Abstract
Over thirty years ago most Americans who had remained after the achievement of what their then President had called in 1973, a ‘Peace with Honor,’ together with those Vietnamese who scrambled to go with them, left hurriedly as South Vietnam was invaded from the North and re-unified as one country. Among the Vietnamese who remained in what was swiftly re-named Ho Chi Minh City was Pham Xuan An, who throughout the war had worked as a reporter for US media organizations — principally for Time magazine — but who, as a Viet Cong colonel, had passed military secrets to the North. As The Washington Post noted in his obituary — he died in September 2006 aged 79:
Although his job as a spy was to uncover and report the plans of the South Vietnamese and U.S. military, he was so good at collecting and analyzing information that he was considered the best Vietnamese reporter in the press corps. He said he did not lie, tilt the news or spread disinformation in the stories he filed.
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Notes
‘Pham Xuan An, 79; Reporter for Time, Spy for Viet Cong,’ The Washington Post, 21 September 2006. See Larry Berman, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press/ HarperCollins, 2007).
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 13, 15.
Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 21; Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars p. 15.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr, The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966 (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1968 edition), pp. 58–9.
For a discussion of this see Jon Roper, ‘The Politics of Sanity: Vietnam, Watergate and the Psychological Afflictions of Presidents,’ Euramerica, Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2000, pp. 31–68.
Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1995), p. xvi.
Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 14.
The title of Podhoretz’s book is a direct riposte to his former friend, Norman Mailer’s novel, Why are We in Vietnam? (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 edition), p. 9.
Harry Summers, ‘Palmer, Karnow and Harrington: A Review of Recent Vietnam War Histories,’ in L. Matthews & D. Brown, eds, Assessing the Vietnam War (Washington DC: Pergamon Group, 1987), pp. 4, 9–10.
L. Gelb and R. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1979).
Sullivan quoted in R. McMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath & Co., 1990), pp. 604–5.
R. Friedman and J. Moore, ‘Introduction,’ in J. Moore, ed., The Vietnam Debate: A Fresh Look at the Arguments (Maryland: University Press of America, 1990), p. xii
Other more recent revisionist accounts of the war include Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War (New York: Free Press, 1999).
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), p. 636.
John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 187.
P. H. Melling, Vietnam in American Literature (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), p. 22.
Michael Herr, Dispatches (London: Pan Books, 1978), p. 14.
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (London: Arrow edition, 1978) p. 228.
John Del Vecchio, The 13th Valley (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), p. 501.
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Holt, Reinhart & Wilson, 1948), p. 282.
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (London: Pan Books Ltd, 1973), p. 789, Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars p. 291.
Robert Kennedy, To Seek a Newer World (London: Michael Joseph, 1967), p. 177.
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© 2007 Jon Roper
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Roper, J. (2007). Over Thirty Years. In: Roper, J. (eds) The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War. Global Conflict and Security since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591769_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591769_1
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