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

262 THOMAS A. BASS
Dozens of obituaries marked An’s death. He had not been
forgotten by his friends in the press. His was the lead
obituary in the New York Times and Le Monde, and even Time
broke its years of embarrassed silence to give An his due as a
great correspondent. An was “a first-class journalist . . . part
Confucian scholar, part medieval monk,” wrote Stanley Cloud,
a former Saigon bureau chief. Cloud knocked down the charge
that An planted disinformation, saying that he “saved us from
reporting things that weren’t true.” Cloud went on to say that
An was a nationalist, a patriot, someone who loved his country
and culture. This did not exclude his loving America or France.
He loved French literature. He admired American culture.
But there was not a servile bone in his body, and the only relationship
he wished to have with outsiders was one of mutual respect.
Vietnam had been repulsing invaders for thousands of
years, and to expect anything else of a Vietnamese patriot was
to imagine a leopard with no spots. People looked at An and
imagined he was spotless. They thought he was on their side,
and he never told them otherwise, but he was most assuredly
a spotted Vietnamese, who placed the love of his country above
his own self-interest. As Cloud wrote at the end of his obituary,
“During the war, a colleague of ours said to me, ‘I think Pham
Xuan An is the perfect example of the very best in Vietnamese
society.’ I felt that way, too. I still do.”
In another obituary, An’s first boss at Time, Frank McCulloch
wrote, “Not once in the years he worked for me in the Time
bureau did An ever slant or shade his reporting to favor the
Communists. Paradoxically, he truly loved the U.S. and its
democracy, and he also vastly respected and treasured good
journalism in the American context of that phrase.” McCulloch
ended his obituary on a personal note, writing, “I still
salute you, An, as a friend, a journalist, a complex and contradictory
lover of democracy, a husband and father, and perhaps,
above all, as a Vietnamese patriot who may, or may not, have
placed his biggest bet on the wrong horse.”