The press, Vietnam and a mistaken piece of conventional wisdom

Now that the Republican Party has adopted the Nixon-on-Oxycontin strategy to paint all critics of Bush's policies in the Iraq War as unpatriotic supporters of The Terrorists who behead people, I'm sure we'll being hearing various aspects of it elaborated in the Reps' Mighty Wurlitzer over the next few weeks.

And one major part of it will be one of their perennial favorites, attacking the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press!  The notion that The Media caused the defeat of the US in the Vietnam War is dear to the hearts of the Radical Republicans.

That interpretation, or "narrative" to use the postmodern term, is seriously at odds with reality.  And in this post I take a look at some of the problems with it.

The press and the Battle of Ap Boc

Jeffrey Record was right when he wrote the following in The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998), speaking of the common notion that the US media was a significant cause of the loss of the Vietnam War.  Though he notes that it remains one of "prime targets of recrimination among those who believe that victory in Vietnam was stolen from the American military."

Condemnation of the media is a dog that won't hunt. To be sure, the media's professional performance in covering the war left much to be desired. The fact remains, however, that until the [1968] Tet Offensive, which prompted a dramatic lowering of U.S. war aims (from seeking; a military victory to searching for an "honorable" way out of Vietnam), both print and broadcast media editorials by and large supported the war, in many cases buying the official and congenitally optimistic line on the war's course. Moreover, the early skepticism of such bright and ambitious young journalists as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnette, and David Halberstam over official prognoses of the war's progress was justified. That skepticism was fueled by the yawning gap between, on the one hand, what they saw in the field with their own eyes - and were told by such U.S. Army advisors as the legendary John Paul Vann - and, on the other, the perceptions to which they were treated back in Saigon by such career optimists as Ambassador Fritz Nolting and Westmoreland's predecessor, Paul Harkins (who, among other things, called the South Vietnamese Army's calamitous performance in the January [1963] Battle of Ap Bac a victory). The press was rightly suspicious of an official reporting system whose integrity was constantly threatened by a near manic preoccupation with quantification and with pleasing superiors.

This sounds depressingly familiar to anyone who has followed the US press coverage of the Iraq War and the "congenitally optimistic" pronoucements of progress by both military and civilian officials.

The Battle of Ap Bac to which Record refers was an important early turning point in the relationship of some of the most important reporters in the field and US officials.  It was an engagement in which the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN), under the direction of American advisers, performed badly in a situation where ARVN troops had a 10:1 advantage against the Vietcong.  At the end of the battle, 61 ARVN soldiers were dead, but only three Vietcong bodies were found.

Both military and civilian officials insisted it was a triumph.  The reporters covering it thought otherwise.  This wasn't simply a case of deliberate deception.  There was also some self-deception going on.  The American officials were judging it by the standards of conventional warfare.  As Stanley Karnow wrote in Vietnam: A History (1983), this positive evaluation by US officials "underlined their concept of the conflict: a conventional contest for territory."  The ARVN had seized a piece of ground.  But the Vietcong had outfought them.

Karnow also describes how the Kennedy administration viewed the bad press on the battle:

The outcome at Ap Bac aggravated the friction then growing between the American government and the news media. Neither Kennedy nor his successors would impose censorship, which would have required them to acknowledge that a real war was being waged. Instead, they wanted journalists to cooperate by accentuating the positive. Just after the Ap Bac battle, when Peter Arnett of the Associated Press asked him a tough question, Admiral Felt shot back: "Get on the team."

The lesson of being suspicion of the press

Retired Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard conducted a survey in 1974 of Army General Officers who had served in Vietnam.  His survey covered a wide range of issues, including press relations.  He published his results as The War Managers (1977).

Rating newspaper coverage, only 8% of his respondents selected "generally responsible."  Fifty-one percent selected "Uneven.  Some good, but many irresponsible," while 38% picked "On the whole tended to be irresponsible and disruptive of United States efforts in Vietnam."

Television coverage rated even more poorly in his sample, though the question here was considerably more specific.  It asked about whether they thought it was good "for American peole to see actual scenes of fighting."  Only 4% said yes to that.  Fifty-two percent selected "Not a good thing ... was counterproductive to the war effort," and another 39% said it was "Probably not a good thing in balance."

Kinnard observe that the intensity of the feelings expressed was surprising.  Some of the elaborations he got in commentary from his respondents showed a strong willingness to blame the press for problems in the war:

Several of the respondents felt that the reporters had made up their minds in advance that going into Vietnam was a mistake and were out to prove their point. Many generals attributed a lack of support of the war by the American people to the media. One senior general said that the media conducted "a psychological warfare campaign against the United States policies in Vietnam that could not have been better done by the enemy."

A large number of respondents commented on the media's representation of the war, some saying that the reporters simply did not understand the war, and in other cases that reporting was distorted for effect. In some instances editors at home were blamed for distorting stories or writing misleading headlines. A former Chief of Staff studied combat photography closely and was convinced that much of it was staged. One Division Commander tells of seeing a telegram from one of the major TV networks to a field reporter in his area which read, "Get footage of American soldiers misbehaving." (my emphasis) [Kinnard simply reports the last two claims; he doesn't comment on their accuracy.]

Such negative assessments and even extreme comments had been encouraged by the Nixon administration, which had criticized the press heavily for allegedly biased and inaccurate coverage.  Since then, with major assistance from the well-funded conservative noise machine, the negative attitude expressed by many of the officers in Kinnard's survey has become conventional wisdom among a large part of the population, especially in the Republican Party.

Gen. William Westmoreland , who had been the commander of the forces in Vietnam, later expressed great hostility to the press over their coverage.  His influence certainly shaped part of public opinion, as conservatives tended to lionize him.  Kinnard quotes him as saying the media created an "aura of defeat."  This kind of notion has become a bedrock article of faith for true-blue (true-red?) Republican conservatives.  Kinnard quotes Army Gen. Hamilton Howze from a 1975 article in the journal Army taking this stance in a way that would warm any Radical Republican's heart (my emphasis):

The worst feature of the war was the fracturing of our society. This took the form we all know so well; heavily slanted, anti-administration and anti-military reporting in the news media. . . . Hanoi was able, through our press, to monitor closely . . . the situation respecting U.S. morale and willingness to continue the fight. The record was good until America itself lost much of its will to fight and the politicians and press began their program of villification.

This is a pretty blunt statement of a stab-in-the-back theory to shift blame for the loss in Vietnam away from the military and its mistakes and inadequacies onto a seditious media and cowardly civilians.  "America itself lost much of it's will to fight," he said.  He sounds like he would be more comfortable in some more disciplined and orderly form of government than democracy.

Kinnard's own analysis of the press performance in the Vietnam War is considerably more sober.    He writes that after the Battle of Ap Bac, news correspondents became highly skeptical of official declarations.  However:

It should be noted that they were not questioning the propriety of the American presence; that was to come later. No doubt existed at this point regarding the premises of United States involvement or ofits ability to prevail. There were questions about the South Vietnamese ability to fight and about the tactics being employed, but as yet the correspondents were not raising the big question of whether we should be there at all.

One legacy of this early period was that any form of strong press control became impossible. The press formulated its own guidelines, such as not publishing details of military operations until the Military Assistance Command had released them. Subsequently, attempts were made to rebuild the credibility of the United States Information Offices, but without any notable success so far as projecting a favorable image of United States efforts is concerned.

In other words, news reporters who considered their job to be more than doing stenography for the Pentagon rightly decided that they had good reason to doubt the credibility of the official version.  Once that confidence is lost, it's hard to rebuild.  We always have to keep in mind, though, in looking at this period, that the press corps of the 1960s was far more conscientious in its work that our sad excuse for a "press corps" today.

When the Johnson administration decided to move from an advisory role to having American forces assume the leading role in direct combat, he tried "to give the appearance that there had been no change in policy."  Kinnard hits the high points in a succinct manner describing what actually undercut public confidence in the war.  And it wasn't the press:

This approach [of underplaying the significance of the 1965 escalation] first eroded and then destroyed President Johnson's credibility with the public far more than any action of the media.

Press relations under Westmoreland were a great deal better than under Harkins [his predecssor], but eventually Tet 68 destroyed his credibility too. Speaking on the eve of Tet in November 1967, before the National Press Club, Westmoreland painted a rosy picture. Conjuring up the statistics of the Measurement of Progress system, he indicated steady progress. He stated, in fact, that withdrawal of American troops could begin in 1969 (which they did, but under different conditions). ...

It was in this rosy atmosphere that the American people turned on their television sets at the end of January and early February 1968, to view theTet Offensive. What they saw was shocking beyond belief. Instead of victory, there seemed to be a new war going on. A group of VC commandos was briefly ensconced on the ground of the United States Embassy in the heart of Saigon. How, they wondered, was this possible? What in the world was happening?

A shocker of a different sort occurred a few days later in the streets of Saigon. In the course of the fighting, the Chief of the National Police, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executed a captured VC officer with a revolver pointed at the man's head. As it turned out, the event was recorded by both a still camera and a TV camera. Whatever the justification for the execution, it was an act of cruelty which did not help the world image of the South Vietnamese at a critically important time for them.

Earlier this year, I attended a presentation at the Oakland Museum which included a former South Vietnamese senior military press officer.  When this latter incident came up, he held forth at some length and with great passion about how Nguyen Ngoc Loan was absolutely right to do what he did, and his only mistake was in not taking away the camera that recorded it.  (Actually, there were two cameras, but his point came across very strongly.)  The war never ended for that guy, it seems.

Expectations of the war, and the public's understanding of the war based on years of declarations of victories and successes, were drastically at odds with what was really happening on the ground.  In a small conflict, like Afghanistan is at the moment, it is possible to get away with that for an extended period of time.  In larger, highly visible wars like Vietnam and Iraq, it isn't possible to sustain that kind of illusion forever.

It's a fascinating thing on several levels to me how ideas that mean one thing in a military context can percolate into civilians political discussions and shape attitudes about military issues in a way that may have a very different effect.  For instance, as Kinnard points out, it's no surprise that the officer corps would be critical of press coverage, if only because they saw it more closely and knew some of the details of events in much more detail than the news audience in the US could:

One would expect the military managers of the war to havea negative attitude toward media coverage of events in or concerning that tragedy [the Vietnam War]. Aside from problems of waging the war itself, there are more fundamental reasons. The traditional authoritarian nature of military services requires a tight control of all events, including news distribution. The professional expertise of officers concerning military operations permits them to be more critical of news coverage of such matters than civilians. Also, their deep involvement in military matters causes them to evaluate the treatment by media of matters concerning the military.

But what filters into some of the more paranoid and authoritarian members of the civilian population may get boiled down to something like, "The record was good until America itself lost much of its will to fight and the politicians and press began their program of villification."

It certainly appears that the current Nixon-on-OxyContin marketing blitz will include encouragement of simple-minded approaches like the latter.  Rummy said on his Meet the Press appearance Sunday (06/26/05):

If you think about it, solid progress is being made. The political progress in Iraq is considerable. They've elected a government, they have sovereignty over their nation, they're in the process of drafting a constitution, all people are participating, the elections will be held toward the end of the year, economic progress is being made. And yet Zarqawi and his people continue to kill Iraqis, they continue to kill coalition people, they continue to behead people, and the lethality is violence, and that's what's reported. So the American people are basically seeing almost all of the violence and the negatives but very little of the positive side. So it's not surprising. (my emphasis)

Anybody who wants to stay "reality-based" needs to view such claims about the press with heavy skepticism.  (Actually, anything coming out of Rummy's mouth should be viewed with heavy skepticism.)  But the press also needs to be viewed with a "reality-based" skepticism, as well.