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Sold: “The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World” by Ray E. Boomhower

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One of the pleasures of having been an active literary agent for several years now is the satisfaction I get from selling a subsequent book by an author whose earlier book that I sold is already on the way to being published. This is the case with Ray E. Boomhower, whose biography of combat reporter, Richard Tregaskis: Reporting Under Fire From Guadalcanal to Vietnam will be published this November under the High Road Books imprint of the University of New Mexico Press. Yesterday we announced that Boomhower’s next book, The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Vietnam, and the Photo that Stunned the World, has also been acquired by University of New Mexico Press. The book will detail how Browne—a most unlikely war correspondent who switched from life as a chemist to a journalist, and became the Associated Press’s bureau chief in Saigon at age 32—was the only Western reporter on June 11, 1963, to capture, with a cheap Japanese Petri brand camera, the image of Thich Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the Catholic-dominated administration of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem.

Boomhower, who began publishing books long before we began working together (in fact, The Ultimate Protest will be his nineteenth title), has made a speciality of tracking the work of journalists at war, with earlier books on Ernie Pyle and Robert Sherrod, and the forthcoming book on Tregaskis, best known for publishing Guadalcanal Diary, the 1943 bestseller that was the first book in the US to emerge from the Pacific theater.

Chronicling the impact of the gruesome photo inside the Kennedy administration, from the draft manuscript:

“Jesus Christ!”

The sharp expletive uttered by President John F. Kennedy interrupted the telephone conversation he had begun early on the morning of Tuesday, June 11, 1963. The president was talking with his brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, who had called to discuss what to do if Alabama governor George Wallace made good on his promise to deny the entry of two African American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, into the University of Alabama.

The impetus for the president’s exclamation had not been Wallace’s intransigence, but a photograph he saw splashed on the front pages of newspapers delivered to him that morning. Since May 8, 1963, when a company of Civil Guards had killed Vietnamese civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddah’s birthday in Hue, South Vietnam had been wracked by demonstrations. The awful image that had so startled the president showed a man—a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quảng Đức—engulfed in flames while calmly, it seemed, sitting in the lotus posture on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam.

Browne, who had been tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, was the only Western reporter on the scene to photograph the horrific event. Although the monk, as he burned, uttered no sound nor changed his position, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.

“Numb with shock I shot roll after roll of [35mm] film, focusing and adjusting exposures mechanically and unconsciously,” Browne recalled. “Trying hard not to perceive what I was witnessing I found myself thinking: ‘The sun is bright and the subject is self-illuminated, so f16 at 125th of a second should be right.’ But I couldn’t close out the smell.” The AP correspondent was almost overwhelmed by the smells of joss sticks—incense burned for religious rituals—mixed with burning gasoline and diesel fuel and the odor of burning flesh.

 

 

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Give Ed Kennedy a Posthumous Pulitzer!

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The Washington Post reports that fifty-four prominent journalists are recommending that a Pulitzer Prize be awarded to the late Ed Kennedy, nearly seventy years after the American journalist first revealed to English-language readers the news of Germany’s surrender to the Allies in WWII. Sadly, rather than receiving laurels for his scoop, Kennedy’s press credentials were withdrawn by the American military for breaking their embargo on this information, and he was later fired by the Associated Press. Kennedy had broken the ban after learning that the information was being held not for security reasons, but so that Joseph Stalin could “stage a signing ceremony of his own to claim partial credit for the surrender, and U.S. officials were interested in helping him have his moment of glory.” When he next learned that news of the historic surrender had already been broadcast on German radio, Kennedy, then in France, found a phone that he knew was “not being monitored by military censors,” and transmitted this message to AP editors in London: “Germany has surrendered unconditionally.”

According to the Post‘s Manuel Froig-Ranzia, “Kennedy’s story ran big in newspapers around the world. It should have been his greatest moment, but it became an ordeal. The military revoked his credentials, but that was the least of the indignities. His fellow correspondents turned on him, voting 54 to 2 to condemn him. And the head of AP— the Philadelphia Bulletin’s publisher, Robert McLean—apologized for Kennedy’s report rather than praising him.” Like a schoolboy called on the carpet, “Kennedy was summoned back to AP headquarters, where his bosses refused to accept his resignation but also refused to give him any work. Several months later, he discovered more than $4,000 in his checking account—it was a severance, though no one had the courtesy to tell him he was being fired.

Kennedy died in 1963, at age fifty-eight, leaving behind his wife, Lyn Crost, also a former war correspondent, and daughter Julia, who would later become a journalist, as well. She told Froig-Ranzia that the AP fired her father “in the most cowardly way.” After his death, a book-length manuscript surfaced that he’d completed in 1951, for which he’d never been able to find a publisher. Froig-Ranzia reports that,

“Over the years, Cochran tried to read it. But she could never finish it. It was too painful to recall the father she’d lost when she was just 16. She kept it packed away for more than 40 years, through marriage and divorce and a career change. Eventually, in retirement, she found time to read it anew and to gain a deeper understanding of the father she’d lost. She set about searching for someone who would let her father tell his story. The publisher she found—Louisiana State University Press—didn’t tell her who they’d asked to write the introduction. It was Curley, the AP president [nowadays]. She was ‘overjoyed’ when she read what he’d written, sentiments that he said Kennedy’s former bosses and AP’s board of that era ‘could not admit.’

“Edward Kennedy,” Curley wrote, “was the embodiment of the highest aspirations of the Associated Press and American journalism.”

The book, Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press, was published in May of this year, and Cochran is making appearances in support of the book. Among its supporters is Sydney Schanberg, who wrote this in his endorsement of the book, “Ed Kennedy’s AP war stories were smoothly written, full of flowing English and rich in detail. He was the kind of reporter who made his readers feel they were there with him on the scene. This fascinating memoir was written by a gifted war correspondent.”

I am eager to read Ed Kennedy’s War, and hopeful that the Pulitzer committee will redress the wrong that was done to him by recognizing him with a belated award.

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