The final panel of the day discusses the Vietnam War and the media. Here are the speakers and their topics:
Generals Westmoreland and Abrams Meet the Press: What Went Right and What Went Wrong with Media Relations in Vietnam--Dr. William Hammond
The Viet Cong Assault on the U.S. Embassy at Tet and the Military Media Controversy It Launched--Mr. Donald North
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Generals Westmoreland and Abrams Meet the Press: What Went Right and What Went Wrong with Media Relations in Vietnam--Dr. William Hammond
ReplyDelete•Media-military relationship stretches back to the Revolutionary War.
•Military relationship with the media was excellent at the beginning of the Vietnam War. The only disagreement was how to fight the Cold War.
•By the end of the conflict, the relationship had deteriorated with members of the military actually setting up journalists to be killed.
•Both Westmoreland and Abrams failed in their dealings with the media.
•Presidents Johnson and Kennedy did not want media attention during Vietnam so they would have a free hand to prosecute the war as they saw fit.
•A 1964 conference in Honolulu was held to ensure good coverage of the upcoming war.
•“In dealing with the media you can’t run it by the book.”
•MACV’s relationship with the media failed because it was predicated on the South Vietnamese government doing the right thing.
•Censorship was considered but ruled impractical for a number of reasons including differences in languages and intractability of South Vietnamese government.
•The military was drawn into the process of justifying the war in Vietnam. This had disastrous effects. Westmoreland was able to dodge these political requests initially. Then, in 1967 Westmoreland returned to the U.S. and gave a series of speeches to drum up support for the war. This alienated the media.
•The military reflected Presidential optimism for the war.
•Tet forced the media to gain ground truth from the Soldiers in the field, not the generals at headquarters.
•“Stay away from the justification of war if you’re a Soldier. Let the politicians argue.”
•Progress with the media is only made through small acts over a long period of time.
•“There are no uglier words in the American lexicon than cover-up. The press has a long memory.”
The Viet Cong Assault on the U.S. Embassy at Tet and the Military Media Controversy It Launched--Mr. Donald North
ReplyDelete•Media did not play a decisive role in losing the Vietnam War—Gen Harry Kinnard.
•Even after Tet, Westmoreland played down the significance of the embassy attack.
•Survivors of the embassy attack during Tet were embargoed by the State Department.
•Denial of realities on the ground continued far after Tet ended. This served to disillusion the media even more.
•Network stations censored negative news from their correspondents in the field.
•Media reports were not as pessimistic as official reports from the military, CIA or Rand.
•American leaders decided controlling access and information from the battlefield was the lesson provided by the Tet Offensive.
The Vietnam War was America's first televised war. I believe that TV coverage affected the American public's opinions of the Vietnam War.
ReplyDeleteMAJ Mike Smith
ILE Class 2010-01 Staff Group 15B
I listened to both Dr. Hammond's and Mr. North's presentation. Mr. North in particular seemed to want to convey that journalists have long memories. His discussion of Peter Arnett seemed to indicate that they are also capricious when it comes to a perceived slight. As for Tet and the US embassy, a couple things jumped out at me over the discussion of the reporting and the mistaken report about the embassy's actual seizure. First, war is chaotic. Everyone who knows war know this. One assumes professional war correspondents are party to this knowledge. Everyone from Clausewitz to Craig Mullaney will tell you that 100 folks can be a part of a battle and have 100 different perspectives.
ReplyDeletePoint two: the first report is usually wrong in military operations. Everyone knows this, the first reports on anything must be treated with a great amount of skepticism, especially in combat.
Point three: Of the branches in the Army, the MPs are not perhaps the best one to get an operational assessment from on a live battlefield. Go back to points number one and two, they exacerbate this final point.
Mr. North's rationalizations struck this listner as tortured and tennuous. He would have done much better to have discussed the issue from a different stance, supported by Dr. Hammond's statistics in an Army History Magazine article (Winter 2009), that public opinion in support of the war had already declined past the point of no return. Tet affected Cronkite and LBJ, American public opinion (reflected in Gallup Polls) had already turned against the war--although most did not act on these convictions as actively as did the Antiwar movement (AWM). My own view is that the AWM influence was small and probably convinced as many people to support the war as to turn against it, in other words a wash.)
vr, Dr. John T. Kuehn, who watched Hippies/Yippies burn down the Indiana University Library in Bloomington when he was 12 years old in 1968(in shock).