A Triangle Comes Full Circle

He had become fascinated with the country while studying in Washington at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1952. He decided to make it the subject of his dissertation.

Vietnam was a remote and exotic land caught up in the titanic struggle of the Cold War. It was a place where some of the fighting was still done with poison darts and blowguns, Fall would report, and where France was losing its battle with the communists.

Fall made his first research trip to Vietnam in 1953 and another in 1957. He went to Thailand, Laos and briefly back to Vietnam in 1959. He published "Street Without Joy" -- named after the same guerrilla-infested strip north of Hue where he would later be killed -- in 1961.

That same year, he and his family moved to Cambodia for six months. While there, Fall asked for and was granted permission to visit North Vietnam. He stayed for two weeks and landed rare interviews with Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong.

Back home in 1963, Fall found that he had become a sensation. He was interviewed on network TV, and wrote, lectured and taught incessantly. And he irritated the State Department, which considered him to be a "neutralist, crypto-communist," his wife learned later.

Dorothy moved the family into the house in Washington's Forest Hills neighborhood that would be her home for the next 40 years, and Bernard's for the next three.

It was airy and modern, and had a huge stone fireplace that was open on two sides. Bernard would set up his office in the front of the basement; Dorothy would take the back for her art.

But at that moment in 1963, Bernard got sick. He developed a rare disorder that was strangling his kidneys and colon with fibrous tissue. He wound up in the hospital for two months, and one of his kidneys had to be removed.

It was a hard time for the Falls, made worse by the obvious surveillance of the FBI, which was stationed outside the house observing the family's mundane comings and goings.

While the FBI watched, U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened, the national debate over the war became poisonous and Fall's profile grew.

Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and George McGovern came to visit, along with CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and journalists Tom Wicker, Stanley Karnow and David Halberstam.

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