page_title: Beverly Deepe Keever
section_title: Journalism
hierarchical_section_title: Beverly Deepe Keever / Career / Journalism
caption_attribution_description: English: Beverly Deepe Keever with USMC UMA (aco) 242 Sqd of A-6 Intruder out of Danang Airbasse March 12, 1967 with Bomber/Navigator explaining all the electronic gadgets – for Cosmopolitan piece on USMC (which was later published; this photo was not submitted)
context_page_description: Beverly Deepe Keever is an American journalist, Vietnam War correspondent, author and professor emerita of journalism and communications.
  Beverly Deepe Keever has had a varied career that spanned the journalistic profession and professorate. Her career ranged from public opinion polling for an author-syndicated columnist in New York City, to war correspondent, to covering Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. and then to teaching and researching journalism and communications for 29 years at the University of Hawai’i.
  As a professor emerita and 40-some years after departing Saigon, she wrote her memoirs of covering the Vietnam War for seven years—longer than any other American correspondent as of that time. Titled Death Zones and Darling Spies, the book chronicles her dispatches as a freelancer and then successively for Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor and the London Daily Express and Sunday Express.
  Her 1968 coverage of the embattled Khe Sanh Combat Base was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting by the Christian Science Monitor.
context_section_description: The 27-year-old Beverly Deepe arrived in South Vietnam in early 1962 just as President John Kennedy had initiated a new phase of an anti-communist campaign and American helicopter units and provincial advisors were unpacking.  With this uptick in newsworthiness, she worked as a free-lancer without a regular paycheck, relying on her portable typewriter to write dispatches airmailed on speculation to Associated Press Newsfeatures and other media outlets. Upon her arrival, she was the sole female correspondent among the eight resident Western correspondents.  When she departed Vietnam after seven years of continuous reporting, she had outlasted all of them.  During that long tenure, she acquired an institutional knowledge and array of valuable local sources that few other Americans had, giving her a unique plus often lipsticked perspective.
  She was among the 467 women correspondents accredited by the U.S. Military command from 1965 to 1973, the years when U.S. combat units arrived and when they departed; of those 467, 267 were American.  Scholars assess that with more women covering the Vietnam War than any previous U.S. conflict, it was “a turning point—to some extent a watershed—for American women as war correspondents” and in doing so, “they staked out a lasting place for their gender on the landscape of war.”;
  After her arrival, she switched from dresses to fatigues and combat boots purchased in the black markets that flourished throughout the Paris-like Saigon.  She helicoptered to Western-styled forts designed to foment communist infiltration along the Laotian border only to learn seven years later of their fall or abandonment.  By jeep and by speedboat along the waterways of the Mekong Delta, she traveled to interview embittered peasants and tenant farmers, as her own parents had been when she was born.
  By 1965 with the introduction of American combat troops and squadrons of U.S. aircraft and helicopters, she trudged along soup-y rice paddies and head-high grasses to report on American and South Vietnam fighters, who often had difficulty detecting friendly folk from hide-and-seek guerrillas.
  Her Vietnam War reporting included a number of notable achievements: 
  Using her background of door-to-door political interviews conducted in the U.S., she became intrigued in Vietnam to learn why villagers were joining the communist enemy of the U.S.-backed Saigon government and what drove these do-or-die guerrillas or sympathizers to battle a global, nuclear-armed superpower. She wrote a number of articles probing this question over the seven years, consulting her Vietnamese assistants and numerous other sources, dissecting translations of captured documents, and interviewing pro-communists who had defected or been captured.
  In 1962, she was probably the first American correspondent to write about “death zones.”  She used that chilling term in quoting province chief Maj. Tran Van Minh, head of the Saigon government’s Operation Sunrise that warned the rural population in pro-communist-controlled jungled areas northwest of Saigon to leave their home areas or were forcibly relocated to secured areas because the 40-square-mile pro-communist stronghold was going to be bombed and shelled. The gripping “death zones” term was later sanitized by the U.S. government into the more palatable label of “free-fire zones” needed to obscure the increased number of allied airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Six years later, as President Johnson began peace negotiations in 1968, one renowned scholar noted, “further applications of massive American firepower across South Vietnam seemed likely to annihilate all too well the country the Americans had come to save.”
  In 1964 when working for the New York Herald Tribune, she was the first to report on the first-ever detected presence of North Vietnamese fighting units, based on her field trip to the northern city of Danang and interviews with top U.S. and South Vietnamese officers. But the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara denied her dispatches during this politically sensitive period
caption: Beverly Deepe Keever with USMC UMA (aco) 242 Sqd of A-6 Intruder out of Danang Airbasse March 12, 1967 with Bomber/Navigator explaining all the electronic gadgets – for Cosmopolitan piece on USMC (which was later published; this photo was not submitted)
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