The Beautiful Simplicity of War

Journalist Keyes Beech was sometimes accused of being a war lover. He denied the charge. Wars, he said, just kept happening on his watch. "You may hope that they'll go out of fashion, but you can't just ignore them." His accusers weren't entirely wrong, however. Even friends acknowledged that he liked to be where the action was. Keyes Beech saw a lot of action.

He saw the flag raised on Iwo Jima in World War II; followed the first bloody year of the war in Korea; witnessed the defeat of the French in what was then Indochina; and covered the long, drawn-out saga of the American war in Vietnam. Beech was on one of the last helicopters to lift off from the United States embassy in Saigon in April 1975.

He was a Tennessee-born farm boy who rose from hardscrabble beginnings to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent whose reports were syndicated in more than seventy newspapers across the country. In describing Beech's life, Jonathan Webb traces the arc of a nation that moved from unity and moral clarity during World War II to the division and doubt of Vietnam — a transformation that left Beech as the voice of a disillusioned Middle America that was never reconciled with the war's bitter end. Webb's biography of Keyes Beech is not only a portrait of a man shaped by war but also a study of America's own reckoning with its changing role in the world.