Women Who tell our stories: Frances fitzgerald

By Eliza Billingham

When Frances Fitzgerald landed in Saigon in February 1966, no one was ready for her. She was 25, a magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, a New York City debutante whose sister was a supermodel and father was the deputy director of the CIA. She was touring southeast Asia for a month, planning to write a magazine article to subsidize her trip. The plane had barely landed, forced to make a quick entry between relentless mortaring.

Her host in South Vietnam, a young diplomat named Frank Wisner, picked her up with a tennis racket in his backseat (he wouldn’t forgo a match just because of some shellfire). He told her that “guns, tanks and brutality” didn’t belong in a woman’s world. He forgot to get her press credentials. He barely managed to find housing for her before she came. But Wisner did remember to pick her up, and they drove one February afternoon from the heavily militarized Tan Son Nhut air base toward an American embassy entrenched in thick heat, wasting dilapidated French architecture and coagulating dust.

Saigon grabbed Fitzgerald by the throat. She meant to stay in Vietnam for a week. Instead, she stayed for 10 months. She didn’t focus on army movements but centered her gaze on a people the American military deeply misjudged. She wrote articles for The Village Voice, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine that gave the American public some of its first insights into Vietnamese culture.

By 1972, her relentless fascination produced Fire in the Lake, a book-length exploration of the identity that shaped Vietnamese life. It was the first history of Vietnam attempted by an American, and it garnered praised for its sensitivity and insight, eventually winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for History. Fifty years after the armistice, it is still an indispensable introduction to an agonizing war destined for agony. Fitzgerald’s prophetic voice continues to speak to the fraught dialogue between East and West.

The night she arrived, Fitzgerald went to a birthday party at the Caravelle Hotel where journalists and embassy staff toasted champagne and sampled rooftop hors d’oeuvres while rocket blasts serenaded them from just outside the city. As Fitzgerald watched mortar fire light up the other side of the river, she became aware of “violently disconnected realities” passing each other in the night.

“You must not forget. You simply must not forget. That this war is a tragedy,” Fitzgerald wrote to herself in her reporter’s notebook. “That the greatest sin is to speak of politics in the abstract…you must stick to the concrete because that way you will be able to see from more points of view than the abstract.”

This motto that separated Fitzgerald her from the war correspondents who fed the stringer service back home. She was a new kind of journalist in Vietnam, with particular thanks to her lack of training. Her fresh eyes, steep intellect and steady resistance to American assumptions had been honed by a unique experience with loneliness. Her personal detachment from an all-male, mob- mentality newspaper world allowed her to send a completely different kind of report back to the public at home.

Despite her elite privilege and connections, Fitzgerald was accustomed with being an outsider. Her parents divorced when she was young, which hurt her more than she let on. Her mother started another family with Ronald Tree, a wealthy Englishman. They had another daughter, Fitzgerald’s half-sister, Penelope Tree. (Penelope would go on to become a supermodel, attracting the attention of John Lennon’s crowd at the same time Fitzgerald came back from Vietnam flustered, exhausted and angry.)

Fitzgerald studied Middle Eastern politics at Radcliffe University, the sister school to a then all-male Harvard University and established herself as something of a nerd. She was deeply impressed by nuances of language and interpretation, how words could be so different that they could barely be translated at all.

After graduating in 1964, Fitzgerald took a job at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. It was a CIA front, though Fitzgerald didn’t know it at the time. She was too focused on trying to write a novel. She discovered, however, that she couldn’t write fiction. Worried that she was disappointing her family, she returned to New York feeling like “the ugly duckling” caught between a sparkling socialite mother and gorgeous teenage sister.

She did tap her mother’s connections, however, to get assignments at the New York Herald Tribune. Editor Clay Felker, who was also publishing Tom Wolfe, assigned her mostly profiles of New York’s elite men in politics and entertainment, like infamous Broadway producer and egomaniac David Merrick. She was getting published, but the Tribune was headed toward demise and she wasn’t given the same trajectory as her male counterparts.

But Fitzgerald had established herself enough to get accreditation from Vogue and The Village Voice to go to southeast Asia and come back with a story.

Fitzgerald was a green reporter, but she had spent her whole lifetime watching Washington up close. As a teenager, she wrote policy advice to Illinois governor and Democratic presidential nominee-hopeful Adlai Stevenson while he and her mother had an affair. She argued with the revered conservative columnist Joseph Alsop and her own CIA father about the Vietnam War during a dinner party. Though she didn’t know all the inner workings of the war, she knew the first names of the men who pulled the strings. She was quieter than her dazzling mother, but she wasn’t intimidated by powerful men. Instead, they were dinner guests, vacation companions, men who had made passes at her.

Confident, confused, privileged, directionless and terribly smart, Fitzgerald was “wandering along on [her] merry way” through southeast Asia when Vietnam took hold of her. It, too, was made up of pieces that weren’t fitting together. Themes that drew her to Middle Eastern politics unveiled themselves as politicians, diplomats, peasants and Buddhists swirled before her eyes—worlds using the same words but completely lost in translation.

In Fitzgerald’s own words, the Saigon that was once celebrated for a beauty unmatched on the Pacific Rim was suddenly a “single lifeboat thrown into the sea for all the passengers of a sinking ocean liner,” its newest expansion marked by “piles of garbage,” resembling “less an urban quarter than a compost of villages where peasants live with their city children.”

President Lyndon Johnson sent thousands of  American troops to Vietnam in 1965, increasing American military presence by two-thirds a year before Fitzgerald landed. In twelve months, at least a million refugees abandoned the burned countryside for cities. In Saigon, Fitzgerald had an up close and personal view of the nation’s cultural fabric being ripped at the seams.

“There were very few woman war correspondents then,” Fitzgerald told CSPAN years later. She was a freelancer, and an inexperienced one at that. “All of these things were hindrances, but they were helps in a way as well.”

She didn’t know much about war or Asia, and very few people were willing to invest in a young female reporter. Wisner proved to be a bust, except that he introduced Fitzgerald to Ward Just, a dashing reporter for the Washington Post who would take Fitzgerald on reporting trips to Hue and the Buddhists communes there, as well as excursions bicycling, skinny dipping, and sleeping on a floating sampan on the river. They eventually became one of the embassy’s favorite couples in South Vietnam.

But better than Just, Fitzgerald fell into the orbit of Daniel Ellsberg, an intelligence officer who took her and her questions seriously. Ellsberg worked for the American government and supported the war automatically, but was intrigued by Fitzgerald’s measured analysis that approached the war with skepticism. (Ellsberg would eventually change his position; he went on to leak the Pentagon Papers to Neil Sheehan and help change the course of the war.)

Another generous teacher was Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, who asked Fitzgerald to investigate a question that would haunt the rest of her work. Could anyone explain why did the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam’s military, was failing?

 “Well, this turned out to be a very profound question and something I knew I really couldn’t answer at the time,” Fitzgerald recalled in another CSPAN interview. “But at least it directed me to looking at the Vietnamese as opposed to looking at troop movements.”

Had Fitzgerald been a male correspondent with a U.S. newsroom eagerly expecting daily military reports, she may not have had the time, curiosity and drive to learn about anything else. But her rookie status meant that she was free to zig when everyone else zagged and explore the questions that, in 1966, almost no one else was asking.

“My quest was to try and understand the really unknown subject—the Vietnamese,” Fitzgerald said. “People in the embassy would admit to you that they didn’t understand them. A lot of them spoke Vietnamese but it really didn’t matter. It was a subject that didn’t come up very often…nor did losing.”

In this particular matter, her gender served her well. “As a woman, it was marginally easier to talk to the Vietnamese than had I been a man,” she said, “because at least I couldn’t be suspected of being a soldier or a CIA person or something like that.”

She made all the rookie mistakes, like not covering her arms (as Vietnamese women were expected to) and getting stuck in violent dangerous situations—once, she and Ellsberg drove to see Buddhist protests in downtown Saigon, only to get trapped and assaulted by an angry mob. They only escaped by  the grace of a Vietnamese stranger who jumped on the hood of their jeep, yelling at the crowd and clearing a path for Ellsberg to drive away.

But extended reporting time with Vietnamese sources allowed her Fitzgerald to uncover nuance that otherwise went unreported. Buddhists were burning themselves to death while Southern Vietnamese politicians backstabbed each other and villagers seemed like they couldn’t care less. Was there a unified South? Was there a consistent Vietnamese identity? How could the conversations between the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments sound so different from the conversations on the street?

Fitzgerald did plenty of reporting in the field, and constant high stress wore her down. During a stint of recovery, she read Viet-Nam: Sociologie D’Une Guerre by Paul Mus, a French scholar who grew up in Hanoi and could start to explain a Confucian worldview to a Western audience. Few people would consider reading Mus’ treatise in French “‘recovery.”’ But it was Mus’ book that started to answer Fitzgerald’s questions and positioned articulated her skepticism to see the writing on the wall, long before so many othersearly in the war.

First, she wrote a profile of General Ky for The Village Voice in April 1966. Her description of the Southern Vietnamese politician was much more sarcastic than American diplomats were used to reading about their ally. Then she published an ambitious piece about the village of Duc Lap with The New York Times Magazine in September 1966. She still had questions.

Her final piece was for The Atlantic, having becomewhere she had friends onwith the editorial staff there. They were thrilled. The piece, published in December 1966, was wholly unexpected, a completely new voice that brought tipsy politicians, teenage slum lords and savvy prostitutes to life. But Fitzgerald was still unsatisfied.

“Which tone do you take?” she wondered wondered aloud to the CSPAN audience. “What language do you use to describe something that you’ve never remotely seen in your life?”

In November 1966, she left Vietnam in body but not in spirit. She was physically and emotionally exhausted from unrelenting stress. But when she returned to New York, she couldn’t stop thinking about the war. She wouldn’t stop reporting on it.

“I didn’t know how it was going to end up,” she said. “I just got deeper and deeper into the whole thing.”

Far from the noxious gas and blistering heat of Vietnam, ancient Killarney oaks shaded a manicured garden looking over the River Shannon. Glin Castle emerged from the foliage, full of Irish antiques and fine art, hosting glitzy parties with guests as glamorous as Mick Jagger.

Tucked away from the castle, more intimate living quarters housed Fitzgerald and Just, who also left Saigon by May 1967. The castle belonged to a distant cousin of Fitzgerald’s, who was now hosting the beleaguered war correspondents. They typed away in a cottage in Limerick, each trying to digest and describe their experience in Vietnam.

Fitzgerald briefly thought about writing a novel about Vietnam, much in the vein of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which Fitzgerald said later was the best book ever written about the war, even more so because it was written in 1955, before the war even started. when U.S. involvement in Vietnam’s war had barely begun .

But she quickly dismissed her fantasies about writing fiction. “Of course, I couldn’t,” she says now, still convinced that novels were never in her wheelhouse.  

Instead, she produced a piece at Glin that was published by The Atlantic but and would eventually serve as a book outline. This article was her most important piece yet. It was especially praised by Henry Kissinger, who would become assistant for national security affairs to President Nixon the next year.

But separate from the sufferings of war, the months after Vietnam held a different kind of sorrow. In July 1967, Fitzgerald’s father, the man who had peakedpiqued her curiosity in about southeast Asia, died. He was only 57, struck by an unexpected heart attack on his home tennis court.

Though Desmond was affectionate from afar, Fitzgerald always felt distant from her father, and now he was gone forever. She attended the funeral and continued grieving at Glin. She was distracted from writing and from Just, who. Just finished his own book about Vietnam and left Glin by September. A month later, Just surprised Fitzgerald with a letter on her birthday, informing her that he had married another woman.

And yet, that same autumn held unexpected joy as well. Fitzgerald received a call from John McAlister Jr., a lecturer at Princeton, who not only admired her Atlantic piece but asked her if she wanted to meet the very man who influenced her understanding of Vietnam the most—Paul Mus. Fitzgerald had no idea that Mus was in the U.S. Not only was Mus at Yale, but he was very impressed by Fitzgerald’s work and thrilled that she was considering a book.

“Look at yourself and at what you have written with unprejudiced eyes, and you will understand our prejudice in your favor!” Mus wrote to her after their first meeting. “Even at the risk of appearing too bold, if we are to be the friends I believe we can become—no delay, then!”

Mus, who was 65, filled a fatherly void that felt freshly empty for Fitzgerald. “He was so amusing and so divine that I kept going to see him,” she said in a interview for this story. He could tell her stories about Confucius that finally illuminated various Vietnamese reactions towards foreign powers and national infighting. Apart from her father, here Mus was the other man who inspired her interest in Vietnam the most. Under his mentorship, Fitzgerald’s book started picking up steam. By the time Mus died in 1969, Fitzgerald had gleaned enough insight to produce a book steeped in Vietnamese thought.

Fitzgerald spent a month writing in the MacDowell art colony in New Hampshire, then moving moved around Cambridge and New York. She met Joseph Buttinger, an academic, philanthropist, and early critic of the war. She read his rare collection of English and French scholarship on Vietnam that he had been collecting for decades before combat.

There were some who were not optimistic about the book. While she was at MacDowell, comments from Peter Davison, an editor at The Atlantic, might have made Fitzgerald toss the entire book in the fire.

“I’ve been putting in an hour or two a day on it for the last ten days, and I can’t hide from you the fact that I’m having great difficulty with it,” he wrote to her in August 1969. “There are moments of tremendous illumination…but these are, alas, far between.”

But Robert Lescher, Fitzgerald’s agent, kept her afloat.

“I am appalled at the idea that Peter Davison had any great difficulty with the manuscript,” Lescher assured her. “I feel sure that it brings us closer to an understanding of the Viet Cong than anything that has been written to far.”

Her manuscript was finished by the time she went back to Saigon in 1971. She abandoned her editors and copyeditors at The Atlantic, who were facingat Little, Brown to the major task of fact- checking and editing a monster bibliography. The process was “a series of aches and pains,” according to Michael Janeway, an editor at The Atlantic Monthly Press who was involved in getting the book published. But Fitzgerald was largely unbothered, focusing instead on producing new coverage of a war everyone thought would end five years earlier. Besides, her publishers had in their hands a book that was not only an incredible accomplishment from a rising star, but a work that would change the American perspective on the war forever.

 Twenty-five years after the end of American combat in Vietnam, Frances Fitzgerald sat on a panel hosted by the LA Times Festival of Books called “Vietnam Reconsidered.” After her introduction, she looked at the audience and said, “The title of this panel reflects the fact that for most Americans, Vietnam is a war and not a country.”

Fitzgerald’s book Fire in the Lake was praised by academics fellow author on Vietnam and professor of Chinese and Southeast Asian history Alexander Woodside as “perhaps the most sensitive, the most ambitious, and certainly the most eloquent book ever to examine the American intervention in Vietnam against its Vietnamese historical setting.” It was first published as a five-part series in The New Yorker, despite early reservations from Fitzgerald’s editors that perhaps, by 1972, no one would want to read about Vietnam anymore.

Fitzgerald dedicated the book to her father and Paul Mus.

In six years, Fitzgerald had transformed herself from a quiet, unsure, wide-eyed heiress in Saigon into one of the leading experts on Vietnamese life, politics and society. Her work was imitated by other young reporters and dog-eared by America’s top government officials.

In the fifty years since Fire in the Lake, Fitzgerald has tackled other issues of national scope, most recently the rise of evangelicalism in the US.

Fire in the Lake was “an accident,” she said  in a recent interview, based on the simple observation that “the Americans don’t have any feelings for the Vietnamese.”

Fitzgerald worked to fill the gaping hole in American reporting and didn’t mind racking up the pressure on Washington. But she wasn’t dreaming of any prestige for herself.  “I was just fascinated by Vietnam,” she said, “and knew I couldn’t put it down.”