KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
Oct 25, 2018
by Thomas C. Fox
I write today from a fourth floor room at NCR’s midtown headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, the very room where I gathered 50 years ago with Robert Hoyt and his fledgling staff. I had just returned from two years in Vietnam, working with war victims and beginning my journalism career as NCR’s “Vietnam correspondent.” My purpose then was to “debrief” the NCR staff after witnessing the brutal war close-up as a volunteer with International Voluntary Services. (That debriefing ended up in the July 24, 1968, issue beneath the headline “Tom Fox Sums Up: How war — and the way we fight it — destroys a people.”)
My purpose now, emerging out of a three-year retirement, is to lead the company, focusing on successfully completing a much-needed $10 million endowment campaign. It’s embarrassingly called “The Tom Fox Fund to Sustain Independent Catholic Journalism.” (Note: All funds go to endowing NCR editorial work.)
Five decades back, a younger version of Fox saw the world very much in disarray. The Vietnam War was at a high point. The Tet Offensive had turned Vietnam on its head, ripping away a pretense the war was being won. A total of 16,592 U.S. soldiers perished in Vietnam in 1968; tens of thousands more Vietnamese were killed; hundreds of thousands more lost their homes and livelihoods. Our nation was bitterly divided. Family members wouldn’t speak to each other because of political differences. Turmoil grew in the wakes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert Kennedy’s deaths. Days of rioting were breaking out in Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and elsewhere.
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