and Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World, and reported the following:
What’s on page 99 of The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World?Follow Ray E. Boomhower on Instagram and Threads.
Photo, caption: Quang Duc on fire—the Browne photo that is most widely known today.
Initially, I was disappointed to learn that when I turned to page 99 of my Malcolm W. Browne biography, it fell within the photo spread included in the book. Astonishingly, however, the photograph on page would give any reader a very good insight into what the book is about, as it is the image that became known around the world as “The Ultimate Protest.” It is one of a series of images captured on film by Browne, the Saigon bureau chief for the Associated Press, on June 11, 1963, as Buddhist monk Quang Duc sacrificed his life to protest the alleged anti-Buddhist policies of the Catholic-dominated administration of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem.
Browne, who had been tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, was the only Western reporter on the scene to photograph the horrific event. Although the monk, as he burned, uttered no sound nor changed his position, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear as he worked moans from the crowd that had gathered, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.
The photo stands as a keystone of Browne’s character as a reporter—a willingness to be on the scene when news broke and a determination to tell the truth no matter what the danger, avoiding becoming what he called being “a brainless journalistic cheer leader.” Believing himself to be a “conscientious newsman,” Browne set tried to set aside his “personal views when reporting events,” instead trying to “emulate the detachment of a camera lens” when he covered a story.
During his time covering the Vietnam War, Browne had been determined to provide his readers “a continuous, honest assessment of the situation” of what he called “a puzzling war,” believing as well that officials in Vietnam—both Vietnamese and American—should try to do the same. After all, he noted, Vietnam had been too important to “look at through rose-colored glasses.”
Journalists, Browne acknowledged, were fallible, but he asked his readers to show some understanding. “When you really get into almost any subject it turns out to be much more complicated and confusing than you thought,” he pointed out. “For journalists, life and work are a continuous learning process, and although we often get it wrong to start with, sometimes the second draft is better.
Getting his photographs of the monk’s sacrifice had not been easy. With the aid of a “pigeon,” a regular passenger on a commercial flight willing to act as a courier to avoid censorship by South Vietnamese government officials, Browne’s exposed film made its way from the AP bureau in Saigon to a transmission point in Manila. Upon finishing their fifteen-hour-, twenty-minute odyssey, Browne’s images were edited and distributed from the New York office to AP member newspapers in the United States and around the world.
The image used by most newspapers was a tightly cropped one showing Quang Duc engulfed in flames with the Austin and a small number of the monks in attendance in the background. Later, Browne’s full sequence, including the expanded view of the self-immolation, described by AP’s editors as “The Ultimate Protest,” the photo featured in full on page 99, became available for publication.
From Lawrence, Kansas, to Cumberland, Maryland, from Bluefield, West Virginia, to Colorado Spring, Colorado, readers retrieved their morning and afternoon newspapers and were confronted with the photo of Quang Duc engulfed in flames at the intersection of two main streets in Saigon, Phan Dinh Phung and Le Van Duyet. “That picture put the Vietnam War on the front page more than anything else that happened before. That’s where the story stayed for the next 10 years or more,” noted Hal Buell, then AP deputy photo editor in New York.
Although Browne noted that millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, his pictures possessed “an incomparable impact.” A group of clergymen in the United States used the photograph for full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post decrying American military aid to a country that denied most of its citizens religious freedoms. Vietnamese Buddhist leaders emblazoned the image on placards they carried during demonstrations. Officials in Communist China used the image for their own propaganda purposes, distributing copies throughout Southeast Asia and attributing the monk’s death to the work of “the U.S. imperialist aggressors and their Diemist lackeys.”
Browne’s photograph has become one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, standing alongside two other searing AP photographs that have been burned into the collective American conscience—Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution,” his graphic shot of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being summarily executed at point-blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief and Nick Ut’s “Terror of War,” showing a naked, nine-year-old girl screaming as she runs down a road with her skin burned from a South Vietnamese napalm bombing that mistakenly hit her village.
Quang Duc’s sacrifice weighed on Browne, who died on August 27, 2012. “I don’t think many journalists take pleasure from human suffering,” he noted, but he did have to admit to “having sometimes profited from others’ pain.” Although by no means intentional on his part, that fact did not help, Browne noted. “Journalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,” he said. “Either way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.”
There were other deaths that Browne witnessed in Vietnam—losses that became mere “footnotes” in the history of the war compared to the “theater of the horrible” that Quang Duc’s sacrifice represented for his cause. Browne, however, never forgot them.
The Page 99 Test: Richard Tregaskis.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
