{"id":26899,"date":"2023-06-09T14:55:27","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T21:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=26899"},"modified":"2023-06-09T14:55:28","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T21:55:28","slug":"the-journalist-who-photographed-the-burning-monk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/06\/09\/the-journalist-who-photographed-the-burning-monk\/","title":{"rendered":"THE JOURNALIST WHO PHOTOGRAPHED THE BURNING\u00a0MONK"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Man Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Image Captured \u2018the Ugliest Events of Our Time\u2019<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc\u2019s self-immolation during the Vietnam War, captured by journalist Malcom Browne, left an imprint on the public conscience. Author Ray Boomhower explores the story behind the iconic photo and its lasting effects. Courtesy of AP Newsroom<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by<\/em> RAY E. BOOMHOWER | JUNE 8, 2023 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While President John F. Kennedy was talking by phone with his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 12, 1963, he suddenly exclaimed: \u201cJesus Christ!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The president\u2019s outburst had nothing to do with their conversation. Rather, he was responding to a photograph taken the day before, splashed on the front pages of the newspapers just delivered to him. The photo showed 73-year-old Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc engulfed in flames on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam while sitting calmly\u2014it seemed\u2014in the lotus posture. He hoped his drastic action might bring the world\u2019s attention to what the Buddhists saw as the persecution against their religion by the Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Buddhist organizations had called for freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to assemble in public, and an end to the supposed Catholic bias in appointing government officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Captured by Malcom W. Browne, the head of the Associated Press\u2019s bureau in Saigon, the photo retains its ability to stop conversations to this day, making it an enduring symbol of the power of protest. Meanwhile, critics insist that the photo, and the reporting from Vietnam by Western newsmen including Browne, David Halberstam of the New York Times<\/em>, and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, were responsible for Diem\u2019s downfall and America\u2019s ultimate defeat and humiliation in Vietnam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Browne had been determined, he insisted, only to provide his readers with a \u201ccontinuous, honest assessment of the situation\u201d in what he called \u201ca puzzling war.\u201d He believed that officials in Vietnam\u2014Americans and South Vietnamese\u2014should have tried to do the same. Browne thought that living in a free society meant a journalist had to \u201ctell all of the people all of the truth all of the time. The newsman is obliged to fight forces that interfere with this vital process.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Criticism continued to follow Browne. Later, when he reported on the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, detractors back home accused him of harming the American cause in its fight against Iraq. \u201cThis is just silly, of course,\u201d Browne said. \u201cTo the extent that America newsmen \u2018took sides\u2019 in either Viet Nam or the Persian Gulf, it was on the side of the United States.\u201d For all societies at war, the important truth, he suggested, was the truth \u201cthat tells you \u2018we are the good guys and we are winning,\u2019 regardless of what team you\u2019re on,\u201d reflected Browne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet as American involvement in Vietnam wound down, it no longer seemed possible \u201cto believe in the goodness and rightness of our cause,\u201d Browne noted. The public had been regularly promised by its government that there was \u201ca light at the end of the tunnel\u201d\u2014yet victory never came. Instead of pointing fingers at the individuals who involved the country in the conflict, many in the United States decided to \u201cblame the messengers\u2014people like myself who had been sending back discouraging tidings of how bad things had been going,\u201d Browne said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Journalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,\u2019 Browne said. \u2018Either way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of the monk\u2019s self-immolation began on May 8, 1963, when South Vietnamese army and security forces had killed civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddha\u2019s birthday in Hue. These killings sparked protests against the Diem government\u2019s perceived anti-Buddhist policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quang Duc\u2019s fiery sacrifice was the latest of these protests. Thirty-two-year-old Browne captured it on a cheap, Japanese Petri-brand camera. Browne had arrived in Saigon on November 7, 1961. He had witnessed the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam grow from about 3,000 American military advisers when he arrived to more than 16,000 by the end of 1963. Tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, he was the only Western reporter on the scene to capture the horrific event on film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The elder monk uttered no sound as the flames consumed his body, and did not change his position. But from his spot about 20 feet to the right and a little in front of Quang Duc, Browne could see that his \u201cfeatures were contorted with agony\u201d and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered to watch, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The newsman found himself \u201cnumb with shock\u201d at the horrible scene. Though witnessing anyone commit suicide or suffer a violent death \u201cis always a hard experience,\u201d Browne later noted, \u201cyou can get used to it in war, but there was something special about this. It was kind of a horror.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After about ten minutes, the flames died down and the monk \u201cpitched over, twitched convulsively and was still.\u201d Seemingly out of nowhere, a coffin appeared and fellow monks attempted to place Quang Duc inside. It was no use. The monk\u2019s limbs, Browne recalled, \u201chad been roasted to rigidity, and he could not be bent enough to fit in the casket. As the procession moved off toward Xa Loi Pagoda, his blackened arms protruded from the coffin, one of them still smoking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Browne\u2019s film soon made its way from the AP bureau in Saigon to Manila with the aid of a \u201cpigeon\u201d\u2014a regular passenger on a commercial flight willing to act as a courier to avoid censorship by South Vietnamese government officials. The photos were sent via the AP WirePhoto cable from Manila to San Francisco, and from there to the news agency\u2019s headquarters in New York. There, the images were distributed to AP member newspapers around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reaction was immediate. While millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Browne\u2019s pictures possessed what the correspondent later termed \u201can incomparable impact.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A group of clergymen in the United States used the photograph for full-page advertisements in the New York Times <\/em>and Washington Post <\/em>decrying American military aid to a country that denied most of its citizens religious freedoms. Vietnamese Buddhist leaders emblazoned the image on placards they carried during demonstrations. Officials in communist China used the image for propaganda purposes, distributing copies throughout Southeast Asia and attributing the monk\u2019s death to the work of \u201cthe U.S. imperialist aggressors and their Diemist lackeys.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When President Kennedy called Henry Cabot Lodge to the White House to discuss his ambassadorship to South Vietnam, the president had on his desk a copy of the monk photograph. \u201cI suppose that no news picture in recent history had generated as much emotion around the world as that one had,\u201d Lodge noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Browne\u2019s photograph has become one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, seared into the collective American conscience alongside two other AP photographs\u2014Eddie Adams\u2019s \u201cSaigon Execution,\u201d his graphic shot of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being summarily executed at point-blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief, and Nick Ut\u2019s \u201cTerror of War,\u201d showing a naked, nine-year-old girl screaming as she runs down a road with her skin burned from a South Vietnamese napalm bombing that mistakenly hit her village.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Browne, who won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam, was often asked if he could have done anything to prevent Quang Duc from taking his life. But Browne realized that it would have been fruitless to try to intervene. The monks and nuns gathered for the protest stood ready to block anyone who dared to interfere. When a fire truck appeared, some of the monks had leapt in front of their wheels to stop them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quang Duc\u2019s sacrifice weighed on Browne, who died on August 27, 2012. \u201cI don\u2019t think many journalists take pleasure from human suffering,\u201d he noted, but he did have to admit to \u201chaving sometimes profited from others\u2019 pain.\u201d Although by no means intentional on his part, that fact did not help, Browne noted. \u201cJournalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,\u201d he said. \u201cEither way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were other deaths that Browne witnessed in Vietnam\u2014losses that became mere \u201cfootnotes\u201d in the history of the war compared to the \u201ctheater of the horrible\u201d that Quang Duc\u2019s sacrifice represented for his cause. Browne, however, never forgot them. He had learned during his career to deal with \u201cthe ugliest events of our times,\u201d including keeping his wits as he observed the dead and wounded on a battlefield. Browne was able to do his job by \u201cconcentrating on the mechanics of news covering. I have the nightmares afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RAY E. BOOMHOWER<\/strong>is senior editor of the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is the author of 18 books, including biographies of journalists John Bartlow Martin, Robert L. Sherrod, and Richard Tregaskis. His book The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Qu\u1ea3ng \u0110\u1ee9c, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World<\/em> will be published by High Road Books, an imprint of the University of New Mexico Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Man Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Image Captured \u2018the Ugliest Events of Our Time\u2019 Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc\u2019s self-immolation during the Vietnam War, captured by journalist Malcom Browne, left an imprint on the public conscience. Author Ray Boomhower explores the story behind the iconic photo and its lasting effects. Courtesy… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[675],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26899"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26900,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26899\/revisions\/26900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}