Information at War. Philip Seib

Post publisher Eugene Meyer came to London, they were assiduously courted by Bracken and often invited to 10 Downing Street for a drink with Churchill.²²

      At this time, radio was still something of a novelty; in the United States it was just in its second decade as a mass medium, but its reach was growing rapidly. In 1921, 60,000 American homes had radios and there were 30 radio stations in the country. By 1940, there would be radios in more than 29 million US homes (out of a total 35 million households) tuned in to 814 stations.²³ Perhaps most important, it was a national venue. Across the country, radio networks’ listeners could hear the same news bulletin at the same time, which was unprecedented. Today, the entire nation (and much of the rest of the world) can tune in to broadcasts that are “going live.” This is now the standard, not the exception, and it changes how we regard events ranging from a football game to a battlefield firefight.²⁴

      The novelty of a particular technology should not, however, overshadow the importance of the content it delivers. Staying with Murrow and Roosevelt as examples, their presentations of information were anything but prosaic. The power was in the words, not solely the medium. Consider these excerpts from FDR’s fireside chat of December 29, 1940:

If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Austral-Asia, and the high seas. And they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us in all the Americas would be living at the point of a gun – a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military. We should enter upon a new and terrible era in which the whole world, our hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force … The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically, we must get these weapons to them, get them to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure … We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.²⁵

      When reading this on a page today, Roosevelt’s words still have power, but not as much as when they came directly from the White House into living-rooms, forging a connection between the country’s president and its citizens.

      For his part, Murrow was working toward the same end: to present the view from Britain and push Americans toward realizing the importance of providing the British with the tools they needed to continue the fight. His colleague Eric Sevareid later wrote: “Murrow was not trying to ‘sell’ the British cause to America; he was trying to explain the universal human cause of men who were showing a noble face to the world. In so doing he made the British and their behavior human and thus compelling to his countrymen at home.”²⁶ Excerpts from Murrow’s broadcasts illustrate this:

      [After visiting an air raid shelter at 3:30 a.m.] How long these people will stand up to this sort of thing I don’t know, but tonight they’re magnificent. I’ve seen them, talked with them, and I know.

      [About Londoners] They’ve become more human, less reserved; more talkative and less formal. There’s almost a small-town atmosphere about the place … There’s been a drawing together.

      [Watching a German air attack] The fires up the river had turned the moon blood red. The smoke had drifted down until it formed a canopy over the Thames; the guns were working all around us, the bursts looking like fireflies in a southern summer night … Huge pear-shaped bursts of flame would rise up into the smoke and disappear. The world was upside down.²⁷

      Murrow knew that the most effective way to present news is by wrapping issues into stories of people with whom the audience could empathize. When his sonorous voice came into American living-rooms from London’s streets or the CBS studio there, the information he provided – forceful, but not overtly political – was about the British people and how they managed in their transformed world. Murrow later reflected on the challenges he and his colleagues faced: “In reporting this new kind of warfare we have tried to prevent our own prejudices and loyalties from coming between you and the information which it was our duty to impart. We may not always have succeeded. An individual who can entirely avoid being influenced by the atmosphere in which he works might not even be a good reporter.”²⁸

As Murrow’s observation indicates, he and other pro-interventionist journalists had to walk an ethical tightrope: reporting in a straightforward way about a topic that stirred mixed feelings within the news audience, while still recognizing that they were being “influenced by the atmosphere” in which they worked. Being physically distant from his audience may have limited Murrow’s understanding of the power of his broadcasts, but those watching the trends in American public opinion recognized the effect of his words.

      Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, speaking at a New York dinner in Murrow’s honor just a few days before the Pearl Harbor attack, addressed the historic significance of Murrow’s voice spanning an ocean:

      You destroyed the superstition of distance and time … You destroyed in the minds of many men and women in this country the superstition that what is done beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all; the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here … It was not in London really that you spoke. It was in the back kitchens and the front living-rooms and the moving automobiles and the hotdog stands and the observation cars of another country that your voice was truly speaking. And what you did was this: You made real and urgent and present to the men and women of those comfortable rooms, those safe enclosures, what these men and women had not known was present there or real. You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead – were all men’s dead – were mankind’s dead – and ours.²⁹

      Such was – and is – the power of information. A new technology – radio – had enhanced information’s effects, just as television would do when it arrived some years later. This occurred most strikingly during the Vietnam War (or, as it is known by many Vietnamese, “the American War”).

The Early Stages of the Vietnam War: John F. Kennedy and “Managing Information

      One of the most enduring myths about the Vietnam War is related to information: “The news media lost the war.” According to this notion, negative and inaccurate news reporting about the conflict so poisoned American public opinion that it became politically impossible for the government to pursue the fighting with the patience and aggressiveness needed to win.³⁰

Granted, information provided by the news media helped to fuel dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war, especially during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But journalists were mostly following a path that was charted by government policymakers and that led into the much-discussed “quagmire” in which the US war effort foundered. Clark Clifford, who succeeded Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense during Johnson’s final year in office, later wrote:

      The press made errors in reporting, as it does in every war, but the bulk of the reporting from the war zone reflected the official position. Contrary to right-wing revisionism, reporters and the antiwar movement did not defeat America in Vietnam. Our policy failed because it was based on false premises and false promises. Had the results in Vietnam approached, even remotely, what Washington and Saigon had publicly predicted for many years, the American people would have continued to support their government.³¹

      Much of the analysis of news media performance during the Vietnam years has focused on coverage of the Tet offensive in early 1968, which will be addressed later in this chapter. But the government–press relationship, which had been relatively cozy during World War II, was changing earlier