Unleashed Memoir #6 / Part I: Exciting preparations

In which the author, as he embarks on the fourth decade of his life, finally succeeds in attaining his long-sought goal: posting as a foreign correspondent. With ever so many adventures to come.

On October 6, with my beloved wife of the past quarter century—Pamela—I celebrated the 80^th anniversary of my presence on this planet among my fellow citizens of the world. As it happens, it also marks precisely the half century (50 years) since I embarked on my life as a foreign correspondent, observer, and chronicler of more than 90 lands far from my own. To commemorate this, another moment from my own past, frozen in time, you will find here an excerpt from my memoir, "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter,” which is still being written. From time to time, Unleashed Memoir will present excerpts from this work where and when they resonate especially. And in this excerpt, I am preparing for so many adventures to come.

To set the context

At the debut of the year 1975, the war in Vietnam had largely stabilized—absent most Americans. The peak, of course, had been reached in 1968 when more than 536,000 U.S. troops were "in country," larger than the population of the city of Miami at the time, which marked the peak, too, of vast anti-war demonstrations stretching across the United States.

It took until January 1973 for President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to reach a peace accord with North Vietnam in Paris. American withdrawals began without hesitation, though the war continued brutally between north and south. By the opening days of 1975, barely 50 uniformed American troops remained in South Vietnam, while back home most Americans had had their fill of the conflict. All this perhaps played a role in the decision by New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal and foreign editor Jim Greenfield to send an utter novice into the heart of darkness. This chapter of my story begins with my preparations for departure—and how The Times readied one of its own to take on such a new challenge.

By January 10, 1975—fifty years ago—my life on the Metro Desk of The New York Times finally wound to a close. I’d embarrassed Mayor Abe Beame earlier that week by disclosing that at least one Bronx hospital had barely a 62% occupancy rate and was costing $458.68 ($2,665 in 2024 dollars) a day to care for each patient. In a three-part front-page expose, beginning January 5, effectively my Metro swan song—I have tended to depart most of my gigs with a bang—I'd uncovered the sad fiscal and medical reality of the city’s hospitals, namely, as I observed, “Five years after the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation was created to improve the quality of care in the municipal hospitals, patients are still dying from inferior medical treatment, the corporation is virtually insolvent and, as the largest non-federal health-delivery system in the nation, is struggling just to provide the basic minimums of health care."

Ironically, I shared this front page with Jim Markham, who I was to be replacing in Vietnam as he moved on to Paris, and Sy Hersh, still a great friend five decades later, who'd earned his place in the firmament with some major Vietnam-era exposés.

For nearly two months now, my name would disappear from The Times’ pages. I was getting prepared. First there were the shots—typhoid on January 7, cholera two days later, plague (that’s right, the bubonic plague, carried by fleas on infected rats in Saigon) on January 13—all administered by the paper’s medical department. (A service that died along with many other perks before long.) To check out the landscape, I had lunch at the Harvard Club with Larry Altman, the globe-trotting physician who for decades was The Times medical editor. I stopped in to see Lola Madsen at the Citibank branch at 40^th Street and Broadway who’d shepherded the finances and paychecks for a generation of Times men and women as they traveled the world.

Before any Times foreign correspondent headed overseas, however, a final stop had to be in Washington for a round of high-level briefings that the bureau was quite adept at setting up—pinballing from embassies to Capitol Hill to the White House, down to Foggy Bottom for the State Department, out to the Pentagon and winding up at the Central Intelligence Agency.

My week began Monday morning January 20 at the office of Hay Maly, a 32-year-old career Cambodian diplomat at the Khmer Embassy, 4500 16^th Street, N.W., in the heart of Embassy Row.

Maly was one of seven Khmer diplomats who would be stranded in America when the brutal Khmer Rouge took over his country three months later and he dared not return to Phnom Penh with his wife and five small children. For now, he quickly agreed to stamp my passport with a dramatic, full-page, utterly useless visa of the Cambodian Republic, which no one on my arrival even glanced at since the airport was being shelled mercilessly by the Khmer Rouge. But I’m getting ahead of my story. An hour later, I was on Capitol Hill in Room 132 of the Old [Russell] Senate Office Building where Jerry Tinker held sway. Tinker, then 35 years old, was the master of all issues dealing with refugees. Staff director for the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Tinker, who’d studied in India, knew more about these problems than anyone in Washington. And as it turned out refugees would come to dominate my years in Asia. When Tinker died in 1994 at age 55, Senator Kennedy said he’d been “instrumental in shaping every piece of immigration legislation for two decades, including the sweeping Immigration Reform Act of 1990.”

After lunch, I headed across the river to the Pentagon. There, Bill Beecher took me in tow. Meeting him at the River Entrance of what looked to me as the largest office building in the world—which it happened to be at the time—Bill escorted me to the first of two most valuable appointments he’d arranged. Beecher, a fellow Harvard man, pre-dated me by a decade, having done his obligatory stint on the Crimson, just up the block from Adams House where lived. He’d joined the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs a year before I arrived in Washington for my briefings. Seems that Eliot Richardson, when appointed Secretary of Defense, had persuaded Bill to leave a remarkable career in The Times Washington bureau to help spruce up the image of the American military, somewhat seriously tarnished by the years of the Vietnam War.

Of course, Bill had done his level best himself to tarnish that reputation. His beat was defense and national security, and in 1969, just after I’d joined the paper, he broke the story of the secret bombing of Cambodia. This was the project of Henry Kissinger, then the National Security Advisor to Nixon—such a closely held secret that Secretary of State William Rogers was denied any detailed information about the air strikes against the Ho Chi Minh trail routes and sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos that were being used for re-supply by Hanoi of its North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. The effect, however, was to drive the war more deeply into Cambodia and bolster the resolve and the domestic image of the Khmer Rouge who would wind up seizing control of Cambodia barely weeks after my eventual arrival in Phnom Penh.

Beecher set up two appointments. The first was with Morton Abramowitz —a most appropriate briefer for me, though I wouldn’t realize that for nearly a year, since he’d just recently completed a tour of duty as ambassador to Thailand and had now been loaned to the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for inter-American, East Asian, and Pacific affairs. That meant he was mostly concerned with what was happening in Vietnam since the armistice. My second appointment was with one of the Pentagon’s true dark knights—Erich von Marbod, whose official title was manager of the Office of the Vietnam Military Assistance Program, but who was really the Defense Secretary’s principal deputy for Vietnam issues. There were many who considered him the Pentagon’s best bureaucrat—someone who could get things done. Frankly, since I can hardly recall a single remark from either of them, I guess their job of delivering no memorable comments had been most effectively accomplished.

Quite a gaggle … l-r: Henry Kissinger… Gerald Ford … von Marbod … Theodore G. Shackley, chief, East Asia Division CIA, station chief in Miami, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, director of the "Phoenix Program" in Vietnam, station chief in Laos 1966–1968, running the secret war there, Saigon station chief 1968-1972, in 1976 head of CIA's worldwide covert operations … George A. Carver, Jr., Deputy to the Director of Central Intelligence for National Intelligence Officers … Army Chief of Staff Gen. Frederick Weyand.

On Tuesday morning, I delivered my passport to the Lao Embassy to get my visa stamp, though I hardly wasted any time at all there—Laos, at the time, seeming quite a distant sideshow from the main attraction of Vietnam. But Wednesday proved to be the highlight of my visit as I headed over to the State Department.

My first stop there was with Philip C. Habib, a veteran Lebanese-American, who on his death in 1992, The Times described as “the outstanding professional diplomat of his generation in the United States.” At the time, he was serving as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He’d just returned from a triumphant tour of duty as ambassador to South Korea. (The residence of the American Ambassador in Seoul, which he’d commissioned, is still named Habib House.) But he’d made his stripes as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace accords that had negotiated the truce ending the hottest phase of the war in Vietnam.

At the time I stopped by his office, on the department’s sixth floor, just below the office of the Secretary of State, he was best known as the department’s top expert on Vietnam.

“You’re going to Saigon, young man,” he began, confirming what I already knew, as we sat down in overstuffed armchairs. “And you’ve been preparing for this?”

“I have,” I replied brightly. “I’ve even been taking Vietnamese lessons and doing quite nicely, thanks.”

Habib looked at me closely. “Are you married?” he said suddenly.

“I am,” I confessed, somewhat surprised and wondering where this might be going.

“Then you’ll never learn Vietnamese. The only way to learn Vietnamese is to get a Vietnamese girlfriend.”

I was not terribly surprised. Even my Vietnamese tutor suggested much the same, then warned me that I probably shouldn’t tell, Susan, my bride of four months.

There followed some less than memorable briefings with the desk officers for Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, escorted by Morton S. Smith, director of public affairs for the East Asia and Pacific Bureau. Habib, incidentally, would eventually be replaced by a brilliant young foreign service officer, newly returned from Vietnam, named Richard C. Holbrooke who would take over at the age of 35 a position that most men would not occupy until they were decades older.

I would see Habib only one more time, six months and it seemed a lifetime later. Habib had arrived in Vientiane, capital of Laos—the last of the three Indochinese dominos not to have fallen to their homegrown communist rebels. It was a last ditch effort to snatch some semblance of victory from the jaws of a very ignominious across-the-board defeat. If anyone could have pulled it off, I was persuaded, it was Habib. But by the time we met him at the airport as he was exiting, his mission really in tatters, there was barely a handful of we correspondents there to see him off….

Habib, seated center … from top left, yours truly, Le Monde, embassy spokesman…in front, Lew Simons (WashPost), Bob Kaylor (UPI), and a young Ed Bradley (CBS), pre-60 Minutes.

Of course, Habib tried gamely to put the best possible shine on his efforts, as we dutifully reported…

But within weeks, Prince Souvanna Phouma, who as prime minister struggled to play honorable mediator, was gone. And the Pathet Lao were in charge. I was the last American correspondent there at the end, til the Pathet Lao discovered me and, well, encouraged my exit. But more about that later.

Meanwhile, back in DC before I set forth…..

The next morning at 11 AM I presented myself at the Vietnam Embassy at 1738 P Street NW, for a brief meeting with Ambassador Pham Duong Hien, who was persuaded to give me a Vietnam visa on the spot. As chief government spokesman, two years earlier in Saigon he'd engineered the expulsion of the NBC correspondent Ron Nessen [later, ironically, Gerald Ford's press secretary], for having “distorted” the remarks of a military spokesman and falsely attributing them to Pham.

At which point I was off like a shot to lunch at the Hay Adams Hotel, where I was staying, just across Lafayette Park with the White House out the window. My lunch guest was Dick Moose, 42 years old, who was staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired for 16 years by Senator J. William Fulbright, the Democrat who represented Arkansas for three decades. If there was one elected official in Washington who was able to set America’s foreign policy priorities, it was Fulbright. A Rhodes Scholar at Pembroke College, Oxford, following a stellar career as a college football star, from his first days in Washington, Fulbright broke molds. He was the sole opponent, in 1954, of an appropriation for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist-hunting Subcommittee on Investigations. But his most notable contribution was to take the lead opposing America’s widening role in the Vietnam War—dramatically reversing the support his sponsorship of the landmark Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 had given President Johnson in terms of an all but unfettered right to flood Vietnam with American forces.

Moose, more recently arrived, was the architect of Fulbright’s impressive anti-war stand. I recall Moose as a rumpled, bear of a man, with a capacious intellect and total understanding of the realities of the world, especially the Indochina where I was heading. I lost track of Moose after our one encounter in Washington. But his illustrious career in the State Department eventually came to a somewhat ignominious end when he resigned as Undersecretary of State for Management in 1996 after State’s inspector general began an investigation into charges in an anonymous letter that much of Moose’s overseas travel had been taken in the company of a woman on his staff with whom he was alleged to be having an affair.

After my lunch with Moose, I headed back to the State Department for a briefing with Douglas Pike, at the time the department’s leading specialist on our enemies—the Viet Cong and the government of North Vietnam. Described by those who knew him as a “living encyclopedia of the war,” Pike would eventually publish eight books and collect more than seven million pages of documents relating to Vietnam and the war.

“Vietnam has become the great intellectual tragedy of our times,” he wrote in his major 1969 work War, Peace, and the Viet Cong, which was one of a host of books I’d been reading in preparation for my departure. Pike had managed to develop enemies on both sides of the Vietnam debate—a paper he’d published five years before suggested North Vietnamese forces had massacred civilians at Hue during the Tet offensive of 1968, while later sharply criticizing the ineptitude and corruption of the South Vietnamese government and military that the United States was supporting. We spent the better part of an hour talking about the ongoing role of the VC in the region, and especially the role they might play in any future government of a united Vietnam—one of the few individuals to recognize that this might become a reality sooner rather than later.

It was only with the greatest reluctance that I broke off our conversation since at 5 o’clock, I had an appointment with Peter Rodman, a top aide to Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council staff at the White House, who would serve every Republican President from Nixon through George W. Bush until his untimely death in 2008 at age 64 from leukemia . Peter and I had grown up together in Massachusetts. He was a year older than I, but we were both Sunday school students of Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn at Boston’s Temple Israel. His father, Sumner Rodman, happened to be a classmate (1931) of my father at Harvard and eventually became his insurance broker.

Peter had hooked up with Kissinger when he became his undergraduate thesis advisor in 1963 and would follow his mentor throughout his career in global diplomacy. Peter was at Kissinger’s side throughout the Vietnam peace talks, for the opening of China and the historic Nixon trip to Peking, and the extended shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Egypt in the Middle East. Eventually, Peter ghost-wrote most of Kissinger’s remarkable three volume memoirs before returning to the State and Defense Departments as policy planning guru. In short, in January 1975, there was no better guide to the American perspective of the Vietnam War and its aftermath than Peter. And seated in his ornate office, before the fireplace in the Old Executive Office Building just next to the White House, that’s precisely what I got.

Part II picks up a week from today with what the CIA told me during my weeks of preparations for my assignment—and that I have never reported…until NOW

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