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

The Spy Who Loved Us 167
controlled gambling in Nevada, they threatened to kill him.
McCulloch took this as a call to type faster. He broke other important
stories on white racism in the South, corruption in the
Teamster’s Union, and Republican Party cronyism in Los Angeles.
The cronyism story was a particularly brave piece, considering
that McCulloch was managing editor of the Los Angeles
Times. The paper was a house organ of the Republican Party,
and its city hall reporter was a registered Republican lobbyist.
McCulloch went on to edit other papers, including the Mc-
Clatchy family’s Sacramento Bee. At each paper the number of
pages devoted to investigative reporting increased, and the stories
got tougher.
The bald McCulloch was called “Buddha” by the Vietnamese
as he traveled through the countryside. “He was a very scary guy,
the journalistic equivalent of a Marine Corps drill sergeant,”
said Morley Safer, in an interview published in the American
Journalism Review. “He could sometimes terrify the guys working
for him with his bullet head. He demanded that they get it
absolutely right, but at the same time he had a remarkable understanding
of the problems his reporters faced. In his gruff
way, he was very compassionate. He was a soft-hearted guy.”
One day, when they were supposed to go out to lunch
together, McCulloch found An sitting at his typewriter trying to
file a story under deadline. “What’s it about?” McCulloch asked.
An told him. “Excuse me,” said McCulloch, pulling up a chair
to An’s desk. “I’ll take it from here.”
“He started typing a mile a minute,” An says. “He goes
ratatatatatat, like a machine gun, and then he pulls the paper
out of the typewriter and hands it to the telex operator. ‘That’s
done,’ he says, rising from my desk. ‘Now, let’s go to lunch.’”
During his four years in Vietnam, McCulloch turned a oneman
operation run out of Room 6 in the Continental Hotel
into a major bureau bustling with correspondents, photographers,
contract employees, secretaries, telex operators, drivers,