Reporter hailed for book on Vietnam
Philippines work won Pulitzer
Stanley Karnow, the award-winning author and journalist who wrote a definitive book about the Vietnam War, worked on an accompanying documentary and later won a Pulitzer Prize for a history of the Philippines, has died. He was 87.
Karnow, who had congestive heart failure, died in his sleep Sunday at his home in Potomac, Maryland, said son Michael Karnow.
A Paris-based correspondent for Time magazine early in his career, Karnow was assigned in 1958 to Hong Kong as bureau chief for Southeast Asia and soon arrived in Vietnam, when the American presence was still confined to a small core of advisers. In 1959, Karnow reported on the first two American deaths in Vietnam, not suspecting that tens of thousands would follow.
Into the 1970s, Karnow would cover the war off and on for Time, The Washington Post and other publications and then draw upon his experience for an epic Public Broadcasting Service documentary and for the million-selling Vietnam: A History, published in 1983 and widely regarded as an essential, even-handed summation.
Karnow’s In Our Image, a companion to a PBS documentary on the Philippines, won the Pulitzer in 1990. His other books included Mao and China, which in 1973 received a National Book Award nomination, and Paris in The Fifties, a memoir published in 1997.
A fellow Vietnam reporter, Morley Safer, would describe Karnow as the embodiment of “the wise old Asian hand.” Karnow was known for his precision and research — his Vietnam book reaches back to ancient times — and his willingness to see past his own beliefs. He was a critic of the Vietnam War (and a name on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list) who still found cruelty and incompetence among the North Vietnamese. His friendship with Philippines leader Corazon Aquino did not stop him from criticizing her presidency.
A salesman’s son, Karnow was born in New York in 1925 and by high school was writing radio plays and editing the school’s paper, a job he also held at the Harvard Crimson. He first lived in Asia during Second World War when he served throughout the region in the Army Air Corps. Back in the U.S., he majored in European history and literature at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1947.
He was often called on for speeches, panel discussions and television appearances and asked for his opinions on current affairs. One query came in 2009, through his old friend Richard Holbrooke, at the time the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan. Holbrooke wanted advice on U.S. policy in Afghanistan and put Karnow on the phone with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander. Karnow and the general discussed similarities between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam.
“What did we learn from Vietnam?” Karnow later told the AP. “We learned that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”