r journalist of the era he was five years the president of the magnum photo of the had a definitive book vietnam he is going to talk today pretty particularly about a book that he's put together more recently called agent orange collateral damage in vietnam yet another book we're not going to be discussing called vietnam peace he's a war correspondent of the highest order and philip welcome very much the conversation a great pleasure we've been here you've been here with us in the past and i thank you very much for coming in i wonder we could maybe you could talk just a little bit if you don't mind about your background your out of wales that sort of thing and also i know you work to boots as a chemist heaven bad boys go everywhere and i being just one hundred and forty dollars countries a so and i'm always running around but it's always southeast asia that's really fascinated me more than anyone else and i've spent a long time covering the war in vietnam and i've been back since the end of the war twenty five times while that much in vietnam in vietnam i know you've been to cambodia well no i know i've been to come but i haven't counted combo you know i got my next book oh i think i don't know a good publicity that thirty years after the original publication i did not have to change a word to write and also i think i concentrated on what was really important which was that america was trying to impose its cultural values on the vietnamese and i also introduce a lot of the sort of what could be described as the ecological problems there but also the problems of of consumerism being imposed on them on the globalization i think i would probably into globalization long before people because we knew very little about said the st reports we had came from one noise same with america was using poison poison gas and was causing problems chemical warfare it was it was what they were accused of which is correct of course then the st sort of information we really hard hard information we had i was some newspapers in saigon published photographs of some of these deformed children the being blown president queue of south vietnam you know that you have to pick the right moment to look at it because some of the pictures are very graphic very graphic indeed and i think when you had children of your own most of these pictures taken on all of them but  only was prepared to go against the tide in washington but also to risk putting out pictures where people might want to sort of close the book did you have problems with that back in the days where you were filing pictures from vietnam in the war front and they would play your undercutting the war effort and you were part of a journalistic still photography there is also some film and television in the press and you know some of the early people began to build up a lack of support for the war effort in vietnam and  knew what was happening there was barely anyone who didn't know someone who'd lost somebody in vietnam you know the war was brought home they had a very realistic way i mean the weight is now with iraq it is it we know they do you never see an american wounded you never see people in that small community that have lost family members and as a result those people are beginning to say look we were misled about this will things wanted to see an incumbent on all of those yeah exactly the same way that people during the vietnam war said got to be nine hundred and sixty eight mr johnson is the president i guess there were five hundred thousand troops there and it's up like that and remember the political consequence was such that he had to there was such a counter force going here that he had to say he would not run for president in may or march of one thousand nine hundred and sixty eight that the approval rating for his handling of the war was down about thirty eight percent at the time it had know the result today is that there are two prongs of what's happened to vietnam the ecological one which is horrendous and then there's the human won the way in which people are being affected so that you have for instance all over vietnam you have a total norma's increase in the number of cases of liver cancer for instance the e p a now says that a quarter of all cancers in america caused by dioxin and wait a minute who says that the contained a pen adulterant if you like something that shouldn't have been that which is the dioxin and this was because a company that was making so many gallons a month from now making one hundred them based in new jersey and on the around the east coast here but they were all over the place they even had been had a small plant in new zealand making the stud grief and around that town they never could never understand why so many babies were being born deformed they always knew that in the production of all the agent orange it would be some dioxin but as one person i quote in the book says well we knew there was about ten times more in them than the should have been but as we were the same monuments was built in vietnam for the vietnamese dad it would be nine miles long good god that is the proportion and of course it would keep growing every year because of dioxins because in the why i think this book must be on my new book called vietnam and peace and i try to try to be fat yeah show i know yeah you know what's happened and the trials and tribulations that the country has from phase of this yet out of an aftermath things back revisit and they're doing and you had a particular notice of this back and seventy's or you were you're linking into that there was this long term damage that was being delivered down on the bed you know drugs of the whatever knowing bads but i was i knew that that would not happen if the nurse all the midwife all the major alone the ward or even the patients were catholic because you know the catholic religion believes that you should always save  to people that have very little of it one little bit of something would really help the poor but they don't want to admit that they made a name and that if we were in the wrong that try to pretend that by don't even talking about it now somehow the problem will go away have they tried to argue that they all hide this is the book and it has a kind of a it's a little difficult to see let's see what looks like but i think it's worth they maybe taking a nd to look at it because it's got an unusual cover if i may say so and i think it might be worth could we show if this is the cover of the book agent amazed me about i was very lucky to find this particular part of the map because it shows that the spraying ones you see when they were this is actually a reservoir where people got their drinking water home wonderful so they actually came down the coast rather than stopped when they got to the edge of the of the water here that they actually just kept dumping it into the water itself and some of these are actually done over the water which i write into the drinking rather i find out particularly sadistic considering that this well considering then you don't think they were just bad at what they were doing or well you know who knows yeah i know but the result is that these are the people who have the problems that we see today yeah and it was it's interesting larry it will get back to a but it was interesting because this took place in south vietnam not north korea back to may be relevant because that would give us a particular cold control group important in terms of understanding the long term scientific implications of the  is prepared to stick his neck out window on that nobody else would not be here in america and i think let's say let's let's see if we can bring it up because you're going to have it we're talking now on august thirty one two thousand and five this will air on the th labor day  could you maybe run those slides now i guess we've got about twenty or so and we're talking again with philip jones griffiths photo journalist extraordinary could we run the pictures now on the screen pl veterans administration immediately contacted his widow and said you're in the clear that he's definitely agent orange you know you more do they doing to cover the well may have been know they may get they may may get some trouble or something getting them up on the screen we can't seem to see them on the screen i don't know the usual i don't quite know why we're not sure oh there there than otherwise never we're in business is that this is also a picture taken this is time little seedlings and these are the sort of small the seedlings which will be transplanted and when when they're big enough that you know that they're actually seeded on hill so he had a picture of a little girl who had a thing protecting him from the wrath and  the outside of the back of the had but i chose a picture like this because you know that they're embracing there's a little bit of nascent humanity and i think that you can get away with a picture like that whereas some of the totally brain brain dead right now they're going to be people are going to be trying to say well there are children that are born without the diaconate you're trying to thank you know the causal link between the dioxin and the birth defect is absolutely clear in your mind is there's no question it's like a scientific you think it's there's no there's no question of how we're going to deal with this both in comic terms or in policy terms is something that ought to be brought up in the public dialogue things to me  yeah docs and seems to go for the ice in the developing fetus and here he has strange strange things but he has no t adopts or as a result this picture was taken about ten years ago so he would have been blind by now they reckon he wouldn't last very d these were actually the very st age alone victims that i had ever seen so that's one line the other line is that if you are someone who's living next to a hot spot a hot spot where  companies settled out of court the night before the case went to trial paid out one hundred eighty million dollars which at the time was the biggest payment had there been any initiation or anything about the vietnamese that they right i don't think you i don't think there's anyone left in the country today that will say that cigarette smoking is not connected to lung cancer but until ten years ago there was yeah maybe there is still a few in her other arm but yeah there are other you and hiding  last nd world war they had treated you your jews horrendously and there was some accounting for that horrendous treatment that out which and so for the experiments all kinds of things like that we treated people horribly and there's going to be no accounting at all for the horrible conditions and the residue of these horrible things what do we do with that in terms of the responsibilities involved in that helping from a moral point of view how do they do it without sort of alienating their right wing supporters who think that you know we communal wrong exactly so so what you say is that you say look this is the state every man woman indeed very very you know now you could say to america look why don't you do something positive for humanity and try to work out what it is about docs and how it works is still so all of back to it's important research and the one place to do that research would be vietnam because you've got this control group in the north that wasn't sprayed and they're not doing on that foundation of a little bit but it's the exactly so what i'm saying is that you could work out it's morally something you should do america's doing it for the its own people and for all the people of the world because if there was a magic pill she wants the dolphins in your body to never leave o waken leaves through mother's breast milk into the baby was not the last thing you want anyway and you could say look america you could do this research is going to be expensive you would come up with some way al it's it's doable and it's it means no one loses face in the asian way that's that would be such an easy thing to accomplish both might help move the nation in and hopefully doing what i've suggested yeah and i think nothing more than the sadistic callousness by the american government  the absolute power corrupts absolutely mr act and you know he did and we haven't even been able to get to the idea of linking it that we got the iraq that we had the police of uranium the other side i think that is the big issue that ought to be addressed there in ink and it seems to have a photo a journalistic community can now bring that together i didn't realize you had all the film or have a talk to you about that young man but i'm really glad you got that going and philip thanks a lot and fire run out of time here you're a pleasure to have the perception of