David Laulicht, 'the professor'

Veteran Reuters journalist John Chadwick, in a letter recently published by The Baron about the death of Cy Fox, wrote: “One of the worst things about working for an international organisation like Reuters is that it comes to an end. You finally lose all contact with friends and colleagues once you’ve left the firm.”

Of course, one doesn’t lose touch with all colleagues, thanks to The Baron’s website and such events as the Baron’s Bash.

But sometimes years go by before one receives news of former friends, often in the shape of an obituary.

I only just learned that David Laulicht (photo), a journalist for Reuters from 1966 to 1977 before heading the press department of Amnesty International for about a decade and who was Reuters’ last bureau chief in Saigon before it fell in 1975, had died in Britain - ten years ago this month!

I received a message from Harry Keyishian, Professor Emeritus of English at Farleigh Dickenson University in Madison, New Jersey, USA, a close friend of David’s stretching back to their years together as students at Forest Hills High School, and later at Queens College in New York. Keyishian, who serves on the Editorial board of Farleigh Dickenson University Press after having directed it from 1977-2017, was curious to know about David’s time in South Vietnam where he was bureau chief in 1974-1975.

I was sent to Saigon to take over from David two days before Saigon fell on 30 April 1975 because Reuters felt that my French passport would be better protection than David’s American nationality. Britons Pat Massey and Jeremy Toye were also withdrawn from Saigon at the same time and for the same reasons.

I told Harry that I only overlapped with David in Saigon for a single highly memorable day, but that I had known him well when we worked together in the Reuters Paris bureau in the early 1970. David’s own academic background (he earned an MA at the University of Michigan but later dropped out of a doctoral programme) and the fact that he chewed endlessly on his pipe, had then earned him the nickname of “the professor”.

I do remember that David’s last hurried instructions to me, despite of, or perhaps because of, the huge human drama developing around us, were to try to take the best care possible of the very loyal and long serving local Vietnamese staff members whose lives were to undergo dramatic change. ■