Michael Arlen : When the Pictures Go Live in the ‘Living Room War’

As the Vietnam War built to its crescendo, Michael Arlen wrote a series of essays exploring the effects on the American psyche of the conflict intruding itself into homes across the country each evening. He titled the book with the phrase he invented--”Living Room War.”

Arlen was the first to see that something profound was occurring to the people of this country. He also saw clearly the fundamental paradox that the television pictures often obscured the reality of the violence and horror that was transpiring in the jungles, paddy fields and villages of Vietnam. For the people who insisted that television was undermining the war effort, this was a revelation.

Vietnam was the first war in which, as Arlen put it, the “Goyaesque images” of war were thrust into the family room, the den, the lives of the average American each and every day. Yet, Arlen was never satisfied with easy explanations of this novelty of news coverage. “I can’t say,” he wrote, “I completely agree with people who think that when battle scenes are brought into the living room, the hazards of war are necessarily made ‘real’ to the civilian audience. It seems to me that by the same process they are also made less ‘real’--diminished, in part, by the physical size of the television screen, which . . . shows one a picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall, and trivialized, or at least tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household.”

With some suddenness, the war in the Persian Gulf has invaded the lives of Americans--most powerfully through vivid TV images, particularly the scenes of Baghdad under attack on the first night of the war. Arlen, a long-time writer at the New Yorker, analyzed some of the consequences of this powerful new kind of television war coverage--”live” pictures--on the American psyche.

Arlen ambles over to greet visitors with a lanky boyishness that belies his 60 years. Cutting an image more typical of a banker at leisure--his gray wool pants perfectly cuffed, his blue, button-down oxford shirt starched ever so subtly, his thick, pewter-gray hair brushed straight back--Arlen speaks with an easy grace, his thoughts flowing in and out of subjects like a river spilling into a broad delta.

Arlen spoke in his spacious Fifth Avenue apartment, a tumble of rooms fixed with Qing lacquer paintings and a golden Buddha, and where he lives with his wife, Alice, a well-known screenwriter. The author of eight books--one of which, “Exiles,” is about his father, who wrote the immensely successful novel, “The Green Hat” in the 1920s--and innumerable magazine essays, Arlen joked that the empty typewriter in the study was a “museum piece.”

As much as the film from Vietnam created the “living-room war” and its aftermath, now the potential for carnage appearing on television screens as it happens, with an uncertain outcome, may again reshape Americans’ notions about war and themselves.

Question: It appears that movie theater receipts are down, restaurants have lower bookings--all because people are watching the Gulf War. What about you?

Answer: Well, there was that first night--that was very strange and over-exciting--which led many people to think there was going to be a war to be watched on television. Many people, including myself, stayed glued to their sets through the night. But then it turned out there wasn’t a war to be watched on television. It was a war of briefings and tidal waves of experts. So for myself, I plug into CNN a lot because CNN seems to carry what war news there is. I notice the networks have pretty much cut back on this.

First of all, there was this tremendous apprehension, anticipation, which I think you always have when trying to deal with a future event. Going to college, going to war, getting married, makes everybody nervous and people devote enormous energy trying to control the future by figuring out what will happen. . . .

I think there was an obsession on the part of television--and also on the part of the audience at first. But now that it seems to have settled down into something more conventional--there’s both less coverage and less histrionic interest.

Q: What do you think about what CNN has been doing?

A. What I had sense of is that all the news organizations were floundering around in the beginning because there was no hard news.

There was a lot of amateurishness in the opening days, a lot of histrionics. CNN wasn’t alone in this--in the histrionics over the supposed gas attacks on Israel. These things are working themselves out now.

There is a rumpled quality to CNN that isn’t true on the networks. This, compounded with no news, sets it apart. I’m glad there is this plain-spokenness on CNN. The mainstream news is so smoothed over, so tricked up. Remember, Dan Rather was raised in the assassination mode--that you do all the talking, you take over the country. And that’s what he’s tried to do here. CNN doesn’t really have any stars, so it doesn’t try to do this.

Q: In “The Living Room War , “ you discussed the phenomenon of the Vietnam War being played out on television. One thing you looked at was how this affected popular morality. Even then, the images were somewhat slow in getting here. They had to be filmed and edited. The notion now is that this is a “live” war. We are seeing images of Patriot missiles being shot into the air, of Scuds coming in. What does this evolution in news technology mean?

A: You see, I don’t think television is anywhere nearly as powerful as people sometimes think it is. What I think are powerful are the emotions that people project onto television images.

It’s fascinating to me how misremembered Vietnam is--especially as far as the role that media played, that television played. A lot of people persist in thinking that what turned the tide of war were the horrific images presented on the home screen, the horrors of war. The truth is the horrors of war were kept off, stayed off the home screen for years and years and years. It wasn’t until the war was about two-thirds run through that you began seeing death, or certainly anything like pain or injury. In fact, I remember writing a piece about the first appearance of this.

Q: You wrote, “Little shooting, little killing and little death appeared on the home television screen.”

A: For years and years. Yes. What I’ve thought about television then and now is that it’s such a paradoxical, contradictory force. It does many, almost opposite things at the same time.

For example, television--we’re talking about Vietnam now--by its banalizing of the war--these disconnected black-and-white images, soldiers trotting up hills or walking through tall grass--it made it all seem sort of ordinary or remote. I think those images, in their way, assisted, you might say, the pro-war euphoria that many people in the country felt.

At the same time, the reverse is true. . . . . Television began to reveal--in spite of itself--the bad stuff. And even just the persistence of it, the fact it was still going on, helped fuel the opposition to the war.

But both things are true. And what is really true is the real energy comes from the emotions of the people, as various as they are. This is certainly true with the Persian Gulf situation.

For those who want to feel bullish about it, they provide those wonderful laser smart-bomb things. And people think you can stay above it all and nobody has to get hurt. Well, now, we actually we haven’t seen anything at all in the way of combat really. There hasn’t been too much material to fuel an anti-war sentiment. But you feel it hovering around--which is why I think the country and the leadership, fortunately, seem to really be very modest about their ambitions for ground combat.

There are interviews with some of these young Marines on the front lines, who talk about how they want to get out there and kick Saddam’s butt--which is the way young Marines, or young Iraqis, or young everybody, alas, always talk--before they get their legs blown off. But that’s the immortality of youth.

Q: Some of the reporters in Saudi Arabia had covered Vietnam. There seems to be a nostalgia for the freedom they had to report there. Do you think there is an overly romantic image of how the press operated in Vietnam as opposed to what they now chafe against?

A: Yes. I think they are very real constraints, and they are certainly worth chafing against . . . . In the Gulf, the control of the military is very rigid. . . . The military has learned from the Falklands War, in the sense that you keep the correspondent on the aircraft carrier until you want to get the news off. . . .

Military and government always impose it (censorship) too tightly. They’re always screaming national security, clearance, and it turns out later they didn’t have to. . . . The military always says it is looking out for your safety when you know perfectly well that’s not what they’re looking out for. My own feeling is that military censorship seems overly tight and controlling. . . . I hear the press fulminating about this and I hardly blame them. . . . I am reminded that in Vietnam there was quite a bit of military control.

My feeling is that the last war always has a romantic glow to it. The thing is, in Vietnam you had two kinds of constraints. You basically couldn’t go anywhere without the military OKing it. Now, the military was more disposed to OK a lot of things.

But part of the problem with the coverage, I always thought, was the extent to which most big news organizations--the networks, the papers--really deferred, I thought appallingly, to the military perspective. . . . The news organizations imposed an oppressive weight of self-censorship on themselves and their people in the field. . . . Efforts by correspondents in the field to portray the negative things that were going on were often rebuffed. There was a tremendous self-censorship.

Q: It has been reported that the senior Pentagon staff believes the press lost the war in Vietnam and this is why the military is trying to control things now. Are they misremembering as well?

A: I’ll tell you. In World War II, everybody was a hero. Well, not everybody. But if you were a general . . . it was in the nature of what you were doing, and the war you were fighting, that you were a hero. The military loved the press in World War II.

. . . . It was largely true, because the seamy underside of the war--the execution of Private Slovak, whatever it was--nobody was much interested. . . .

But then in Vietnam--where you had many people who were in World War II or certainly had memories of it--the whole thing changed. . . . There were some substantially negative reports that would come out. And I think the military had a sort of tantrum at the press--just as many people back home were having a tantrum at the military. Neither of them, in a way, was that much to blame. It was a politically mismanaged war.

Q: The military logic seems to run: “If the press has a free rein in the Gulf, people will see these things on their screens at home and they are going to turn against the war effort because they will realize the horror of war.” Do you think that is how Americans respond to what they see?

A: That’s what a lot of people think. What I think is: When you have a war you’re bound to have a lot of deaths, pain, ghastliness. In the abstract, people often think or say that they want to be told everything. For example, they want to be told everything about their operations, about their medical condition. For myself, I’d rather be told more than less . . . . I’ve noticed, in this war, that so many people seem to be so weighed down by it, by their dismay over it, their worry, their fear. A lot of this, I think is . . . because a lot of people don’t know how to think about this war. . . .

Q: Perhaps because there are unknowns--the shadow of poison gas, of biological weapons--that are amorphous fears.

A: When I watch a football game--which I do more than I care to admit--when there is an injury on the field and the camera pans away from that as they so often do. I think to myself, “I’m not a kid, I can deal with what’s going on with so-and-so on the field . . . . “

At the same time, I am aware that these people who run these things must know something . . . about their audience--that a sizeable part of their audience . . . really doesn’t know how to deal with--want to deal with--pictures of Joe Theisman with his leg bent double . . . .

Q: Is this an argument for insulating the American people from the war?

A: It’s an argument for proportional behavior. It’s an argument for reasonable behavior. Everyone knows one is supposed to protect kids from certain things. But in many ways, grown-ups, alas, are not that different from kids . . . .

Q: Most Americans seem to get their news from television. What role do newspapers play in all this and how do they help people understand what is going on?

A: Papers seem to be catching up. At first it was all the movie of the war, then the Scuds. But then--because there is so little hard news--the reporters go back to what they were supposed to be doing, which is not writing movie scenarios but developing such few stories as there are.

. . . . There’s an emotional underside of conflict to journalism, the hostage mania. TV is doing this sappy “Day 14 of the Gulf.” Oh, come on, guys, stop with this “Day 14.”

I think that as the war gets, quote, more boring, the print press comes back into its own. I hope anyway. I mean, it’s hard for the print guys to compete with the flash on TV. But then, after a while, you begin to realize that a lot of the flash you see on TV is taped footage of the same fighter taking off, the same Tomahawk missile. That must have been one of the most widely seen Tomahawk launches. That missile was launched about 400 times.

A public that has complacently--or not complacently--spent about two-thirds of its national treasury on armaments without the least inkling of what they were, or what they did, in a few days rapidly educated itself and now seems bored by it. Now they know as much as anybody wants to know . . . .

There are two things I am struck by when people talk about the war . . . . People will say, “Well, both sides are just the same, aren’t they?” . . . . This is a little morally lazy. Both sides are not the same. Yes, there’s a lot of keeping the lid on on our side. One of the things you feel the military is trying to do, with all its clumsiness: They’re trying not to lie to people--at least not as badly and not as boldly as they used to--which is a very good thing not to do.

The other thing I hear is: “Do you think the war will solve things?” I mean, why do people ask of war what they don’t ask of anything else? Possibly the war will solve some of the problems that resulted in the war. But then there’ll be new problems.

People say these things because they’re trying to figure out what they think. They were sort of happy citizens mostly, trying to be disconnected to all this stuff.

Q: Do people know why we’re in the Gulf? Under what conditions can the press do a good job in explaining this to the public.?

A: . . . . The press is always best when it lets people in on the story. People will get in on the story anyway. This is a very strange time and there hasn’t been a lot of immediate awfulness yet, but there’s a lot of awfulness hovering around the edges that may creep into the picture.

. . . . A question that runs throughout history is . . . when hasn’t there been censorship? (In Vietnam), between Gen. Westmoreland and (CBS Chairman) William Paley (you had) two mighty forces of censorship that hardly anyone got by . . . .