PRESS: Neglected Stories
Powers, Thomas
PRESS There are three possible reasons why the American press has published as close to nothing as two-graf stories can get about Vietnam since the other side won not quite a year and a half...
...and a final if not public admission of failure in Washington;-all that simply disappeared from the press...
...But Vietnam first...
...Whom did he call up to bid goodbye...
...I would be amazed if it were not dramatic enough to interest readers...
...A lot of attention has been paid to journalists and journalism of late but not much of it has been directed at what I take to be the most important fact about reporting: it is expensive...
...Or was he committed to stretching out the interval-militarily if not diplomatically-at least until the next election, in keeping with Ellsberg's law...
...The New Yorker is the only magazine with the imagination and the money for reporting that matters...
...The only way to find out certain things-did Kissinger really think peace was at hand...
...In most instances the book must be researched and written at night, or subsidized by a foundation, or paid for by the writer out of savings...
...Book publishers will occasionally underwrite a major piece of reporting, but no more than a handful of writers can negotiate contracts sufficient to pay expenses and a New York policeman's salary for the year it takes to do a book of that sort...
...There must have been gnashing of teeth and weeping and numbed sorrow and disbelief and humiliation and perhaps even moments of self-doubt all over Washington...
...The United States is out...
...Was it still living a dream even at the end...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...I was struck by the clarity with which editors grasped the size of the event...
...Was Ford urged to send in the planes...
...The story didn't go anywhere...
...No one will tell you what the Secretary of State was saving to the President that morning, but after a month or two they might...
...Not only have they been published, they've been read...
...The hard part is no longer the struggle to find qyt anything at all, but the effort to understand what you are being told...
...Was the American diplomatic community in Saigoa caught by surprise...
...It is so expensive, in fact, that the only institutions which can really afford it are big newspapers...
...When did he start to bom the files...
...Reader's Digest, Playboy and perhaps one or two of the women's magazines have the resources for ambitious reporting, but a glance at their contents pages will prove they don't often do it, and are sometimes erratic or whimsical in their choice of subject when they do...
...Was he telling the President that the game was up...
...Whom did the CIA insist on bringing out, and whom leave behind...
...The others must make do with think pieces, or with fact pieces which have been researched at someone else's expense...
...Did McGeorge Bundy cancel his appointments for the day in New York...
...Ambassador Graham Martin...
...Nearly every fact of American life was touched in one way or another-from Pan American Airlines to Congress, from the families of Marine legation guards to {he Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...It's only natural...
...The importance of the subject would certainly justify the expense and the space...
...First, the cast of characters...
...Profiles, investigations of malfeasance and skullduggery, trend pieces and long reports on sociological, environmental and political subjects are all well-established forms in newspaper convention, but historical narrative is not...
...A magazine like Harper's or Esquire will not often spend as much as $2,500 on a story, and even that would not keep a Washington Post man going for more than a month...
...Did it recognize die end for the end, and if it did, why did it neglect to destroy computer tapes listing every South Vietnamese who had ever been on the CIA's payroll...
...What did McNamara and Rusk think...
...Sidney Schan-berg lingered on in Pnom Penh and there were a lot of Vietnamese refugees to resettle, but the larger drama -the victory of the party of Ho Chi Minh after 35 years and three wars against the Japanese, the French and the Americans, surely one of the greatest national struggles in history...
...Maybe later, after a decade or two...
...My own candidates would be the Angola affair, Truman's decision to use the A-bomb, the Cuban missile crisis, the last years of Life magazine, the murders of Sam Giancana and John Rosselli, the Portuguese revolution, the wile of J. Edgar Hoover, the life and death of Salvador Allende, the Phoenix program, the building of the Alaska pipeline, the origins of the Cold War, the murder of Trotsky, the rise of Las Vegas, the Hungarian revolution, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the deportation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the collapse of the British pound, and, a year or two after he leaves office, the public career of Henry Kissinger...
...No one wants to think about it any more...
...Did Walt Rostow want to reach for his phone in Texas...
...What Kissinger wouldn't say about himself, others might...
...Newsday probably comes closer than any other...
...In the heat of an event an indiscretion may have an immediate effect but later on the worst is likely to be mild embarrassment...
...As time passed and everyone canned down, the story opened up as stories do...
...they yield their factual details and emotional color...
...it was only the national attention which wandered...
...Consider for a moment some aspects of the story' which was being ignored...
...Nothing else...
...Memoirs are notoriously cautious and narrow, and often appear too late for challenge...
...And Pilger is an Englishman, Terzani an Italian...
...there are many others...
...It costs at least $100 a day to go on the road and even a relatively simple story-a profile, say-can take a month or more if you go about it seriously...
...John Dean's Blind Ambition is on its way...
...An American Life by Jeb Magruder, Theodore White's Breach of Faith, Jimmy * Breslin's How the Good Guys Finally Won, The Final Days, and Leon Jaworski's The Right and the Power have all been on the Times bestseller list...
...3) It hasn't occurred to anyone there is a great story there, waiting to be reported and written...
...New York magazine gave Nonnan Mailer most of an issue and $15,000 last summer for a long piece about the CIA, an astonishing sum for a general magazine, and enough, perhaps, to pay for the first three paragraphs of a major investigative piece by Seymour Hersh...
...PRESS There are three possible reasons why the American press has published as close to nothing as two-graf stories can get about Vietnam since the other side won not quite a year and a half ago...
...The London Sunday Times Insight Team has often written history of this sort-on the Philby conspiracy, the Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes hoax, the Cleveland Street affair, the Zinoviev telegram, among others -but no American paper has followed their example in a determined manner...
...Thirty years of effort, $150 billion or more, 60,000 Americans and countless French and Vietnamese lives, a whole decade of American political life were going down the drain as the last helicopters took off from the embassy roof, leaving all those disbelieving clerks in their white shirts still pounding on the gates...
...The story is dead because there is nothing left to happen...
...what did Graham Martin say to Ford when he got home?-is to ask the people who ought to know...
...Why, then, hasn't some newspaper done it...
...The spectacle of Americans fleeing a conquered city had not been seen since the Civil War and the final departure was recorded every step of the way, just as it should have been...
...The expulsion of the United States from Vietnam is only one example of an event which deserves the dense treatment which only a newspaper's resources could provide...
...But then the story simply disappeared...
...These stories all share at least four things in common: they are worth looking into, they would especially benefit from a newspaper's unique ability to inter view a lot of different people in a lot of different places, it would be all but impossible to come up with nothing, and in most cases the story would probably make a book which would help recover expenses...
...1) The war is over...
...Even the Japanese left in good order, while the French retired from the field with their arms and a piece of paper...
...When did he start to push for an evacution program...
...My reason for wishing that someone would is not simply impatient curiosity, but a feeling that some things must be discovered by reporters if they are ever to be discovered at all...
...The reason, I think, is simply that the idea hasn't occurred to anyone...
...The best time to piece together almost any event, in fact, is in the middle distance, by which I mean that period which comes after the event has cooled, and before the principals have begun to write their memoirs...
...can this have come as a surprise to him...
...Once the temperature is down stories become vulnerable to reporting...
...The two books which have appeared-John Pilger's The Last Day and Tiziano Terzani's Giai Phong...
...The humiliating flight from Saigon while desperate South Vietnamese pounded on the embassy gates was visible evidence of the completeness of American failure in Vietnam...
...This is very odd...
...Only the Americans had to flee pell mell, with their shirt sleeves hanging out of suitcases and the memory of weeping friends...
...A 30-year policy had failed utterly and the last act, so long foreseen, was unfolding right now...
...It has spent a lot of money with brilliant results on ambitious reporting-a long report of Bebe Rebozo's financial affairs, a huge investigation of the heroin industry-but it has never, so far as I know, attempted to reconstruct the history of an event...
...Richard Nixon in San Clemente let it be known what he would have done if he'd still been President, and Gerald Ford in Washington was under the psychological pressure to act which finally resulted in the Mayaguez affair...
...The "decent interval" written into Henry Kissinger's peace was proving indecently short...
...created hardly a ripple...
...The story will never be more accessible than it is right now...
...Reporting from the middle distance is in some ways closer to history than journalism, with the exception that the documents are human memories rather than pieces of paper...
...Not now...
...Watergate began to generate books even before Nixon was out, of office and the flood has not broken even yet...
...It's hard to explain this...
...They all de serve to be written, and maybe some of them will be...
...What was the CIA telling Ford and Kissinger...
...I may even have forgotten one or two...
...Interim accounts may not tell the full story, but at the very least they will encourage honest accounts from the principals later on...
...Stories ripen...
...Or at least, it is not in this country...
...At the time, of course, the Times and the Post and the other major papers covered the story heavily, even obsessively, printing more about the advance of the North Vietnamese, the collapse of Saigon's army, and the refusal of Congress to come up with still more funds than any ordinary citizen could conceivably read and still get to work on time...
...2) A nameless spiritual malaise-part regret, part guilt, and part simple exhaustion-attaches to the very word "Vietnam...
...What was the position of U.S...
...official documents are, after all, official, and even the private working papers of government are frequently incomplete, misleading or self-serving...
...After the passage of time the event is whole, memories are still vivid, and people have had a chance to'reflect...
...Did he understand it had to be, or was he simply helpless...
...Only a newspaper could easily afford to undertake a major account of the end of the American adventure in Vietnam, and, equally important, find the space to print it...
...You'd think there's be a story in all that, but so far it has failed to appear...
...But only silence about Vietnam...
...Why did he break the pattern of American presidents where Vietnam was concerned, and let it go...
Vol. 103 • November 1976 • No. 24
