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At this early stage, there’s every indication that GOP cooperation is less likely on a massive public works bill than it was on the pandemic legislation. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
DRIVING THE DAY
Women reporters of the Vietnam War; Jessica Winter’s new novel March 09, 2021
At
The Atlantic, George Packer reviews a new book about women reporters in Vietnam. Elizabeth Becker’s
You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War covers the work of reporters Frances FitzGerald and Kate Webb, and photographer Catherine Leroy. Packer writes of FitzGerald, a twenty-something Radcliffe graduate and daughter of a CIA official: “Sheltered all her life, she was profoundly shocked by the suffering of the Vietnamese not just the death, injury, and displacement, but the loss of identity under the crushing weight of the Americans.”
When women reporters started arriving in Vietnam to cover the war, the military wasn't sure what to do with them. Many of them had come straight from the women's pages of their local newspapers, frustrated and ready for a challenge. Elizabeth Becker tells the story of just three of them, and how they changed the way war was reported.
Book excerpt: ‘You Don’t Belong Here’ Elizabeth Becker March 8 “You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War” by Elizabeth Becker. (PublicAffairs)
Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.