Born to wealthy bluebloods William B. Emerson and Ruth Shaw Emerson, Gloria Emerson, who grew to 6' tall, spent some of her youth in Saigon. It was there that she first began to write for the newspapers, freelancing for
The New York Times in 1956. Subsequently tiring of writing only about fashion, she returned to America and quit to get married. Returning in 1964 to the
Times, she worked in the paper's London and Paris bureaus until she convinced the paper, as she said in the obituary she wrote for herself, "that she be sent to Vietnam because she had been in that country in 1956 and wanted to go back to write about the Vietnamese people and the immense unhappy changes in their lives, not a subject widely covered by the huge press corps who were preoccupied with covering the military story."
Among her first reports for
The New York Times, Emerson exposed false "body counts" and "unearned commendations" to field-grade officers and the use of hard drugs by American soldiers. She also reported on the suffering of the Vietnamese people.
In her self-written obituary, which reporters at the
Times discovered on the day she died, Emerson described the plaudits that came her way:
Her dispatches from Vietnam won a George Polk Award for excellence in foreign reporting, and, later, a Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications. Her nonfiction book on the war, Winners & Losers (Random House, 1977), won a National Book Award in 1978 but she described it as "too huge and somewhat messy". Its subject was the effects of the conflict on some Americans, or "an absence of the effect", as she once said.
One of the most quoted parts of the book was Emerson's condemnation of "killing at a distance":
Americans cannot perceive ... even the most decent among us ... the suffering caused by the United States air war in Indochina and how huge are the graveyards we have created there. To a reporter recently returned from Vietnam, it often seems that much of our fury and fear is reserved for busing, abortion, mugging, and liberation of some kind. ... As Anthony Lewis once wrote, our military technology is so advanced that we kill at a distance and insulate our consciences by the remoteness of the killing.
John Lennon and the anti-war movement
In December 1969, Emerson conducted a very contentious interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Apple Records headquarters in London, during which she disputed the effectiveness of Lennon and Ono's anti-war campaign, undertaken at great professional and financial cost to the Lennons. Her abrupt manner and skeptical approach enraged Lennon. Ironically, given Emerson's own anti-establishment positions, the interview became famous as an example of the establishment press resistance to the Lennons' peace movement. The interview was prominently featured in the 1988 documentary
John Lennon and the 2006 movie
The U.S. vs. John Lennon.
Emerson said at the time...and repeated decades later...that she believed the Beatles and Lennon "could have stopped the war" had they performed for U.S. troops in Vietnam.