PRESS: Reporting on Indochina:
Powers, Thomas
PRESS REPORTING ON INDOCHINA One of these days-perhaps soon-we are going to pick up our morning papers and see, there on the front page, the last photograph to be taken by an American in South...
...And if they don't deserve it, what are we going to do about it...
...When the administration argued military aid was necessary to pre-vent an immediate collapse of the Lon Nol government, reporters in Cambodia wrote persuasively that the end was inevitable and more aid would only mean more war arid more suffering...
...The press has often been blamed for Mc-Carthyism, and especially for reporting McCarthy's first West Virginia speech without bothering to find out if there really were X number of Communists in the State Department...
...One of these days soon the last divisions of the South Vietnamese Army are going to melt away, just like those in the North...
...The result is that we are treat-ing the issue of their rescue as if the only questions of importance were (1) do they deserve it...
...might be used as a roundabout way of re-entering the war...
...The problem is not that journalists are by nature morally insensitive or politically indifferent but that they must write before they have had time to think...
...Having charged for so many years that our allies did not deserve our support, it is difficult for op-ponents of the war to turn around now and argue that we ought to rescue them...
...That is the way McCarthy's claims were at first re-ported, and that is the way the war in Vietnam was re-ported, too...
...One reasdn, of course, is that reporters know very little about the Communist side and cannot judge on the basis of their own knowledge claims that a Saigon defeat will be fol-lowed by a punitive "bloodbath...
...Reporting from Indochina since the first of the year has been absolutely first-rate, fully up to the magnitude of the event-I am thinking especially of Sydney Schanberg in Phnom Penh for the New York Times- but the plight of our South Vietnamese friends is being more or less deliberately overlooked...
...The answer, unless the question is raised widely and energetically now, while there is still time, is nothing...
...The ideal of objectivity is not based on the premise that all positions are of equal value, but on the practical fact that life is complicated and time short...
...and (2) is it only a Kissinger-Ford trick to get us back into the war...
...So far, Congressional reaction has been thoroughly negative to President Ford's request for au-thority to use American troops in the evacuation of South Vietnamese as well as Americans when the time comes, as come it will...
...Hold on to the story for six weeks while they checked it out...
...There is time for nothing else...
...After awhile a note of skepticism about official statements began to appear, and eventually re-porters energetically and critically examined not only the conduct but the premises of the war...
...And then, too late as always in this war, we will begin to ask ourselves how we could have done such a thing, when really, our intentions were so good...
...Marine kicking a South Vietnamese out the doorway of the last American plane to leave Saigon...
...I don't mean that journalists have learned to be perfect (who's per-fect...
...Period...
...Marines will guard the exit of the last Americans...
...I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been thinking about this recently, and I hope I'm not the only person to find the image upsetting, but the subject-one of the very few about which there is still time to do some-thing-has not been much discussed in public...
...What does this mean...
...When the administration tenta-tively suggested that the collapse of the South Vietna-mese Army in the northern two-thirds of the country was the fault of the Congress, reporters pointed out that ARVN had abandoned $1 billion in munitions and ma-t6riel, that Hue and Da Nang were surrendered vir-tually without a shot, that the South Vietnamese could not maintain the equipment they already had, that dozens of helicopters were sitting idle on airfields, that South Vietnam's air force-the world's fourth largest-had hardly entered the fighting...
...The truth is that most news stories demand to be re-ported in simple declarative sentences: Senator Mc-Carthy charged today there are "X ,number of Com-munists in the State Department...
...The question of helping South Vietnamese to leave the country, however, is a new one and reporters have been cautious and even nervous in dealing with it...
...President Thieu will get on a plane with his 16 tons of gold and the U.S...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...One of the principal arguments against the war has been the nature of the South Vietna-mese government itself: inefficient, undemocratic, cruel and corrupt...
...The leaders will probably find a way to leave but the vast majority of the Vietnamese who fought on our side, who served in the government or in the police or were employed by the CIA will be left to their fate...
...Other people say the Communists will establish a government of national reconciliation and reeducate their former enemies with gentle persuasion and the poetry of Ho Chi Minh...
...Some people say the Communists will kill everybody from Thieu's bootblack on up...
...But really, what were reporters to do...
...This is absolutely our last chance to do the right thing in this war but we have been wrong about everything else and I'm afraid we're going to be wrong about this, too...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...The war in Vietnam has always raised the most dif-ficult sorts of questions for journalists...
...When the precarious military situation in Cambodia and South Vietnam began to unravel early this year, reporters effectively countered, with informa-tion, the Ford administration's attempts to reduce the question of continued support to one of honor alone...
...I think I know what its subject will be: a U.S...
...Finally, when the adminis-tration pointed to the refugees as evidence the South Vietnamese people were voting against the Communists with their feet, reporters wrote that in fact it was fear of being caught between the armies and a kind of crowd hysteria which had uprooted them...
...This maturity is the result of a long history of dis-crepancies between American policy and reality in Viet-nam...
...It means that the only South Vietnamese who escape will be those who stole enough American money to buy their way out at the end...
...I was talking about this with my friend Tim Ferris recently and he said, "If they deserve what they get, then what do we deserve...
...Another reason for the reticence of journalists on this matter is healthy doubt about the administration's pur-pose...
...In almost every in-stance, I would argue, reporters in South Vietnam and Phnom Penh have demonstrated more realism, deeper human sympathy and a truer sense of American in-terests than the administration in Washington...
...I don't know who's right, but I do know that the consequences of error on this ques-tion will not be suffered by us...
...Congressmen, anti-war activists and journalists alike seem to fear that an energetic evacuation program by the U.S...
...but that they have learned enough, and are self-confident enough, to judge official statements as soon as they are made...
...Through bitter experience journalists have learned to depend on what they, themselves, know to be true...
...Watching them go from the runway will be some skinny govern-ment clerk, some quiet, white-shirted fellow who can't believe the people he served so long have left him be-hind...
...There is no doubt in my mind that the United States has some sort of moral obligation to the South Vietna-mese and Cambodians we induced to fight, but the nature of the obligation is subject to reality...
...Part of the problem is that so many people would instinctively react to that last sentence by saying: they're not any friends of mine...
...PRESS REPORTING ON INDOCHINA One of these days-perhaps soon-we are going to pick up our morning papers and see, there on the front page, the last photograph to be taken by an American in South Vietnam...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 4
