Eddie Adams, Associated Press
By Richard Pyle, The Associated Press
South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong
captive with in Saigon, Vietnam on Feb. 1, 1968. The photo by New Kensington
native Eddie Adams won a Pultizer Prize in 1969. Adams died yesterday in New
York.
Mr. Adams, a native of New Kensington, died at his Manhattan home from
complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, said
his assistant, Jessica Stuart. Diagnosed last May, Mr. Adams quickly lost his
speech but remained alert and worked into his final days.
"Eddie Adams was an enormous talent and an inspiration to generations of AP
photographers and staffers. His courage and creativity left a mark that will
live forever," said AP President and CEO Tom Curley.
In addition to his photographs of 13 wars, Mr. Adams' images of politics,
fashion and show business appeared on countless magazine covers and in
newspapers around the world. His portraits of presidents ranged from Richard
Nixon to President Bush, and those of world figures included Pope John Paul II,
Deng Xiaoping, Anwar Sadat, Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev.
But fame -- instant, enduring and discomforting -- resulted from a single photo
taken Feb. 1, 1968, the second day of the communists' Tet Offensive, in the
embattled streets of Cholon, Saigon's Chinese quarter.
Drawn by gunfire, Mr. Adams and an NBC film crew watched South Vietnamese
soldiers bring a handcuffed Viet Cong captive to a street corner, where they
assumed he would be interrogated. Instead, South Vietnam's police chief, Lt.
Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, strode up, wordlessly drew a pistol and shot the man in
the head.
Mr. Adams caught the instant of death in a photo that made front pages
worldwide. It would become one of the Vietnam's War's most indelible images,
shocking the American public and used by critics to dispute official claims that
the war was being won.
In later years, Mr. Adams found himself so defined and haunted by the picture
that he would not display it at his studio. He also felt it unfairly maligned
Loan, who lived in Virginia after the war and died in 1998.
"The guy was a hero," Mr. Adams said, recalling Loan's explanation that the man
he executed was a Viet Cong captain, responsible for murdering the family of
Loan's closest aide a few hours earlier.
"Sometimes a picture can be misleading because it does not tell the whole
story," Mr. Adams said in an interview for a 1972 AP photo book. "I don't say
what he did was right, but he was fighting a war and he was up against some
pretty bad people."
Mr. Adams won a 1969 Pulitzer Prize for the Saigon execution picture, among the
more than 500 honors he received.
Born on June 12, 1933, in New Kensington, Mr. Adams began his photojournalism
career at the New Kensington Dispatch.
He was an usher at the former Dattola Theater in the Westmoreland County town
while in junior high school and one day wandered into the camera shop next door.
Shop owner Lou Cavaliere sold Mr. Adams a $24.95 Kodak camera on credit.
"I sold it to him for $2 a week, and as a joke I tell everybody that he missed
his last payment and he owed me $2 for about 35 years," Cavaliere, owner of Ken
Kamera, told The Pittsburgh Press in 1991.
Mr. Adams served as a Marine Corps combat photographer in the Korean War . He
worked for the AP from 1962 to 1972 and from 1976 to 1980, and with Time-Life,
Parade magazine and other publications.
A crafter of images, Mr. Adams also cultivated his own -- a prickly personality
with a studied flamboyance that included a black wardrobe, a neck scarf and a
wide-brimmed porkpie hat.
Mr. Adams is survived by his wife of 15 years, Alyssa, and a son; three children
by a previous marriage; his 100-year-old mother, Adelaide Adams, and four
sisters.
