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11. Rocking the Establishment, 1962–1972
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[ 322 ] Chapter 11 Rocking the Establishment, 1962–1972 Believe half of what you see And none of what you hear. —“I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” as sung by Marvin Gaye, 1968 In the fall of 1962, a young correspondent arrived in Vietnam to take over the Saigon bureau of the New York Times. The new man was David Halberstam, and he was succeeding a reporter who was a living legend: Homer Bigart. Having covered both World War II and Korea, Bigart had seen more combat than most of the U.S. military officers serving in Vietnam. Bigart was eager to leave, but first he sat down and typed out a three-page letter to Halberstam. It was a classic handoff from a veteran to a rookie, full of advice on everything from news sources to food. Dear Dave: I am very glad you’re going to Saigon. . . . The Caravelle is a good hotel, and the food is better than in New York. . . . A good guy at the Embassy is Barbour, in the political section. The Ambassador [Frederick Nolting] is rather complicated; sometimes he won’t tell you anything, at other times he will drop a few clues in an offhand way. He’s no genius, but I’ve seen worse. . . . The city is full of American spooks trying to silence the few honest Americans who will level with correspondents. Never reveal your sources of information. . . . The climate is like West Africa, except for some pleasant months in mid-Winter. Take a sweater for the highlands. You can have some bush [ 323 ] ROCkINg THE EsTABlIsHmENT, 1962–1972 jackets made up in Saigon (the 55 Tailor) in a few days and quite cheap. I left a lot of essential gear, canteen, messkit, belt, etc. . . . [Signed] Homer Bigart PS: I never really got to know the new Vietnamese chief of information , but I hear he is a decent fellow, not like the crummy bastard that tried to throw me out.1 In a sense, it was a handoff not just from Bigart to Halberstam but from the World War II generation to a rising group of younger reporters. Bigart, who had seen a lot of action in the Second World War and won a Pulitzer Prize for his Korean War reporting, was then fifty-five years old; Halberstam was just twenty-eight. Halberstam was part of an in-between generation—too young for World War II and even Korea, but too old to be counted among the baby boomers , the first of whom were born in 1946. Halberstam turned out to be a pioneer for many of the younger American journalists who came after him in the 1960s and 1970s, a fearless reporter who would fight for stories and fight just as hard to keep his stories from getting suppressed by the regime in Vietnam, by certain editors back home on the Times foreign desk, or even by the president of the United States. Halberstam’s reporting from Vietnam not only set the standard for those who followed but also provided the wedge that resulted in a cultural and political trend that would come to mark the era: the “credibility gap.” This in turn opened up American journalism to an approach that was much more skeptical, often more honest, and ultimately more creative than it would have been otherwise. Even in 1962, when he took over the Saigon job, Halberstam was already a rising star. Born in 1934 in the Bronx to a doctor father and schoolteacher mother, Halberstam grew up in the small town of Winsted in northwestern Connecticut and attended the local schools (where one of his classmates was Ralph Nader). In 1951 he entered Harvard and stepped onto a new trajectory when he joined the reporting staff of the independent student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. After graduating in 1955 with a degree in history, Halberstam did something very unusual for a talented, well-connected young Harvard grad from the Northeast: he went to Mississippi and got himself a job on the smallest daily newspaper in the state, the West Point Daily Times Leader, where he banged out as many as a dozen stories a day. The next year he moved up to the Nashville Tennessean, a progressive paper in the thick of covering the civil rights movement. The lunch counter sit-in campaign was gathering force in Nashville just as Halberstam arrived, and he was assigned to cover it. As a young Northerner in sympathy with the movement’s...