Among journalists—and particularly war correspondents—Homer Bigart was both legend and example. In a career of four decades, first with the New York Herald Tribuneand then, through 1972, with The New York Times, Bigart distinguished himself as a superb writer and tireless digger for the realities that could be learned only in the field and not at headquarters. In 1943 Bigart sailed for England to cover the air war and was soon on mule-back in Sicily, and hanging on at Anzio. He then went to the Pacific, where his dispatches won him his first Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. When hostilities erupted in Korea he was again on the front lines in the front lines in the Orient, and again recipient of a Pulitzer. By the time of the American involvement in Vietnam, he was an old-timer, a seasoned correspondent admired and celebrated for his wit but regarded with awe for his masterly stories, in which straightforward prose, informed by tenacious reporting, cut to the heart of the issues.
Previously available only n crumbling library copies of the Tribune and the Times, or in microfilm repositories, his dispatches, with their rare insights into warefar and he minds of those who wage war, are now collected in Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Home Bigart, edited by Betsy Wade and introduced by Harrison E. Salisbury, himself the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism.
Forward Positions does honor to a breed of journalist that had passed into history by the time of Bigart’s death. It includes one of the first accounts of the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima, a report on the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, a number of dispatches on “hot” battles of the Cold War, and a probing dispatch on Lieutenant William Calley’s testimony on the Mỹ Lai Massacre. With this representative selection of more than fifty of Bigart’s accounts of war on the ground, in the air, and in the courtroom, Wade provides a wealth of background material about his career, as well as glimpses of his impact on journalism. The book promises hours of captivating and informative reading for journalists, historians, veterans, and anyone who likes a good story tautly told.
Betsy Wade (1929-2020) was the first female copyeditor at The New York Times, where she helped prepare the reporting on the Pentagon Papers that won the Times the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She worked with Homer Bigart and was his friend through the later phases of his career. In retirement, he gave her his clipping files to use in preparing a collection of his dispatches. Wade’s career began at the Herald Tribune and Scripps-Howard; she headed the Times foreign copy desk in the seventies during the Vietnam War. She later wrote the Times’s “Practical Traveler” column, the advice from which was published in the New York Times Practical Traveler Handbook.
Harrison E. Salisbury (1908-1993) was a longtime reporter and editor at The New York Times, as well as a prolific author. His books include American in Russia and The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. He notably reported from Communist China, Moscow following World War II, and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was the 1955 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
“Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Homer Bigart is an exhilarating journey through some of the most dramatic moments of our time. Bigart had the sharpest eye and the greatest stamina among the best of our foreign correspondents.”
—Kati Marton
“Homer Bigart was the greatest war correspondent of his time. Decades after his stories were published in the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times, the detail of his reporting remains as vivid, his finely crafted prose as taut, as the day the stories were written. To read these stories, rescued from the impermanence of daily newsprint in this splendid book, is to see those wars through his extraordinary eyes.”
—Neil Sheehan
“Homer Bigart’s reputation as a fearless war correspondent and candid wordsmith ignited a new generation of journalists with the zest to cover Vietnam and the wars since. His intellectual courage in challenging the official line in half a dozen war theaters remains the standard by which all American foreign correspondents measure themselves today.”
—Peter Arnett
“Generally speaking, a book patched together from old news clippings is a poor candidate for success. The contents of newsroom morgues may be immensely interesting to scholars, but a reader browsing through the average file of some deceased reporter is apt to encounter prose that seems as yellow and decayed as the paper on which it was printed. But Forward Positions: The War Correspondence of Homer Bigart is a stunning exception. The 51 battlefield dispatches collected here by Betsy Wade, Homer Bigart’s colleague at The New York Times, ring with genuine drama shorn of facile cliches, propaganda and self-congratulation. Assembled in book form, they afford a rare overview of a great journalist’s career.”
—The New York Times, April 1993
