Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Vietnam War
We weren't always welcomed home from the war. But we were good at what we did and the patients knew we mattered.
Editor’s Note: Capt.
President Johnson shocked the nation when he ended his bid for reelection in 1968. As early as 1964, Lady Bird had suggested that he might not want to run for a second term.
Editor’s Note: Too often, historians have underestimated the role that Lady Bird played in Lyndon Johnson’s political life.
Though it was one of his most controversial actions as president, Richard Nixon's covert bombing of Cambodia was excluded from his impeachment articles, helping to shape how the Vietnam War has been remembered ever since.
After her death, Dickey Chapelle’s editor at National Geographic paid tribute to the gutsy war correspondent he knew.
Editor's Note: Bill Garrett was Dickey Chapelle's primary contact at National Geographic and often worked with her on assignments in the field. He wrote these observations about his friend and colleague shortly after her death.
When the Pentagon wanted a photographer to record the largest airborne assault in the Vietnam War, the most qualified candidate was a young French woman.
At fi
The award-winning photojournalist broke gender barriers and was the first American female reporter killed in combat in Vietnam.
Editor's Note: Cultural critic and historian Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and politics.
American Heritage has published many important essays on the history of the Vietnam War.
The New York Times reporter who spent months in hiding analyzing the Pentagon Papers remembers how they broke the story.
After we published the Papers at the Washington Post, the Supreme Court decision in our favor has underpinned American freedom of the press.
Th
Jan Scruggs fought on multiple fronts to build the Vietnam Memorial, which was once derided as a “black gash” and “Orwellian glop.” His work inspired a nation and helped bring Americans together.
Editor’s Note: James Reston, Jr.
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite underwent a dramatic change of heart during the Vietnam War—and in doing so, changed the face of broadcast journalism.
On February 6, 1965, Vietcong guerrillas attacked the U.S. base at Pleiku, killing eight American soldiers and wounding 126. The Johnson administration quickly retaliated, commencing another vicious cycle of lightning reprisals and military escalations. Suddenly U.S.
The late David Halberstam was a journalist, heart and soul, with a distinctive way of writing history.
DAVID HALBERSTAM had put the finishing touches on his final book, The Coldest Winter, in the spring of 2007, just five days before his tragic death in a car accident in California.
A magazine reporter covered the first American deaths in Vietnam, unaware that the soon-to-explode war would mark America’s awakening to maturity.
On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of the eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring
How the U. S. military reinvented itself after the Vietnam disaster
January 11 Surgeon General Luther L. Terry releases his report on cigarette smoking.
January 16 Hello, Dolly! opens at the St. James Theater in New York City.
Viewing a transformation that still affects all of us—through the prism of a single year
The explosion at the Army Math Center blew in the window near my laboratory desk.
On Monday, August 24, 1970, I was a graduate student in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. My research laboratory was in the chemistry building, and that morning, I rode over on my bicycle to find broken glass everywhere.
A search begun in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse 140 years ago continues today as a $100-million-a-year effort to reunite the U.S. military and American families with their missing soldiers.
Atop a half-mile-high mountain deep in the heart of the A Shau Valley in central Vietnam, a poisonous worm snake winds itself onto the edge of a spade. After a fleeting glance, the U.S.
This is a journalist’s list. My reading (and knowledge) is greatly influenced by the events of the day, the time, the era. My reading and my work are often one and the same. That is one of the best things about being a writer, but it may not be ideal for list-making.
In his kaleidoscopic novel U.S.A., a trilogy published between 1930 and 1936, John Dos Passos offered a descriptive line that has always stayed with me.
Forty years ago, the USS Maddox fought the first battle of America’s longest war. How it happened—and even if it happened—are still fiercely debated.
From the combat information center (CIC) of the Destroyer USS Maddox, Commodore John Herrick radioed: “Am being approached by high-speed craft with apparent intention of torpedo attack.
Powered flight was born exactly one hundred years ago. It changed everything, of course, but most of all, it changed how this nation wages war.
Walter Boyne’s résumé makes for unusual reading. He is the author of 42 books and one of the few people to have had bestsellers on both the fiction and the nonfiction lists of The New York Times.
How a patch of ground forged a man’s future, stole a part of his soul, and gave it back to him 30 years later
How’s this for a story? North Vietnam, 1972: Jane Fonda is in the midst of her visit when an N.V.A. officer gets an idea.
A historian argues that, in Vietnam, America’s cause was just, its arms effective, and its efforts undermined by critics back home, and that this is how things must work in a free society.
A tantalizing archival discovery suggests the perils of historical evidence.
The Air Force medevac plane taxied in. I felt a surge of apprehension. The plane stopped, and the ground crew wheeled over the stairway for disembarking. When the door opened, a very small girl appeared, excitedly waving.
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE NOW, TENS OF THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS HAVE BEEN LEAVING LETTERS AND SNAPSHOTS, CIGARETTES AND CLOTHING AND BEER FOR THEIR FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND PARENTS WHO NEVER MADE IT BACK FROM VIETNAM.
The faces of the "American Dead in Vietnam” was Life magazine’s cover story on June 27, 1969.
The Smithsonian Institution has taken a good deal of heat lately because of some sophomoric pieties formulated by the staff responsible for mounting an exhibit on the Enola Gay and the bomb it dropped on Hiroshima 50 years ago next summe
Featured Authors
