As a young BBC correspondent visiting Saigon in 1971, I avidly devoured a bootleg copy of Frances FitzGerald’s book “Fire In the Lake,” which was officially banned.
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Ms. FitzGerald ended her powerful account of America’s failure in Vietnam with an impassioned expression of yearning for communist victory, when “‘individualism’ and its attendant corruption [will] give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community.” Many observers back then assumed that nothing could be worse than the bloody, shambolic, corrupt mess that had prevailed in Vietnam since the abdication of the French colonial regime in 1954.
Today, however, there seems reason to modify the verdict of such writers as Ms. FitzGerald and Jack Langguth, another reporter covering the war, who wrote: “North Vietnam’s leaders…deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders…deserved to lose.”
This is not because what either journalist recorded about America’s record in Vietnam has proved to be untrue. It is because we can now see that those who delivered tales of woe from Saigon—to which I contributed something myself—told only half the story.