The Rift in the Earth was researched and written almost entirely within the grand precincts of the Library of Congress as a visiting fellow at John W. Kluge Center. For her unfailing assistance and good cheer, I want to thank Mary Lou Reker, the associate director of the Center, and for being such a good friend of this project. Others at the Center who provided help are Travis Hensley and Joanne Kitching. Concerning the art war over Vietnam memory, the Library has significant and unique holdings in the Manuscript Division, Prints and Photographs Division, and Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recording Sound Division. The archives of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, all 132 boxes of material, are in the Manuscript Division. The Prints and Photographs Division has the slides of all 1,421 entries to the Memorial competition, as well as Maya Lin’s original design boards. I have mined these treasures extensively.
In pointing me to the newspaper and television coverage of the controversy, I’m grateful to Professor Edward J. Gallagher at Lehigh University for his chronicle and his class notes. My main military advisers for the book were Dick Manuel, a retired captain in the US Marines, and Ray Wilkinson, both of whom fought in the battle of Hue during the Tet Offensive. When I saw Wilkinson in Hue, he was teaching English at a high school in Dong Ha, just south of the old DMZ. Lieutenant General Ron Christmas (Ret), who as a Marine captain, commanded the salient force to retake Hue in early February and was badly wounded there, provided me with insights into the landscape of the city during the siege. And Ambassador James Bullington, who as a junior diplomat was stranded in Hue and rescued by Captain Christmas, also provided me with details about his ordeal, as well as information about the NVA massacre of civilians during the month-long occupation.
And I send special thanks to the incomparable Chuck Searcy, a former US Army Intelligence officer during the war. Searcy has lived in Vietnam for the past twenty years, and it is no wonder that he has often been called the unofficial US ambassador to Vietnam. He was my fascinating guide on our trip through the former “Demilitarized Zone” in December 2016 and was immensely helpful in arranging the logistics for that trip, as well as arranging important interviews. I thank Nguyen Luan Huu, Nguyen Quoc Tuan, and especially Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Hung for their insights.
From the beginning of this project I understood that the memory of the controversy was difficult and unpleasant for Maya Lin, even though her eventual triumph catapulted her into international fame. My questions to her were confined to specifics on design matters and to episodes where there were conflicts in the historical record. On December 2, 2016, she wrote to me: “I’ve never really wanted to talk about the controversy, [though] I’ve always been happy to talk about the design process. But I haven’t really felt like talking about how tough that time was, as far as the machinations behind the scenes.” So I thank her for her answers to my queries. Lin’s mentor at Yale, César Pelli, and her professor at Yale in the fall of 1980, Andrus Burr, were also invaluable sources for me.
Lindy Hart, Frederick Hart’s widow, was very generous with her time, and provided me with important letters and documents about her husband’s involvement in making the memorial. He too was seared by the reaction to his statues. Were he still living, I suppose he would have been similarly circumspect and reluctant to revisit this difficult chapter of his life. His collaborators for his submission to the contest and its later execution, Joseph E. Brown and Michael Vergason, were also generous in giving me their time and thoughts. My friend, the prominent artist Craig McPherson, was my chief adviser on the culture of the art world. And Dr. Kathryn Fanning, a historian at the US Commission of Fine Arts, shepherded me through the voluminous proceedings of the Commission from 1981 to 1984.
Also at the Library of Congress, I’m immensely grateful to Becky Clark for her counsel, encouragement, and wisdom in marshaling the Library’s specialists for the fact checking, image selection, and editing of the book in its final stages. These included the deft hand of a superior editor, Susan Reyburn; a true professional in image selection and rights acquisition, Athena Angelos; and a skillful researcher and fierce fact checker, Hannah Freece. To them I’m eternally grateful.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks goes to Cal Barksdale, my editor at Arcade, who saw the potential of the idea for this book from the beginning and embraced it enthusiastically, partly because he remembered the Art War over the Vietnam memorial vividly. He was trenchant in his advice about the large themes of the book. But he is also a stickler for using just right word. I will long remember his counsel to use the word bogus instead of false and patinated instead of patinaed. How much better that corrected sentence of the foundry man for the Hart statues now sounds:
“We could have patinated the piece with tears.”