In August 1963, a young reporter named Charles Mohr threw away his career at one of the premier print journalism outlets in the United States when he made a stand for integrity.
Mohr, a 1951 graduate of the University of Nebraska’s journalism program, was Time magazine’s chief correspondent in Southeast Asia. Mohr and a stringer wrote two articles, one of which began with “The war in Vietnam is being lost.”
Time’s hawkish upper management changed the entire meaning of the article and killed that line. The other article was never published but was replaced with an article attacking U.S. correspondents in Saigon. Mohr demanded an opportunity to respond in print; he was refused, so he quit.
“Charley understood that journalistic integrity was essential to the survival of journalism and journalism was essential to the survival of our democracy,” said colleague R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times in an interview in late May. “Those are two pretty good things to understand if you think you’re going to be a journalist.”
But Mohr is known for much more than just that particular incident. As a reporter first for Time, then The New York Times, Mohr was one of the premier war correspondents of his generation. From the steamy jungles of Vietnam to the arid deserts of the Middle East, wherever there was a war, there was Mohr.
Soon after leaving Time, Mohr was hired by The New York Times. The next year he was covering Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Once that was over, The Times sent him back to Vietnam as the Saigon bureau chief.
Among Time’s Vietnam correspondents and Washington bureau men, Mohr is still remembered as the best in the business. He was even profiled by his colleague David Halberstam last year in The Times’ 150th anniversary edition in a piece titled “The Reporters Reporter.” In that profile, in his 1989 obituary and in interviews for this article, some of the top names in journalism and politics praised Mohr’s work.
“He was the best war correspondent I’ve ever worked with or for,” Apple said. He listed three big reasons Mohr was so good.
- Courage. Mohr repeatedly put himself in harm’s way.
- Stamina. Mohr was tall, lean, could walk long distances and keep up with the troops.
- Skills. He had the ability to get information out of anybody, get it right and write it fast. Mohr could crank out a 1,500 word story in less than 45 minutes.
“You couldn’t have a better formula for a war correspondent,” Apple said.
There were other reasons for his success, too. Craig Whitney was often Mohr’s supervisor in the ’70s and Æ80s. He said Mohr’s extensive curiosity and ability to talk to anybody were big reasons for his success.
“He was a talker. … He was friendly. He just put you at ease. You wanted to talk to this guy, and he actually wanted to talk to you. He had that Nebraska accent, and he came across as kind of a colorful, clean cut … all-American, smart as hell reporter who didn’t miss a thing but enjoyed the people he met and wrote about,” he said.
Whitney is now an assistant managing editor at The New York Times, but in 1972 he was 29-years-old and the Saigon bureau chief during a big North Vietnamese Army offensive. Mohr was flown in to help with the workload. A respected veteran reporter like Mohr might have been expected to come in and take over. Instead, Mohr asked Whitney, “What do you want me to do, boss?”
“That was Charley,” Whitney said. “He was not a prima donna. He knew how to be a war correspondent better than everybody. He was just a joy to work with.”
And entertaining, too. Whitney described Mohr as an incredible raconteur of his adventures. He could keep his listeners laughing, riveted or horrified for hours.
“Every time you turned the corner and saw him you thought, ‘Oh boy! There’s Charley Mohr. I wonder what he’s going to tell me today,’” Whitney said.
Mohr was born and grew up in Loup City. He was a police reporter for The Lincoln Star in 1950 and 1951. After that, he spent three years in the Chicago bureau of United Press International before joining Time in 1954. Assignments for Time included San Francisco, the White House, New Delhi, Hong Kong and Saigon.
Mohr’s wife, Norma Mohr, described her husband via e-mail as an intense man with a good sense of humor who loved everything he did — or he wouldn’t do it. He liked sharing his excitement with his family. He was a very independent, almost rebellious, overachiever, she said.
Mohr’s intensity and aggressiveness as a reporter led him directly to the battlefield and put him in the gun sights of the NVA and the Viet Cong. Mohr was wounded by shrapnel in 1965. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, Mohr and two fellow newsmen braved enemy fire to rescue a mortally wounded Marine. Mohr and his fellow reporters were awarded Bronze Star medals after the war for their actions.
After reporting wars in Africa and the Middle East, Mohr returned to The New York Times Washington Bureau and reported on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. In the 1980s Mohr’s health deteriorated, and he was no longer traveling the world for the paper. Yet, he was part of a team of five New York Times reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1986 for a nine-part series of articles on the Strategic Defense Initiative.
He still considered integrity as important as ever. When speaking to the Lincoln chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists in 1987, Mohr emphasized the importance of intellectual honesty and courage in journalism.
“This is so … necessary to journalism that its not debatable,” he said according to the March 22, 1987, Sunday Journal-Star. “But it often is debated, and it is often eroded. … Even a reporter who does not have any talent can do little harm if he is honest.”
He was still a Times employee when he died in a Bethesda, Md., hospital on June 16, 1989, his 60th birthday.
When asked what lessons young journalists could draw from Mohr’s life, Apple said the most prominent one was the importance of integrity. Whitney said it was Mohr’s pursuit of his stories where they were actually taking place.
“You don’t get the whole picture by just talking to officials or working the phones,” Whitney said. “You have to get out there and slog on the ground with people who actually do the work to get the truth of the story.”
There was another lesson, too:
“You don’t have to be a snobby sophisticate from an East Coast big city who went to Harvard or Yale to be a brilliant foreign correspondent, analyst and observer of high politics and the United States,” Whitney said. “Charley’s roots were always evident. … He had the common touch. He wasn’t afraid to go out drinking with ordinary soldiers. … That’s why he saw what was really going on there.”
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