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

184 THOMAS A. BASS
and presidents. As he passed through Saigon, he would occasionally
shake the hand of Pham Xuan An and his other employees.
Six feet tall, a chain smoker with pale blue eyes and a
beetle-browed intensity, Luce boomed out his opinions with
utter authority. As Luce said of the Vietnam war on one of his
visits to the Saigon bureau, “It’s the right war in the right place
at the right time. All we have to do is get this goddam situation
cleared up and establish an American regency; then it will
be over.”
McCulloch tells a story about Henry Luce, or “Harry,” as he
liked to be called, visiting him “in country.” As recounted in his
interview with David Felsen, McCulloch arranged a dinner
party in Saigon for Luce and the Australian ambassador, the CIA
station chief, and other officials. Their negative evaluation of
how the war was going upset Luce. “Luce got angrier and angrier
until he hit the table and said, ‘I know what the solution
is. We put an American proconsul in here and clean it up and
get out.’” There was silence around the table, Luce’s outburst
having ended the evening.
Practicing what he called “group journalism,” Luce insisted
that his publications speak with a unified, omniscient, corporate
voice. To this end, he marshaled a huge, well-paid staff. His
reporters made up one of the finest news-gathering organizations
in the world, and his editors included some of America’s
most distinguished writers. Together, they produced a nameless,
homogenized prose, published in unsigned articles that were
utterly unreliable. This corporate product offered the perfect
cover for a spy. An worked on everyone’s stories, offering advice
on large parts of the cable traffic going out of Saigon, while
leaving hardly a trace of himself in the company’s corporate
paper trail.
Luce’s correspondents were often dumbfounded when the
magazine printed the exact opposite of what they had reported.
It was as if New York were staffed by mad logicians. The correspondents
wrote massive stories and compiled volumes of