SCHELL, Jonathan Edward

(b. 21 August 1943 in New York City), columnist for the New Yorker whose detailed descriptions of the systematic annihilation of a Vietnamese village and U.S. military criteria for identifying Vietcong raised public awareness of the irrationality of U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Schell is one of two sons of Orville H. and Marjorie Bertha S. Schell. He attended the Dalton School and the Putney School. Schell graduated from Harvard University with honors with a B.A. in 1965, and then studied Japanese in an intensive, one-year course at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. He then enrolled in graduate study in Far Eastern history at Harvard in 1967.

Schell's second book, The Military Half, is dedicated to his brother Orvill, who, "against everybody's better judgment, suddenly dropped out of his junior year in college to set out for the Far East as third cook—or vegetable peeler—on a Norwegian dynamite freighter," which set the tone for many impulsive trips East they both made since. However erratic his inspiration to travel East, Schell developed a reputation for tenacity in consistently describing the Vietnam War in such a way as to characterize U.S. intervention as inane and arbitrary.

At the age of twenty-four, Schell published The Village of Ben Suc (1967), the story of the January 1967 evacuation and leveling of a Vietnamese village thirty miles north of Saigon. The village was an instrumental part of a forty-square-mile jungle "iron triangle" stronghold of the Vietcong. Schell flew with the first sixty helicopters and witnessed the invasion, the evacuation of 3,500 Vietnamese civilians, and the annihilation of the village. John Dillon of the Christian Science Monitor aptly explained the source of power in Schell's writing style, "(Schell) lets the events speak." In relentless, un-complicated description Schell illustrated the nature of the destruction. By using simple observations and by pointing out the contradictions in American assumptions about Vietnamese culture and life, he illustrated the U.S. military's ignorance of guerrilla warfare.

The power of Schell's straightforward writing style is further manifested in The Military Half (1968), which originally appeared in serial form in the New Yorker, and was introduced as a book "about what is happening in South Vietnam." Schell limited his observations to the criteria used by the U.S. military to identify the enemy and the extent of destruction of a specific area in South Vietnam. Schell believed that, in a democracy, everyone participates in the decisions; therefore, everyone should be informed immediately. He wrote, "All of us must share the responsibility for this war." He hoped that by recording what he witnessed, "… it would help us all to understand better what we are doing."

Beginning in January 1969, Schell contributed some of his most persuasive editorials about Vietnam and the Nixon administration to the "Notes and Comment" section of the New Yorker. Schell addressed a lag in the underlying political assumptions of presidential administrations dating back to President John F. Kennedy, pointing out that the containment theories of the post–World War II era were driving U.S. policy in Vietnam. The United States, he said, was more interested in its international image or credibility within the context of the nuclear age than it was in any honest effort to save Vietnam from oppression or promote democracy. In the early 1970s Schell observed that U.S. administrations favored credibility—"the image of the truth"—over candor. He said they "referred not to anything tangible but to an image: an image of vast national strength and of unwavering determination to use that strength in world affairs." Obsolescent assumptions, coupled with the "domino theory," which described the potential chain reaction of toppling small governments by Communism, were the root causes of the destruction of the very country that Americans professed to be rescuing. Schell added that the existence of a South Vietnamese government depended solely upon U.S. support, and that the South lacked the support of the people. He wrote that, while policymakers warned that the South would fall within a month of a U.S. withdrawal, it had already succumbed.

Schell claimed that every aspect of American life in the 1960s had been consumed by the escalation of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson's so-called guns and butter proposals had drained social programs of funding in favor of the war effort. Watergate, the antiwar demonstrations, campus unrest, war propaganda, and the intimidation of the American press posed direct threats to the U.S. Constitution and the republic. Schell was part of a generation and subculture whose assumptions were informed by a televised popular culture. In addition, the precursors of unscripted television—nightly broadcasts of the Vietnam War—only compounded the effects of the daily threat of nuclear destruction that baby boomers had grown up with. The promises and hopes generated by World War II victories and subsequent social programs to rebuild U.S. society were crushed during the most vulnerable years of adolescence for baby boomers. The betrayal of the public trust, the assassination of a president, and a series of drug-and alcohol-induced deaths of their popular heroes had eroded the confidence of their generation.

Bearing those orientations in mind, Schell's ability to constrain his reporting to reasonable observation was remarkable. He did not conceal the fact that he believed the Vietnam War was a mistake and morally wrong, but neither did he entertain sensationalism or accusations in order to make his point. There was no need. The gruesome nature of the war, the paradoxes faced by U.S. troops and society in general, and the massive contradictions between what the establishment espoused and what it actually did furnished him with ample material. In the preface to Schell's Observing the Nixon Years, William Shawn wrote in 1988, "What to me is most characteristic of Schell's writing is the unexpectedness of his turn of thought. He is constantly saying what has not been said before."

Schell was awarded the National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Sciences award in literature in 1973. His book The Fate of the Earth garnered the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Prize nomination, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1982. He wrote for the New Yorker from 1967 to 1988, and became a staff writer for Newsday and NY Newsday beginning in 1990. In 1989 Schell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1990 a MacArthur Foundation Grant for Writing on Peace and Security. Schell has taught at Princeton University, the New York University School of Journalism, Emory University, and Wesleyan University. A life-long resident of New York City, he lives with his wife Elspeth and their three children.

Biographical information is found in Schell's own works, The Village of Ben Suc (1967), The Military Half: An Account of the Destruction of Quang Ngai and Quang Tin (1968), The Time of Illusion, an Historical and Reflective Account of the Nixon Era (1976), and Observing the Nixon Years: "Notes and Comment" from the New Yorker on the Vietnam War and the Watergate Crisis, 1969–1975 (1989). Articles about Schell and his work include those in: Time (17 Nov. 1967), the Christian Science Monitor (2 Dec. 1967), the National Review (25 Mar. 1969), Newsweek (12 Jan. 1976), the Christian Science Monitor (9 Mar. 1976), the New Republic (28 Apr. 1982), and the National Review (22 July 1988).

Leri M. Thomas