In 1965, a young Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter named Bob Schieffer convinced his editor to send him to Vietnam.
Once there, he tracked down soldiers from his hometown to write about their daily lives. The Star-Telegram encouraged readers to send in letters about their loved ones in Vietnam, so Schieffer could check in on them.
A Star-Telegram paperboy named Billy Buchanan wrote to Schieffer from Dublin, Texas, asking the reporter to look for his brother Fred.
“I know Fred is homesick just like thousands of other men and women who are in South Viet Nam,” Billy wrote, thanking Schieffer for "bringing good news from our men in South Viet Nam to all of us in Texas.”
That letter is now on display at a new exhibition at UT Arlington, “Our Man in Vietnam,” curated by Sara Pezzoni. The show includes Schieffer’s photos from his time covering the war, as well as his paintings inspired by those photos.
Schieffer returned to the U.S. in 1966 and became a legendary broadcast journalist, spending decades moderating Face the Nation for CBS News. He retired from CBS in 2015 after a 46-year career there.
At the exhibition’s opening, Schieffer spoke to KERA’s Miranda Suarez about his memories of Vietnam and the current state of the news business.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What made you go back to those photographs and revisit them as paintings?
I'd always kind of wanted to do this, because meeting these kids from Fort Worth in Vietnam and walking up to them and saying, your mother asked me to come and check on you, I'm from the Star-Telegram — sometimes they would just break into bawling, crying.
They were lonely, they were at a place that they probably didn't know where they were until they got there. And just to see someone from their hometown — it made me just really feel good. It made me feel like I kind of helped them through the day and that what I was doing was important, and I'll never forget it. I still think about it a lot. I don't want to say it changed my life, but it gave me a new understanding of life.
In what way?
When we talk about wars and things, and casualties — and that's terrible enough — but we sometimes forget about the folks back home. We sometimes forget about how people feel while they're there. They're lonesome. They're there because somebody else is telling them what to do.
They want to be there. During the time that I was there, they felt like their country had asked them to do something, and they were trying to do it. It was just difficult being away from home, among other things, and so I always thought about that.
I covered a lot of stories in my career — which, by the way, covered a full one-fourth of American history. Think about that! So I covered lot of stories in that time, but I never felt as good about what I was doing as I did when I felt like I was helping those kids through a very difficult time.
In some of the letters in the exhibit, families write to you and say, “Here's my son, he's in South Vietnam, can you go look him up?” The emotion in that is palpable. You can see the difficulty for the families in the fact that they had to write to a newspaper reporter to get news of their kid.
And I got a lot of letters like that. The Star-Telegram had run full-page ads when I went to cover this story, and it said, “Bob Schieffer's going to Vietnam, write us and tell us where your husband, brother, so forth is, and he'll try to find them.”
In those days local newspapers were so powerful, and they were like part of the community.
I wanted to ask you kind of about the state of the news in general. I know that you've talked over the years about what it means for communities to deal with the diminishment of newspapers. Right now, for me as a reporter in Fort Worth in 2026, the idea of the Star-Telegram sending someone to another country is crazy. How do you see the environment for news now?
Well, the world's pretty much upside down right now to start with, but, you know, we've always had problems.
There was a columnist, and I can't remember his name, who said one time, he said, “In the short term, I'm a pessimist. In the long term, I'm an optimist.”
And I said, “How can that be?”
And he says, “Because the country has come through some very difficult times, and they generally come out stronger.” So, we don't know what's going to happen, but we're in a very critical time right now in history.
I did want to ask you about some of the controversy that's surrounding your longtime employer, CBS — the hiring of Bari Weiss. Some have criticized her hiring as an appeasement to the Trump administration.
Can I interrupt you right now?
Yeah.
I don’t comment about new bosses.
Can I ask why?
Because I’m not an idiot. [Laughs]
Fair enough!
I've been through several of these, when the company will be sold and somebody else will buy it, and it's just very difficult for everybody — for the new persons coming in, for the person who's already been there for a long time.
It’s like getting a new car or something. You know, everybody has to kind of get adjusted to the new setting. So I can't comment right now because I don't know how this is going to all work out.
Let me assure you, I wish them the absolute very best. And I think 60 Minutes is the best news broadcast on television.
Is there anything that you wish people knew or understood about the Vietnam War today?
Yes, I think a good lesson is never get involved in something that you don't know what you're getting involved in. And Vietnam was just almost an unspeakable tragedy.
We still to this day don't if that was the right thing to do, but had we not gone, 50-some-odd-thousand Americans would not have been killed.
People still don't have the answer, should we have gone, or should we not have gone, and I don't have the answer either.
“Our Man in Vietnam” runs through April 4 on the 6th floor of UT Arlington’s Central Library. Admission is free.
Got a tip? Email Miranda Suarez at msuarez@kera.org.
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