Читать книгу Information at War - Philip Seib - Страница 11

One of the most enduring myths about the Vietnam War is related to information: “The news media lost the war.” According to this notion, negative and inaccurate news reporting about the conflict so poisoned American public opinion that it became politically impossible for the government to pursue the fighting with the patience and aggressiveness needed to win.³⁰

Granted, information provided by the news media helped to fuel dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war, especially during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But journalists were mostly following a path that was charted by government policymakers and that led into the much-discussed “quagmire” in which the US war effort foundered. Clark Clifford, who succeeded Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense during Johnson’s final year in office, later wrote:

The press made errors in reporting, as it does in every war, but the bulk of the reporting from the war zone reflected the official position. Contrary to right-wing revisionism, reporters and the antiwar movement did not defeat America in Vietnam. Our policy failed because it was based on false premises and false promises. Had the results in Vietnam approached, even remotely, what Washington and Saigon had publicly predicted for many years, the American people would have continued to support their government.³¹

Much of the analysis of news media performance during the Vietnam years has focused on coverage of the Tet offensive in early 1968, which will be addressed later in this chapter. But the government–press relationship, which had been relatively cozy during World War II, was changing earlier than Tet, notably during the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Two episodes not related to Vietnam set the stage for later tensions. Both centered on Cuba: the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and the Missile Crisis of October 1962. In each instance, the flow of information to the public was significantly limited by behind-the-scenes agreements between the White House and leading news organizations.

Trying to maintain secrecy about the upcoming American-sponsored invasion of Cuba, the White House pressured the New York Times and several other publications to withhold, or at least modify, stories before the invasion date, lest they tip off Fidel Castro’s regime about the coming attack. They agreed and did so. Nevertheless, the invasion was a disaster; almost all of the 1,400 US-backed anti-Castro Cubans were killed or captured as they went ashore at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast.

Although Kennedy had orchestrated the pressure campaign to limit coverage, he later told Times managing editor Turner Catledge, “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.” Catledge later observed: “On the one hand he condemned us for printing too much, and in the next breath he condemned us for printing too little. He wanted it both ways, and he did not change my view that the newspapers, not the government, must decide what news is fit to print.”³²

As we will see, journalists deferring to the White House is not uncommon when “national security” is cited. Those in the higher echelons of government often seem to believe that “We know more and we know better than you do,” with “you” encompassing not just the news media but the broader public as well. Sometimes the officials are correct; the breadth of their information sources – which may include the intelligence community and others not available to the press or the public – might give them enhanced perspective on events of the moment. But a government’s access to information does not, in itself, always lead to wisdom, and journalists generally agree that they should resist pressure even when it is dressed up as an appeal to patriotism.

Compared to the Bay of Pigs situation, the 1962 Missile Crisis was a very different matter, as the stakes involved were so enormous. At issue was not an invasion of Cuba by a ragtag military unit, but rather a real danger of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union because of the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Alerted by aerial reconnaissance photos, Kennedy had decided to impose a naval quarantine on Cuba as part of a strategy to force the Kremlin to remove the missiles. “Quarantine” meant a blockade, which under international law constitutes an act of war and, in this case, could easily have led to a confrontation between American and Soviet naval vessels. The United States was poised to launch airstrikes and an invasion force if the missiles were left in place, and US bombers armed with nuclear weapons were ready to attack the Soviet Union. Kennedy planned to address the American people and the rest of the world on Monday evening, October 22, and he was counting on the Soviet leadership not knowing beforehand about the American response to the crisis.

So, when Kennedy learned that the New York Times and Washington Post were prepared to run stories about the quarantine and US troop movements before the speech, the President asked Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos and Post publisher Philip Graham not to print information that would give the Kremlin time to issue its own ultimatum before Kennedy’s address. Graham quickly agreed, but the Times moved more slowly. Washington bureau chief James Reston called the president and, citing the agreement by the Times the previous year to withhold information about the Bay of Pigs, asked: “If we hold out on our readers now, are we going to be in a war against the Russians before we print another edition? Some of us wonder whether you are asking for secrecy until after the shooting has begun.” In response, Kennedy promised, “There will be no bloodshed before I explain this very serious situation to the American people.”³³

With that, the Times agreed, and it published only a vague report about “an air of crisis” in Washington. Kennedy gave his speech, which included this frightening message: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”³⁴ After an exceptionally tense six days, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev declared (after the United States had secretly agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey) that the missile sites in Cuba would be dismantled. The crisis was over.

These two Cuban crises illustrate how the news media operated as a gatekeeper determining what information reaches the public. As a matter of Constitutional law, news organizations could not be ordered to withhold information, but shared perceptions of national interest sometimes fostered de facto partnership. The public’s “right to know” became secondary to what news executives, in collaboration with the government, defined as a “need to know.” Between the government and the leading news organizations, a chokehold could be applied to the flow of information. Government officials and journalists could negotiate among themselves the timing for the public being able to learn important facts about a particular situation.

In 1962, was the withholding of information a proper role for the news media? During the Missile Crisis, the public was left in the dark, albeit briefly, but the exigencies of the situation may have dictated news organizations’ restraint as being in the public’s interest. According to Graham Allison, when the missiles in Cuba were first discovered, Kennedy’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy told the president that they probably had a week before the news leaked. Kennedy took six days to formulate his response and “noted afterward that if he had been forced to make his decision in the first 48 hours, he would have chosen the air strike rather than the naval blockade – something that could have led to nuclear war.”³⁵

From the perspective of those at the White House, this collaboration between the press and the government was a good thing, as diplomacy had time to work and defuse the situation. But the gatekeeper role cited here has changed considerably in recent years. With the presence of expanded broadcast outlets and the arrival of social media, there are now so many information “gates” that they cannot be controlled by a few media executives. Today, rather than having Kennedy’s seven days to devise a plan, the time during which secrecy could be maintained would probably be closer to seven hours. If Twitter, YouTube, and other such venues had existed in October 1962, they would almost certainly have been filled with individuals’ reports about troop movements in Florida, leaks from people in government supporting and opposing the administration’s proposed measures, disinformation from the Soviets, and other content – some of it accurate and some of it not. With social media available, it would be relatively easy to circumvent any limitation on information, no matter how high-minded the intent. The president would have faced a far more demanding timetable for deciding what to do.

Even in the early 1960s, the government’s reliance on “national security” as a rationale for discouraging journalistic enterprise was wearing thin as a new, aggressive corps of correspondents made their presence felt. In their work during the initial years of the American presence in Vietnam, a number of these journalists reflected a more adversarial approach to covering their country’s military operations and a more confrontational attitude toward policymakers. In many ways, this was a contest for control of information, with news professionals rejecting the notion that they should be merely conduits for government-generated material and be deferential when the government wanted information altered or suppressed. They increasingly embraced their independence in their role as the principal providers of information to the public.

Among the most notable of these journalists was David Halberstam of the New York Times. Halberstam was not yet 30 years old when he arrived in Vietnam in mid-1962, and he soon became frustrated by what he considered stonewalling and false information from US officials – civilian and military – in the country. So, he went off on his own. He wrote to an editor at the Times: “There are no briefings to attend, no easy way of coverage. The only way to get a story here is to walk through the swamps and climb the mountains and ride the helicopters into battle. I have been shot at innumerable times.”³⁶

Halberstam saw it as a holy mission to tell his readers what was really going on in a war that, as yet, was receiving little attention from the American public and from most American news organizations. As his colleague William Prochnau later wrote, Halberstam understood journalism’s innate power:

As the media grew more influential in American life, it became more common among journalists, still is among some, to disingenuously diminish themselves – we have no power, we send out no armies, we raise no taxes, we only carry messages. Halberstam had no tolerance for such humbuggery. The press had power, the power to create images and myths, to tilt history, to drive large forces.³⁷

But journalists could not wield that power without encountering pushback. The government had ample power of its own and was willing to use it on occasion to undermine press coverage. An example of this occurred in August 1963, when Halberstam sent a story to the Times about South Vietnamese government attacks on Buddhist activists. Halberstam reported that Ngo Dinh Nhu, the brother and chief adviser of Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem (who was supported by the United States), ordered the attacks by secret police and special forces under his command, presumably with President Diem’s approval. President Diem denied this, claiming that the Vietnamese army, some of whose leaders were his political rivals, had carried out the attacks without his backing.

The White House and State Department defended their man Diem, denying the allegations in Halberstam’s reporting and telling Times editors that Halberstam had it wrong. Under pressure from the administration, editors at the Times could not decide whom to believe. The result, in William Prochnau’s words, was “one of the most bizarre front pages in the history of the New York Times … In effect, the world’s most influential newspaper told its readers to flip a coin.”³⁸ The front page of the Times on August 23, 1963 carried the headline, “Two Versions of the Crisis in Vietnam: One Lays Plot to Nhu, Other to Army.” Beneath the headline, in two side-by-side columns, were Halberstam’s story from Saigon and one from Tad Szulc of the Times’s Washington bureau, who had to rely more heavily on administration sources. Each story directly contradicted the other.

Amidst the confusion that surrounded so much of the Vietnam War, this episode was far from being earthshaking, but it illustrated the evolving dynamics of the government–press relationship. At this time, the byword for the government was not to “censor” or “control” the news flow, but rather to “manage” it.³⁹ That euphemism did not mask the growing anger that some in the Kennedy administration (including the president himself) felt toward journalists who they believed were undermining the American public’s support for their anti-communist efforts in Vietnam. This led to putting pressure on reporters and their editors to conform to the administration’s worldview.

The president became angry enough to ask the CIA to review four months of Halberstam’s articles. The intelligence agency’s report stated:

A review indicates that he is by and large accurate in terms of the facts that he includes in his articles. The conclusions he draws from his facts plus the emphasis of his reporting, however, tend to call his objectivity into question. In his almost invariably pessimistic reports, Halberstam makes liberal use of phrases “some Americans,” “informed Vietnamese,” or “lower (or higher) ranking Americans,” etc. Such sourcing is impossible to refute … optimistic sources are almost never quoted by Mr. Halberstam.⁴⁰

Soon thereafter, Kennedy tried – unsuccessfully – to get Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger to reassign Halberstam, moving him out of Vietnam.⁴¹

Some journalists responded to the administration’s anger with anger of their own. Halberstam used military vernacular: “What began as sniping turned into an orchestrated attack. It became a full-fledged war with more fronts than Vietnam. We were getting cannon fire from a different direction every day: the Pentagon regiment, the White House regiment, the embassy regiment, the press regiment, the right-wing regiment – and all of it feeding the regiments from our own offices.”⁴²

Halberstam’s last point is important because it underscores the fact that “the press” is not monolithic. Among those in the profession, and even within a single news organization, different points of view sometimes collide. During the early years of the Vietnam War, journalists such as Marguerite Higgins and Joseph Alsop endorsed the American war strategy and were not shy about criticizing fellow correspondents.

A lesson Kennedy learned painfully during his brief presidency was that the American chief executive is far more constrained than he would like to be when it comes to prolonged armed conflict. Only rarely can an administration count on continued public support for going to war. This happened after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, when the United States declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy, and after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when the United States invaded Afghanistan. But even in those cases, it soon became obvious that a war waged by a democracy can be politically precarious for the government in charge. There may be an initial surge of patriotic fervor, but support for a conflict is likely to diminish as casualties mount and negative economic consequences are felt.⁴³ Delivering information to the public during this process may become something of a competition between government and news media, with each seeking to be considered the more credible provider.

Kennedy apparently did not fully appreciate how problematic this process could be. As news reports from Vietnam took on a more critical tone, Kennedy ordered that a new press policy be implemented in Saigon. Richard Reeves wrote:

[Kennedy] wanted “maximum feasible cooperation and guidance” for correspondents, with the goal of directing them away from “undesirable” situations and stories. The President was trying to keep bad news from Americans, but the real effect of keeping the press away from unpleasantness was that he himself might be the last to know what was happening in Southeast Asia if he depended only on official reports.⁴⁴

Even presidents’ actions are grounded in the information they receive. As Reeves points out, reducing press access to information can prove self-defeating, limiting the breadth of the picture the president has of a situation about which he must make decisions. But in the hothouse of politics, what is perceived as “bad press” is often considered intolerable.

Part of Kennedy’s concern with news coverage was based on his recognition that the American role in Vietnam was rightly susceptible to criticism and legal challenge. In a private conversation, he told Newsweek’s Benjamin Bradlee, a personal friend and later editor of the Washington Post: “The trouble is, we are violating the Geneva agreement. Not as much as the North Vietnamese are, but we’re violating it. Whatever we have to do, we have to do in some kind of secrecy, and there’s a lot of danger in that.”⁴⁵ (As an illustration of how journalists can become too close to the powerful, Bradlee did not write about this conversation until years after Kennedy’s death.)

How much did government obfuscation and news media criticism matter to public opinion about the conduct of the war during the Kennedy years? Not much. At that point in the war, the public was paying limited attention to even the most critical news coverage, and the war had not become the politically existential menace that Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, found it to be. The war simply did not yet resonate, certainly not to the degree that civil rights and other domestic issues did. The cost in American casualties was nowhere near the peak it would reach in later years, the economic costs were not yet perceived to be great, and neither news coverage nor public opinion showed signs that the United States might be marching into a future “quagmire.” If there was a foreign trouble spot that would capture Americans’ interest, it would probably be Berlin, Cuba, or another familiar Cold War testing ground.

During the Kennedy presidency, there was a widening stream of negative information flowing to the public from the elite media, a class that grew to include television news. Two months before he was killed in November 1963, Kennedy appeared on the CBS and NBC nightly newscasts that had just expanded from 15 to 30 minutes (ABC followed in 1968). The evening news became a regular presence in millions of American homes, and Walter Cronkite at CBS and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley of NBC became trusted providers of information in much the way Edward R. Murrow had via radio during World War II. Television reports from the Vietnam War soon became broadcast staples, and the power of the visual made itself felt.