Gloria Emerson
Gloria Emerson (born 1929 in New York City; died 2004 in New York City) was an American author, journalist and New York Times war correspondent, who won a National Book Award for her book about the Vietnam War, Winners and Losers. She committed suicide in her apartment in New York in August 2004. During her long career, she wrote four books as well as reportage for Esquire, Harper's, Vogue, Playboy, the Saturday Review, and Rolling Stone, besides the Times.
Coverage of Vietnam
Emerson spent some of her youth in Saigon; it was there that she first began to write for the newspapers, freelancing for The New York Times in 1956. Subsequently tiring of restricting herself to writing about fashion, as was expected of her on her return to America, she quit to get married. Returning in 1964 to the Times, she worked in the paper's London and Paris bureaux until she convinced the paper, as she said in the obituary she wrote for herself, "that she be sent to Vietnam because she had been in that country in 1956 and wanted to go back to write about the Vietnamese people and the immense unhappy changes in their lives, not a subject widely covered by the huge press corps who were preoccupied with covering the military story."
Among her first reports for The New York Times exposed false "body counts" and "unearned commendations" to field-grade officers and on the use of hard drugs by American soldiers. Her reports focussed on the suffering of the Vietnamese people themselves.
Again, in her obituary, which shocked reporters at the Times discovered with a covering letter on the day she died, she described the plaudits that came her way thus: Her dispatches from Vietnam won a George Polk Award for excellence in foreign reporting, and, later, a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications. Her nonfiction book on the war, 'Winners & Losers' (Random House, 1977), won a National Book Award in 1978 but she described it as 'too huge and somewhat messy.' Its subject was the effects of the conflict on some Americans, or 'an absence of the effect,' as she once said.
One of the most quoted parts of the book was the condemnation of 'killing at a distance': Americans cannot perceive—even the most decent among us—the suffering caused by the United States air war in Indochina and how huge are the graveyards we have created there. To a reporter recently returned from Vietnam, it often seems that much of our fury and fear is reserved for busing, abortion, mugging, and liberation of some kind. Our deepest emotions are wired to baseball players. As Anthony Lewis once wrote, our military technology is so advanced that we kill at a distance and insulate our consciences by the remoteness of the killing. A very large part of the war's moral horror, he said, has been our ability to conceal its human significance from ourselves.
It was at this time that she had a hard-hitting and famous interview with John Lennon at the Apple headquarters in London featured in, among others, in the 2006 movie U.S. vs. John Lennon, that summarised her opinion of some of the anti-war movement[1]:
John: [Angrily in response to Gloria Emerson's views about John returning his MBE] If I'm gonna get on the front page, I might as well get on the front page with the word "PEACE".
Emerson: But you've made yourself ridiculous!
John: To some people, I don't care....if it saves lives!
Emerson: You don't think you've - oh - my dear boy you're living in a never-never land.
John: Well you talk to a...
Emerson: You don't think you've saved a single life...
Emerson: You're a fake! I know in England it's kind of smart not to be too serious about anything...
Yoko: Everything needs a smile, you know.
Emerson: I see.... Take the massacre, ha, ha, ha. Can't you give up something else if it means a little bit more....
Emerson: Well - it just seems a never-never land, I can't think of anyone who seems more remote from the ugliness of what's happening than you. I do see you getting up on a Tuesday morning and thinking 'let's see, what shall we do today? - what war is going on'.
Yoko: [Exasperated] That's your imagination you know, I mean really that's YOU.
John: [To Emerson] You carry on, why don't you make a film while you're at it.
Emerson: I'm somebody who admired you very much.....
John: [Interrupting] Well I'm sorry if you liked the old moptops dear and you thought I was very satirical and witty and you like Hard days' night love......
Emerson: I'm talking about cashing in on the Beatles.
John: .......but I've grown up but you obviously haven't.
Emerson: Have you?
Gaza: A Year in the Intifada
Gaza, a Year in the Intifada, was published in 1991 about a year she spent in the occupied territories. The book provoked hostility among friends, and others felt it was anti-Israel, but Ms. Emerson insisted this was not the reason for writing it, she explained in her obituary; she hoped to provide a primer for those who felt the situation in the Middle East was too complicated or too controversial to understand.
Parkinson's Disease
Shortly before she died, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease; unable to contemplate a future in which she did not write, she committed suicide.