Frances FitzGerald (born October 21, 1940) is an American journalist and historian, who is primarily known for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), an account of the Vietnam War. It was a bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and National Book Award.
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Early life and education
Frances FitzGerald was born in New York City, the only daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, an attorney on Wall Street, and socialite Marietta Peabody. Her grandmother was a prominent activist in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and from an early age, FitzGerald was introduced to a wide range of political figures. Her parents divorced shortly after World War II. From 1950 to his death in 1967, her father was an intelligence officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, becoming a deputy director. Her mother subsequently remarried Ronald Tree, a British journalist, investor and Conservative MP, from that marriage Fitzgerald has a half-sister: British model Penelope Tree.
As a teenager, FitzGerald wrote voluminous letters to Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, her mother's lover, expressing her opinion on many subjects, a reflection of her deep interest in world affairs. She graduated from Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, and magna cum laude from Radcliffe College, then a women's college associated with Harvard University.
Career
FitzGerald became a journalist, initially writing for the New York Herald Tribune magazine. She went to South Vietnam in January 1966. She met Washington Post journalist Ward Just at a party soon after arriving in Saigon and began a relationship with him that continued until she left South Vietnam in November 1966. She formed a close connection with Daniel Ellsberg who was working as an intelligence officer at the U.S. Embassy. Unlike many of the male journalists, she did not report on the latest combat operations, but rather focused on the effects of the war on South Vietnamese politics and society. Her first article titled "The Hopeful Americans & the Weightless Mr. Ky" was published in the Village Voice on 21 April 1966. She investigated the effects of Operation Masher on South Vietnamese civilians and followed the Buddhist Uprising. She repeatedly visited the village of Duc Lap, interviewing villagers to write "Life and Death of a Vietnamese Village" which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on 4 September 1966. Her final story was "Behind the Facade: the Tragedy of Saigon" describing the conditions of refugees who had sought safety in the city and were overwhelming its inadequate infrastructure and funding.
On her return to New York she attended Truman Capote's Black and White Ball with her mother, stepfather and half-sister Penelope Tree on 28 November 1966, which launched Tree's modelling career.
In late June 1967 she met Just in Paris and the two then spent July and August writing at Glin Castle owned by her distant relative Desmond John Villiers FitzGerald, Knight of Glin. She flew back to Washington in late July to attend her father's funeral and then returned to Glin. In October Just sent her a birthday letter advising that he had got married. Just's book, To What End, written at Glin, did not mention FitzGerald by name.
In October 1967 she was introduced to Paul Mus who was visiting professor at Princeton University. Mus' book Sociologie d'une Guerre had informed her writing on Vietnam. Mus became a mentor to her until his death in 1969. In 1968 she signed a contract with the Atlantic Monthly Press for a book about the Americans and Vietnam.
In late 1969 she was awarded residency at the MacDowell Colony and began a relationship with fellow resident writer Alan Lelchuk. At the end of the residency she lived with Lelchuk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked as an assistant professor at Brandeis University.
Personal life
FitzGerald is married to James P. Sterba, a former writer for The Wall Street Journal. They live in New York City and Maine. Sterba featured the latter in his 2003 book Frankie's Place: A Love Story.
Books
FitzGerald, F. (1972), Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
FitzGerald, F. (1979), America Revised
FitzGerald, F. (1986), Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures
FitzGerald, F. (2000), Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star wars and the End of the Cold War
FitzGerald, F. (2001), Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth
FitzGerald, F. (2017), The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America