Barry Zorthian
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.
Baryoor Zorthian was born on October 8, 1920, in Kütahya,Turkey, the child of Armenian parents. "His father, a writer, was imprisoned in Turkey but escaped. His mother, refusing to divulge her husband’s whereabouts, was herself sent to jail, along with their son. [The family] eventually migrated to New Haven, Connecticut, the father working in a dry cleaners. Barry went to Yale University, where he edited the student newspaper and joined the secretive Skull and Bones society.",
Zorthian served with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II. After working for a St. Johnsbury, Vermont newspaper, the Caledonian Record, he joined CBS Radio and then the Voice of America (VOA). He earned a law degree from New York University, attended at night." In 1948 he covered the Korean war as one of VOA’s first overseas correspondents. Later, he was a co-author of the VOA Charter, which persists to this day, and served as program director. In the last role, he launched several programming initiatives which were still on the air more than a half century later. 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. It was launched in 1959 and proved successful, according to a 2012 VOA review. After 13 years at VOA, Zorthian became a diplomat in India.
Zorthian was best known for his four years as chief spokesperson for the U. S. government in Saigon, Vietnam from 1964-68. "His daily afternoon briefings for press correspondents ... were dubbed “Five O’Clock Follies” by reporters frustrated by the lack of complete transparency. ... New York Times Correspondent, Gloria Emerson, declared him 'a determined and brilliant liar' at a 1981 conference on the Vietnam War. Despite the criticism, many still trusted him as an honest public official. 'He had a conscience. 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. 'His problem was that he was trying to sell a bad war.'" 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." He oversaw the 500-person Joint United States Public Affairs Office under Carl T. Rowan after Murrow retired. Other journalists he faced were members "of a tough school in American journalism covering the war [including] Richard Pyle, ... Halberstam, Apple, Arnett, Kalb, Karnow – several of whom made their reputations in Vietnam."
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