Journalism graduate Beverly Deepe Keever (’57) covered the Vietnam War longer than any other American correspondent. Now she’s leaving an indelible mark on her alma mater.
By Carson Vaughan (’10)
The old Deepe place isn’t much to look at anymore. A few hulking grain bins. A shallow pond. Three hundred and twenty acres of corn stubble and cracked earth. But this is where it started. The dreams. The dollars. Right here where County Road R collides with County Road 5800. Five miles northwest of Hebron, Nebraska. Five miles southwest of Belvidere. Right here where the sky meets the dirt; where now meets later; where the farmer’s oldest daughter gripped tight the pages of her library books and imagined the unimaginable. Distant lands. Distant people. Worlds unfamiliar to her own.
“A swarm of ragged women and children issued forth each day from the huts,” she read in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, “and with bits of tin and sharp stones or worn knives, and with baskets made of twisted bamboo twigs or split reeds they searched the countrysides and the roadways for the food they could get without begging and without money….”
Last December, the University of Nebraska Foundation sold the old Deepe place — this everyday excerpt of southeast Nebraska — for an astounding $4.65 million. At the family’s behest, the proceeds have been used to establish the Deepe Family Endowed Chairs in Depth Reporting. This permanently endowed fund enables the College of Journalism and Mass Communications to recruit two new faculty: one focused on investigative journalism, the other on data journalism. According to Dean Shari Veil, it also ensures the college “will establish preeminence in depth reporting.”
Most of the trees surrounding the homestead are missing now. The house is gone, too. But underneath it all lies the story of a girl and her wanderlust; the story of a woman detoured; the story of a Pulitzer Prize nominee and the longest-serving American correspondent covering the war in Vietnam. Right here, where the dust rises from the winter fallow, not a hiccup on the horizon, begins the story of Beverly Deepe Keever and the largest single gift in the J-School’s nearly 100-year history.
“Few correspondents engaged in the protracted, ugly war in Laos and Vietnam were as diligent and perceptive as Beverly Deepe,” wrote historian Stanley Karnow, whose Vietnam: A History won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. “As energetic and intrepid as her male counterparts, she slogged through dense jungles, flooded rice fields, and thick rubber plantations, filing dispatches that shed insights on that futile conflict.”
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The war comes later. The “death zones” and “darling spies.” The bullets and bylines. To understand Deepe, she tells me, you first need to understand her parents. She’s agreed to Zoom from her home in Honolulu, squeezing it in between tai chi and a book on the biggest corruption scandal in Hawaii’s history, between the ongoing business of her family trust and the endowed professorship at her alma mater. She’s huddled in a small office exploding with books, wearing a sky-blue shirt and smart gold frames that could swallow a clementine whole. Now 87, she’s prim and articulate and flashes a wide and knowing smile every time she mentions her parents, as if they’re standing just out of frame.
“Even though the folks are gone,” she says, “I feel they’re still kind of with me.”
Too poor to afford a wedding, Martin and Doris eloped in Kansas in 1934, still coughing through the Dust Bowl, and moved into a decrepit old farmhouse Beverly’s mother called “the Knob.” No telephone. No electricity. No running water. No insulation. They rented the house and the land from Martin’s father, a German immigrant who’d clawed his way up from a sod house to a farm he couldn’t afford. “Everybody has to get old, but to be old and poor is the shits,” her father often said, and so he kept pushing — kept plowing and threshing and binding and planting — and finally upgraded to a tractor with headlights to work a little longer still.
“Mom and dad had a bleak existence,” Deepe wrote in Death Zones & Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting. And yet they managed to hide the struggle from their two daughters, Joan and Beverly, whose vivid childhood memories are tinted instead with homemade ice cream and Burpee seed catalogs and Three Billy Goats Gruff, a Norwegian fairy tale her father incessantly retold.
“I would relive those years if I could,” she says. “Money was tight, but we always had fun.”
It was during her elementary years at Coon Ridge, the tiny country school nearby, that Beverly slipped headfirst into Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction novel The Good Earth, set in mainland China during the early 20th century. Though it mirrored some of the agrarian themes her own parents had experienced — namely the hardscrabble existence of the small farmer — it seemed nevertheless fantastical, a world set aside from her own. The whole atmosphere, she says — the jewels, the opium, the rickshaws and rice porridge — sparked in her a desire to see it all for herself. At the same time, in the same country school, she could hear the upperclassmen learning geography in the room next door, discussing foreign names and faraway places.
“The beauty when you’re in the middle of the country is that you want to see what’s out there,” she says. “I don’t know that I initially thought of being a journalist, but I knew I wanted to travel and see people and interact with their cultures.”
A few years later, then attending Belvidere High School with a class of ten, she entered a countywide essay contest. Citing pamphlets circulated by the Soil Conservation Service, she wrote about farming’s newest practices. She described her own father terracing the land, and “personalized the farmer standing on his shovel at the end of the day.” She won the contest, of course, and began for the first time envisioning a career in journalism. She thought maybe reporting was her ticket out — that journalism might grant her access to the people and places that Pearl Buck described so eloquently in her novels. The only catch, she says, was that “I never liked the writing part.”
“That was real work.”
But like her parents, she plowed ahead anyway. Equipped with a Regents Scholarship, she enrolled at UNL after high school, double majoring in journalism and political science. State school was the obvious choice for a cash-strapped farm girl, and if the Cornhusker Yearbook of 1957 is any indication, she didn’t waste a minute of the next four years: student government, Mortar Board, Alpha Xi Delta and several journalism honorary societies to boot. She credits William Swindler, then director of the School of Journalism, with sparking her later interest in the First Amendment and media law. But it was Swindler’s successor, William Hall, to whom she feels most indebted. Hall served as her academic advisor, and after suggesting she pursue her master’s degree at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York, he landed her a summer job with the Associated Press in Des Moines.
“It was just a flunky job,” she says, “but I learned what you’re really gunning for is a good recommendation from the boss.”
She graduated with honors from Columbia in 1958 and spent the next two years working for her former professor, Samuel Lubell, also a public opinion pollster and syndicated newspaper columnist. Together they practiced what she called “journalism from the bottom up,” ringing doorbells and asking questions about the upcoming elections. The gig didn’t pay well, but it paid well enough. Combined with the penny-pinching ways she’d inherited from her parents, she built up a small nest egg and finally set sail in April 1961. China was then closed to American citizens, but she “made a quick study of other parts of Asia,” she writes, selling dispatches to the Associated Press along the way.
“I lived with and taught English to Japanese students, hired interpreters to talk with South Koreans about the 1961 military coup d’état that I witnessed outside of Seoul, interviewed prostitutes in Hong Kong and Macau, visited opium dens in Singapore, and traveled by tramp steamer to talk to descendants of headhunters in British-held Borneo.”
She eventually circled back to Hong Kong, where she met with the Associated Press bureau chief. If she was looking for work, he told her, “Things are really heating up in Vietnam.” The helicopters were landing. The U.S. government was withholding information. So off she went, a 26-year-old farm girl steaming across the South China Sea, up the Saigon River, into the “seemingly unending mangrove swamp.” Armed with little more than her Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter, she arrived in Saigon on Feb. 14, 1962.
“Beverly Deepe, one of the first young vagabonds to land in the tiny Saigon press corps, was the girl next door, a symbol of the rapidly fading apple-pie ’50s,” wrote fellow correspondent William Prochnau in Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles.
Deepe waded through the crowded boulevards of the “Paris of the Orient” without any preconceptions of the war or America’s growing involvement. She was one of just seven other western reporters in the city, a freelancer and the only female, too. She wrote about this new reality in Death Zones & Darling Spies, published in 2013 by the University of Nebraska Press:
My gender afforded me a distinct perspective in a war zone dominated by male soldiers, officials, and reporters. It enabled me to go beyond traditional battlefield coverage and male-focused controversies to report much-needed stories about the views of Vietnamese women and others on how the war impacted their lives, about the political, economic, and historical factors underlying the conflict, and about why the pro-Communist guerrillas and cadre fought so vigorously.
Employing the same grassroots interviewing style she practiced with Lubell in New York, she ventured well beyond the city, focusing instead on the small farmers and rural villages scattered throughout the jungle. It didn’t take her long to conclude the countryside was “the traumatic front line in the war of no front lines,” that many of the villagers themselves were ensnared in a civil war without any clear protagonist.
“Please don’t ask us to say which side is best,” one farm laborer told her. “If I answer the Viet Cong is best, the government will put me in prison. If I say the government is best, the VC will kill me.”
She landed her first byline from South Vietnam three months after her arrival. Supported by the United States, the South Vietnamese government was planning to break up Viet Cong enclaves throughout the countryside by creating so-called “Death Zones.” Villagers living within these heavily forested areas would be relocated to “safe hamlets,” she reported, and anyone left in the “D-Zone” after it was cleared, one military chief told her, would be assumed Communist and “shot on site.” The article first ran in the Manila Times and was subsequently distributed via the Associated Press.
She was just getting started. Deepe ultimately covered the war in Vietnam for seven baffling and brutal years, outlasting every other western correspondent. She rented apartments, hired interpreters, rode helicopters, jeeps, riverboats, an elephant. She interviewed Buddhist priests and American ambassadors, Vietnamese generals and the astrologists they often consulted. She witnessed self-immolation and the slum-ification of Saigon, how war had decayed the “Frenchified” capital city she first laid eyes on. And she wrote hundreds of stories for dozens of publications, from Newsweek to the New York Herald Tribune, Cosmopolitan to Christian Science Monitor, Parade to the Pittsburgh Gazette — all of it, you might say, with a Buckian penchant for what Deepe calls the “vulnerable and the voiceless.”
“Battlefield correspondents bring the war home to the American people and allow them to feel part of the struggle,” says Dr. Thomas Berg, a military historian who has lectured on Deepe’s life and work for Humanities Nebraska. “We know that ‘where it bleeds it leads’ and ‘if it burns it earns,’ but Beverly does the brilliant work of getting behind the scenes and understanding what the people think and how they think and why they think.”
Some of those American people, of course, were Martin and Doris Deepe, likely the only farmers in Nebraska now routinely reading the New York Herald Tribune. She asked herself with every assignment: “Will mom understand this?” She sent them copies of every story, and though her dispatches from guerrilla strongholds and Laotian battlefields and smoldering frontier forts hardly eased their concerns, they were reminded — one byline at a time — their oldest daughter was doing exactly what she had long ago set out to do. And she was doing it damn well. In 1969, Christian Science Monitor, then one of the most widely distributed daily newspapers in the country, nominated Deepe’s reporting on the Battle of Khe Sahn for a Pulitzer Prize.
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“Vietnam zapped a constant, nagging buzz in my head that life can be snuffed out in a flash,” Deepe later wrote me in an email. She said the war made her emotions “very elastic,” that they never quite snapped back, that seven years in Vietnam made her both more forgiving and more fragile. She still remembers the villager who asked so plaintively, “Why was I born Vietnamese?” She still remembers interviewing Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk who three days later showered himself in gasoline and lit a match. She still remembers the heartbreak. She still remembers the dead.
But life is strange. Buried in the chaos, she found love, too. She found a Harvard Law graduate from Hutchinson, Kansas, a man who seemed to care as much about the lives of these rural villagers as she did. She found Major Chuck Keever, the Civic Action Officer in the III Marine Amphibious Force. At first he was just another guy in fatigues, she says, one of thousands scurrying around the airbase in Danang. Then he was behind the wheel, driving Deepe and her two loyal interpreters to the “strategic hamlets” they’d supposedly coaxed back from the Viet Cong not by force, but a perhaps more radical method: good will. In fact, it was Major Keever himself who wrote the first civic action order for the Marines in Vietnam.
The results of said directive were middling at best, Deepe admits. Many of the villagers she spoke to at the time were still dubious, if not altogether disparaging of the Americans. But the relationship between the Nebraska freelancer and the Kansas marine grew more fruitful every week. Keever often delivered classified information from Danang to Saigon, and when the major arrived in the city, he looked up the “girl next door,” that “apple-pie” freelancer, every time. They finally agreed to marry, but not until Deepe quit smoking. He said he “didn’t want to marry a corpse.”
“He literally saved my life,” she says, grinning again. “I didn’t think I could possibly write a (story) lead without lighting up.”
They left Vietnam together, both very much alive, and on Valentine’s Day 1969, exactly seven years after Deepe first stepped off the boat in Saigon, they tied the knot back home in tiny Belvidere, Nebraska. They stood at the altar just miles from the old Deepe place and the old schoolhouse where she first cracked open The Good Earth and read the first line: “It was Wang Lung’s marriage day.”
***
Deepe may have left Vietnam, but Vietnam never left Deepe. She and Keever eventually landed in Honolulu, where the major ultimately practiced law and the journalist embarked on a 29-year career teaching the next generation of reporters at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. But in ways both subtle and not, her seven years abroad still colored her day-to-day. She stayed off the island’s high-speed freeway, still hyperaware of life’s fragility. “I just tootle around the neighborhood at the speed I once drove in our old Model A,” she says. And she carried a sobering conclusion on her shoulders: “We never got the picture across in the right way.” In America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, in every troop surge and drone strike, Deepe could feel history repeating itself.
Never was the past more present, however, than when she discovered that Pham Xuon An and Nguyen Hung Vuong, her two most trusted interpreters in Vietnam, were somehow — in a plot twist readymade for a Ron Howard blockbuster — both spies. In a story by journalist and historian Stanley Karnow published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1990, she learned that An was acting doubly as a colonel for the Viet Cong; and years later still, while digging through the archives at Dartmouth, she found materials indicating that Vuong had long been plotting with the CIA. She considered them both brothers, especially An, who stood on the tarmac with his family and waved goodbye as she and Keever finally left Vietnam. In a word, Deepe was “thunderstruck.”
“I tried to erase him (An) from my memory,” she writes in Death Zones & Darling Spies. “But like a wandering ghost, he kept reemerging as details revealed his secret life and otherworldly sleuthing.”
And though she felt betrayed on a personal level — she’d paid his hospital bills and even claimed him as a beneficiary on her insurance policy — she never begrudged his loyalty to the Communist party. Had she been Vietnamese in that era, she says, she likely would have been a Viet Cong herself.
“They were for land reform. They were for helping the villagers. The Viet Cong were in the same position as my father was as a tenant farmer when he was first married,” she says. “So, I didn’t hold that against him. It’s just that I was completely blown away.”
And then, of course, there was the major — her major. Because the Danang Airbase handled vast amounts of Agent Orange, Keever registered with the official Agent Orange Registry after settling in Honolulu. They weren’t particularly concerned. The Veterans Administration assumed most who served in Vietnam had been exposed to the toxic chemical at one time or another, and regardless, Keever was feeling just fine. Decades later, however, he was diagnosed with coronary heart disease, rendering him 50% disabled. Then came the numbness in his toes, a symptom of neuropathy. Both have since been linked to Agent Orange exposure. The joy she found in “a joyless war” died in a Honolulu clinic on Sept. 2, 2021, exactly four years after the death of her younger sister Joan, with whom she was also extremely close.
“And in between,” she says, “mommy died, too.”
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In 2013, Deepe donated a trove of personal materials — story drafts, photographs, personal correspondence and more — to the UNL Archives & Special Collections. In one of those photographs, a stunning, if unintentional self-portrait taken in 1963, she’s standing upright in her second-floor apartment on Cong Ly Street, just blocks from Saigon’s central market — an apartment soon to be ransacked and riddled with bullets during the coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. Sunlight spills through the window, illuminating a small bamboo sofa, a mirror-lined bookshelf, and Deepe herself, wearing a clean white dress and gripping the camera tight at her waist. The bookshelf splits her reflection in two. Above: a short brunette bob. Below, and six inches to the right: everything else. Only her face is missing. No eyes. No smile.
She wasn’t likely aiming for symbolism. Perhaps she wasn’t aiming at all. But for those who know her impossible story, it’s difficult to ignore the metaphor. It’s difficult not to see a woman transformed by war. A woman who can’t unsee what she’s seen, or unhear what she’s heard, or unlearn what she’s learned.
It’s difficult not to see a life in two frames: the before, and the after.