Revisiting Front Lines in a TV War

“At its heart, at its core, what war is about is killing people,” says Dan Rather today. “Real mud, real blood, real screams of the dead, wounded.”

And that is the way Rather covered the Vietnam War for CBS News in the mid-1960s.

Yet in his 1977 memoir “The Camera Never Blinks,” Rather reflected on the criticism he received for that coverage. Critics complained he spent too much time in the field covering combat, what’s known in television circles as “bang-bang,” instead of the politics of war. At the time, he wrote, “I think the complaint was fair.”

Now, more than two decades later, he has rethought the issue, and he’s not so sure that he wasn’t right after all, to cover the war the way he did . . . capturing for the nightly news the heat and the aftermath of battle.

President Lyndon Johnson has been famously quoted that when he lost CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, he lost the war. Indeed, Vietnam has passed into the history books as the “television war,” and today there remains little doubt that television coverage, the relentless and graphic battle pictures that came for the first time into viewers’ living rooms and took a seat at their dinner tables, had an impact on public opinion.

But 25 years after the official end to hostilities, some of the early conclusions about the interaction between television and Vietnam may not be so obvious anymore. Rather, for one, thinks the media’s role in turning public opinion against the war has been overstated. The war was lost, the “CBS Evening News” anchor thinks, when bodies started returning home to American towns; the combat pictures, he says, were a reflection of that.

“Those were the kids from Flint, Mich., who were dying, from South-Central L.A. and Mississippi,” echoes Ted Koppel, anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” whose first television assignment for the ABC network was in Vietnam in 1967. “The driving story for most Americans was, what’s happening to our boys, why are they dying? That’s really what people wanted to see, not violence for violence’s sake.”

Nonetheless, Koppel says, some political stories were missed because of television’s unending hunger for combat. Television correspondents who covered Vietnam learned quickly that “If you got good video, you were guaranteed to get on the evening news,” says Richard Wagner, who covered Vietnam for CBS. And the evening news was essentially the only game in town, since there were no all-news cable channels, no “Nightline,” few prime-time newsmagazines.

Television came of age with the Vietnam War, and the war helped shape the television landscape, as well as the careers of many. An extraordinary roster of television correspondents went through the war machine, many of them the dominant journalists of the medium today, from Rather and Koppel to Morley Safer, Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, Bruce Morton, Bill Plante and Bob Simon, to name a few.

Some, like Rather and Safer, were sent there early on. Later, it became the assignment that many, like Bradley, clamored for. “For reporters of my generation, it was the seminal experience,” says NBC correspondent George Lewis, who went in 1972. “It was the big story of the time, if you wanted to make your mark as a journalist.”

“It was how you earned your chops,” adds Wallace, who went there in 1967 for just a few months because “I felt like a damn fool if I didn’t go.”

NBC, unlike CBS, sent few of its very top correspondents to the war, asking instead for volunteers, precisely because “they viewed the story as more of a bang-bang story . . . that didn’t require expertise to cover,” says Lewis. He, for one, wishes he had had “some of the life experience and wisdom that I now possess.” That, he says, would have made him “better able to put events in context. We kind of covered it as a cops-and-robbers story.”

Although management continually told its war correspondents that they also wanted stories about people and the conditions in Vietnam, “invariably it was the bang-bang stories that got played high up in the nightly news,” he says. “The pressure was sort of indirect.”

Sometimes, it was more direct. In early 1968, says John Laurence, who covered the war for CBS, “New York [management] insisted--demanded--that CBS News have a camera team in the besieged Marine combat base of Khe Sanh 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That was madness. Khe Sanh was expected to be attacked and possibly overrun at any time. . . . No one from CBS was killed there, but several were badly wounded,” including a producer on a field visit. Five CBS News people were later killed in Cambodia in 1970.

(On Friday through next Sunday, all surviving CBS employees who spent time in Vietnam--about 80 people in all--have been invited to attend a reunion in Washington. Many are expected to attend.)

The war was easy to cover in the sense that access was largely unlimited and fighting was everywhere, Bradley says. But especially early on, the primitive technology provided challenges, including “schlepping around hundreds of pounds of film equipment,” Safer notes. Correspondents would make a soundtrack and then stuff their film, not today’s video, into yellow grapefruit sacks and make a mad dash for the airport to get it onto a plane to Tokyo, where it would then go on to make several more stops before arriving in New York to appear on the newscast two or three days later. It might be a week or more before a correspondent would know whether the story made the newscast, and in what form. Live pictures were unheard of.

The war became a player in the battle for dominance between first-place NBC and CBS, which had fallen behind after leading through the 1950s. Largely due to executive Ernie Leiser, say CBS officials, CBS decided to “own” the Vietnam story, along with civil rights and space coverage. The network’s reporting in those areas, they say, helped it regain its most-watched status, which it held for many years after.

Koppel recalls his own pressures, what he calls “telex rockets” from New York, talking about “Charlie” (CBS) and “Nancy” (NBC), as in “ ‘Charlie with phenomenal bang-bang from wherever. How come u un-have?’ They sent chills down my spine. The first lesson I had to learn was to cover the story as a journalist, rather than as a puppet at the end of 7,000-mile string.”

Roger Ailes, now chairman of Fox News, worked both sides of the TV war: As executive producer of the “Mike Douglas Show” from 1965 to 1968, he oversaw a week of war-themed entertainment programming that including jumping off a tower at Fort Bragg and swimming with Navy SEALS. Later, as an outside media advisor, Ailes persuaded President Richard Nixon to take his case for the Cambodian invasion to the people via a television “chalk talk,” to counter all the evening news body counts.

“He recognized perhaps that television was hurting Johnson and decided that television might be a help to him, that the people watching on television ought to at least get both sides,” Ailes says. “I created the concept . . . sold him that they had to get out there and counter the message.”

Ailes thinks public opinion about the war would have built similarly without television, but it would have been a slower process. “Television sped up the anger of the American people, because it is a faster medium.”

*

Although it wasn’t restricted to television journalists, one of the biggest consequences of the Vietnam War was a new skepticism reporters developed for authority.

Laurence, who has written a book about his experiences, “The Cat From Hue,” to be published next year, says the turning point for him was an Army battle in the Ia Drang Valley in late 1965, when 155 out of 500 men in one American battalion were killed in a few hours and Saigon military spokesmen presented the battle as a victory. “After that, I no longer trusted what I was told by the military in Saigon.”

Koppel says Vietnam taught many journalists that “experts frequently don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. You have to develop enough confidence to believe the evidence of your ears and eyes.”

“It was a Step 2,” adds Ailes. “During the civil rights movement, the government wasn’t totally candid about what was happening; during the Kennedy assassination, they weren’t totally candid; there was a building feeling in the press that the government was spinning them.”

“I went over quite open-minded, but within a week or less of being there, you knew this thing stunk,” says Safer.

The consequences of the combination of almost complete access and intense skepticism were to be felt years later in restricted access to battle for journalists.

“Various administrations realized that if they want to get their message out, they have to have more control over the messengers, not just let someone go out and see what’s going on,” says Bradley.

“Now, the technology is instant, but the access is zero. . . . Then, we had primitive technology with immediate access,” says Safer, who earned the wrath of some in the military for his 1965 report that showed U.S. Marines setting fire to the village of Cam Ne.

In skirmishes involving U.S. forces in Panama and Grenada, and in the more extensive Gulf War, journalists such as Safer who were used to wandering largely where they wanted in Vietnam found their movements highly restricted.

During the Gulf War, developments were reported faster than ever, but the “administration . . . was able to report the war directly to the audience--and the journalists played a totally secondary role,” Safer says. With CNN covering the military press conferences live, “anything anybody reported was stale or much less dramatic, because there was that living 50-caliber bullet [Gen. Norman] Schwarzkopf showing highly selective pictures of missiles that worked. . . . The war was totally without journalistic reporting--despite a smog of information coming at you.” *