(page 3 of 5) Many of the details of our stories were censored, so we found other ways to send out the news of the growing Buddhist protests. The Government wanted to stop us from reporting the truth, hoping that military censorship would make us frightened. But we kept reporting, and not using public communications systems, but giving the material to friendly travelers taking commercial flights to nearby Bangkok or Hong Kong. They would then pass our reports and pictures to our bureaus there. There would only be a few hours delay. That was a major advantage of working for large news organizations with bureaus in many places. Our most serious public critic was the president's sister-in-law, Madame Nhu. She was married to Ngo Dinh Nhu, the closest advisor to the president and who, with his wife, wielded much power. Madame Nhu claimed that Malcolm Browne had taken the gasoline to assist in the suicide of the monk, Thich Quang Duc. Not true. She claimed we were agents of Hanoi, and threatened to expel all of us, which worried me because I had been expelled from Indonesia just the year before. Mal Browne and I even thought of moving from our apartments to the main Caravelle Hotel for security. Madame Nhu became even more nasty, more difficult. She criticized the American military aid effort, and the growing distrust of the South Vietnamese government by American politicians at home. She even ordered all of Saigon's many bars and nightclubs closed, a decision not welcomed by the many American soldiers who used them. Madame Nhu declared that the Americans in Vietnam should "dance with death and not our girls". The growing crisis again put President Diem on the cover of Time magazine, the most influential publication in the United States in that era. Time magazine had often criticized all of us in the Saigon press corps, but the management of the Associated Press stood by its own people and supported our reporting fully. By this time we extra help had come in from other bureaus. The criticism of the press just seemed to make us tougher. By then we had been there over a year. I was enjoying living in Saigon. The city had an old world charm, with tree-shaded streets and old colonial buildings in the downtown area, and a busy Chinese-Vietnamese business area in the southern suburbs with excellent restaurants. The layout was that of a modern European city; moving around was easy.         PREVIOUS PAGE RETURN TO BIO NEXT PAGE