Information at War. Philip Seib

understood journalism’s innate power:

As the media grew more influential in American life, it became more common among journalists, still is among some, to disingenuously diminish themselves – we have no power, we send out no armies, we raise no taxes, we only carry messages. Halberstam had no tolerance for such humbuggery. The press had power, the power to create images and myths, to tilt history, to drive large forces.³⁷

      But journalists could not wield that power without encountering pushback. The government had ample power of its own and was willing to use it on occasion to undermine press coverage. An example of this occurred in August 1963, when Halberstam sent a story to the Times about South Vietnamese government attacks on Buddhist activists. Halberstam reported that Ngo Dinh Nhu, the brother and chief adviser of Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem (who was supported by the United States), ordered the attacks by secret police and special forces under his command, presumably with President Diem’s approval. President Diem denied this, claiming that the Vietnamese army, some of whose leaders were his political rivals, had carried out the attacks without his backing.

      The White House and State Department defended their man Diem, denying the allegations in Halberstam’s reporting and telling Times editors that Halberstam had it wrong. Under pressure from the administration, editors at the Times could not decide whom to believe. The result, in William Prochnau’s words, was “one of the most bizarre front pages in the history of the New York Times … In effect, the world’s most influential newspaper told its readers to flip a coin.”³⁸ The front page of the Times on August 23, 1963 carried the headline, “Two Versions of the Crisis in Vietnam: One Lays Plot to Nhu, Other to Army.” Beneath the headline, in two side-by-side columns, were Halberstam’s story from Saigon and one from Tad Szulc of the Times’s Washington bureau, who had to rely more heavily on administration sources. Each story directly contradicted the other.

      Amidst the confusion that surrounded so much of the Vietnam War, this episode was far from being earthshaking, but it illustrated the evolving dynamics of the government–press relationship. At this time, the byword for the government was not to “censor” or “control” the news flow, but rather to “manage” it.³⁹ That euphemism did not mask the growing anger that some in the Kennedy administration (including the president himself) felt toward journalists who they believed were undermining the American public’s support for their anti-communist efforts in Vietnam. This led to putting pressure on reporters and their editors to conform to the administration’s worldview.

      The president became angry enough to ask the CIA to review four months of Halberstam’s articles. The intelligence agency’s report stated:

A review indicates that he is by and large accurate in terms of the facts that he includes in his articles. The conclusions he draws from his facts plus the emphasis of his reporting, however, tend to call his objectivity into question. In his almost invariably pessimistic reports, Halberstam makes liberal use of phrases “some Americans,” “informed Vietnamese,” or “lower (or higher) ranking Americans,” etc. Such sourcing is impossible to refute … optimistic sources are almost never quoted by Mr. Halberstam.⁴⁰

      Soon thereafter, Kennedy tried – unsuccessfully – to get Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger to reassign Halberstam, moving him out of Vietnam.⁴¹

      Some journalists responded to the administration’s anger with anger of their own. Halberstam used military vernacular: “What began as sniping turned into an orchestrated attack. It became a full-fledged war with more fronts than Vietnam. We were getting cannon fire from a different direction every day: the Pentagon regiment, the White House regiment, the embassy regiment, the press regiment, the right-wing regiment – and all of it feeding the regiments from our own offices.”⁴²

      Halberstam’s last point is important because it underscores the fact that “the press” is not monolithic. Among those in the profession, and even within a single news organization, different points of view sometimes collide. During the early years of the Vietnam War, journalists such as Marguerite Higgins and Joseph Alsop endorsed the American war strategy and were not shy about criticizing fellow correspondents.

      A lesson Kennedy learned painfully during his brief presidency was that the American chief executive is far more constrained than he would like to be when it comes to prolonged armed conflict. Only rarely can an administration count on continued public support for going to war. This happened after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, when the United States declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy, and after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when the United States invaded Afghanistan. But even in those cases, it soon became obvious that a war waged by a democracy can be politically precarious for the government in charge. There may be an initial surge of patriotic fervor, but support for a conflict is likely to diminish as casualties mount and negative economic consequences are felt.⁴³ Delivering information to the public during this process may become something of a competition between government and news media, with each seeking to be considered the more credible provider.

Kennedy apparently did not fully appreciate how problematic this process could be. As news reports from Vietnam took on a more critical tone, Kennedy ordered that a new press policy be implemented in Saigon. Richard Reeves wrote:

      [Kennedy] wanted “maximum feasible cooperation and guidance” for correspondents, with the goal of directing them away from “undesirable” situations and stories. The President was trying to keep bad news from Americans, but the real effect of keeping the press away from unpleasantness was that he himself might be the last to know what was happening in Southeast Asia if he depended only on official reports.⁴⁴

      Even presidents’ actions are grounded in the information they receive. As Reeves points out, reducing press access to information can prove self-defeating, limiting the breadth of the picture the president has of a situation about which he must make decisions. But in the hothouse of politics, what is perceived as “bad press” is often considered intolerable.

      Part of Kennedy’s concern with news coverage was based on his recognition that the American role in Vietnam was rightly susceptible to criticism and legal challenge. In a private conversation, he told Newsweek’s Benjamin Bradlee, a personal friend and later editor of the Washington Post: “The trouble is, we are violating the Geneva agreement. Not as much as the North Vietnamese are, but we’re violating it. Whatever we have to do, we have to do in some kind of secrecy, and there’s a lot of danger in that.”⁴⁵ (As an illustration of how journalists can become too close to the powerful, Bradlee did not write about this conversation until years after Kennedy’s death.)

      How much did government obfuscation and news media criticism matter to public opinion about the conduct of the war during the Kennedy years? Not much. At that point in the war, the public was paying limited attention to even the most critical news coverage, and the war had not become the politically existential menace that Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, found it to be. The war simply did not yet resonate, certainly not to the degree that civil rights and other domestic issues did. The cost in American casualties was nowhere near the peak it would reach in later years, the economic costs were not yet perceived to be great, and neither news coverage nor public opinion showed signs that the United States might be marching into a future “quagmire.” If there was a foreign trouble spot that would capture Americans’ interest, it would probably be Berlin, Cuba, or another familiar Cold War testing ground.

During the Kennedy presidency, there was a widening stream of negative information flowing to the public from the elite media, a class that grew to include television news. Two months before he was killed in November 1963, Kennedy appeared on the CBS and NBC nightly newscasts that had just expanded from 15 to 30 minutes (ABC followed in 1968). The evening news became a regular presence in millions of American homes, and Walter Cronkite at CBS and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley of NBC became trusted providers of information in much the way Edward R. Murrow had via radio during World War II. Television reports from the Vietnam War soon became broadcast staples, and the power of the visual made itself felt.