THE PRESS AND THE WAR
Wechsler, James A .
the PRESS and the WAR by JAMES A. WECHSLER /~\n a day in early spring George C. ^-^ Wilson, a staff writer for The Washington Post, performed a simple exercise in journalistic diligence. He asked...
...Their gallant resistance evoked some small applause from some islands of the press...
...In one of those sweeping oversimplifications symptomatic of the frustrated military mind, Westmoreland charged that the "unpatriotic acts" of peace advocates were crucially responsible for our mounting casualty lists and prolongation of the war...
...It is to their eternal honor that such men as Senators George McGovern, Mark Hatfield, J. W. Fulbright, and others subsequently showed no sign that they had been intimidated...
...those who differed suffered in silent loneliness...
...the momentary frenzy produced by his return soon faded away...
...Nor could it have been much comfort to the Vice President to discover that his popularity had spurted in the Gallup Polls as a result of his increased acceptance among Goldwater fans...
...What may well have prolonged the conflict is our underestimation of the tenacity of the adversary, our diplomatic two-headedness and the growing misconception that our Air Force excursions in the North —which have so far sabotaged peace talks—can somehow obscure and finally obliterate disaffection in the South...
...Time and again American officials have conceded that South Vietnam is the crucial battleground of the war...
...But as far as much of the country is concerned, it died a sudden death...
...The German generals cried they were "stabbed in the back" in World War I; the French generals said the battle of Dienbienphu was "lost in Paris...
...Certainly it hardly created the stir that it merited—especially in the absence of any challenge to its authenticity...
...It was treated with adequate front-page respect by his own newspaper...
...For there is much simultaneous evidence that many newspapers—with honorable exceptions—have abdicated on the larger issue of dissent as well as the minimal matter of inquisitiveness...
...Ironically, the arrival of Joseph Stalin's daughter and her gracious expressions of love for liberty were to be heralded by the same journalistic figures as new proof of the blessings of American freedom...
...The lack of general response may well have reflected only the mingled fatalism and numbness which increasingly afflict much of the American press as this dead-end war drags on...
...few of those who enlist in the Vietcong receive copies of our newspapers at their doors in the morning or view our peace demonstrations on television...
...But at no time in the last two years did the prospect of sudden change seem dimmer than when these lines were finished in early May...
...it received no attention in any television or radio news broadcasts...
...Amid this tumult Vice President Hubert Humphrey was quoted as expressing his belief in "responsible dissent" but emphasizing the Administration's right to state its own case...
...The last time a general addressed a joint session of Congress, his name was MacArthur, and he had just been dismissed by President Truman for his defiance of civilian rule...
...It was one more cruel spring, when one thought anew of the young men who would never see another flowering of any countryside...
...And the burial of George Wilson's elementary enterprise in journalistic fact-finding was a symptom of the preference for self-deception that may be, to borrow Westmoreland's cliche about American resolve, our real "Achilles' heel...
...It is not dissent in Washington or New York that has rendered this war a nightmare...
...Wilson's Pentagon figures cast a dreary light on the heralded programs of constitutional reform and pacification...
...How many member newspapers of the Post-Times service published it in any form is not a matter of record...
...One would hardly have expected The New York Daily News or The Chicago Tribune and their jingoist counterparts to herald this somber news...
...My curiosity was initially stimulated by a fragment of the dispatch published in New York by the afternoon World-Journal-Tele gram...
...he got some sensational answers...
...He asked the Pentagon some hard, specific questions about the progress of the Vietnam war...
...The matter of the press and the war remains my preoccupation because journalism, after all, is my profession...
...Admittedly there were sad irrationalities uttered in some of the peace demonstrations— such as Stokely Carmichael's wild characterization of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara as a "racist...
...In a dispatch subsequently transmitted on The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service wire, he reported that, according to the figures given him by our own military establishment, "the enemy has more troops in South Vietnam than ever before...
...I am sure there are publishers and editors whose newspapers I never see who have asked the urgent questions evoked by newsman Wilson's Pentagon fact-finding expedition and the Westmoreland flag-waving performance...
...A political war has been steadily translated into a desperate exhibition of bombing power...
...I have no basis for suggesting that some hidden Pentagon or Administration pressures were responsible for this seeming conspiracy of silence on a disclosure of vast significance—that support for the Vietcong among the South Vietnamese, as revealed in recruitments, was rising rather than falling...
...But the answer is not wholly satisfying...
...As of that moment, more than two years after the Johnson Administration's fateful decision to begin escalation of the conflict, there were 287,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops operating in the South "compared to 239,000 this time last year...
...officials predicted.'3 [Emphasis added.] There was a melancholy footnote to these findings...
...there he avoided a crude repetition of his intolerance of dissent, but his appearance was unmistakably designed to humiliate and harass the Senate "doves...
...This time a visiting general was speaking under the auspices of a President who had seemingly abdicated to the demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and embraced the "strategy of victory" he scorned when running against Barry Gold-water...
...After obtaining the full story and writing some editorial comment on it, I waited expectantly for large journalistic follow-up of Wilson's devastating disclosures...
...their spirited rejoinders suggested, in fact, that Mr...
...But as far as I can ascertain, the story was never pursued by The New York Times—the official historian of American journalism—nor by the Associated Press and United Press International...
...And by the time the Pulitzer committee assembles next year, Wilson's enterprise in initiative will no doubt have been filed and forgotten...
...The fate of Wilson's dispatch may be dismissed by some as a case history in widespread negligence...
...Westmoreland journeyed to Congress a few days later...
...Nothing in Westmoreland's "progress reports" on the war answered the most basic of Wilson's questions: If things are in fact going so well, if only a possible failure of nerve and resolve bars the road to total success, if the Vietcong possess no seeds of growth other than those planted by Hanoi, how could their forces have increased in the South during the twelve-month period of our alleged gains...
...His first major appearance was at the annual luncheon conducted by the Associated Press in conjunction with the convention of the American Newspaper Publishers Association...
...Surely it should have been apparent to the press lords and their deputies that it is only a small step from the cry that "unpatriotic acts" are wounding our troops and encouraging the enemy to the charge that skeptical printed words are inflammatory...
...in the latest week for which figures were available, 274 U.S...
...Johnson had overplayed his hand and, in endeavoring to curtail debate, had succeeded only in exacerbating it...
...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of The New York Post and a featured columnist for that newspaper...
...Was that right under fire...
...troops had been killed—higher than the Korean war weekly average of 255...
...But the silence in places such as The New York Times—where editorial criticism of escalation has been forthright—was astonishing...
...But the land was full of voices blaming public protest for military miscalculation, and proclaiming that the only way to "support our troops" was to avoid identification with any quest for peace...
...And on the basis of this definition of our "progress," how many more years of this adventure lie ahead...
...The most ominous aspect of the arithmetic was the simultaneous disclosure that infiltration from the North "still appears to be down, indicating that recruiting in South Vietnam [for the Vietcong] has been more successful than U.S...
...As he told me later, Wilson returned to his office confident that he had obtained one of the bigger stories of the war...
...they caricature all claims that General Ky has begun to capture the hearts of the people in the southern territory...
...but such episodes in the politics of the absurd in no way reflected—as Humphrey knew—the deep crises of conscience confronting many young Americans as they face the prospect of service in a war they never made and for which they have no passion...
...I was especially intrigued because what seemed so meaningful a dispatch vanished from later editions of that paper...
...But on most editorial pages Westmoreland carried the day—at least for the moment...
...It was not many days after Wilson's documented description of the treadmill on which we are marching in Vietnam that General William G. Westmoreland left his command post to lead a massive propaganda offensive on the home front...
...Each time I write on Vietnam for an issue of The Progressive that will not appear for several weeks, I have the fugitive hope (as well as the journalistic anxiety) that the words will be rendered academic by the time they appear...
...From this large multitude of press dignitaries—owners and editors alike—he received a standing ovation for what was in effect a call for suspension of the First Amendment...
...Were we approaching the point of no return while the press mindlessly recorded "body-counts...
...One sadly suspects that Wilson's efforts will remain unrewarded and unremembered until the final chronicles of the war are written and men begin to ask how we could have so long endured a condition of national delusion in the face of such tangible evidence of our folly...
...But the word that went out to the world was that these guardians of our freedom had saluted the general's call for muteness...
...There the general, in a speech obviously inspired, if not entirely dictated, by the President and his White House ghosts, delivered what was to become celebrated—or notorious—as the most flagrant assault on the right to dissent since the worst hours of the dark McCarthy age...
...The air was full of martial sounds and the typewriter warriors were mounting new offensives...
Vol. 31 • June 1967 • No. 6
