Chris's Project

To write about Vietnam after 1945 is, inevitably, to eulogize something . Many things were destroyed or irrevocably changed during a half-century of conflict —colonialism, postwar idealism, the millions of human beings, the land itself — and journalism is no exception.

The gentlemanly character of war coverage that prevailed among correspondents during and after the Second World War died in Saigon in 1961. American involvement in Vietnam had hardly begun when the skeletal corps of Asia wire service and newspaper correspondents abandoned it in favor of a radical new approach that was confrontational, autonomous, and unapologetic. It was grounded in the conviction that the appointed officers of the United States government were unable or unwilling to recognize the truth when they saw or heard it, and were refusing to speak it.

The result was that the citizens of the world, and of the United States, were afforded a particularly vivid view of warfare. Uncensored and unsanitized, the "Living Room War" brought the frightening details of combat home, and the standards by which the media now routinely inform the public were set in place 12 time zones distant from President John F. Kennedy's Washington.

A parallel development that influenced this upheaval would radically change the fundamental nature of war coverage. Advances in technology gave reporters new tools. Helicopters allowed correspondents a first-hand look at what was happening far from the briefings in Saigon and made it possible to file a story in a matter of hours. The recent development of solid-state electronics made television cameras portable, bringing matter-of-fact coverage to television, ending the era of the spliced and dubbed, and carefully manipulated, newsreel.

Probably more pivotal in the long run was the fact that, from the beginning, facets of the American military intervention in Vietnam were in some sense unlawful, and the government assumed that discretion on the part of the press was obligatory. It wasn't.

At the outset, a balance of openness and discretion that is difficult to imagine today characterized the relationship between the press and government officials. Censorship was unnecessary, so the thinking went, because reporters acted responsibly. From 1933 on, a convention existed among photographers that Franklin D. Roosevelt's wheelchair was not to be shown in images of the President, lest it convey an impression of a less-than-omnipotent commander-in-chief. According to one story, as Roosevelt made his somewhat ungraceful way from his car to a podium set up for a speech, a rookie photojournalist clicked away—and was promptly relieved of the film by outraged photographers of the White House press corps.

William Prochnau, the author of Once Upon a Distant War , relates how it worked:

[A Press Officer] had been among the war correspondents covering the Normandy Invasion when the legendary Patton

briefed the press on a top-secret breakout operation known as Operation Cobra. Several correspondents passed the

information on to reporting colleagues in other commands, and Patton erupted. The general accused the correspondents of

“blabbing,” and “risking the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers.” At the end of an unforgettable tirade, Patton

added, “It is not my intention, however to change my policy of telling you everything I know.” Patton kept briefing; the

reporters stopped blabbing. (23)

At the United States Embassy in Saigon, as well as in Washington, it was expected that journalists would be "on the team." (244)

In 1961, the Kennedy administration, bruised by crises in Berlin, Cuba, and the Congo, was looking for a foreign policy success — a place for an effective stand against what it perceived as the creep of communism — and the place it chose was South Vietnam. The United States had, since 1954, kept a force of military advisors in the country, as permitted by the Geneva Accords that ended the French war in Indochina and established North and South Vietnam as separate states. The new initiative, called Project Beef-Up, committed thousands of additional advisors, immense amounts of military hardware, and billions of dollars to President Ngo Dinh Diem and his government.

The problem was that all of it exceeded the amounts the Accords allowed. And so the United States began executing Project Beef-Up secretly. Ultimately, it was this decision that created the ever-widening divide between the truth , what the correspondents heard and saw, and the official version of the truth , what the generals and the embassy were telling them. The old model of journalistic self-censorship was doomed. As Prochnau writes, "This was not like past wars. Because Project Beef-Up openly violated an international treaty, Washington . . . wanted reporters to go along with the fiction, to play the ostrich. The emperor was naked, but it would become unpatriotic to say that he was wearing no clothes. When the policy didn't work, American officials clammed up, covered up, and lied — not only to the public and the press but eventually to themselves." (18)

For the correspondents, the divide became unbridgeable almost immediately. They watched the aircraft carrier USS Core steam up the Saigon River, and scores of helicopters were visible on the flight deck. The aircraft weren't invisible to agents of the Vietcong, they knew, however much the government might wish them to be to the American public.

Another rift grew out of the fiction that United States forces were not engaged in combat operations. As the influx of "advisors" reached 1,500 per month, it was inevitable that casualties would occur — and be reported. The irony was that wounded soldiers could not be awarded the Purple Heart because their country wasn't publicly at war.

Journalists' willingness to ignore the obvious was further eroded as they found themselves in situations of extreme personal risk. An event with far-reaching consequences took place when the young CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt and a camera crew wandered into a violent ambush outside Saigon. Nineteen South Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the sudden and intense firefight, and the resulting blurry, black-and-white footage seen on American television sets could not be compared with newsreel-era coverage. Accuracy had replaced glory as a news value.

The reporters found themselves facing an even greater dilemma. In previous conflicts, the correspondents' role was relatively clear: to inform the public about military progress, however slight, toward openly stated, fervently desired legal goals. The situation in Vietnam in 1961, however, had no roadmap and no traffic signs. David Halberstam, who covered the war for the New York Times, writes in Facing My Lai:

For reporters in Vietnam, our job was to ask does it work? Is it working? And it did not work. There is a wonderful story

about Neil Sheehan very early in the war. He was a young kid, twenty-five-years old, and it is 1962. He is with my great

predecessor, the sainted Homer Bigart, who won the Pulitzer Prize in World War II and in Korea. The first helicopters have

arrived in Vietnam, and they go down to the Seventh Division in My Tho. Neil is very excited because it is going to be a big

story.

Sheehan, who was covering the war for United Press International, and Bigart spend a day, then another day, then a third day following "typical pillowpunching ARVN operation[s]," without gathering a shred of reportable news. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam was doing what it always did, and would continue to do — avoiding contact with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese Army as much as possible.

They drive back to Saigon together, and Neil is mumbling and grumbling and very angry. Homer Bigart, by then in his late fifties, says, “Mr. Sheehan, Mr. Sheehan what's the matter?” Neil sort of grumbles about three days of wasted time and no story. Homer says, “Mr. Sheehan, there is a story. Mr. Sheehan, there is a very good story. It doesn't work, Mr. Sheehan, that's your story.” The job of reporters is to cover whether it worked or not. American combat troops could fight bravely . . . We could fight bravely, and then we would be gone and the VC and the NVA would keep coming. (53)

It didn't work, and everybody knew it. Everybody, that is, except the American public.

By the end of 1961, according to Prochnau, the American military force in South Vietnam had reached 3,200, exceeding the 685 allowed by the Geneva Accord, and was growing by 1,500 additional personnel a month. Personnel from an unit codenamed the "Jungle Jims," a U.S. Air Force equivalent of the Army's Green Berets, were training South Vietnamese airmen to fly close support missions for ground troops, and eventually flying the missions themselves with only junior Vietnamese personnel aboard to maintain the pretense of their "advisory" role.

In November, Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, had sent cables to the American Embassy in Saigon, advising:

DO NOT GIVE OTHER THAN ROUTINE COOPERATION TO CORRESPONDENTS ON COVERAGE CURRENT MILITARY ACTIVITIES

IN VIETNAM

and

NO ADMISSION SHOULD BE MADE THAT ACCORDS ARE NOT BEING OBSERVED. (Prochnau 20)

In January 1962, when President Kennedy was asked in a press conference, "Are American troops in combat in Vietnam?" he answered, "No." By the end of the month, Jungle Jims had flown 229 sorties.

In The Making of a Quagmire, David Halberstam writes that these denials and lack of cooperation had destroyed the general relationship of mutual respect that exists between ambassadors and reporters in most underdeveloped countries.

But in Vietnam these relationships simply did not exist. The split between the reporters and the mission was basic; it had foundered on the policy itself. . . . News management cannot turn a bad government into a good one; from time to time it can hide the story of, say, one military defeat, but in the end it cannot conceal the fact that an enemy with superior drive and motivation is gaining ground. (32)

The duplicity was never more obvious as when General Paul Harkins, the commander of the American forces in Vietnam, announced at a press conference during Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's May 1962 visit that the war "will be over by Christmas." (Prochnau 166)

It is important to note that, despite later assertions to the contrary, the members of the press corps at this time were uniformly in favor of the American presence in Southeast Asia. The question of whether or not the United States should be involved militarily, one that would dominate discussions about Vietnam in later years, was not an issue. Charley Mohr, the Time magazine correspondent, said, "We were children of the Cold War. We believed." (Prochnau 259) Halberstam, when asked how his reporting might have been different if he had addressed that question, replied, "That would have made me almost unemployable in a situation like that." (Prochnau 193)

The questions that the Saigon reporters wrestled with sprang from narrower issues — whether policies and strategies were correct, or if the Diem regime was indeed the best team to accomplish the goal of a free and independent South Vietnam. Or whether, as Bigart had asked, the whole awful, unwieldy enterprise was working or not.

Faced with the dilemma of reporting a war that wasn't a war, one that the United States was winning except when it wasn't, on behalf of a regime whose citizens were often indistinguishable from the supposed "enemy," the correspondents — who also included Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett and photographer Horst Faas of the Associated Press, and photojournalist Francois Sully of Newsweek— chose to report what they saw.

Shortly after the start of Operation Beef Up, the New York Times ran a story under the headline, "U.S. OFFICERS CROWD SAIGON ON 'ROUTINE MISSIONS.'" The implicit skepticism of the quotation marks that surround the final two words may have acquired more weight over the years, but they highlight the reporters' difficulties in reconciling fiction with reality. As American involvement deepened, reporting became proportionally less charitable. Of an operation that was part of the Strategic Hamlets Program, an ill-fated attempt to deprive the Viet Cong of support in the villages, Sully wrote:

. . .Soldiers ordered 205 bewildered farm families to pack up their belongings. Then, the soldiers burned the villagers' huts

and marched the families off to a "strategic hamlet" in the nearby valley of Ben Truong. Some of the peasants went

voluntarily, attracted by a government payment of $20, but many had to be forced. Others fled to the jungle to join the

Viet Cong. (Prochnau 72)

Somewhat later, Peter Arnett captured one of the fundamental ironies of the war, quoting a U.S. Army Major who said, "It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." (Prochnau 109)

If there was a point of no return, it came at a place called Ap Bac just after New Year's in 1963. Despite matter-of-fact reporting by the Saigon correspondents, Americans were generally only dimly aware of the gathering storm in Vietnam, eclipsed as it was by the Cuban missile crisis and other foreign policy debacles. The humiliating battle at Ap Bac brought the flaws of the Kennedy administration's intervention in Southeast Asia to the front page and to television.

Neil Sheehan's book, A Bright Shining Lie, considered by many to contain the definitive account of the battle, is the source of most of the details that follow.

Initially, the American advisors' objective was to seize a Viet Cong radio transmitter in the hamlet of Tan Thoi, roughly 50 miles southwest of Saigon. Three battalions of ARVN regulars and Civil Guards, about 1,400 troops in all, supported by armored personnel carriers, artillery, and fighter-bomber aircraft, were expected to easily overwhelm what was thought to be a reinforced Viet Cong company of about 120 men. The planners anticipated that the assault would duplicate hundreds of similar encounters with the communist forces—that is, an ambush followed by the usual enemy withdrawal under strafing and bombing. The attack was the first of the New Year, and the first under a newly promoted ARVN division commander, Lt. Col. Bui Dinh Dam, and hopes were high for a morale-building victory.

The outcome at nightfall on January 2,1963, couldn't have been different. The "raggedy-ass little bastards," (262) as General Harkins called them, turned out to be about 350 guerillas who failed to oblige the ARVN and U.S. forces by retreating as planned. They remained in foxholes and fought, and at the end of the day had shot down five U.S. helicopters and killed three Americans. The South Vietnamese forces counted 63 dead and more than 100 wounded. The lightly armed Viet Cong, who disappeared under darkness, suffered a total of 18 killed and 39 wounded.

Sheehan was one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene of the battle the next morning. After coming under a deadly but useless artillery bombardment among the corpses still on the battlefield, he located General Harkins at an airstrip nearby. The general, wearing his office uniform and carrying a swagger stick, said, "We've got them in a trap and we're going to spring it in half an hour."

Sheehan wrote, "There was something obscene about this to me and the other reporters." (276) In his dispatches, he included details about the "bungling and cowardice" that led to the stunning defeat, but he did not quote Harkins. The quotation he filed was from Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, the senior American advisor, who said, "It was a miserable damn performance." (277) The wire service story that contained it, picked up by newspapers across the United States, reverberated all the way to President Kennedy and Secretary McNamara, and perhaps more to the point, all the way to American living rooms and kitchen tables.

Six months later, Malcolm Browne's photograph of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation in a Saigon intersection brought the horror of what was happening in Vietnam to the front pages in an grisly, unprecedented form. In less than a year, South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem would be dead, victim of a CIA-supported coup. President Kennedy would follow, assassinated barely three weeks later. Compared with the extent that the conflict would eventually achieve in the coming decade, the war had just begun. But the rupture with the old model of wartime reporting was a fait accompli , and a new journalistic ethic had taken its place, one that would profoundly influence public opinion about the war itself and ultimately affect its conclusion.

It is intriguing to examine the events that followed the American war in Vietnam in light of the changes in the relationship between journalists and the government that took place in Saigon from 1961 to 1963. An emboldened press exercising its Fourth Estate oversight responsibility played varying roles in the resignation under duress of one president and the impeachment of another, and significantly altered the conditions under which commanders-in-chief chose to use military force on foreign soil. Today, as it was in 1961 when Charlie Mohr coined the phrase, "winning the hearts and minds of the people," is at stake.

Works Cited

Prochnau, William. Once Upon a Distant War . New York: Random House, 1995.

Anderson, David L., Ed. Facing My Lai: Moving Beyond the Massacre . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Halberstam, David. The Making of a Quagmire . New York: Random House, 1964.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam . New York: Random House, 1988.

Additional Works Consulted

Eldridge, John, Ed. Getting the Message . London: Routledge, 1993.

Hallin, Daniel C. The "Uncensored War" . New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Turner, Kathleen J. Lyndon Johnson's Dual War . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Braestrup, Peter. Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet

1968 in Vietnam and Washington . Boulder: Westview Press, 1977.