Scope and Content Note
The papers of Philip Laussat Geyelin (1923-2004) span the years 1917-2000, with the bulk of the material dating from 1962 to 1989. The papers are organized into the following series: Personal File, Subject File, Writings File, and Oversize.
The Personal File contains material relating to speaking engagements, symposia, trips, and organizations to which Geyelin belonged, along with correspondence and photographs relating to his career and family. Some correspondence was written to Geyelin by friends and family while he was serving as a marine in the Pacific during World War II. Other letters were penned to Geyelin by fellow servicemen stationed on various islands throughout the Pacific. Also of interest are files relating to the clarification of his work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s.
The Subject File reflects the types of material Geyelin gathered while researching a topic for a story, editorial or column, including his articles and drafts of articles, interviews, memoranda of conversations, and notebooks and notes. He covered a myriad of topics throughout his career with the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, but his main issues were the Vietnam War and the Middle East. Conversations with United States officials, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Clark M. Clifford, Arthur J. Goldberg, Richard Helms, Townsend Hoopes, Henry Kissinger, Robert S. McNamara, John N. Mitchell, William P. Rogers, W. W. Rostow, Dean Rusk, Bromley K. Smith, and John Paul Vann, conducted either off the record or not to be attributed to them are included in the memoranda and notes.
The Writings File contains articles, book reviews, books, editorials and columns, essays, a poem, and other writings by Geyelin. His book Lyndon B. Johnson and the World covers the Johnson Administration through 1965 into early 1966 and contains a section on the Vietnam War. In 1980, Geyelin began working on a book about Vietnam War veterans with the help of Barbara Josephs. Under the working title “Strong at the Broken Places,” he sought to convey how the veterans had pulled together to help themselves, their distrust of the Veterans Administration and the government in general, and how they did not fit in with older organizations such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars of America and the American Legion. The chapter titles and arrangement of materials for this book were largely kept as Geyelin had organized them. A publisher was never found for the book. After retiring from journalism, Geyelin started the book “Hashemite: The Story of King Hussein.” His objective was to write the book from the approach of a foreign correspondent on an assignment from an American newspaper covering United States foreign policy, an approach Geyelin pursued when he first met King Hussein in Jordan in the 1950s. Geyelin died while working on the book and it was never published. A file of Geyelin's editorials and columns contains mostly his work from the 1980s.