How Vietnam Changed Journalism

America owns the story of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese are sidelined and made silent bystanders or victims or faceless " enemies" in an American drama. The country itself is taken over and made into a part of America, given place names like "Hamburger Hill" when most Vietnamese did not even know what a hamburger was. The well known book and movies about the war are all American, whether they back the American invasion or condemn it. And that is frightening because the Vietnamese experience will soon be lost with the generations that endured the war. The government in Hanoi has its own priorities of pleasing the USA in the hope of getting good economic deals or help in standing up to China. Who then will give the Vietnamese side of the story? I am not talking about the exiled Saigon people; they clearly have thrown in their lot with the Americans and do not have a genuine Vietnamese angle to anything. They are the American's Vietnamese. I am thinking of the men and women and chldren who fought the mighty USA for all the millions of tons of bombs and defoliants and napalm they unleashed over 10 years. Who will tell the world THEIR story, the most heroic story the world will probably ever have? I know one European documentary which tries to present the Vietnamese story and not just another predicatable and choking American version: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=how+hanoi+won&&view=detail&...

I'm a Vietnam vet. 1st Cavalry Division, 1965-66. I never liked reporters, and I still don't. When they talk to you they are trying to get something for themselves. They pretend to be interested in you, but they aren't. They just want something from you. "Better reporters stuck around for a while, spent the night, shared the combat food rations, the heat and rain, made friends before leaving. So the grunts felt you weren’t just using them, like a stage set to entertain the viewers back home with a little bang-bang, as we used to call it." He thinks a reporter could make "friends" by spending a night with the grunts and eating C-Rats? Really? He's kidding himself. Never, ever, ever talk to a reporter. Not ever. The U.S. has gotten into many conflicts because some reporter said or suggested that it was the right thing to do. Think Iraq, Judith Miller, and The New York Times. When he or she walks up with that notebook open and asks where you're from, just walk away. The press cannot be trusted.

Can you take another look at your photo caption, though? After all, it's highly unlikely that all *Vietnamese* journalists left their own country after April 1975. You mean 'The last Western (or foreign) journalists leaving Saigon in April 1975.'

I served as a infantry battalion surgeon from 1966-67 and It was not unusual for reporters to be embedded with our unit. Most of us were aware of inflated body counts and excesses of enthusiasm espoused by the government and higher commands. But when I returned home and watched and read the news, I was appalled by its lack of balance. The almost daily reports of civilians killed in error, or by wayward troops, or of our own troops killed by friendly fire were justified and newsworthy - even though the public could never comprehend the stresses of fighting an enemy disguised as civilians, that seemed to appear from nowhere, and booby-trapped everything in sight. But, I was most dismayed and disappointed by what the press did NOT report. To this day, I do not remember watching a single personalized news report of enemy atrocities or enemy cadres terrorizing civilians as a matter of policy. And on the few occasions when it was reported, the reporting was abstract - as if it did not affect real people. I expected that the government was lying - or certainly "bending the truth." But this selective reporting created an erroneous public perception that we were fighting a morally benign enemy. It was unfair to our troops - and one of the reasons the public had difficulty separating feelings about this unpopular war from those fighting it. Many soldiers who returned home were injured as much by being abandoned as by the war they left behind.

The truth ebbs and flows from day to day and from journalist to journalist. The truth is elusive and only reveals itself sporadically often when nobody is paying attention. The entire journalistic experience in Vietnam was a quest for a glimpse of what was really going on despite the practised lying of LBJ and McNamara. Both Johnson and Mac were slowly driven insane by Vietnam. MacNamara almost lost his mind and was having a nervous breakdown when he left for the World Bank. He wasn't able to speak over his sobbing. Johnson, later on, would tear his clothes off in the Oval Office according to Bundy, as if by getting undressed he could remove all semblance of Vietnam from his soul. As a psychologist in Ohio while taking post Master degree courses at Kent State, four students were killed in May by the National Guard while I watched on the campus. To wrap it all up, the entire country had a nervous breakdown by 1975 when the last journalists left Vietnam. That is why this series is still timely because America is not now and may never completely be over Vietnam!

The U.S. government lied from Day 1, first under LBJ, then under Nixon. The U.S. government continues to lie as we speak.

I have so much respect for the journalist who covered Vietnam. They did the best they could under terrible conditions, all the while fighting to get their stories printed. Many excellent journalist died getting the truth of the war to the American people and the world.

I'm in favor of self-congratulation as much as the next man, but this is too much even for me. Most reporters have learned so much since US government deceit during the Vietnam War that they managed to cheer-lead the American troops into Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; and, any day now, with a little luck, will cheer-lead American troops into Iran and North Korea; and later, with even more luck, into Russia and China. Yes, there were honest reporters even in the early days (and before) of the Vietnam War, just as there were honest reporters even in the early days (and before) of the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war. But those honest reporters were a minority each time, and, more importantly, neither the government nor a majority of the public paid much attention to them. If Donald Trump starts a war, most reporters, and most of the government and most of the public will back him to last drop of somebody else's son's blood.

" But the best young reporters have learned from the Vietnam War to question authority and find out for themselves what’s really going on. " All I can say is: Tell me more about the run up to Iraq.

That photo is very telling. While all those meaningless Western busybodies were finally marching out of her country after decades of having been part of a foreign presence that had destroyed it with massive violence, a calm Vietnamese woman sits on the pavement minding her own business and apparently indifferent. She does not seem to be panicked about the imminent Communist takeover.

That hostile marine veteran in Ohio was correct. Western journalists misrepresented the war, and this author continues to do so despite excellent histories of the war. Mr. Pearson continues to think that the North Vietnamese were simply freedom fighters engaged in their national war of independence. He ignores the documentation that Ho had always been committed to a world-wide communist takeover. He and his comrades initiated and supported revolutionary movements throughout Southeast Asia (Ho had lived in rural Thailand to do so). Reliable histories put the numbers of civilians murdered by the communists in the hundreds of thousands. The communists practiced revolution by terror and assassination, before, during, and after U. S. involvement: government by concentration camp. The North Vietnamese took advantage of the Western news media to advocate for their cause, surrender, while preventing their own citizens from anything but propaganda. The Tet offensive resulted in the destruction of the Viet Cong as a fighting force, but our news media used Tet as the ultimate argument for surrender. Western reporting of incompetence and deception at all levels in the U. S. effort was largely accurate. The missing piece in the reporting was that mass murderers intent on world domination escaped revelation. Hence, the news media were, in effect though unwittingly, an essential tool of a ruthless enemy willing to sacrifice millions for the sake of an evil and ultimately repudiated cause.

"Vietnam '67" is with few exceptions one of the finest essay series I have ever seen in the Times. This current piece in particular serves as a reminder of the major lesson of the Vietnam War: the government lies. In this case the lies-- which continued over a generation and led to more than 50,000 American deaths-- were born of hubris and the simple desire for re-election. If there is anything we should have learned from this, it is disbelief. Just because our government wants to go to war does not mean it is a just cause. Just because a President makes a statement does not mean it is true.

Today, we are all Neo-conservatives when it comes to foreign policy. Every person in uniform is a hero and every military intervention is done in the name of freedom and democracy and therefore beyond reproach. Both sides of the aisle rush to ingratiate the war machine or risk being left out of the victory parade. I will forget the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003, both W Bush and Hillary had blood on their hands. Journalism today is 100% partisan and only interested in attributing blame to either party. It should instead be focused on exerted sustained pressure on the military industrial complex to prevent further crimes against humanity.

One of the best and most-exhaustive - and alternative - examinations of that war has just come out. "The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam" by Max Boot. It was reviewed in January here:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/books/review/max-boot-the-road-not-ta... It goes into much detail about Lansdale's earlier anti-insurgent work against the Huks of the Philippines in the laste 1940s and why he was chosen to go the Vietnam of the 1950s. How his relationships with the (South) Vietnamese were sabotaged by Washington and the US diplomats in Saigon. How the war was magnified through the military tactics of the 1960s. It's an excellent counterpoint to Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest". Max Boot makes more than occasional comparisons with the US involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he should.

"We realized over the years that the government was ill-informed..." Not ill-informed but intentionally deceptive. "...reporters today are doing a better job because they know about the evolution of that deception and what its effects have been on American society." And yet we were still cheer-led into Iraq.

"We realized over the years that the government was ill-informed ..." So, who is it that actually informs government? It surely didn't, and doesn't, listen to journalists... USN 1967 - 71 Viet Nam 1968

Today is the 1st Anniversary of National Vietnam War Veterans Day. Most of us are proud to have served, despite the press, the ivory tower professors, and those who could have served, but ran away. Keep writing your books - your ignorance of the subject is showing. US Army, Vietnam 1971-1972

I agree with Mr. Pearson's insightful analysis of the way the combat reporting of information from the War in Vietnam changed American journalism. However, I suggest the more profound effect was not on matters in south Vietnam, nor did it involve combat exclusively. The Pentagon Papers and the Enemies list stemmed directly from the War, and Watergate itself was, at base an outcome of the War, resistance, and reaction to that resistance. All of that profoundly affected the way American journalism is practiced. And we have failed, to this day, to address and assess what we did in the War, as citizens, as politicians, as journalists, as soldiers. That failure left our public media both arrogant and profit centered, defenseless against the manipulations of the sparkly, voracious moral black hole now spinning in the White House. Those who fail history are doomed thereby.

This is an engaging piece, but if journalism has gotten so much better, why did we have the fawning--slobberingly so--support from the slipstream news media for Bush's Iraq war? If reporters and editors really did improve as much as the author asserts, they would have assailed the invasion (and Bush) forcefully and repeatedly. Instead, they energetically joined in the flag waving and played a decisive part in launching a mis-adventure that continues to have negative consequences. Sorry, but the media have not improved, nor have members of the media learned anything from Vietnam (other than how to keep government happy and cozy up to right-wing America).

As a young, idealistic draft resister (who also read Mother Jones) and had left the U.S. - through a series of highly unanticipated events and ironies - i ended teaching English in Bangkok for six months with short side trips up into Cambodia and Laos- around the time of the 1972 Spring Offensive when most American ground troops had been withdrawn. So I was like a lot of young travelers, ex-pats. addled mystics and alienated vagabonds we were the godchildren of Kerouac and avowed 'soldiers of peace'. As long as you were against the 'system' you were included in this brotherhood. Now, maybe it's the changes that come through maturation or from having done more research about the war especially in the last few years but I recently read Lewis Sorley's A Better War - in which he posits an alarming counter argument to all the easy platitudes that seemed so right at the time - you know, e.g. the definitive "Armies of the Night" by my friend and colleague N. Mailer. Personally, I felt that no matter what the outcome would be, militarism was counter to the zeitgeist then when you consider that all my friends at Stuyvesant H.S. were celebrating Dylan songs and things like Lennon's 'All You Need is Love': the alienation from the mainstream was deep. But while there I met a S.Vietnamese refugee who quickly dispelled any notion of the S Vietnamese as being disinterested in the outcome. Over 50K S. Vietnamese went on to die fighting the North. Quo Vadis indeed.

I realize that the author of this column has limited space, but he is making general statements about a very complex issue. Some wars were a mistake. Certainly our involvement in the first World War was a mistake. Both sides were exhausted and bankrupt by the time we entered the fighting. And what about the Korean conflict? Sixty years later and all we have is a truce.

My admiration for reporters and the NYT is constant and knows few boundaries. It is sad to read that newspapers are in terrible financial straits because their staff is the first front against oligarchy and authority, and their support of Institution freedom is essential for democracy to exist. The only barrier to corruption lies in the ability of journalists, some of whom must be exceptional because they and their families are in constant danger of abuse and assault. We are in eternal debt to journalists who pursue truth and I wish them all the best.

How sad to see the direct line between Westmoreland and Trump decrying "fake news".

We have both gotten old watching one Presidency after another war against journalism of the kind you know which may be disappearing in favor of agit prop so that there will always always be a debate not even about the consequences of events but about events themselves. The brutal immediacy of John Leonard in the jungle putting a microphone in the face of a wounded soldier changed not only Cronkite but altered family dinner all over this country. Later Cronkite said that the only news organization getting the disaster right from the onslaught was Mother Jones, which meant to me at the time that he read it! The driven war correspondent buffeted between fronts may be dwindling in numbers and we who watch them may fear that they’re reckless (pace Arwa Damon) and that now we fear they will be beheaded for trusting the wrong person for the right story but the history of this country from the Revolution forward has first been written by journalists who pointed the directions for historians and even philosophers to look. That American journalism flourished under Johnson and Nixon and Westmoreland is as much a testimony to the audience for it as to the writers themselves. Vietnam was the first televised war and surely the last to get intimate between dying or dead and the casual viewer. Quo Vadis?

In the beginning, the early sixties, only the radical press told these truths about the War. This young man was quite daring, if not valiant, in bringing the reality to the main papers and TV. As he points out, reporters are now armed with suspicion about "the line" when they cover combat. Unfortunately, he points out that those who purvey the official views have armed themselves to overcome that suspicion. Thus, "embedding", a la the Iraq war of 2000 and subsequently: reporters are now kept under control by "minders". How sad it is that the public has acquiesced in the military's importing of this Soviet technique for assuring a positive press.