Inside Television's First War: A Saigon Journal

This volume recounts Ron Steinman's tenure as head of the NBC News Bureau in Saigon from April 1966 until July 1968. This was a time during the Vietnam conflict that included the major American buildup and the Tet Offensive of 1968 and saw much of America turn from support for the war to opposition. This book is a behind-the-scenes look at how the Vietnam conflict influenced young journalists, and how their coverage of the war influenced the American public. It looks at how television journalists learned to report war in a distinctly new way, through the eye of a camera on the front lines, in the countryside, in cities, towns, and villages. The experience of living-room war was new, and its effects are still being felt today. The author also reveals glimpses into his personal life, his courtship of Josephine Tu Ngoc Suong, a young Vietnamese woman who was seriously wounded and near death in 1967. After her recovery she and Steinman were married and had three children together. And he tells the story of his brother-in-law, a prisoner in a Communist re-education camp after the war, to whom he tried to smuggle money and medicine during a visit in 1985.