CNN - Review: 'Reporting Vietnam'

(CNN) -- For the past 30 years, the attitude of the United States military toward the journalists who report about it might best be summed up in the words of Richard Nixon: "Our worst enemy seems to be the press." The former president didn't issue that indictment at the height of Watergate. He was talking about Vietnam.

In some quarters, it is an article of faith that the news media are to blame for the failure of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In other quarters, there is the equally firm belief that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was a failure from the start and had it not been for the heroic efforts of journalists, military and political leaders would still be covering up their mistakes.

Military historian William M. Hammond conducted an exhaustive study of the way the Vietnam War was waged and the way it was covered in the news media. His results were originally published in two scholarly volumes. Late in 1998 his research was summarized in a single book, "Reporting Vietnam". His conclusions should prompt both institutions, the military and the media, to re-examine their relationship with each other and their roles in a democracy.

Hammond had access to a vast collection of news accounts in the archives of the Defense Department. By comparing them to contemporaneous communications between military commanders and political leaders, Hammmond provides a fascinating portrait of the deteriorating conditions on the field of battle, and the deteriorating relations between the military and the media.

In his introduction, Hammond notes that the feelings of camaraderie between soldiers and war correspondents which had been a hallmark of reporting during World War Two and, to some extent, the Korean War, gradually eroded during the years of Vietnam. He suggests that erosion was a result of changing circumstances. The U.S. military mission in South Vietnam before 1965 was radically different in scope and nature from that after 1965. At the same time, the way news was reported in the early 1960's -- mostly by newspapers and magazines -- evolved rapidly to the nearly instantaneous reporting of the ever-more-important television networks by the late 1960s.

Moveover, the war in Vietnam was unlike any other war the United States had ever fought. Although superficially similar to Korea, Vietnam was a very different kind of environment, for the soldier and for the war correspondent. Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting a generation before he achieved global celebrity on CNN during the Persian Gulf War, learned early on that South Vietnam presented unique challenges to a journalist. In 1963, Arnett watched a Buddhist monk douse himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest the policies of the Diem government. Arnett admits he could have stopped the man from killing himself, but he felt that would have embroiled him in South Vietnamese politics on the side of the government. So he photographed the man's suicide and dispatched a story about it on the news service wire.

Of course, as Hammond points out, that act injected Arnett into South Vietnamese politics anyway, by giving the protesters access to global public opinion. "There was no middle ground for him or the rest of the Saigon correspondents. Since whatever they said or wrote could be made to serve one agenda or another, they had altered the war by their very presence, becoming as much a part of it as any soldier in the field."

As the war evolved, suspicion drove a wedge between the military and the media. Commanders convinced themselves that reporters were trying to make them look bad. Reporters convinced themselves the commanders were never telling the truth. The suspicion poisoned any hope of accommodation.

Hammond demonstrates that the news stories which most infuriated the military were, for the most part, relatively accurate. At the same time, he shows that the military -- and political -- leaders responsible for Vietnam grew increasingly secretive and tried to shield their actions and decisions from scrutiny by the Saigon correspondents, whom they no longer trusted.

One reason for the distrust was the conviction by political leaders that the news coverage was turning the American public against the war. That conviction influenced decisions about Vietnam at every level. But as Hammond clearly demonstrates, the American public was turning against the war not because of how it was reported, but because it was becoming so costly. The erosion of public support followed the identical pattern it had during the Korean conflict. Public opinion polls show support for each war declined by about 15 percentage points each time the number of American casualties increased by a factor of ten (100 to 1,000, or 1,000 to 10,000, for example).

Each increase in the casualty figures also prompted an increase in news coverage of the war. Hammond notes that the amount of time devoted to Vietnam on network news programs tripled between 1965 and 1969. Correspondents were flooding into the war zone. The military chafed at taking responsibility for so many civilians. Many reporters stayed in Vietnam no more than three months. They barely had time to find their way around Saigon before they were replaced. Commanders viewed such short timers as interlopers at best.

In early 1968, everyone's perception of the Vietnam War changed. Despite official pronouncements from Saigon and Washington that the tide had turned, North Vietnamese forces launched a major offensive during the celebration of Tet, the lunar New Year. Although the commanders would proclaim later that the Tet Offensive failed, journalists had seen for themselves the fierce fighting at Hue, and North Vietnamese troops strolling through the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

The reporting reflected that changed perception. "Prior to Tet, for example, journalists on television in particular had described the war as 'our side' versus 'their side' and had cast it in terms of the so-called good war, World War II. After Tet, they still rarely questioned the honesty of American motives, but 'our war' became 'the war,' and references to World War II faded. By 1971, many reporters were no longer referring to North Vietnam as 'the enemy.'"

In "Reporting Vietnam" Hammond offers an unflinching view of the way the war was fought and the way it was covered. He presents a balanced account of what went right and what went wrong, both on the battlefield and in the news media. Moreover, he demonstrates that the animosity between the military and the media could have been avoided. But it wasn't, and the distrust that infected their relationship in Vietnam continues to fester.

L.D. Meagher is a senior writer at CNN Headline News. He has worked in broadcasting for 30 years.

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