lunes, 5 de agosto de 2013

Edwin Q. White, Saigon bureau chief for AP during Vietnam War, dies in ... - Washington Post

White, who served as AP's Saigon bureau chief as the U.S. deployed massive numbers of combat troops to Vietnam, died before dawn Thursday at his home at age 90, his daughter Rachel White Watanabe said.

White said the biggest regret of his career was leaving Saigon when South Vietnam fell to Hanoi's communist forces on April 30, 1975, a moment he thought about almost every day. He left on one of the last evacuation helicopters from the roof of the U.S. embassy.

"Going off of the roof of the embassy wasn't the greatest happening of my life," he said.

Known among colleagues by his middle name, Quigley, he was part of a fabled crew of journalists who covered the war for the AP from Saigon, a thinning group that has seen five deaths this year.

"They were such a great bunch of people. I sometimes just stood around in awe of them," White said in August, after the death of Malcolm Browne, a reporter and former Saigon AP bureau chief who became best known for his 1963 photograph of a Buddhist monk who committed suicide by fire.

Other Saigon staffers who died this year were White's close friend Roy Essoyan, a writer who became his neighbor in Hawaii, along with correspondent George Esper and legendary photographer Horst Faas.

Former AP Tokyo photo editor Hal Buell said White tightly bonded with colleagues in Asia and kept in touch long after they left the region to share a mutual affection for covering international news for AP.

"We never lost that feeling," said Buell, who worked with White in Tokyo before White went to Saigon. "It was a brotherhood, simply put."

Watanabe said White died in his sleep in Honolulu, where he moved after retiring in 1987. His had congestive heart failure and his health was deteriorating, she said.

"Ed White led an extraordinary AP bureau that covered the American involvement in Vietnam from its start through the fall of Saigon in 1975," said John Daniszewski, AP's senior managing editor for international news. "He embodied accuracy, dispassion and objectivity in his reporting, and his contribution to the telling of that history will never be forgotten by his colleagues."

Born in Tipton, Mo., on Aug. 29, 1922, White was a reporter's reporter — skeptical, careful, a stickler for accuracy, with an acerbic wit and a no-frills writing style that stressed facts over drama.

In a 1997 oral history interview for AP, White said his love of journalism began in boyhood, when he "got kind of interested" in how Tipton's weekly paper was printed.

He graduated from the University of Missouri's prestigious journalism school and saw Army service in WWII. In the Philippines when the war ended in 1945, his unit was sent to Korea to help handle the repatriation of defeated Japanese troops.

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