Malcolm W. Browne, Pulitzer-Prize Winning Reporter, Dies at 81
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: August 28, 2012
Malcolm W. Browne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose four-decade career included covering the Vietnam War — and taking one of the most memorable photos of the conflict — and a lively second act as a science writer who explained chemical weapons and described the rise of synthetic body parts, died on Monday in Hanover, N.H. He was 81.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Le Lieu Browne.
Mr. Browne, who lived in Thetford Center, Vt., and Manhattan, spent most of his career writing for The New York Times, which sent him to Argentina, Vietnam, Bosnia, Pakistan and wherever else his curiosity called him after he became a science writer in the late 1970s.
“My life is terrific,” Mr. Browne said in a 1993 interview. “It affords the greatest possible variety of experience. That, after all, is why I became a journalist.”
But his career path was something of an accident.
Mr. Browne had been working as a chemist in New York in the 1950s (among his tasks: finding a substitute for chicle, then the main ingredient in chewing gum) when he was drafted to go to Korea in 1956. He drove a tank for a time, but the Army later assigned him to write for Stars and Stripes, a decision he said was their idea, not his. After he was discharged, Mr. Browne found a job in Baltimore with The Associated Press. Less than a year later, in 1961, The A.P. made him their Saigon bureau chief.
Mr. Browne was among several reporters who became skeptical of the American effort to prop up the Saigon government.
Neil Sheehan, who joined The Times after serving as Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said Tuesday that Mr. Browne was a “fierce competitor” but also a friend. Mr. Browne often wore a gold belt buckle and carried a money belt so he would have cash “to get out of a tight situation.”
“But,” Mr. Sheehan added, “I don’t think he ever had to use it.”
While reporters in Vietnam often clashed with American officials, Mr. Browne later singled out Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in 1963 as the United States ambassador to South Vietnam, as “more honest than most of the U.S. officials that I had known.”
It was Mr. Lodge who told Mr. Browne that he had played an important role in elevating awareness of the problems in Vietnam to the highest levels at the White House through a photograph he took in 1963.
When a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in public that year in protest of the government of South Vietnam, Mr. Browne was the only reporter there, and he captured the stunning moment in a photograph. Several papers, including The Times, chose not to run the disturbing image, but Mr. Lodge told him he had seen a copy of it on President John F. Kennedy’s desk.
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| I SAW THIS ON TV WHEN I WAS A KID. WE NEED TO SEE THESE PICTURES SO YOU KNOW WHAT REALLY GOES ON AROUND THE WORLD! |
In 1964, while working for The A.P., Mr. Browne shared the Pulitzer for international reporting with David Halberstam, who was covering the war for The Times.
Mr. Browne returned to the United States and later joined The Times, which eventually sent him back to Vietnam. He continued to find that the sources he had developed on the front lines refuted the Saigon government’s optimistic accounts.
“A South Vietnamese military spokesman said at a briefing in Saigon yesterday afternoon that sizable elements of airborne soldiers, supported by tanks, had entered Quangtri city early yesterday morning,” he wrote in a 1972 report. “But authoritative sources at the front said that was not true.”
Mr. Browne also worked for The Times in South America, Europe, South Asia and elsewhere before he began writing about science. He had studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College.
His assignments ranged widely: the dangers posed by toxic debris from the crash of the space shuttle Challenger; an effort to build a robotic flying pterosaur; an effort to rid Antarctica of garbage accumulating there.
He left The Times in the 1980s to work at Discover magazine but returned a few years later and continued writing about science.
Malcolm Wilde Browne was born in Manhattan on April 17, 1931. His mother was a pacifist Quaker, and Mr. Browne attended Quaker schools through college. His grandfather’s first cousin was the writer Oscar Wilde and Mr. Browne, like Wilde, was something of a wit. His autobiography, “Muddy Boots and Red Socks,” takes its title from the socks he started wearing while serving in Korea as a break from the Army’s olive drab.
Besides his wife, whom he met in 1961 when she was working in the information ministry for the Saigon government and married in 1966, his survivors include a daughter, Wendy Sanderson; a son, Timothy; a brother, Timothy; a sister, Miriam Poole; and two grandchildren. Two previous marriages ended in divorce.
In 2000, after retiring to Vermont, Mr. Browne wrote an essay for The Times on the dual nature of his journalistic career.
“After a time, a news writer may begin to sense a kind of sameness in most of the events that pass as news,” he wrote. “When that happens a lucky few of us discover that in science, almost alone among human endeavors, there is always something new under the sun.”
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