So were going to get started with our second panel. We spent the first hour talking about the of war and something about the military issues and strategies associated with it. In this hour, were going to talk about writing about war. What it means to be on the ground in the place, sort of study it and reflect on it from. A historical or literary point of view. And id like to start with we have panelists. Ill introduce them very briefly, although i suspect known to all of you, robert brigham, the shirley ecker. Barsky professor of history and International Relations at vassar and author of numerous books on vietnam war, including reckless Henry Kissinger and the tragic tragedy of the vietnam war and vietnam and the limits of american power. Bob brigham. Next, we have philip caputo, a vietnam vet and author of 71 books, including a rumor of war, one of the most important early books on vietnam. And indeed, it helped to establish a whole genre. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, along with other awards. Next, we have frances fitzgerald, a pioneering american journalist and historian who has written many books on a wide variety of subjects. Her book, the fire in the lake the vietnamese and americans in vietnam, which has been discussed quite a bit already this morning, won the National Book award and the Pulitzer Prize, among numerous other. And then frederick the vol the lawrence dee belfer, professor of International Affairs at harvard university. Hes the author of Pulitzer Prize winning the embers of war the fall of empire and the making of americas vietnam, and more recently, jfk coming of age in the american century, 1917 to 1956, the first of two planned volumes on jfk. So welcome. Its great to have the four of you with us for this next hour. And if we if i can, id like to start with frank with a question about indeed, youre a pioneer. Your work in vietnam helped to establish an extraordinary level of of journalistic scholarship and significant engagement with the issues on the ground. But can you talk a little bit about what it meant for you as a young woman in vietnam to be writing about war . How did you understand that experience . Well, all i can say is that that fire in the leg was the most difficult book ive ever had to write. And the reason was not so much the subject matter. It was a matter of tone. I mean, im talking in writerly way and. The subject code came up immediately that. I got to vietnam. I remember getting there on a plane from vientiane, and the plane was going along and so on, and suddenly went almost vertically to a land and the we got out and they said, well, you know, they were mortaring the airport just now. And so we had to do that. So then i got through the customs and so forth, and i was met by a. Friend and he said, weve got to hurry. And i said, why . He said, because i have a tennis game. And he did. So i thought, you know how, how do i write about that . And that evening we went to not he and i, but you know, the whole press corps gang went to a Birthday Party given by the sailors for nbc correspondent for his photographer girlfriend, and it was on the roof, the Caravelle Hotel and. There was roses and champagne and there were firing in the distance all the time. Was of it was outgoing, but some of it was incoming. And we heard even. Gunfire in the streets just below. And nobody paid any attention at all except me and i thought, well, how do i write about this . And then then the next thing i remember very well was i went up to quinlan, which is the capital of indian province, finding out who had been a viet cong forever. I mean, it might as well have been in the north. And the americans were putting on an enormous more than operation. It went on for a couple of weeks and somehow the first place i got to was the hospital. And they said, well, its over there. So i went and this beautiful old french building, i went inside the courtyard and there was nobody there at all. So finally i saw this american leaning over one of the balconies and so i went up to him and he was a doctor who was there for six months. And he said he was practically his hair out. He said, you just cant believe how terrible it is. You cant believe it. You cant believe it. You cant believe it. And he showed me along this corridor where were there. There were stretchers with people lying on every one of them not able to get into the rooms and the people were so horribly disfigured, they they they were up to twice their size. And a lot of them had terrible wounds as well. And of course, it was napalm or c4 that had done it. And it was clearly. Initiative. So. He couldnt speak to them. He had no medicine even even to make them make it more comfortable that he was he didnt he . You know, he saw himself when it came there as being in a nice clinic with some some children. You know. But there it was almost all by himself with these impossible cases that and he didnt know who they were, what where they came from, what had happened to them. So on and i remember him, whereas we were looking over over the courtyard there was a dog walking along with a bone in his body in its in its in its mouth. And he said, you know, thats a human bone because they dug, they, they dont bury them very deeply. And so dogs often just dont dig, dig the bodies up and and chew the bones and and you know, the whole spectacle was so terrible that i really had no idea how to how how to how to deal with it. I mean, i could have sort of screamed like he did know in writing, but i knew that that nobody could read that, you know, it would just turn everybody off and they would think that was a little crazy. And equally, i could not sort of take that distance from it because the id be if i did. And so, you know, i would go back forth while i was there between these two things were four things, you know, the sort of general ease of life in saigon and and these horrors outside and so that thats when i started to worry about how to how to write about the whole thing. And it and i learned more about the context about the war and about the vietnamese who still was there. And so when i started writing this book, i still didnt quite know how i was going to be able to deal with. Its really paradox in some ways that wandered into this circumstance and found to be as complicated as you did, but you set out to write an extra ordinarily ambitious book and as a very Young Journalist on the ground, you recognize at the time you were beginning work the level of ambition that would be required to pull it off. I guess not. I wouldnt. Well, it worked out, which is good. Well, i thank john for for boosting it. Very kind of him. Well, thank you. So, fred, you have as a historian who has studied the vietnam a great deal from the distance of the aftermath of the war, can you tell you something about your own interest, this work, what drew you to it in the first place and how you see the evolution of thinking about this issue since you published the embers of war . Well, i think i im originally from sweden and i think developed an interest early on down in us Foreign Policy. We emigrated to canada and i dont think you cant help when you live in canada to be if you care about foreign affairs, to think a lot about the us, what are they up to down there . And so i think i developed this interest. I read and ill come back to this in a second. I read David Halberstams best in the best and the brightest college blew my mind. And then in graduate school, i decided, need to figure out how this whole thing started. And initially, that had to do with kennedy and johnson and their decision to americanize. And i think something that happens to all of us or many of us is that we begin to write about this conflict and then we visit the country and something takes hold. And so all of a sudden you find yourself committing to do another book. And so thats a thats how i got into this in terms of the the literature. Dan i guess id make a couple of remarks. You know, were as historians to were trained to believe that you a certain period of time before you can really good history. I think thats true. But im also conscious of the fact that so many of the early works, we might call them first cut histories. Second cut have just stood up so incredibly well and the certain person just my immediate right, i, i think fire in the lake belong is on any short list today. Any short list of essential books on the war. Halberstam. George herring. Bernard faull, arguably one of our great writers, still on this conflict. So its striking to me. Dan chester, there are a number of these early books that i think right now if you picked them up, you would find you learned a great deal about this conflict. It should also be said, maybe my second point is that, of course, the scholarship thats come out over the last couple of decades ive contributed a bit of this to this myself, i think has been incredibly important. Its given us a whole new a whole new understanding in some respects of the of the struggle. Some of it based, obviously, on vietnamese sources, sources in france that ive made use of and others have made use of an incredible outpouring of documentary materials in this country. And and its its its been so important. And yet theres irony here which i think that this new scholarship has really changed the terms of the debate in this country. Im conscious of the fact that were still debating the core questions. Why did the United States get involved . Why did the United States escalate its involvement . Why did it perpetuate wait this war . Why did it fail to achieve its objectives . I guess what the new scholarship is really doing is allowing to debate those questions with more sophistication than we had before, which it seems to me is an interesting. And if i may, just one final thought on this, and that is whats striking to me after 25 years of studying this war is, that american leaders and this includes John F Kennedy, who did research and writing about right now, kennedy, johnson and nixon, as i see it, were realists behind closed doors. They were gloomy realists about this war, i think from the beginning to the end, Robert Mcnamara would later say to us, if only we had known it was a kind of of the latter day mcnamara. He sells himself short. He did know. They did know. And so what i find striking for me is the degree to which they were realists about the war. Dan and they escalated, it seems to me, and perpetuated a war that they privately doubted was either winnable or necessary. Thats a rather gloomy conclusion that ive reached on the basis of my research. Well, it raises themes that id like us to discuss in this hour. One of them is the role of leadership in Decision Making that that maybe we can come back. And the question is, why is it today still we seem to devalue integrity, transparency, a certain commitment to honesty. And in way in which leadership is practiced in this country politically, when we learn much after the disclosures of, mcnamara and johnson and nixon, we knew what they were really thinking because actually that became public, which was revelatory. But i want to back up just a bit and stay with you for a second, fred. It seems to me, anyway, it was selfevident by the late 1970s that if we learned nothing else, well never do that again. We will not go back to a place like vietnam, not understanding the nature of the conflict that we are engaging. And we spent much of our time this talking about afghanistan and iraq. So from a historical point of view, what we learned or not, in your view . Well, in the final paragraph of my first book, which is called choosing war, i wrote, and i remember thinking about, should i put this in, should i not put this in . But i put it in and i remember i wrote the last conclusion about the escalation, the war in vietnam. Is this something very much something very much like it could happen again. So some of me understood that eternal temptation of politicians to pursue their short term interests, to push to do whats best for them in the short term will continue to be there, even this misbegotten adventure in Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia. And i think down that thats what weve seen. Weve seen in terms of their calculation of best for them in the short term pursuing a military option in these later conflicts works for them. It gets to something that i havent mentioned, which i think is central to understanding. Certainly the war in vietnam, but also these later interventions, which is that i think it has a lot to do with domestic politics and maybe democrat in particular being nervous about being tarred with the soft on communism or later soft on terrorism label and in domestic political terms and in careerist terms. Lets not underestimate the importance of playing old careerism, making these commitments, even if youre saying Something Else behind closed doors matters, which is i guess a way of saying, dan, that maybe we havent learned, maybe we havent learned that much or. Maybe its really about leadership and well come back that. Thank you, phil. Most everyone knows, i think about your first book, which certainly anyone who has any interest in the vietnam war has encountered a rumor of war. I certainly have. And i thought it was an extraordinary achievement. Can you Say Something about why you decided to write about vietnam in that way . What was your process that led you create a rumor of war and then reflect a little bit about what youve learned since you wrote it. Well, i had no idea what process was. I dont even know if i had a process. I think we all need to make a distinction between the kind of book that i wrote and and what my fellow panelists up here or wrote and mine was basically an account, an intensely personal experience. It had nothing to do with politics or with the geopolitical causes of the war. And what i basically wanted to write about what the was like for those were in it. The the i have two problems with that. One was, is that in the past novels or memoirs, convention or wars call them that, whether it was Norman Mailer, james jones or Siegfried Sassoon of world war one, had a narrative that was imposed on them by the event itself. In other words, like, say, Norman Mailer wrote about the philippines, the Philippine Campaign in his novel the naked, the dead. Well, that had a beginning, a middle, an end of the vietnam war just seemed to have no coherence or pattern to it at all. And i had almost no idea about how to go about writing an arc to that or putting it a narrative arc on that experience. And the other one, of course, was that at the time i was writing it, it was it was still an intensely debated topic here in the us and elsewhere. So it was difficult to get away it to get a perspective on it. But what saved me in that was, is first of all, as i read, i was in london and i read sid fritz as soon as memoirs of an infantryman officer, which was best, it was a memoir, thinly, thinly, thinly disguised as a novel and i said, thats ive ive got to do the arc is what happened to me and my who were over there. Thats the arc thats the narrative arc, not the event itself. And then i said i wanted to write about it in such a way that was it was such fidelity to the experience that those who were debating the war back here would take a pause and say, what do i think about now . I mean, everybody struck me as almost smug in their attitudes about the war, whether they were, you know, prowar or somewhere in between. And thats what i wanted. I wanted the book to undermine been there, assumed the attitudes. So thats why i wrote about it the way i did. But there was no process to it. I just if i may, i started that book when i was still in and in. I started it and at camp lejeune, North Carolina and got nowhere with it and i continued to it around with me literally all over the world for Something Like nine years before i was finally able to put it all together. And then i think id written one third of it in those nine years. And then in the last six months, i wrote the rest of it. It all came together. Well, one of the things i think you accomplished brilliantly in the book is its theres no question the hardest thing about writing about war is giving people a sense of really what it feels like to be in a war. That terror can only be known by people who have lived it. But you tried in a literary way, and i think quite brilliantly to evoke something about how awful it and what it feels like to be in a war. And i know youve spoken about that that hadnt really been done in that way before. So my question is how did you come about doing that . And at the time were actually writing the book . Nobody wanted to talk about the vietnam war. It wasnt you were ahead of your time. This was not a moment when people were talking about memorials and memory though nobody wanted to talk about the war. So how did you come to terms with those issues . I you know, i was ive never experienced in my career since then what i did there was a compulsion to create this narrative that i could not overcome and nothing outside of me could overcome it. I mean, if i say this in all sincerity, if somebody had told that if you write this book, you will be shot by the government, i would have written it anyway. And. The. And so there was there was that compulsion that was that was that was just driving me. And i dont know if that answers question, but. Well, the best reason to write a book is because you cant figure out anything better to do. So i think thats yeah, i had Something Better to do. I was a i was actually if i was a newspaperman for ten years, thats one of the reasons it took so long to write. So yeah, i had very little bits, little spare time to work on it. I, by a certain irony i got shot in another war in lebanon and it put me in the hospice or on crutches for Something Like nine months and thats when i truly had nothing better. Write book. Did you have any inkling that the book actually might sell . No. You know, i was quite certain it would just i think i got an advance of 6,000 for the book and i and i remember telling my wife that i said, you know,