PRESS: Writing Saigon's Obit
Powers, Thomas
WRITING SAIGON'S OBIT PRESS An odd thing happened back in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson started to ship American combat troops to Vietnam: the American press stopped writing about Vietnam. They went...
...The baby-lift, for example, a side issue if there ever was one, got more front-page headlines in the New York Post than the fall of Phnom Penh...
...I hear it everywhere, from cab drivers and bank clerks, from friends who were in the Army as well as those who were not, in one instance from the next table in a restaurant, occasionally even from long-time opponents of the war who ought to know better: the United States fought with one arm tied behind its back...
...I'm not sure exactly what I think about that...
...He failed, naturally, but not by much...
...Americans wrote almost exclusively about the American involvement and now that the war is finally over the inevitable post mortems which have begun to appear all attempt to analyze the American failure, as if the Vietnamese were only witnesses to the 30-year struggle in which they, after all, were the principal victims...
...If we had only once just . . . let go, if we had brought our full weight to bear, if we had made up our national mind to win, if we had gone all out we would have won...
...A year or two later Johnson echoed this position when he said the struggle was for "the hearts and minds" of the people who live "out there...
...Stories of little importance receive major coverage while larger events are neglected...
...A second, more basic reason is that the obstacles to a victory by our side were not military but political in nature...
...I suppose it is too late now for the general public to learn anything new about Vietnam, or to unlearn the mistaken idea that we could have won if only we had hit them harder and sooner...
...It was because we failed to understand the political nature of the war or the true source of the enemy's strength that we chose the bomb...
...Both men were right, but neither was willing to follow his own logic to its conclusion...
...It is important that they should try to write not only about the United States, but about Vietnam...
...I once heard the owner of a weekly paper say that his ideal of coverage would be to get the name of every local resident into every issue of his paper...
...If Vietnam had mattered to this country, if we had cared what happened to its people, I do not think we could have fought the war in the way we did, and I do not think President Ford could have found the heart to ask, only weeks before the final collapse, for more arms and money so that we might prolong the agony a little longer...
...The worst, he said, was a bomb, which would tend to kill friend and foe alike...
...If we committed crimes of war there it was because we failed to grasp the political nature of the struggle, and fought our opponents just as we fought the armored divisions of Hitler...
...In the same way the wire service bureaus in Washington spend most of their time covering stories of interest to individual clients, rather than general stories of interest to everybody, just as the New York Times and the Washington Post tended to cover the American involvement in Vietnam rather than Vietnam itself...
...Very few American reporters ever learned to speak Vietnamese...
...There is no space here to demonstrate in detail why more of the same, even a lot more, could not have "won" the war...
...government's sleight of hand with both the Congress and the American public were all major errors but they pale in significance beside the primary and fundamental failure to understand that while military violence can occasionally achieve political ends, it cannot fill a political vacuum...
...Back in the early 1960s some sensible general-I have forgotten his name-said the ideal weapon in Vietnam was a knife because it was precise...
...Anyone who thinks we did ought to read then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's testimony before a Senate Armed Services subcommittee in August, 1967, and the various publications of Project Air War at Cornell University and of the Indochina Research Center in Washington...
...Because we did not care about Vietnam we did not understand it, and because we did not understand it our intervention achieved nothing but thirty years of useless human suffering...
...And yet, of course, the effort must be made...
...They went on writing about the war, of course, but they wrote about it as an American conflict, as if the contest were between Hanoi and the Vietcong on one side, and the Americans on the other...
...Box 3662, Grand Central Station, New York, N.Y...
...They are the ones who will win it or lose it...
...But in any event, it is clear that in 1965 the American press stopped writing about Vietnam...
...10017.k, N.Y...
...And in rural India 80 percent of pre-school children suffer from dwarfism and stunted growth...
...Of course American pride and self-confidence have been badly bruised by Vietnam and it is natural that the American press should concern itself with our reaction to our failures, but at the same time It is important to understand what happened to the Vietnamese...
...So far, the American people-what George Orwell used to call the Big Public-has absorbed only one clear impression or idea about the war...
...This notion, which is widely accepted not only by the general public but also, more dangerously, by the military, is absolutely and profoundly incorrect...
...The CIA's expert on the Vietcong never learned Vietnamese, despite the fact that he spent nine years studying them...
...Donations should be sent to U.S...
...Not long before he was killed John F. Kennedy, speaking of the Vietnamese people, said that "in the final analysis it is their war...
...A parallel in the United States would be an attempt to end racial animosity in Cairo, Illinois, by bombing the city...
...For reasons which had a great deal to do with the United States, and almost nothing to do with Vietnam, American presidents were unwilling to let our side lose...
...That happened so long ago, and the worst consequences of the error were so long in arriving, that most journalists seem to have forgotten all about it...
...So far as the level of military violence is concerned we fought very hard indeed...
...puppet regimes with no true Vietnamese identity or legitimacy...
...For example, "in many parts of Africa almost every child under 5 suffers from some protein malnutrition...
...More than half the childhood deaths in Latin America are related to malnutrition...
...We could wreck the place, we could kill all its inhabitants, but we would hardly be likely to make blacks and whites love each other...
...For the first time in its 27-year history the United Nations Childrens' Fund has declared a state of emergency for the world's children...
...The United States was not much involved in these upheavals, so far as we know, and the American press had reflected not the significance of the events themselves, but the limited nature of our involvement...
...dollars into Saigon, the U.S...
...As little as $11 will provide enough high protein food supplement to feed 33 malnourished children for a month and $50 can stock ten village fishponds with a local supply of valuable protein...
...First, we did not fight with one arm tied behind our back...
...The ill-advised creation of a mechanized South Vietnamese Army after the American model, the corruption and inflation which inevitably followed the flood of U.S...
...I suppose self-absorption of this sort is characteristic of every country, but it leads to a journalism which is weirdly skewed...
...It would be hard to say just when we went wrong in Vietnam, but I think it was in 1945, when we decided to support the French against the Vietnamese people for reasons which had little to do with either...
...The flow had been going every which way and yet I had only the dimmest recollection of how these got to be so many uprooted people...
...And because we did not care about nor understand Vietnam we are in danger of learning the wrong lesson...
...The best book about Vietnam- indeed, almost the only American book about Vietnam -was The Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald, and not even she spoke Vietnamese, although she did speak French...
...Military means were not suited to our purpose...
...The journalists who were in Phnom Penh and Saigon at the end will be back in this country soon to write their final stories...
...Perhaps the various governments of Saigon were only U.S...
...Hanoi saw it that way and so, apparently, did Lyndon Johnson, and perhaps, in truth, that was all there was to it...
...This indifference to the reality of Vietnam went deep...
...10017...
...The danger of myopia now is that it obscures the most important American failure, the one which led to all the others, which was our failure to understand the nature of the political struggle in which we so light-heartedly chose to take sides...
...In reading the most recent Report of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees I discovered that the UN was trying to look after more than a million refugees in Africa...
...I rah across an example of this parochialism recently while working on an article about Haitian refugees...
...Committee for UNICEF, P.O...
...A brief answer would have two parts...
...Parochialism of this sort is at the heart of journalism...
...It was even unusual for Foreign Service officers, or economic and military advisors, to speak Vietnamese...
...Our efforts in Vietnam were of precisely that sort...
...No American ambassador ever spoke the language...
...thomas powers AN APPEAL-This spring the United States Committee for UNICEF reports that millions of children in poorer countries are threatened with severe malnutrition, "or even starvation...
...The free-fire zones, the indiscriminate bombing of the countryside, the substitute of firepower for manpower were all military measures suited to a conventional war, not to a political struggle for the allegiance of a people...
Vol. 102 • June 1975 • No. 6
