Stanley Abram Karnow (February 4, 1925 – January 27, 2013) was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War.
Education and career
Karnow was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and had a middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing. His father was a machinery salesman; his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, a homemaker. Interested in writing from a young age, at James Madison High School in Brooklyn he wrote radio plays and was a sports writer and an editor of the school paper.
Karnow enrolled in the University of Iowa, but left in 1943 to serve in the Army Air Corps, in which he was a weather observer, cryptographer and unit historian along the China-India border. After the war, he attended Harvard University, where he was an editorial and feature writer for the Harvard Crimson newspaper and majored in modern European history and literature. Upon graduating in 1947, Karnow went to Paris intending to stay the summer, but wound up staying ten years.
Journalist
Karnow attended the Sorbonne and the Institut d'Études Politiques on the GI Bill, and did freelance journalism for the National Guardian, L’Observateur, and New Statesman. In 1950, he was taken on as a local “interpreter, researcher, and legman” by the Paris bureau of Time magazine, but was soon promoted to correspondent, covering France, Western Europe, and francophone North Africa. Following a year at Harvard as a Neiman Fellow, he headed Time’s new Rabat bureau in 1958-59, and then its Hong Kong bureau until 1962.
Karnow spent the most influential part of his reporting career in east and southeast Asia. He covered the region from 1959 until 1974 for Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, London Observer , Washington Post, and NBC News. Karnow was acquainted with Indochina from his work in Paris, and was in Vietnam in July 1959 when the first Americans were killed, He gave attention to the war during its earliest years when few Americans were aware of it, and he reported on it for the whole subsequent duration of American involvement. He was close friends with Anthony Lewis and Bernard Kalb. Karnow's Vietnam reporting landed him a place on the Master List of President Nixon's political opponents.
After the war, in the 1970s and 1980s, Karnow was a columnist for King Features Syndicate, a contributor to Le Point and Newsweek International, and an editor with the The New Republic. He was also a founder and editor of the International Writers Service, a non-profit agency which commissioned work from European and Japanese journalists on their own countries and made it available to American newspapers.
Author
Karnow’s first book was his text for Southeast Asia (1962), a volume in his employer’s illustrated, mass-market, ‘Life World Library’ series. His first major publication was Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution (1972), a 600-page analysis of the recent Cultural Revolution. The book built on Karnow’s Hong Kong reporting on a then-isolated China and a fellowship year at Harvard, and was nominated for a National Book Award. Despite his place on the “Enemies List,” Karnow got an invitation to accompany Nixon on his historic visit in 1972, during which he sought to confirm the information in his manuscript.
In 1977, two years after the fall of Saigon, PBS suggested to Karnow a television series on the Vietnam War. He worked in tandem on the series and on what became a 750-page book, Vietnam: A History (1983). For the 13-hour Vietnam: A Television History, Karnow was historical adviser and credited as ‘chief correspondent.’ The series aired in 1983, was PBS’ most-watched documentary series to date, and won numerous awards. The titles reflected contemporary American usage, referring not to the centuries-old country but to the recent war. 90% of the book treated the years 1945-75, and called attention to the continuities between the French and American wars. The film was similarly focused, with only a brief prologue on prewar French colonialism and a final hour on post-1975 “Legacies.” Both were very successful, reaching large parts of the American public at a time when interest in the war was reviving after nearly a decade of Forgetting. Like the conflict itself, the book and film were controversial and helped spark the ongoing public debate on the history and meaning of the war.