The Not-So-Quiet Australian

La guerre d’Indochine
by Lucien Bodard
Grasset, 1997, 1168 pages

When Graham Greene arrived in Saigon (above) to represent the London Times he was met at the airport by Graham Jenkins, an Australian journalist who drove him around the city. In Greene’s The Quiet American Jenkins may be the Wilkins of the novel and he is certainly the Reuters correspondent who the journalist narrator asks to carry a letter to Hong Kong to avoid French censorship.

Jenkins was anything but a quiet Australian.  In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai secret police were going to shoot him and another newspaper man but didn’t. The story of this unpleasant experience, when he was guilty of knowing too much and publishing too much, is told in Noel Barber’s The Fall of Shanghai (1979) where Jenkins is described as being in “his early twenties [he was actually thirty-three], a youngster with a great sense of humour and adventure”. The young man undiplomatically told the arresting officer what he thought of him. Barber refers to his “belligerent Australian voice” when he said, “Have you quite done, Colonel? Now just you listen to me for a moment.” After two nights in captivity, journalist pressures had them released and they both escaped from the city as the communist takeover was happening.

Jenkins had worked on Victorian country newspapers and then for the Argus, for whom he covered post-war stories in Indonesia, Malaya, China and Africa. In February 1950 he was reporting that “The price of wives is falling in Nigeria after a big post- war boom”. Later the same year he was appointed as Reuters correspondent in Saigon to cover the French Indochina war. In preparation he visited Paris. On his way to Saigon, his plane landed in a sandstorm in Bahrain hours before another Air France Skymaster making a journey in the opposite direction crashed in the same area, killing most of its passengers. The story was one of his first reports from Saigon.

In Greene’s diary Jenkins appears as J, the same disguise he is given when he appears in a very different book: a work of “history” by French writer Lucien Bodard:

He’s an Australian with a face like raw meat and dangerous eyes. His flesh has been furrowed, tanned and cooked by who knows how many suns, mysteries, shady places, missions and intrigues, and is the blackish red of charred blood. It’s not at all hideous, but has the solitary, melancholy beauty of a vulture, a beauty that is sometimes crossed by tics of joy and even vulgarity. He has regular, large, well-established features, a little deformed by accidents or by the essence of his nature, a ferociously amused, neurasthenic and relentless buccaneer. He is the “gentleman adventurer” of the engravings of the past. White teeth, thick dark hair, always a certain look of silent provocation, of disdainful irony that makes you think he’s hovering, that he despises. However, as soon as it comes to journalism, he reveals himself as unbelievably violent, sharp and perfidious. He believes in no truth. Puritanical naivety in politics is good for quiet American women. His particular brand of puritanism is to rush any boy who has the awful misfortune of having an unfastened fly button. He gesticulates, he whispers, he blushes with shame without daring to use precise terms to warn the unfortunate. We don’t know his morals. He has none, no doubt, despite his extraordinary eye for the slightest disorder in costume. His colour becomes apoplectic—even in spite of his beefsteak cheeks—as soon as you talk to him about inappropriate things, affairs of the ass or even sentiments. Naturally, he is suspected of having special habits. But we don’t know. He lives alone in a hotel room, apparently like a monk. His only vice, but taken to a fantastic degree, is the “flash”—the sensational news story that breaks on every teletype in the world.

Bodard was writing in 1967 of events in 1951 and was tactful about the queer bits. The getting-woke-fast Australian Dictionary of Biography now describes Jenkins as “a sexually active gay man”—as opposed to a sexually lethargic gay man?

Bodard was a correspondent for the French mass-circulation newspaper France-Soir during the Indochina war and his pages on Jenkins come from the third volume, L’Aventure (1967), of his trilogy on the war, La Guerre d’Indochine. The first two volumes, L’Enlisement (the Bogging Down) (1963) and L’Humiliation (1965) were translated into English by the novelist Patrick O’Brian as The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam (1967). Though the translator praised Bodard, he cut and condensed and added his own “explanatory text”. It seems cruel. The renditions of Bodard’s text in this essay are based on the DeepL internet translations.

Lucien Bodard was an informed and early critic of Mao’s China, with books published in 1957 and 1961 which aroused the fury of the French Left. He was born in Chongqing, China, the son of the French consul. One of his earliest memories was seeking baskets of human heads. His writings on Asia are always worth reading and re-reading. Affectionately known as “Lulu le Chinois”, he was a great journalist, novelist, biographer with a rich, detailed, torrential flowing style of prose, opiniated and detailed. The Indochina books are passionate, and much of what he recounts comes from his own experiences. The reported conversations are brilliant and entirely unreliable. His biographer Olivier Weber suggests Alexander Dumas as a literary precedent. A French officer who knew him said that “With Bodard, nothing is correct but everything is true.” 

L’Aventure, the third volume in Bodard’s work where the pages on Graham Jenkins are hidden, is heavily concerned with General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who came to Vietnam as High Commissioner and commander-in-chief of French forces in December 1950. Reading Bodard pre-internet, J seemed an interesting and anonymous Australian journalist. Re-reading the books in the present, a few clicks revealed Graham Jenkins.

In 1945 de Lattre had signed the German capitulation document on behalf of France. He had, as Bodard points out, entered Vietnam like a theatrical star. He had dramatically taken charge of French forces, with a promise to command them, and resolutely affronted and defeated the Viet Minh forces poised to occupy Hanoi. He raised the morale of a forgotten and sometimes despised French army and sought international support for his anti-communist war—with America involved in Korea, only minor assistance was received. De Lattre was flamboyant, charming and vain, and impassioned about his soldiers. Bodart is equally fervent describing French Indochina and the imperious de Lattre, who he calls Roi Jean.

The story of de Lattre in Vietnam is also tragic. There is newsreel film on YouTube of the general decorating his troops. The soldiers stand at attention as he pins a ribbon on their chests and places a manly kiss on both cheeks. One tall, gawky young soldier awaits his turn. The general struggles a little in placing the ribbon. The young man smiles and says something. The general finally gets the decoration in place and gives the soldier a light and affectionate slap on his left cheek. There is no kiss. The young man is still smiling. He is Bernard de Lattre, the general’s only son. He was serving in Vietnam before his father arrived. He was killed in action several months after this was filmed.

At the end of his Vietnam year, de Lattre was diagnosed with cancer and returned to die in Paris in January 1952. De Gaulle, Eisenhower and Montgomery were among those present at his funeral. In his Indochina year he had needed the press to tell his story and make the case for France. This is where Graham Jenkins enters the story:

Fortunately for him, de Lattre found a famous accomplice in J, the correspondent of a British press agency. He was ready to sell himself to the devil, but Roi Jean provided him with a very tractable Lucifer who was excellent value for money. And so it was that this unknown, forgotten, disappeared character essentially forged de Lattre’s Indochinese legend. Consciously, but on a “give and take” basis. With what subtle hypocrisy!

Bodard covers pages talking of Jenkins and his journalistic practices—secretive and underhand and productive. His relationship with de Lattre is worthy of fiction:

In the General’s press conferences, J assumed the tone and appearance of a villain. He asked tough questions, but with a viciousness that almost always miraculously worked to de Lattre’s advantage. After the comedy of invective, they shake hands. All this is not too conspicuous. But, some days, J’s interrogations were the real, worst kind of nasty. It’s to prove his independence, to himself, to his colleagues and to Roi Jean. The latter was going mad. Once, in his fury, he didn’t “contain” himself. He marches on the Australian as if to hit him. J is even redder, screams even louder. In his broken antipodean voice, he growls, “If you touch me, I’ll smash your face in.” Immediately, the rage of the general gives way to amusement.

J often entertains him. Especially when he tells him straight out: “If you expect me to make good reports, you must give me good ‘scoops’, just to me. Otherwise I have no reason to help you. You’ve forgotten me for a week …”

De Lattre laughed: “I know you haven’t been happy with me for the last eight days. That’s obvious from your telegrams.”

De Lattre in Vietnam remade the fighting forces, tried to force greater support from the forgetful Paris governments, and sought the involvement of America in his cause. He needed the media to make his case and show that he was serious and successful where the others had failed. In the shadow of the Korean War he presented hope. De Lattre needed the newspapers and public opinion, while Jenkins needed his source:

Friendship between them, of course. But also well understood interests on both sides. The General knowingly favours J. He knows him to be honest in his perfidy. He sometimes reveals himself to him. He never does this for American news agencies of which he is not sure. As for the French agency, why support it automatically? In any case, it is or should be his. And a system of preference towards it would be frowned upon by the foreign journalists, who he needs so much. He is playing for France, of course, but even more so for the world.

J, for his part, explains:

“I don’t know if de Lattre will win the war. But he certainly won’t lose immediately, he’ll last long enough to be considered a ‘great captain’. In any case, we’ll have tragi-comics. And it can be sold on all markets, including the United States, since the State Department and the Pentagon are pro-French and pro-de Lattre on the subject of Indochina. I came to turn him into a colonialist ogre. But I realised that the best thing was to portray him as a great man, a champion of anti-communism.”

As Reuters correspondent, Jenkins had a worldwide audience. In March 1951 he set out the changed face of the Indochina war:

Meanwhile General de Lattre de Tassigny’s strong personality and iron discipline have produced little short of a miracle on the fighting efficiency of the French Union forces and injected in them a new determination to hold on … He has won respect and a sort of hero worship, which can come quickly to a strong leader in Asia.

In a 1981 television interview on Vietnam, Bodard, speaking in English, suggested that the public image of de Lattre the international press created in 1951 drew American interest towards the country: “And General de Lattre went to the States, and I think it was General de Lattre who brought the attention of America upon Vietnam. And I think that for Americans Vietnam becomes important since that visit.” It is the same argument he had earlier made in L’Aventure when talking of Jenkins’s leading role in creating the de Lattre mystique in the English-speaking countries:

This is how J became the locomotive of Roi Jean. He drags along all the correspondents, obliged by the laws of competition and the international climate, to follow in his footsteps. While giving himself the appearance of sometimes being his enemy, it was this J who was the real inventor of the golden legend—not too golden after all—of de Lattre in Indochina.

The pages Bodard has devoted to Jenkins in Saigon are an overlooked treasure of literature and biography. Jenkins later worked in Singapore before moving to Hong Kong, where he became owner and editor-in-chief of the Star, Hong Kong’s first tabloid newspaper, and finally publications officer for the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce. Wikipedia has also noticed him and his Hong Kong newspaper: “He was unashamedly racist, once quipping: ‘If [the Chinese] can’t speak bloody English then they’re not worth f***ing speaking to.’” It’s called tough love.

The Reuters correspondent Ernie Mendoza, who worked with Jenkins, remembered a “gruff man” who founded a remarkable newspaper: “Using his Chinese contacts, he scored with a string of exclusives on events on the mainland during Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution. His paper was essential reading for China-watching journalists and diplomats in Hong Kong.”

Graham Jenkins wanted to die in Hong Kong, and he did on March 3, 1997.