Mike Kelly

The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record

The black-and-white photograph is fuzzy, perhaps out of focus.

It doesn’t matter. What the photograph captured almost half a century ago is still as clear and sharp as a gunshot.

A man in a uniform is pointing a .38 caliber silver revolver inches from the head of another man, whose hands have been handcuffed behind him.

The man holding the revolver displays no expression. The handcuffed man winces as the bullet is fired.

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Eddie Adams, who lived then in Bogota, N.J., took that iconic photo Feb. 1, 1968, in Saigon. It came to be known as the “street execution” of a captured Viet Cong operative by Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of South Vietnam’s National Police.

At the time, Adams did not know this image would change history.

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If you've been watching the 10-part, 18-hour PBS-TV series Vietnam from acclaimed documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick you’ve seen this photo.

You’ve seen others too. The National Guard soldiers' shooting of a student in 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio is one.

By the time the series ends, you will see more.

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Vietnam was America’s first visual war, brought into our living rooms each night in televised footage on the nightly news and in dramatic photography in newspapers and magazines from Adams and others.

Before Vietnam, we had seen photos from other wars.

• Mathew Brady’s images from the Civil War established a standard for photo journalists.

• Robert Capa’s grainy, black-and-white pictures of U.S. troops landing at Normandy in 1944 set the bar higher.

• Joseph Rosenthal’s portrait of the raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima did as well.

But military censors controlled photographs from those wars. Vietnam was the first uncensored war.

And Adams' single photo on a Saigon street in 1968 not only set a new journalistic standard for war coverage, it touched the nation in ways that other previous war photos had not.

Suddenly, war was shown in all its visceral brutality. Whether the cause was noble or not suddenly became secondary.

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Adams reminded us that the act of killing people, no matter how justified, is never glorious.

Adams, then 34, was in South Vietnam as an Associated Press staff photographer. Three days earlier, Viet Cong guerrillas, along with North Vietnam’s army units, kicked off a series of attacks on dozens of U.S. and South Vietnamese military bases and government offices.

The so-called Tet Offensive would end badly for both sides. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were soundly defeated with tens of thousands of their soldiers killed.

But the brutality of that moment also turned the tide of public opinion in America against U.S. involvement in the war. By 1968, America was deeply divided.

A month after the Tet Offensive, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.

The Democrats’ leading presidential candidates became two of the party’s most vocal anti-war critics, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York.

In April, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam as part of his civil-rights agenda, was assassinated. Riots broke out in dozens of American cities.

By June, an assassin also had killed Kennedy. By August, protesters were battling club-wielding police in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention as the party nominated Johnson’s vice president and war supporter, Hubert Humphrey, as its candidate.

By November, Republican Richard Nixon, who promised to bring “peace with honor” to Vietnam, was elected president.

To say that 1968 was a transformative year in America is an extreme understatement. As the PBS film by Burns and Novick points out, the social, political and cultural tides from 1968 still ripple through America today.

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One of those ripples began with Adams’ photo on that Saigon street.

Adams died in 2004, only months after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

He was 71 and was widely known — and praised — for his photography, which included portraits of celebrities as well as dramatic images of major news events. A series of photos in the mid-1970s of the suffering of Vietnamese refugees, known as “Boat People,” prompted the Carter administration to welcome some 200,000 of them into the U.S. as citizens.

Adams won a Pulitizer Prize for the Saigon photo. And he knew the image changed history.

But he did not display the photo in his Manhattan gallery and rarely spoke about it, explaining in 1998 to Time magazine that “two people died in that photograph” – the Viet Cong officer who was shot and the South Vietnamese general who fired the bullet.

“The general killed the Viet Cong. I killed the general with my camera,” Adams said, adding that “still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world.”

Adams is correct. Watching film footage of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II is not nearly as dramatic as the single photo. Seeing New York Yankee slugger Aaron Judge smash a home run on television barely captures the muscle-rippling power of his powerful swing conveyed in a photo.

Even the video footage of New York City firefighters raising a flag over the rubble at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks seems inconsequential when compared with the photo of that event by The Record’s Tom Franklin.

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Because of his links to Bogota, across the Hackensack River from Hackensack, N.J., where The Record had its offices for decades, Adams became close to several of the newspaper's photographers, including Franklin, who now teaches journalism at Montclair State University. Once, during a breakfast years ago, Franklin asked Adams about the Saigon photo.

“He was uncomfortable,” Franklin told me in an interview. “His main point was that photographs don’t always tell the whole truth. And while he understood why this photograph resonated with people, he wanted people to know that there were ramifications.”

“Even when it comes to my photograph, it’s still a difficult thing to talk about,” Franklin said of his 9/11 flag raising image from Ground Zero. “There’s a bittersweet aspect to it. With Eddie’s picture, there’s a whole lot more bitter than sweet.”

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Adams’ wife, Alyssa, a photo editor at TV Guide who married him in 1989, said even in later years that her husband rarely discussed the photo.

“That photo distills for us a horrible moment,” Alyssa Adams said. “Eddie was all about the context. What people don’t realize is that the man who had just been shot had just killed the family of a man who worked for General Loan."

This is the sort of context that the PBS documentary is now bringing to America. Does this context make the Vietnam war — and, in particular, the deaths of 58,220 U.S. soldiers — any easier to accept?

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Not really.

Vietnam is still a painful scar.

This healing will take a while. Long ago, Eddie Adams understood that.

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