“I confess that when I went to Vietnam early in February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest, and that I found it, though often by accident or in the process of being briefed by an official.”
So begins the first of the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy’s extraordinary dispatches from the Vietnam War filed for the New York Review of Books between the spring of 1967 and the summer of 1968. Quickly collected and published as two books, Vietnam and Hanoi, McCarthy’s reporting on Vietnam proved some of the most controversial American journalism to emerge from the war. It was not that she exposed one of the many war crimes perpetrated by U.S. forces in Vietnam, as Seymour Hersh documented the My Lai massacre or Jonathan Schell wrote of the destruction of Bến Súc. Rather, her reporting depicted the war as something perhaps even more painful for many Americans to confront: a psychodrama of vanity and hubris that indicted the values of the “Greatest Generation” to which she belonged.
Descriptions of combat were hardly necessary to illustrate this, and in fact McCarthy—curiously for a war reporter—passed up opportunities to accompany U.S. soldiers on patrol. Soon after she arrived in South Vietnam, the revered correspondent Bernard Fall encouraged her to tag along with the Air Force on a bombing mission. The experience would help train her to “feel nothing” as a war reporter, he said. “Be completely detached.” The idea revulsed her. “For a person like me, a natural civilian,” she wrote, “insentience should be the last thing to strive for; detachment would equal indifference.” McCarthy’s biographer, Frances Kiernan, notes that only a few days after their conversation, Fall died after tripping a landmine—one of over sixty journalists killed during the war.
More than fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam and Hanoi are worth reading as much for what they suggest about the possibilities and liabilities of war correspondence as what they say about Vietnam. History and public opinion have validated McCarthy’s assessment of U.S. involvement as a sordid imperial endeavor many times over; that much is settled. What writers can say or do about a war to end it, though, remains a worthy question. Few literary figures living in the West today are willing to confront it as directly as McCarthy did, and they, like her, are typically rewarded with the condescension of a loud and powerful segment of their peers. Sally Rooney’s defense of Palestine Action—and the subsequent backlash—is a case in point.