Historicizing Theory

7. New Historicizing the New Historicism; or, Did Stephen Greenblatt Watch the Evening News in Early 1968?

The journalists reorder the actuality of Vietnam into . . . isolated hard-news incidents for the benefit of their editors.The editors say that that’s what the public wants, and, to a great extent, the editors are right about that. The public does indeed want and need hard news, something amid the chaos, something you can reach out to over the morning coffee and almost touch. . . . —Michael J. Arlen, The Living Room War (my emphasis) We wanted the touch of the real in a way that in an earlier period people wanted the touch of the transcendent. —Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (my emphasis) “I WAS MORE PERSUADED BY THE TUBE. . . .” On 1 February 1968, in the early hours of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive , somewhere on the streets of Saigon, Brig. Gen. Nguyen Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, raised his right arm to within inches of the head of a man dressed in dark shorts and a checked shirt, and fired a single bullet. The man grimaced and then slumped to the pavement with a jet 159 7 New Historicizing the New Historicism; or, Did Stephen Greenblatt Watch the Evening News in Early 1968? IVO KAMPS of blood splashing from a hole in the side of his head. In the chaos of Tet, this man was not the only suspected Vietcong (VC) sympathizer to be disposed of in this gruesome manner, without a trial or even as much as a hearing. What made this now infamous execution different was that it was caught on film by an NBC cameraman and broadcast the next day on the evening news into the living rooms of millions of Americans.1 For the Johnson administration, the broadcast of the execution came at a highly inopportune time, just as the administration was launching an intense public relations campaign to convince the press and the American people that the Vietcong’s massive invasion of the South was really an act of desperation rather than a sign of its military strength. Following the onset of Tet, the White House had urged the commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, to explain to reporters that the Vietcong’s military infiltration of Saigon and the U.S. Embassy itself were not significant militarily. Westmoreland met with reporters on the grounds of the newly liberated U.S. Embassy; the press dutifully filmed and recorded the general’s statements of assurance. Westmoreland’s words of assurance were reported on the front page of The Washington Post and the New York Times the next day, but they were completely overshadowed by sensational coverage of the execution of the suspected VC sympathizer by Loan.2 On the same day, President Johnson met with ten reporters to do some more “convincin,’” and expressed “concern about the television reporting of the Tet Offensive and the Pueblo Affair.”3 Late that afternoon it was decided that Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara would appear on a one-hour special edition of NBC’s Meet the Press on 4 February to make the administration’s case to the American people. It was that night that NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report showed gruesome film of the Loan execution, editing the footage slightly to spare the viewing audience the fountain of blood splashing from the victim’s head.4 Anything the administration planned to say on Sunday morning about the progress of the war amid the terrible confusion of Tet was bound to be overwhelmed in the public mind by the brutal execution of this single individual. A few days later, Secretary Rusk would, in a “background session” before twenty-nine reporters, directly question the patriotism of the media: “Whose side are you on?”5 Although it is not my purpose to attempt to measure the impact on the American psyche of the broadcast of the execution6 —an execution that in and of itself meant little or nothing to a war in which tens of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of Vietnamese lost their lives—it may be instructive to glance at a single example because it reaches into the White House itself. Harry McPherson, one of Johnson’s speech writers and confidants, had the following response: 160 Ivo Kamps I watched the invasion of the American embassy compound, and the terrible sight of General Loan killing the Vietcong captive. You...