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John Laurence (also known as Jack Laurence) (born 1939 in Bridgeport, Connecticut) is an American television correspondent, author and documentary filmmaker best known for his work on the air at CBS News, London correspondent for ABC News, documentary work for PBS and CBS, and his book and magazine writing. He won the George Polk Memorial Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad" for his reporting from Vietnam in 1970.

Biography

Laurence attended Fairfield College Preparatory School and then Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. While at the University of Pennsylvania, he started working at the campus radio station, WXPN which led to his career in broadcast journalism. He worked at WWDC (AM/FM) in Washington D.C. for a year and then at WNEW-AM/FM in New York from 1962-64. He joined CBS News as a radio correspondent in January, 1965. He covered the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Civil War in April-May 1965 where he produced a radio documentary on the revolution.

Vietnam War

Laurence volunteered to go to South Vietnam in August 1965 as a radio reporter while Morley Safer, Charles Collingwood, Peter Kalischer and others did television. However, as an extra camera crew was available, he started reporting for TV as well as radio. His TV work began with an exclusive report on the arrival of the 1st Cavalry Division's advance party in South Vietnam. He covered Operation Piranha, the Battle of An Ninh, the Siege of Plei Me, the aftermath of the Battle of Ia Drang and Operation Masher.

Laurence was initially supportive of U.S. policy in Vietnam and gave favorable if neutral coverage in what was referred to by the U.S. Army public information officers as "being with the program". However, as he saw more and more of the war, witnessing the deaths of American GIs and Vietnamese civilians, the accidental bombing of a village in neutral Cambodia, coming under fire from friendly forces, and seeing the corruption endemic in South Vietnam, he became more critical of the U.S. presence and what might actually be achieved there.

Through his friendship with UPI photojournalist Steve Northup, Laurence became a regular visitor at 47 Bui Thi Xuan, Saigon, the home of Northup and fellow correspondents Tim Page, Martin Stuart-Fox, David Stuart-Fox, Simon Dring, Joseph Galloway, Tom Corpora and Sean Flynn. It was known as "Frankie's House" after the resident Vietnamese houseboy. One of the members, Sam Castan, a senior editor of LOOK magazine, became close friends with Laurence. Castan was killed at Landing Zone Hereford while leading three GIs to safety, an act of courage for which he was awarded an Army Commendation Medal posthumously by the commander of U.S. forces, General William Westmoreland. Laurence wrote Castan's obituary for LOOK. Frankie's House became a social club for a small group of young correspondents and their friends who talked, listened to music and smoked marijuana between field assignments.

On 10 March, 1966, following the Battle of A Sau (also known as A Shau), Laurence interviewed Marine Lt. Col. Charles House, commander of HMM-163, the unit which had evacuated the survivors of the battle and who had himself been shot down and rescued from the battlefield. House stated that panicking CIDG troops had overloaded the evacuation helicopters. The crews and Special Forces troops opened fire on them to restore order. The story caused outrage when broadcast and led to an investigation by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) and III MAF but no further action was taken.

Laurence left Vietnam in late May, 1966, returning to the U.S. and working out of CBS bureaus in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Atlanta. He covered racial/police violence in Cleveland, Ohio in 1966, the civil rights movement in the South and other domestic stories in the United States.

Laurence returned to Vietnam in August, 1967. He covered the Battle of Dak To, the Tet Offensive, the siege of Con Thien, the Battle of Khe Sanh, the Battle of Hue, corruption among the Vietnamese, and the plight of South Vietnamese civilians among other combat stories. With cameraman Keith Kay, he was the first journalist to report the intense shelling of the Marine outpost at Con Thien in September, 1967. Kay and Laurence received a cable from Walter Cronkite congratulating them on their work. Later, Laurence and Kay were the first TV team to reach Hue on the third day of the battle and first to get their film on the air in the U.S.

In February, 1968, Laurence had dinner with Walter Cronkite the night before the CBS anchorman returned to the United States following his two week tour of Vietnam to study the Tet Offensive. He tried to impress on Cronkite his belief that the war had reached a stalemate and that America was wasting the lives of its own troops and those of the Vietnamese people by continuing the war. Soon after, Cronkite broadcast a special report on CBS calling for negotiations to end the war.

Laurence reported the 1968 documentary "Hill 943," an hour-long special report on CBS News, recounting the lives (and death) of a small American unit trying to capture a hill during the Battle of Dak To. "The grim and unpublicized routine of the war in Vietnam--the dangerous assignment of an American company to penetrate the jungle and take Hill 943--was related with unusual intimacy in last night's news special of the Columbia Broadcasting System," New York Times TV reviewer Jack Gould wrote.

Laurence's second tour in Vietnam ended in May 1968. Based in New York, he covered racial violence in Chicago, Detroit, Newark, Kansas City and San Francisco.

Sigma Delta Chi, the U.S. professional journalism society, made its television reporting award for Distinguished Service in Journalism to Laurence for his coverage of the Vietnam war in 1967. Laurence received an Emmy Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his 1968 series of investigative reports called "Police After Chicago" on the CBS Evening News.

In 1969, Laurence reported an hour documentary on what had become known in the United States as the "Generation gap," the difference in attitudes between young people and their parents. "People are so much more interesting than statistics, a fact demonstrated once again last night on the Columbia Broadcasting System's superb television study of the generation gap, "Fathers and Sons" wrote George Gent in the New York Times.

In March, 1970, Laurence returned to Vietnam to produce and report a documentary that would later become The World of Charlie Company. Along with his cameraman, Keith Kay, and sound technician James Clevenger, they spent four months recording the daily lives and experiences of Company C, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, in Tây Ninh Province in War Zone C near the Cambodian border. They lived, ate and marched with them, while sending reports for the CBS Evening News. In April 1970, Laurence and his team accompanied C Company as they conducted a helicopter assault into Memot District at the start of the Cambodian Campaign attempting to engage the North Vietnamese military headquarters known as COSVN. For his work, Laurence received a Columbia duPont Silver Baton award.

1970s

In 1970, Laurence moved to London to take over as bureau chief from Morley Safer. He and Keith Kay covered the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 from East Pakistan.

In 1977, Laurence left CBS News and began working on his book, "The Cat from Hue: a Vietnam War Story." In 1978, he joined ABC News as a London correspondent at a time when its new president, Roone Arledge, was building the TV news division to make it more competitive with CBS and NBC.

In July 1982 Laurence returned briefly to Vietnam for the first time since 1970.

Laurence's memoir of his years covering the war in Vietnam, "The Cat from Hue: a Vietnam War Story," was published in 2002 by PublicAffairs Press in New York. It received positive reviews, especially in The New York Times, but also in major U.S. newspapers and magazines. The book received the Cornelius Ryan Award from the Overseas Press Club, its sole annual book award, for "Best Non-Fiction Reporting on International Affairs".

References

1. "C.B.S. Team Wins Award for a Vietnam Project". The New York Times. 27 March 1971. Retrieved 25 February 2018.
2. ^ Laurence, John (2002). The Cat from Hue. Public Affairs. p. 425. ISBN 1586481606.
3. Christie, Michael (2012) Vietnam Magazine 17 Sept 2012 "The decision to leave a mortar platoon alone at Hereford sealed the fate of its men and journalist Sam Castan"
4. Laurence, John (1966) "Sam Castan" LOOK Magazine, June 1966.
5. Young, Perry (2009). Two of the Missing: Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. Press 53. ISBN 9780981628097.
6. Page, Tim (1990). Page After Page. Paladin Books. p. 100-5. ISBN 0689120885.
7. Shulimson, Jack (1982). U.S. Marines in Vietnam: 1966, an Expanding War. History and Museums Division, USMC. p. 62-3.
8. Yarborough, Thomas (2016). A Shau Valor: American Combat Operations in the Valley of Death, 1963–1971. Casemate. ISBN 9781612003542.
9. Arlen, Michael (1969). Living Room War. Viking Press. p. 86-102.
10. "50 years ago, Walter Cronkite told America the bitter truth. We need more Cronkites today". Philadelphia Inquirer. 22 February 2018. Retrieved 26 February 2018.
11. Brinkley, Douglas (2012) Cronkite. Harper/Harper/Collins (New York)
12. Gould, Jack (5 June 1968). "TV: The Agony of War 25 Years Ago and Today" (PDF). The New York Times.
13. "News Awards Made by Sigma Delta Chi" (PDF). The New York Times. 12 April 1968.
14. "C.B.S. Hunger Show Wins an Emmy" (PDF). The New York Times. 27 May 1969.
15. Gent, George (13 August 1969). "TV: Poignant Study of Generation Gap" (PDF). The New York Times. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
16. "duPont Winners Archive". Columbia University. December 7, 2017. Retrieved February 25, 2018.
17. Kutler, Stanley (21 April 2002). "Apocalypse Then". The New York Times.
18. "Press Reviews". 10 August 2003.

• American television journalists
• CBS News people