The Press: Old Orient Hand

The best daily newspaper in Thailand is edited by a wiry, wearily patient American named Darrell Berrigan. An expatriate newsman and longtime resident of Bangkok. Berrigan got his newspaper last year through an orientally inscrutable tactic—he wrote a magazine article charging that Thailand’s chief cop, General Phao Sriyanond, was also Thailand’s biggest opium smuggler. General Phao was impressed. With characteristic Thai logic, he apparently reasoned that any newsman intimate enough with the country’s boatmen, taxi drivers, prostitutes and businessmen to put together such a report would make an ideal editor. Phao hired Berrigan to edit his newly founded Bangkok World—printed in English, because English is the second tongue of educated Thais and self-respecting Thai strongmen.

Phao was unceremoniously kicked out of the country in 1957. But before he left, he thoughtfully put aside funds—things are like that in Thailand—for Berrigan to keep going until he could scrape together enough money to buy control of the World for himself. Today Berrigan is such a national institution that diplomats phone him openly for guidance, and Thai officials consult him on politics— foreign and domestic. What is more, by his wit and wits, Editor Berrigan has turned his World into one of the genuinely cultured pearls of the East.

Ploy & Counterploy. Publishing an English-language paper in Thailand, Berrigan frequently has to carry the World, Atlas-like, on his back. His 43 Thai compositors handset every word of the ten-page paper, and since they speak no English, regularly speckle the World with gaudy and sometimes bawdy typos. His general manager is a converted taxi driver; his star photographer was once his houseboy. Worst of all. most of Berrigan’s Thai reporters cannot write English. After they cover a story, Berrigan has to debrief them in a game of delicate ploy and diffident counterploy. Sample:

Berrigan: Where’ve you been?

Reporter: We go Sanam Luang [site of an election rally].

Berrigan: What did you do?

Reporter: We look look all the Sanam Luang.

Berrigan: Did you see something?

Reporter: Yes, but I don’t know what.

“No one would believe you can run a newspaper this way,” muses Expatriate Berrigan. “But it’s the most satisfying work I’ve ever done.” Last week, as he patched up staff quarrels over slugs of mekong (raw, locally made liquor), Berrigan could take consolation from the fact that the World was at least regularly in the black, would soon move into new quarters equipped with two secondhand typesetting Monotype machines.

Column of Whimsy. In the Orient, competition among syndicates and news services has cut prices so low that Berrigan can afford to give his 3,500 readers the biggest names in the business: the Associated Press, United Press International and Reuters; Editorial Cartoonist Herblock; Columnists Art Buchwald, Sylvia Porter, Walter Lippmann and Joe Alsop; Pogo and Steve Canyon comics. Berrigan runs no editorials, explains: “We give the news and let intelligent readers form their own opinions.”

Six days a week Berrigan himself spins out a column of whimsy on such themes as Thailand’s heat (“A neighbor’s pig was unwise enough to walk into the sun, and the sun rendered him down to a shoat”) and the pleasures of ignoring a watch (“We sit here thinking we have plenty of time because the sun is where it is, and the shadow of our pencil is falling at the plenty-of-time angle”). Occasionally Berrigan forgoes his humor, reports with fascination on subjects like dawn coming to a Thai village: “In the quiet hour before the sun bursts above the surrounding trees, and the mystery is burned from the sky, the villager is closer to his God than when he kneels in the temple.”

I Was There. Raised in California, Berrigan attended junior college in Bakersfield, worked restlessly as a factory hand in Detroit, schoolteacher in Colorado and a social worker in California, then started to make his way around the world as a freelance writer. In 1939 he landed in Shanghai flat-broke and wangled a job with the United Press. Except for brief trips back to the U.S., he has been in the Orient ever since. He spent two years reporting the Sino-Japanese War, then moved to Bangkok shortly before Pearl Harbor. When Thailand meekly surrendered to the Japanese, Berrigan’s Thai friends hustled him aboard the last train out of the country, and a sympathetic Thai captain cleared his papers at the Chinese border. Berrigan has never forgotten that the Thais saved him from a prison camp.

Later in the war, Berrigan covered General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers and General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell’s campaigns, filed some good I-was-there stories on the British retreat from Burma. Quitting U.P. in 1945, Berrigan freelanced around the Far East (Saturday Evening Post, New York Times) until he met General Phao and the World in Bangkok.

A bachelor, Berrigan works seven days a week “from early morning to early morning,” is likely to show up at a dignified party in an outsize, loud sports shirt, and is famed among Bangkok’s beggars of high and low degree for being the softest touch in town. He plans to stay on indefinitely. “I went back to the U.S. in 1951,” he explains, “but I could not get un-Oriented.”