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

The Spy Who Loved Us 227
There were accusations all throughout the war that we had
been infiltrated by the Communists. What he did allowed the
right-wingers to come up and slug us in the eye. For a year or
so, I took it personally. Then I decided it was his business.”
With rare exceptions—and even Arnett praises An as a
“bold guy”—An’s colleagues are united in their support of him.
“Was I angry when I learned about An?” says Frank McCulloch,
who first hired An to work for Time. “Absolutely not. It’s his
land, I thought. If the situation were reversed, I would have
done the same thing.”
McCulloch, who now lives in a retirement community in
California after a distinguished career as the managing editor
of the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and other newspapers,
recalls An as his “colleague and star reporter. . . . An had
a very sophisticated understanding of Vietnamese politics, and
he was remarkably accurate.” McCulloch bursts into laughter,
“Of course he was accurate, considering his sources!”
Remembering An with fondness and respect, McCulloch
says it gave him “great pleasure” to organize a subscription
fund in 1990, which raised thirty-two thousand dollars to send
An’s eldest son, Pham Xuan Hoang An, to journalism school at
the University of North Carolina. The list of subscribers to the
fund reads like a Who’s Who of Vietnam war reporters. (Hoang
An, known to his friends and family as “Little An,” earned a law
degree from Duke University in 2002. Working for the Vietnamese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he accompanied Vietnam’s
president to the White House when he made his first official
visit to Washington in 2007.)
“Let’s say that the United States in 1966 had been occupied
by a million Vietnamese troops who were here to tell us how to
run our country,” McCulloch told David Felsen. “What if I
had a chance to defeat them and send them away? I would
have done exactly what An did.”
“How did An show you that he loved his country?” Felsen
asks.