http://homepage.newschool.edu/~wilder/htmlfiles/Coffeetablewar.html....
The Collection
The minute I got home I sat on the floor with the box and took inventory with archeologicalcare. Twenty-eight LIFE magazines, soon being eagerly passed around the Superbowl guests, several of them vets. One of them didn’t watch a minute of the game over the next two hours as he pored over issue after issue. It was a pretty heavy duty collection, concentrated from between 1966 and 1968 and including some of the finest combat photography of Henry Huet, Tim Page, David Douglas Duncan, and Larry Burrows.
The collection also included a copy of Newsweek with a fiery Khe Sanh cover, a New York Times "Week in Review" from 2/21/65 with extensive coverage of Vietnam issues, a miscellaneous gung ho magazine called Vietnam in Pictures that was the print equivalent of The Green Berets, a newspaper clipping of the first boy in their town to die in Vietnam,
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More compelling were the letters. Twenty-three from the young marine to his parents, half a dozen from his wife to his parents, several letters from the mother of the marine that she had sent to him in Vietnam and been stamped "return to sender," and even one letter from the mother to President Lyndon Johnson.
It was clear that the contents of this box had belonged to the mother. They had been carefully chosen and saved. Why had she thrown them away? Or maybe she had died and someone else had tossed them. But who? Why would anyone throw away the letters from a war?
....
New Managing Editor Ralph Graves had the idea of doing a story on all of the American dead killed in one week, an idea he knew would be difficult to get past Hedley Donovan. They chose the week May 28 – June 3, 1969, and dispatched stringers and correspondents to get in touch with all 242 families and do a photo round-up. Donovan was not to know of the project until a basic layout was completed. Collecting the photographs was filled with "heartbreaking ironies," but only about twenty families wanted nothing to do with the idea.
When Donovan was finally called in to see the preliminary pages and copy, he took a long time reviewing the material, finally saying to Graves "All right. Thank you." And with those words Donovan both changed LIFE’s editorial policy toward the war and sanctioned an unforgettable issue of the magazine, with page after page of yearbook size pictures – thirteen pages in all – of boys from across the U.S. who had died in a single week in Vietnam.
more....
much more....
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