Ray E. Boomhower is the author of the new book The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World. It focuses on the Vietnam War, highlighting the experiences of journalist Malcolm Browne and his photograph of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. Boomhower's other books include a biography of journalist Richard Tregaskis. Boomhower is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press.
Q: Why did you decide to write about Malcolm Browne and Thich Quang Duc in your new book?
A: My biography of Malcolm Browne and his famous photograph of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation grew directly out of my previous book for the University of New Mexico Press, which focused on the life of World War II correspondent Richard Tregaskis.
In the early 1960s, Tregaskis had traveled to South Vietnam to obtain a “firsthand, eyewitness look at the strange, off-beath, new-style war” in which U.S. advisers tried to turn the Army of the Republic of Vietnam into a professional fighting force against guerilla forces backed by Communist North Vietnam.
During his stay, Tregaskis clashed with one of the young journalists covering the war—David Halberstam of The New York Times, with the older reporter telling Halberstam: “If I were doing what you are doing, I’d be ashamed of myself.”
Tregaskis’s uncharitable view of the younger man continued when he reviewed Halberstam’s 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire. Instead of Halberstam’s work, Tregaskis suggested that a “more temperate example” of the new books about Vietnam came from a reporter named Malcolm Browne, who had been head of the Associated Press bureau in Saigon since 1961.
I was intrigued by Tregaskis’s mention of Browne, who shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting with Halberstam. Although I had known about the Quang Duc photo, I did not know that it had been captured on film by Browne.
How did Browne manage to be in the right place at the right time to snap his famous photo? I was determined to find out. After all, my recent biographical work has focused on journalists and their work. To me, Browne was the perfect subject.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Browne’s papers are in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Reading Room in the James Madison Memorial Building in Washington, D.C. I knew I had picked the right subject early on while reviewing Browne’s correspondence.
In 1967 he had outlined for an interested reader what he believed his role as a journalist should be. Browne wrote: “In a free society the duty of all newsmen is to tell all of the people all of the truth all of the time. The newsman is obliged to fight forces that interfere with this vital process.” Quite the goal!
I was surprised by the scope of Browne’s career as a foreign correspondent. He reported from the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1966, returning to South Vietnam in 1972 to cover a North Vietnamese offensive for The New York Times, and returning three years later to be there for Saigon’s fall to the Communists.
Although Browne was close to turning 60 at the time, the Times sent him to the Persian Gulf in the winter of 1991.
President George H. W. Bush had assembled an international coalition of approximately 40 countries to face off against Iraqi forces, who had invaded and taken over the oil-rich nation of Kuwait in August 1990.
The rules imposed by U.S. military authorities made the Gulf War “more difficult to cover” than anything Browne had experienced before, except for the Indian-Pakistan conflict in 1971.
During the month he spent in Saudi Arabia, he could not escape the feeling that the military had learned all the wrong lessons from its 1983 invasion of Grenada, a smashing triumph for American troops, all without the bothersome presence of civilian journalists.
Q: What do you see as the legacy of Browne’s photograph? What are some other photos that you think had a similar impact since then?
A: Although Browne left Vietnam in 1966 for a reporting career that took him all over the world, from South America to Eastern Europe and even the frozen Antarctic, his legacy has always included his haunting photograph of Quang Duc in flames, often cited under the title “The Ultimate Protest.”
The photograph has become one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, seared into the collective American conscience alongside two other AP photographs—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, 9-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.
Browne, who won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam, was often asked if he could have done anything to prevent Quang Duc from taking his life.
But Browne realized that it would have been fruitless to try to intervene. The monks and nuns gathered for the protest stood ready to block anyone who dared to interfere. When a fire truck appeared, some of the monks had leapt in front of their wheels to stop them.
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 forget them. He had learned during his career to deal with “the ugliest events of our times,” including keep his wits as he observed the dead and wounded on a battlefield. Browne was able to do his job by “concentrating on the mechanics of news covering. I have the nightmares afterwards.”
Thinking about what images might have the enduring impact that Browne’s has had, I immediately thought of another enduring image of protest—“The Tank Man,” a photograph made by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press of a lone man standing in front of a line of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 5, 1989, after the Chinese government crackdown on pro-democracy protestors.
I believe that no other photograph captures bravery and determination in the face of impossible odds.
Q: The historian Mark Atwood Lawrence said of the book, “With meticulous attention to detail, The Ultimate Protest deftly captures the dilemmas that faced journalists during the Vietnam War--and that continue to face reporters in more recent times.” What do you think of that description?
A: Mr. Lawrence does a great job of describing the book in just a few words, as well as posing the continuing difficulties a reporter faces.
Despite the frustrations Browne faced when dealing with those in authority who wished to tailor the news to fit their own needs, he persevered, believing that the free press would remain alive and vibrant.
Browne took as his inspiration the example of the great Irish reporter William Howard Russell, who had been sent by The Times of London to cover the Crimean War.
British authorities threw Russell out of its headquarters area, going as far as depriving him of food, shelter, and transport. The British commander, Lord Raglan, prohibited his officers from talking to the reporter. “Despite their hostility, Russell covered every major action of that war, in mortal danger most of the time,” Browne noted.
In his dispatches for The Times, Russell did more than just “root for the home team,” Browne recalled.
Although he had touted the bravery of British soldiers—the “thin red line tipped with steel”—Russell let his readers know that the commanders who had ordered the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade into the deadly fire of Russian artillery had also mishandled every other aspect of the war.
They had bungled the supply situation, leaving their men with inadequate stocks of blankets and uniforms, and British soldiers were “dying in large numbers of illnesses and infected wounds, for want of medical attention,” Browne said.
Russell’s words mattered: “Parliament and the English public were electrified. The commanders were changed, Florence Nightingale went to the Crimea (incidentally founding the Red Cross) and the fat was pulled out of the fire.”
Because of his articles, Russell became known as “the man who saved an army.” Browne always tried to remember that his idol had not earned that title by being “a brainless journalistic cheer leader.”
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I recently signed a contract to work with the University of New Mexico Press once again, writing the first biography of pioneering Black journalist Wallace H. Terry, who covered the civil rights movement in the 1960s from Malcolm X to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and risked his life writing for Time magazine on the battlefield during the Vietnam War.
While in Vietnam, he captured the voices and experiences of Black soldiers, using the insights he gained to produce the classic book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984).
The book will examine the life and times of a journalist who displayed great determination and drive from the beginning of his start in the profession, which included groundbreaking positions at his high school and college newspapers.
Terry became used to being in the public eye, as his career received sustained attention from his hometown African American newspaper, the Indianapolis Recorder. He possessed the self-assurance of someone who loved to ride rickety wooden roller coasters for fun.
Terry’s trailblazing in journalism continued at The Washington Post newspaper, where he served as one of only three Black reporters there in the early 1960s, and Time magazine, where he became the first black correspondent working for a major American news magazine.
He became deeply enmeshed in reporting about the civil rights movement, considering it “the biggest story in the county. It was a story that I passionately cared for because it was going to affect me, my family, my children, and generations of black people to come.”
After volunteering to serve as a Time correspondent covering the Vietnam War, Terry discovered that war often brought out the worst in men, but also sometimes their best, especially compassion and love for each other regardless of the color of their skin—a camaraderie forged in battle.
“That’s the lasting message, the only positive message, about Vietnam,” he said. “The rest of it is nonsense. Foolishness.”
Terry found it ironic that the closest America came to the kind of society Martin Luther King had dreamed about came during “the middle of a war he hated.”
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There were some fun facts I uncovered while doing my research: I learned that Browne was a distant relative of English wit and writer Oscar Wilde.
Browne considered himself an “accidental journalist,” as he started out as a laboratory chemist, switching to journalism after service in the U.S. Army in postwar South Korea.
His early experience came as a newspaper reporter for the Middletown Daily Record in Middletown, New York, working with a young journalist named Hunter Thompson, and reporting from Havana, Cuba, during the early days of Fidel Castro’s regime.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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