He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, a third of the way into the book, happens to introduce one of the themes of this history/memoir of Vietnam during the Kennedy administration: the outsized role of US news correspondents in shaping the gloomy narrative of an alliance that was not working.Visit Charles Trueheart's website.
The most famous of these correspondents was David Halberstam, whose book The Best and the Brightest, published nearly a dozen years later, charted the series of hubristic misjudgments that led the United States into a ten-year war. My page 99 introduces Homer Bigart, Halberstam’s predecessor as the New York Times correspondent in Saigon, and a model of the skeptical reporting that would undermine the optimistic progress reports the US government was producing for public consumption. Bigart famously coined a phrase describing the American reliance on the flawed governance of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, pronounced Ziem: “Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.”
To quote a salient passage about the US reporters from page 99, “The presidents of the United States and South Vietnam, and their entourages, were being driven crazy by their reporting. They thought it was inaccurate. They thought it was tendentious. They thought it was simplistic. But at least some Americans knew it was accurate.”
Although the focus of Diplomats at War is on the ranking US Foreign Service officers in Saigon at the time – US ambassador Frederick Nolting and deputy chief of mission William Trueheart, my godfather and father, respectively – their stormy relationship to the press corps is an important element in the narrative, and not a bad glimpse of the forces shaping historic outcomes in Vietnam more than sixty years ago.
--Marshal Zeringue
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