By Tom Nusbaumer
Twenty-five years after the Vietnam War, one point — possibly only one — is certain about that devastating and disconcerting conflict: the American public remains largely uncertain about its meaning, beyond that it was a horrendous mistake. Yet the political and military establishments have formed hard lessons of certainty. The American schizophrenia over Vietnam continues.
There were three major American participants in Vietnam. The politicos who created the war, the soldiers who fought the war, and the journalists who reported the war. Each had profoundly different experiences and, subsequently, each developed specific lessons. For the political establishment, the primary lesson from Vietnam is that U.S. wars must be short and casualties low, otherwise the American public will withdraw support. Even wars of moderate length are politically unfeasible today. Meanwhile, the military concentrated its focus elsewhere concluding that politicians must first define the goal (something not done in Vietnam), then give the military the freedom to plan and execute the armed means. Specific goals and freedom of means are enshrined in Pentagon doctrine. For the media, the lesson of Vietnam is summed up by counter-culture journalist I.F. Stone: "Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." Certainly a maxim of modern journalism.
These three lessons — only brief and cheap wars; civilians establish goal, then scram; they're all liars — are the boiled-down wisdom from America's greatest foreign policy disaster. There is another cardinal lesson, central for grasping the true legacy of Vietnam. Since public support is considered crucial for conducting war operations, even short ones, that which influences public opinion is of paramount importance. Since defeat in Vietnam, controlling the media has become an axiomatic directive that, if ignored, is tantamount to political and military suicide. So today the American military seems to spend as much time planning media strategy as combat strategy.
Both the U.S. political order and military establishment overwhelmingly believe that biased journalism, by itself, undermined public support for the Vietnam War. That is, the media lost the war. And they continue to believe journalists are dangerous and in need of tight control, especially during times of military conflict. We might call this fourth lesson "gag the media." Just as intensely, journalists demand the freedom to report the truth even in times of conflict. With one side, then, forever seeking to restrict the dissemination of information and the other contentiously seeking to expand it, enmity is built into their relationship.
The modern system of censorship was already in functioning World War I, and it nearly crushed the correspondents into virtual silence. This was also when governments first used propaganda in an organized manner to mold public opinion. In World War II, first MacArthur in the Pacific then other theaters of the war created a bundle of censorship rules and an elaborate propaganda bureaucracy.
As General Eisenhower, the supreme commander in Europe, said: "Public opinion wins war." Initially the Korean conflict had no censorship or organized propaganda, yet soon MacArthur had the media under his control and toeing the emperor's line. Eventually, this censorship reached ludicrous heights, as it did in most of the 20th century wars.
In times of war, governments justify censorship, publicly that is, in two ways. The most common way is to prohibit the reporting of valuable information that could jeopardize soldiers' lives. The military adores this justification, forever harping on the dangers of uncensored press reports getting our young soldiers killed. The military seeks absolute operational security, yet has no concern about the press's responsibility to report the news. Yet every journalist I know is horrified at the thought that his or her reportage could result in the death of American soldiers. It would seem, then, that self-censorship would be sufficient except for the most recklessly aberrant reporters, yet individual aberrations are not the basis for general policy.
Politicians, in particular, emphasize that censorship is warranted to maintain public support for our military. (Of course, this is often a cover to support a particular military intervention, not really the military.) Whereas the former justification for censoring is concerned with soldiers' security, this one is concerned with the public's support of the war. Under extraordinary circumstances, such as wars for national survival and impending counter-terrorist operations, journalists overwhelmingly abide by the need for secrecy, and therefore censorship is again unnecessary. When the need is demonstrative, journalist do engage in self-censorship.
Journalists, even foreign correspondents, seldom identify with the transnational; instead, they remain fully rooted in their country's national identity. In short, journalists are, for good or bad, as nationalistic as other Americans and as supportive of their soldiers. The problem is not, then, the security of "our boys," or of essential military operations for U.S. vital interests, the problem is political leaders attempting to pressure journalists to support unworthy or possibly unjust military action.
When the facts are not supportive, neither are journalists. When the government year after year saw light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel, and journalists in Vietnam saw only more dark war and more bloodshed, eventually, one by one, journalists (like most Americans) withdrew their support.
There is a third motivation for censorship, which the public never hears about. This is when government or military officials advocate censoring the media to prohibit exposing deficiencies in the conduct of the war and therefore protect the reputations and possibly the careers of military and political leaders. The very first war correspondent, William Howard Russell, wrote dispatches to his newspaper on the unpreparedness of the British army in the Crimea War and their effect was to topple the government in London. Although never acknowledged, to hide personal failures is in fact the primary motivation for governments to censor the press. Whereas the first justification for censorship is directed at concealing truths from the enemy, the second and especially the third seek to conceal information and knowledge from one's own citizens. In a democracy, this is a serious problem and a major source for elevating the natural conflict between the government, which generally prefers to restrict sensitive information, and the media, which pushes for the widest circulation.
In Vietnam, the situation was different from the century's earlier wars. Much different. There was no official censorship, and journalists' access to the fighting was extensive, with the military furnishing transportation and even lodging. The U.S. government's propaganda apparatus was of course fully functioning, yet the freedom to travel and write or film insured the government's version could and often was challenged. These reports from the field impacted not merely the American public, and of course the political establishment, but also the majority of journalists who elected to remain in the comfort and safety of Saigon. (Out of the approximately 500 journalists in Vietnam before the Tet Offensive, the average number of reporters in the field was about 40.) This freedom of access and to write whatever one wanted, even if utilized by only a small minority of journalists, combined with the obvious lack of progress in the war, created a near constant undertow of disbelief and antagonism toward the government's optimistic reports. This eventually grew into outright criticism of the war.
Why, then, were conditions so different in Vietnam? The gradual, incremental build-up of American troops meant journalists were already in place and functioning when the first U.S. combat troops arrived; to have reined in the journalists in 1965 or later would have produced a serious media and public backlash. Although the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were both prolific and creative in deceiving and manipulating the media, this was the height of modern classical liberalism and freedom of the press had strong and wide support among influential segments of the population. Shackling the press was simply unacceptable. Furthermore, post-World War II America could not fathom that the U.S. military would be defeated by what it perceived as that rag-tag gang of pajama clad Asians, regardless of what the U.S. media did or did not do. Of course, with the long history of the U.S. media as a good team player (albeit, a grumbling one), it was assumed the media would, after fretting, "get with the program."
Ultimately it was a fourth and previously minor participant in the Vietnam War, an energetic and boisterous minority of the mostly silent American public known as the antiwar movement, which came to demand an end to U.S. participation in the fighting. Increasing numbers of Americans agreed, not because of biased reporting as the military would have us believe, but because the war was utterly hopeless and ridiculously expensive in both money and lives. Nevertheless, President Nixon did squeeze a few more bloody years out of the war, generating another million Vietnamese dead and thirty thousand Americans corpses and an untold number of broken bodies and lives. Yet the last body bag was finally zipped up, shipped home, and buried in the hard ground. The peace that followed felt more like war than peace, but war of another type: instead of bullets, there were words — vindictive, whiny, intolerant words. Rather than war-weary soldiers, there were combative intellectuals. On this battlefield of interpretation, the supporters of the Vietnam War excelled.
Like all wars, this political war had heroes. In 1981, Colonel Harry Summers published "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War" which set the tone for discourse on the military and eventually became every embittered soldier's Bible for "Never Again!" Summers detailed how U.S. military strategy was hopeless inappropriate for the political war in Vietnam, how winning all the combat battles was irrelevant for winning the war. Two years later, Norman Podhorotz wrote "Why We Were In Vietnam," redefining the moral landscape with an odd twist: although a military fiasco, Vietnam was a noble endeavor. Even discredited Richard Nixon jumped on the bandwagon with "No More Vietnams," where the former Commander-in-Chief lambasted the media for manufacturing popular myths which ultimately lost the war.
These literary stars, however, were only the polemical tip of a massive iceberg: a legion of writers and polemics pounded away, propagating this triad of interpretation — conflict fought incorrectly, noble aims, media lost the war — until a decade after the war their version of Vietnam had been solidified in the nation's consciousness. Although never persuading the American public — the world's greatest army of polemics could not salvage the reputation of that disastrous and humiliating war — they were successful in rescuing their main target: military intervention. It wasn't long before military intervention was again considered a viable option, a real possibility, again. It was this political victory which laid the foundation for the 1980s and 1990s resurgence of military intervention. Advocates of the war did lose the war in Vietnam, but they certainly won the peace in America.
The first set of lessons about the Vietnam War had flowed rather naturally — painfully, certainly — yet in tone and motivation they were what one would expect in the wake of disaster. The belief that wars must be kept short with precise military goals and the government must never be trusted and, even, the effort to scapegoat and gag the press were in the beginning often honest, emotionally charged attempts at appraising and understanding the catastrophe. Within a few years, however, the political war was in full swing — an organized, forced assault for ends that, as it turned out, had little to do with Vietnam. The insistence that the effort was noble and that the disloyal media lost the war turned into a nasty cultural war increasing bitterness and polarization. For a group of Americans, the battle over the meaning and failure of the Vietnam War was seen as a necessary battleground to generally save the reputation of U.S. military force. The differences between the first set of lessons and the politically charged second set, had less to do with content, since in some ways they were minimal, and more to do with motivation. The politicos were simply attempting to save the reputation of Vietnam to save the reputation of military intervention. And it worked.
Having lost miserably in Vietnam and desperate to save future U.S. interventions — that is, to save America's grand purpose in the world — these Americans were utterly frantic. And they demolished the moderate and liberal views of the war, at least politically. The media's prime lesson — they're all liars — was never really negated. Yet the relentless emphasis on the idea that the media, having lost the war, needed to be silenced for the good of the country had its desired effect. Today Americans overwhelmingly believe "they're all liars," yet the public also strongly supports restricting the media during wartime. In a sense, the media won epistemologically, but lost politically.
In the post-Vietnam War era, U.S. military actions have demonstrated profoundly the lopsided nature of the military and political establishments' victories and their success in imposing their interpretive lessons of Vietnam. In 1983 when the U.S. military invaded Grenada, the press was simply left at home. The media was shut out! Six years later during the intervention in Panama, the approved pool of journalists were embarrassingly quarantined and denied access to the fighting. They should have stayed home; a journalist without access is useless. For the Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. military permitted history's largest media contingent, numbering 1500 journalists — compared with only 450 journalists who covered D-Day in World War II — then thoroughly managed this colossal horde, reducing them to electronic and print cheerleaders for the home team. Denied access to the battle zone and efficient communication, there was no need for official censorship because journalists had nothing of importance to communicate.
In Saudi Arabia General Dugan said, "Now 1500 isn't an unmanageable number, but it is a number that cries out for management." What the General called management, however, was actually managing the news. The pooling of journalists, assigning them around-the-clock military minders, heavily restricting and outright denying them access to the fighting and fighters, and withholding communication assistance and courier service for filing timely reports, were instruments for managing the news, not for simply managing journalists. The mammoth number of journalists allowed into Saudi Arabia, the overwhelming majority of whom had no experience in war and were clueless about military issues (and therefore inept, since on-the-job training in war is as impossible for journalists as for soldiers) was intended to create the conditions and justification for tightly controlling the media and therefore neutralizing its effect. General Dugan, by the way, is a veteran of Vietnam.
Back during the fighting in the Balkans, the journalist as disinterested observer and honest fact-teller remained on the defensive, penned up, muzzled, while the journalist as unwitting propagandist thrived in the arranged community of pool journalism and staged press conferences. When the allied troops entered Kosovo, this time the military was accompanied by an astonishing 2,700 media people! And every journalist was kept running to daily briefings and military meetings and press conferences with military generals and public spokespersons and to personal interviews with political officials and reading an endless train of government statements deep into the night. They hardly had time for the news, which, of course, was the point. And with the revolution in communications technology at the journalists' calling, satellite phones, instant television links and the Internet churned out a colossal volume of words and images. There were so many written and spoken words that it was nearly impossible to read or view the truth. Again, not an accident of faith, but planned by the military. Kosovo was the most refined model for journalistic death, one conceived in the cataclysm of Vietnam two decades earlier.
What we are witnessing is a near total breakdown of the war reporting system. Hordes of inexperienced journalists, the vast majority general human-interest journalists instead of specialized war correspondents and therefore unqualified to cover military conflicts, are silly putty to be molded by their military minders, filing the most ridiculous and senseless force-fed garbage. And the brevity of today's conflicts works against educating a post-Vietnam generation of American journalists or giving them the tools to fend for themselves against their increasingly sophisticated adversary, the U.S. military. So we end up with a thousand microphones shoved in the faces of bewildered soldiers being asked night after night, "So, how do you feel?" Then turn to another perfect hit of a video missile. And then another perfect hit, and another, and... In American journalism, more has become less. More journalists report less and less news. More and more words are less and less public information. More television images on more channels produce less truth. It's little wonder that aging correspondents look back upon the Vietnam War (when they could hop on a C-130 cargo plane or Huey helicopter and in a half hour be with Marine grunts in some hell hole, a hell hole where the real truths were found) and view Vietnam as the "golden era" of war journalism. Their nostalgia has an element of truth. Although the Vietnam War was not covered well, it was covered. Today, conflicts cover (with a heavy blanket of ignorance) the journalists.
Whereas U.S. intervention in Beirut and Somalia suspended the military and political lessons of the Vietnam War, these operations were not cheap with American lives nor were the goals clearly defined. They illustrate how, when pushed, the political establishment and military order disregard their sacred lessons from Vietnam and engage in actions they swore they never would. None of these numerous post-Vietnam military actions, however, deferred the lessons pertaining to the media. This is the one immutable lesson of Vietnam, the one maxim which is never disregarded: gag the press, then write the script. Political and military leaders bridge their differences, even with murderous consequences, as in Beirut and Somalia, yet the press must always be tightly controlled.
Today, American war correspondents have never been so silenced and manipulated by the military, so useless as a chronicle of the truth, while so valuable as propagandists. If doctors operated like journalists, they would be making their patients deadly ill. Instead of enabling consumers to understand wars, too often the media is obscuring the causes and ignoring the contexts of the conflicts to say nothing about the facts of the fighting. Denied access to combat and combatants, journalists are unable to perform their historical role as a check and balance to the government and official propaganda. Without eyewitness accounts and independent journalism, journalists and editors will continue to be manipulated by governments or critics of government. Without an open, critical and unrestricted journalistic culture, American journalism is dead. And alive and well will be the first lesson of Vietnam: gag the media, write their script!
- Tom Nusbaumer, a Vietnam veteran and seasoned journalist, writes about war and peace issues for MediaChannel. See his special report, At Issue: War and Peace.
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