Ray F. Herndon, a journalist who covered the early days of the Vietnam War for United Press International and later helped free an innocent man from a Texas prison as an investigative reporter, died Sunday after a three-year battle with cancer. He was 77.
Herndon, who finished his long career as a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, died at home in Fountain Valley, said his wife, Annie.
"Ray was a splendid journalist, because he had both physical and moral courage," said Neil Sheehan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Bright Shining Lie," who in the early 1906s worked alongside Herndon in UPI's Saigon bureau, where another famous chronicler of the war — David Halberstam of the New York Times — also shared space.