Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Before the Vietnam war, there was a law that banned women from reporting on the front lines of any war for the US. When President Johnson refused to officially declare a state of war in Vietnam, an opening appeared, no war, no ban. A handful of pioneering women bought one-way tickets into the battlefield. They had no editors, no health insurance, and little or no formal training. Reporter Elizabeth Becker, former Washington Post war correspondent in Cambodia, and then NPR's foreign editor, and then national security correspondent for The New York Times has just published, You Don't Belong Here; How Three Woman Rewrote the Story of War. Chronicling, Catherine Leroy, a French photojournalist. Frankie FitzGerald, an American long-form journalist and author, and Kate Webb, an Australian combat reporter. Elizabeth, welcome to On the Media.

Elizabeth Becker: Well, thank you, Brooke. It's great to be with you.

Brooke: I want to start with where you started. You give your initial experience very short shrift when asked, why did you cross the ocean to cover a war when you were so young? You said, "The short answer was a nightmare I was all too keen to leave behind. My master's advisor had rejected my thesis on the Bangladesh war of independence after I refused to sleep with him, and he said one wasn't related to the other." What happened?

Elizabeth: I took my fellowship money and bought a one-way ticket to Cambodia.

Brooke: Well, of course, that's what anybody would do.

[laughter]

Brooke: You said that the first of the three profiles, although they weave in and out of each other, begins with Catherine Leroy, the French photojournalist. Explain how she came to be in Vietnam.

Elizabeth: She's a very petite French woman, about five feet tall, barely 90 pounds, and she was something of a rebel from her childhood. Rebelling against her petite bourgeoisie French Catholic background. She was a pianist. She quit piano playing. Then she was a parachutist and then she was bored. She decided looking at Paris Match, that why not become a war photographer. I'm serious. There's no more to it than that. She had no reason to think that she could take a photograph, but she bought a Leica camera and a one-way ticket to Saigon and arrived. The Leica camera around her neck tied with a shoelace.

Brooke: Tell me how she was instantly welcomed into the fold of photojournalists.

Elizabeth: Well, first she was a curiosity. She was lucky that a great photographer named Horst Faas, a German who was himself a Pulitzer prize-winning photographer said he'd take a chance and he'd buy a good photograph from anybody, even a woman.

Brooke: He was at AP.

Elizabeth: Associated Press, correct. He was the head of the photography. As is the custom back then, he gave film to Catherine and if she took a decent photograph, he ran it. She started to be good. Very good and very competitive. Her welcome was in fact an attempt to get rid of her.

Brooke: You mentioned in passing, she was a parachutist. She was the first photojournalist to take photos from the air.

Elizabeth: She was the first and only because that was the first and only airborne assault of the whole Vietnam war. You can imagine this teeny woman jumping with these big American airborne. She jumps and she's got three cameras around her neck and you'd think one of them would've flown in her face, but no, she managed to get gorgeous photographs that they almost look like ballet, and then she lands in a combat zone. I get shivers when I think about it.

Brooke: Tell me about some of her other photographs.

Elizabeth: She's totally untrained so she teaches herself. She makes a rule for herself. The photograph has to capture their eyes, which makes sense if you're in a photo studio, but when you're at battlefield, it's crazy. She uses her teeny little body like an acrobat, crawls in the mud, gets unusual angles, and gets those eyes. For instance, a very famous photograph of hers is from the Battle of the Hills. She sees a medic trying to revive another soldier. That soldier dies. He smothers his face and the guy's body then gets up screams and runs after the Vietnamese who killed him. The photographs are everywhere and the guy sees them he says, "Where was she? I didn't see her," and that's the way she does everything. She's so close. She's so small. It's like this magic Sprite all over the place, and it's the humanity she always captures.

Brooke: Something else you observed. I don't know whether she was the first or the only photographer to capture both sides of the war at great personal risk.

Elizabeth: Right, and this is in the great Tet Offensive, and this is in Hue which was the center of it. Dangerous beyond belief and she and Agence France-Presse reporter they get on a bicycle and cross to the other side, which is crazy. They're immediately captured by the North Vietnamese. They take away her cameras. They handcuff them, but speaking French and using charm, the two of them convince them that they're not Americans. They aren't part of the other side, and she gets her cameras back, takes photographs, convinces them to let her go, sends the photographs back to Saigon, and then she photographs the combat from the American side. Nobody else did that during the war and the courage it took is unbelievable.

Brooke: Let's talk about Frankie FitzGerald. The daughter of a CIA officer, Desmond FitzGerald and absolutely irresistible socialite, Marietta Peabody Tree.

Elizabeth: Yes.

Brooke: How did this upper-crust Radcliff graduate get involved in reporting on Vietnam?

Elizabeth: Almost in a classic way she wanted to do serious reporting. Her degree was in Middle Eastern history and she went to Newsweek and she asked for a job as a reporter or a writer, and they said, no, women aren't qualified for that. Women are only qualified to be researchers. She bought a ticket to Vietnam, and it's her privilege that was held against her. Oh, of course, she's going to do well, her dad's number three in CIA. She's got plenty of money. She knows everybody. She rejected that and she created a very serious alternative way to view the war.

Brooke: You note that she wrote to herself, you must not forget, you simply must not forget that this war is a tragedy, that the greatest sin is to speak of politics in the abstract. You must stick to the concrete because that way you'll be able to see from more points of view than the abstract.

Elizabeth: Fabulous, isn't it?

Brooke: Yes.

Elizabeth: She's not a trained journalist, but that should be at the head of every journalist notebook.

Brooke: You do observe though that as unfamiliar with war as she was, she knew a great deal about Washington politics and couldn't be snowed.

Elizabeth: That was very much to her advantage because all journalists claim to be skeptictal, but particularly in the war, and this is at the beginning of war, you're very much pushed to not betray your country. Maybe you have some problems being skeptical about how they're doing this, that, and the other, but underneath it all you support your country's war effort. When you see people dying that's what happens. She was skeptical all the way, and that's hard, but because she was so fluent in the ways of the elite and elite politics, it was possible for her. You're absolutely right. That's one of the roots of her genius.

Brooke: She also understood the importance of the Buddhist protest movements in Vietnam in a way that most of the political experts just basically ignored.

Elizabeth: For her it was the key. She thought she had done a good bit of homework, but she was shocked by the strength and the size of the Buddhist Movement against the Saigon government. Then it opened up her eyes to all kinds of things she did not understand about Vietnam, and even though they didn't meet at that point, Catherine Leroy herself was covering the same Buddhist demonstrations and coming to the same conclusion. Those protests told them the Saigon government was not what it was supposed to be.

Brooke: The irony is that the political and military elite didn't seem to recognize that the only real bulwark against the communists, that they were so afraid were going to create a domino effect across Indo-China were in fact these Buddhist.

Elizabeth: Yes, and why was she able to see that and the people running the war weren't? The classic mainstream appetite was who's winning on the battlefield. Who's on top in Saigon, and she went out to places like civilian hospitals after a battle to see how poorly they were cared for. She covered Saigon from the slums to show that all the money was going to the predictable corrupt people, and what was left for those Vietnamese fleeing the war whose villages were being destroyed, they were stuck in these slums with nothing.

Brooke: Let's go to Kate. She's the woman who first welcomed you to the war, the Australian Kate Webb.

Elizabeth: Kate comes in 1967. She's from Australia, intellectual family. She has a horrible experience where her best friend commits suicide in front of her using a rifle that Kate gave her. Kate's charged with homicide. The charges are dropped but you can imagine what that would do to a sensitive 15-year-old. Then a few years later while she's in college, her parents are killed in an automobile accident. By the time she arrives in Vietnam again with no resume to speak of, one way ticket, a portable typewriter, she's already had more trauma than most of us will ever have in our life.

In some ways that makes Kate more sensitive but also more vulnerable. She's the one who decides that she's going to be like the guys. She cuts her hair into a gorgeous pixie that makes her even more attractive. She wears fatigues. She drinks with the best of them but she knows when to leave so she doesn't have to hold off a guy. She eventually gets work with United Press International, and she makes her big moment during the Tet offensive but in Saigon, not in Hue.

She's one of the first at the US embassy when the Viet Cong break through, take over the bottom of the embassy. Kate is there, she writes an amazing dispatch and uses a phrase that becomes quoted in all the history books that it looked like a butcher shop in Eden, the amount of destruction in the beautiful new US Embassy in Saigon. From there she just does amazing combat reporting. Again like the others she wants to know the South Vietnamese army better than the Americans were covering it so she uses her vacation time to cover the South Vietnamese and get to know them.

Brooke: A lot of people listening to this will think, well these are just like the men who run to danger, they need to be adrenalized.

Elizabeth: No. Well first of all, like the other two women, Kate was involved in the whole country and it's not just adrenaline. All three of these women truly fell in love with Indo-China, and I'll throw myself in there too. You get to know the people, the culture, and it gets into you so that your whole life is covering the story. I have to say Frankie never covered another war and neither did Kate. Catherine covered the Middle East but then quit. These were not junkies.

These were people committed to the story. In those days there's not even the word PTSD much less an understanding of it for soldiers or a female reporter so Kate and Catherine were never treated. Kate essentially after the war became a functional alcoholic and Catherine had a severe problem. She alienated people that she didn't need to and that's very much a part of PTSD. Even though she won those awards, she was the first George Polk, she was the first Robert Capa Gold Medal women to win those, her career petered out, and she died essentially broke in Los Angeles.

The interesting thing about Frankie is that she realized at what point she had to leave. She became very ill. She was having a hard time keeping up. She knew she had to leave, so she went on her own back to the United States, still very committed to Vietnam and spent the next few years doing amazing research on the history of Vietnam and wrote the book Fire in the Lake. She wins the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Bancroft in the process beating out one of the great heroes of the American press Corps David Halberstam because that's the same year Best and the Brightest came out. She won all the prizes and that did not go over well with her former colleagues.

Brooke: Why did she win all the prizes?

Elizabeth: She answered the questions that every American wanted to know. What are we doing in Vietnam? What does this have to do with the history of Vietnam? Whereas Halberstam wrote a good book about the roots of the war in Washington. The Best and the Brightest about the John F. Kennedy cabinet and how they continued the war. Daniel Ellsberg had already published the Pentagon Papers more on how did we get into the war from the American point of view. Francis Fitzgerald wrote from the Vietnamese point of view as well as the Americans. It was exactly what Americans wanted to know.

Brooke: The big glass ceiling was broken by these women but doesn't make a difference fundamentally in how wars are covered.

Elizabeth: Frankie's first long form piece Life and Death of a Village December 1966 New York Times magazine. That was a precursor for all of the immersive work that's done when you go to a village and you watch how war is destroying it. You talk to the people, the everyday life. This was a first, this was before Jonathan Schell Village of Ben Suc. When you look at Catherine's photographs, nobody had done it before.

Art critics later, photograph critics just are amazed at the way she used her positions on the ground, above, below, with a sense of humanity but also action. Kate reading her stuff it was so much better than I remembered and stands to the test of what it means to be a war reporter, not just write baseball scores, good guy is six, bad guy seven. That's pretty much a lot of what was going on then.

She's covering some pilots of a helicopter, and just as she's writing the story they're killed, she writes that. She writes about covering a battle in Saigon and she's having fun with a couple of the mid level Saigon military officers who she knew, she talks about them by name, what they looked like, and how much fun they are, and then she goes to file her story, comes back and they're dead and she writes that too.

Brooke: You came so hard on their heels. Did you go through much of what they went through and what were you able to avoid because of them?

Elizabeth: Because of them I had the confidence that a woman could do this. I knew that it could be done and that's huge. I knew from them what the cost was. Then their example was such that I understood when I went back to Washington as a reporter at the post, that I wasn't the only one who couldn't forget Indo-China. I made sure that I got a visa to visit Cambodia under Pol Pot. It's not like consciously oh I think blah blah blah, it just it was part of the atmosphere that they created for us.

Brooke: Elizabeth, thank you very much.

Elizabeth: Well thank you Brooke.

Brooke: Elizabeth Becker is a journalist who has worked for the Washington Post, National Public Radio and The New York Times. She is author most recently of You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War. That's the show. On The Media is produced by Leia Feder, Micah Loewinger, John Hanrahan, Eloise Blondiau, and Rebecca Clark-Callender with help from Alex Haynesworth.

Xandra Ellen wrote our newsletter and our show was edited by me our technical director is Jennifer Munson, our engineers this week were Sam Bear and Adrian Lilly. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.