Nearly 60 years ago, Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne was sent to Saigon to report on the conflict between the Communist North and American-backed South. He was soon joined in the AP bureau by Peter Arnett and photojournalist Horst Faas, and they found themselves competing with upstart UPI reporter Neil Sheehan and brash New York Times journalist David Halberstam on the beat as the Vietnamese civil war erupted into an American-led war of Cold War containment.
The consequences of that escalation — the protests and culture wars, the draft and the quagmire — were all years away. But the reporting those journalists did, and the price they paid for it, foretold what was in store for America. That story has been eclipsed by Vietnam’s more provocative media moments (My Lai, Agent Orange, Walter Cronkite declaring the war unwinnable on national TV), but it’s resuscitated by filmmaker Thomas D. Herman in his documentary Dateline-Saigon.
The Vietnam experience of Halberstam, Sheehan, Browne, Arnett, and Faas upended how conflict was covered in the American press, and it gave the government and its enablers ammunition in its war against the First Amendment and the reporters some still feel cost the country victory. And despite being more than a half century past, Vietnam has proven it will never be done with us — nor we with it. Dateline-Saigon’s release comes as the country is more divided than at any time since the 1960s. The fault lines are familiar — civil rights, brutal crackdowns of protests, state-sponsored attempts to delegitimize the press — and they vibrate throughout the film
Herman spoke with the Star-Revue about his unexpectantly relevant film and the journalists at the center of it. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Dateline-Saigon is built on really great interviews, some with people who are no longer around, like David Halberstam, who died in 2007, and Malcolm Browne and Horst Faas who both died in 2012. When did you start working on this, and why did it take so long to complete?
I started in 2003 or 2004, and at the time I didn’t know what the film was going to be. I had been a field producer for CNN and spent some time in Vietnam on some projects for some stories on the aftermath of the war. While I was there, there happened to be a reunion of men and women who had covered the war as journalists. In talking to them, I heard some amazing stories and met many fascinating characters. As you might imagine, the kinds of people who go to cover those stories are not necessarily going to be insurance actuaries or bank tellers. They’re a different kind of person. In doing some research, I realized there really wasn’t a documentary on the subject of journalism in Vietnam, which was very controversial and remains so to this day. So I started filming, and it went on over a number of years. Part of the reason for that was I would have to stop and go out and raise some more money, and that had benefits as well as detriments. The detriment being it took longer; the benefits were that some of the material I wanted to use in the film had been classified and I didn’t have access to it until later on, like some of those secret White House tapes, which I had pushed to have declassified.
It took close to 15 years to make this damn thing, in the course of which, as you observed, three of the protagonists died. Fortunately, I was able to get them before that happened. I was fortunate to get these people. I ended up doing more than 60 interviews: print journalists, newspaper, magazines, wire service, TV journalists, radio, photojournalists, historians, military people, and others. And the film emerged out of those many interviews, and it was a story that very few people knew about, how these young men, all in their 20s—I think actually Malcolm Browne was the oldest at 30—got sent there when nobody thought it was going to be a very important story. None of the big shot reporters wanted to go, so they sent these young men. They had lived through World War II, they were real Cold Warriors, so their inclination was to support the American effort. It’s what happened to them when they realized the government was lying, and they all went through something of a crisis of conscience—particularly Halberstam and Sheehan, who wanted to report positively at first but then they realized the government was lying. And when they started to report the truth, they got called pinkos or traitors or cut off of information or put on assassination lists, got beaten up, put in jail—all of those things happened.
Collections of Vietnam War reporting are fairly common, but we rarely see or hear directly from the people whose bylines are on the stories and rarely get the story behind the reporting.
I’ve been told by a number of people that the example set by Halberstam, Sheehan, and the others is a real guide for people covering conflict today and what they’re reporting. For example, Dexter Filkins covered the war in Iraq and now he’s a correspondent who writes for The New Yorker. He had gotten to know Halberstam, and he told me that quite a number of his colleagues— whether it was in Iraq or in Syria or in Afghanistan or elsewhere—took Halberstam’s book about Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, with them. Dexter spoke at David’s memorial service and said something along the lines of, when the official version that the reporters were getting didn’t match what they were actually seeing on the streets of Baghdad, they’d asked themselves what would Halberstam and Sheehan and these other greats of an earlier generation have done? Dexter also said that any reporter who has ever tried to hold his government to account learned from Halberstam, Sheehan, and the others that the truth is not just a point of view, it doesn’t adhere to the person who shouts the loudest, and it doesn’t necessarily belong to the person with the most power. That’s so relevant to today, and it makes this film about more than Vietnam. This is a film about the importance of a free press, an independent media, holding government to account, speaking truth to power. When I started making Dateline-Saigon, I didn’t know anything more about Donald Trump than he had a bunch of failing casinos in Atlantic City and an ego that was so large it was difficult to walk for him to walk through a door. I had no idea that he would be elected president and then declare war on the media.
How did your estimation of these journalists change in the making of the film?
I knew a little bit about some of them and even less about a few others. I had read Sheehan’s reports, and I knew that he was the guy who got the Pentagon Papers. I’d read a number of Halberstam’s books. I had been fascinated, even before this film, in the coverage of Vietnam because it is perhaps the most controversial period or case history of journalism in this country. Maybe the period we’re going through now we’ll eclipse that. And then I got to know each of these five well. I had multiple interviews with each of them, I got to know them and their families, I spent time with them, and I developed an enormous respect for them. Among the interesting things I learned was that each of these guys had very little experience, very little reputation when they went in there. They each of them went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for covering essentially the same story of Vietnam. Each of them went on to have illustrious, if not legendary careers winning all sorts of awards and becoming very famous in their own right. To a person, they told me that their experience in Vietnam as a journalist was the single most important professional experience, the single most important story they covered in their very long, illustrious, award-winning careers. And beyond that, they said that the relationships they developed with each other were the most important professional relationship they’d established in their entire lives. I was interviewing them when they were in their 70s. They went in there as competitors, but because of what they went through they were forced to rely on each other to protect each other and they became lifelong friends. Halberstam was the godfather for Neil Sheehan’s oldest daughter. Sheehan is the godfather to Halberstam’s kids. They became very close.
Sheehan says in the film that the government realized it had made a mistake allowing journalists to have unfettered access at the start of the war and that was a mistake they would never make again. Because of how long it took to make it, the film touches on two live wires of current history as they intersect with press freedoms and access: one being the moment we’re in now, and the other the experience of journalists embedding in Iraq a decade ago.
You’re absolutely right. If you go to the service academies or wherever they teach Public Information Officers, they go into Vietnam as the big mistake. “We can’t give journalists unfettered access to what’s going on.” Initially, after the Vietnam War, they didn’t even allow journalists nearby. So, for example, when Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, journalists weren’t allowed to go watch American troops putting their lives on the line. That was specifically in reaction to Vietnam. So what the government then came up with is this idea of embedding, which is better than nothing but it is still a form of censorship. You have to go with the troops and you really aren’t supposed to look around independently. We spent about a weekend shooting in Baghdad with Peter Arnett. We did a stand up with Peter outside of some blown up hotel, and he talks about how the information that journalists have access to in Baghdad is much less than they had in Vietnam. When we went to Baghdad, it was during a really difficult period and when it was a very dangerous place, we had to of course go to the embassy to let them know we were there, which is a good thing to do. But we also had to go to the military to get a credential that would allow us to move around. We had to sign a whole bunch of forms, among which were, you are not allowed to quote or refer to any member of the military anonymously. You can’t say “a source,” you have to use his or her name, which is effectively backdoor censorship. So, yeah, the experience of Vietnam has, in many ways, set the rules for how the government will allow conflict to be reported today. I think the controversy over Vietnam will live beyond my lifespan and yours. It will be controversial in many ways for many years and for many reasons. For example, a significant number of people today still believe that it was the critical reporting of Halberstam, Sheehan, and the others who came after that caused us to lose the war. Well, that’s nonsense.
We hear this idea of a “Vietnam Syndrome” that gripped the government after the war, which put a brake on militaristic interventions and prevented the U.S. from rushing headlong into something like Grenada. You mentioned this pernicious myth that journalists cost the country the war. Do you think there’s a kind of Vietnam Syndrome when it comes to the press and how the American public and political class look at media, journalism, and the First Amendment?
I’m hopeful that the viewpoint that journalists caused us to lose the war is a minority viewpoint. But I think another very contemporary and relevant point, and I think you’ve picked up on this, is President Trump’s war on the press is not the first time the government has declared war on the press. Trump has taken it to a new level and has gone to lengths that no one else previously in his position has gone and has really ignited an anti-journalism movement or fever in this country. But this is not the first time. The First Amendment is precious to me — freedom of speech, freedom, assembly, all of that — but it’s something that every generation has to struggle to maintain. It’s not something that is happening only today. It’s not a one-time thing. It happened during Vietnam. President Nixon had his enemies list with a number of journalists’ names on it. It happened to a lesser degree in World War I, under President Woodrow Wilson and his attorney general. Censorship was imposed by Lincoln during the Civil War. There was not censorship imposed during Vietnam. There were a lot of rules, and the journalists didn’t break those rules, but Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson knew they couldn’t impose censorship. The country wouldn’t stand for it. Freedom of the press is essential to a democracy, in my opinion. It was obviously essential to a democracy among the Founding Fathers because there wouldn’t have been a First Amendment and it wouldn’t have been so importantly defended and described by politicians and by the Supreme Court for many years afterwards. But it’s under attack right now in a way, I think, that perhaps it has never been previously. We cannot take it for granted. Fortunately, there’s some extraordinarily good journalism going on today and some smart and honorable people who understand the importance of freedom of the press — not only among so-called liberals; true conservatives understand the importance of this, as well. But every generation has to fight for it.
Dateline-Saigon is now available on DVD and video on demand from First Run Features. Visit firstrunfeatures.com for more information.
7 Comments
Very enlightening viewpoint from a journalist. More on that here: http://vietnamveterannews.com/1813-2/
Bunch of journalist who decided that they could become famous and save the world but its on them how many young guys died because of anti war stance that the foggy bottom dug in and let the war drag on without full support blood is on there hands to war is dirty soon as i saw cnn i knew the slant that it would take
Having read the above review, there seems little doubt that Dateline-Saigon will make a complementary companion piece for Burns-Novick’s documentary epic, The Vietnam War. A similar selectivity of commentary produced from a liberal, political perspective seems set to play its customary role in reinforcing already well-entrenched media misrepresentations of the Second Indochina War.
Revealing a ‘dirty war’ does not relieve a correspondent from his or her responsibility to seek out and report with equal vigour those aspects of that war which could be metaphorically described as ‘clean’. If reporting the ‘dirt’ was of primary importance, then revealing the filth-ridden brutality and deceit of Hanoi’s hegemonic war in Indochina was imperative by way of balance. That simply did not happen and there was no excuse for the omission.
While North Viet Nam cannily prohibited its state-controlled media from reporting ‘dirt’ on the activities of the NVA and Viet Cong, western reporters in South Vietnam had the privilege of reporting free of censorship, a privilege which too many of them conspicuously exploited and abused. By way of one of many illustrative examples, in his tellingly entitled memoir, Triumph of the Absurd, war correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto recounts how he asked an American cameraman why he wasn’t filming the mass graves of South Vietnamese murdered by the communists in Hue. The cameraman replied he wasn’t there to make anti-communist propaganda. How professionally noble of him!
A similarly noble motivation may have influenced Walter Cronkite when he misreported the 1968 Tet offensive and advocated that the United States abandon South Viet Nam. Cronkite had already recorded a highly professional and, given the short time he was there, remarkably accurate assessment of the US/ARVN victory, but he failed in his duty to convey it to the American people after his return to the United States. Instead, he delivered a demonstrably false and misleading report consistent with his self-confessed sympathies for antiwar ‘dissidents’ and his resentful contempt for conservative opinion. Thus, with catastrophic consequences for the people of Indochina, a misinformed America entered the bright and shining era of fake news.
This leads, in conclusion, to the film-maker’s political antipathies as evidenced in his criticism of President Trump’s attitude towards the media. A well-justified Presidential contempt for the press should not be misconstrued as an attack upon the freedoms which the press enjoys and serially abuses. It is regrettable that President Johnson did not deliver a similarly Trumpian rebuttal of Cronkite’s ideologically tainted reportage of the Tet offensive. Instead, that legendary and disgraceful journalistic performance contributed to Johnson’s resignation and a stunning propaganda victory for Hanoi. If that was indicative of what America’s most trusted journalist could do for Hanoi’s war effort, the mind positively boggles at the collective contribution and achievements of the rest.
While due respect must be tendered to correspondents who reported honourably and to the best of their ability, it is absurd for the maker of this documentary to dismiss as ‘nonsense’ the media’s share of culpability in the defeat of South Vietnam. As a consequence of the US withdrawal which Cronkite and others in the media helped to induce, millions of Indochinese lives and the hopes for freedom shared by millions more were lost.
I do agree with the filmmaker’s assertion that ‘freedom of speech, freedom [of] assembly, all of that [is] something that every generation has to struggle to maintain.’ While Cronkite was sailing his yacht around Martha’s Vineyard, thousands of freedom-loving South Vietnamese were sailing across the perilous reaches of the South China Sea. Their defeated country’s freedom-struggle was reported as a myth, a brightly shining lie from a supposedly discredited Establishment, but nonetheless a quarter of a million South Vietnamese died horribly at sea in efforts to regain the freedoms which they lost when Saigon fell.
So a ‘dirty war’ revealed? Perhaps. It is a matter of regret, though no surprise, this documentary is unlikely to reveal the media’s contribution to the making of a dirty peace.
Cronkite’s original Tet offensive report is available at the URL below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=40&v=TfMocPJZvfQ&feature=emb_logo
By way of correction, it was Peter Braestrup, the Saigon bureau chief of the Washington Post, who asked the US film crew why they weren’t filming the mass grave site at Hue. War correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto was with Braestrup at the time. For the full details of the horrors which Mr Siemon-Netto witnessed at Hue and what the US film crew declined to report, see his Triumph of the Absurd, chapter 15.
Also, I’d like to seem them try to explain provoking a combat refusal and spending time in a Saigon bar while a story they would write implies they were there.
Some spot-on comments here. Peter Braystrip’s “Big Story” is a compelling read on this subject. The idea that reporters and the 1st Amendment was somehow imperiled by the government is patently false. Sure reporters like Peter Arnett were criticized, but given his dripping disdain for America, was that pushback so unreasonable? Throughout the war, press critics of our actions in Vietnam, including the most vicious among them, continued to write whatever they wanted , even increasing their vitriol as our withdrawals ramped up. Right up to this day, when the President mocks grandstanding CNN reporters, they are quick to characterize it as a “direct assault on the 1st Amendment” — proving yet again that they remain absolutely free to put out any degree of nonsense.
After serving in the Army medical corps in Vietnam; I came home to return to working in commercial photography. After much rejection and many poor paying jobs I started freelancing as a photojournalist. Years later when applying to a small town newspaper and being rejected, I was told it was because I was a Vietnam Veteran. There was a short time of homeless living, change of location, a return to chasing stories, too this time of the press being called fake news. All of this to say: perhaps we should let the people’s Congress and only the Congress declared wars. It is time overdue to have a free press away from corporate, commercial, entertainment, and propaganda as news. We had that once it was changed so big corporations could make money on news. A free press is the only Industry in the Constitution.