Pointedly, Marr praised FitzGerald for bridging the chasm between scholar and journalist.29 In fact, as late as 1970, there was no tenured professor of Vietnamese studies in an American university. John K. Fairbanks, professor at Harvard who was considered the founder of Chinese studies in America, said the lack of American scholarly expertise on Vietnam was an “academic Pearl Harbor.”30
Timing played heavily into the extraordinary reception of Fire in the Lake. Americans were exhausted by the endless war and wanted to know who the Vietnamese were who seemed to be winning.
Taylor Branch, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for his trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr., captured that feeling in his review for the Washington Monthly.
“Writing authoritatively from her experience in Vietnam… FitzGerald makes the culture vivid, the people alive and believable. She accomplishes on the vast stage of Vietnam what few writers can achieve in describing a single incident… how American dollars and arms ripped through the Vietnamese society, tearing up its people with firepower, and tearing up its values with whorehouses and refugee slums and Polaroid cameras.
“This comprehensiveness seems like a reward for FitzGerald’s sticking to Vietnam, for not bubbling off to Washington to take the pulse of national leaders who were thousands of miles from the effects of their policies… the best single volume on Vietnam.”31
Fire in the Lake came out at the same time as The Best and the Brightest, an examination of Washington’s early entry into Vietnam by David Halberstam. The New York Times journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Vietnam, Halberstam was considered the savant of the early Vietnam press corps. His long-awaited book dissected how the “whiz kids” at the center of the Kennedy administration—the best and brightest of the title—pushed the US deeper into Vietnam with “brilliant policies that defied common sense.”
To the shock of the journalistic establishment, Fire in the Lake won the top awards that year. FitzGerald, the young woman many of her colleagues had dismissed as an overprivileged dilettante while she was in Vietnam, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for history. It was the only book on Vietnam to win those three top prizes.
In a sense, Halberstam’s book came in second to FitzGerald because it seemed to confirm what Americans had come to accept, especially after the release of the Pentagon Papers: that Washington officials became involved in Vietnam for misguided reasons, hid unwelcome facts evident on the ground, and stuck to the devastating conflict out of hubris.
FitzGerald was overwhelmed. She had had so many doubts about her book she had never dreamed of winning these accolades.
There was grumbling among her journalist colleagues. The common complaint, as voiced by Dan Southerland of UPI, was she had relied too much on Paul Mus.32
FitzGerald’s book introduced Americans to the whole story, to Vietnam and the Vietnamese, as well as the American officials and American soldiers, explaining from Vietnam itself why the US was not winning and the unspeakable, tragic consequences.
And she had written for the general audience. “Not a scholar’s book,” she said, knowing that some academics would “huff and puff” over her generalizations meant to give the full view of war to Americans.33
Those complaints were lost in the tsunami of praise in the same year that the Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its Watergate coverage. FitzGerald felt a kinship with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who, as young reporters, had faced enormous skepticism as they uncovered the lies and crimes of President Nixon. Her blistering critique of Nixon’s war policy was unappreciated by the White House as well. “Henry Kissinger told me he was very offended by my book.”
Newspapers ran personality profiles of this high-achieving young journalist. Many treated her like a unicorn and were written by women for women or style sections. They focused on her family background as if being a WASP heiress explained her success. A classic example was a 1972 Washington Post profile by Myra MacPherson that began coyly saying FitzGerald had “all these handicaps” of privilege and wealth and important parents when she arrived in Saigon. Because of these “handicaps” the press corps didn’t take her seriously. An anonymous male reporter was quoted saying he expected FitzGerald “to be everything I wouldn’t like but she turned out to be great.” And so it went. MacPherson fixated on FitzGerald’s social status and showed no interest in her singular achievement of breaking through in a male world so that she could offer a new vision of how to cover war. MacPherson’s employer, the Washington Post, had never sent a woman overseas as a foreign correspondent, much less a war correspondent, and had not had a single female byline from the Vietnam War as late as 1972.34
Later, after she had covered the women’s movement and the legacy of the Vietnam War, MacPherson came to regret her profile of FitzGerald. She felt “a little ashamed” that she didn’t even think to ask FitzGerald how she, as a woman, had become a war correspondent in Vietnam, what hurdles she faced, and why so few women were able to follow her. MacPherson simply presumed that FitzGerald’s wealth and prestige magically opened up doors closed to other women.
MacPherson, like Kate Webb, also did not want to be labeled as sympathetic to women’s liberation. “In those days, there was this whole thing about trying to be one of the boys. There was a stigma attached to women’s lib. You didn’t wear it on your sleeve.”35
David Greenway, the Vietnam War correspondent with a similar high WASP and Ivy League lineage as FitzGerald—he had been christened by FitzGerald’s great-grandfather in the chapel at the exclusive Groton School—knew better than most that her family’s stature and Radcliff degree were useless to her. “If Frankie had been a young man, she would have automatically been hired by Time as I was. But she was female.”36
For FitzGerald, her new prestige and success meant that for the first time she could support herself as a journalist and author. Her bank account was fattened with the $25,000 payment from the New Yorker series and royalties from Fire in the Lake. She was in demand. And in Kevin Buckley she had a boyfriend who was happy to celebrate her success. Their romance fizzled out after a few years, but they became lifelong friends.
What FitzGerald couldn’t have realized then was how her work would inspire generations of journalists and historians to see war far beyond the battlefield, to examine the culture and history and clash of civilizations as seriously as the armed conflict itself. Among the many reporters who looked to her decades later was Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign correspondent for the Washington Post and the New York Times, who cited Fire in the Lake as his touchstone when he began covering wars in the Middle East thirty years later.37
In a “lessons learned” study on Vietnam, the CIA credited FitzGerald with identifying “the basic misunderstanding and miscommunication between Vietnamese and Americans… which made the whole enterprise risky in the extreme.”38
Her book had an immediate impact on historians even though she wrote it as a generalist. Fredrik Logevall, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian of wartime Vietnam, said Fire in the Lake was “absolutely of seminal importance—a profoundly important book.”39
When he first read it in college, it “was an intellectually thrilling experience,” he said. “It had a huge influence on me as a beginning scholar of the war.”
Years later he saw flaws and problems in the book but believes some of the later criticism was motivated by jealousy. “Yes, I think there is jealousy. What we know about academic and journalist envy. There is sexism going on, too.
“This book needs to be judged for its time and its importance at the time. Her book filled a void and was an extraordinary influence. It is a classic.”40
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saigon Signing Off
RICHARD NIXON PROMISED PEACE IN VIETNAM AS HE PREPARED for his 1972 reelection campaign. Nixon argued that he had made great progress toward negotiating “an honorable end to the Vietnam War” and had even brought home half a millio
n American soldiers from the war under his Vietnamization program. Reelect him, he said, and let him finish the job. Ignore the antiwar pacifism of his opponent Senator George McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat.1
McGovern openly opposed the war and called for an American withdrawal from Vietnam in exchange for the return of American prisoners of war. He also supported amnesty for American draft dodgers. In the climate of the time, McGovern, a taciturn Midwesterner, was successfully tarred as being ultraliberal and unpatriotic, a champion of “amnesty, abortion, and acid.” Nixon led in all the polls.2
The antiwar veterans whom Cathy Leroy befriended at Woodstock did not trust Nixon. They planned a demonstration they called Operation Last Patrol at the Republican National Convention in Miami in August 1972, part of a massive antiwar rally aimed at disrupting the convention as it nominated Nixon.
The veterans got in touch with Leroy, and she decided to film their event. For her, their protest was a tragic continuation of their service to the country, a coda she could never have imagined when she first photographed the young Americans in battle in 1966. Their message was simple: no other soldiers should be sacrificed for a lost cause.
She flew in from Paris and teamed with Frank Cavestani, one of the Vietnam veterans at Woodstock. Cavestani claimed he had held a bottle of bourbon for Janis Joplin while she performed on stage.3 Even though she was the only professional photographer or videographer of the two, Leroy shared credit with Cavestani as directors and for cinema photography. Cavestani was an actor and had never been a professional photographer.4
The filming began on August 15, 1972, as thousands of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War left in convoys from cities around the country—San Diego, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Detroit, New York—all headed to Miami. Leroy was with the crew in San Diego. With their long hair, mismatched shirts, and antiwar signs, the veterans resembled hippies on a quest. The discipline they showed in keeping the cavalcades moving reflected their military training.
The film, Operation Last Patrol, begins with Leroy’s still photographs from Vietnam showing the face of the war that these men fought. Then an intimate, casual monologue by a veteran named Ron Kovic takes over. Kovic is driving as he explains calmly how three 30 caliber bullets had wounded him and left him paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. He is young, angry, and articulate. He remembers seeing babies dying as civilians were napalmed, admitting “I still have nightmares.”
The group traveled three thousand miles over five days across the South in a caravan of VW beetles and buses and battered four-door sedans. Kovic’s interviews were interspersed with panning shots of freeways and traffic.
At one stop Kovic picked up a megaphone to lament that “what this trip does, I suppose, is work out our guilt for the crimes we’ve done.… Nixon will win [the election] but we’re the biggest losers. The damage has already been done. It’s corrupted America.”
At night, the veterans and women traveling with them set up tents and ate communally. They bathed communally in rivers, their bodies silhouetted against pale evening skies, their dogs waiting on the riverbanks.
Driving through Texas, they were stopped and searched by state police. Driving through Louisiana, they were escorted by state police. Along the way, other veterans shared their anger and confusion over the war. One said he had such bad nerves he broke the fingers of a friend waking him up. Another said he conquered his heroin addiction with cough syrup and candy bars. By the time they reached Miami, they were keyed up for action, convinced they were the true patriots. “We’ve been there. We all got honorable discharges. We aren’t subversives, communists, or draft dodgers. We think the war is wrong.”
The veterans marched down the streets of Miami whistling “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” and raising their fists to shouts of “right on!” They chanted: “Babies keep on dying—Nobody seems to care.”
Kovic moved in his wheelchair past barbed-wire barricades, police, and tear gas, into the conventional hall. “An ex-Marine who won the silver star and is paralyzed from the waist down begged for attention from his wheelchair and was answered by the cold, empty stares of delegates as Nixon made his acceptance speech,” Leroy wrote in a film precis.
The film shows Kovic in the hall shouting: “Do you hear me when I say I’m in pain from this war?”
Operation Last Patrol became a niche favorite, portraying as it did the agony of antiwar veterans in the age of Nixon. Kovic was so inspired by the documentary that he immediately wrote his autobiography Born on the Fourth of July. It became a best seller and was made into a hit movie in 1989, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Tom Cruise as Kovic. The movie won two Oscars. Kovic got Cavestani a position as paid adviser for the film and as an actor playing several unnamed veterans. The two gave speeches describing how Operation Last Patrol inspired Born on the Fourth of July.5
Missing from all of this was Leroy. Kovic never acknowledged her in his book or in the Hollywood feature film.6 Leroy was angry and disappointed that only Cavestani received public acclaim and credit for what was also very much her movie. She told friends that she fought to receive some financial compensation. She remained proud of Operation Last Patrol, though, and included it in the catalogue of her most important coverage of the Vietnam War.
By the time she finished making the documentary, Leroy made herself a promise: she would not return to Vietnam until she was certain she would photograph the war’s end.
NORTH VIETNAM MADE another attempt to win the war militarily with a massive Spring Offensive beginning at the end of March 1972. President Nixon had made public the secret talks between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, and all sides seemed to be maneuvering for battlefield advantage in advance of a cease-fire. But North Vietnamese leader Le Duan was more ambitious: he wanted to overthrow the South Vietnamese government.
Hanoi sent 120,000 troops across the DMZ in its biggest offensive since Tet in 1968. With Soviet tanks and heavy artillery, the North Vietnamese captured territory deep in the South. But the ARVN counterattacked with massive American bombing support and pushed the communists out of An Loc and Quang Tri City. Under Vietnamization, American strength had been reduced to 140,000 troops remaining in the country.
The US also launched its first air attack on North Vietnam since 1968, signaling that Washington would escalate as necessary to halt the North Vietnamese. Kissinger said the bombing was “saving American honor.” ARVN held off the North Vietnamese, and the offensive ended in May with a North Vietnamese defeat. But the communists held on to some of the newly captured territory in the South, which would prove critical in the months ahead.
The South Vietnamese army had been stronger than expected. Historians would later debate whether ARVN could have reversed the course of the war eventually and kept Vietnam divided. Nixon felt the renewed bombing of North Vietnam demonstrated how “we will demolish them” if they didn’t accept his peace proposals.
That failed Spring Offensive helped convince the North Vietnamese of the wisdom of Ho Chi Minh. He had opposed the earlier Tet Offensive in the belief that the road to victory required the departure of the Americans first before defeating Saigon.
The North Vietnamese returned to the negotiating table over the summer, and both sides made concessions and rewrote proposals. In early October, Le Duc Tho wrote a nine-point peace agreement that included the essential new compromises needed from both sides and handed it to Kissinger. Under the plan, the United States would allow North Vietnamese troops to remain in place in the South. And Hanoi would drop its requirement that the South Vietnamese government and military be disbanded at the same time. That was the breakthrough Kissinger had been waiting for.
“We’ve done it,” said Kissinger.7
After their three years of secret negotiations, both sides were pleased. American objectives were fulfilled with the agreement that the communists would release all American prisoners of war as the United States withdrew all of its troops and ended direct m
ilitary involvement. The final terms were not unlike the McGovern plan proposed in 1972.
President Nixon and North Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong agreed on the text and scheduled an official signing on October 30, 1972, days before the November presidential election.
But South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu was furious. He had been left out of the talks where, to his mind, the United States had accepted too many of North Vietnam’s conditions in the peace accords, including recognizing Vietnam as a single nation and not two sovereign states. Under the agreement, there would be no withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the South, and no effective body to police a cease-fire. The political future of South Vietnam was not settled.8
Thieu refused to accept the agreement.
Back in Washington, Kissinger downplayed Thieu’s intransigence as a misunderstanding. “Peace is at hand,” he said at a press conference packed with one hundred reporters hoping to report that the Vietnam War was ending.
Nixon won reelection in November in a landslide, carrying all the states except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
Buoyed, Kissinger gave the North Vietnamese sixty-nine new amendments proposed by South Vietnam, expecting Hanoi to accept a few as a face-saving compromise for Thieu. But the North Vietnamese resisted Kissinger’s pleas. The talks were officially declared at an impasse on December 16, 1972.
Two days later, the United States launched the largest aerial blitz of the war, attacking Hanoi and Haiphong for twelve days in what became known as the Christmas bombing. B-52 bombers and fighter jets dropped bombs around the clock on what was left of military targets, effectively destroying the city’s air defense cover. The bombs hit city blocks and nearby villages. Bach Mai Hospital was hit twice. Schools, pagodas, markets, and apartment houses were flattened. At least 1,600 civilians were killed. Photographs of this destruction were published around the world and provoked mass demonstrations. Pope Paul VI said the bombing was the “object of daily grief,” while Sweden’s prime minister compared it to Nazi atrocities.9
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