Showtime recently announced that The First Lady series is cancelled.  Mercifully it only had one season. This will spare other former presidential wives from the historical malpractice visited upon the three women portrayed in the show by creator Aaron Cooley. It will, however, be a crushing disappointment for those waiting for the Jacqueline Kennedy and […] Read More

Everyone needs a mentor. Mine was Dirck Halstead. His was Robert Capa. Dirck never met Capa, but he was able to bid him farewell. Dirck Halstead and David Kennerly in Vietnam, 1972 Halstead had just graduated from high school in 1954 when he heard that photographer Robert Capa had been killed covering the Vietnam War. […] Read More

Kennerly’s Watergate Photo Gallery This is the 50th anniversary of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building. It led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. This image of Martha Mitchell was John F. Kennedy, Jr’s favorite political photo. I took it in 1970.  Martha was the wife of […] Read More

Fifty years ago today, May 1, 1972, a message reached me in Saigon that changed my life. It said I had just won the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Feature Photography. Here’s an edited version of the story as recounted in my book Shooter published in 1980. I got the call at 4 a.m. from […] Read More

Fifty years ago on March 9, 1972, I celebrated my 25th birthday in Saigon. It was an occasion I never thought I’d see. I arrived in Vietnam a year earlier, and during the ensuing months saw combat in Cambodia, the India-Pakistan War, and of course, Vietnam. There were so many close calls that by rights […] Read More

David Hume Kennerly’s address to the Commencement and SBS Convocation, 2021 graduating class of the School of Social Sciences & Behavioral Sciences, “The People College” at the University of Arizona, Tucson, December 17, 2021 What an amazing group! Congratulations to the graduating Class of 2021. You have survived and triumphed over our ongoing Covid nightmare, […] Read More

“First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Henry Lee’s eulogy honoring General George Washington could well have been written for General Colin Powell. Our paths didn’t cross in Vietnam where he pulled two tours, the first in 1962-63, and then in 1968. During that second deployment Major Colin […] Read More

September 11, 2001. I was in Washington, D.C. on an assignment for Newsweek. Just before 9 a.m. I tuned in to ABC’s Good Morning America. They were holding on a live shot of the North Tower of the World Trade Center where it appeared that an airplane had crashed into the building. It was smoking […] Read More

After word of the ship’s capture reached the president the administration tried to secure the release of the crew through diplomatic channels.  They sent messages through the Chinese who were allies of the Khmer Rouge. There was no reply, however, and some doubt that anyone, including the Chinese, really knew who was running the show […] Read More