The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972: Images and and Reality in Vietnam
Herz, Martin F. & Rider, Leslie F.
BOOK REVIEWS THE PRESTIGE PRESS AND THE CHRISTMAS BOMBING, 1972: IMAGES AND REALITY IN VIETNAM Martin F. Herz, assisted by Leslie Rider Ethics and Public Policy Center / $ 5.00 Peter W....
...Frankly I find this hopeful...
...For a new generation is indeed emerging that has no personal memory of these events...
...The nation's hope of having an undis-torted historical memory will depend on such contributions...
...prestige media copiously reported as news (with full attribution) the propaganda given out by the enemy and his allies...
...The antiwar movement, up to that point demoralized by George McGovern's defeat and disarmed by Nixon's apparent near-achievement of peace, erupted in a cathartic last orgy of vicious attacks on Nixon's Vietnam policy...
...smart bombs" had effectively zeroed in on military targets...
...The United States was accused of indiscriminate carpet-bombing of civilian populations...
...Terror Bombing in the Name of Peace," howled the Washington Post...
...Nevertheless Herz makes a valid point-really a moral point-that a government owes its people an effort to explain an unpopular action, and to keep on presenting its reasons and arguments even in the face of seemingly endless and hysterical criticism...
...Hiroshima was called to mind...
...Charges of U.S...
...At the end of April the New York Times Book Review informed us of two new brief histories of the Vietnam war written for teenagers...
...And Nixon was much berated for callously remaining silent throughout the period, never fully explaining to the American public what was happening and why...
...he overwhelmed skeptics with two volumes of irrefutable evidence that media coverage of the event was a distortion of reality...
...responsibility for the breakdown of the talks, of reckless use of B-52s, of massive civilian damage, of unanimous foreign criticism, of the futility of bombing as an instrument of pressure-these themes dominated the reporting...
...Hanoi's population had already been largely evacuated months earlier...
...The claim that Hanoi would never negotiate under pressure was disproved by events when, almost immediately, the talks resumed...
...Herz and Rider deserve enormous credit for a fair-minded book that documents its conclusions and is honest in its judgments...
...amazing because it betrayed not so much the freshman's ignorance as his age...
...Negotiations resumed in November, settling many remaining issues, but ran aground in mid-December...
...Other journalists who visited Hanoi soon afterwards reported, to their credit, that civilian destruction was minimal and clearly not deliberate...
...This, of course, was exactly what the U.S...
...One can imagine what it must be like...
...Guenter Lewy, in America in Vietnam, has done a meticulous analysis of the military conduct of the war, critical in many respects, but in the process knocking down canards about American war crimes and atrocities...
...Fortunately there is a growing library of scholarly work of a more balanced character, interested not in waging ideological warfare but in pursuing historical truth...
...The charges of gross urban destruction and massive civilian casualties were belied by Hanoi's own published casualty figures-about 1,300 over twelve days, which, as the Economist later pointed out, was the same number of civilians killed earlier in the year by deliberate North Vietnamese artillery fire on a refugee column fleeing Quang Tri in South Vietnam...
...The next generation of Americans may yet be able to consider the Vietnam war with some semblance of objectivity, with minds unpoisoned by the passions, the peer pressure radicalism, or the journalistic distortions of the period...
...Herz is highly critical, however, of the Nixon administration's failure to explain its case to the American public...
...The impatient new Congress convening in January could be expected to force the United States out of the war on terms far worse than those embodied in the stonewalled agreement...
...Much less space was given to the contrary evidence and opinion which demonstrably existed: "The news was largely generated by opponents, and the U.S...
...Otherwise the public discourse of a democracy is inevitably dragged down to the level of the most demagogic...
...government had intended...
...They found the media treatment to be unbalanced, misleading, and emotional in its revulsion at the bombing-not only in editorial columns but in one-sided news reportage, not only in light of what is known now but in terms of information available then...
...Deaths at Dresden and Hiroshima numbered in the hundreds of thousands...
...One of the students asked an amazing question: ' 'What was the Christmas bombing...
...A few years ago, journalist Peter Braestrup, in Big Story, did a monumental study of how the American press and television reported and interpreted the Tet offensive of 1968...
...They might as well have been discussing the Treaty of Versailles...
...His answer may be even more illuminating to many who remember the period, because most of the news coverage of the time-as the book shows-bore little resemblance to what really happened.Peter W. Rodman is a former member of the National Security Council staff.On October 26, 1972, North Vietnam and the United States both acknowledged publicly for the first time that they were close to an agreement on a cease-fire, release of prisoners of war, and American withdrawal...
...The administration seems to have been resigned to constant vilification at this stage of the war, and hoped to be vindicated by the outcome...
...such contributions...
...Ambassador Herz and his research . assistant Leslie Rider have collected the available evidence on the bombing, its background, and its effects...
...It does not excuse the prestige media...
...Kissinger's negotiations with Le Due Tho resumed in early January and quickly resulted in a completed agreement...
...Henry Kissinger declared (a bit prematurely) that peace was "at hand...
...The reviewer chastised one of them for being insufficiently explicit about the lies, deceptions, atrocities, and general criminality of the United States government...
...Herz shows that, with few exceptions, they made little effort to present a balanced picture and in fact tailored their news reportage to their editorial position...
...After several days of frustration, the United States concluded that Hanoi had...
...BOOK REVIEWS THE PRESTIGE PRESS AND THE CHRISTMAS BOMBING, 1972: IMAGES AND REALITY IN VIETNAM Martin F. Herz, assisted by Leslie Rider Ethics and Public Policy Center / $ 5.00 Peter W. Rodman Not long ago, a friend of mine teaching at a well-known northeastern university was discussing Vietnam with a group of freshmen and referred to the Christmas bombing...
...made a strategic decision not to complete the agreement...
...But make no mistake about it, the battle for the minds of the young has already begun in earnest...
...Herz considers it likely (though not conclusively provable) that the Christmas bombing brought North Vietnam back to the conference table...
...Kissinger had described the breakdown of the negotiations in a news conference two days before the bombing began, but the administration's subsequent aloof silence left the field to its ideological opponents and is thus partly responsible for the one-sidedness of the press treatment...
...It is an essential addition to the growing body of research on the Vietnam war...
...The author is Martin F. Herz, a distinguished former ambassador who is now director of studies at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy...
...And, methodically and at length, they have examined and analyzed the contemporary news coverage by five leading "prestige" news organizations: the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the CBS-TV "Evening News...
...Editorials predicted that the bombing would only harden the hearts of the North Vietnamese and make a negotiated settlement impossible...
...B-52s and fighter-bombers assaulted military targets in and around Hanoi and Haiphong...
...And if much of the junior faculty is still, as it undoubtedly is, the entrenched remnant of the 1960s enrages, perhaps the exuberant skepticism of youth will find even their smug antiwar orthodoxy a natural and juicy target...
...Analogies with the four-day fire-bombing of Dresden were common...
...Now comes a first-rate book answering the puzzled freshman's question: What was the Christmas bombing...
...the new U.S...
...The bombing clearly caught the American public by surprise, and was perhaps as much of a shock at home as in Hanoi...
...At the same time, General Alexander Haig visited Saigon to bring around our South Vietnamese ally, who was also balking at the cease-fire...
...The other book he praised...
...Shame on Earth," lamented Tom Wicker in the New York Times...
...Richard Nixon thereupon lifted restrictions on the bombing of North Vietnam, and for twelve days, from December 18 to 29, 1972, U.S...
Vol. 14 • August 1981 • No. 8
