Eddie Adams ( photographer ) General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong prisoner Nguyen Van Lem : Eddie Adams ' Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph Eddie Adams ( June 12 , 1933 – September 19 , 2004 ) was an American photographer noted for portraits of celebrities and politicians and as a photojournalist having covered 13 wars . It was while covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press that he took his best-known photograph – the picture of police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner , Nguyen Van Lem , on a Saigon street , on February 1 , 1968 , during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive . Adams won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a World Press Photo award for the photograph ( captioned General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon ) , but would later lament its notoriety . On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph , Adams wrote in Time : The general killed the Viet Cong ; I killed the general with my camera . Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world . People believe them ; but photographs do lie , even without manipulation . They are only half-truths . What the photograph did n't say was , 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day , and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one , two or three American people ? ' Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to Loan 's honor while he was alive . When General Nguyen died , Adams praised him as a hero of a just cause . He once said that `` I would have rather been known more for the series of photographs I shot of 48 Vietnamese refugees who managed to sail to Thailand in a 30-foot boat , only to be towed back to the open seas by Thai marines. '' The photographs , and accompanying reports , helped persuade then President Jimmy Carter to grant the nearly 200 , 000 Vietnamese boat people asylum . Adams remarked , `` It did some good and nobody got hurt . `` Adams died in New York City from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ( Lou Gehrig 's disease ) . External links Voice autobiography of his Pulitzer photograph , the execution Interview for PBS Eddie Adams Photographs Eddie Adams obituary Categories : 1933 births | 2004 deaths | American photographers | Photojournalists | War photographers | Pulitzer Prize winners In other languages : Deutsch | Français | 한국어 | Svenska | 中文 