François Sully

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François Sully (born August 7, 1927 in Paris , † February 23, 1971 in Long Binh , Vietnam ) was a French journalist and photographer who reported on the wars in Vietnam. In 1971 he was killed in a helicopter explosion.

biography

François Sully fought in the Resistance against the German occupation of France in World War II at the age of 17 and was wounded in the process. He later joined the French armed forces in French Indochina . In 1947 he left the army and took over a tea plantation. He had a tree cleared in which, according to the Vietnamese belief, a ghost lived. As Sully himself later reported, the overseer died shortly afterwards, whereupon all the workers left the plantation, believing that the ghost would kill them in revenge. Then he had to give up the plantation. Later, the abandoned plantation was taken over by Catholic settlers from North Vietnam who did not believe in such spirits.

Sully decided to work as a journalist and initially became a correspondent for various Vietnamese and French magazines and newspapers, from 1959 he worked for the US news agency UPI . He wrote articles for Time , and his photos were distributed by Black Star until he started working primarily for Newsweek from 1961 .

In 1954, Sully was commissioned by Time Life to report on the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ . He jumped off the parachute and achieved some fame among his colleagues because - as always - he had his white- piped blue pajamas with him: “Even in the foxhole, he was the elegant Frenchman.” (“Even stayed in the trench he the elegant French. ”) Everything he did, wrote Newsweek in its obituary for Sully, he did“ with style ”. That was "good for morale", he told an astonished colleague with a "grin". Even if you had little water, he insisted on washing and shaving. “Unlike the rest of us, he was more thirsty than dirty.” In addition to French and English , he spoke Vietnamese and Lao . In his work he relied on an extensive network of informants from all political camps. When a colleague asked him about his “contacts” with Vietnamese, he replied: “I have no 'contacts', I have many friends and they tell me something.” He was known for his exceptional politeness towards everyone which is why the people - whether Vietnamese farmers or American soldiers - would have trusted him with their true opinion about the war , according to Newsweek .

In Điện Biên Phủ, Sully was one of the last journalists to persevere on site. Many of his colleagues reported from the relatively safe Saigon , he surrendered again and again to places where there was fighting and sought to meet simple Vietnamese. He also lived on site for more than two decades, while most foreign correspondents were usually changed after 18 months at the latest. He harbored a deep dislike for the Vietnamese upper class, who, in his opinion, had become estranged from their compatriots.

In September 1962, François Sully, who was now considered the " doyen " of journalists working in Vietnam, was expelled from the country by the then South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm , as was his American colleague Homer Bigart . Bigart's expulsion was later withdrawn after the US embassy intervened, but the Frenchman Sully had to leave the country because, according to the President, he had been “viciously slandering” his family for years. State-run Vietnamese newspapers accused Sully of being an opium smuggler and a spy for the Viet Cong and of organizing sex orgies. Not all journalists in Vietnam showed solidarity with Sully, but understood his expulsion as a warning, for example to report on the setbacks of the US-backed army of the President against the Viet Cong. The Kennedy administration also distrusted him, as he predicted in his "devastating" reports that the US would experience as much a debacle as France in Vietnam.

After his expulsion from Vietnam, Sully studied with the support of Newsweek as a Nieman Fellow for journalism at Harvard University , then worked in the neighboring countries of Vietnam and only returned to Vietnam after the murder of Di vonm in November 1963. Newsweek remained his main employer, but he also worked as a photographer and journalist for other magazines such as The Nation and The New Republic . In 1967 and 1968, Sully wrote articles for World News , which shared his text and photos with Business Week , Medical World News, and other publications. In addition, he published two books. The Age of Guerrilla manuscript , which Sully had brought to safety under the bed in his apartment in Saigon, almost fell victim to a bombing by the Viet Cong: “It would have been ironical to see the manuscript of the Age of Guerrilla destroyed by guerillas. "

In March 1971, François Sully was together with General Do Cao Tri and other soldiers on board a helicopter that was patrolling the Vietnamese- Cambodian border. The helicopter exploded and Tri and eight other people were killed. Sully jumped out of the burning helicopter and fell about 20 meters. He suffered life-threatening injuries to which he succumbed three hours later in the hospital at the American military base Long Binh. He was buried in the Saigon European Cemetery . He bequeathed the income from his life insurance to Vietnamese orphans . A colleague commented on his death: “The really astonishing thing is that he lived so long.” It is assumed that by 1975 over 60 journalists in Vietnam were killed in the war. Among them was a close friend of Sully, the US war correspondent and political scientist Bernard B. Fall , who died in a land mine explosion in 1967. Sully dedicated his book Age of the Guerilla to him .

After Sully's death, his office colleague Kevin Buckley sent his papers and photos to Newsweek . From there they went to the broadcaster WGBH Educational Foundation , which they used to create the documentary Vietnam: A Television History . In 1985 the material was given to the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts in Boston .

John Berthelsen, a former colleague at Newsweek , recalled in 2011: “Sully understood the Vietnamese community better than anyone in the 550-strong press corps. He knew and loved the Vietnamese […]. He was a source for all of us and the institutional memory of the Newsweek office, if not the entire press corps. ”Sully had neither let himself be captured by the government in Saigon nor by the“ farmer catchers ”in Washington ; US officials were therefore suspicious of Sully and suspected him of “treason”. Some colleagues had suspected that Sully was a communist, that was "nonsense", so Berthelsen: Sully reported fair and honest. In 1985 New York Magazine discussed whether and to what extent François Sully represented French interests and had connections with the French secret service.

Publications

  • Age of the Guerrilla: the New Warfare . Parent's Magazine Press, New York 1968.
  • (Ed.): We the Vietnamese: Voices from Vietnam . Praeger, New York 1971, ISBN 978-0-275-25470-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ François Sully. Biographical data and works in the Netherlands Institute for Art History (Dutch), accessed on July 13, 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j John Berthelsen: Remembering War and Francois Sully. In: Asia Sentinel. February 6, 2011, accessed February 25, 2018 .
  3. ↑ a b Top Saigon General And News week Man Die in Copier Crash. In: The New York Times . February 23, 1971. Retrieved September 19, 2018 .
  4. ^ Sully, Age of the Guerilla , p. 12.
  5. ^ A b Institut d'Asie Orientale, Lyon, Isabelle Durand: François Sully. In: Virtual Saigon. September 17, 1962, accessed February 25, 2018 .
  6. ^ David Nyhan: To those whose Vietnam images linger . The Boston Globe , December 21, 1997.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h Chacun son tour. Aujourd'hui le tien, Demain le mien . In: Newsweek , New York, March 8, 1971, p. 11.
  8. ↑ Lars Klein: Greatest success and worst trauma: the momentous idea that journalists had ended the Vietnam War . In: Ute Daniel (Ed.): Eyewitnesses. War reporting from the 18th to the 21st century . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36737-6 , pp. 195 .
  9. ^ A b William M. Hammond: Public Affairs. Government Printing Office, 1988, ISBN 978-0-16-001673-8 , p. 24 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  10. ↑ Joyce Hoffmann: On Their Own. Hachette UK, 2008, ISBN 978-0-786-72166-5 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  11. ^ Class of 1963. In: Nieman Foundation. June 1, 2014, accessed September 18, 2018 .
  12. ^ Sully, Age of Guerilla , p. 1.
  13. ↑ American Journalism Review. In: ajrarchive.org. August 17, 2003. Retrieved September 28, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Sully, François, 1927–1971: Papers and photographs, 1958–1983 (Bulk, 1963–1971) - Joseph P. Healey Library. In: lib.umb.edu. September 17, 1962, accessed September 17, 2018 .
  15. ^ New York Magazine. dated March 11, 1985, ISSN 0028-7369 , Volume 18, No. 10, p. 6 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).  
personal data
SURNAME Sully, François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French journalist and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH 1927 or 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1971
Place of death Long Binh , Vietnam