HONOLULU (AP) — One night in 1969, as a salvo of Viet Cong rockets exploded in the streets of Saigon, Edwin Q. White paused after typing a dateline on his typewriter to light his pipe and reflect on his belief that as an American journalist, he belonged in Vietnam.
To his Associated Press colleagues, it was typical of the reporter-philosopher known as “unflappable Ed,” the calmest person in any crisis.
White, who served as AP’s Saigon bureau chief as the U.S. deployed massive numbers of combat troops to Vietnam, died before dawn Thursday at his home at age 90, his daughter Rachel White Watanabe said.
White said the biggest regret of his career was leaving Saigon when South Vietnam fell to Hanoi’s communist forces on April 30, 1975, a moment he thought about almost every day. He left on one of the last evacuation helicopters from the roof of the U.S. embassy.
“Going off of the roof of the embassy wasn’t the greatest happening of my life,” he said.
Known among colleagues by his middle name, Quigley, he was part of a fabled crew of journalists who covered the war for the AP from Saigon, a thinning group that has seen five deaths this year.
“They were such a great bunch of people. I sometimes just stood around in awe of them,” White said in August, after the death of Malcolm Browne, a reporter and former Saigon AP bureau chief who became best known for his 1963 photograph of a Buddhist monk who committed suicide by fire.
Other Saigon staffers who died this year were White’s close friend Roy Essoyan, a writer who became his neighbor in Hawaii, along with correspondent George Esper and legendary photographer Horst Faas.
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