Self-Reliance in Saigon

The call came from no less a man than Lieut. General Nguyen Khanh, and Saigon's prettiest Western correspondent hopped a cab to the general's elegant town house on the Saigon River. There the New York Herald Tribune's Beverly Deepe, 29, found Khanh and his wife decorating their patio. They were getting ready for a petite danse, explained the general with a smile. Then he led the visitor into his study, where they talked for more than half an hour. "It was so fantastic," said Beverly later of what the general told her, "I didn't think anyone would believe it until it was in print."

The general's attack on U.S. Ambassador Max Taylor rated headline reaction all over the U.S. (TIME, Jan. 1). By last week, the dust-up seemed to be dying down, but Beverly's story was still a singular achievement for a girl who has yet to be accepted as a regular in Saigon's corps of foreign correspondents and who had been a Tribune correspondent for only two months.

Making Friends. Correspondent Deepe modestly attributed her coup to "luck and timing." "I was sure something like this was going to happen," she said, "and I had put in an application for an interview nearly three weeks before." Beverly has arranged just this kind of coup before. Her first exclusive audience with Khanh took place in August, after the general had been forced out as Premier. "I try to make friends with people on their way up," says Beverly, "and they remember me later--like Khanh."

There are those around Saigon who would like to forget. Only last week Ambassador Taylor challenged the accuracy of one of Beverly's stories in which she reported the gist of an off-record Taylor news conference from which she had been excluded. Taylor, said Beverly, had said that some of the generals who had taken over power in the Vietnamese government "border on being nuts." "The article," sniffed an official U.S. embassy release, "is apparently based on inaccurate leaks from a background session to which the Tribune's correspondent was not invited."

But Beverly is used to being the only U.S. reporter not regularly invited to official U.S. briefings. "They don't like me," she says of embassy personnel, "because I won't say what they want me to say. They accuse me of giving the Vietnamese line, when in fact what I do is listen to them and then go out and find out for myself."

Following Fashions. An honors graduate of the University of Nebraska and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Beverly toured the world in 1961, did so well as a freelance correspondent that she showed up later in Saigon as a stringer for Newsweek and for the London Daily Express. On the strength of her first interview with Khanh, the Trib hired her. By now, she has developed resources and contacts that largely obviate the need for getting along with the embassy, or even with Saigon's somewhat clubby and introspective press corps. What she does not know she can usually get from her two Vietnamese assistants, both wise in the labyrinthine ways of the country's politics. "I don't date," she says. "Men are a luxury I can't afford. I'm a woman journalist, and I'm competing with men. But I follow fashions--and General Khanh likes my clothes. He said so the other day."

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