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Working in Vietnam over all those years, I could never understand the drumfires of antagonism that reverberated about our reporting. I won't go into the gory details here, because in retrospect they were not important: You stuck by us, you published our material. And that was all that mattered.
The press did not send American troops into Vietnam and is not bringing them out. The official cries of anguish about our reporting were the classic syndrome of blaming the bringers of bad news rather than the news itself. The most famous example in history being Peter the Great, the Czar of Russia, who strangled the man who brought him the news of the defeat of Russian troops at Narva by the Swedes under Charles XII. We were never strangled, and thanks again.
Before making a few remarks about the war as I see it, and where it may be heading, I would like to mention the "new journalism." This is sometimes called the activist approach which is essentially determining which side is right and then becoming the advocate of that side. A journalism student corralled me last week in Urbana and brought up Neil Sheehan's article in The New York Times Book Review that [said that] American commanders might be guilty of war crimes in Vietnam. I was asked, "Why didn't Sheehan write about war crimes when he was in Vietnam: why now, four years later?"
I bring this up because the intensity for the "new journalism" disturbed me. I am all for involved journalism, but not for the AP: We deal in facts. So I mentioned that I accompanied Neil Sheehan on some of those military operations he wrote about; I watched hooches burning down; I saw the civilian dead. I didn't write about war crimes either.
We took pictures of those burning buildings, we told of the civilian dead and how they died, but we didn't make judgments because we were witnesses, and like witnesses to robbery, accident or murder surely it was not for us to be judge and jury. I said my attitude might be broadly classed as objective, but I would
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