Fitzgerald, Frances

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FITZGERALD, Frances

Born 21 October 1940, New York, New York

Daughter of Desmond and Mary E. Peabody FitzGerald

Born into an old Boston family that included scholar and explorer Francis Parkman, FitzGerald spent her childhood in America and Europe. Her mother was an urban planner and a former U.S. representative to the United Nations, and her father was a former deputy director of the CIA. With Middle Eastern studies as her major, FitzGerald graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe in 1962. After graduation, during a two-year stay in Paris, she worked on a novel and published magazine articles for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. After her return to New York in 1964, she wrote a series of profiles, including one about Amelia Peabody—her maternal grandmother who had been jailed for participation in a civil rights demonstration at the age of seventy-two—for the New York Herald Tribune Magazine. In 1966 she went to South Vietnam as a freelance journalist, publishing articles on politics in Saigon during the following year for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Village Voice, and Vogue, receiving the Overseas Press Club award for interpretative reporting in 1967.

Returning to America, FitzGerald spent the next five years researching and writing Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972, reissued 1984). Informed by study with the Indochinese scholar Paul Mus at Yale, historical research at Harvard, reading in sociology and psychology, and another five-month trip to South Vietnam, Fire in the Lake earned FitzGerald (among other awards) the Pulitzer Prize for contemporary-affairs writing (1973), the National Book Award (1973), and the Bancroft Prize for History (1973). After the book's publication, FitzGerald made a speaking tour on behalf of the Indochina Peace Campaign.

Since 1973 FitzGerald continued to write about American society and culture. Most of her articles (appearing in the New Yorker, Redbook, the New York Review of Books, Ms., Harper's, and the New Republic) have focused on social conflicts in terms of historical and cultural origins, political leadership, and effects on ordinary people in such areas as the Middle East, Ireland, and Cuba.

Fire in the Lake was greeted with widespread critical acclaim not simply because it was the best scholarly effort by an American to interpret Vietnamese culture and the American presence in Vietnam for a general audience, but also because of its superior analysis of the political and social nature of the Vietnamese response to foreign occupation, particularly the Saigon governments' "desire for, and hostility to, the American presence."

Not interested in being a war correspondent "attached to the U.S. government forces," FitzGerald focuses on the political activity of the war and on the people and the country. Dividing her study into two parts, she first explores Vietnamese culture and national character within a historical perspective, relying—too much at times—on Western sociological and psychological modes of analysis in explaining national behavior. Second, FitzGerald examines the politics of leadership practiced by the National Liberation Front, the Saigon governments, and the Americans, effectively illustrating a "complete circle of self-deception."

Within the double frame, FitzGerald presents a compelling explanation of the American sense of "righteous mission" in Vietnam, an attitude originating in a "definite historical and mythological perspective." At the same time she depicts the particular effects on human lives of the American attempt to fulfill their mission. She carefully builds an awareness of the perspectives of both soldiers from small American towns finding themselves "among people with whom they could make no human contact" and the Vietnamese in isolated villages, refugee camps, and cities seeing one another separated from "family, friendship, our manner of expressing ourselves."

FitzGerald's prose is restrained rather than detached. Her empathy for the Vietnamese is apparent, yet she does not sentimentalize. While some generalizations concerning national character seem to have been too easily inferred, her analysis, especially as it is supported by carefully chosen and well-drawn anecdotal illustrations, makes the study a major source for a deeper understanding of the Vietnam conflict.

In 1979 FitzGerald again explored changing representations of American culture and national identity through a study of elementary and secondary American history textbooks. In America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1980), she focuses on the special functions and traditions of schoolbooks for American children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing how texts of the 1960s and 1970s were not "written" but "developed" within a context of conflict and compromise among publishing, educational, and political institutions. She concludes that contemporary efforts to present "the world, or the country, as an ideal construct," or a "utopia of the eternal present"—a place "without conflicts, without malice or stupidity"—rather than achieving the purpose of "creating good citizens" may "give young people no warning of the real dangers ahead."

FitzGerald published Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Culture (1986, reissued 1987) in an effort to understand change in America since 1960 by looking at four "communities or cultural enclaves" in which individuals "deny the power of the past" by seeking to "cut all ties." These include the "first gay neighborhood in the country," the Castro in San Francisco; the "separatist" Liberty Baptist Church ministered by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia; the retirement community of Sun City Center in Tallahassee, Florida, "radical in the sense that never before in history had older people taken themselves off to live in isolation from the younger generation"; and Rancho Rahneesh, an eastern Oregon "New Age Commune" of "doctors, lawyers, accountants, and the like led by an 'Indian guru."' The book studies the complexities of everyday life and moral conflicts for individuals in each community and illustrates FitzGerald's consistent focus on the role of family in the relationship of individuals and communities in American life.

While critics saw the book as a contribution to the study of the changing "American Dream," they often disagreed with her efforts to find similarities among the four groups in their expression of "quintessentially American behavior and values," or to discover valid roots in nineteenth-century utopian social experiments. For the remainder of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s FitzGerald continued to write regularly for the New Yorker, as well as Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, Rolling Stone, and Vogue on diverse subjects.

A sampling of FitzGerald's Vietnam-era journalism appears in Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism (1998), a two-volume set from the Library of America presenting pieces written in and about Vietnam by several journalists, spanning the years 1959 through 1975.

On 31 January 1999, FitzGerald appeared on the C-Span television program, Booknotes along with Peter Kann (another Vietnam-era journalist) to discuss Reporting Vietnam and the era's reporting in general. FitzGerald discussed her trips to Vietnam in 1969, 1971, 1973, and 1974, and her now-classic book, Fire in the Lake. On the subject of reporters in Vietnam expressing biased views, Fitzgerald observed a progression or development closely tied to the war effort itself. The journalists who went to Vietnam in 1959 went there with assumptions formed in World War II as to the actions required of journalists reporting U.S. involvement in wars. Their style was reconstructed, says FitzGerald, by Neil Sheehan and others who found themselves playing the roles of critics as a result of the lies they were told by American representatives in Vietnam. They were unpopular with the embassy, their investigative efforts were deemed threatening, and they were perceived as being either Hawks or Doves when in fact, it was the difficulty in getting an accurate story that made them appear so.

In 1999 FitzGerald continued her work on a book about Ronald Reagan, Star Wars, and the end of the Cold War, a project she's been researching for several years and hopes to complete in the near future.

Other Works:

A Reporter at Large: A Disciplined, Charging Army (1981). America's Spirit Dream, Myth and Reality (recording, 1982). School Book Banning (recording, 1983). Vietnam Reconsidered (recording, 1984). Cultural Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy (audiovisual, 1993).

Bibliography:

Barker, W. P., "Literary Techniques Employed by Three Writers on the Vietnam War: Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Frances Fitzgerald" (thesis, 1981). Elwood-Akers, V., Women War Correspondents in the Vietnam War, 1961-1975 (1988). Estrangement: America and the World (1985). Frederick, J., "Textbook Shock"—A Critique of Frances Fitzgerald's America Revised (1980). Proceedings of Ralph Nader's Second Annual Journalism Conference on Investigative Reporting, Mar. 19-21, 1982, Washington, D.C. (recording, 1982). The Vietnam Reader (1991). 1984 Revisited: Walter Cronkite Looks at Orwell's Novel, and Interviews Anthony Burgess, William Lutz, David Burnham, Anthony Pole, Jose Delgado, Richard Riel, Jonathan Sanders, Phillip Goetz, Ronald Plesser, Malcolm Muggeridge, James Thornwell, Inge Kempkehefke, Frances Fitzgerald, Marvin Rosenbloom, Bernard Crick, and Jacobo Timmerman (recording,1983). To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War (1990).

Reference works:

CA (1974). CANR (1991). CBY (1987). WW of Writers, Editors, and Poets (1989).

Other references:

Journal of American Studies (1973). Life (27 Oct. 1972). Nation (8 March 1993). NR (16 Sept. 1972, 29 April 1985, 20 Oct. 1986). NYRB (5 Oct. 1972, 29 Jan. 1987). NYTBR (27 Aug. 1972, 12 Oct. 1986). PW (16 Oct. 1972). Redbook (March 1975). Vogue (Jan. 1973, Oct. 1986).Who WillProtect the Family? With Reporter Frances FitzGerald (audio-visual, 1981). Booknotes web site:http://www.booknotes.org. C-Span web site:http://www.c-span.org.