You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  This was the moment when the North Vietnamese understood that they had to prepare to fight a different kind of war and began the mammoth project of transforming the Ho Chi Minh Trail into a modern highway with sturdy bridges to send tens of thousands of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops, along with their weapons, ammunition, and food, to the South on the trail that became Westmoreland’s Moby Dick.

  Wisner and the embassy were charged with making sense of the political and military realities on the ground, translating them for Washington while absorbing missives from the government, answering constant queries, including from the newly concerned members of Congress. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was unsettled by Johnson’s rapid buildup in Vietnam and told the president he feared that a “massive ground and air war in Southeast Asia would be a disaster.”8

  FitzGerald knew the outlines of the proposed escalation, and as a friend of Robert Silvers, editor of the literary New York Review of Books, she had absorbed some of the toughest critiques of war. “People used to sit and talk to Bob about the war, and if they were not antiwar, they were highly skeptical.” During a charged Manhattan evening, drink and cigarette in hand, she met Jean Lacouture, the influential French journalist of Le Monde who had covered the wars for independence from colonial France in Africa and Asia. Hearing Lacouture explain why he believed the United States was repeating the failed French policy, citing historical fact rather than ideological imperatives, impressed FitzGerald. She thought: “Anyone who knew about the French war would feel this wasn’t a good idea.”9

  When Wisner saw FitzGerald in Saigon, he realized she had changed. A tall blond, she was now willowy, her blue eyes brighter, even piercing. Her serious side was showing.

  He found her lodging in the empty apartment of embassy officials away on temporary assignments. Then he planned to introduce her to the Saigon press corps, where she could find colleagues to show her around and help her write those two or three articles before she moved on to Singapore.

  Wisner’s solution was a party: he would escort FitzGerald to a birthday celebration on the rooftop of the Caravelle Hotel, the modern luxury hotel on the Saigon River that had become the foreign journalists’ watering hole. Talented, experienced, and entertaining American journalists were crowded into this splashy party hosted by Dean Brelis, the new NBC television correspondent. He was celebrating the birthday of his sweetheart, Jill Krementz, a young New York photographer. Brelis had exchanged his first-class airplane ticket for two round-trip coach tickets so she could come with him when he was given the coveted assignment in Saigon.

  Scruffy reporters and photographers like Leroy were not part of the mix.

  Vietnamese waiters passed trays of champagne and Asian hors d’oeuvres. Thanks to river breezes the evening was cool. Guests watched rockets and mortar fire exchanges across the river. When Wisner arrived with a beautiful young woman, the crowd took notice. Wisner made introductions, first to Brelis and Krementz. Neither she nor FitzGerald recognized each other even though they had been debutantes together in the 1958 New York season.10

  Wisner then steered FitzGerald toward Ward Just, the elegant Washington Post reporter who happened to be Wisner’s best buddy. He had a similar background to Wisner—a graduate of the elite Cranbrook School near Detroit, also a favored escort at debutante balls and an heir to a modest newspaper fortune. Newly arrived in Vietnam, Just had become as comfortable on the battlefields as he was at cocktail parties. He was considered one of the defter writers in the press corps.

  Newly divorced, Just took an immediate liking to FitzGerald. She’s a looker, he thought, a head-turner. Wisner left them alone. He could tell his work was done.

  Normally the master of political banter, Just found himself in the presence of a quiet young woman with a surprising understanding of American politics. After a few rounds of drinks, Just had an idea. Why shouldn’t the two of them bicycle over to the Cercle Sportif, the private French country club, and swim in the moonlight?11

  Just paid the Vietnamese guard ten dollars to look the other way and let them in. They had the pool to themselves. When they climbed out and dressed, Just discovered the guard had stolen his battered but beloved Timex watch. Somehow the mindless theft added to the romance of an evening that could only have happened in a war zone.

  FitzGerald was surprised how much she was attracted to Just. She had left New York deeply hurt by the end of an affair with a married man. But after her night in Saigon with Just, she felt restored.

  The romance was a prelude to the hold Vietnam and the war would have on her. Vietnam hit FitzGerald like a thunderbolt. She found the war unbelievable. It challenged her understanding of how the world worked and how she could convey that vision in writing. She threw out her old plan and decided to stay on. Turning her life upside down to become a war correspondent was a monumental decision, one she made far from the restraints and privileges of her New York life. She was twenty-five years old with little understanding of what she was getting into.

  Ward Just captured this moment of Frankie’s innocent introduction to wartime sophistication in a book he wrote after they had both left Vietnam. He describes a scene in a Saigon restaurant, a dinner with a few friends: plates of entrecôte grille, washed down with glasses of Bordeaux.

  “The girl was blonde and Radcliffe and in Vietnam on assignment for magazines. In time she would grasp the Vietnamese condition as well as anyone in the country but then she was a very shy girl, uncertain why she was there. She talks about the Buddhists in I Corps, and said she was going to Quang Nam Province.

  “She wants to talk about Vietnam, but her dinner partners want to hear about New York and Washington and the mood in the United States. There is a long dialogue about what Vietnam is doing to America, as ice cream and coffee makes its way around the table.”12

  After dinner, the group headed toward a bar, filing past the Air France office, stumbling over homeless beggars, and getting splashed by an American army jeep speeding through a monsoon-drenched street. At the Sporting Bar, they drank their nightcaps while GIs played cards with young Vietnamese bar hostesses, many of whom were prostitutes.

  In this way Frankie FitzGerald was inducted into Saigon society and the life of a war correspondent.

  AT EIGHT YEARS of age, young Frankie was tested and discovered to have an extraordinarily high IQ. She was born into a family of enormous wealth and social advantages that were unimaginable to most Americans, much less Vietnamese. She was raised in mansions by maids and nannies and chauffeured to school in limousines. She rode horses to hunt, summered on a thousand-acre estate on Long Island. Her behavior was impeccable, a girl with a pleasant, almost patrician demeanor.

  Her mother, Marietta Peabody FitzGerald Tree, was a famous blond beauty with a near perfect New England pedigree: her lineage included the Peabody and Parkman families, two of the oldest clans of New England, a grandfather who founded Groton, a grandmother who helped found Radcliffe College, and a father who was the Episcopal bishop of central New York state—the very definition of high WASP. With Marietta’s marriage to the handsome Desmond FitzGerald, her mother became a New Yorker as well, with a New Yorker’s appetite for glamour and the spotlight.

  Frankie had almost no memory of her parents together. Her father enlisted in the army in 1942, when she was two years old, and spent the rest of the war in Asia. Her mother worked at Life magazine as a fact checker and socialized at night. She had a high-minded view of her responsibilities and helped establish a nursery school in Harlem. (Marietta’s first choice of a career was as a diplomat until she was told women were ineligible.) Desmond returned home in peacetime to find his wife had had an affair with the movie director John Huston.

  The precocious Frankie chronicled their divorce in a school essay. “Mummy and I went to Lake Tahoe, which is near Reno,” she wrote. John Huston was also in Reno, as was Ronald Tree, the multimillionaire heir to the Marshall Field fortune. Frankie knew that both men
were vying for her mother’s hand.

  “I wanted Ronnie because he had a pony that I could ride in England. I got my wish. You may think that this sudden divorce and marriage was rather trying for me but if you do you are wrong, for although I was sad about leaving Daddy it didn’t bother me a bit.” She did admit that she may have been “too young to really realize the full meaning of it.”13

  Underneath the bravado, FitzGerald was very upset about her parents’ separation. “Of course, I lied—to protect my mother, the only parent I had. I hadn’t had a father, period. I desperately wanted my father—a theme of my life.”14

  Frankie and her new family sailed across the Atlantic to their new home at Ditchley Park, one of England’s finest country estates. She now owned a miniature racehorse named Beauty and a springer spaniel puppy named Whiskey. She was the only child in the one-hundred-room mansion with servants and nannies waiting on her. Chauffeurs drove her to the Crescent School in Oxford.

  That English country idyll didn’t last long. In two years, her mother was bored and a change in British tax law had diminished Tree’s wealth. The family returned to New York with Tree’s butler and Frankie’s dog, moving into a home on East 72nd Street off Central Park. Frankie went to the exclusive Dalton School, and her mother gave birth to Penelope Tree, Frankie’s half sister. During winter breaks, the family vacationed in their Barbados mansion. In the summer, Frankie traveled to Maine, splitting her time between her father and his new family and her Peabody grandparents—a gilded childhood, with a deep undertow of loneliness.

  As a teenager, Frankie went away to Foxcroft, a girls’ boarding school in the Virginia hunt country. She was not impressed. “The teachers were just terrible. They hadn’t been teaching me math and when we went to get our S.A.T. scores the headmaster told me: you did well for a girl.”

  She escaped boredom by boarding her horse at school and riding on weekends with other young women. Her high school albums are filled with friends and their horse shows. No dances, no boyfriends, no slumber parties, no football games, and no weekends in the city.

  At Radcliffe College, she finally began dating: “After having not seen a boy until I was 18, I suddenly saw a lot of them.” She attended class with the young men at Harvard, discovered dancing, brilliant professors, and freedom. She developed into something of a nerd. Meg Douglas-Hamilton, who roomed with FitzGerald off campus at Henry House, admired Frankie’s discipline, how she researched and wrote papers like a professor instead of slopping them together in two nights like the others.15

  FitzGerald tackled the hardest questions in her papers on Middle Eastern history and politics, exploring the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and the Abbasid succession as a revolution in Islam. In a paper entitled “The Caliphate and the Kingdom,” FitzGerald wrote: “It is very difficult—if not impossible—for an observer of one culture to analyze the impact of his world upon another culture,” the kernel of the questions she raised in Vietnam five years later.16

  Her classmates were struck by her good humor. She seemed immune to the petty difficulties and arguments that undid other young women.

  Her father rarely if ever visited. She only saw him during summers and occasional holidays, and those visits were often canceled. As if making up for his absence, he wrote his daughter letters filled with affection.

  Her mother, Marietta Tree, was, however, all too noticeable. When she visited Harvard, she captured everyone’s attention like a celebrity. She dressed like a Vogue model and charmed like a politician, especially around the young Harvard men. Some of her classmates thought it wasn’t easy for Frankie to be Marietta’s less glamorous daughter.

  FitzGerald graduated magna cum laude and decided she wanted to write. After she was rejected at Newsweek, she realized how hard it would be to find rewarding work as a woman. Opportunities at the New York Times, her hometown newspaper, were no better since it sequestered its few women reporters in the women’s section, cut off from the main newsroom and dedicated to what was considered women’s news. Her dilemma was characteristic of the uncertainty facing the other women in her graduating class.

  She turned to her mother for help. Marietta Tree had become a grand dame of Democratic politics and New York society, hosting soirées, dinners, and cocktails for the city’s most powerful and cultured men.17

  Adlai Stevenson, twice the Democratic nominee for president, had become her mother’s discreet lover sometime after he lost the 1952 presidential campaign to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. When Stevenson lost a second time to Eisenhower in 1956, he recovered with the whole Tree family at their Barbados home. He invited the Tree family—Ronald, Marietta, and Frankie—to accompany him and his sons on a semiofficial eight-week tour of Africa with Alicia Patterson, founder and editor of Newsday newspaper. Ever conscientious, Frankie wrote a forty-eight-page report of the trip for her father and sent him copies of Patterson’s seven-part newspaper series.

  In 1961, the newly elected President John F. Kennedy named Stevenson as ambassador to the United Nations and Marietta Tree as US representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Johnson asked Stevenson to stay on as the UN ambassador, with Marietta Tree as a special adviser.

  This was the moment her mother came through with a job for Frankie. There was an opening for her at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, which, unbeknownst to Frankie, was a front for the CIA. When she arrived in Paris, she realized the job had been created to please her mother.

  Undeterred, Frankie spent two years on the Left Bank trying and failing to write a novel. In some ways, it didn’t matter. She needed distance from New York and her mother to find herself by herself. When it was time to return to New York, she extended her stay out of fear that back home she would fall once again under the maternal shadow, which would curtail or somehow smother her.

  She shared her anxiety in a letter to her mother: she felt she had yet to live up to the great expectations of her family and her overachieving mother.

  Marietta Tree replied immediately.

  “Thank you so very much for your sweet and thoughtful letter. It moved me to tears. I am honored and grateful that you can write me what is in your mind and heart—a most difficult feat between mother and daughter and especially vice versa.…

  “From the day you were born I have always been extremely proud of you and surprised that I could have such a superior child. You have been born with far higher intellectual talents than I, and you have developed them through hard work.…

  “You are beautiful and will become more so. You are healthy and strong. You have a nice and loving family who are responsible people in the community, and you are financially independent. With all of this I suddenly realize that you are probably the most fortunate female of your age in the world.

  “You know you could have your own apartment on your return and will chose your own job and of course know that I am not offended by your decision. The question is—are you having some kind of interior battle of an important nature and have substituted me for your conscience or better judgment? I love you with all my heart.”18

  Frankie took her question to heart and returned to New York in 1965, still trying to keep the right distance from her mother. It wasn’t easy: “I was so identified with her in my mind. She was the one constant in my life. She was so beautiful, so admirable, and so brilliant in so many ways—every man fell in love with her. I felt like the ugly duckling in the story. I didn’t want to go back to her orbit.”19 Marietta Tree was too supportive to be easily dismissed as a vampire mother and too self-absorbed to be relied on.

  THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION had changed while FitzGerald was writing her novel in Paris. Passions that had focused on civil rights were shifting toward the buildup of the Vietnam War. While the two were twinned around the issue of social justice, Vietnam was hitting white American families in a way the racial issue did not. The military draft skyrocketed that year to the largest since the end of t
he Korean War. The draft exempted most young men in college, which meant that men of the lower classes and men of color were disproportionately sent to the new war. Julian Bond, the cofounder of the civil rights group Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was blocked from taking his seat in the Georgia state legislature because of his early opposition to the war. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and won.

  At first Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the civil rights movement, avoided open opposition to the war out of respect for President Johnson, who had championed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. When the troops landed in Da Nang, King would only say the war in Vietnam was “accomplishing nothing.” By late summer of 1965, King was more forceful, unsettled by the violent escalation of the conflict and calling for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam as well as a negotiated settlement. At year’s end, he was preaching against the immorality of the war: “As a minister of the gospel, I consider war an evil. I must cry out when I see war escalated at any point.”20

  On campuses across the country, students who came out of the civil rights movement were allying with pacifists and the nascent new left to protest the US involvement in the war. They organized teach-ins where they questioned the government’s rationale behind sending Americans to a small country across the globe, and they invited the press to their events, just as they had done in the South while registering black Americans to vote.

  In this atmosphere, Frankie decided to try breaking into journalism again. Her mother obliged. She hosted a small dinner party and introduced her to Clay Felker, the charismatic editor of the magazine of the New York Herald Tribune. Felker was a champion of new journalism and was publishing writers like Tom Wolfe. He was game and gave Frankie freelance assignments that played to her strengths: writing magazine profiles of men who were changing New York, men like John Torres, a young leader in the barrios of the city, and David Merrick, the impresario of the New York World Fair. She was becoming a published journalist, her name in print. Still, she saw no clear path toward a full-time career with the Tribune, where women on staff were stuck in the “flamingo-pink ghetto” of the women’s department.21