TOKYO—Richard Pyle, ‘The Vietnam War Reporter’ for The Associated Press and my close friend, was a straight, no-nonsense top journalist who despised dictators and bureaucracy, shared the same values as Little Larry on the Brooklyn sidewalks, and cared about the United States and the world with patriotism. Richard shared identical traits as Senator John McCain.
Richard’s ashes, an Army veteran, was entombed at Arlington National Cemetery Aug. 21, 2018. During his half a century career as an AP reporter, Richard covered a whole range of news, starting in Detroit and then in Southeast Asia, Tokyo, the Middle East, and lastly New York.
Richard wrote several books and in one, ‘Lost Over Laos’ co-authored with his Vietnam era AP photographer colleague Horst Faas (Da Capo Press, 2003), John McCain reviewed it:
”The ethic and the courage of…photojounalists in Vietnam’s crucible, brilliantly captured by Pyle and Faas, radiate from those pages like the sun over the battlefields they left behind.’ – Senator John McCain, former Navy pilot and Vietnam POW.’
Richard and Horst had approached major publishers for the book but were politely turned down, understandably so because it was time when the United States was trying to erase bitter war-time memories.
John McCain apparently didn’t think the Americans should erase the Vietnam war memories, and when a galley arrived on his desk in 2002, he agreed to read it and wrote blurbs to go to the book back cover, Richard told me at the time. A former Nebraska senator, John Kerry, also wrote, and David Halberstam, who wrote about the Vietnam War extensively, wrote the book’s introduction.
PBS’s Vietnam War documentary, which was broadcast from September 2017 ‘appears to have used many parts of Richard’s book,’ Brenda Smiley, Richard’s wife, told me recently. The TV series could have been made more accurate and balanced had the producers used Richard’s input, she said.
Richard wrote the book with Faas as an accurate record of what happened around him and his colleagues in Vietnam with uncompromising integrity and accuracy, always from journalists’ eyes, the same eye level as for John McCain’s as a politician, both of them sharing the same compassion for people and nations and still working to make their country and the world a better place to be.
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