Steinbeck in Vietnam

January 23, 2012
In December 1966 when the Vietnam War was beginning to dominate America’s political landscape, novelist and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck went to Vietnam as a reporter for Newsday. Over the next year he wrote over 80 pieces about the war. Because these articles are not presented here in a historical context, readers will find them an eerie flashback, opinions frozen in time, but opinions that viscerally reflect the deep political chasm that the war created in America. Steinbeck’s writing is vividly descriptive, evoking place and circumstance–for instance, the Central Highlands of Vietnam are compared to the Texas Panhandle; Hong Kong is “the Neiman Marcus of the Far East”; and he calls the “new” warfare without battalions and linear goals, the “drifting phantasm of a war.” But Steinbeck’s ruminations about the wisdom of the Vietnam War, the bitterness with which he describes the antiwar bias he discerns in some American media, and his endorsement of the “domino theory” as a reason to intervene in Vietnam feel naive in retrospect. Nonetheless, Steinbeck’s ability to capture the day-to-day conduct of the war and its destructive force is sometimes shockingly immediate. 13 b&w photos.

January 15, 2012
A collection of the pro-war pieces filed from Southeast Asia for Newsday by the Nobel laureate not long before his death. Editor Barden, a Vietnam veteran and professor (English/Univ. of Toledo; editor: Virginia Folk Legends, 1991, etc.), mostly lets Steinbeck speak for himself in this motley collection of columns that the author framed in the form of letters to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, the deceased editor and publisher of Newsday, whose husband was continuing in her stead. Barden sandwiches Steinbeck's columns between an introduction and afterword and intrudes in the text with only a handful of parenthetical explanations--reminding us, for example, who Lurleen Wallace was. Between December 1966 and May 1967, Steinbeck filed pieces that sought to support the U.S. effort in Vietnam, to lionize the soldiers whom he met (and with whom he occasionally ducked incoming rounds), to expose the dimensions of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese violence against civilians, to chide the liberal media for ingesting without question the enemy's propaganda and to urge other writers (he names Updike, Williams, Bellow, Albee and Miller) to travel to Vietnam to see the war firsthand. Steinbeck did not just sit in Saigon and bloviate; he went to various sites around the country and flew in helicopters and, in one case, the plane dubbed Puff the Magic Dragon, a night mission that frightened him, prompting him to write of mortality. He also offers some tactical suggestions that seem bizarre and naive: dropping thousands of transistor radios (with earplugs) via paper parachutes over the countryside so rural people could hear the truth; training Saigon street urchins for espionage. Steinbeck's positions later softened, but not in the pages of Newsday. Sometimes Steinbeckian in texture and bite, but often tone-deaf, tendentious and surpassingly sad.

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March 15, 2012

Steinbeck went to Vietnam in late 1966, staying through May 1967 as a correspondent for Newsday. He and his wife--their son John IV was stationed in Vietnam--traveled to major combat areas in South Vietnam, and also into Laos and Thailand. Steinbeck, a friend of President Johnson, supported the war, but by this time opposition was growing. His dispatches reflect his initial excitement over the weaponry (e.g., the AC-47 gunship, known as Puff the Magic Dragon) and the heroic American soldiers standing against communism, but he gradually came to see the mismatch between the American narrative and the reality that most Vietnamese just wanted the war to end. By the time he left Asia, readers can sense disillusion and a feeling that the soldiers were in an unwinnable situation. These dispatches were Steinbeck's last published works; he died in December 1968. Editor Barden (English, Univ. of Toledo) provides a preface, introduction, and afterword but relatively scant annotations or context for the dispatches themselves. However, there are ten pages of notes. VERDICT This personal look at a contentious moment in American history will supplement Vietnam War collections and reward any student who wishes to better understand the times.--Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KS

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