The Pentagon's War, The Media's War

William M. Hammond. Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. xi + 362 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $34.95.

"Our worst enemy seems to be the press!" snapped an exasperated Richard M. Nixon at the height of the controversial Laos incursion of 1971 (p. 293). His White House predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, had often vented similar complaints about what they considered slanted media coverage of the Vietnam War. U.S. reporters seemed much too willing, at least in the view of Washington officialdom, to challenge government pronouncements about the course of the conflict in Southeast Asia. "Sooner or later," remembered prize-winning reporter Michael Herr, "all of us heard one version or another of 'My marines are winning this war, and you people are losing it for us in your papers.'" ¹ Plainly, the close, cooperative partnership that obtained between the armed forces and the press during World War II bore little resemblance to the conflict-ridden relationship that developed during the Vietnam War.

The relative veracity of Vietnam War reporting and the impact of that reporting on public opinion, combat operations, and governmental decision-making have long ranked among the more contentious issues associated with America's most drawn out and least popular war. Robert Elegant, a correspondent who covered the conflict for the Los Angeles Times, charged in a notorious 1981 essay: "The press was instinctively 'agin the Government'--and, at least reflexively, for Saigon's enemies. . . . For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen." ² That indictment found special favor with conservative critics who bemoaned the media's baleful influence on American life. It also resonated with those determined to find a scapegoat for the shameful U.S. failure in Indochina. Along with the antiwar movement and the Congress, the media offered a very tempting target indeed. Some veteran reporters, not surprisingly, rose to the bait, defending their coverage of the war as courageous truth-telling--scrupulously honest, tough-minded, yet also highly patriotic and, above all, instrumental in hastening the end of a tragically ill-conceived foreign intervention.

In this evenhanded, incisive, and impressively researched monograph, William M. Hammond demolishes each of those myths--and more. Reporters instinctively supported the war effort during its early stages, he demonstrates, questioning only tactics and never policy ends. They were, in almost all respects, as staunchly anti-communist as the Pentagon's war managers. Not until deep divisions with regard to the war rippled through American society itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s did print and television coverage turn more critical. The press thus reflected changing views within the American polity much more than it shaped them; the notion of an oppositional media, Hammond makes clear, simply cannot be sustained.

Reporting Vietnam also exposes the hollowness of the prevailing liberal counter-myth: that a crusading corps of reporters broke through the miasma of official secrecy and obfuscation to present the unvarnished truth about the Vietnam War to the American public. Although the press "often conveyed more of the truth than official pronouncements on such significant matters as drug abuse, race relations, the state of military morale, combat operations, and conditions within the South Vietnamese government and armed forces," Hammond points out, "it was highly circumscribed by the nature of journalism as it is practiced in the United States" (p. 294). Reporters accepted the official line too faithfully for too long, he insists. For the bulk of their war coverage, they depended upon official handouts and relied on senior civilian and military sources who too frequently manipulated them into writing and producing the kind of stories that served simply to bolster the U.S. government's version of Vietnamese reality. After the watershed Tet offensive of early 1968, media skepticism about...