THE JOURNALIST

A thoughtful, revealing look at the early years of the war in Vietnam from one of the first reporters to cover it.

“Be careful….This can be a dangerous place for someone with an artist’s soul.” So a colleague warned Rose when he arrived in Hue in 1959 to teach English. The war between France and the Viet Minh was long over, and foreigners assumed the peace would hold between North and South. Two years in, Rose was recruited as a stringer and discovered that his artist’s soul came in handy as he crafted tightly composed stories for publications including Time and the Saturday Evening Post. Early in the narrative, a bête noire emerges in the well-known journalist Stanley Karnow, who comes off none too well: “round-faced and pudgy…[with] the smooth, slicked-back look of a used-car salesman.” Another bête noire was the South Vietnamese government, corrupt and repressive. It didn’t take long before secret police agents were following Rose. He became a model of levelheaded analysis and taut prose as he traveled across Southeast Asia, moving throughout the region before returning to Saigon as an adviser to the South Vietnamese government. His stories were among the most important in their time and remain so today in explaining America’s involvement in a war that, when he arrived, supposedly had nothing to do with the U.S. His easy familiarity with Vietnamese people, Green Berets, and American pilots led to one scoop after another. He was also astonishingly prolific, leaving “hundreds of pages in journal entries, letters, articles, stories, a partially completed novel, and miscellaneous notes, much of it exquisitely written,” that his sister, Fischer, used to weave together this outstanding memoir more than half a century after his death in a plane crash out in the field. This book sits well alongside The Mark, Street Without Joy, and other essential frontline reports.

Readers will feel as if they’ve been in the firefights Rose describes, an immediacy both thrilling and frightening.