respects to him. as you see, reverend billy graham is giving the eulogy and for those of you who are very interested in history, and i know how magnificent this is. this is a wonderful opportunity for you to see the first time and the only time in the history of our country that five presidents and five first ladies attended president nixon s funeral. you can watch american artifact and other american history tv programs any time by visiting our website, c-span.org/history. in october of 1995, several vietnam war correspondents including peter arnett and bernard calb shared their experiences covering the war. this conference was hosted by the non-profit organization, no greater love. it s about an hour. my name s stanley. i served in world war ii as a gi then covered the algerian war in the middle east and so forth. and i got to vietnam, in my terms late, but early in other terms, in the middle of 1959. and the vietnam war was just a cloud on the horizon at that point t
embassy during the tet offensive we opened the teletype in the time bureau to any journalist who needed it. the great charlie moore came by. he worked, as you know, for the new york times. he was full of excitement. he said wally, can you believe it? can you believe what the general did? like any journalist who doesn t like being beaten to the news, i pretended to know what the general had done. after charlie left i quickly read his copy, that the general had executed a suspected vietcong right in front of eddie adams camera and the rest of the press assembled before the pagoda. we had a fellow in the bureau by the name of nguyen nguyen. he was our vietnamese military expert. i turned to him because i had sent him over to pagoda just in case something happened. i said, nguyen, why didn t you tell me what the general had done? he said, mr. terry, that was not news. the general does that all the time. i looked aghast, and our other vietnamese reporter this was our politica
the term vietcong had not been invented. actually the term vietcong was invented by the south vietnamese government. there were a few communist guerillas left over from the struggle against the french. they would occasionally pop up to stage quick raids and disappear. we had an ambassador there, the american ambassador by the name of eldridge der borrow, a rolly, poly figure with a rather rotarian manner whose gawk i can wife insisted on wearing the vietnamese dress in which she looked rather ridiculous. at the time the only foreign reporters in sigh gong with a handful of stringers and visitors like myself from hong kong. evidently unaware that vietnam had been a nation for about 3,000 years, der borrow kept telling us that one of america s priorities was nation building which meant converting the vietnamese into being facsimile americans. he was always promoting schemes of one sort or another to achieve that objective. one which had been invented earlier by colonel ed lands