The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

146 THOMAS A. BASS
International Herald Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor.
Deepe became his déesse, Shaplen one of his best sources.
“Brunette, gentle, and unprepossessing,” Deepe was what
former Washington Post correspondent William Prochnau calls
a perfect example of “the girl-next-door world of the fading
fifties.” Deepe lent herself to this cause when she wrote that a
woman journalist at war should be a “living symbol of mother,
sweetheart, and the apple-pie world back home.” Deepe grew
up on a farm in Nebraska. She majored in journalism and political
science at the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1957,
and then got a master’s degree from the Columbia School of
Journalism. She traveled on a student exchange to Russia and
Central Asia. Bitten with wanderlust, she saved her money
while working as a political pollster during the U.S. presidential
election in 1960 and then pitched up in Vietnam in 1962.
Planning to stay for two weeks, she stayed for seven years—
making her one of the longest-serving Western correspondents
to cover the war.
An felt beholden to Beverly Deepe, Laura Palmer, and the
other women correspondents who coached him in the etiquette
of American journalism. They taught him how to punch up his
leading sentences. They showed him how to be objective (the
great god of American reporting). They helped him branch
out from writing staccato wire service prose to penning longer
opinion and editorial pieces. Unknowingly, Beverly Deepe
served other purposes for An. She traveled widely through the
country and was well received by soldiers who loved being
gallant to a female reporter. She needed An to translate; he
needed her to get access to his own investigative reporting
from the field.
Deepe tended to report on America’s activities in Vietnam
with credulous enthusiasm. She reminded her colleagues of
Alden Pyle, the “quiet” American who thought of Vietnam as a
civics lesson on “the problems of freedom.” The few critical remarks
she ventured about the American enterprise in Vietnam