Beverly Deepe Keever

She has received the University of Hawai`i Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching, numerous freedom-of-information awards and awards from the alumni associations of two of her alma maters, the University of Nebraska College of Journalism and Mass Communications and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In March 2015 she was inducted into the Marian Andersen Nebraska Women Journalists' Hall of Fame, housed in Andersen Hall of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska Lincoln campus. From May through September 12, 2015 the Newseum, blocks from the White House in Washington, included in its "Reporting Vietnam" exhibit her press card issued through the Christian Science Monitor and a North Vietnamese shovel for digging foxholes given to her by fellow correspondents upon her departure from Saigon and a description of her journalistic contributions.

Her 1968 coverage of the embattled Khe Sanh Combat Base was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting by the Christian Science Monitor. Another of her 1968 dispatches was selected by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in its centennial year as one of the 50 great stories by its alumni. In 2001, she was one of some four dozen combat correspondents whose work was selected for an exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. designed to trace 148 years of war reporting starting with the Crimean conflict of 1853. Fourteen years later, her artifacts and journalistic career were displayed and discussed in the "Reporting Vietnam" exhibit featured at the Newseum through September 2015.

She was among the 467 women correspondents accredited by the U.S. Military command from 1965 to 1973, the years when U.S. combat units arrived and when they departed; of those 467, 267 were American. Scholars assess that with more women covering the Vietnam War than any previous U.S. conflict, it was "a turning point—to some extent a watershed—for American women as war correspondents" and in doing so, "they staked out a lasting place for their gender on the landscape of war.";

By 1965 with the introduction of American combat troops and squadrons of U.S. aircraft and helicopters, she trudged along soup-y rice paddies and head-high grasses to report on American and South Vietnam fighters, who often had difficulty detecting friendly folk from hide-and-seek guerrillas.

The 27-year-old Beverly Deepe arrived in South Vietnam in early 1962 just as President John Kennedy had initiated a new phase of an anti-communist campaign and American helicopter units and provincial advisors were unpacking. With this uptick in newsworthiness, she worked as a free-lancer without a regular paycheck, relying on her portable typewriter to write dispatches airmailed on speculation to Associated Press Newsfeatures and other media outlets. Upon her arrival, she was the sole female correspondent among the eight resident Western correspondents. When she departed Vietnam after seven years of continuous reporting, she had outlasted all of them. During that long tenure, she acquired an institutional knowledge and array of valuable local sources that few other Americans had, giving her a unique plus often lipsticked perspective.

To fulfill her childhood fantasy, in 1961—a dozen years after Mao Tse-tung's army transformed the world's most populous country and a decade before the United States established diplomatic relations with it, she wrote a Ship-side View of Drab Shanghai from a Polish passenger-carrying steamer. 52 years later, she again visited Shanghai and described the dazzling changes that had transformed it with the world's tallest sky-huggers being constructed on marshland where she had seen cows grazing a half century earlier and she noted its determined push toward a "de—Americanized" world economy.

She then entered the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, double majoring in journalism and political science, graduating in 1957 as Phi Beta Kappa for scholarship and Mortar Board for leadership. She went on to attend Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, graduating in 1958 with honors.

Beverly Deepe Keever (born June 1, 1935) is an American journalist, Vietnam War correspondent, author and professor emerita of journalism and communications.

Beverly Deepe was born during the worst of the dust-bowl days in 1935 to Doris Widler Deepe and Martin Deepe as they struggled on his father's heavily mortgaged farm. At the Coon Ridge country school that her father had attended a generation earlier, the youngster was mesmerized upon reading Pearl Buck's Good Earth, which sparked her childhood dream of visiting China.

She also researched and wrote News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb. Excerpts from and adaptations of this book have been published in two award-winning cover articles in Honolulu's alternative weekly and on global web sites. She is also a co-editor of U.S. News Coverage of Racial Minorities: A Sourcebook, 1934-1996, for which she conceptualized with others the prospectus of the volume; made arrangements with the publisher; served, in effect, as the managing editor coordinating the writing of 11 other scholars; contributed two chapters and co-authored two others.