By Kevin McCauley
Barry Zorthian, U.S. spokesperson in Saigon during the Vietnam War, died Dec. 30 in Washington, D.C. He was 90.
Presiding over the first U.S. war without official censorship, Zorthian created the daily briefings that came to be known as the "Five O'Clock Follies," where military officials gave battlefield summaries and fielded questions from reporters.
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The Associated Press noted those briefings, which often turned into shouting matches, were the only regular forum at which American and South Vietnamese officials spoke entirely on the record. The "Follies" ran for a decade.
As head of the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office, Zorthian served as media advisor to three successive U.S. ambassadors to South Vietnam — Henry Cabot Lodge, Maxwell Taylor and Ellsworth Bunker — and to then-U.S. military Commander Gen. William Westmoreland.
Zorthian also was in charge of coordinating psychological warfare operations. His office dumped tons of propaganda leaflets and mounted loudspeakers on airplanes to broadcast funeral dirges in an effort to scare enemy troops.
Leaving Vietnam in 1968, Zorthian worked at CBS Radio and Voice of America. Ge spent a dozen years at Time Inc., serving as president of Time Life Broadcast and Cable and then VP of government affairs in D.C.
He joined the lobbying firm Alcalde & Faye in 1984.
Life magazine's online archives contain several images of Zorthian from the Vietnam era.
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