VIETNAM: A STUDY IN DECEPTION
Wechsler, James A.
Vietnam: A Study in Deception by JAMES A. WECHSLER "piiPLOMATs and historians will one day offer their considered assessment of the war in Vietnam and the role of the United States in that...
...He was one of the younger journalists who refused to accept the official versions...
...Many live on small plots of rented land and pay fifty per cent or seventy-five per cent of their crops to landlords...
...Homer Bigart, who preceded Halberstam, suffered similar reproach...
...Vietnam: A Study in Deception by JAMES A. WECHSLER "piiPLOMATs and historians will one day offer their considered assessment of the war in Vietnam and the role of the United States in that conflict...
...it is part of a larger saga of suppression and distortion in which eminent Americans have been no less guilty than Madame Nhu and the minor Machiavellis who succeeded her...
...had in effect taken place...
...Senator Mike Mansfield (who has remained steadfastly sober throughout the Vietnam madness, and was one of the first to urge efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement) warns that such action would invite a larger version of Korea "paid for primarily with American lives.' Meanwhile, according to a dispatch to the New York Herald Tribune, "experts at the State and Defense Departments said the Vietcong were engaged in a desperate effort to recapture the initiative . . ." In September occurred the painful Sylvester affair...
...But back in their home office there were men who professed to be able to see things more clearly...
...The General said "the Vietnamese forces have seized the initiative" and that the Vietcong, having been rebuffed in "large attacks," had reverted to small units...
...This somber report evoked instant counterfire...
...Indeed, those who had led us to believe in 1963 that Halberstam and his associates were being unduly pessimistic were tacitly conceding, by the end of 1964, how right he had been...
...By November, the coup d'etat—plainly promoted by Washington—had occurred...
...This was not always the product of diabolical deceit...
...Kennedy's better moments...
...I do not happen to be one of those who lightly raise the cry of "managed news...
...If these programs don't show measurable progress this year," a U.S...
...two years ago, in this magazine, I defended President Kennedy's resort to concealment in certain crucial hours preceding the Cuban confrontation...
...Some of the mischievous propaganda circulated in various U.S...
...They, too, found little substance for the good news periodically being sponsored by those who were the makers or mouthpieces of official policy...
...Sulzburger replied that the Times was entirely satisfied with his coverage, and canceled Halberstam's imminent vacation lest it be construed as a capitulation...
...Yet on the same day that this gloomy acknowledgment arrived, Secretary of State Dean Rusk blandly announced on television that he remained serenely confident of the ultimate victory of the Vietnamese without any expansion of the conflict...
...So far, he said, there was no sign of a new day...
...Both episodes stirred far too little notice in the country...
...it has merely augmented our own confusion, and delayed too long the airing of our real dilemma...
...Two other "trouble-makers" were Charles Mohr and Mort Perry of Time magazine...
...Defense Secretary McNamara had been persuaded to embrace Harkins' wistful forecast...
...Surely that desperate predicament could not be attributed to any underestimation of Vietnamese strength voiced by the heretic correspondents...
...At various intervals they reported that certain idealistic but untutored young men were offering a "defeatist" view of the war that was somehow infecting the atmosphere...
...The ordinary citizen, unless he had been rendered cynical by a surfeit of similar "great victories" prematurely heralded, was clearly being invited to believe that the tide had turned dramatically...
...Perhaps it might have been more audible if less time had been spent in seeking, between the intermittent moments of truth, to blur the hard facts of life...
...From Burgh Gia the United Press International reported that "a major defeat for the South Vietnamese government's forces became apparent today as fighting subsided here after six days...
...Those who did so quickly became the targets of Madame Nhu and her entourage...
...Two young girls spend a long day weaving three fiber mats on a crude hand-loom, dividing wages of only fifty cents between them...
...But prosperity hasn't touched most of the province's 300,000 inhabitants...
...On the surface the theory seemed somewhat implausible since the circulation of The New York Times among the masses of Vietnamese peasants is limited...
...The existence of such a cabal should hardly be suppressed, or dismissed as journalistic fantasy...
...They believe the ouster of President Ngo Dinh Diem, of his brother and principal political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and of only a few of their principal adherents will bring an end to internal repression and recurrent political turmoil...
...But the total effect has been scandalous...
...It may be even worse a year from now if we continue the process of self-delusion and perpetuate the legend that time and providence are necessarily on our side...
...At the same time I also wrote that much of the press too often achieved maximum indignation over marginal issues and that it had been singularly lacking in outrage over the fashion in which the more diligent U.S...
...Arthur Sylvester, formerly an able Washington correspondent and now Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of public relations, had accompanied McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor on a tour of inspection to Saigon...
...We made this coup to win the war," he proclaimed in an interview...
...and Vietnamese officials in describing the capture of a Vietcong headquarters and the killing of some ninety of the Communist troops...
...A veteran Southeast Asia observer, he was guilty of lack of reverence for Madame Nhu...
...the military had wiped out any semblance of constitutional rule and the United States found itself in the awkward position of imploring a restoration of the fragile status quo...
...but it expressed a state of mind not confined to the White House...
...As redrafted in New York, it became a highly favorable estimate of the grand fighting spirit of the Vietnamese troops...
...We realize that the Diem regime had lost the confidence of the population, and you cannot win a war without the support of the population...
...Simultaneously, according to an Associated Press dispatch from Washington, "Dean Rusk, in a TV interview, also denied that the Vietnam war was going badly...
...New songs of hope officially emanated from Saigon and Washington...
...It is because we have been subjected to an almost unsurpassed compound of misinformation and wishful thinking...
...They were not isolated incidents...
...Our bargaining position might have been far better two years ago if we had tecognized what Halberstam and others attempted to tell us...
...Sylvester, a conscientious, thoughtful man who has had the unenviable mission of trying to speak coherently amid all the conflicting clamor, finally conceded that his previously optimistic briefings might have "tended to throw things out of focus...
...By autumn of 1963 it became clear that all the effort invested in saving the face of the Diem regime had been a futile endeavor...
...military command in Saigon, was cheerfully observing that "Premier Ngo Dinh Diem has adopted two concepts of major importance in the struggle against the Communist guerrillas...
...I have never doubted President Johnson (or Kennedy's) earnest desire to end this war on honorable terms, and to avoid reckless "escalation...
...Senators Barry Goldwater and Stuart Symington have joined in a call for U.S...
...The truth is that, almost from the moment of the U.S...
...he was dismayed by the stream of military and political dignitaries who junketed to the area, went on conducted tours, and returned to the United States proclaiming that victory was on the horizon...
...correspondents were being pushed around in South Vietnam...
...There has been mounting documentation of that story in the ensuing period...
...air strikes against North Vietnam...
...junior officers" helped to hasten the day of the Diems' overthrow...
...commitment to defend South Vietnam, dedicated, responsible newspapermen began striving to break through the curtain of oversimplification...
...journalists who conceived it their first function to tell the country the truth, and certain elder statesmen of the press who had voluntarily assumed the role of advance men for influential voices in the Pentagon and the State Department...
...they also found themselves embroiled with U.S...
...The verdict, like so many postmortems, will hinge in large measure on how the story ends, and in the early days of January, 1965, when these lines are written, the fog of uncertainty remains thick...
...In this as in other matters, there was essential continuity between the Kennedy and the Johnson Administrations...
...It seems to me that the clearest clue to the agony of South Vietnam—and the point that the harassed journalists have been steadily trying to make— was contained in a dispatch from Robert Keatly, The Wall Street Journal's man in Saigon, published on June 15, 1964, which began: "Long An province, just southwest of Saigon, is potentially a rich area...
...But the message has never been truly heard...
...He suggested that this able young man might have become "too involved" in the Saigon story...
...there have no doubt been many moments when some of the sources of befuddlement were merely articulating their own confusion or ignorance...
...many decades of "bungling, graft, and indifference" in high places had created a profound skepticism about "vigorous new programs" such as those proclaimed by the new regime of General Khanh...
...I am entirely convinced that Mr...
...He added: "Administration leaders are confident that a new civilian government could quickly restore order in Saigon and turn its attentions back to the war effort...
...And time, he warned, was running out...
...it may weir be argued in retrospect that only prolongation of the long, desperate stalemate paved the way for such an outcome...
...On July 24, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, returning from a Pacific conference, said he was "encouraged over the progress of affairs in South Vietnam" but conceded that the struggle there might last "four years...
...Now we arrive at May, 1963...
...The phrase "great victory" was exactly the one jointly employed by U.S...
...Finally, Mohr and his colleague, in 1963, filed a comprehensive report which began: "The war in Vietnam is being lost...
...Other, far more ominous alternatives still confront us, including, of course, the most awesome peril that we will stumble into large-scale collision with Red China on this bleak terrain—surely the most intolerable example of "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...Even as Harkins was reaffirming his prophesy, a Washington dispatch to The New York Times reported that "officials at the State Department are less inclined than in the past to place optimistic interpretations on day-by-day combat reports...
...organs of the new pro-Chinese left is as unjust and as unrelated to reality as the monolithic mystique of the Muscovites of the 1930's...
...General Dvong Van Minh, the new military ruler of South Vietnam, exuded positive thinking...
...To the ambassadors and generals, on the other hand, it was crucial that the news be good, and they regarded any other interpretation as defeatist and irresponsible...
...they were symptomatic of an underlying tension between inquisitive newsmen and the Saigon Establishment (Vietnamese and American...
...it is also a painful episode in the chronicles of the Kennedy Administration...
...Madame Nhu's frenetic attack on "U.S...
...Early in July of the same year an Associated Press dispatch from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, based on interviews with U.S...
...Most do without electricity and running water...
...But whatever place the Vietnam involvement may occupy in our military annals, it has already become a classic case-history in the uses—and misuses—of government deception to sustain a course that deserved the fullest national awareness and debate...
...At many moments of setback on the Vietnamese front, there has been a persistent tendency to make skeptical journalists the villains of the drama...
...Army Chief of Staff, said such opinion did not "accurately reflect the opinions of responsible army authorities in Washington or in the field...
...Reference to a most recent episode may be a proper prelude...
...emissaries there, but it should hardly have been used as a yardstick of journalistic virtue...
...Neither Diem nor the military claque that succeeded him has shown any capacity for effective popular leadership or for carrying out those reforms that might give the populace some sense that it had a true stake in the war...
...Perhaps the more serious contention was that the capricious, tender-spirited rulers of the land could be induced to larger effort if we maintained the pretense that they were giving their all and that their deeds were being crowned with daily success...
...Thus, on April 6, 1962, General Paul D. Harkins, chief of the U.S...
...intervention to rescue Saigon's chaotic regime...
...In the aftermath of the coup, Max Frankel reported in The New York Times that the Administration anticipated "greater progress in the war against the Communist guerrillas...
...The alternative, wrote Alsop, is "the most humiliating defeat" in our national history...
...Johnson has resisted such proposals...
...But not many days earlier President Kennedy had voiced concern that the war was being undermined by internal strife in the Diem regime...
...On December 28, at a moment of new turmoil in the Saigon regime, two large New York newspapers (and no doubt many others throughout the nation) carried almost identical headlines: "Great Victory in South Vietnam...
...They resigned...
...The incident was not one of Mr...
...This bare outline of history is recited because it provides the essential background against which the journalistic war must be weighed...
...If much .of the country has suffered a sense of bewilderment and frustration over the Vietnam deadlock, it is not merely because our "illusion of omnipotence" has been shattered anew...
...In fact, he declared, he had merely been reporting what General Harkins had told McNamara...
...Halberstam himself soon became a "controversial figure...
...Within twenty four hours of their arrival, Sylvester told correspondents that the war was "going well" and that the moment was "rapidly approaching where goals set will be reached relatively shortly...
...officialdom and, in some cases, with their home offices and some of the pillars of the fourth estate...
...But neither do I believe there can be any sane solution if we are ourselves unwilling to confront unpleasant truth and to recognize that the game, as we have played it so far in Vietnam, may be nearly up...
...David Halberstam of The New York Times, writing recently in the magazine Commentary, summed it up this way: "The job of reporters in Vietnam was to report the news, whether or not the news was good for America...
...Its fertile land produces quantities of rice and fruit, and large numbers of the white Peking ducks so highly favored in Vietnamese cuisine are raised locally...
...As usual there were contradictory sounds...
...it could do so only by providing dramatic improvements in "drab, substandard living conditions...
...Most American observers in South Vietnam, Keatly added, agreed the Saigon regime could wage effective military action against the Communists only if it wins the "loyalty and confidence" of the people of the Vietnamese countryside...
...As 1963 drew to an end, General Harkins was reiterating his confidence that, by the end of 1965, the United States would be able to pull out most of its own forces and permit the Vietnamese to finish the mop-up operation...
...After another year of feverish fluctuation in the statements of public officials and Vietnamese generals, a new coup "Do you want to take that call now...
...Twas indeed a famous victory that preceded this debacle...
...That was June, 1964...
...officers recently returned from Vietnam, said they found military operations in South Vietnam "confused and ineffective...
...Certainly there has been an honorable American attempt, under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to convey the warnings to Saigon's elite...
...Beyond that, the lesson of these matters is that all of our "psychological warfare," geared to promoting the notion that things are usually better than they seem, has singularly failed to deceive the enemy...
...Among his books are "The Age of Suspicion" and "Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor...
...He said the South Vietnamese are "beginning to hit the Vietcong where it hurts most—in winning the people to the side of the government," and added: "Our military assistance to Vietnam is paying off...
...General George H. Decker, U.S...
...but any newspaperman over twenty-one knows these stories were planted by men within his own Administration —in the Pentagon and elsewhere—who have been pressing for such action, and who believed the publication of such dispatches might somehow force the President's hand...
...The first clear portent was the ouster of Francois Sully of Newsweek...
...When Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, then the new publisher of the Times, paid a courtesy cail on President Kennedy in the fall of 1963, the President asked whether there was any prospect of Halberstam's early transfer...
...In fact, from Saigon to Washington, there has been a war within a war—a conflict between a small, gallant band of JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post...
...He said they were apparently viewed as "tending to suggest I was trying to plaster things over with a pretty look...
...Moreover, correspondents on the scene presented statistics to Sylvester which disclosed that during the first half of 1963 there had been a decline in guerrilla casualties and loss of weapons and a corresponding increase in government casualties...
...Meanwhile, President Johnson has on at least two occasions during this recent period of agonized paralysis chided the press for "speculation" about the possibility of expanding the war...
...Halberstam's experience with The New York Times was exactly the reverse...
...A hired field hand earns seventy cents a day if he can work...
...Time's press section carried a harsh diatribe (reportedly dictated by the managing editor) against Saigon reporters who engaged in "crusading"-—meaning that they tried to write what they saw, rather than what Saigon and Washington preferred to see in print...
...In miniature these episodes were, one might say, the story of the war as it has been officially presented to the nation: small triumphs, sharp reversals, and, most of all, sugary reassurances...
...Plainly this was the judgment of some U.S...
...Soon thereafter came the exiling of James Robinson of the National Broadcasting Company for comparable heresy...
...Regardless of how the story ends, events have abundantly and repeatedly vindicated the gloomy "crusaders...
...Sadly enough, some of the most articulate spokesmen of this attack were themselves journalists who intermittently visited Saigon—Joseph Alsop, Frank Conniff, and Marguerite Higgins...
...Led by Joseph Alsop, they were clamoring for large-scale U.S...
...Exactly one week after this inflated depiction of a small success came the dismal anti-climax...
...Correspondents would read such stuff under Washington datelines, Halberstam noted, and then return to the field and "see the same tired old government tactics, the same hack political commanders in charge, the same waste of human resources...
...If, for example, the conflict should terminate with the beginning of broad negotiations for an Asian detente and the initiation of meaningful discourse between Washington and Peking, the American policy-makers may emerge with larger distinction than now seems likely...
...One year later, at the close of 1964, the cycle was sadly completed...
...official was quoted as saying, "the whole war effort could be washed out from beneath us...
...The Vietcong legions have stepped up their attacks...
Vol. 29 • February 1965 • No. 2
