White Paper, Red Scare
If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security.... Conflict...
...Debate concerned the pace and terms of American withdrawal, not the ideological underpinnings of U.S...
...While the Kennedy Administration considered the media's focus on "domestic instability" a major political liability, at least the media were not about to question the ideological assumptions that underlay U.S...
...objectives...
...2 Reports from the field in 1962-63 contradicted official optimism, and tensions rose to the point that the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations carried out a public campaign to discredit the Saigon press corps...
...1 The day after its release, the President, awarding a belated Congressional Medal of Honor to a veteran of Vietnam, made clear his intention to reinterpret the meaning of that war: "They came home without a victory, not because they were defeated, but because they were denied permission to win...
...Warns Cuba to End Subversion...
...Interview, Miami, July 31, 1981...
...But if the leader of the Western world makes a statement, it's policy almost...
...By the day the White Paper was released, Barrie Dunsmore's ABC report included an animated map showing the countries of Central America turning red one by one...
...It should be noted that it was possible, even at this early date, to investigate the arms issue independently...
...Does it prove that the news has turned...
...4July/Aija 1983 S "Maybe There's Something to It" Most Central American field journalists were extremely skeptical of the White Paper's Cold War rhetoric...
...6. "Communist Interference in El Salvador," Special Report No...
...1981: The Same Frame Sixteen years later, the three-week-old Reagan Administration released its own White Paper, "Communist Interference in El Salvador...
...South Vietnam and South Korea are ruled by authoritarian regimes whose roots haven't sprung from the people...
...cit., p. 54...
...The New York Times refused a request from the White House that it remove its Saigon correspondent, David Halberstam...
...U.S...
...Even in the later part of the Vietnam war, when journalists were disillusioned with American policy, discussion about the origins of revolution or the basic outlines of the U.S...
...1965: "Framing" the Issue A starting place that is as relevant as it is poetically symbolic is a comparison of two administration "White Papers"-one in 1965 and the other in 1981-each aimed at building public consensus for an escalation of U.S...
...Time correspondents Charles Mohr and Mert Perry resigned when their own organization failed to back them in the dispute over the accuracy-or patriotism-of Vietnam reporting...
...Monolithic media...
...9. Quoted in Maslow and Arana, op...
...Sidney Blumenthal, "Marketing the President," New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1981, p. 43...
...At the same time, it was important not to arouse what could be called the "Korea Syndrome"'the fear of another inconclusive land war in Asia...
...It is through these that we can record change...
...2. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979...
...This interim report is based on an ongoing study, and includes the monitoring of about 30 hours of television coverage beginning with the October 1979 coup in El Salvador, as well as a less systematic monitoring of major print media and interviews with more than 30journalists, both in Central America and in Washington, New York and Miami...
...The Times of London, for example, sent a reporter to inspect captured weapons displayed in El Salvador (the same ones shown by Diane Sawyer): "...many were homemade," reported the Times, "belying the notion of a sudden rush of sophisticated arms...
...The content of the news had shifted from The Great Communicators: Reagan on El Salvador, Cronkite on Vietnam...
...80, Department of State, February 23, 1981...
...It was the Administration itself which first raised the comparison with Vietnam...
...Journalists have in fact become more skeptical and more sophisticated...
...Thus, officials kept as quiet as possible about the contemplated extent of U.S...
...Sidney Blumenthal, "Marketing the President," New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1981, p. 43...
...National Wirewatch, No...
...Blumenthal, op...
...In 1976, when the Trilateral Commission released a report on the "governability of democracy," the section on the United States, authored by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, called the media "the most important new source of national power in 1970 as opposed to 1950...
...There were exceptions...
...8. CBS Evening News, February 12, 1981...
...Blumenthal, op...
...The documents, which were part of the White Paper, had in fact been "leaked" to the Times by the Reagan Administration...
...This is a tactic familiar to journalists...
...This was the purpose of the White Paper: to "frame" the conflict in Southeast Asia as a confrontation between East and West, and thus a matter of national security...
...0 C" 'U a July/Aua 1983 56 NACLARSoOuI questions about right-wing death squads and the degree of popular support enjoyed by the Salvadorean guerrillas to arms supplies and "Soviet expansionism...
...2. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979...
...to play a role with respect to the President that a local paper plays with respect to the mayor...
...7. A detailed critique of White Paper coverage can be found inJonathan Evan Maslow and Ana Arana, "Operation El Salvador," Columbia Journalism Review, May/ June, 1981...
...35, April 30, 1981...
...Considers More Military Advisors for Embattled Nation, Pentagon Says Two days later: Given 'Higher Visibility Than It Deserves,' White House Believes...
...Hodding Carter Paper as containing "documents, photographs and letters captured in November andJanuary, which firmly establish the links between leftist insurgents in El Salvador and Communist governments worldwide...
...officials say the evidence is unmistakable that the Cubans are re-supplying the guerrillas in El Salvador under the direct sponsorship of the Soviet Union...
...Not at all...
...Press Coverage Criticized" 1 Walter Cronkite was soon appearing before a graphic not of hammers and sickles but of the ominous profile of Vietnam...
...involvement in El Salvador's bloody civil war will provoke a major debate in this country about whether Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr...
...Why settle for a day of publicity when one can easily stretch it out for several weeks...
...There will be no comment of any sort on future actions except that they will be adequate and measured and fitting to aggression...
...The decision to focus somewhat more on television is motivated by studies which show that it is the most important influence on the perceptions of the mass public, especially in the area offoreign policy...
...Nearly a decade after Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, it was, for the most part, strikingly similar to the period of U.S...
...Does this mean that the Administration's initial success with the White Paper was without lasting significance...
...Problem In none of these endangered nations can the United States rely upon internal stability as a Dan Hallin is assistant professor ofpolitical science and communications at the University of California, San Diego...
...III, p. 324...
...The rest of the story summarized the State Department document...
...The President still possesses enormous power to shape the news...
...ABC first used the graphic on February 18, 1981...
...9 More important, few reporters questioned the relevance of the whole issue of "outside arms" for understanding the insurgency in El Salvador...
...The Administration's public relations strategy had two components...
...The Washington Post, February 22, 1981...
...not on [U.S./South Vietnamese] military operations...
...Government Printing Office, 1962), p. 336...
...There's always a thing in your mind, 'Well, maybe there is something to it.' "13 So for all intents and purposes, it was indeed "Communist intervention, Communist intervention" that dominated front page coverage...
...cit., p. 111...
...allies were uneasy that the Administration "chooses to view what's happening in El Salvador exclusively in the context of U.S./Soviet relations...
...16 Turning the Press On Despite this initial success, it quickly became clear that 1981 was not 1965...
...cit., p. 111...
...First, it was essential to rally support by raising the specter of Communist aggression...
...The whole issue of running the presidency," noted Reagan pollster Richard S. Beal...
...4 And indeed, it is harder today for a President to "manage" the news than it was in the early 1960s...
...Frank Reynolds introduced one ABC report with the words, "And now, for more on El Salvador and other aspects of U.S./ Soviet relations, here is Peter Jennings in Moscow...
...In this sense, its battle in Central America is in part an ideological one, directed at the American public-and media...
...has been accused of human rights violations and that is in large part why people were rebelling against it.' 0 Field reporters were by no means the only ones who were skeptical...
...LikeJohnson's before it, the Reagan Administration was playing a delicate game, "turning the press on" just enough to revive the faith of the Cold War without raising the specter of a major war...
...The Administration thus not only got more mileage out of the documents themselves, but set itself up for several weeks of public statements about Communist intervention which would be legitimized by a body of evidence most of the media had not yet seen...
...5. The Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), Vol...
...80, Department of State, February 23, 1981...
...5 The New York Times of February 6, 1965, led with a straight account of official statements: The United States issued today a detailed, documented indictment charging North Vietnam with flagrant and increasing aggression against South Vietnam...
...7. A detailed critique of White Paper coverage can be found inJonathan Evan Maslow and Ana Arana, "Operation El Salvador," Columbia Journalism Review, May/ June, 1981...
...4 And control was precisely what the Administration had achieved...
...Furthermore, it has been able to add a cluster of related themes to the top of the news agenda that are equally weak-arms supplies to the Salvadorean rebels, "totalitarianism" in Nicaragua, Nicaraguan military aggression, the "democratic" motivation of U.S...
...4. Edwin Diamond, "From Patriotism to Skepticism: How TV Reporting Has Changed," TV Guide, August 7, 1982...
...ABC World News Tonight, February 25, 1981...
...involvement in Vietnam-i.e., that the question was fundamentally one of outside Communist aggression, and the role of the United States was to contain it...
...Hodding Carter basic source of strength in the free world's fight to contain aggressive Communism...
...3. Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp...
...And The Washington Post's John Goshko wrote in a news analysis: Inevitably, this move toward increased U.S...
...Conflict between the media and presidential administrations over foreign policy is nothing new...
...But the Administration quickly found that the legacy of Vietnam and the changes in American political consciousness that have occurred since then run deep...
...III, p. 324...
...Interview, Mexico City, July 15, 1981...
...5. The Senator Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), Vol...
...Dunsmore, like other reporters, had not had time to read the documents, which were released just a few hours before his deadline...
...he was relying on an eightpage summary released along with them by the State Department...
...Consider the following background report on Southeast Asia from The New York Times Sunday edition, February 18, 1962: HONG KONG, February 17-...As the richest non-Communist power and as the principal Western nation with a Pacific Ocean frontier, the United States has inherited the chief responsibility for confining Communist rule in Eastern Asia to its present boundaries...
...The documents, which are considered genuine by United States intelligence agencies, say the weapons came from stockpiles of American arms seized in Vietnam and Ethiopia...
...3 The popular press has been full of such commentary lately, and a good deal of it has focused on the issue of Central America...
...9. Quoted in Maslow and Arana, op...
...cit., p. 54...
...references WHITE PAPER, RED SCARE 1. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: 1961, (Washington: U.S...
...For example, the day before the White Paper was released, NBC's Bob Kur "balanced" a story on Administration statements by citing an earlier State Department report which had concluded that the insurgency in El Salvador resulted from "generations of inequality and repressive rule...
...The week before the White Paper was released, Alexander Haig had declared that Central America would not be another Vietnam because the "source of supplies" [Cuba] would not remain "outside the target area...
...The very day after the release of the White Paper, Administration statements began to take on a distinctly defensive tone...
...independence...
...ABC first used the graphic on February 18, 1981...
...are orchestrating the intelligence at their disposal to whip up support for their hardline attitudes and push the United States into what many liberals fear could become a Central American miniversion of Vietnam.12 As NBC's Ike Seamans said, "Anybody who'd been to Salvador as much as the people who normally cover it knew it was a pretty simplified view of the situation...
...Heavyhanded news management...
...involvement would have to be escalated dramatically if the "loss" of South Vietnam were to be prevented...
...This marks the emergence of a very significant check on presidential power...
...escalation in Vietnam...
...President Kennedy addresses reporters, 1961...
...It questioned neither the 3NACLA Report accuracy of official information nor the motivations or implications of its release...
...posts in the Far East shortly after the White Paper was released, "will be kept as far as possible on [North Vietnamese] aggression...
...7 On February 6, for example, The New York Times carried a lead story pre-dating the official release of the White Paper which began: Indications that the Soviet Union and Cuba agreed last year to deliver tons of weapons to Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador are contained in secret documents reportedly captured from the insurgents by Salvadorean security forces...
...This was the so-called bi-partisan consensus of the Cold War, a consensus the Reagan Administration has John Kennedy, 1961' been striving mightily to rebuild...
...Does it mean, in short, that nothing is happening and nothing can happen to affect the public news flow in this country...
...interference in a third world conflict...
...98-99...
...references WHITE PAPER, RED SCARE 1. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: 1961, (Washington: U.S...
...Juan Tamayo, formerly UPI bureau chief in Mexico City and now with The Miami Herald, describes his reaction this way: When the Administration came out with this White Paper all the news mentioned was Communist intervention, Communist intervention...
...On February 27, 1965, the State Department issued a White Paper entitled "Aggression from the North-the Record of North Vietnam's Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam...
...ABC World News Tonight, February 25, 1981...
...We did not appreciate how rapidly El Salvador would take off in the minds of the press as a Vietnam," one White House aide admitted...
...involvement...
...4. Edwin Diamond, "From Patriotism to Skepticism: How TV Reporting Has Changed," TV Guide, August 7, 1982...
...Los Angeles Times, February 23, 25, 27, 1981...
...The sequence of headlines in the Los Angeles Times the week of the White Paper is revealing: The day before: U.S...
...Ironically, it was only in response to this Cold War rhetoric and the opposition it provoked in Congress that the media began to cover the Central America story heavily...
...1 8 The Administration's errors, in fact, were much more severe than a mere failure to foresee the reaction of the press...
...In decidedly unqualified language, Dunsmore summarized the White The press play in the opening weeks of the campaign to convince us that E Salvador is the place to roll back the Iron Curtain demonstrated that big government sets the terms of public discussion about major issues far more often than the press likes to admit or the public understands...
...policy...
...98-99...
...This success is perhaps best illustrated by the graphic ABC News adopted a few days before the release of the White Paper: a map of El Salvador with the Stars and Stripes on one side, the Hammer and Sickle on the other.15 The networks also began to pair Central America stories with reports on meetings of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union, then taking place in Moscow...
...National Wirewatch, No...
...The Washington Post, February 22, 1981...
...relationship to the third world were not a part of the news agenda...
...35, April 30, 1981...
...On February 12, for example, CBS State Department correspondent Diane Sawyer reported: U.S...
...The Turning of the News...
...Government Printing Office, 1962), p. 336...
...This was the standard convention of "objective" reporting, making it easy most of the time for officials to control the content of foreign affairs coverage...
...The charge was accompanied by a warning that the United States might be compelled to abandon its policy of "restraint" and to expand the war in Vietnam if the Communist aggression from the North did not cease...
...You've got to follow it up...
...It is commonly assumed today that the media were transformed over the course of the Vietnam-Watergate era from a relatively docile and conservative institution to an assertive and generally critical one...
...But the "turning of the news" should not be exaggerated...
...To a large extent, the Administration's problems with the press have been of its own making...
...In recent years there has come into existence a national press with the...
...But as intense as these conflicts seemed to those involved in them, they took place within the narrow bounds of a powerful consensus...
...The focus of public attention," read a Department of State cable sent to nine U.S...
...control of the news on Central America was not going to be easy to sustain...
...Last August, for example, TV Guide ran an article on Central America coverage entitled "Patriotism to Skepticism: The Turning of TV News...
...In many ways, the political assumptions and journalistic routines that made it possible in the early 1960s for foreign policy elites to finesse the country into one major war and many minor interventions with hardly a ripple of public debate have persisted remarkably intact...
...3. Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp...
...The early escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, as is now well known, provoked a particularly intense conflict...
...The Washington Post, February 22, 1981...
...8. CBS Evening News, February 12, 1981...
...6 How did the media respond...
...6. "Communist Interference in El Salvador," Special Report No...
...Nobody in Washington bothered to mention that this thing had been going on for years, that the guerrillas have been around for a long time, that the government itself in El Salvador...
...2 NACLAReandJuly/Aug 1983 The White Paper was swallowed whole and regurgitated in a fashion not equaled since the Johnson Administration's White Paper on Vietnam 15 years ago...
...The Washington Post, February 22, 1981...
...Does it imply conspiracy and collusion...
...Interview, Miami, July 31, 1981...
...How can this be...
...Necessary Steps' to be Taken to Stop Arms, Meese Says The day after: Salvador Role 'No Vietnam'--Reagan...
...The locus of coverage had shifted from Central America itself to Washington...
...Los Angeles Times, February 23, 25, 27, 1981...
...Officials were busy planning the exact timing and form of the escalation and worrying about public opinion...
...The Johnson Administration had concluded that U.S...
...is control of the agenda...
...Interview, Mexico City, July 15, 1981...
...He noted that many U.S...
...National Wirewatch, a newsletter for the "wire editors" who select national and international news for most daily papers around the country, criticized the wire services for "heeding in lockstep fashion" the "party line from Washington on Communist infiltration...
...In a sense what is really remarkable is not the degree of skepticism one sees in the press or the public or Congress, but the fact that the Administration has succeeded as well as it has at keeping the spotlight on "Soviet expansionism" in Central America, despite the objective weakness of its case...
...Some of the evidence has come from weapons and documents captured in El Salvador [video coverage of weapons].s This acceptance of the leaked documents at more or less face value was typical...
...To understand the relationship of change to continuity in the media, it is first necessary to recognize the conventions and routines that have evolved through many years...
Vol. 17 • July 1983 • No. 4
