The Schoenbrun Papers are arranged as CORRESPONDENCE, FINANCIAL RECORDS, SUBJECT FILES, AUDIO RECORDINGS, and VISUAL MATERIALS. The collection consists of business, personal and financial papers, and some records of his corporation, Atlanticom, Inc., for 1963-1964, with scattered material through 1970. Atlanticom, Inc., based in New York City, was formed to handle Schoenbrun's personal and business transactions in the United States.
Although best known for his years as chief of the CBS News Bureau in Paris, the papers contain virtually nothing about this period in Schoenbrun's career. About Charles DeGaulle whom Schoenbrun observed for many years while living in France, there is only “DeGaulle and the Anglo-Saxons,” a monograph not published in the United States. Schoenbrun's three books about DeGaulle, as well as his other publications are available in the Historical Society Library and the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Library.
The CORRESPONDENCE, which begins in 1962 when Schoenbrun was appointed head of the CBS Washington News Bureau, is divided into business, personal, and financial files, all arranged alphabetically and chronologically thereunder. The Business Correspondence encompasses all facets of Schoenbrun's later professional work and includes information connected with interviews, the gathering of research material, and the publication of The Three Lives of Charles De Gaulle and several articles. Although there are exchanges with some individuals of note, none of the correspondence is extensive. One folder of Personal Correspondence deals mainly with organizational memberships and other non-business topics. The Financial Correspondence concerns Schoenbrun's personal financial transactions.
The FINANCIAL RECORDS include Schoenbrun's personal finances and Atlanticom, Inc. It is arranged by subject and chronologically thereunder. These records include the income tax returns and bills of Atlanticom, Inc., 1963-1964. Other papers cover the years 1963 through 1965 and are mainly business related expenses and taxes.
The SUBJECT FILE is arranged alphabetically and covers broad areas such as Schoenbrun's daily radio commentaries while with Metromedia in 1964, materials on his 1967 Asian tour, manuscript copies of “De Gaulle and the Anglo-Saxons” and his biography of Benjamin Franklin, and other writings and speeches. The best material concerns his trip to Asia in 1967 during which he spent two weeks in North Vietnam interviewing Pham van Dong and other officials and photographing street life and the destruction caused by American bombing. The collection also includes his articles about the Hanoi visit published by Newsday and a report for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which sponsored the trip. The latter includes extended comments on his interviews with Japanese Premiers Eiseka Sato and Takeo Miki, Generals Creigton Abrams and William Westmoreland, and Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik. Research material in the Subject Files includes one cubic foot of photocopied documents about the French Underground from the National Archives and bibliographies and chronologies about Vietnamese history.
The AUDIO RECORDINGS contain tapes of a 1964 interview of Dwight Eisenhower about Charles DeGaulle and a 1968 radio interview with Schoenbrun about Vietnam, and disc recordings of North Vietnamese patriotic songs. A transcript of the Eisenhower interview can be found in the correspondence series.
The VISUAL MATERIALS consist of the previously mentioned photographs of Hanoi, Phat Diem, and Phu Xa taken in North Vietnam by Schoenbrun in 1967 and the film David Schoenbrun on Vietnam: How Did We Get In? How Can We Get Out? Shoenbrun's Vietnamese photos consist of the original negatives and contact prints, and he has supplied information for identification. Twenty five additional prints of Vietnam, which are unidentified, are attributed to a French photo agency. There are also prints of Schoenbrun taken during this trip with Premiers Sato and Miki of Japan and two photographs and a cartoon concerning Dory Schary. Nineteen of the North Vietnamese images are online as part of Wisconsin Historical Images database.
