J O H N ' S    J O U R N A L I S M 1 5 0 t h    A N N I V E R S A R Y    O F    T H E    A P by John Connolly for the Irish Times, September 1998 Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan is a famous man, yet few people actually know his name. The general is one of only a handful of 20th century figures immortalised by a single photographic image, a picture that appears to define his essence by catching him in the performance of a single, life-altering act, his reputation sealed forever after by it like a fly in amber. On February 1st, 1968, the general, who was then the Vietnamese national police chief, summarily executed a suspected Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. He did so in front of Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams, who created from that moment one of the war's defining images of man's inhumanity to man. Except Adams, looking casually rumpled in a black DKNY jacket, his silver ponytail snaking from under a black fedora, doesn't see it quite that way. "A lot of people condemn the general for executing this man, but I defend the general," he says, speaking at a bookstore close by Rockefeller Center, where AP's headquarters is based. "He may have killed this guy, but it was a war. When this guy was grabbed, it was out of the second storey of a building during a gunfight. People die in wars. This is a bad guy, this is a good guy. If you were in the general's position, would you shoot him?" Then he adds, quietly and unexpectedly: "I take responsibility for destroying the general's life with that picture, and that's about all I've got to say." The reason for Adams's introspection, and a rare discussion of an image which still resonates for him decades later ("It's not worth talking about how it was taken," he remarks sharply at one point, curtailing further questioning.) is the publication of a collection of photographs to mark the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the Associated Press news agency. Founded in 1838, AP now has 3,000 staff, among them 300 photographers, and produces 20 million words of reportage ever day. The agency is so omnipresent that Gandhi once remarked: "When I get to the Hereafter and stand at the Golden Gate, the first person I shall meet will be a correspondent of the Associated Press." From a library of several million images, the editors have chosen just 180, among them some of the most memorable in newspaper history. "A good picture can be blurred, totally out of focus, with bad composition," says Adams. "But when you look at it and it does something to you, then it's a good picture. It's a great picture when it feels like someone shoved a fist in your chest, grabbed your heart, and twisted it." And so we have Richard Nixon, awkward and doomed, caught checking his wrist watch while shaking hands with well-wishers; Joe Rosenthal's disputed image of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima in 1945; Fire Captain Chris Fields carrying the body of one-year-old Baylee Almon from the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing; and "Nick" Ut's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc, her skin burning after US planes mistakenly napalmed Vietnamese civilians. "When he realised the pain she was in, Ut stopped taking pictures and brought her to a hospital," recalls Vincent Alabiso, AP's executive photo editor and one of the editor's of the collection. "He went back 25 years later and took a photo of her in Canada, where she now lives. She remains badly scarred physically from the attack and the picture was difficult for her at first, but its importance helped her to come to terms with what happened. At the inauguration of the Vietnam memorial, she ended up forgiving the captain who gave the order to bomb." But there is a lighter side too to the collection, wonderful images of Marilyn Monroe, Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Marty Lederhandler's surreal photo of 10 sidewalk Santas helping an accident victim on a street in uptown New York. "Everyone was doing something," says Lederhandler. "Some Santas were moving traffic along, others were keeping people back. They managed to revive the gentleman and he woke up to find seven Santas looking at him. 'Where am I?' he said. 'The North Pole?' Lederhandler is the AP's longest-serving active staffer with 62 years of service. He was with the 4th Infantry Division during the Normandy landings in 1944. "The photographic unit was given carrier pigeons, so I went on to the beaches with a hat, a life preserver, and two pigeons in a box on my back," he remembers. "The pigeons would race from Calais to Dover and, hopefully, get the pictures to London on the same day, but they could only carry 10 exposures of film. The invasion was delayed by a day, but what they didn't tell me was that you can't keep a pigeon cooped up for more than three days. I took 10 pictures very quickly in the landing craft, put the film in the aluminium tube attached to the pigeon, then threw the pigeon up in the air, which I shouldn't have done. He went straight down and hit the water." Eventually, the stunned pigeon became airborne and Lederhandler didn't think about the pictures again until a German command post was captured. There, on the front page of a Nazi newspaper, were his pictures, with a caption crediting Lederhandler and his unit, all taken from the captured pigeon. Lederhandler survived the war, but five AP correspondents did not, among them Joseph Morton who was executed at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria after he was captured while covering a US intelligence mission in Slovakia. In total, 23 AP journalists have lost their lives covering stories for the agency, including Mark Kellogg, who died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn while covering Custer's campaign. His last dispatch read: "By this reaches you we would have met and fought the red devils, with what result remains to be seen. I go with Custer and will be there at the death." Despite AP's achievements, the photographers are not unaware of the sometimes intrusive nature of what they do. "I do feel uncomfortable prying at times," says Kathy Willens, who has worked for AP since 1976 and once used a 1200 mm lens (a 600 mm lens with a 600 mm extension) to take a long distance photograph of then-president George Bush fishing. "There have been assignments when I have been looking through fences with long lenses and it makes me pretty uncomfortable. But I have to do it. It's an assignment." The consequences of his actions, and the conflict which can arise between the photographer's obligation to his editors and to the subjects he is called upon to photograph, are subjects about which Eddie Adams has thought long and hard. "One of the things photographers have to do is to get a head shot of murder victims from their relatives," he says, when the subject of intrusion is raised. "I remember being in the Germantown section of Philadelphia once. A little boy, say eight years old, lived in a house there and in this other house lived a little girl, six years old. The little boy murdered the little girl and shoved her body in the basement. I was on the night shift and was told to get photographs of these two children. "So I got to the street and I followed this glassy-eyed man to the girl's house. He went up and knocked on the door, and a woman answered. This turned out to be the father of the little boy and the mother of the little girl. He told her, 'I'm sorry.' She said, 'It's your loss as well as mine', and they both broke down. "I went back to the office and told them there was nobody home. There are times, and moments, when you just leave them alone."