As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator William Fulbright held nationally televised hearings on the war. He publicly worried that the United States was showing an “arrogance of power” and was “in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it.”22
At the hearings, George Kennan, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union and a respected foreign policy analyst, advised that the United States “withdraw as soon as this could be done without inordinate damage to our prestige or stability in the area” and to avoid risking war with China.23 Angry at Kennan’s testimony, President Johnson ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate whether his old friend Fulbright was “either a communist agent or a dupe of the communists.”
Powerful voices were joining Middle Americans, asking: Why not end this war with a negotiated settlement? Ambassador Lodge found a surprise ally in Henry A. Kissinger, the Harvard professor who had been no fan of the war. But in 1966, Kissinger publicly came out against negotiations with North Vietnam, arguing that South Vietnam wasn’t ready; it wasn’t strong enough. Lodge invited Kissinger to visit Saigon in July.
It was the professor’s second visit to what he called a “weirdly fascinating city” of dirty streets, hopeless traffic, and graceful people.24 Lodge assured him that the war was practically won and insisted that a peace settlement shouldn’t be on offer. Ellsberg, in a separate conversation with Kissinger, demurred, saying things weren’t so good in the countryside: the local military cadre system wasn’t working, and the provincial administration was so poor, “we are simply shuffling dirt in the wind.”25
After a quick survey of rural Vietnam, Kissinger realized that Ellsberg’s assessment was the more accurate one. But he stuck with Lodge, advising against negotiations, an opinion that became more important over time.
Before he left, Henry Kissinger met Frankie FitzGerald at a party. She remembered him from her Radcliffe College years when she took classes at Harvard. He paid close attention to her, flirting and recounting a meandering story from his rural tours.
A few weeks later FitzGerald received a letter, hand-delivered by John Negroponte, another rising young diplomat at the embassy:
Dear Frankie:
This is just a note upon my return to the United States to tell you how much I enjoyed seeing you in Vietnam. I thought your article on Hau Nghia was extremely sensitive. Do let me know when you are back to the States and we can then form a society for picaresque talks of Vietnam. Kind regards,
Sincerely yours,
Henry A. Kissinger26
FitzGerald dismissed his attention: “To him I was just a pretty girl.”
But that would not be the last of their exchanges.
DURING HER RECOVERY, FitzGerald read a book strongly recommended by Tran Ngoc Chau, a Vietnamese intellectual working with Ellsberg on pacification programs. Chau had fought on the Viet Minh side against France during the First Indochina War and then joined the South Vietnamese side during the American war. He told her that Viet-Nam: Sociologie d’une Guerre by Paul Mus would help her understand what was unfolding in the American war.27
She was enthralled. Sociologie d’une Guerre was a masterpiece. Mus provided her with the historical and cultural underpinnings to see Vietnam as its own country and its quest for independence. His book was much more than an academic’s work; it was infused with insights and nuance from his upbringing in Vietnam.
The son of a French academic, Mus was raised from an early age in Tonkin, the northern region of French colonial Vietnam, where his father opened the Collège du Protectorat. He graduated from high school in Hanoi, knowing Vietnam and the Vietnamese as few other foreigners did. In World War II, he joined the Free French resistance and saw firsthand what it meant for your own country to be occupied by a foreign country. Mus left Europe with a new sympathy for the Vietnamese and their fight for independence. After the war, Mus became a senior adviser to the French high commissioner of Indochina as France faced another war with the Viet Minh.
By then, Mus was the most qualified of the senior French aides and was sent to the jungle headquarters of Ho Chi Minh on a historic mission to reopen negotiations for a cease-fire. On hearing the French offer, Ho famously rejected it, saying: “In the French Union there is no place for cowards. If I accepted these conditions, I would be one.”28
Mus became convinced that Ho and his Viet Minh had already won the war for the people’s allegiance. He became a respected public opponent of the French Indochina War and published Sociologie d’une Guerre before the war ended.
Sociologie d’une Guerre wasn’t an easy read: it was never translated into English. But Mus’s book gave FitzGerald a new understanding of the sophisticated questions that Americans refused to ask.
RECOVERED FROM HER illness, FitzGerald set off on one of her most ambitious projects: an article for the New York Times Magazine on the village of Duc Lap. But first she had to convince an American commander to allow her to ride on his helicopter to the village. He refused to believe she was a journalist much less writing for the Times. Though FitzGerald had shown him her credentials from MACV, he still didn’t believe her. This wasn’t the first time the American military had given her a hard time, but it was among the most brazen. She had no doubt the problem was her gender.
“Wait,” he told her. FitzGerald waited, politely, for hours, while Lt. Col. Harley F. Mooney Jr., commander of a battalion of the United States Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, picked up his military telephone and asked to be patched through from rural Vietnam to New York City and the New York Times. When he finally reached the newspaper, an editor confirmed that FitzGerald was writing a piece for the magazine. She then was given a ride on the helicopter.29
On the ride to Duc Lap, FitzGerald flew over undulating blue-green rice paddies that appeared to her “like the bottom of an aquarium.” She would make multiple trips to the hamlet in order to describe the war at village level, where the consequences of the set-piece battles and lethal politics played out on the most human scale. Missing from official US or South Vietnamese findings was any evidence that their aid and military campaigns harmed or helped the rural villages where the vast majority of Vietnamese lived. Who was protecting them from either the Viet Cong or errant friendly fire of the ARVN or the US? Did they feel loyalty to either side or victims of both? Were the American programs to win the political war working? FitzGerald had selected Duc Lap, a provincial capital just twenty-two miles south of Saigon that was regularly under attack, as the test case for whether the Saigon government had recovered any effectiveness after the string of political crises in the capital.
The village was sufficiently important—a transportation crossroads in the middle of a rich rice-growing region—that the US Army sent a battalion to help the ARVN combat a resurgent Viet Cong in early 1966. It was also part of a larger project, which Daniel Ellsberg was involved in, to uncover and try to eliminate corruption.
As she began her reporting, FitzGerald kept Ellsberg at a distance, writing in her notes that Dan was wrong to “expect a simply anti-government article about Duc Lap.” She tried to let the villagers and farmers speak for themselves, which was difficult to do since she didn’t speak Vietnamese and had to rely on translators.
In “Life and Death of a Vietnamese Village,” Duc Lap became an entire universe. The war was seen uniquely from the villagers’ point of view: what had been lost in each phase of the war beginning with the drive for independence from the French; how homes, fields, and traditions were changed or obliterated beyond recognition.
The villagers described the sorrow and anger they felt about the recent programs crafted in Saigon or Washington that forced them out of their homes into barbed-wire enclosures called strategic hamlets. FitzGerald included no quotes from foreign experts. Her method of reporting required sitting patiently with people with a radically different sense of time and different cultural touchstones and sorting out how their stories
fit together.
In Duc Lap, the two sides were at a virtual standoff. The men guarding the village fled when the fighting flared up. The Viet Cong taxed the villagers at night while the South Vietnamese taxed them during daylight. Each side drafted the young men until most had disappeared.
The American commander hoped his battalion’s visit would shore up support for the Saigon side of the war and break the deadlock. An American military medic set up a makeshift clinic in a hamlet’s granary and storage shed where he dispensed medicine and treated people who hadn’t seen a doctor in years.30
The medical care was meant to offset the damage that had been done earlier when American mortars had landed on the village, destroying homes and killing water buffalo.
In this designated strategic hamlet, the villagers had to stay in their homes or risk being shot by the government troops protecting them. Because the fighting made it impossible for them to farm their rice paddies, food was routinely scarce. A village elder said all he wanted was enough to eat and to sleep in peace without the sound of artillery.
In that atmosphere, FitzGerald wrote, “fear and suspicion rose like a ground mist.”
The officials from the Saigon government were routinely corrupt. The village’s local administrators stole food, money, and, most alarmingly, the dinh or the village’s guardian spirit. Village elders told FitzGerald that the people believed the communists would win because the side that relied on a foreign power would lose.
“Worse than the houses burned and the fields left to jungle was the villagers’ loss of identity,” FitzGerald wrote.
The Times published her article in September 1966.31 The next month the New Yorker published a more traditional magazine piece about Vietnam. The contrast was striking.
Robert Shaplen, the esteemed Far East correspondent for the New Yorker, wrote “Letter from Saigon,” a densely reported analysis of the state of the war as seen from the capital.32 He reported that the South Vietnamese Constituent Assembly had been elected with the purpose of holding free and fair elections; the French rubber plantations continued to make money; and a shake-up of the generals had preceded the Viet Cong’s continued assaults during the rainy season while the communists continued their strategy of fighting until the United States gave up. That comprehensive sweep did not break new ground or offer a fresh perspective much less present the reality for rural Vietnamese villagers.
Yet, one year later, the New Yorker ran a piece called “The Village of Ben Suc,” a devastating article by Jonathan Schell, a young journalist who chronicled how the US attacks and forced migration destroyed the village and banished its inhabitants to muddy camps.33 It was similar to FitzGerald’s and showed the extent to which her vision was helping define the war.
FITZGERALD WAS RELIEVED when Ward Just returned to Saigon from Washington. In his absence, she had moved into her own apartment, a carriage house behind a Vietnamese villa where she continued her recovery in relative quiet. In one diary entry she wrote: “I am scared of the loneliness of it. This small town is a lonely place.”
In September she had a burst of introspection, about herself, her work, and her romance: “It’s so hard to write. I haven’t the energy left over for it after this day of walking up and down Tu Do Street in the dead, sulk heat… Real entropy this place.
“One goes along drifting—not listening, not really listening at all the way one must as a writer and a person. I haven’t listened to Ward for so long… I feel numb, deadened to the point where I hate to spend an evening alone…
“I do not long for another day. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow. So, I read Tolkien and tears come.”34
She had few close friends she could confide in or relax with, and none of them were women journalists who could appreciate the pressures of her life. About four other women reporters lived in Vietnam at the time, but their lives rarely crossed. She never met Catherine Leroy. Denby Fawcett remembers seeing FitzGerald at a distance with Ward Just and once writing in Just’s apartment. Nothing more.
The legendary Martha Gellhorn did visit Saigon to report a piece, but she essentially ignored FitzGerald to concentrate on Just, who was happy to accompany her around. Gellhorn’s marriage to Hemingway and her stories of the Spanish Civil War and D-Day held Just in thrall.
FitzGerald did report briefly alongside Patricia Marx, a visiting radio reporter who was dating and would eventually marry Dan Ellsberg. The two women had much in common—Marx had graduated from Radcliffe two years before FitzGerald and was also an heiress—and they worked well together.
FitzGerald wrote her final long-form article for the Atlantic Monthly, focusing on the city of Saigon like a local reporter, showing the consequences of war far from the battlefield. She spent weeks investigating how well the city worked, not as the capital of South Vietnam but as the municipality in charge of the welfare of 1.7 million inhabitants and the infrastructure and economy to provide their needs.
Saigon had become overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of new refugees fleeing their war-torn villages in 1966. The municipal government had no power or funds to care for them, and neither the South Vietnamese nor the US governments took direct responsibility for their welfare.
The budget of the mayor of Saigon was miniscule, less than that of a small American city even though the national war budget was endless. He had to beg national ministries for help that never came. He bragged that he once went to the countryside and stole a herd of hogs from the Viet Cong to help feed his city. “I do not have to fight the people; I have to fight the government.”
The US embassy admitted it didn’t know if American aid money was funding successful projects in Saigon. “If you find out anything, just let us know,” one of the coordinators told FitzGerald with a straight face.
Official neglect blighted the city: the sewer system was foul; the water pipes were rusting and corroded and all the water in the city came from just forty wells; the public bus system contained only seventy buses, a third of which were usually out of commission. Public housing was inadequate even before the population explosion provoked by the American war. Public education was even worse.
The Vietnamese elites, Americans, and other foreigners lived in Saigon neighborhoods with piped clean water, sewer, and electricity. Corruption created an impossible gap between the few rich and the massive number of poor people in Saigon.
“Given the overcrowding, the lack of drainage, of sewage and garbage collection, it may rate as one of the least healthy cities in the world,” FitzGerald wrote. The thousands of Americans living in the city ignored or shunned these slums “hidden within a tangle of canals, between main streets fronted with respectable houses.”
“Gigantic sewers, lakes full of stagnant filth, above which thatched huts rise on stilts, crammed together but connected by only a thin strip of rotting board… a small boy falls in and flounders in the filth.”
The slum dwellers were former villagers and farmers who turned to begging for a lack of a livelihood and whose children ran in gangs. They were angry. When FitzGerald and Marx visited one slum, they were pelted with stones.
FitzGerald called these slums the new face of Vietnam. They were the ultimate expression of the dysfunctional American war strategy. The contrast with the American extravagance for the military was stark. Just one Defense Department contract to MK-BRJ, a group of American companies hired to build military construction projects in South Vietnam, cost more than the total Vietnamese GNP. Such an imbalance fed corruption. It was impossible for the Vietnamese professional classes to be both honest and able to feed their families.
FitzGerald’s final report anticipated America’s ultimate failure in Vietnam. It was entitled: “Behind the Façade: The Tragedy of Saigon.”
She considered it her most substantial piece, and it reflected her growing sense that the United States’ military strategy was failing. She was tired of the deaths and the torpor of daily life in the war zone. It was a cumulative fatigue. Her notebooks were
scattered with exhaustion. “Am too tired to write after another average day in Saigon. Mostly errands. How to transport a potted palm in a cycle moteur. How to be sure the French market has sent the food, how to buy notebooks, telephone 3 bureaucrats, get a new Vietnamese press card… et tout, et tout.”
With fatigue came friction. Another day she wrote: “Maybe Ward wishes I would go away for a while. Just to see what it would be like.”
By September 1966, she realized she hadn’t fully recovered from her illness and was at the end of her rope. She made plans to move back to New York. She wrote her father, who was relieved at the thought his daughter would soon be leaving Vietnam.
Desmond FitzGerald welcomed her decision and wrote her a letter of congratulations for her New York Times Magazine piece about My Tho and the Mekong Delta, showing he appreciated what his intellectual daughter was trying to accomplish.
“I think I understand your style of working which is not to write until you feel you have a three-dimensional graph on the subject—most commendable and encouraging when one contemplates the miles of newsprint covered with surface scribblings from everywhere,” he wrote.35
And he included her in his own work on the war: “Like everyone else in Washington, (it must be by statute) I devote a good bit of my time to Viet Nam but I wish that I could swear that it was to great avail. I am about to lose my franchise as a participant in the V N game because I haven’t inflicted myself on Saigon for almost a year.”
In a last burst of energy, Frankie FitzGerald finished the reporting for several articles she would complete after she returned to the United States. She celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday in October with Ward Just. Their romance was still blazing when FitzGerald flew home the next month, arriving in New York City for a fancy gala on November 28, 1966.
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