A Matter of Honor
Simon, Gerald
A MATTER OF HONOR Don Kowet/Macmillan/$16.95 Gerald Simon Vietnam, we are told, was fought as much in America as overseas, and when CBS presented its documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A...
...History of a Free People, Macmillan, 1981) "Americans have covered the land with cement and asphalt, buildings and highways . . . . To meet our demand for goods, mountains have been stripped bare for lumber and for coal, copper, silver, gold, and other minerals...
...They draw their arguments, he adds, almost verbatim from the Club of Rome's apocalyptic 1972 report "The Limits to Growth," from Jimmy Carter's nightmarish Global 2000 Report, and from the interminable "debates" on the "New International Economic Order" at the United Nations...
...At first CBS seemed fairly contrite in response to TV Guide's charges...
...For example, when CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter issued a memorandum to the press on the Benjamin report, he accepted that "a judgmental conclusion of conspiracy was inappropriate" but steadfastly stood by "the substance of the broadcast...
...Discussions of environmental problems, London notes, range from " i n t e m p e r a t e to hysterical...
...At a press conference three days after the program aired, the former U.S...
...This is just one example of the paradoxology inherent in the media's analysis of the war...
...In another interview left on the CBS cutting room floor, Walt Rostow, former special assistant to LBJ, pooh-poohed the allegations, telling CBS that it was simply "wrong...
...Was President Johnson really so unaware of the intelligence controversy...
...Unfortunately, London and Kahn actually understate the case...
...Anyone...
...CBS "rehears[ed] its paid consultant Samuel Adams before he was interviewed...
...CBS "pulled quotes out of context...
...Provocative and seemingly convincing, "The Uncounted Enemy" won kudos for Adams and producer George Crile from just about every sector of the media establishment...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...There have been hints, however, that CBS's contrition was somewhat less than sincere...
...As Carver himself said at 1975 congressional hearings, the "lumping of disparate types together" that Adams espoused was "as unacceptable to most observers in the CIA as it was to those in military intelligence...
...One small problem: CBS chose not to 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 broadcast this poruon of the interview...
...One of the documents that led Adams to this pithy conclusion was MACV bulletin 689, a report captured from the Vietcong detailing the number of "guerrilla militia" in Binh Ding province...
...I deduced it...
...The package included a general defense of the show as well as letters addressed to Kowet and his publisher, Macmillan, from indignant CBS employees...
...American Civics, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979) "Who would have guessed that within less than 200 years, a trackless, halfmapped continent could be crisscrossed by super highways, defaced by billboards and tin c a n s ? . . . Who would have believed that a continent, once frightening by its emptiness, would now terrify people by crowding them together...
...There, the CIA and General Westmoreland's MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) engaged in a fiery debate over what was known as the "Order of Battle"--the strength of the various parts of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong armies...
...The fact is that while CBS is willing to admit to the editorial indiscretions of George Crile, it is not prepared to relinquish the documentary's underlying premise that intelligence figures were manipulated by the military under Westmoreland...
...But Samuel Adams, who was an analyst for the CIA at the time, maintains that at these conferences the Army deliberately ignored evidence--in short, the "books were cooked...
...It will pay a high price for denying Westmoreland, at the very least, a fair hearing...
...In other words, Adams smelled some sort of foul cover-up, and this is what viewers of the CBS documentary were supposed to believe...
...Children are taught that the U.S...
...In a foreword to the book, the late Herman Kahn even suggested that the recent dramatic rise in the teenage suicide rate may be due in part to depressing textbooks...
...rape, cancer, and radiation are cast as the defining metaphors o f the American future...
...Surely these men exaggerate, some might reply...
...commander in Vietnam accused CBS of leading "a vicious, scurrilous, and premeditated attack" in "an attempt to execute me on the guillotine of public opinion...
...and finally, that he had obliged the CIA to cave in to MACV's and, by implication, his personal demands...
...As Terence O'Flaherty of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in the wake of the TV Guide article, for CBS it was "like finding a dead rat in the punch bowl...
...Westmoreland :thought riot, and had argued against the use of special political cadre figures in intelligence analyses since, in his view, their "inclusion . . . in an estimate of military capabilities was highly q u e s t i o n a b l e . . , they were no more effective in the military sense than the dozens of other nonmilitary organizations which served the VC cause in various roles . . . . " Westmoreland brought the same argument to George Crile and stated that there was a debate between "the theoreticlans--really statisticians--at the CIA who wanted to count every old woman and child" and his own troop of "practioners...
...Perhaps the most startling omission was that of Gen...
...George Carver of the CIA, on the other hand, thought that they had "underestimated certain c a t e g o r i e s . . , a complicated structure the aggregate size of which was in the 500,000 range, but not 500,000 in the field . . . . " It is clear that Carver initiated a compromise with MACV in 1967, and in a private meeting with Westmoreland the two men mediated their differences...
...It responded by charging that CBS was attempting to "chill" publication of the book...
...Among the charges: CBS "turned a deaf ear toward evidence" that ran counter to its charge of conspiracy...
...A History of the United States, Ginn, 1981) "Approximately 130 countries [apparently including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Korea] are referred to as developing nations . . . . They all have one thing in common: abject poverty...
...In short, the Army and CIA had agreed on how to count the enemy...
...At the center of the dispute, Kowet writes, was the intricate question of "whether a pair of enemy organizations, Self-Defense and Secret SelfDefense units, were sufficiently potent to be included in the monthly military Order of Battle summary...
...But again, CBS's own evidence contradicted its thesis...
...Scott, Foresman, 1982) " . . . a rundown earth with a runaway population...
...World economic development is cast in Manichean terms, with the "North" being evil and the "South" being good...
...and even George Carver...
...Herbert 1. London/Stein and Day/S15.95 Allan C. Carlson The troubled specter of the Parson Malthus haunts our land...
...CBS had performed a great service to both history and the American public...
...that he had "blocked reports," fired or transferred intelligence deviants...
...What has happened to CBS's vaunted allegiance to the First Amendment...
...On the eve of the book's publication, CBS had a public relations firm send a package of material to media representatives across the country...
...General Westmoreland's suit against CBS is still pending, but if he wins the only player guilty of under-estimating the enemy will be CBS itself...
...HighTHE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...Robert Komer, former special ambassador to South Vietnam...
...Col...
...Even William F. Buckley trumpeted the documentary as "truly extraordinary...
...William C. Westmoreland, perhaps the key figure in the documentary, thought differently...
...Hawkins," Adams told Mike Wallace in disbelief, "whom I knew so well and whom I admired, looked sick, looked like he didn't believe what he was saying...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...
...Gains Hawkins, chief of Westmoreland's Order of Battle intelligence division...
...unfriendly witnesses with prosecutorial zeal...
...That Westmoreland had imposed a ceiling of 300,000 above which his intelligence officers were forbidden to place their estimates...
...Outdated, inaccurate, biased, and absurd claims have entered our children's texts," he writes, "and, at least for the moment, nothing is being done about i t . " Most of the civics, history, economics, and "social problems" texts used in our secondary schools, he charges, combine "fire and brimstone logic" with "fear-anddoomsday psychology...
...Four months later, TV Guide published a cover story by Don Kowet and Sally Bedell entitled "Anatomy of a Smear...
...He frets that the pessimism and negativism dominating high-school texts is spiritually damaging a whole generation...
...That cha, ge stems from the National Intelligence Estimate conferences held in 1967 and 1968 in Langley, Virginia...
...asked Crile...
...A MATTER OF HONOR Don Kowet/Macmillan/$16.95 Gerald Simon Vietnam, we are told, was fought as much in America as overseas, and when CBS presented its documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" in January 1982, it became clear that some of those domestic battles have not abated...
...economy is the cause of global disaster...
...Although the Benjamin report had made it clear that "conspiracy" was out, Crile in responding to the TV Guide article continued to hint darkly at much the same thing, writing that Westmoreland suppressed reports " t o conceal this discovery of a larger enemy from the American public, the Congress, and perhaps even the President...
...How can young people remain loyal to this nation when its past triumphs are labeled "wasteful, careless, and greedy...
...Simply comtemplate these randomly selected excerpts from high-school texts: "There is increasing awareness that human beings, especially affluent human beings like the Americans, threaten to make the earth unlivable...
...At the NIE conferences, however, Adams met with resistance from a number of people--including Col...
...How can youth devote themselves to future-oriented actions if they're told there won't be any future, he asks...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 43...
...A man of common sense, London believes that the view of the future impressed on children affects their attitudes, actions, and morale...
...WHY ARE THEY LYING TO OUR CHILDREN...
...London's thesis is bold and simple...
...Hawkins, according to Kowet, had said no fewer than four times that he had not been given a numerical ceiling before the Langley meeting, tlawkins told Crile that he had defended the "command position"--the total of 296,000 enemy estimated in the May Order of Battle...
...The article seriously questions the journalistic procedures undertaken in the making of the CBS documentary...
...It seemed that Gerald Simon is assistant to the Executive Director o f the Committee f o r the Free World...
...Based in part on a Harper's article by disgruntled CIA analyst Samuel Adams, the program charged that the nature and size of the Vietcong had been seriously underrepresented to Americans as the result of a "conscious effort--indeed, a conspiracy at the highest levels of American military intelligence --to suppress and alter critical intelligence on the enemy in the year leading up to the Tet offensive...
...In September of that year CBS even offered Westmoreland fifteen minutes of free air time "to say what he wished to say in the manner he wished to say it," but Westmoreland by then had decided to slap CBS with a $120 million libel suit...
...Who told you that...
...CBS "asked sympathetic witnesses soft questions, while grilling The Int_lerSoff Pdzes i n Literature and the Humanities 1984 Tile T. S. Efiot AwardjCor Creative Anthony Dymof~ Poweff Near Dome, Somerset, Erufl{ana c Trig Ricfiar~ M. Weaver Award for Scfio~rCy Lettzrs Russeff Kir~ Mecosta, Mich~an The Irt~ersoff Fouadatiott ~f ~c~fa nl, l/hno~ Cfa)~on K. Gayfonl, Chairman Jofm A. Howard, Pt~nt Leopof~ Tyrmartd, Executive Secretary, The lruflerso[[ P~es Tile awards, m the amount o( $15,000 each, wiff tic ~n~ente~ at a coentorty at The Ritz-Carlton 1 toter tn Cfikajo on No~mK, r 16, 1984 In'citation o~y...
...Global Geography, Macmillan, 1981) In an important insight, London shows that the purveyors of these textbooks actually have a distinct pedagogical agenda: "What educational philosophers such as John Dewey argued against--a pedagogy based on fear and guilt--has been restored as neo-Puritanism...
...And I defended it willingly...
...Another aspect of CBS's increasing reluctance to abandon the substance of the charges in "The Uncounted Enemy" was its continuing insinuation of some base motive behind Westmoreland's estimates o f enemy strength...
...Thrown into a "state of nervous excitement" by his findings, Adams brought them to the attention of his superiors, believing, as Kowet notes, that the fact that the "extracts were captured ones seemed to lend them a legitimacy American ones lacked," and apparently not believing the Vietcong's well-known propensity to inflate estimates of their own armed strength...
...This year, with the publication of Don Kowet's A Matter o f Honor, an expanded version of his TV Guide article, it has become evident that CBS has no intention to make any further apologies for its broadcast...
...George Crile's creative editing decisions were termed "journalistic oversights" and "imprecisions...
...and CBS's parade of witnesses did not offer a balanced presentation of the intelligence dispute...
...Herbert London, dean of the Gallatin Division of New York University and chairman of the Hudson Institute's Visions of the Future Education Program, tries his hand at ghostbusting in Why Are They Lying to Our Children...
...Philip Davidson--Westmoreland's chief o f intelligence--who CBS thought was dying of cancer (in fact, Davidson had just remarried and spent much of his spare time "playing lots of tennis...
...In the books, overpopulation, eco-catastrophe, Western greed, resource shortages, environmental Allan C. Carlson is affiliated with The Rockford Institute...
...As for checking these conclusions, several key members of MACV and the CIA never appeared on the show: Ellsworth Bunker, former ambassador to South Vietnam...
...Kowet's contribution serves, if not as a buffer against, then as a reminder of how far afield some members of the press are willing to travel in order to avoid the real issues of Vietnam...
...The Vietcong's figures were ten times higher than our own estimates, and Adams went on to discover several other discrepancies...
...However, Gen...
...An internal investigation headed by senior executive-producer Burton Benjamin was initiated, and his much-publicized report cited the "principal flaws" of the broadcast and admitted to "the coddling of sympathetic witnesses" along with "other violations of CBS News Guidelines...
...No one told me...
...The point is," Rostow explained, "Johnson did u n d e r s t a n d . . , there was a debate, and it was a debate essentially about whether, they had underestimated in the past the scale of that guerrilla category . . . . " In other words Westmoreland was not concealing anything from anyone, but simply participating in the legitimate debate that had raged throughout the war over just how the enemy might be counted...
...For Macmillan the message was unmistakable: Publish and pay the consequences...
...The strange thing about the whole affair, though, is that those who were once excoriated for inflating body counts are now attacked for minimizing enemy strength...
...But what did CBS report...
...When interviewed by George Crile, Col...
...I was not given any specific orders," Hawkins said...
...CBS screened "the statements of other witnesses already on film" for George Allen, "a sympathetic witness...
...While noting the "obviously and historically controversial" nature of the show's premise, Benjamin conceded that "a 'conspiracy,' given the accepted definition of the word, was not proved...
...His conclusion: The enemy army was almost 600,000 strong--nearly three times the official estimate...
...According to Adams, Hawkins wanted to agree with him but was forced under orders originating from Westmoreland to consider no figures beyond a certain level...
...But there is more to the story...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
