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8 1 Bringing the News Home There is an important need for documenting the Negro soldier . . . in the light of the civil rights struggle back home.—Ethel Payne to U.S.official inVietnam, December 28, 1966 Vietnam swarmed with reporters. Newspaper correspondents began filing stories from the combat zone early in the war. A few, like David Halberstam of the New York Times, became journalistic superstars who wrote compelling pieces that began to define the Vietnam story for millions of readers and to deepen hostility toward the media within the Johnson administration. After the Tet Offensive became big news in early 1968, the number of journalists in the country swelled to more than six hundred from all over the world. Although no military censors systematically restricted the flow of information from the war zone to news outlets, as was the case in World War II, U.S. officials in Vietnam sought to manage and control the news that was reported . Public information officers representing the U.S. command in Saigon tried ceaselessly to shape the story of the war. Their daily briefings were so disconnected from reality that they came to be known among reporters as the “Five O’Clock Follies.”1 Among the horde of U.S. correspondents in Vietnam, few were African Americans. Despite more hiring of African Americans during the sixties, by 1970 only 5 percent of all reporters and photographers in the mainstream U.S. Bringing the News Home 9 media were black. None of the black publications could afford to keep permanent news staffs in South Vietnam.2 To fill the gap various African American news publications sent reporters on temporary assignment to Vietnam to observe the war and file stories chronicling their impressions. Ethel Payne, a prominent journalist at the Chicago Defender, arrived in Saigon on her first temporary assignment inVietnam on Christmas Day 1966. Three days later she wrote a memo to Barry Zorthian, chief information officer at the U.S. embassy, to say what she intended to do in Vietnam and to elicit official cooperation. Her statement was an apt description of what other black journalists on assignment from African American news publications went to the war theater to do. She told Zorthian that her first purpose was “to try and give an adequate picture of why we are involved in Vietnam,” particularly to inform “Negro communities.” Payne’s second stated goal was “to tell the full role of Negro soldiers in this conflict,”focusing especially on“the extent of integration in the services.” She noted that other African American journalists who had visitedVietnam to report on the war were “in agreement” that they needed “more material and cooperation” from U.S. officers in the war zone, particularly in ferreting out information about individual blacks in the battle zone that would reveal their “assignments, acts of heroism[,]” and “overall performance.” She lamented the absence of clear official documentation of the war-zone performance of black service people that had been reported by “other Negro correspondents.” The requests of these war correspondents for detailed information about African Americans’ service had often been fruitless, Payne reported, because military officials claimed racial statistics were not available from personnel records.3 Payne later acknowledged that, although black service personnel hinted at their “nagging doubts about the legitimacy and morality of the war,” she failed to focus on that aspect of the story. She even confessed that “maybe I was a little brainwashed myself” because she did not concentrate on elements of the Vietnam story that might have reflected badly on the official Washington line. “I’ve always regretted to this day that I didn’t do what I felt was an adequate job in reporting on the immorality of the war,” she told an interviewer in 1987.4 Her statement was a remarkably honest expression of what she regarded as a personal failure. It also sheds light on the pressures that at least one journalist felt, to emphasize the positive elements in the story of African American members of the U.S. military in Vietnam. Some of this restraint may have reflected her innate caution or may have been influenced by the editorial moderation that was typical of some black newspapers, including Payne’s own Chicago Defender, when complete candor might have 10 Chronicles of a Two-Front War meant criticizing Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy even as he championed civil rights programs beneficial to African Americans. Another African American journalist who traveled to Vietnam on...

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