Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century

Afterword

Afterword Editorial Note A distinguished journalist and proliĀc author, David Halberstam came to personify the new trend of a more critical form of war reporting that emerged during the Vietnam War. His experience, as recounted below, provides a personal view of what happens when a correspondent gets in the way of the government’s efforts to sell a war. Born in New York City in 1934, Halberstam graduated from Harvard, where he was editor of the student newspaper. He covered the civil rights movement for Mississippi and Tennessee newspapers and then took a position with the Washington bureau of the New York Times. Following a stint in the Congo, in 1962 he was assigned to Vietnam, where the war between the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front insurgency supported by North Vietnam was heating up. Along with Neil Sheehan of the United Press International, Halberstam quickly sensed that the war was not going as well as U.S. spokespersons claimed. His critical dispatches gained the attention of diplomatic and military officials in Saigon and even of President John F. Kennedy, who sought to silence him by getting him transferred. Halberstam’s perceptive reporting on Vietnam won him a Pulitzer Prize. Halberstam left the Times in the late 1960s and became a proliĀc and versatile writer on a variety of subjects. An early book, The Making of a Quagmire (1965), told of his experiences in Vietnam, but it was The Best and the Brightest (1972) that established him as an author of note. This critical analysis of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ handling of the Vietnam War included richly colorful sketches of the leading personalities. The villain was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the “can-do man in the can-do era,” as Halberstam called him. But the focus of the book was the fundamental question of how the best and the brightest Americans could be so terribly wrong in Vietnam. Over the next three decades, Halberstam authored more than twenty books on topics ranging from the Japanese automobile industry to the 1949 262 · David Halberstam American League pennant race. At his untimely death in April 2007, an account of the Korean War was in press and he was working on another book about the NFL championship game of 1958, generally considered the best football game ever played. He had also intended to write a selection for this book. Graciously, his family allowed us to publish instead his talk at Florida Atlantic University’s Alan B. Larkin Symposium on the American Presidency. That lecture—one of his last—appears below. It has been edited for publication by Kenneth Osgood and George Herring. A Worm’s-Eye View David Halberstam I would like to talk about the war and the presidency and the presidency selling the war. Rather than provide a lofty historian’s perspective, I wanted to give you a worm’s-eye view of the president selling a war and what happens when you’re the reporter that the White House wants to roll over. I will begin with the early 1960s in Vietnam and with a tape of a conversation in the White House in October 1963.1 President John F. Kennedy was meeting with his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, his assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, William Bundy, and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara—the guy with the slicked-back hair, or, as Lyndon Johnson described him, “the guy with all the Stacomb on his hair.” In the recording, Kennedy asks his advisors about the media’s treatment of the conflict in Vietnam: Kennedy: “What about the press out there?” McNamara: “Miserable. . . . Terribly difficult. There are two or three good ones. But Halberstam and [Neil] Sheehan are the ones that are . . .” Kennedy: “Causing you a lot of trouble.” McNamara: “Just causing a lot of trouble. They’re allowing an idealistic philosophy to color all their writing.” Afterword:Worm’s-EyeView · 263 The discussion soon turned to me and my reporting on Vietnam, as President Kennedy asked, “How old is Halberstam?” William Bundy: “About twenty-Āve.” McGeorge Bundy: “[Class of] ’55.” Kennedy: “[Was] he at Harvard?” William Bundy: “Mac [McGeorge Bundy] was his teacher. Listen to him.” (By the way, that is not true. I never took a course with him.) McGeorge Bundy: “I want you to know that he was a reporter even when he...