Barry Zorthian (1920–2010) was an American diplomat, most notably press officer for 4+1⁄2 years during the Vietnam War, media executive and lobbyist.
[6] Also at VOA, in response to a proposal from director Henry Loomis, Zorthian helped develop a Special English broadcasting capacity with slower word rate and limited vocabulary for non-English speakers.
He believed in informing the American public,' Neil Sheehan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a former New York Times reporter in Saigon, told the Washington Post.
'"[8] He was "Murrow's last recommendation before retiring from USIA, [an appointment] so sensitive that it required President Lyndon Johnson and the secretaries of state and defence, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, to sign off on it.
[5] Other journalists he faced were members "of a tough school in American journalism covering the war" including Richard Pyle, David Halberstam, R.W.
He] used a mixture of charm, sly wit and uncommonly straight talk in trying to establish credibility for the U.S. effort.... [H]e refused to be intimidated by either officials or the news media.
'In postwar years, Barry Zorthian remained steadfast to his conviction about the significant role the media must play in a democratic society,' said Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter for the AP in Vietnam and later a CNN foreign correspondent.
'"[2] Zorthian was press media advisor to three successive U.S. ambassadors to South Vietnam — Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Maxwell D. Taylor and Ellsworth Bunker — and to Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. military commander there.
[2] "Zorthian remained proud of his most controversial achievement ... [the] Follies.... [T]he briefings lasted a decade, the only regular forum in which U.S. and South Vietnamese officials spoke entirely on the record and were often challenged or contradicted by reporters, sometimes to their embarrassment ... [i]n the first U.S. war without formal censorship.
In a letter to the editor in response, Elliot Bernstein, the ABC News Saigon bureau chief in the mid-1960s, countered that the press had been kept in the dark about the extent of American bombing of Laos beginning in 1964, as well as the fact that bases in Thailand were being used to conduct air raids on North Vietnam.
[2] In October 2010, Zorthian was given a 90th birthday 'roast and toast' which included Richard Holbrooke, who had begun his diplomatic career in Vietnam and would die soon after the gathering.