Gloria Emerson - Coverage of Vietnam

Coverage of Vietnam

Born to wealthy bluebloods William B. Emerson and Ruth Shaw Emerson, Gloria Emerson, who grew to 6' tall, spent some of her youth in Saigon. It was there that she first began to write for the newspapers, freelancing for The New York Times in 1956. Subsequently tiring of writing only about fashion, she returned to America and quit to get married. Returning in 1964 to the Times, she worked in the paper's London and Paris bureaus until she convinced the paper, as she said in the obituary she wrote for herself, "that she be sent to Vietnam because she had been in that country in 1956 and wanted to go back to write about the Vietnamese people and the immense unhappy changes in their lives, not a subject widely covered by the huge press corps who were preoccupied with covering the military story."

Among her first reports for The New York Times, Emerson exposed false "body counts" and "unearned commendations" to field-grade officers and the use of hard drugs by American soldiers. She also reported on the suffering of the Vietnamese people. At a 1981 conference on the Vietnam War, Emerson declared U.S. spokesman and host of the Five O'Clock Follies Saigon briefings Barry Zorthian "a determined and brilliant liar."

In her self-written obituary, which reporters at the Times discovered on the day she died, Emerson described the plaudits that came her way:

Her dispatches from Vietnam won a George Polk Award for excellence in foreign reporting, and, later, a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications. Her nonfiction book on the war, Winners & Losers (Random House, 1977), won a National Book Award in 1978 but she described it as "too huge and somewhat messy". Its subject was the effects of the conflict on some Americans, or "an absence of the effect", as she once said.

One of the most quoted parts of the book was Emerson's condemnation of "killing at a distance":

Americans cannot perceive — even the most decent among us — the suffering caused by the United States air war in Indochina and how huge are the graveyards we have created there. To a reporter recently returned from Vietnam, it often seems that much of our fury and fear is reserved for busing, abortion, mugging, and liberation of some kind. ... As Anthony Lewis once wrote, our military technology is so advanced that we kill at a distance and insulate our consciences by the remoteness of the killing.