awaiting a plane that would carry them to the United States. Tregaskis had made a remarkable recovery from the wound he received on the afternoon of November 22 while observing U.S. Rangers battling German forces for control of the high ground on Mount Corno in the Venafro sector.

Bourke-White noticed that instead of Tregaskis’s head being covered in layers of white cloth, he now sported only a small bandage, about two inches across, protecting his head wound. She called Tregaskis “the bravest” among the group of battle-hardy correspondents she had known during the war. “Newspapermen are not compelled to go storming mountaintops with Rangers,” Bourke-White said. “With Tregaskis, that inner desire to do truly firsthand reporting burned deep and clear.”

Feeling relieved at being alive, Tregaskis told the photographer that doctors had told him that once home he would have to have another operation to insert a metal plate in his head. “Maybe you’ll autograph it for me,” he said to Bourke-White. 

“What would be the use?” she joked. “Who is tall enough to read anything written on the top of your head?”