Early Adams joined the
United States Marine Corps in 1951, during the
Korean War as a
combat photographer. during the early part of the
Tet Offensive. Adams won the 1969
Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a
World Press Photo award for the photograph. Writer and critic David D. Perlmutter states that "no film footage did as much damage as
AP photographer Eddie Adams's
35mm shot taken on a Saigon street ... When people talk or write about [the Tet Offensive] at least a sentence is devoted (often with an illustration) to the Eddie Adams picture". Anticipating the effect of Adams's photograph, an attempt at balance was sought by editors at
The New York Times. In his memoirs,
John G. Morris recalls that assistant managing editor
Theodore M. Bernstein "determined that the brutality manifested by America's ally be put into perspective, agreed to run the Adams picture large, but offset with a picture of a child slain by Vietcong, which conveniently came through from AP at about the same time." Adams' picture, however, retained a more lasting infamy.
Max Hastings, writing in 2018, accused Lém of murdering Colonel Nguyen Tuân, his wife, six children, and 80-year-old mother; he also wrote that American historian
Ed Moise "is convinced that the entire story of Lém murdering the Tuân family is a post-war invention" and that "The truth will never be known". In
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003),
Susan Sontag was disturbed by what she saw as Loan's staging of the execution in the street for journalists' photographs. She wrote that "he would not have carried out the
summary execution there had they [journalists] not been available to witness it" and positioned himself in profile view with the prisoner facing the cameras. However, Donald Winslow of
The New York Times quoted Adams as having described the image as a "reflex picture" and "wasn't certain of what he'd photographed until the film was developed". Furthermore, Winslow noted that Adams "wanted me to understand that 'Saigon Execution' was not his most important picture and that he did not want his obituary to begin, 'Eddie Adams, the photographer best known for his iconic Vietnam photograph "Saigon Execution. On Loan and his photograph, Adams wrote in
Time in 1998: Loan later relocated to the United States, and in 1978, there was an unsuccessful attempt to rescind his
permanent residence status (green card). On the television show
War Stories with Oliver North Adams referred to Loan as "a goddamned hero!" He once said, "I would have rather been known more for the series of photographs I shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to Thailand in a 30-foot boat, only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines." The photographs, and accompanying reports, helped persuade then President
Jimmy Carter to grant asylum to the nearly 200,000
Vietnamese boat people. He won the
Robert Capa Gold Medal from the
Overseas Press Club in 1977 for this series of photographs in his photo-essay, "
Boat of No Smiles" (published by AP). Adams remarked, "It did some good and nobody got hurt". On October 22, 2009,
Swann Galleries auctioned a print of Adams' photo of Loan and Lém. Printed during the 1980s, it had been a gift to Adams's son. It sold for $43,200. The sole survivor of Lém's alleged killing of Tuan's family was
Huan Nguyen; aged nine at the time, he was shot twice during the attack that killed his family and stayed with his mother for two hours as she bled to death. In 2019, he became the highest ranking Vietnamese American officer in the U.S. military when he was promoted to the rank of
rear admiral in the
United States Navy.
Later Adams started a photojournalism workshop, The Eddie Adams Workshop (also known as the Barnstorm) in 1988. It reached its thirtieth year in 2017.
Awards Along with the Pulitzer, Adams received more than 500 awards, including the
George Polk Award for News Photography in 1968, 1977 and 1978,
World Press Photo awards on 14 occasions, and numerous awards from the
National Press Photographers Association,
Sigma Delta Chi,
Overseas Press Club, and many other organizations. ==Personal life==