Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who produced acclaimed books and television documentaries about Vietnam and the Philippines in the throes of war and upheaval, died on Sunday at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 87.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mr. Karnow’s son, Michael.
For more than three decades Mr. Karnow was a correspondent in Southeast Asia, working for Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Post, NBC News, The New Republic, King Features Syndicate and the Public Broadcasting Service. But he was best known for his books and documentaries.
He was in Vietnam in 1959, when the first American advisers were killed, and lingered long after the guns fell silent, talking to fighters, villagers, refugees, North and South Vietnamese political and military leaders, the French and the Americans, researching a people and a war that had been little understood.
The result was the 750-page book “Vietnam: A History,” published in 1983, and its companion, a 13-hour PBS documentary, “Vietnam: A Television History.” Unlike many books and films on Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s and the nightly newscasts that focused primarily on America’s role and its consequences at home and abroad, Mr. Karnow addressed all sides of the conflict and traced Vietnam’s culture and history.
“Vietnam: A History” was widely praised and a best seller. The documentary, with Mr. Karnow as chief correspondent, was at the time the most successful ever produced by public television, viewed by an average of nearly 10 million people a night through 13 episodes. It won six Emmy Awards, as well as Peabody, Polk and duPont-Columbia awards.
Six years later, Mr. Karnow delivered his second comprehensive book and television examination of a Southeast Asian nation. The book, “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines” (1989), was a panorama of centuries of Filipino life under Spanish and American colonial rule, followed by independence under sometimes corrupt American-backed leaders. It won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for history.
Narrated by Mr. Karnow, the three-part PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image” traced America’s paternalistic colonial rule in the Philippines, the shared suffering of Filipinos and Americans under a cruel Japanese occupation in World War II, and Manila’s postwar independence under regimes nominally democratic but repressive, corrupt or indifferent to the miseries of its people.
Mr. Karnow also wrote “Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution” (1972) and was a co-author of or contributor to books based on his years in Asia, including “Asian-Americans in Transition” (1992), “Passage to Vietnam” (1994), “Mekong” (1995) and “Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War” (1995).
Early in his career he lived in Paris for a decade, and in 1997 he published a memoir, “Paris in the Fifties.” A nostalgic reporter’s notebook of life among the cafe philosophers, bereted musicians and pseudo-revolutionary artistes, it danced with digressions about taxes, restaurants, the guillotine, Hemingway, Charles de Gaulle and the Devil’s Island penal colony.
In its range, learning and appetite for fun, Bernard Kalb, the former CBS reporter and Mr. Karnow’s friend since Vietnam, told The Associated Press in 2009, the memoir was vintage Karnow. “Stanley has a great line about how being a journalist is like being an adolescent all your life,” he said.
Stanley Karnow was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 4, 1925, the son of Harry and Henriette Koeppel Karnow. He grew up in a city with more than a dozen daily newspapers and decided early that he wanted to become a reporter. He served in the Army Air Forces in World War II. After graduating from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in 1947, he sailed for France, intending to spend the summer. He stayed for a decade.
Mr. Karnow married Claude Sarraute in 1948. They were divorced in 1955. In 1959, he married Annette Kline. They had two children, Michael and Catherine, who survive him, along with a stepson, Curtis Karnow, and two grandchildren. His second wife died in 2009.
He studied politics at the University of Paris in 1948-49, and from 1950 to 1957 was a Paris correspondent for Time magazine, covering Western Europe and North Africa. As Algeria’s war of independence shook France with increasing violence, Mr. Karnow was posted to North Africa in 1958.
In 1959 Mr. Karnow moved to Southeast Asia, established a base in Hong Kong and traveled widely in a region rife with conflicts. He was not typical of the Western correspondents, most of whom worked for one publication, dropped into war zones or political hot spots, wrote a few articles and moved on. He often had more than one employer, including weekly newsmagazines and other publications without daily deadlines, and he was drawn to reporting in greater depth and longer, more analytical writing forms.
Mr. Karnow was an Asian correspondent for Time-Life from 1959 to 1962, The London Observer from 1961 to 1965, The Saturday Evening Post from 1963 to 1965 and The Washington Post from 1965 to 1971. He was a diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post in 1971 and 1972, and a special correspondent for NBC and an associate editor of The New Republic from 1973 to 1975.
In his first book, “Southeast Asia” (1962), an illustrated Life World Library volume, he noted that Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s authoritarian anti-Communist president, was in danger of being overthrown. In November 1963, President Diem was slain in a military coup that the Kennedy administration had tacitly endorsed.
Besides reporting periodically from Vietnam, Mr. Karnow covered news events across the region, including President Richard M. Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, for The Washington Post. Although he was one of 87 news representatives chosen by the White House to accompany Nixon to China, Mr. Karnow was also on the White House “enemies list” made public by the Senate Watergate committee in 1973.
As China emerged from decades of isolation, Mr. Karnow’s book “Mao and China” examined the nation’s history from the Communist revolution through the Cultural Revolution, and also looked at Chairman Mao’s often conflicting roles in the period.
After the Vietnam War Mr. Karnow was a columnist for King Features from 1975 to 1988, wrote for the French newsweekly Le Point from 1976 to 1983 and for Newsweek International from 1977 to 1981, and was an editor with the International Writers Service from 1976 to 1986.
He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1958 and was a recipient of many awards, including the Shorenstein Prize for reporting on Asia.