Pulitzer-Prize Winning Reporter Malcolm W. Browne Dies at 81

Malcolm W. Browne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for four decades of his career, which included covering the Vietnam War - and make one of the most memorable images of the conflict - and a lively second act, as a science that explains chemical weapons and describing the increase in the synthesis of body parts, died Monday in Hanover, NH

The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, said his wife, Le Lieu Browne.

Mr. Browne, who lived in Thetford Center, Vermont, Manhattan and has spent most of his career writing for the New York Times, which sent him to Argentina, Vietnam, Bosnia, Pakistan, where his curiosity the name has become a science writer at the end of 1970.

"My life is exceptional," Browne said in an interview in 1993. "It provides the widest variety of experiences. This, after all, why I became a journalist."

However, his career was somewhat of an accident.

Mr. Browne had worked as a chemist in New York in 1950 (one of his tasks: finding a substitute for gum, the main ingredient in chewing gum), when he was recruited to go to Korea in 1956. He drove a tank for a while, but the army has assigned later to write for The Stars and Stripes, a decision he said it was his idea, not hers.

After being discharged, Mr. Browne found a job in Baltimore with The Associated Press. Less than a year later, in 1961, the AP Saigon made its head office.

Mr. Browne was one of the journalists who have become more skeptical of American efforts to support the government of Saigon.

Neil Sheehan, who joined The Times, after serving as Saigon bureau chief of United Press International, said Tuesday that Mr. Browne was a "fierce competitor", but also a friend. Mr. Browne often wore a belt buckle of gold, and wearing a money belt so you should have cash "to get out of a difficult situation."

"But," said Mr. Sheehan: "I do not think I've ever had to use."

While journalists in Vietnam often clashed with U.S. officials, Mr. Browne later identified Henry Cabot Lodge, who arrived in 1963 as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam as "more honest than most U.S. officials I had known. "

E 'was that Mr. Lodge said Browne, who had played an important role in raising awareness of the problems in Vietnam at the highest levels at the White House through a photograph taken in 1963.

When a Buddhist Monaco was set on fire in public in the same year in protest at the government of South Vietnam, Mr. Browne was the only journalist there, and captured the stunning moment in a photograph.

Several studies, including The Times, decided not to run the disturbing image, but Mr. Lodge said he had seen a copy on the desk of President John F. Kennedy.

In 1964, while working for the AP, Mr. Browne shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reports David Halberstam, who covered the war for The Times.

Mr. Browne returned to the U.S. and then joined the Times, which eventually sent to Vietnam. Then go find the sources that had developed in the forefront refuted optimistic accounts of the government of Saigon.

"A spokesman for the South Vietnamese Army, said in an afternoon press conference in Saigon that the elements formed by the soldiers in the air, supported by tanks, entered Quangtri city early yesterday morning," he wrote in a report in 1972. "However, authoritative sources in the reception said that was not true."

Browne also worked for a time in South America, Europe, Southeast Asia and elsewhere before he began writing about science. He studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College.

Their tasks vary widely: the dangers posed by toxic waste drop the space shuttle Challenger, an effort to build a robot flying pterosaur, an effort to rid the trash Antarctica accumulate there.

He left the Times in 1980 to work for Discover magazine, but returned a few years later and continued to write science.

In 2000, after retiring to Vermont, Mr. Browne wrote an essay for The Times the dual nature of his journalistic career.

"After 'time, a news writer may begin to feel a sort of monotony in most of the events that pass as news," he wrote. "When this happens the lucky few of us to discover that in science, almost unique among human activities, there is always something new under the sun."