2014-15
JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient
The Tet Offensive and the MACV’s Information Defensive: An Analysis of Limitations to Watchdog Journalism in the Vietnam War (1964-68)
Apoorva Rangan, Class of 2015
THE TET OFFENSIVE AND THE MACV’S INFORMATION DEFENSIVE: AN ANALYSIS OF LIMITATIONS TO WATCHDOG JOURNALISM IN THE VIETNAM WAR (1964-68)
Apoorva Rangan Near Scholar Paper
Mentors: Ms. Ellen Austin, Ms. Katy Rees, Ms. Meredith Cranston April 10, 2015
Wartime journalism houses the intersection between national security and freedom of speech, for the media serves both as a tool to spread an administration’s message and to check its veracity. A record 5,098 accredited reporters undertook the responsibility of covering the Vietnam War, a proxy war fighting Communist expansion in South Vietnam, with major U.S. involvement from 1964 to 1973.1 With the United States fighting in the name of democracy, an emphasis was placed on press freedoms and reporters experienced the first modern military conflict without a formal system of censorship. But the breadth of guerrilla warfare combined with the demand for timely news and official sources left journalists susceptible to unclear or manipulated information. A study of the media-military relationship during the Vietnam War allows for an analysis of how well journalistic ideals survive with a press dependent on official statements for fast news.
Scholarly research in the decades following the North Vietnamese capture of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon in 1975 pins growth in American anti-war dissent on the “watchdog” journalist. The watchdog archetype, in line with theories about the press’s role as a fourth check on the government, consists of journalists cross-validating policy results with independently collected information and publishing the discrepancies.2 It also assumes an ideological distance between a press intent on exposing truths and an institution intent on concealing wrongdoing. However, the image of a Saigon press corps that solely subverted the military’s presence in Vietnam oversimplifies the behavior of both the media and the Army during the period of escalation (1964-1968). Most media-military interactions occurred between reporters who understood that good, thorough journalism was a hallmark of a democratic nation and public affairs officers who appreciated fair coverage and intended that their leaders should be held accountable for poor military decisions. As such, the ideological foundation for press
policy during the early years featured record levels of tolerance for journalistic independence and invalidates the watchdog theory’s assumption of administrative secrecy.
On a practical level, pressroom dynamics and sourcing practices as the war progressed further complicated the implementation of watchdog journalism. These factors can be traced through the development of the national print media, the arm of American media that employed the most veteran reporters, faced the most restrictions, and had the most political influence in dealing with the military.3 As the military streamlined its communications department in the early 1960s, reporters navigated the high information density through the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)’s Office of Information, a centralized information dispensary established in 1964. That year, the Press Relations sub-department of the MACV became the sole provider for official details on military operations, press briefings, and statistics throughout the war. The department also oversaw South Vietnamese press relations and sought stories that “presented allied efforts in a favorable light.”4 The public affairs officers thus toed an increasingly fine line between propaganda and public relations that frustrated the media. With this tangled but exclusive system in place, reporters grew discontented with the informal information monopoly. Some impactful reports did communicate unpleasant truths that served as a check on the Johnson administration’s optimistic narratives, and the vast majority of reporters intended to maintain their journalistic independence from authority. However, few reporters found success in distancing themselves from the official sources that the structure of news demanded, and coverage largely remained neutral or consistent with official positions, instead of the frequently antagonistic coverage suggested by the watchdog theory.
In January 1968, after four years of reliance on a factually inaccurate and increasingly duplicitous MACV, the American media and public were shocked when the North Vietnamese
army launched widespread offensives on their national holiday of Tet. “What the hell,” said CBS anchor Walter Cronkite of the war’s psychological turning point, “I thought we were winning this war.”5 The ideological intentions of the Johnson administration to allow for the first uncensored war could not compensate for the infrastructural problems of over-dependence on official sources, the news cycle’s need for timeliness, and excessive administrative secrecy. These factors compromised the integrity of an open press over the course of Johnson’s first term (1964-68), bookended by idealistic media policy creation under Operation Maximum Candor (1964) and the credibility gap exposed during the Tet Offensive (1968) between the media, the military, and the public.
Developing a Press-friendly Ideological Foundation for Media Policy
Censorship has always been a fact of the American media’s existence during wartime; divulging key strategic secrets to the American public and enemy analysts without the administration’s knowledge could easily destroy public support and cost lives. The explicit and pervasive nature of censorship was established during the Civil War period with President Lincoln controlling all telegraph stations in the South, and persisted through World War II and the Korean War. Multiple governmental agencies, including the Office of War Information and the Office of Censorship, were created during the early 1940s and controlled war-related news in the mid-20th century.6 Censors physically read and redacted text, images, and popular radio segments before wiring the news overseas on military equipment.7 Until the Vietnam War, news organizations had little to no say in what content came back from the ground.
The undeclared nature of the Vietnam War, still formally referred to as the Vietnam Conflict, prevented the use of formal censorship and thus gave reporters more autonomy. From the Kennedy administration onwards, policymakers understood that explicit censorship in the
vein of WWII practices could not be employed during Vietnam, since U.S. forces were considered guests of the South Vietnamese government under President Ngo Dinh Diem.
Attempts at content redactions would thus complicate tenuous relations with the South Vietnamese government, who Kennedy administrators feared would create a propagandistic narrative that would overemphasize U.S. involvement and compromise trust between the government and the public.8 A problematic loophole also allowed reporters to file un-redacted stories from Singapore or Hong Kong, countries independent from the Vietnam conflict. With these practical motivators augmenting the stated democratic goals of offering open media access, administrators thus had to create and justify a system that news organizations would buy into by offering more journalistic freedoms and voluntary restrictions.
Military influence on the media’s message became subtler, neither conducted through an Office of Censorship nor through physical restrictions on the press’s movements, but instead through the control of quoted and statistical information, beginning with the Kennedy administration. Accredited reporters, those authorized by the South Vietnamese government to cover the war in line with the MACV’s content specifications, had access to officials and sites that independent journalists did not. Thus, the undeclared nature of the Vietnam War also led to a higher emphasis on reporters’ self-censorship and administrators’ clever redirections than the explicit redactions of the early 20th century. The establishment of the paradox of open access to limited verified information began under the Kennedy administration.9
Operation Maximum Candor: The Origins of Accreditation
From 1960 to 1963, the Kennedy administration’s restrictive sourcing practices revealed the ability of the military to conceal Vietnam from the public consciousness even without concrete censorship. Instead of guiding policy discussion towards a favorable consensus on its
actions, “[the administration’s] objective was to play down the whole issue of Vietnam, to keep the extent of U.S. involvement out of the headlines.”10 Under the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO)’s careful oversight, Vietnam had become such a nonissue that the New York Times featured the first airborne “direct military support” to the Saigon government on page A21. Through JUSPAO directives such as February 1962’s restrictive Cable 1006, government officials were encouraged to not cooperate with the press, offer no stray military information, and provide vague quotes, if any.11,12 Diplomatic tensions also factored into the reticence during the Kennedy administration. The American public offered tenuous support at best for the Diem administration, with its staunch anti-Communist platform but dictatorial behavior. Full journalistic independence and coverage of South Vietnamese corruption would compromise American support for the provision of resources. Sourcing offered a partial resolution of this tension by making the Diem administration the source of as much information as possible. In doing so, the JUSPAO minimized the U.S’s role and placated South Vietnam’s insistence on sovereignty.13 Thus, while reporters did not have to submit stories to screeners, they had little candid content in their pieces to screen in the first place.
Cable 1006 also physically constrained reporters to missions that avoided U.S. involvement not only to keep from implicating U.S. troops, but also to keep from informing the North Vietnamese about troop movements. The Kennedy and early Johnson administrations justified the reticence seen in Cable 1006 with the imbalance of press freedoms between America and North Vietnam, since “the United States faced an enemy who had complete control over every word published in areas under his domination [while] the Communists had only to read the American press to learn important details of what they wanted to know.”14 From the military’s point of view, Cable 1006 was a way to level the playing field.
In the face of this reticence, the small but growing press corps began turning to nontraditional sources – lower-rank members of the ground forces. The most famous example of this sourcing is the frequent quoting of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann by New York Times reporters
Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam.15 Vann, frustrated with military strategy as well as administrative disconnect from the ground action, reported on his own experiences with quotes like “it was a miserable damn performance,” referring to the January 1963 Battle of Ap Bac that was generally cited as a victory by officials. Vann also offered criticism of diplomatic inaction. “When the general and his staff in Saigon did not listen to him, and his reports aroused their displeasure,” said Neil Sheehan, “he leaked his meticulously documented assessments to the American correspondents in the country.”16 Quotes from sources like Vann infuriated the Diem regime as well as upper military command, and the Diem regime began mandating reporters to submit questions intended for South Vietnamese officials in advance. As tensions increased during the Buddhist crisis of June 1963, South Vietnam ordered police officers to follow reporters and antagonize them if they attempted to cover the crisis.17 Though the State Department paid lip service to the reporters by “expressing concern […] and making vehement representations in private,” reporters increasingly lost trust in the government’s commitment to a free press due to a lack of public censure of Diem’s policies. Though the toxicity of the Diem administration prevented the Kennedy administration from taking immediate action, it helped convince American officials that transparency and outspokenness to the press would give their message a better chance of reaching the public.18 Transparency would also soothe diplomatic tensions by increasing reporters’ trust in American officials and reducing the number of subversive sources.
As with many policy decisions throughout the war, external factors spurred the military’s dissatisfaction with Diem’s constrictive press practices and the reporters’ dissatisfaction with military reticence into action. By 1964, both the Kennedy and Diem administrations had come to an end through violent means, filling the scene with new policymakers from the Johnson administration. The political vitriol during an anti-Diem Buddhist uprising in 1963 and the general turmoil of the last year of the Diem regime left many civilians, press, and military personnel disoriented with America’s role in the conflict. A larger volume of disgruntled and disillusioned soldiers reported their experiences to the Saigon press corps, which sparked a growing understanding among military command that a means to control the media narrative was necessary. South Vietnam’s political instability exacerbated the country’s disbelief in press freedoms, a disbelief that shook American administrators’ trust in the nation’s public relations officers. The new and unstable post-Diem government continued in its predecessor’s footsteps by taking an antagonistic approach to relatively unprotected American reporters in 1963, placing at least two New York Times reporters on assassination lists.19 Military officials increasingly realized that since the South Vietnamese government was “outright hostile,” the U.S. military had to step in to create trust in government among reporters.20 “The press will write whether or not we brief […] you can’t prevent stories by not providing information,” said President Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs James Greenfield, and the military began turning towards regulation and protection.21 Greenfield’s statement indicates the ability of a third party, in this case the Diem administration, to propel the media to call for administrative support and for the military to side with the American correspondents.
Responding to the fears and complaints of the press, the Chief Public Affairs Officer from 1962-64, John Mecklin, began convincing the Johnson administration that the denial of
information resulted in danger to reporters and negative, often erroneous printed pieces due to South Vietnamese manipulation and unverified information.22 The relationship with the Diem administration also shed doubt on statistics provided by the South Vietnamese. Thus, the military saw its own need for a centralized information bureau to improve data collection and dispersal, to protect American correspondents, and to advise the agenda and daily function of a free press.
The formal manifestation of these pro-media sentiments in 1964 was nicknamed Operation Maximum Candor, and remained the ideological backbone of media policy until the latter days of the war. The main manifestations of the operation were twofold: a) reducing the extent of restrictions on the press and b) streamlining and bolstering public relations offices. As far as access to the ground went, reporters were given more assistance in reaching conflict zones. Accredited broadcast crews could choose which squadron to accompany the night before their excursion began. Photojournalists were especially free to travel, often utilizing helicopter transport to reach virtually any area within the U.S. presence. The military also funded the construction of press facilities and drastically swelled the size of the public relations force from nineteen to fifty-nine public affairs officers.23 These freedoms, especially the liberties for journalists to physically travel to the front lines (provided they had their publication’s editorial and financial support), represent the pro-press mindset of the MACV in comparison to information bureaus of previous wars.
As a result of Operation Maximum Candor in 1964, the MACV’s structure was simplified, and a hierarchy of information dispersion was cemented with MACV information as the highest standard of objectivity on the ground.24 With the appointment of an “information czar” in the form of Barry Zorthian, the mission’s chief Public Affairs Officer, a larger quantity of fact-checked information was made available. Zorthian, a former newspaperman and an often-
quoted individual during his tenure, was answerable only to the ambassador. Under Zorthian, the MACV expanded its daily briefings, where information like death counts and the forces’ current positions would be recapped.25 After modifying the MACV structure in mid-1964 to include the Information and Reports Working Board, the department produced military situation reports every day in addition to a monthly evaluation of long-term progress and quarterly reports on the North Vietnamese. As the number of reporters swelled from fewer than 20 in 1963 to nearly 200 by December 1965 reflecting the growth of American involvement under Operation Rolling Thunder, “the civilian and military information operations in South Vietnam had grown into a small army […] the logistical support required to report the hard news of American activity.”26,27
Consequences of Print News Structure
If so much attention was placed on expanding access and protections for those covering the war, if reporters were truly so free to access the stories they thought were important, why did coverage continue to misinform the public? In the Johnson administration’s view, another one of the Operation’s objectives was achieved – the increased reliance on government sourcing through streamlined accreditation. The tradeoff between information access and full journalistic freedom made accreditation a critical part of the infrastructure that “generated a reporting that […] because of its official origins, tended either to be neutral on the war or to support the official point of view.”28 Accreditation was seen as a voluntary way to achieve credibility, access, and safety as a reporter. Veteran reporters were largely accredited: Don North, Larry Burrows, and Homer Bigart, among dozens of others. Since accredited reporters were able and encouraged by their editors at home to use official statistics, the individual journalist’s role of data collection and corroboration was diminished. The volume of official sourcing trumped sources like Lt. Vann in terms of influence.
The conditions for accreditation in Vietnam did allow for more analytical freedom than accreditation documents from World War II and the Korean War that stated, for example, that “articles may be released for publication to the public provided […] They will not embarrass the United States, its allies, or neutral countries.”29 Instead, the MACV banned mention of future plans, operations, supply movements, and air strikes, voluntary restrictions that the majority of reporters agreed to. However, though content was largely left to the discretion of reporters and the MACV, who offered a 24-hour advisory service, most of the Saigon press corps relied on the official press releases, authorities, and other reporters to explain the situation on the ground.30,31
In addition to the expanded access to and reliance on official sources, a significant consequence of the liberal use of accreditation beginning in 1965 was a swell in “short timers,” the reporters sent by major and minor news organizations to either cover high-impact events like the My Lai Massacre of March 1968 and the Tet Offensive of January 1968, or to “[give] their reporters a measure of credibility on the war without incurring the great expenses involved.”32 Forty-eight percent of reporters stayed for a month or less, according to correspondent accreditation files compiled by the MACV between 1965 and 1973. High turnover rates serve as evidence for the emphasis on timely stories instead of more complex news coverage, and the role of the MACV in providing facts and briefs since extended ground coverage was rare, impractical, and expensive.
Timeliness, the characteristic feature of news, ironically may have been the largest compromiser of journalistic independence on the ground. Newsmagazines and journals sent comparatively few reporters to cover the war (The New Yorker sent eight), and though these publications grew their readership during the war, newspapers and daily broadcasts still remained the primary methods of reaching the public. The disjointed nature of television
especially discouraged the use of in-depth analysis in the early part of the war, since episodes could only be consumed 24 hours apart. The volume of news coverage thus became nonrepresentative of the volume of military action, since “the majority of the Saigon correspondents had to file every day, whether the war was heating up or slowing into one of its periodic lulls”33 From a sourcing point of view, to find news, reporters “gathered what impressions they could, drawing upon the nightly MACV briefings and the word of other reporters, whose own conclusions were sometimes half-formed or poorly drawn.” The MACV was thus able to steer the narrative by redirecting the press corps on a daily basis towards divergent stories. The collaboration between reporters further reduced their analytical independence.
Restricted Access on the Ground
If 1964 was a pivotal year in establishing a press friendly ideology and a large press corps with a larger appetite for information, 1965’s significance stemmed from establishing how reporters and information could legitimately be restricted. The most controversial restrictions revolved around air strikes on Laos, which were used as a metric for tracking U.S. aggression and the mission’s expansion during Operation Rolling Thunder. Air strike information, according to the military’s official rationale, could reveal trends and strategic patterns to the North Vietnamese forces. According to the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s senior historian William M. Hammond, “in order to limit the amount of specific information reporters could acquire, [General Maxwell D. Taylor] closed Da Nang Air Base to all but escorted reporters.”34 The closure of Da Nang, the main launching point for air strikes against North Vietnam, prevented reporters from communicating the specifics on the number of flights departing to and returning from dispatches to Laos. Da Nang, too, was the site from which most journalists had wired their reports to the States, and the closure complicated the process and
timeliness of news coverage.35 Journalistic outcry against this action was swift and harsh, since there were only two military escorts on the base for the dozens of reporters, thus drastically limiting the scope of coverage about Laos. This unilateral restriction of key, controversial information went counter to the access that the Saigon press corps was used to, planting some of the first major seeds of discontent between the press and the military.
However, the real damage to the media-military relationship came afterwards, when the media protested these physical restrictions as well as the lack of access to information on Laos and later, Cambodia. When the MACV or other military departments shut out the press as U.S. success became less clear-cut, there were no channels to re-establish access without compromising trust. When Taylor ordered the closure of Da Nang Air Base, only after significant media protest and petitioning domestic officials was the base reopened, and the damage to the relationship occurred through complaints to the State Department.36
Sourcing Practices in Professional Journalism
One of the main factors leaving reporters vulnerable to undue influence was the sourcing requirements of professional journalism. The practice of quoting important sources as fact or at the very least relying on them for background information, like in a political or police beat, generated an undue reliance on sources that were increasingly directed to follow a “command line.” The Johnson administration increased the amount of factual information available to reporters to not only simplify the information collection of journalists, but also to advance their own rationale and justifications. As the Saigon press corps swelled to a record 2000 wartime reporters in 1965-67, the volume of interviews with government officials increased dramatically.37 Public affairs officers largely still believed in minimal secrecy; as Greenfield’s aide summarized, “it’s never a good idea to conceal from reporters what they may find out for
themselves – because in Viet-Nam they will. And when they do they’ll write it their way, not in a context of our choosing.”38
Case Studies
The Torching of Cam Ne
The questions then emerge: if early reporting as a whole remained consistent with official statements as a consequence of journalistic practice, why did anti-war movements begin to increase in prominence, how did reporters publish anti-war pieces, and why did officials maintain their support for open press freedoms after these reports?
Visual journalism may hold the answer, as seen in a 1965 case regarding the torching of the village of Cam Ne. As with war reporting today, more vivid stories often overshadow quotidian ones, so while the Cam Ne case is atypical of the stories filed from the ground in that it visually and explicitly condemned military action from an ideological basis, it held the public consciousness for a longer period of time and thus warrants analysis. Reporter Morley Safer joined CBS’s television crew in 1964, just one year before broadcasting his narrative changing report on American brutality. On August 2, 1965, he chose a troop of Marines to shadow the following day. On August 3, he rode an armored personnel carrier to the village complex of Cam Ne. After reports of friendly fire, the Marines with whom Safer traveled, “systematically” torched house after house, lighting napalm with Zippo lighters, “getting people out in some cases, using flamethrowers in others.”39 In his report of the events, Safer noted that none of the group spoke Vietnamese. The footage consisted of mothers fleeing homes with their children, of soldiers dropping lighters onto thatched roofs and ignoring civilians asking for time to remove their belongings. The vivid imagery created narrative immediacy, contributing to the 31 percent of respondents in a 1967 Newsweek survey who stated that television had caused them to oppose
the war.40 By 1966, the major news networks had pumped five million dollars into an industry dependent on active footage. The emotional nature of the coverage meant “a better understanding of the war was rarely a product of television news. […] It left its viewers ‘an appalling record of surprise and death.’”41
When reflecting on the event later, Safer commented, “it was the end of a certain kind of innocence among the public, really. […] That's why it was so shocking, because it's not how we do things. And there we were, and seen to be doing it. […] Of course, this wouldn't have happened in World War II, or if it had happened, it wouldn't have been photographed”.42 Safer was right when he acknowledged the unprecedented nature of his negative report. Convinced that the footage highlighted important truths about military behavior, Safer submitted his tape and footage over the telex to CBS from Da Nang, unseen by military censors who would have been present in former wars, and the clip aired on the evening news two days later.
On the one hand, the Cam Ne incident shows that in fact individual journalists were able to create and distribute pivotal reports that exposed the unflattering activities largely absent from the American consciousness.43 Analysts of the time agreed; to ABC News Vice-President James Hagerty, “American television was exposing the false glory of war,” leading the public to question the legitimacy of the American presence. This case study helps show that journalists did not buy into the patriotic narratives that Johnson insisted on publishing, and that journalistic skepticism towards authority was alive and well. The public vitriol against the troops’ actions subverted the authority of the military in the American media narrative, even when the Cam Ne torching was not fully supported by the military’s official line. The morning after the Cam Ne report aired, President Johnson phoned CBS director Frank Stanton to say, “this is your president, and yesterday your boys s--- on the American flag.”44 For months, Johnson was
convinced Safer was a Communist and ordered his removal from Vietnam, a statement that certainly did not help governmental standing in the eyes of reporters and may have made them wary of pursuing other subversive stories. But in the spring of 1966, Johnson ordered General Westmoreland, Zorthian’s successor, to strongly consider implementing a formal system of censorship that would require all media content to be screened prior to publication. Johnson questioned Maximum Candor’s policies when the American military lost face at the hands of a reporter doing his job, indicating his administration’s discomfort. Safer had brought the editorial pages to television and forced the administration to listen. The Marines’ actions were later denounced by the Johnson administration after the report, in an attempt to recover from the public relations debacle. With televised images, it was easier for the public to believe the brutal narrative told on screen. Though the coverage was perhaps not representative of everything that happened on the ground that day, Safer used the torching to visually take a stand against the war, indicative of a visual journalist’s freedom to choose what content to portray and the media’s ability to affect change in line with their watchdog role.
But the paradox remained: Safer’s coverage of the troops was only possible due to MACV policy and a consensual agreement with the troops he shadowed. The report highlights the complexities underlying the watchdog theory, since the government provided access to the scene and its policies theoretically supported Safer’s reporting of the incident since he did not technically go against accreditation policy.
4.2 Gas Uproar
Another flaw in the “watchdog” theory is that it assumes that reporters cannot err in their information gathering. Though more rare than official influence via sourcing, misinformation also occurs when reporters misrepresent the severity of military concealment either due to faulty
fact-checking or in order to retaliate or react to concealment. In early 1965, the military faced censure because a reporter included a controversial quote about the use of non-lethal gas. As a consequence of the uproar, reporters and editorial pages left the Johnson administration a bitter scapegoat for exaggerated events.
In March 1965, troops began employing a non-lethal nausea-inducing gas in Hanoi and other South Vietnamese cities in contact with the Viet Cong in order to more effectively evacuate civilians. AP reporter Peter Arnett confronted the MACV about rumors of the tactic. The MACV held doubts as to whether to reveal this information. Since the gases were non-lethal and the North Vietnamese could generate anti-US propaganda based on the tactic, the MACV maintained its reticence. Denied information, Arnett held the story for months, until his photographer partner shot footage of South Vietnamese troops with gas canisters. Visual corroboration was what Arnett needed to file a report. The report briefly discussed the compounds used in the attacks, but included a quote from an adviser who decried the tactic as one hearkening back to the brutalities of World War 1.
The explosive response to the report, especially the quote, criticized the tactics as eugenics warfare “supplied and sanctioned by white men against Asians,” as a New York Times editorial stated the week following the report. Ambassador Taylor, doing damage control on the outcry, withdrew the use of gas as well as crop-control pesticides. Though it revealed secret military tactics as per the watchdog theory, Zorthian (now a USIA adviser) called the story “deliberately negative” due to an imbalance of quoted material and a skating coverage of the gas’s non-lethality.45
Arnett’s story had practical consequences as well. For the second and final time before the Tet Offensive, the Johnson administration proposed a formal system of censorship to
Westmoreland. The media was not a silent participant in the increasingly questionable relationship with the Johnson administration. In a May 1965 editorial published in the New Republic, the term “credibility gap” was used for the first time to address MACV deceptions as well as discontent with government statements on domestic issues.46 As doubts increased about U.S. success and practices, the press continued to employ government sources but included caveats at a higher rate about the trustworthiness of the sources, as in Arnett’s gas story.47 The military also moved towards a position of secrecy as it became clear that the media would continue to pursue subversive stories.
Introduction of Communist Sources
As in the days before Operation Maximum Candor, the press began looking to alternative methods of finding anecdotal information due to their frustration with the MACV. A significant sourcing change unaccounted for by the MACV was the increase in access to North Vietnamese sources from 1964-67. Either because of domestic numbness towards traditional stories of combat or because of higher interaction rates with North Vietnamese civilians, American reporters began following the trails of journalists from neutral countries who spent time embedded in North Vietnam. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett spent a third of 1964 reporting on Vietcong strategy and lifestyle. The “life-behind-the-lines” story became a trademark of New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury, one of the first Americans to extensively employ North Vietnamese sources.48 When Americans began reading about and reacting to stories of daily life in Vietnam, the news media began to realize they “had accepted without ‘skepticism or doubt’ the official characterization of the bombing.”49 As scholar Clarence R. Wyatt states, “beginning with Salisbury, the American people could see their enemy not as animals but as another people trying to make a life for themselves and their children amid
hardship and sacrifice.”50 Reporters also began expanding their coverage of air strikes, with the consequence of expanded reliance on North Vietnamese sources.
Stories about life in Vietnam under U.S. air raids faced censure from the Johnson administration and were written off as “propagandistic,” reflecting the return of the military’s discomfort with unorthodox sources. Johnson’s administration labeled Salisbury a communist. However, the 1967 shift away from traditional channels of official sourcing continued despite the military’s censure of Salisbury and cemented the growing media distrust in the MACV.
Zorthian’s brainchild nighttime briefings, supposed to be the ideological peak of information access, were nicknamed “The Five O’clock Follies” in a reflection of the distrust in MACV information.51 Though they represent a small fraction of the coverage during the early years of the war, the incorporation of North Vietnamese sourcing and movement away from MACV briefings represents the farthest distance that the print media was able to achieve from the MACV. In line with the watchdog theory, journalists had collected independent information that shed light on the consequences of military action. If they had proceeded with unconventional sourcing and increased the volume of ground reporting, a more robust image of the war would have emerged. Due to the war’s movement into one of attrition in 1967, though, the public grew eager for concrete measurements of the war’s progress. The Johnson administration was able to capitalize on this need and the news industry moved closer to dependence on the MACV.
The Tet Offensive as a Catalyst for Media Policy Instability
Issues with Inconsistent Statistical Information
By 1965, concrete analyses of the war’s progress were few and far between, with Lt. Charles Mohr stating, “The one certain characteristic of a guerrilla war is the extreme difficulty of telling how it’s going”.52 The impracticalities of measuring the number of deaths in a guerrilla
war did not stop the press’s demand for this semblance of a statistical measure of the war’s progress. Until 1966, the MACV had provided North Vietnamese kill counts on a weekly basis, though “from General Westmoreland down, American commanders in Vietnam realized that many of the numbers upon which they had relied so heavily were of questionable origin and accuracy.”53 With the war stretching into one of attrition, the death counts of North Vietnamese were not high enough to create an optimistic narrative with U.S. victory.
Admiral Grant Sharp, a vocal critic of Vietnam policy, stated, “we have trapped ourselves with our obsession to quantify everything.” The MACV could neither halt the dispersal of North Vietnamese casualty statistics without raising suspicion nor continue releasing honest statistics without compromising the illusion of progress. They thus turned to deception at the behest of military command. Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs General Wheeler told Westmoreland to “do whatever is necessary to ensure that these figures are not, repeat, not, released to news media or otherwise exposed to public knowledge.”54 The blatant de-emphasis of Operation Maximum Candor’s restrict-and-justify spirit indicated a turn towards a more dangerous cycle of deception and the expansion of the credibility gap, since the media could not communicate accurate information to the public.
The Propaganda Campaign the Month before Tet
The month before the Tet Offensive saw the distilled version of the tensions building up over the previous years. In November 1967, directives tending towards secrecy emerged from higher up, and exploited infrastructural weaknesses in print journalism. Concurrent with the expansive growth in the press corps, the Johnson administration launched a public relations campaign in order to swell public opinion of the war, which lagged due to the lack of visible progress and the prominence of the anti-war movement. Through televised interviews with
generals and Johnson himself, and the aggressive dispersal of traditional print propaganda materials, though, public opinion of the war improved by eight percent.55 But the optimistic narrative necessary to maintain this growth could not be sustained alongside footage of ground combat, like Safer’s Cam Ne report. Johnson’s propaganda agenda spiraled wider, with Westmoreland going in front of the National Press Club in December 1967 with the message that “whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.” These quotes found wide circulation among a population that was thirsting for progress and an end to the war of attrition.
David Halberstam captured the press’s appetite for optimistic official narratives and statistics by stating, “When you pay $30 billion a year [to fund a war] you buy at least a fair share of illusions.”56 Many of those illusions emerged from an overreliance on statistics instead of trend analysis. The MACV Office of Information (MACCOI) published nearly 400 reports on a monthly basis, with the figure approaching 500 in times of large news output. The MACCOI expanded to create “increasing amounts of readily retrievable, easily manipulated data” that were presented to reporters and the Department of Defense.57 However, as the MACCOI developed its data-gathering arm, it began re-evaluating and narrowing the way it defined statistical parameters – including kill counts – for accuracy’s sake. The new, more accurate data deviated from past measurements and reflected a more pessimistic outlook on American progress, and thus regularly faced questioning from the news media.58
The MACV had to decide how to reconcile the underestimation of North Vietnamese strength with the Johnson administration’s desire for an optimistic narrative. An episode in March 1967 dealing with enemy battalion-size attacks displays the pressures exerted by Johnson’s progress campaign. Internally, the military took measures to respond to the more pessimistic statistics. In reporting the total attacks in 1966, General Westmoreland reported a
total of 174 attacks to General Wheeler, far higher than the 45 predicted in preliminary reports.
However, the military was unwilling to transmit this more accurate data to reporters and the public. After hearing from Westmoreland, Wheeler employed an analysis team from Washington to “review” the MACV’s collection of data, subsequently reducing the estimated total back to 45 in his report to the president. Here, we see higher-level officials bypassing the public affairs officers’ opinions in favor of Cold-War-era levels of manipulation.59 The specific method of manipulation occurred when the numbers excluded “an entire category of the enemy, the militia forces. By dropping the militia forces,” scholar Jake Blood states, “intelligence could now support the image of progress without any convoluted explanations for higher militia numbers based on better intelligence.”60 In this way, after the MACV realized that it had underestimated North Vietnamese strength, it caused official government and military sources to restrict access and twist information in the face of American military failure.
These strategy numbers misled not only the press, but government officials as well. Though both parties were adversely affected by Wheeler’s concealment, the harsh realities of the Tet attacks and the optimistic narrative pandered by the progress campaigns, juxtaposed against years of tension and suspicion between the press and the government in Vietnam, produced dismayed and skeptical reactions in the press as well as among soldiers. The Tet Offensive brought to light the instability of the nebulous information policy in the face of an increasingly unsuccessful military policy.
The Offensive Itself
Due in part to the MACV’s increased internal accuracy, upper military command increasingly became aware of North Vietnamese consolidation near the Marine base of Khe Sanh. At a diplomatic meeting in late December 1967, Johnson “predicted quietly” that a major
enemy offensive within the next few months was highly plausible. He did not envision the political breadth and specificity of the North Vietnamese attack. Enemy forces attacked 39 of the 44 provincial capitals within a four-hour period on January 30, 1968.61 The city of Saigon witnessed full-scale warfare for the first time and the recently constructed U.S. embassy came under heavy artillery fire.62
Ironically, in the breaking news situation that American journalism was supposed to be best prepared for, infrastructure issues compromised journalistic integrity. Because the press corps was disproportionately located in Saigon and highly concentrated in the area around the U.S. embassy, they began covering “the target most accessible to them” – the attack on the embassy.63 In the moment, journalists relied on the word of military policemen, and broadcast crews transmitted reports of Communist infiltrations of the first two floors of the embassy when no such events had occurred. After regaining control of the embassy, Westmoreland held a press conference to clarify the “capable” U.S. response to the North Vietnamese. In fact, North Vietnam suffered casualties over 10,000 men, while allied U.S. forces lost 749.64 As a reflection of their distrust of Westmoreland’s words, though, reporters also turned to quotes from other military personnel who candidly discussed North Vietnam’s “very successful offensive, in its initial phases.”65 The media’s response to their inaccuracies further reveals the media’s bitterness and lack of immediate trust in official statements. The broadcast and print media had misrepresented the embassy attack, but CBS and The New York Times took until February 2 to correct the factually incorrect reports. In the seventy-two hours that the media had spread the message of surprise, the offensive had been cemented as a “psychological turning point” that belied the optimistic narrative of the previous month’s progress campaign. Yet, as Yale scholar
Peter Braestrup says, though, “by his lack of coherence and candor before Tet and his failure to take charge just after the enemy assaults, Lyndon Johnson suffered a self-inflicted wound.”66
To many individuals in the media, Tet represented the perfect opportunity to chastise the military for the distance between official statements and reality. “These are not the deeds of an enemy whose fighting efficiency has ‘progressively declined’ and whose morale is ‘sinking fast,’ as United States military officials put it in November,” said a New York Times editorial on February 1.67 Ironically, by ignoring realities of U.S. military competency, they helped perpetuate that gap, since “most journalists, especially TV journalists, did not correct their first impressions” of U.S. military failure.68 Yes, the mental and physical speed necessary to compile stories that went against concretely optimistic administrative statements strained the logistical backbone of the Saigon press corps to its core. But by selectively choosing to highlight negative analyses from lower-level military officials, journalists misappropriated the watchdog role in order to confirm their existing conclusions that efforts for pacification and South Vietnamese stability had ended. In this sense, the American public suffered at the hands of Johnson’s precedent of secrecy in late 1967 as well as the media’s frustration towards the administration, which allowed for little communication of the U.S. response’s positive realities.
The instabilities of post-Tet coverage were avoidable, as the media felt as though they had misrepresented American progress and blindsided the public. Granted, the government did not anticipate the scale or location of the attack. But the press being caught cold on January 30 forced the same kind of retaliation seen in Peter Arnett’s coverage of the gas leaks, or of the media’s protests against the closure of Da Nang – where a story that was a U.S. victory on a strictly military level was communicated as a psychological defeat. The retaliation is best
communicated by Walter Cronkite’s statement: “What the hell – I thought we were winning this war.” A news page in 1965 would have featured stories on many institutional criticisms emerging from a grassroots level – civil rights movements, draft resistance rallies, and the counterculture movement. Vietnam, then, represents one of the only opportunities of the time where the administration was heard directly in the news and its opinions given a platform through the press. By having a single sub-department of the military act as the official source of statistical and quoted information, the administration took advantage of the opportunity to deliver a cohesive message. An open media, thought the public affairs officers during the war’s early years, would be able to highlight the easily achieved successes of spreading democracy through Southeast Asia, the heroic narrative of America bringing stability to the third world. However, homogenous positivity was ill suited to the complex ground situation of Vietnam, where soldiers felt as if they took two steps back for every tepid step forward. Though the realities of journalistic practice combined with the military’s concealment compromised the intentions for an open press, the fact that those intentions existed at all demonstrated a larger trust in the press than had existed previously or has since existed. Reporters intended to accurately portray the complexities of war, and the public affairs officers intended to let them.
Notes
1 William M. Hammond, Who Were the Saigon Correspondents and Does It Matter? Working Paper Series 8 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, 2000), 4.
2 Peter Braestrup, Battle Lines: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Military and the Media (New York: Priority Press Publication, 1985), 10.
3 William M. Hammond, Who Were the Saigon Correspondents and Does It Matter? Working Paper Series 8 (Cambridge, MA: Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, 2000), 41, http://goo.gl/qoJ2D2.
4 United States Army Center of Military History, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Withdrawal, 1968-1973, by Graham A. Cosmas (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007), 129, accessed April 2, 2015, http://goo.gl/RfpAkR.
5 Amanda Pollak, "Walter Cronkite: On Censorship," Reporting America at War, http://goo.gl/I36IZP.
6 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, "Communication: News and Censorship," The War: At Home, last modified September 2007, accessed November 30, 2014, http://goo.gl/xoCSAO.
7 Memorandum by Office of Censorship, "Code of Wartime Practices for Nonmilitary Radio Services," March 1, 1943, accessed November 30, 2014, http://goo.gl/09ZKt2
8 William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968-1973(Washington D.C.: Center for Military History, U.S. Army, 1996), 63.
9 Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America, ed. Martin J. Manning and Clarence R. Wyatt (Washington D.C.: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 657. "Operation Maximum Candor," by Clarence R. Wyatt.
10 Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29.
11 Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda in Wartime America, ed. Martin J. Manning and Clarence R. Wyatt (Washington D.C.: ABC-CLIO, 2011), s.v. "Mecklin, John,” by Clarence R. Wyatt.
12 Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military, 15.
13 Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military, 11.
14 Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military, 12.
15 Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, unabridged ed. (n.p.: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009), p5.
16 Ibid.
17 William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War(Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 10.
18 Ibid
19 Wyatt, Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda, “Operation Maximum Candor”, 658.
20 Ibid
21 Ibid
22 Wyatt, Encyclopedia of Media and Propaganda, “John Mecklin,” 659.
23 United States Army Center of Military History, MACV: The Joint Command in the Years of Withdrawal, 1968-1973, by Graham A. Cosmas (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007), 129, accessed October 22, 2014, http://goo.gl/Pl2m6u.
24 Clarence R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 158.
25 Ibid.
26 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers, 112.
27 Hammond, Who Were the Saigon, 38.
28 Hammond, Who Were the Saigon, 21
29 War Department, FM 30-26 Regulations for Correspondents Accompanying U.S. Army Forces in the Field, by Q. C. Marshall and E. S. Adams, Basic Field Manual, accessed November 30, 2014, http://goo.gl/CTHD2w.
30 Hammond, Who Were the Saigon, 12
31 Clarence R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 68.
32 Hammond, Who Were the Saigon, 12
33 Hammond, Who Were the Saigon, 19
34 Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military, 41.
35 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American, 161.
36 Ibid
37 David F. Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 14.
38 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American, 163
39 Burns and Novick, "Communication: News and Censorship," The War: At Home.
40 “How Bloody can It Be?” Newsweek, December 25, 1967, p. 76
41 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American, 148
42 Amanda Pollak, "Morley Safer," Reporting America at War, http://goo.gl/us6KwN.
43 Daniel C. Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4.
44 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American, 145
45 Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military, 47.
46 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American, 254
47 Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, 7.
48 Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military, 153-56.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American, 164
52 Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American, 162
53 United States Army Center of Military History, MACV: The Joint Command, 294.
54 Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military, 62.
55 Ibid.
56 David Halberstam, "Whose Benefit? Whose Doubt?," Newsweek, November 17, 1967, 68.
57 United States Army Center of Military History, MACV: The Joint Command, 292
58 Ibid
59 United States Army Center of Military History, MACV: The Joint Command, 445.
60 Jake Blood, The Tet Effect: Intelligence and the Public Perception of War., Case Military Studies (n.p.: Routledge, 2004), 2.
61 Braestrup, Battle Lines, 74.
62 Hammond, Reporting Vietnam, 108.
63 Hammond, Reporting Vietnam, 110.
64 Ibid
65 Ibid
66 Braestrup, Battle Lines, 74.
67 “Bloody Path to Peace,” New York Times, 1 Feb 1968.
68 Braestrup, Battle Lines, 74.
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