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TITLE: In Country: The Vietnam War, 30 Years After
SPEAKER: Gen. Julius Becton Jr., Bernard Kalb, Stanley Karnow, Daun van Ee
EVENT DATE: 05/04/2005
RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
The Veterans History Project hosted a symposium which included General Julius Becton, Jr. (U.S. Army, Ret.), Vietnam veteran and educator; Bernard Kalb, a veteran journalist, author and founding anchor on the weekly CNN program Reliable Sources; Stanley Karnow, World War II veteran, journalists and author of "Vietnam: A History;" and panelist/moderator, Dr. Daun van Ee of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division and Vietnam veteran and specialist in 20th century military history. The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center is a nationwide volunteer effort to collect and preserve oral histories from America's war veterans. The collection is housed at the Library of Congress. To date the archive has received more than 33,000 individual submissions.
Speaker Biography: Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr., a World War II, Korean and Vietnam War veteran, is the former chief executive officer of the District of Columbia Public Schools. He spent 40 years on active duty with the U.S. Army and five years as president of Prairie View A&M University. He also has served as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and chief operating officer of American Coastal Industries Inc.
Speaker Biography:
Bernard Kalb is a veteran journalist, media critic and author. He was the founding anchor and a panelist on the weekly CNN program Reliable Sources for a decade. He has traveled the globe for more than three decades as a correspondent covering world affairs for CBS News, NBC News and The New York Times. Beyond his experience in both print and television journalism, he also has served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs and as a spokesman for the State Department for two years, until October 1986.
Kalb travels widely as a lecturer and moderator on subjects ranging from U.S. foreign policy to the media. Since 1997, he has moderated panels for The Freedom Forum, on the state of the media in countries around the world. His travels have taken him across the globe including New Delhi for a U.S.-India media conference and as a correspondent for a PBS television documentary on India; Rio for a television documentary on the Earth Summit; Moscow for a conference that included a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev just days before his resignation; Bali for The Asia Society to moderate a panel on global economy; Budapest for The International Media Fund's seminar on government-press relations; and Istanbul for the World Business Council.
Over the years, Kalb's assignments have placed him in the midst of major news stories. As State Department spokesman, he was with the U.S. delegation when President Reagan held his first summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985. As a television correspondent, he accompanied President Nixon on the opening trip to China in 1972 and traveled with President and Secretaries dating back to Nixon and Kissinger on their diplomatic journeys. He has spent a decade and a half as a foreign correspondent based in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Paris and Saigon.
Kalb was the correspondent for "Global Rivals," a four-part series on US-Soviet relations broadcast on PBS. In 1990, he moderated a live TV program, originating in Manila and transmitted via satellite throughout Asia, linking leaders of five Asian countries.
His credentials as a journalist were recognized by the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University naming him a Senior Fellow for the year 1991-1992. His career has won him a Council of Foreign Relations fellowship and the Overseas Press Club Award for his CBS television documentary, "Viet Cong," based on his many years of reporting the war in Vietnam.
He is co-author, with his brother Marvin Kalb, of two books: "Kissinger" and "The Last Ambassador." Kalb has written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Smithsonian and Newsweek on subjects ranging from foreign affairs to the collecting of Chinese porcelain and antiques. He was appointed by the State Department to the U.S. delegation of the Anti-Incitement Committee associated with the Middle East peace process.
Speaker Biography: Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, began covering Asia in 1959 as chief correspondent for Time and Life. He remained in the area for the next 15 years, reporting for the Saturday Evening Post, the London Observer, the Washington Post and NBC News. He was present in Vietnam in July 1959 when the first Americans were killed and reported on the war there until its conclusion. He wrote the 1983 book "Vietnam: A History" and was chief correspondent for the PBS series "Vietnam: A Television History," winning six Emmys, plus a George Foster Peabody Award, a George Polk Award for Journalism and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. Karnow won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1990 for his book "In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines." His other books include "Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution," which was nominated for a National Book Award. During World War II, he served in the United States Army Air Corps in Asia. He belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Society of Historians.
Speaker Biography: Daun van Ee works in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, is a Vietnam War veteran and a specialist in 20th century military history.