Not to Celebrate or Rehash Battles, but to Remember : Vietnam Correspondents Gather for Reunion

The first casualty when war comes is truth. --Sen. Hiram W. Johnson, 1917

For the 4,000 men and women who covered it--as well as for the nearly 3 million Americans who fought in it--the war in Vietnam is engraved eternally in the memory as a shared moment of exhilaration and anguish, as tangled as it is vivid.

On Friday--25 years after Army Spec. 4 James Davis of Livingston, Tenn., became the first American killed in the war and 11 years after the final evacuation of Americans from Saigon--more than 230 correspondents and a handful of government and military officials gathered in New York to remember. Their reunion, under the auspices of the Overseas Press Club, marked another step in healing the wounds of a war in which 254,257 South Vietnamese soldiers, 47,381 American troops and 56 correspondents were killed.

Came to Remember

They came from Tokyo and Moscow and London, from Maine and California and New York. In a mood that was neither festive nor somber, they came not to celebrate a war or to rehash battles in places like Dak To and Ben Het and Dong Ha, but just to remember--to remember those whose Vietnam pictures and stories had been their last, to remember and embrace friends they had not seen in years, and to remember what it had been like to be young and courageous and to be obsessed by the most important story of their generation.

America’s longest war gave birth to a new breed of war correspondents, who, unlike those of World War II, did not consider themselves part of the military mission, and who found there were no certain truths or clear lines to distinguish victory from defeat.

They were the protagonists of the nation’s first television war and its first without censorship. Their coverage was often critical enough to make skeptics say, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk did in 1968: “There gets to be a point when the question is, ‘Whose side are you on?’ ”

‘Benefit of the Doubt’

When Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey went to Vietnam in 1967 to spend a day with U.S. troops in the field, he called aside 30 American reporters in Chu Lai to ask them a favor: “When you speak to the American people, give the benefit of the doubt to our side. I don’t think that’s asking too much. We’re in this together.”

And retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland, former U.S. troop commander in Vietnam, recalled in a telephone interview: “In World War II, correspondents wore the same uniform we did. They went into battle with a notebook and pen and wrote stories that went through the censor so as not to give the enemy information. All the troops knew they were on our side, that they wanted us to win.

“In Vietnam, they didn’t wear any uniform. They dressed in all manner of garb--they could have been beer salesmen for all you knew. Instead of a pen, they had TV cameras and there was no censorship and their stories reflected the prejudices they represented. The soldiers became very disillusioned with the media. Their attitude was that the media didn’t want us to win and the media, I think, had an adverse effect on morale.”

‘We Should Have Won’

On Friday, in the 7th Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, men and women were still debating how the war was fought, whether it even should have been fought and what the role between the news media and the government should be.

“I think the great mistake of Vietnam was that we should have won the war,” said Keyes Beech, 73, who reported from Asia for 33 years and covered World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

“There’s one simple truth in Vietnam--we never should have gone in and we never should have fought the war,” said David Schoenbrun of Independent News Network, who was in Dien Bien Phu during France’s decisive defeat in 1954.

“Those of us who understand the complexities of Vietnam should fight against simple interpretations,” said retired Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.

‘Feisty as Ever’

Barry Zorthian, chief spokesman for the U.S. Mission in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, told the reunion: “You really do look older, but you’re just as feisty as ever.”

Zorthian, sometimes criticized by the media during the war as a purveyor of Washingtonian half-truths, wore a lapel button that said, “Ambush the Credibility Gap,” and urged the media to continue to demand access to U.S. military operations. The 1983 attack on Grenada--launched without the presence of journalists--was not an encouraging sign of what the future holds, he said.

“It’s been almost 20 years,” he later recalled, “and I suppose I’ve mellowed--or at least gotten mellower. I don’t want to overstate it. Sure the press was a discomfort then. But the postwar charges that the press lost the war were completely unwarranted. Our efforts on the ground lost the war, not the press. There’s also no doubt the government lost a lot of credibility in the war.”

Assessment Revised

Military historians, who are revising their assessment of the press’s role in the war, tend to agree.

“I think most mainline scholars would say the press was unduly maligned as far as undermining the war effort goes,” said James Luetze, professor of military history at the University of North Carolina. “By the time the press turned against the war, in the spring of 1968, the decision had already been made in Washington to wind down the war. The press was following, not leading, public opinion and I think it’s entirely possible to make the case that the press was not very influential at all in affecting public opinion.”

William Hammond, a civilian historian at the Pentagon who is writing a two-volume book about the military and the press in Vietnam, believes that in both Korea and Vietnam public support for the war was tied to the number of American casualties, not to what the press reported. Polls constantly showed, in fact, that the majority of Americans backed U.S. troops in Vietnam even if there was debate over the execution of the war.

‘Didn’t Want to Lose’

“Americans basically didn’t want to lose the war even if they weren’t in love with it either,” Hammond said in a telephone interview. “What they really wanted was some kind of honorable settlement. But if they perceived that the President wanted their support, they were willing to suspend judgment and give it. They’ve always done this. I don’t think the public ever turned against the war. They turned against losing, mismanagement and half-hearted policies that were unfulfilled.”

Most journalists who covered Vietnam recall their reportage as being supportive of American troops in the field and of reflecting pro-American biases, even if they recognized the futility of the war. Few believe they were anti-war.

“If anything, I think many of us were far too uncritical,” said Joe Treaster of the New York Times, who now covers the Caribbean. But even editors back home were uncomfortable with the idea that reporters should question or challenge a national war effort.

As far back as 1962, Charles Mohr wrote for Time: “The war in Vietnam is being lost.” That line was gone when the magazine came out, and a few months later a Time article written in New York accused correspondents of pooling “their convictions, information, misinformation and grievances” and producing stories that were “prone to distortion.” Mohr later quit to join the New York Times.

For the next 13 years, until two Marine corporals, Charles McMahon Jr. and Darwin Judge, became the last Americans killed in Vietnam on April 29, 1975, the government and the press were pitted against each other. The former believed the press had become an enemy almost as lethal as the Viet Cong; the latter believed it was being deceived and lied to.

President John F. Kennedy early in the war tried to get the New York Times to reassign David Halberstam, whose coverage he considered unsupportive, and later President Lyndon B. Johnson made a habit of calling Gen. Westmoreland almost daily to urge more efforts at “image-making.”

The conflict was not a new one: Napoleon once said, “I fear three newspapers more than 1,000 bayonets,” and Gen. William Sherman, who tried to have one reporter hanged for espionage, complained during the Civil War about journalists’ having the “imprudence of Satan.”

As the mistrust in Vietnam deepened between the press and the government, and the number of correspondents in Vietnam at any one time grew to 500 and beyond, Zorthian’s public affairs office became in itself a mini-army with 119 American civilians, 128 U.S. military personnel and 370 Vietnamese employees.

“I think the real mistrust goes back to late 1965 or early ’66 when it became apparent President Johnson was lying to everyone about what his intentions were, and was planning to commit a far greater number of combat troops than had been publicly announced,” said William Tuohy, whose war coverage in 1968 for the Los Angeles Times earned him one of the 11 Pulitzer Prizes awarded to reporters and photographers during the war.

“We’d go into the field and what we’d see simply didn’t coincide with the official remarks about the progress of the war. And in the process a new concept evolved of what a war reporter should report. If things weren’t going well, I think you had the obligation to report the defeats as well as the victories. In some cases you quarrelled with the definition of victory and defeat.”

The reunion here Friday marked no special date or anniversary, which somehow is as it should be.

‘Touched All Our Lives’

“I suppose all the criticism about the war and the war coverage pushed us closer together,” said Murray Fromson, a former CBS correspondent now on the faculty of the University of Southern California. “The war touched all our lives. I think about Vietnam all the time, even now.”

Other journalists agreed that they had been changed by the war. Many went on to cover other wars in Latin America, Africa and Lebanon; a handful slipped out of journalism; few ever lived a moment again when life was so intense and each story meant so much. If there were scars, they carried them quietly; if there were memories, they shared them freely.

Esquire’s Michael Herr took eight years to finish the final 60 pages of his splendid Vietnam book “Dispatches.” Novelist Ward Just, a former war correspondent for the Washington Post, said that “Vietnam ruined me as a journalist” because the political stories he later wrote in Washington seemed almost trivial by the standards of wartime reportage. Newsweek’s Nick Proffitt left the magazine to write two books on Vietnam and was surprised to discover that, even a decade after Vietnam, he didn’t have to do one iota of research--every character, every smell, all the feeling and emotion of war, had already been locked away in his mind’s eye.

“I felt paralyzing depression for 10 years and was unable to function as a journalist, or even want to be one any more,” Gloria Emerson, a former New York Times reporter and now an author and a fellow at Princeton University, said by telephone from New Jersey. She said she did not find the idea of a reunion very inspiring because there was nothing to celebrate, no righteousness to feel part of.

“The idea of going to another war after Vietnam was so unspeakable. I look back on Vietnam now and I think generally we weren’t tough enough as reporters and I’m deeply sorry for that. And I look back and I wonder, if indeed we had won the war, what is it exactly that we would have won?”