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Author Speaks Out Against Vietnam War

Gloria Emerson, who won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1978 for Winners and Losers, her bleak first-hand account of the Vietnam War, spoke to a modest crowd at the Hallock Auditorium on Thursday night. Her lecture, "Choosing War: The Vietnam Catastrophe," was free to the public, part of a series of talks dedicated to the challenges of national security in the 21st century.

During the war, Emerson received a George Polk Award for her journalistic endeavors in Vietnam as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. At that time, she became renowned for her investigative reporting on the Vietnamese civilian society in the south, though she also provided extensive coverage of the United States Army. She later continued working as a correspondent for the Times in Paris and London, and she once again found herself knee-deep in turmoil while covering conflicts in West Africa and in Northern Ireland.

Soon after her return to the United States, Emerson began work on her second non-fiction book, 1985's Some American Men. Six years later, she returned with another work of non-fiction, Gaza: A Year in the Intifada, which won Hunter College's James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Her first novel, Loving Graham Greene, is scheduled to be published by Random House in September.

On Thursday night, Emerson captivated her audience with tales of her experiences in Vietnam and an explanation of her growing dissatisfaction with the American government and the Armed Forces. She encouraged those in attendance to take part in the discussion and soon found herself engaged in a lively debate about the war and the culpability of the men who were responsible for it. Before long, the lecture had been transformed into something of a round-table discussion, with Emerson moderating and offering commentary. After responding to questions from her audience for more than an hour, Emerson finally called it a night.

The final lecture in the national security series will take place on Wednesday, April 12. It will feature the husband-and-wife writing team of Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, the authors of Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship and Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua.

-Rossiter Drake

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