Media, Propaganda and Vietnam

The first is that the Americans lost the war because the media coverage in the United States, notably on television, undermined the military and political effort. The second is that most journalists and broadcasters opposed the war. Neither is true. Indeed the truth may well be the opposite ... that on the whole the American media, while questioning the way in which the war was being fought, supported what Stanley Karnow, formerly of the New York Times, has since called a failed crusade.

In his classic study of war correspondents, Phillip Knightley described the reporting from Vietnam during the early 1960s as

... not questioning the American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness. Most correspondents, despite what Washington thought about them, were just as interested in seeing the United States win the war as was the Pentagon. What the correspondents questioned was not American policy, but the tactics used to implement that policy...

[Some of the war atrocities that had come to light] represented ... the war itself: an all-out assault on the Vietnamese people, regardless of whether they were communist or non-communist. But the war was not presented in this way, rather as teams: good teams and bad teams. The Americans were on the side of the good team, the South Vietnamese, who were defending themselves from against aggression by several bad teams of communists. Not surprisingly, this version exclusded the fact that the Americans had killed tens of thousands of their South Vietnamese allies and had destroyed their homes and crops, levelled their forests, poisoned their water and forced them into refugee programs. The propaganda version also excluded what American intelligence had known from the beginning: that the regime America had installed in Saigon, complete with the machinery of mass terror, had no popular base.

The standard version never satisfactorily came to terms with exactly who the communists were. If the NLF, or Vietcong, were South Vietnamese how could they possibly invade their own country? Words had to be found to describe what were, in effect, the actions of people defending their country against an invasion by the United States. The words chosen were internal aggression. The propaganda also had difficulty with the North Vietnamese who were said to be attacking the South. There had been no North Vietnam and no South Vietnam until the Geneva conference on Indo-China in 1954 temporarily divided the country to await national elections in 1956, which the Americans refused to allow, knowing the Ho Chi Minh would win hands down. Not only was Vietnam one country but there were southerners in Hanoi leadership in the North and northerners in the southern-based NLF. The first units sent south by Ho Chi Minh to support those resisting the foreign invaders were composed entirely of southerners. So once again, the South Vietnamese were invading their own country!

This was confusing to reporters (myself included) ... The easiest way was to adopt the jargon, euphemisms, acronyms, the whole language of propaganda on which, sadly, so much bad reporting was based. Criticism of events, individuals and even policies was not uncommon but this dissidence rarely exposed the false assumptions which underpinned the American war. Moreover, criticism which did not go too far and which remained objective and unemotional and incorporated the principles of the official line served to strengthen the impression that the war was being reported vigorously and entirely free of censorship. General Sidle told me, Two delegations of bureau chiefs called on me in 1968, asking me to please impose censorship. They were getting confused about what they could do, what they could say and what they couldn’t say.

Death squads, which were to prove so effective in Central America, were expertly organised in Vietnam. An estimated 50,000 South Vietnamese were systematically murdered by assassins working for the CIA’s Phoenix Programme. The most decorated American soldier of the war, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert, wrote in his book, Soldier, They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing. Like Agent Orange, the Phoenix Programme was not a story until the war was ending. Like Operation Speedy Express [an atrocity where the US Ninth Infantry Division had killed 11,000 people, 5,000 of whom were non-combatants], the massacre of between 90 and 130 men, women and children at the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, was not a story until long after it had happened. For more than a year a soldier who had heard about the My Lai massacre tried to interest Newsweek and others, without success. Finally, the story was broken, not by any of the 600 reporters in Vietnam, but by a freelance in the United States, Seymour Hersh... Only then did the correspondents in Vietnam tell their own atrocity stories. There was a cataract of them. Everybody, it seemed, knew about or had witnessed at least one; and everyone had either not reported it or pleased that their office had spiked the story they had sent.

Disaffection provided the key theme of the poignant Winter Soldier, a collective documentary in which Vietnam veterans spoke about the atrocities that they themselves had committed in Vietnam in the name of Western civilisation. Of all the anti-war documentaries, this one had the most impact on public opinion.

The films shows young veterans (20-27) returning from the war. They realise they have been taking part in an act of butchery, and that they have been conditioned, dehumanised and turned into criminal Terminators. They also realise that there will never be an international criminal tribunal to look into the Vietnam war: the politicians and generals responsible for the massacres, the use of napalm, the bombing of civilians, the mass executions in prisons and the ecological disasters resulting from the use of chemical defoliants will never be tried for their crimes against humanity.

Scholarship is hardly different [than the mainstream media]. Thus in a critique of U.S. ideology from the liberal left, Michael Hunt describes Reaganite neo-conservatives as unexpectedly obtuse, rejecting the notion that the Vietnam commitment was a fundamental mistake and insisting that the United States should defend freedom around the world whatever the price. The price to whom? To the peasants massacred as we defended their freedom in the Mekong Delta and Quang Ngai province? But McNamara was better than most: To his credit, McNamara recognized earlier than most of his colleagues that the war was not winnable, a leading historian of the Vietnam war, George Herring, observes, departing from the norm by at least mentioning that the American failure was far more of a tragedy for Vietnam than for America.

... McNamara’s goal [in his memoirs] is to explain how such vigorous, intelligent, well-meaning, patriotic servants of the United States ... came to get it wrong on Vietnam. We acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation, he writes. What they thought was correct, at least if principles and traditions are illustrated by historical fact, as in the clearing of the continent, the conquest of the Philippines, Wilson’s Caribbean exploits, and much else. These well-meaning planners were wrong, McNamara concludes, but it was an error not of values and intentions but of judgments and capabilities — remarks that are superfluous in a cultural environment that lacks the concept of wrong-doing. The worst of the mistakes, McNamara writes, was the failure to see the Communist movement in Vietnam as a nationalist movement, as it appears in hindsight: We totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement.

McNamara’s regretful account of this mistake has been accepted with much respect. It is utter nonsense. Even from the Pentagon Papers that he commissioned, McNamara and those who repeat his words could have learned that in 1948 the State Department understood perfectly well that the Communists under Ho Chi Minh had captur[ed] control of the nationalist movement — by implication, illegitimately.

... McNamara assumes that the U.S. war was a failure and a defeat, a judgment that is widely shared. But these conclusions again reflect the narrowness of his vision. That the major U.S. war aims had been achieved was clear enough 25 years ago, and was recognized by the business press not long after.

Legacy of [what President Reagan described as] a noble war ... is gaining certain currency as revisionists work quickly, ... demanding a change in perspective, when the old facts remain at bay, in shadow, unheeded. This is known as the new Vietnam scholarship. New Vietnam scholars include the familiar, discredited faces and the new facts they present are familiar, discredited lies.

...The epitome of the new scholarship is a 700-page history of Vietnam which [new scholar at Berkely, Douglas] Pike has described as more objective than earlier angry works. This is Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: a history ... His readers are told that the war was a failed crusade conducted for the loftiest of intentions, that the communists were terrorists who were merciless and brutal in contrast to the Americans who were sincere and earnest and whose instincts were liberal.

Images usurped the judgements of experienced reporters who affected the roles of innocent bystander and caption writer. Public attitudes follow from perspectives; by allowing the false neutrality of television images to dominate the coverage of war, journalists allowed misconceptions to become received truths. The first casualties were truth and context; bang-bang and contemporary history were deemed not to blend on the screen. That the Geneva peace conference in 1954 had been undermined by Washington, that communist China was no friend of communist Vietnam, that the NLF had sought the establishment of a non-communist, neutral coalition in South Vietnam — these truths went unremembered and unconnected.

So rare were those like [former CBS news correspondent, Morely] Safer, who would describe in his reports what he saw as well as the camera saw, that he was accused of being anti-American: the catch-all tag for those who stepped even briefly outside the consensus view. When in 1965 Safer’s CBS crew filmed marines burning down a village with Zippo cigarette lighters, President Johnson himself intervened. David Halberstam related what happened, in his book, The Powers That Be:

Frank, said the early-morning wake-up call, are you trying to fuck me? [Frank Stanton was then the president of CBS.]

Who is this? said the still sleepy Stanton.

Frank, this is your President, and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag, Lyndon Johnson said, and then administered a tongue lashing: how could CBS employ a Communist like Safer, how could they be so unpatriotic as to put on enemy film like this? Johnson was furious. ... (Johnson was insisting that Safer was a Communist, and when aides said no [after also getting to check him out in depth], he was simply a Canadian, the President said, Well, I knew he wasn’t an American.)

... Safer’s crime had been to give a mass American audience a glimpse of the real war. When British journalist James Cameron and cameraman Malcolm Aird raised their own finance to make a filmed report from Hanoi in 1965, they were castigated as communist dupes a charge Cameron later told me, he relished. Only when they call you a dupe, not a communist outright, but a dupe, he said, did you know you’d broken the great mould that covered the reporting of the Vietnam war and that maybe you’d got it right!

As all governments realise that to wage war successfully their troops must learn to dehumanise the enemy. The simplest way to achieve this is to inflame nationalistic or racist feelings, or both. This, American racism, which had first been aroused on a national scale in the Second World War and then revived in Korea, reached a peak in Vietnam. But Vietnam was an insurgency war. The enemy was physically indistinguishable from the ally. Racist hate directed at Charlie Cong the enemy made no provisions for exempting those Vietnamese that the United States had intervened to save. In motivating the GI to fight by appealing to his racist feelings, the United States military discovered that it had liberated an emotion over which it was to lose control.

In Vietnam, racism became a patriotic virtue ... All Vietnamese became dinks, slopes, slants, or gooks, and the only good one was a dead one. So the Americans killed them when it was clear that they were Vietcong.... And they killed them when it was clear they were not Vietcong.

It was the racist nature of the fighting, the treating of the Vietnamese like animals, that inevitably led to My Lai, and it was the reluctance of correspondents to report this racist and atrocious nature of the war that caused the My Lai story to be revealed not by a war correspondent, but by an alert newpaper reporter back in the United States — a major indictment of the coverage of the war.

No newspaper in the United States would publish the series of articles [by Miss Gellhorn detailing some of the details of the war]. Everywhere I was told that they were too tough for American reader. Eventually, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch took the two mildest ones. Miss Gellhorn had to turn to Britain to get all five published. They appeared in the Guardian, and ended Miss Gellhorn’s career as a war correspondent in Vietnam. When she applied for a visa to return there, her request was refused. She tried over the years since then, applying to various South Vietnamese embassies around the world, and was refused every time.

...Philip Jones Griffiths, one of the few photographers to concentrate on portraying what the war did to Vietnamese civilians, had great difficulty in find an outlet for his work in the United States. I was told time after time that my photographs were too harrowing for the American market. When, eventually, a book of his photographs, Vietnam Inc., was published in the United States, the South Vietnamese government banned his return to Saigon.

So in the reporting of Vietnam each day’s news was swiftly consumed by the next day’s. Too few correspondents looked back and tried to see what it added up to, too few probed beyond the official version of events to expose the lies and half-truths, too few tried to analyse what it all meant. There were language problems: few correspondents spoke French, much less Vietnemese. There were time problems: Kevin Buckley’s investigation into Operation Speedy Express took two men two and a half months. And there were cultural problems: apart from Bernard Fall’s and Frances FitzGerald’s, there were no serious attempts to explain to Americans something about the people they were fighting. On the whole, writers for non-daily publications came out better than most of their colleagues because, free from the tyranny of pressing deadlines, they could look at the war in greater depth.