Beginning in late 1966, John Steinbeck, roughly the age of the century, spent several months in Southeast Asia, covering the war in Vietnam for Newsday. His reports back home, published now in Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War, constitute the Nobel laureate’s final published work. Steinbeck’s reports took the form of letters to Alicia—a tribute to Alicia Guggenheim, the late publisher and editor of Newsday. In them, he applied his naturally superb eye to a scene that eluded comprehension, “a war not like any we have been involved in.” The Huffington Post has posted a typically eloquent, searching letter here. Positive reviews are in from Shelf Awareness, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus.
Steinbeck is most associated with Depression-era works such as The Grapes of Wrath. But, says Steinbeck in Vietnam editor Thomas Barden, “Steinbeck always wanted to be where the action was.” His reports were complicated by the fact that, despite his rather left-leaning past, Steinbeck was no dove. While not as important as Steinbeck’s novels, Barden feels these dispatches “have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck’s great works of fiction. They have his trademark immediacy and passion.”
Barden was invited to talk about the book on the Washington Post‘s Political Bookworm blog, as well as on a recent episode of NPR’s Weekend Edition. He also took time out to answer some of our questions…
Q: Many of Steinbeck’s fans don’t know that he traveled in and wrote about Vietnam during the War. How did you find out about his Newsday columns, and what drew you to them?
Barden: I remember hearing about them when they first came out in the 60s, especially when Steinbeck picked a fight with the Russian poet Yevtushenko in one of them. But I was in college and honestly didn’t pay much attention. When I started teaching Steinbeck in graduate seminars in the 1990s, I got microfilm copies of some of them from a Princeton archive, which had a number of the columns, but wasn’t complete. What drew me to the project was the feeling that all the published works of this enduring major American literary figure ought to be readily available. Ultimately I also felt I was the right person to do this particular project.
Q: Steinbeck is most closely associated with his Depression-era works of social struggle. What do you think prompted him to risk his literary reputation to report on Vietnam?
Barden: Steinbeck always wanted to be where the action was. Even The Grapes of Wrath was based on journalistic fieldwork he did, spending time with and talking to the Okies in California. In World War II he lived in Army Air Corps barracks with a crew of airmen and published an account of their training and missions titled Bombs Away. Later in that war he went to the Italian front as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. In the 1950s he went to the Soviet Union for the US State Department and filed a series of essays he published as A Russian Journal. So his going to Vietnam as a reporter wasn’t atypical for him. But, as his wife told it, the real draw was that his two sons were there.
Q: Steinbeck was friendly with LBJ, but declined Johnson’s invitation to officially document the war in Vietnam. Why do you think Steinbeck decided to cover the war for a tabloid newspaper, and what was Johnson’s reaction to his columns?
Barden: Steinbeck didn’t want to go “as Johnson’s man,” as he put it. He wanted the independence of being a journalist observing and reporting with an open mind. But he had a definite slant. He declared that he was in favor of the war effort to reporters in Hawaii even before he got to Saigon. Johnson, of course, was delighted to have the strong and eloquent support of his Nobel laureate friend. Steinbeck truly believed in the “domino theory” and thought the US troops were doing a great job in a tough situation to keep communism from spreading across Asia and the Pacific. What comes across in reading the pieces now, though, is that he was being manipulated, at least to some extent. He was shown what the high level officers, American and Vietnamese, wanted him to see. He didn’t go off on his own the way younger journalists and freelancers like David Halberstam or Michael Herr did. In fact, his youngest son, John IV, contested his father’s rosy view of things from the moment they met up in Saigon. John IV even wrote an investigative piece on drug use by the US troops titled “The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam.”
Q: War correspondents, such as the late Anthony Shadid or Marie Colvin, obviously put themselves in great danger. What do you think Steinbeck’s journalistic intentions were in Vietnam?
Barden: As I said, he wanted to see the war for himself. But he didn’t try to go it alone. He was a 64-year-old out-of-shape smoker, and he had his wife with him, so there were obviously some limitations to his activities. He spent a considerable amount of time in safe settings like the Saigon Caravelle Hotel, which he called the “Pundit Palace,” turning his field notes into well-crafted, first-person accounts.
One goal he had was to challenge his fellow writers and counter the growing consensus that the war was going badly. A theme he hit on often was “at least I’m here seeing it for myself,” even though General Westmoreland was his tour guide. There’s only one piece in the collection that conveys any sense of fear for his personal safety. On his last night in Vietnam before going to Bangkok he flew on a mission with a “Puff the Magic Dragon” gunship that took live fire. When he eventually got back to Elaine in Saigon he was still rattled by that.
Q: How do you think the presence of his sons in Vietnam influenced how Steinbeck covered the war?
Barden: When John IV volunteered, Steinbeck took him to the White House to get his enlistment papers from LBJ personally. Thom was drafted before he could enlist, but he was just as excited to get into the action as his brother was. Both father and sons saw the war as a noble cause, at least at first. All three became progressively more disillusioned as they went along, although John senior never went public with his doubts. Instead, he started to focus the articles more on the soldiers themselves, their circumstances and their everyday bravery, and less on the big picture. He became fascinated with the weaponry and military technology and took some training on the M-16 automatic rifle and the M-79 grenade launcher. When a photograph of him posing with the grenade launcher was published, many of the anti-war writers and critics back home were very upset, calling him a warmonger or worse.
Q: These columns are addressed as letters to Alicia Guggenheim. Can you tell us who she was and why Steinbeck chose to address the columns to her?
Barden: She was Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, the longtime editor of Newsday, who grew the Long Island daily from a small publication to a major regional paper with a circulation of over 400,000 and major syndications. She died in 1963 and her husband Harry Guggenheim, the wealthy industrialist, took over as editor before they brought in young Bill Moyers, who left the Johnson White House to become general editor. The Steinbecks and Guggenheims had been friends for many years, so John dedicated the dispatches to her as a memorial. Harry wrote a preface to the first piece explaining all this to readers. Steinbeck said it made the articles easier to write, because he felt as if he were writing personal letters to a brilliant and dear friend.
Q: Given that these are Steinbeck’s last published writings, why do you think they haven’t been published in book form before now?
Barden: Steinbeck’s third wife, Elaine–not the mother of his sons–was careful about John’s copyrights. In fact, a court case between the Steinbeck estate and Thomas Steinbeck was only settled in 2008. I think Elaine blocked the publication of the dispatches because she thought they would hurt her husband’s reputation. She said he changed his mind about the war after they returned from Asia in 1967 and decided it was a mistake. But he was too sick to write about it. When he died in 1968, Elaine gained copyright to the essays along with all his other works. Then, when she died in 2003 things stayed tied up until the appeals court case ended. The agency representing the estate never told me why permission was finally given, but my guess is it was because Elaine was no longer there to say no.
Q: You also served in Vietnam. How do you relate to Steinbeck’s take on the war?
Barden: I arrived in Vietnam in June of 1970, three full years after Steinbeck wrote his last dispatch. Things had changed dramatically by then. Tet, 1968 had happened and the Me Lai massacre story had emerged. I can sympathize with his desire to have the war be noble and winnable, but by my time there that was clearly not “the way it was,” as Walter Cronkite used to say. Vietnamization was in full swing and everyone I talked to when I arrived agreed that the mission was to wind the thing down with as few casualties as possible and get out.
Q: What is the most important take-away here, in terms of Steinbeck’s legacy and our perception of the war?
Barden: As far as Steinbeck’s legacy, the essential thing for me is the sense of completeness having these writings out brings. I wouldn’t argue that they are comparable to The Grapes of Wrath, or even Travels with Charley, but they are Steinbeck’s last works and even though they were written on the fly in hotel rooms, and were little more than field notes with off-hand political opinions thrown in, many of them still “work” in a literary sense. They have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck’s great works of fiction. They have his trademark immediacy and passion.
As to our view of the war from the 21st century, these essays feel to me almost like a time capsule dug up after forty years. Steinbeck’s firm belief in the domino theory, his disgust at the hippies and war protesters, and his “in it together” mood when he is with the troops seem naïve, but he was voicing the feelings of a large portion of the American population at the time. The tension between John and his son John IV is certainly a reminder of the wrenching “generation gap” the war caused. Vietnam remains unfinished business for a large number of Americans, and Steinbeck’s essays remind me how complicated it was.
One thing that haunts me about the story is a big “what if.” What if Steinbeck had been well enough after he returned from the war to write about his change of heart and come out publicly against it. What if he had declared something like Walter Cronkite’s famous pronouncement on the CBS Evening News: “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Would Steinbeck’s famous and trusted voice have changed the course of the war, of the Johnson presidency, of American history?
Steinbeck in Vietnam is available now.