Scope and Content Note
The papers of Richard Dudman (1918- ) span the years 1911-2014 and consist of correspondence, notebooks, writings, and background material relating mainly to his career as a journalist with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Prominent topics include his coverage of the war in Vietnam and reporting on the Middle East, Cuba, Southeast Asia, and China during a period of cold war and revolutions. Others subjects relate to domestic politics in the 1960s and 1970s including Watergate, right-wing conservatism, and the Jimmy Carter administration. The collection is organized into six series whose contents reflect the arrangement and description of the material as it was received in installments from Dudman: General Correspondence, Notebooks, Subject File, Writings, and Addition I and Addition II.
In the spring of 1965, the studied calm that generally characterizes meetings of the Massachusetts Historical society was disturbed when a troubled federal judge, Charles Wyzanski, posed several questions about the course of current events.[1] Judge Wyzanski was bothered by the little-debated but widening war in Vietnam, and he asked Walter Lippman, a guest of the society, if all the facts were accessible to the “informed public,” which he defined as “the type that reads the New York papers and the Washington papers.” Lippmann replied that the most relevant facts were available, but not in the New York or Washington papers, and he praised a recent series by “a correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who's an old hand out there, Richard Dudman . . . . I have checked those articles against our own intelligence sources privately. They are perfectly correct. . . . [H]e shows that the Viet Cong has won the war in the countryside of South Vietnam.” [2]
Richard Dudman had been a reporter for the Post-Dispatch since, 1949, and Walter Lippman's endorsement reflected the widespread respect that Dudman's work enjoyed among readers and reporters alike. His news articles and columns are a distillation of the major public events of the post-war era, and his papers provide important insights into the character of his career. The papers, listed in the 1978 [Manuscript Division] acquisitions report, were formally deposited by Mr. Dudman in 1979. They range from 1946 to 1978 and include correspondence, research files, clippings, and notebooks that document a newspaperman's odyssey. There are fascinating glimpses of half a dozen revolutions, Israeli operations in the 1956 Sinai campaign, the Lebanon crisis of 1958, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, China, the two Vietnams, and other troubled spots throughout the world. Dudman's papers are also valuable for exploring a wide range of domestic political problems, and there are interesting files on right-wing politics, the Watergate scandals, and other major issues that have emerged since World War II. In 1969, after twenty years and over fifteen hundred stories with the Post-Dispatch,he became chief of the newspaper's Washington bureau, a post from which he continued to survey American politics and the world beyond until his retirement.
The collection consists of approximately sixty-three hundred items, and it has an organic character that gives it special value for researchers. There are clear relationships between the notebooks, the columns, and the correspondence that permit one to follow the story as it emerged, as it appeared, and as it provided the basis for Dudman's further reflections. On a number of matters, such as the Dixon-Yates plan, Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign, and negotiations leading to American withdrawal in Vietnam, there are memoranda from Dudman to his editors that show how his articles took shape. More frequently, fragments appear in his notebooks that help one understand events as they unfolded for him. Correspondence with readers and fellow newsmen gives other insights into Dudman's efforts to reconstruct and interpret the events of the day.
Wide-ranging personal interests and the multiple demands made on reporters in a Washington bureau have led Dudman to explore an incredible range of problems, but he is perhaps most frequently associated with his coverage of the war in Vietnam. Dudman first went to South Vietnam in 1962, and his many subsequent visits to the field combined with his assessment of his decisions in Washington to make him and the Post-Dispatch leading critics of the war. In early 1965, while he was in Vietnam preparing the series that Lippman praised, Dudman wrote his colleague Marquis Childs, that “[m]y own view is that the war is being lost, and in a hurry.” As events developed during the remainder of the decade, Dudman retained a commendable open-minded sensitivity to the complexities of the quagmire, but his earliest impression that the war was an overwhelmingly flawed enterprise continued to be the central theme of his reporting. Thus the jottings in his notebooks on Vietnam are particularly lively, and they reveal the human dimensions as well as the structural dynamics of war. Typical notes from January 1970 describe Henry Kissinger's deputy, General Al Haig, as “RA [Regular Army] all the way. . . . JCS insisted he sit at Henry's elbow. Sits on Henry's info flow.” A briefing on the situation in Vietnam was summed up as“The line—Enemy capability down,”with emphasis supplied by the uncharacteristic underscoring.“All quotas met”(and furiously underscored by Dudman) characterized the Phoenix program, an element in the assault on the Viet Cong infrastructure that included assassination. Dudman wrote several critical pieces about the Phoenix program, and his papers also include interesting exchanges with government officials who ran the program.
Perhaps the most unusual documents in the Dudman Papers are the notes he took during May and June 1970, when he and two other reporters covering the Cambodian incursion were captured by forces of the National Liberation Front. Dudman and his colleagues were held for forty days, and following his release he transformed these jottings, many of them on student's lined copybook paper, into one of the most dramatic series of the war. Other materials relating to the series and to the book that followed, Forty Days with the Enemy (New York: Liversight, 1971. 182 p.), are contained in the papers. Dudman's capture and release gave renewed hope to the families of many journalists who had not been so fortunate, and he began to play a larger role in the many efforts to secure the return of those still listed among the missing. One of the most poignant experiences of the war is reflected in his exchanges with Patricia Hangen, the wife of a missing television correspondent, and her spirit, persistence, and dignity give the tragedy of her husband's disappearance in Cambodia a special sadness.
It is appropriate that a collection which documents the full range of public issues also runs the gamut of private emotions, for there are lighter moments in the Dudman Papers that give some balance to the more somber situations he encountered. Among the most delightful notes in the collection are letters from his daughters in 1966, when he was midway through his third trip to Vietnam. Janet, a high school student, sought his advice about which modern language she should study. “I am seriously considering Russian but I don't know. Please answer because we have to answer soon.” His daughter Martha asked him “to write me about the situation there, and explain it so I can tell those guys I argue with. OK?” Such family letters appear throughout the collection, and they will provide students of modern journalism with a valuable angle of vision on the life of a reporter on assignment.
Following a tour of the Middle East in 1956, Dudman wrote Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., his publisher, that he “found government leaders impressed that a Middle Western American newspaper would send its own reporter there, and they were correspondingly helpful.” Dudman's career and the traditions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch confirm the important national contributions that regional newspapers have made to the American experience. The Library of Congress is fortunate to have the papers of many who have been associated with the Post-Dispatch,such as Joseph Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Irving Brant, Bill Mauldin, and Wallace Deuel. Thus future students will be able to consult the Dudman Papers within a particularly rich documentary context.
Material from Addition I are mostly topical files and supplement the Subject File and Writings series. Also included are drafts and supporting material for Dudman's Men of the Far Right and Forty Days with the Enemy. Addition II primarily relates to Dudman's life and continued work in journalism following his retirement from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1981. Material documents his work with the Bangor Daily News and the South-North News Service; involvement with the Maine Lobster Promotion Council; and advocacy for the JUMP playground in Ellsworth, Maine. In 1986, Dudman briefly returned on a special assignment to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to cover the tenth anniversary of the Tangshan earthquake in China. In 1994, he returned to Vietnam on another special assignment to interview the Viet Cong officer who captured and released him and two other journalists in 1970. Both assignments are included in the papers along with other writings about and by Dudman.
1. The following description is taken from Library of Congress Acquisitions, Manuscript Division, 1979 (Washington, D.C.: 1981): 24-26. It describes the collection before the Addition series was appended to the collection in 1985.
2. Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1965 77 (1966): 90.