Reporting Vietnam Part Two: American Journalism 1969-1975

In the predawn morning of May 9, 1970, Richard Nixon left the White House and went to the Lincoln Memorial to speak with a handful of antiwar protesters, most of them college students. The nervous president, who, an assistant later said, "wanted to know what they thought," and the awed students talked amiably for a time, and then all concerned went about their business, Nixon conducting a war, the students trying to end it. So reported Dan Oberdorfer for the Washington Post in one of the dozens of stories, profiles, articles, and dispatches collected in this volume of Vietnam War-era journalism, the second of two content-packed books in a Library of America set. Among the many highlights of the second volume are reports by New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg (of The Killing Fields fame) on the deadly aftermath of the American invasion of Cambodia; Seymour Hersh's coverage of the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers under the command of Lt. William Calley killed 109 South Vietnamese civilians; U.S. Senator John McCain's account for U.S. News and World Report of his six years as a prisoner of war; and, for a weird home-front spin, Hunter S. Thompson's hallucinogen-fueled reportage from the 1972 Democratic National Convention. The complete text of Michael Herr's Dispatches, an influential and estimable book, is included, as well. Students of Vietnam War history will find this and its companion volume to be essential sources. --Gregory McNamee