Once Upon a Distance War tells the stories of such young Vietnam war correspondents as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett, and David Halberstam, providing a riveting chronicle of high adventure and brutal slapstick, gallantry and cynicism, as well as a vital addition to the history they shaped. "Prochnau . . . tells a Vietnam story we haven't heard before. . . . Complex, witty, and humane."--Tobias Wolff. of photos.

A study of young war correspondents and the early Vietnam battles.

In all of journalism, nowhere are the stakes higher than in foreign news-gathering. For media owners, it is the most difficult type of reporting to finance; for editors, the hardest to oversee. Correspondents, roaming large swaths of the planet, must acquire expertise that home-based reporters take for granted—facility with the local language, for instance, or an understanding of local cultures. Adding further to the challenges, they must put news of the world in context for an audience with little experience and often limited interest in foreign affairs—a task made all the more daunting because of the consequence to national security. In Journalism’s Roving Eye, John Maxwell Hamilton—a historian and former foreign correspondent—provides a sweeping and definitive history of American foreign news reporting from its inception to the present day and chronicles the economic and technological advances that have influenced overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities who shaped readers’ perceptions of the world across two centuries. From the colonial era—when newspaper printers hustled down to wharfs to collect mail and periodicals from incoming ships—to the ongoing multimedia press coverage of the Iraq War, Hamilton explores journalism’s constant—and not always successful—efforts at “dishing the foreign news,” as James Gordon Bennett put it in the mid-nineteenth century to describe his approach in the New York Herald. He details the highly partisan coverage of the French Revolution, the early emergence of “special correspondents” and the challenges of organizing their efforts, the profound impact of the non-yellow press in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, the increasingly sophisticated machinery of propaganda and censorship that surfaced during World War I, and the “golden age” of foreign correspondence during the interwar period, when outlets for foreign news swelled and a large number of experienced, independent journalists circled the globe. From the Nazis’ intimidation of reporters to the ways in which American popular opinion shaped coverage of Communist revolution and the Vietnam War, Hamilton covers every aspect of delivering foreign news to American doorsteps. Along the way, Hamilton singles out a fascinating cast of characters, among them Victor Lawson, the overlooked proprietor of the Chicago Daily News, who pioneered the concept of a foreign news service geared to American interests; Henry Morton Stanley, one of the first reporters to generate news on his own with his 1871 expedition to East Africa to “find Livingstone”; and Jack Belden, a forgotten brooding figure who exemplified the best in combat reporting. Hamilton details the experiences of correspondents, editors, owners, publishers, and network executives, as well as the political leaders who made the news and the technicians who invented ways to transmit it. Their stories bring the narrative to life in arresting detail and make this an indispensable book for anyone wanting to understand the evolution of foreign news-gathering. Amid the steep drop in the number of correspondents stationed abroad and the recent decline of the newspaper industry, many fear that foreign reporting will soon no longer exist. But as Hamilton shows in this magisterial work, traditional correspondence survives alongside a new type of reporting. Journalism’s Roving Eye offers a keen understanding of the vicissitudes in foreign news, an understanding imperative to better seeing what lies ahead.

For almost a decade, the tyrannical Ngo Dinh Diem governed South Vietnam as a one-party police state while the U.S. financed his tyranny. In this new book, Seth Jacobs traces the history of American support for Diem from his first appearance in Washington as a penniless expatriate in 1950 to his murder by South Vietnamese soldiers on the outskirts of Saigon in 1963. Drawing on recent scholarship and newly available primary sources, Cold War Mandarin explores how Diem became America's bastion against a communist South Vietnam, and why the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations kept his regime afloat. Finally, Jacobs examines the brilliantly organized public-relations campaign by Saigon's Buddhists that persuaded Washington to collude in the overthrow--and assassination--of its longtime ally. In this clear and succinct analysis, Jacobs details the "Diem experiment," and makes it clear how America's policy of "sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem" ultimately drew the country into the longest war in its history.

A war’s outcome is determined by more than bullets and bombs. In our digital age, the proliferation of new media venues has magnified the importance of information – whether its content is true or purposely false – in battling an enemy and defending the public. In this book, Philip Seib, one of the world’s leading experts on media and war, offers a probing analysis of the role of information in warfare from the Second World War to the present day and beyond. He focuses on some of the thorniest issues on the contemporary agenda: When untruthful and inflammatory information poisons a nation’s political processes and weakens its social fabric, what kind of response is appropriate? How can media literacy help citizens defend themselves against information warfare? Should militaries place greater emphasis on crippling their adversaries with information rather than kinetic force? Well-written and wide-ranging, Information at War suggests answers to key questions with which governments, journalists, and the public must grapple during the years ahead. Information at war affects us all, and this book shows us how.

“Mesmerizing.… Conant’s book has brought [Maggie Higgins] back to life.” —Andrew Nagorski, Wall Street Journal A spirited portrait of twentieth-century war correspondent Maggie Higgins and her tenacious fight to the top in a male-dominated profession. Marguerite Higgins was both the scourge and envy of the journalistic world. A longtime reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, she first catapulted to fame with her dramatic account of the liberation of Dachau at the end of World War II. Brash, beautiful, ruthlessly competitive, and sexually adventurous, she forced her way to the front despite being told the combat zone was no place for a woman. Her headline-making exploits earned her a reputation for bravery bordering on recklessness and accusations of “advancing on her back,” trading sexual favors for scoops. While the Herald Tribune exploited her feminine appeal—regularly featuring the photogenic "girl reporter" on its front pages—it was Maggie’s dogged determination, talent for breaking news, and unwavering ambition that brought her success from one war zone to another. Her notoriety soared during the Cold War, and her daring dispatches from Korea garnered a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence—the first granted to a woman for frontline reporting—with the citation noting the unusual dangers and difficulties she faced because of her sex. A star reporter, she became part of the Kennedy brothers’ Washington circle, though her personal alliances and politics provoked bitter feuds with male rivals, who vilified her until her untimely death. Drawing on new and extensive research, including never-before-published correspondence and interviews with Maggie’s colleagues, lovers, and soldiers and generals who knew her in the field, journalist and historian Jennet Conant restores Maggie’s rightful place in history as a woman who paved the way for the next generation of journalists, and one of the greatest war correspondents of her time.

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.