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In February, 1983, when the war in Vietnam had been over a scant eight years, the Journalism School at the University of Southern California held a four-day conference titled, "Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons From a War." Because feelings still ran high, the Los Angeles Police Department ringed the conference hall with mounted troops to protect against South Vietnamese demonstrators--refugees protesting a numbe of the panelists, including Mrs. Nguyen Ngoc Dung, Hanoi's observer at the United Nations.

It was an emotional four days. When General Westmoreland's chief press officer, Major-General Winant Sidle spoke, his appearance set off such anguished protests from veterans that counselors from the Veterans Administration had to race through the hall to call them. Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times acted as chairman. Arthur Miller and Frances FitzGerald were among the concluding speakers, and the journalists on hand included Morley Safer, David Halberstam, William Tuohy, Peter Arnett, Gloria Emerson and Peter Braestrup. Crusty Seymour Hersh announced that "I do not think the press is very relevant at all." But it was Robert Scheer, the columnist and former editor of Ramparts, who surprised me even more when he said, "I personally did not learn much about Vietnam by going there; I learned much more in the stacks of the library of the University of California."

By the end of the conference, I took his point: Among the historians who had spoken were William Appleman Williams, Ronald Steel, James Thomson and, of course, the man we are honoring today, Professor George C. Herring, the dean of Vietnam historians. Lucid and calm, where some panelists had dealt in bombast or histrionics, Professor Herring traced the development of U. S. polic in Vietnam, and his conclusions were considered but firm:

"In retrospect, the assumptions upon which U. S. policy was based in 1950--and after--appear misguided."

He went on to explain that "it seems highly doubtful that the fall of Vietnam would have triggered a chain reaction which would have resulted in Communist control of Southeast Asia."

Professor Herring's appearance came four years after the initial publication of the book we are discussing today and about the time of his monumental Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War. I had been a reporter in South Vietnam for The New York Times in the mid-1960s, and as I began to write historical nonfiction myself, I remembered Professor Herring's example and spectulated on the differences between a reporter and a historian.

The most obvious is a question of tense. The reporter is writing about the present, a historian about the past--although sometimes a past that is recent and still contentious. But there are more significant differences.

Reporters accept the fact that their writing will be incomplete. They cannot wait until they have assembled ever piece of a puzzle. The missing pieces often emerge only because a sketchy story has already appeared. Knowing that their writing will be inherently fragmentary, even inadequate, keeps most reporters humble about their trade.

More to come