Alumna Dorothy Fall to visit SU Bookstore on Tuesday to sign copies of her biographical book on her husband, ‘Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier Scholar’

Alumna Dorothy Fall to visit SU Bookstore on Tuesday to sign copies of her biographical book on her husband, ‘Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier Scholar’September 21, 2007Kelly Homan Rodoskikahoman@syr.edu

Syracuse University alumna Dorothy Winer Fall ’52 will visit the SU Bookstore on Tuesday, Sept. 25, from noon-2 p.m. to sign copies of her 2006 biographical book of her husband, “Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier Scholar” (Potomac Books).

The public is invited to attend the book signing; parking is available in the University’s visitor pay lots. Books will be available for purchase.

Dorothy Fall, a resident of Washington, D.C., and an artist and graphic designer, wrote the memoir of her husband because she feels it is essential that his story be told. Bernard Fall G’52, Ph.D. ’55 was many things — a scholar, historian, journalist, humanitarian, an expert on Indochina and noted authority on Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s who warned of the U.S.’s looming failure in Vietnam. He was killed there in 1967 while accompanying a platoon of U.S. Marines on patrol. The book draws on 30 years of interviews that Dorothy Fall conducted in the United States, France and Vietnam, as well as her husband’s correspondence, autobiographical writings, his notes written in Vietnam and official U.S. government files.

Bernard Fall, a native of Austria, moved to France as a young child. He lost both of his parents during the Holocaust, and joined the French Resistance and later the French Army. He served as an analyst for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and began his university studies in Europe. He came to the United States in 1950 on a Fulbright Scholarship and became interested in Indochina. He received master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He made his first trip to Vietnam in 1953, traveling with the French Army. He returned to the United States and became a professor at Howard University, returning to Indochina five more times to study the developments firsthand. He studied the development of communism in Southeast Asia, and wrote extensive articles and books detailing his analysis of the situation in Vietnam, including “Street Without Joy” (1961).

Dorothy Fall was the designer and deputy art director of the U.S. Information Agency’s Russian language magazine, AMERIKA Illustrated, from 1956-80. She opened her own firm, Fall Design Communications, with clients such as the National Air and Space Museum and Voice of America.

She is a painter who has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. In 2000, she curated an exhibit of works by 14 American artists at the Hanoi Fine Arts College in Vietnam. She also had designed the covers for most of her husband’s books and selected works for the volume “Last Reflections on a War: Bernard B. Fall’s Last Comments on Vietnam” (1967), for which she wrote the preface.

For more information about the event, contact the Office of Alumni Relations at 443-1795.