Beverly Deepe Keever Collection

Beverly Deepe Keever was a war correspondent and Journalism professor at University of Hawaii-Manoa. She is best known for her work from 1962-1968 as a war correspondent in Vietnam and for her later academic research and advocacy for open government.

Keever grew up in rural Nebraska. A dedicated student, she received her BA in journalism from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1957 and earned a MS in journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1958. From there, she worked under Samuel Lubell in New York City for two years, where she learned his famous interview techniques and his strategies for reporting on and predicting elections.

When plans to tour Asia with her graduate school friends in 1961 fell through, Keever decided to travel alone. She travelled through Japan, Korea, China, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, and Brunei, writing articles for the Associated Press as she went. She first set foot in Vietnam on February 14, 1962 with the tools of her trade: a camera and a typewriter. She intended South Vietnam to be a quick two-week tourist stop, but after the war began to escalate, Keever’s eagerness to follow a story kept her rooted in Vietnam for seven years. During those years, she built a life and a reputation for herself as the longest continuous war correspondent during the Vietnam War. Beginning as a freelance reporter, she learned about the war through the general population rather than just through the lens of governments and military actions. Though her gender created some difficulties male reporters did not face, it also gave her writing a unique perspective.

Her coverage of the Vietnam War was published in the New York Herald Tribune, Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, The Economist, London Daily, North American Newspaper Alliance, Sunday Express, San Francisco Examiner Chronicle, and the Pittsburgh Gazette. Her reporting about the Khe San outpost for the Christian Science Monitor earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1969.

On February 14, 1969 –seven years from the day she arrived in Vietnam– Beverly Deepe married Chuck Keever in Belvidere, Nebraska. Keever briefly spent time writing for the Capitol Hill News Service and covering US politics. The couple moved to Hawaii in 1979, where Beverly pursued two graduate degrees at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. She first earned her Masters in Library and Information Science and then her PhD in American Studies. Keever’s PhD thesis was later reworked into her first book, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb, which was published in 2004. The book details how the US government and the New York Times worked to hide the extent and effect of nuclear testing in the Pacific from the American public.

Keever taught journalism and communications at the University of Hawaii for 29 years before becoming professor emeritus. Keever’s focus during her academic years was on open government and how journalists have a responsibility to advocate for access to government documents. Keever wrote many guides for students and journalists on how to do government research, especially in the state of Hawaii, as well as testifying in government hearings and participating in protests for open government.

After her retirement in 2008, she continued to write. Forty years after leaving Vietnam, Keever saw echoes of the Vietnam War in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She began her memoir of war reporting in hopes that her experiences in Vietnam might help others personally understand events in the Middle East. Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of War Reporting, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2013, chronicles the major events of the war between 1962-1969, as well as her interactions with farmers and soldiers.