Booknotes

Mr. PETER ARNETT, AUTHOR, "LIVE FROM THE BATTLEFIELD": I had an offer from Simon & Schuster, Brian, that I could not turn down. In addition, there were more questions raised by my Gulf coverage than at any time since the Vietnam War and I felt I had enough under my belt in 1991 to write my life story, in a sense, as a cautionary tale to young correspondents who want to become war correspondents, pointing out the dangers; but also, in a sense, an explanation of why people like me and many others--and you can go to Ernie Pyle or go right back into the earlier years of the United States when reporters were out covering conflicts, or to the young reporters of today--Christiane Amanpour, some sense why we do this sort of thing and why we're out there covering wars, getting the information back, even though it's dangerous and, in my case, often controversial.

Mr. ARNETT:I was born in Riverton, New Zealand, a little old whaling town in the southern part of New Zealand and after a couple of years moved to Bluff, which was a seaport--an oyster port, a raucous town with lots of bars, and it was an interesting upbringing.

Mr. ARNETT:My father was very attentive to my needs. My mother was the disciplinarian. My father was a dreamer. He looked at my two brothers and I as--as achieving what he had hoped to as a youth. He wanted to be a businessman. He wanted to travel. He was caught in the Depression with a young family and--but he gave us a life. He gave us a good education and--and always encouraged us to move on out of little Bluff, even though the neighbors could not understand why we were going to get education way outside the town. And in fact, even when I return today, many, many years later, I am asked, `Well, when are you coming home? You know, the old family homestead's still there. When are you going to come back to live here?' It's not easy to explain to them why my sights were set long ago on a distant horizon and they are still set on that horizon.

Mr. ARNETT:My mother is still alive, and she calls me in times like this and says, `Peter, don't freeze to death. It must be so cold there.' So she's still interested in my health, has always been.

Mr. ARNETT:Fortunately, she has traveled somewhat in the later years of my father's--my father died in hi--in his--in his mid-60s, but he did travel for a decade. They came to Hong Kong during the Vietnam War. He met my wife and kids. My mother came here a couple of years ago. I brought her over at age 89 and she enjoyed the travel. And, yeah, she's followed my career with great interest and supported me throughout. I can do no wrong in my mother's eyes, and I love having a mother like that.

Mr. ARNETT:Elsa Arnett is my daughter. She's 25 years of age, born in Saigon. My wife was a Vietnamese woman. We separated a few years ago, but we're still in touch. Elsa, a bright young lady, and she went to Stuyvesant High School in New York, a--a--as an accomplished student, went on to Harvard University. I never had a university education. Well, Elsa compensated for that--for that by going to Harvard University and graduating with high honors and, lo and behold, went into journalism, became a reporter, worked for several months on The Washington Post as an intern and then joined The Boston Globe; spent a couple of years there and, thank goodness, agreed to help me get this book done. And as I say in the acknowledgement, without her support, persistence and computer knowledge, I don't think I would have got through that project. So I am grateful for her and she is now going to get back into daily journalism.

Mr. ARNETT:My son, Andrew, is in Seattle, Washington, trying to be a rock musician. He's a guitar player. He dresses in old clothes and looks pretty sloppy. I believe it's called the grunge movement. And he's in his late 20s and wants to become a rock 'n' roll star, and I give him all the encouragement I can. I think that's the one business that's tougher than war reporting, trying to make it in rock 'n' roll.

Mr. ARNETT:I left New Zealand in 1956. I went into newspaper work out of high school. I joined the local newspaper, the Southland Times, an old-fashioned paper with ads on the front page. And we covered local events. I covered sports and the City Council. And I happened to join that newspaper by chance. My older brother had--had joined the newspaper. He enjoyed it. My father got me a job on the Southland Times and that--from the moment I walked into the newsroom and saw those typewriters clattering and had my first opportunity to write a news story--it was a paragraph about the weather that the sub-editor, who was the editor in that case, who--the--who edited the copy--he changed every word of that paragraph, but I still felt it was mine. I still have that paragraph, that was my first creative work and--professionally, and I just got such a thrill out of being in that environment that--and--and I retained that thrill. I can't walk into a newsroom without feeling the urge to phone someone up or--or get the story moving.

Mr. ARNETT:That happened by chance in Laos in 1960. I went up there to start a little weekly newspaper. It was for the Western community, mostly CIA officials, who were under cover helping the Laotian government then. The military strongman was in our corner at that time. There were many US military people in civilian clothes. You could always get a tip-off when they would be sitting in a bar with a group of, you know, young men with the shaven heads, and an older man would walk in and they would salute him, even though they're all in T-shirts. You can't avoid that military identification. It so happened that I was an AP stringer, but I had a friend in UPI who said would I help out coverage for them while they look for a new man, and the Reuters correspondent in Saigon also got me helping out while they were trying to find someone to fill in as stringer. And a big story happened: A Communist chieftain, Prince Souphanouvong, who had been imprisoned in Vientiane, along with his followers, escaped. And I found it necessary to file for all three news organizations on that occasion.

It was a relatively big story and, as I say in the book--I talked about two or three days later, communications being slow, I got three cables for me in the Hotel Constellation, which was my headquarters--the first from the AP, said, `Congratulations. You were seven minutes ahead with story on Prince Souphanouvong's escape.' UPI said, `You lagged on initial break, but amply made up in detail,' because I'd added a few paragraphs. And Reuters said, `Thanks for helping out.'

You couldn't get away with it more than once, however, and I soon joined the Associated Press as a full-time correspondent and assigned to Indonesia. That was in 1961.

Mr. ARNETT:When I started writing this book, I wasn't quite sure where it would go. I started writing about my beginnings and it was exciting to talk about my early newspaper jobs. It was when I got to the Vietnam section, though, that I felt it--that the meatiest part of my life began to emerge. The Vietnam War was the defining experience of my life. I spent basically 13 years there, from '62 to '75. And even though the Gulf coverage was controversial, the real--the real questions that remained in American society--and within American journalism and government today--revolve around the Vietnam War, the nature of that commitment and the coverage of that conflict. So I had good reason to write in depth about the war. And this was encouraged by my editor, Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster in New York. She said, `Write as much as you can about the Vietnam War. You know, people need to know more about what went on. And try to define, in your eyes, what really happened there.'

Mr. ARNETT:We were sort of a journalistic cabal 30 years ago. I had the good fortune, early in my career, to encounter those three gentlemen whose books you have there. I was a young reporter, enthusiastic, headstrong, poorly trained because Commonwealth journalism was not particularly strong on adequate analysis, on having a--a very deep factual base for your stories. Australian journalism, in particular--in Sydney, it was hit and run to some degree--headline-happy newspapers. In Saigon in 1962, where I was assigned by the Ace--Associated Press, Malcolm Browne was my bureau chief. Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam also covered Vietnam in those days. From them I learned of the principles of American journalism--freedom of expression, the need to delve into stories, to question decisions made by government, you know, to present the obverse side of the story. And the intellectual courage of all three men, in addition to their physical courage, impressed me and made an imprint on me that is--that has lasted to this day.

Mr. ARNETT:Up to the time of Ap Bac, Vietnam was a small counterinsurgency operation, several thousand American advisers, a couple of companies of helicopters involved in a very distant war that was hardly controversial. President Kennedy was trying to figure out a strategy in that area. The few--the handful of newspeople there at the time were writing stories questioning Allied policy, but there was not a great deal of attention upon Vietnam. Laos had been the--the critical legacy that President Eisenhower left to President Kennedy. In fact, President Kennedy had written that in the conferences he held with--with Eisenhower and the changing of command, Eisenhower talked about Laos much more than Vietnam.

So in late 1962, in a--a distant war, Ap Bac brought all the--the--the questionable nature of the conflict into focus, because on that occasion a force of Vietnamese--South Vietnamese soldiers with armor, support--and American helicopter support, encountered a Vietcong unit that, instead of running as they normally did, and--and just hiding out in the--in the jungles and along the paddy fields and the canals, stood and fought. Several American helicopters shot down; several Americans killed; Vietnamese infantry units routed.

In addition to all that an outspoken American adviser, a--a colonel called John Paul Vann, who was so angry at the ineptitude of his Vietnamese--of the Vietnamese soldiers he was advising, that he talked freely to the press. He talked to Sheehan. He talked to Halberstam. He talked to Browne and he talked to me. We quoted him at length, and in writing of this debacle in Vietnam, the story made headlines. It was a quiet weekend in early January of 1963, not much other news--suddenly headlines, the name of John Paul Vann propelled into the spotlight. Great concern in Washington about what was going on. We had thrown the spotlight on the war in a negative way, and from then on in, the questions came even more--even more loudly phrased and--and more vehemently phrased, about whether or not we should be in Vietnam and, if we're there, what should--the nature of our commitment would be. So Ap Bac was really the opening shot of the American war in Vietnam.

Mr. ARNETT:You're talking about John Paul Vann.

Mr. ARNETT:Well, this is a man who, for me and for other reporters, was a beacon of realism in Vietnam. John Paul Vann, after Ap Bac, left the US military service, for various reasons that Sheehan details in his book, but mainly because he was a critic of Vietnam policy. He did return as a civilian adviser and lived in various provinces, and was an acute observer of what was going on. But John Paul Vann, by 1965, had learned his lesson about going public to the media. But he wanted the truth, as he saw it, to come out. So he used reporters such as myself. He leaked information. The leak is a standard ruse in Washington to--to--to--to put out information into the mainstream. John Paul Vann would meet with me. I would ask him questions and I could always believe he would give me candid assessments of what was going on. Were the South Vietnamese really effective? What was the level of corruption? Should American troops be fighting? In fact, when American troops were committed, what were they doing? You know, what about tactics? What about strategy? And I would look upon him several times each year, as the war got bigger and bigger and more violent and bloody and more controversial--he was a beacon of rea--realism for me.

When he finally died in 1972, shot down in a helicopter outside Kontum, by then he had become nationally well-known because he was--basically had become the last hawk left in Vietnam--the last American hawk, because in the end he did believe that maybe--the war could be won. When he was shot down, I thought I'd lost a friend and a great news source. And it was with genuine sorrow that--that I learned of his death. I'd flown with him a couple of weeks earlier. And I wrote an obituary with Horst Faas, our photographer, about John Paul Vann, and was probably one of the more emotional stories from Vietnam that I wrote.

Mr. ARNETT:That's a very good question. And my answer is that we--that in my case, definitely--I can't speak for my colleagues--but I--in this case I think I can speak, that while I looked upon John Paul Vann as a beacon for the truth, I did not pal around with him. I did not socialize with him. I didn't go drinking with him. And he was a news source whom I valued, that I would visit him, officially, as a correspondent. I would talk to him and then our lives would move on--on--on their way.

Daniel Ellsberg is--is--is very much the same. I encountered him, in a story I mention in the book, in a small village south of Saigon. He was very active, at that point, in trying to improve the performance of the South Vietnamese and the US military. He was at the forefront of an American unit, urging them to tactically move forward. They were all bo--they were bogged down in elephant grass and not very willing to move. It was a hot day. There were snipers. But Ellsberg was out there egging them on and telling them, you know, `Let's get this war won.' He was very gung-ho. I rarely saw him after that. And--and I was not the recipient of the Pentagon papers that, of course, he later became famous for distributing--papers he gave, ultimately, to Neil Sheehan.

But I don't feel I was a fellow traveler. Again, in the case of Ellsberg, I would bump into him occasionally. I--I would learn from these people, but they were simply two of the many sources that we used in Vietnam. And as I point throughou--on--throughout the book, not only in Vietnam but elsewhere, my main sources of information were my own two eyes, and my ability to get to where the action was and to make assessments of the nature of the war and its direction from my own experience and observations.

Mr. ARNETT:Put it this way: I wouldn't have been surprised at any point that death would have taken me--not surprised at all. At the end of my Vietnam experience, I suppose I was surprised that I had not been injured, that I hadn't even sprained an ankle in the war. But anyone who gets close to combat has to know that a bullet will have their name on it or a piece of metal will have their name on it, and so it should not come as any surprise to those who do the kind of things I do.

Mr. ARNETT:From the time I arrived in Saigon, in the early '60s, to the time that I left, when everyone else left in late--in the middle of 1975, I made it a point to be out in Saigon, in--in--in the war theater and out of Saigon 75 percent to 80 percent of the time. I had the good fortune to be part of the Associated Press bureau in Saigon. We had, at the height of the war, 20 members of that bureau--10 reporters, 10 photographers. The duty fell on others to go to the 5:00 follies military briefings, to interview General Westmoreland and others, to cover the activities of politicians. I was there early. I had won the right to go and cover the big actions, so I felt it was a privilege, really, to be out of Saigon and in the field with the troops. It was a responsibility that I would--I wanted to bear and I also realized, as the war became more controversial, that my reporting had to be accurate, right on the button, or my career would be destroyed if I was ever wrong, if my assessments were inaccurate.

In fact, Wes Gallagher, whom I talk a lot about in the book--he was the AP president at the time, a wonderfully strong-willed man, a veteran of World War II, a firm believer in the First Amendment and freedom of speech--he backed me, but he would tell me, when I would run into him every year or so, `Peter, Don't ever make a mistake in your reporting. You're so controversial we won't be able to support you, so just be correct in everything you say.' It was an onerous task to face daily, reporting--and I wrote 3,000 or 4,000 stories from Vietnam--knowing that every one had to be accurate or every story I wrote was required to pass the test of close supervision by the Pentagon, by military people, by government. And I endeavored to do that, and I hope I succeeded in that task.

Mr. ARNETT:I guess I fell in love. In Saigon in 1962 and '63, I met Nina Nguyen. She was a young Vietnamese woman who had been educated in the United States, University of North Carolina, as a medical librarian, worked in hospitals in New York. Had returned to Saigon to work in the government hospital as a librarian there. I met her. We had a lot in common. We married in 1964 and had a couple of children. And she--her family was in Saigon. They had come down from the north. They--they had fled from the--from the Communist occupation of Hanoi and the rest of North Vietnam. Her father had been associated with an independent political movement. He was looked upon with disfavor by the Communist side. He brought his family to Saigon where, in fact, he became the secretary-general of the national assembly in Saigon, a bureaucrat there. And I met Nina, and we married and we lived in Saigon.

Mr. ARNETT:For 20 years. We separated a few years ago, but I'm still in touch with Nina. We get along fine. The children keep us together, and it was a relationship which I delighted in and particularly the kids. I think they've done very well.

Mr. ARNETT:She lives in New York City and often visits her relatives in Washington, DC.

Mr. ARNETT:Sure, we're all friends together. We--we did not break up in animosity. The children are the heart of our relationship. We look at them as our joint responsibility and they help keep us in touch. So Nina did, in fact, cooperate, and for that I'm very grateful. I'm grateful to other members of the Vietnamese expatriate community who also helped me and also--who also trust me. Even though I was a controversial reporter, I do have quite a few friends from South Vietnam who believed in the cause but also realized that it was hopelessly flawed from a very early time and that it was a--the hope of a South Vietnama--Vietnam remaining free was a--was a dream, not a reality.

Mr. ARNETT:Yeah. Well, I didn't learn about that until I got out of Baghdad because CNN did not want to trouble me with too much of the criticism. There was a lot in many areas and--and I--my son rose to the occasion--my son Andrew--and wrote a--a defense of the family for the op-ed page of The New York Times, for which Senator Simpson later apologized. I think the incident is behind us. He was--he had erroneous information about the political attitude of Nina's family, and he apologized for it and I feel that it's water under the bridge.

Mr. ARNETT:This was in 1973. There was a lull. This was when American troops had left and the optimists were saying, `Well, Vietnamization has worked. South Vietnam is strong. You have a government in Saigon. President Nguyen Van Thieu is there. He has the support of cabinet. You can travel in the countryside, and basically the Americans have left and, hey, we're--we're home free. You know, we're he--we've held the Communists at bay.' And the US had promised continuing aid and all seemed well. The pessimists said, `Now wait a minute. This is sort of a decent interval'--the title of a book later by Frank Snepp, by the way. `This is just a ruse by Henry Kissinger, President Nixon and the North Vietnamese to allow America to get out, to allow the American public to get used to the idea that American troops are no longer ler--there, and then allow it all to crumble.'

So in 1973 I returned after the American withdrawal. The AP said to me, `Look, have a look at it. Can this work? Can what we hear about the optimism of that time prevail?' So I went back to Saigon with my family and I decided to drive from Saigon to Hue in the north, along provinces and roads that I'd often visited during the course of the war--early, middle and later. And I wanted to take Andrew to give him a sense of, you know, what his country--because he was half-Vietnamese--half-South Vietnamese--what his country was going to look like, because I felt there would be change and I wanted him to get a sense of--of a country about to change forever, to be lost forever. So we made this trip for 10 days up the coast in a van with an interpreter, a lot of Coca-Cola and canned food. And along the way I sort of gave him a tour. He had a look at battlefield weapons, destroyed tanks. We interviewed Vietnamese commanders. We interviewed Polish peacekeepers who'd come in to replace the Americans.

At the end of that trip I wrote a very, very negative assessment of the war. I quoted Vietnamese commanders in the field as saying, `It's finished. We cannot hold against the determined North Vietnamese offensive.' I learned that the North Vietnamese had, in fact, moved deep into South Vietnam; they had constructed roads, they had constructed oil pipelines. They had whole communities established, ready to spring out at the appointed time in the final attack. And I quote an American there, a friend of mine, as saying, `Vietnam--South Vietnam is a river of ice. It's a frozen river. The surface is firm, but underneath, the river is flowing swiftly and soon the ice will crack.' As it was, 18 months later, in March of 1975, the ice did crack. The determined attacks from the North Vietnamese came in the highlands and they were to conclude a month or so later in the fall of Saigon.

Mr. ARNETT:I quote him in the--in the book as saying something about, `Daddy, Daddy, tank, tank.' And he--he claims he never said it. He said he had a better command of the English language than I credit him for. But he does remember the trip and I took many pictures of him on that trip, and--which he has in an album. I think he recalls quite a lot of when--of what went on and I'm glad I took him.

Interestingly enough, I--I've been criticized for what some believe exposing my children to unnecessary risk. Some in the AP bureau at the time said, you know, `How can you take your son on a journey like that?' And I was criticized in the early '80s for taking my daughter--then 15-year-old--years old--to Salvador and Nicaragua to have a look at what was going on. But my philosophy has always been that if you can--you can travel through areas of relatively heavy population with impunity. I mean, you were very unlikely--I would have been very unlikely to be hurt on that long drive up the coast of Saigon, in and out of villages and cities. Why would anyone want to harm us? And I felt the same in Central America, that--and--and--where I had taken my daughter. And neither of them, by the way, feel that they risked their lives when they'd been with me and they're glad for the experiences.

Mr. ARNETT:Yes.

Mr. ARNETT:We actually do. I was talking to David Halberstam the other day and he said, `We really are a gang, aren't we?' We--we--over the years we have gotten together, often on--in Vietnam reunions. We did get together when Neil Sheehan's great book was--was--was--was published and--a few years ago. And we got together for that particular picture that--that Avedon did for The New Yorker. We've been together on some other occasions--Vietnam reunions. We don't get together enough. But, interestingly enough, when we are sitting at the same table, it's like we are back in Saigon at the Caravelle Hotel or the Royale Hotel, and we can bring back the flavor of those days almost instantly. I think it's interesting that four of us have now written books and Horst Faas is threatening to do a photo book. So maybe all of us would have added to the Vietnam literature, of which--which already is--which is of mighty proportions.

Mr. ARNETT:Horst Faas is a photo editor in London. He spends a lot of time planning Olympics Games coverage, sen--summit coverage, and he's a busy man still.

Mr. ARNETT:Not only is Cora Weiss there, but David Dellinger is there, a prominent peace activist, Richard Falk, an international lawyer who wrote against the war and argued that it was illegal, in terms of international law, and ther--the older woman there is Minnie Gartley, and she was the mother of Mark Gartley, who was second from the right. And the others--two other young men there---there were--three of those--the three men on the right were American pilots, two from the Navy, one from the Air Force, who had been shot down in North Vietnam, captured as POWs but who, in September of 1972, were released to an anti-war group that traveled to Hanoi. I was invited to go with that anti-war group to report on the--on the handover of prisoners. Included in that group that Cora Weiss led was the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, the--the--the--the--the Harvard preacher who was very prominent in the anti-war movement and later in the anti-nuclear movement.

What was controversial was that the US government was opposed to this group's going to Hanoi. They felt that an independent American delegation taking delivery of POWs was usurping the diplomatic role of the US government. The US government was negotiating with Hanoi at that time to end the war. But the Hanoi government just went ahead, anyway, and this group of Americans went ahead with their journey. This was a trip monitored from the beginning by the FBI, by other US intelligence services, as many people were in those days. It was a trip in some degree clandestine because the impression of--by the delegation was that the US government would attempt to take those POWs away from the group as soon as they could. And, in fact, when we left Hanoi on a trip to the west, circuitous through Beijing and Moscow, at Moscow the consul general--the American consul general met us at the aircraft and basically demanded that these POWs--excuse me, it's been a long day. Excuse me a second. He basically demanded this P--these POWs turn themselves over to embassy control and into the hands of the US government for debriefings and to return home.

Richard Falk, the international lawyer, argued that under the terms of the release of these men, they had the right to continue on to the United States. And it was a struggle really between the anti-war group's desire to get maximum publicity for this--this journey and--that would benefit the North Vietnamese, in a sense, but also help bring nego--negotiations to an end, and the US government's desire to get these men out of the limelight and to be debriefed. It was up to the men, in the end, and they decided in Moscow that they would stay with the group and go all the way to New York to fulfill the conditions the North Vietnamese had done. And they did, indeed, go to New York, where they were taken over by the US government.

Interestingly enough, at Moscow--when we left Moscow in an SAS plane, an American who described himself as a physician got on the plane with a huge suitcase, and it turned out to be filled with military uniforms, so that when these men got off the plane in New York they were dressed in official military uniforms with their ranks. A controversial story, it made headlines but I think it also helped bridge the gap that existed between the US government and Hanoi, and helped bring the war to a conclusion. The peace agreement was signed relatively soon afterwards and all Americans were out of the war.

Mr. ARNETT:No. I never figured that because there was no way I felt would I have allowed myself to be used in that manner. But I did talk to them at some length beforehand. Wes Gallagher, the AP president, said, you know, `It's your reputation and mine,' he said, `on the line.' Because he was concerned because earlier trips by Jane Fonda and Antho--Anthony Lewis of The New York Times that year had been very controversial. I talked to Cora Weiss. I talked to David Dellinger and they convinced me that they were interested in a full--a comprehensive account of what was going. That was the only requirement they had and that suited me. I filed two, three, four stories a day. I'd never worked so hard in all my life, but it was a wonderful story. I was exclusive for two weeks. I like being exclusive, Brian, in stories. As I point out in the book, the journalism that I know is totally competitive, and I like being exclusive and that was an example of where every story in any newspaper you read was by me.

Mr. ARNETT:That picture is from Binh Dinh Province in Vietnam in 1965. It was taken by Huen Tan My, a wonderful AP photographer--Vietnamese who was killed in the Mekong Delta two or three months later.

I also tell a story--not only do I recount his death and funeral, but I tell the story about his brother--Nick Ut, we named--who came to the AP bureau after his brother had died and begged to learn to be a photographer. And a request that Horst Faas, who knew his brother well, did not take seriously. He said, `You're too young and I don't want to risk you. Your family would never forgive me.' Nick Ut persisted. He learned to be a photographer. In 1972 he came back to the bureau one afternoon with a dramatic picture of a group of young children running down a road, including that of a--of an unclothed young woman who'd been burned by napalm and she was crying. And that picture won him the Pulitzer Prize for that year--the brother of an AP reporter who had died a few years earlier.

Mr. ARNETT:Well, he popped up before Iraq because I was covering a story in Atlanta in 1981. It was the story of the missing and murdered children--the 28 or 30 young children had been murdered in Atlanta. There was a manhunt for the perpetrator of those murders. National attention was focused on Atlanta. I'd been there a couple of times with the AP, writing in-depth stories about the--the issue down there and the search. One morning, staking out a source who was living in a motel, emerging out of the morning fog was a familiar figure and it was Richard Blystone. He had been with the AP in Saigon. He had been with the AP in Phnom Penh. And he--I knew he had joined this fledgling news organization called CNN. All I knew about it really was that Richard Blystone had joined CNN, and we all sort of giggled and says, `You know, does he think he can do television? And, anyway, who is Ted Turner and what is CNN?' He greeted me on the street and he insisted that I have a look at CNN headquarters in Atlanta, which was in a--in a former businessmen's club. I went in there. I had a look around. I met Burt Reinhart, the executive president--vice president. I spent a couple of days in and out of there and they convinced me to join them. I didn't need too much persuasion. I had a sense that CNN was going somewhere. It was television and Blystone helped get me on that news organization.

A decade later Blystone came into my life again because he was covering Baghdad with a group of CNN personnel. His family was very concerned about his well-being. He was concerned about their well-being. He made the decision to leave Baghdad with the last of the US Embassy personnel a few days before the bombing began. Because he had decided to leave, the international editor of CNN called me up, and I was in Jerusalem covering that end of the story. And they asked me if I would go to Baghdad, which I did. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Mr. ARNETT:Yeah, well, I guess--it's very hard to write about issues of--you know, decisions like what, in a sense, could be life and death or personal decisions involved in such crises. In the fall of Saigon, most correspondents left and--and I stayed. But it was a call that anyone at the--at the time and place had to make themselves. I mean, I don't--I've never believed that management can order a reporter, you know, to risk his life on a story. It has to be a personal decision. I also question, however, whether management can order reporters out of a crisis area, even though it's done routinely and, in fact, was done in Baghdad and, in fact, was done in the fall of Saigon. Management did, in fact, instruct the correspondents to leave the scene. Many did.

Sydney Schanberg was instructed to leave Phnom Penh in 1975, and he defied management wishes and stayed to the greater glory of Sydney Schanberg and journalism, and he justly won his Pulitzer Prize. In the case of Blystone I mention morale because--because Bly was the veteran. There was a whole bunch of young people there who looked upon him as being their guide and instructor and inspiration. And they'd made the commitment to stay. His departure--his--his--his departure confused them and worried them. I got in, as I say in the book, `Who is Peter Arnett?' I hadn't built up any rapport with these individuals. In television it is the group that is all-important. The individual is less significant because there is no television news story that can be produced without a cameraman, a sound man, editors and producers. We all work together and the--the group is extremely important, and if the group disintegrates in any way, everyone is affected. So that initial core of individuals who had made a pact, in effect, to stay in Baghdad for CNN began to break up, for valid reasons--I mean, family concerns, other considerations.

And--but it was too late for me to convince my colleagues to stay with me. I was eventually alone. I didn't have a cameraman or a sound man or an editor. Through the miracle of modern technology, I did have a satellite phone. But, you know, I fully understand their decisions, and I hope in the book I did not ridicule anyone for doing it. I tried to be as accurate as I could, because let me tell you, Brian, there have been occasions when I have left battlefields, too. There have been times when I've left the scenes of stories if I thought I was endangered. And, as I say, it's a personal call.

I mentioned Blystone's case simply because that was one of the reasons why, three days later, I was alone in Baghdad with no one else around me. And that was one of the reasons that contributed to it. What I tried to explain in that case, and in the fall of Saigon and at other times is sort of the motivation that I felt that--about--what--what motivated me to make decisions which many others were foolhardy. I mean, I quote Robert Weiner as saying to me, I'm the last of a dying breed. When he was leaving--Robert Weiner was our producer and he says, `Peter, you're the last of a dying breed.' And this upset me at the time, because--because I don't think I'm the last of a dying breed, just as Ernie Pyle and--and war correspondents in earlier wars--Korea and ….Beach and many other correspondents of my generations, we're falling--fulfilling a long tradition.

And as we speak here, American--reporters of other nationalities are in Bosnia and it's cold in Bosnia and it's dangerous in Bosnia. They're on the streets of Kabul, covering the story there--AP, AFP, Reuters. Reporters are in Mogadishu, so there's a--willing to risk their lives to get information back. So I'm not the last of a dying breed. I just happen to be old, but I'm not the last of a breed. I don't want to be the last war correspondent, in the sense that I think information is too important. We need to gather more information. We need to be out there, getting back to the public in the United States and elsewhere, getting back to our government insights into what's going on in the world because there is no one shot fired in the world that doesn't echo ultimately in America.

Mr. ARNETT:I'm living in McLean, Virginia.

Mr. ARNETT:It's--I've--CNN has named me what they call an international correspondent. I was recently in Afghanistan and I did an hourlong special. And I'll be on the road again, once this book tour is over, and I'll be in Latin America and Europe and elsewhere. You know, I like to get--I like to do as many stories as I can and--and get out there and compete with all those other newspeople.

Mr. ARNETT:How do you go about writing? Well, I had never written a book before in my whole life, and I began by writing about the Gulf War. And I wrote 70 or 80 pages and I sent them to New York. And my editor, Alice Mayhew, says, `Ah, you know, this is no good. Try again. Start with your youth.' And I thought, `Well, I won't start at my youth. I'll start with my forefathers,' the--the family legend that goes back--went back to the sealers and whalers, the progenitor of the family who arrived in a whaling ship in Riverton in 1834, came ashore with a group of settlers, you know, married a local Polynesian woman and they built a family--the family line 150 years ago.

And when I started writing that, Brian, I felt I ha--I found a voice. I sort of started to learn who I was, just this kid from New Zealand who wasn't quite sure where his destiny would take him, but knew that he had to go somewhere, that he was--felt very confined by the little community he was brought up in.

The details--fortunately I was a prolific letter-writer when I was a kid. My mother kept everything I ever wrote her. And years ago I'd got all the mail, so a lot of what my early years--I was able to describe in my early years came from my own letters to her a long time ago. I've klep--kept every clipping I ever wrote and I've kept carbons of every story I ever did in Vietnam. So every quote you see in that book from--has been published before and every incident, you know, I--I can verify from my own notes and--and my own stories.

And it was a long and painful experience, digging out all that color and information and anecdote, but each section I finished, I had a degree of satisfaction. I thought, `Well, hey, it's down on record.' All the tor--stories I've told in bars, all the stories over dinner, all the times that Halberstam, Browne and Sheenan and I and Faas have got together and talked--told stories about each other--most of them are there. All the publishable ones are there. And it was a great delight to slowly go through my life.

And one of the joys of this book was to talk about my colleagues. George Esper--who's ever heard of George Esper? He's an AP reporter who spent 10 years in Vietnam. He wrote more about the Vietnam War than any other journalist. George is back in Hanoi now, in fact. He is the AP bureau chief. He a--he opened the AP bureau in Hanoi a few months ago. I was able to talk about George at length. And I was able to talk about people like Ed White and Hugh Mulligan and other characters from that period--many who--of whom appear in that picture. They're the reporters and the photographers who bring America their bread and butter news day after day.

Mr. ARNETT:That is George Esper.

Mr. ARNETT:Hugh Mulligan. It's people such as these who bring America--American newspapers the bread and butter pictures and stories. Their--their relatives, their nephews are out there today covering the news. It's a--I was attracted to the American media because of their--be--be--because of the--the great appetite for information that American news organizations have. The Associated Press--you could never write too much about anything for the AP, particularly about the Vietnam War. And so at the end of a long week in the field, I could come back and write through my notebooks and it would go on the AP wire. American newspapers--The Times, The Post, The Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor--they were writing volumes. They're still writing volumes. It is a thrill to be a journalist in America, where you can spill out so much of what you see. And, ultimately, if you're lucky, you can write a book. But that's what attracts me to the media.

I know that the public has mixed feelings about the media today, and questions our mission and our motive, but I think in the field that I specialize in--you know, foreign correspondence--I think you've got really dedicated people there. You've always had them and they're still there now. And I think they're largely unsung and I think most of them would prefer it that way, but I am really proud of what they do. And I hope this book, when they read it, they'll grin and say, `Hey, that's what we're doing right now.'

Mr. ARNETT:I became an American about a decade ago. I felt that--I was living in this country and I felt sufficiently committed to what America meant to become a citizen. Up to that time, you know, I just didn't want to go through a pro forma citizenship. I wanted to feel like an American. And I really do feel like an American, even though my accent suggests otherwise.

Mr. ARNETT:I have not remarried. I'm planning to remarry.

Mr. ARNETT:Well, I really believe in getting along with people and being persuasive, and a temper can be very disruptive and can--and outbursts can be remembered. And I guess, during the whole of the Vietnam War, only on a handful of occasions did I have, you know, exchanges--differences of opinion with bureau personnel that led to out--outbursts of indignation. I mean, we're talking about a handful.

However, in television, I came up against--I was in circumstances which were unfamiliar to me. It was the team effort that I was not well adjusted to. As a print reporter, as an i--wire service reporter, I've traveled with a notebook and a pencil, sometimes a camera. I was an independent being. I would write my dispatches. They'd be edited a little and then they would go onto the wire. In television I was very dependent on what the cameraman got in his lens--the video. Was the audio usable? In an interview, could you hear what the--the subject was saying? Was it well-edited? And I found very early on at CNN that the assessment of my performance would depend very much on what others were doing. And that led to an--an exchange of feeling occasionally and a couple I detail in the book.

On one occasion--and--and I am not--I am not proud of either occasion--one time, in El Salvador during a national day ceremony by the Salvador military--this was in '82. This was a country in crisis. There were death squads loose. And the national army was parading. There were thousands of people in the national stadium. It began to rain. My cameraman, a freelancer from Florida, had a new camera. He was worried about it. He put a cover on it and says, `I'm not shooting anymore. My camera could get hurt.' And I said, `What do you mean, you're not shooting anymore? You're hired to get the pictures.' He argued with me. He put the camera down, shaped up and I'm afraid we're having fisticuffs in the middle of a stadium. I mean, it was--I had an audience of thousands. And marching by us were Salvadoran marines and rangers, and they were--I'm sure they were wondering, `What the hell are these--these two Americans doing, punching each other out?'

One other occasion, with the same cameraman, unfortunately, in Belize. Independence Day and it was actually a midnight ceremony in the--again, it started to rain and he was again reluctant to use his camera, and again we--we--we had fisticuffs. As I point out in the book, we did make up and we did get along fine, unless it rained.

Mr. ARNETT:OK, that was John Holliman, one of the boys of Baghdad who, with Bernard Shaw and I, covered the first 17 hours of the war live. And--which I detail in great--in--with--with many pages in the book. And it was a team effort. We handed the microphone back and forth. We crawled around the floor and described for an American audience and international audience what we were seeing outside the window, which was horrendous bombing and destruction. John left Baghdad a couple of days later and he returned to the United States. And he was doing some anchoring in Washington.

And on this occasion I had visited a village in the north--Al Dur in the north of Baghdad. There'd been 40 to 50 homes destroyed. There were huge craters in and near these homes. There was a military installation five miles away, burning, that had clearly been destroyed, and it was--you know, it was clear to me that some of those bombs aimed at the military installation had hit this, in fact, bedroom community to the military installation. And there were a lot of homes destroyed and--and neighbors and other officials said many people had died.

So I went back and reported this, and John heard out my report and then he said, you know, `How do you know you're not being duped by the Iraqis?' And--and it sort of shocked me, because this was several days into the war and I was aware of criticism and I was hoping for a little more support by my anchors. But on the other hand, I--they--they were justified, I suppose, in questioning some of my accounts, but I thought that Holliman was going beyond the pale and--and John occasionally does that. But I--I dearly like him. I've worked with him for 10 years. But I felt that he was being a little too critical of what I was doing. Now this is not just my assessment, because Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, who supported my being in Baghdad and who runs our news organization today, did tell me that at one point during the war Peter Jennings wrote him a note and said, `Hey, Tom, your anchors are tougher on Peter Arnett than Senator Simpson.'

But you know, the CNN viewers--hey, we had to assure our viewers that you were accurate, that were being as independent as you could be in your reporting, and that--and that we were watchful about any propaganda content that got into the dispatches. But in that--on that one occasion, I--I guess I sort of lost my temper.

Mr. ARNETT:Thank you, Brian.