WICN’s Inquiry

I recently spent the morning in Worcester, Massachusetts, in order to tape an interview about The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam. The interview is for an upcoming edition of Mark Lynch’s wide-ranging Inquiry program on WICN, the NPR affiliate in central Massachusetts. It was great to talk with Mark about the book and about some of the people in Worcester we both knew years ago at the Worcester Art Museum and Clark University.

Thanks also to Mark for sending me a citation for what may be the first mention of the Vietnam War in an American television-entertainment program. It was in an episode of The Twilight Zone, first broadcast September 27, 1963. In the episode, which was titled “In Praise of Pip,” the actor Jack Klugman (later famous as Oscar in TV’s The Odd Couple and as Quincy, M.E.) says,

“Pip is dying. In a place called South Vietnam. There isn’t even supposed to be a war going on there, but my son is dying. It’s to laugh. I swear, it’s to laugh.”

According to writer Marc Scott Zicree’s book The Twilight Zone Companion, “Very possibly, this marks the first mention of an American causality in Vietnam in any dramatic TV show, and it seems remarkable for its perceptiveness.” (p. 364).

Thanks again to Mark Lynch for some good conversation and for sending along that quite interesting piece of trivia. How ironic, indeed, that the Vietnam War first shows up in The Twilight Zone.