The Journalist: Life and Loss in America's Secret War - True Story Book About War Correspondents | Perfect for History Buffs & Journalism Students

The Journalist enchanted me from page 1 with present-tense immediacy, first-person authenticity, vivid action, and high-stakes scenes. Jerry Rose, a budding American writer and artist, goes to Vietnam to teach English in 1959 and stays to work as a journalist covering the earliest days of US military involvement there.Jerry comes across as amiable and admirable, someone I wish I had known as a colleague and friend. He is high-minded and thoughtful and committed to a vision of the future of Vietnam he absorbed from close Vietnamese friends—yet also prescient about the dangers of a US build-up of troops in Vietnam just as American involvement there was starting to expand. He recognizes and predicts the pitfalls our US military and political leadership failed to see—despite the prominence of his articles in Time, the Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. He takes risks to get on-the-ground reporting in remote places, so committed that he missed the births of both his children in Hong Kong, and even briefly joins the Saigon government as an adviser, hoping to be part of the solution. A plane crash in 1965 cut short his life and robbed his family and the world of a brilliant mind.As a writer, I am in awe of how Jerry Rose's strong, lilting prose comes through—decades after his death—mixed seamlessly with that of his sister, who resurrected his story from journals and letters and articles he wrote. Melding the two voices and selecting the details most relevant to readers today in a way that makes sense to us in 2020 is extremely hard to do, and Lucy Rose Fischer has achieved it. A masterpiece!