WHAT HAPPENS WHEN REPORTERS MAKE WAR

What Felt said to the 32-year-old AP reporter encapsulates the conflict between the U.S. authorities and the ambitious young journalists covering the distant war that was then barely a front-page story. Their dispute over the role of the correspondents would exert an unmeasurable but significant impact on the outcome in Vietnam and the long shadow it casts over a generation of American life.

Prochnau, a well-known reporter and novelist who did two hitches himself as a newsman in Vietnam, does not waste much time pondering these implications. His book covers only 1961-63, ending with the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. He repeats an oft-told story of governmental bungling that, in all honesty, has been better told in many earlier books (especially David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire in 1965). What’s different about Prochnau’s book is his chronicle of how Browne, Halbersram of the New York Times, Neil Sheehan of United Press International, and the other young correspondents covered Vietnam.

The book has been favorably reviewed. H. D. S. Greenway, editorial page editor of the Boston Globe writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it “a rattling good yarn.” Martin Walker, Washington bureau chief of $ IThe Guardian (London), writing in the Washington Post Book World, referred to “a riveting account” and the author’s spinning “a beguiling legend. ”

Frankly, I am not sure that a non-journalist would find Prochnau’s story rattling, riveting, or beguiling. He is dealing in newspapermen’s “war stories” that I, for one, have heard — usually over a drink or two from the time of my first newspaper job almost 50 years ago. Whether dealing with politics, crime, or war, they invariably include: womanizing, boozing, and defiance of authority (both the Establishment figures that the reporters are covering and those wretched, stupid desk editors). The reporter always emerges as the somewhat ribald hero.

Prochnau’s story begins with Halberstam’s predecessor as the New York Times correspondent in Saigon: the stuttering, profane Homer Bigart, then nearing the end of a legendary reporting career. Prochnau elevates him to mythic proportions but does not pretend to clothe Bigart in objectivity. He is described as arriving in Vietnam at age 55 with a “disregard for generals from MacArthur to Patton.” Fritz Nolting, the embattled U.S. ambassador in Saigon, ” was convinced that Bigart had come to Vietnam with a hopeless prejudice and, of course, he was right.”

Bigart, who has been depicted by his acolyte Halberstam as an old-time police reporter who never read books, came to a conclusion about Vietnam ” within weeks” of his arrival, according to Prochnau. “Hating the place the moment he got there and hating it every day he stayed” because of the climate and the secrecy, Bigart in his dispatches written for the world’s most important newspaper “was casting . . . support for Diem as foolish and the strategic importance of this distant and backward place as dubious.”

“The young correspondents hero-worshipped him,” Prochnau writes. Bigart had taught them a lesson: “He had made it pro forma once again to challenge authority, a lesson that had been lost on many of the reporters of his generation in the heat and planetary danger of the Cold War.”

That new lesson was well learned by young journalists who, at the very beginn ing of their careers, earned fame, fortune and Pulitzer prizes from the war. Ha lberstam and Sheehan are lik ened by Prochnau to “two overgrown college boys, determined to use the school newspaper to do in the football coach and have fun in the process.”

So, they were naturally offended by Felt’s displeasure that they were not part of the U.S. government “team” in Vietnam, but he was right: They certainly were not on the team. Browne had declared U.S. diplomats to be persona non grata, refusing even to talk to officials at the embassy. “The press, adversary of all, plays on no one’s team,” Prochnau proclaims.

But that was not true, as Prochnau himself admits. Halberstam was clearly on the team of the Buddhist radicals who did so much to destabilize the Diem government. The correspondents, Prochnau notes without censure, “had become total and unabashed advocates” of ousting Diem. At a Fourth of July party at the U.S. embassy, Halberstam refused to drink a toast to the president of South Vietnam, snapping: “I’d never drink to that son of a bitch.” Diem’s death is described “as a moment of great triumph” for the correspondents.

This attitude set a pattern for the thousands of American journalists who would follow the handful who had been in Saigon in 1961-63. The road to personal success was clearly marked, and it did not go the direction of cooperation with either the U.S. military command or embassy. American officers swore that in future wars, they would make sure that members of the news media were kept far enough away to prevent them from poisoning the well — a pledge that was truly fulfilled in the Gulf war.

For the young correspondents as for their chronicler, the villains were famous visiting journalists — Joseph Alsop, Marguerite Higgins, and Richard Tregaskis — who, like the Kennedy administration, viewed Vietnam as a crucial encounter in the Cold War.

Columnist Alsop, childishly ridiculed by the resident correspondents as “Joe All-Slop,” is thought by Prochanu to have goaded John F. Kennedy into going to war in Vietnam because Alsop “would lose no more of his precious Asia” to the Communists. Tregaskis, the author of Guadalcanal Diary, was 26 when he covered the Marines in the Pacific, the same age as Halberstam in 1963. He rebuked his fellow wunderkind: “If I were doing what you are doing, I’d been ashamed of myself.” As for Higgins (the renowned World War II and Korean War correspondent), Prochnau writes: “The reporter in her had hardened into a Cold War ideologue.”

Indeed, Prochnau’s only serious criticism of the young correspondents is that they were too much children of the Cold War. He contends they missed “the biggest story of all — that all these well-meaning, we’ve-got-the-answer, do- good Americans had no business being in Viemam at all.” They came to this realization, he says, much later, in the fullness of years.

Once Upon A Distant War time and again restates the “no business being in Vietnam” dictum as an axiom, one requiring neither documentation nor argument. In this same axiomatic category is Prochnau’s certainty that the war was unwinnable and that a Communist victory was assured. Neither assertion is challenged widely in the political community today, but both ought to be.

Whatever the validity of the Vietnam commitment, it did not derive from Joe Alsop’s nagging his friend Jack Kennedy. It is clear from numerous sources that, after his humiliation at the hands of Nikita Khrushchev at their Vienna summit in 1961, Kennedy felt the U.S. must take a stand somewhere against the rolling tide of international Communism, and the best place was Vietnam. To prevent another small country from falling under the Red yoke was not a matter for much debate three decades ago.

Supporting the argument for intervention in Vietnam was the widespread perception of expansionist tendencies by Mao Tsetung’s China, a view confirmed by Chinese activity around the world. The 1965 Chinese Communist insurrection in Indonesia might well have succeeded had it not been for the American commitment in Indochina.

The concept of the unwinnable war emerged from the reporting of the young correspondents in the early years. Unfamiliar with the country and unable to speak its language, they came to sweeping conclusions about Vietnam based in no small part on what they had learned from scattered conversations with low- to-middle-level U.S. advisers. Long before the U.S. sent half a million men, Halberstam had pronounced Vietnam a quagmire. When he was leaving at the conclusion of his tour in 1963, an Army captain told him: “You’re going home just in time. This whole place is collapsing.” In fact, the “collapse” was 11 years away and was for from inevitable.

This deep-seated pessimism pervaded the Saigon press corps — including even Robert Shaplen, the distinguished Hong Kong-based correspondent for the New Y orker. Shaplen did not run with the pack of American reporters and is mention ed by Prochnau only in passing, but his major book on Vietnam was titled The Lost Revolution — the l oss of the battle for hearts and minds.

In truth, that battle never was resolved among the people of Vietnam, who suffered at the hands of both sides. However, once President Lyndon Johnson decided to pour in American troops in substantial numbers in 1966, there was no chance of a Communist victory in the guerrilla war.

In 1967, Halberstam paid his only return visit to the war and wrote an article for Harper’s asserting nothing much had changed in the past four years and that the war was still unwinnable. Peter Braestrup, the foremost critic of the American news media in Vietnam, wrote in 1977 that Halberstam was relating “second-hand Saigon horfor stories” of past corruption and incompetence. “He did not see the bloody, semi-conventional war on the DMZ [ demilitarized zone] or live with U.S. troops or ARVN [South Vietnamese army] in the Highlands,” wrote Braestrup, who suggested Halberstam “had fallen into an old newsman’s vice, that of rewriting his past stories.” It was a different war in 1967, where the competency of the U.S.-South Vietnamese forces was markedly improved.

In 1970, John Paul Vann told me that, on a recent visit to the U.S., he had talked with Halberstam and tried, without success, to explain to him how much things had changed in Vietnam. As a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Vann in 1963 established a symbiotic relationship with Halberstam. The officer provided the reporter with inside information, and the reporter provided the officer with an incomparable sounding board. But seven years later, they were no longer on the same wavelength. “Dave still is thinking in terms of ’63,” Vann told me.

Vann had returned to Vietnam as a senior civilian in 1965, and he told me one night while camping out with ARVN forces in the Central Highlands that he had informed his superiors that there were two possible ways to win the war. The first option was for the U.S. to declare war on North Vietnam and use all means short of nuclear weapons, including a million-man expeditionary force. The second option was for American ground troops to go home and instead fully arm and supply ARVN to win or lose the war.

Vann clearly preferred the second option, but Washington took neither course. President Johnson’s warmakers had no intention of waging all-out war, for fear of provoking a Soviet and/or Chinese military reaction. Yet they would not turn the war over to the Vietnamese, ignoring pleas by Vann and others to fully supply M-16 automatic rifles to ARVN infantry units still using the obsolete M-1 Garand. Not until President Richard Nixon in 1969 launched his program of Vietnamization was Vann’s second option belatedly pursued.

In the meantime, reporting by American journalists undermined support, both at home and abroad, for the U.S. effort. There was no more glaring example than the dispatches from the esteemed Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times during a two-week visit to North Vietnam in late 1966 and early 1967 that gave the impres sion that the U.S. was willfully bomb ing civilian targets. The assessment by Guenter Lewy in his studiously objective America In Vietnam (1978) has received all too little attention:

“Only after the articles had appeared and received extensive attention all over the world did a small number of persons learn that Salisbury, in effect, had given the authority of his byline to unverified Communist propaganda and that the New York Times had printed this information as though Salisbury had established it himself with his own on-the-scene reporting.”

But Salisbury was a hero to the journalists in Saigon and Washington in 1968 when Hanoi waged its Tet offensive to win the war with a combined assault by Vietcong and North Vietnamese units on population centers — a tacit admission that the Communists could not take over South Vietnam strictly by using guerrilla tactics. Braestrup, in his magisterial two-volume work, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, reached this blunt conclusion:

“Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. Essentially, the dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam . . . added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies. Historians, on the contrary, have concluded that the Tet offensive resulted in a severe military-political setback for Hanoi in the South.”

But that conclusion by historians never was accepted by the news media. The false perception of Tet changed the political climate in Washington so much that support for the war steadily drained away. Furthermore, just as the negativism by the press corps in covering Tet in 1968 was influenced by the heroes of Prochnau’s tale, so was future coverage of Vietnam shaped by the faulty impressions of Tet.

Regrettably, there has been no comprehensive Braestrup-like study of pre-Tet or post-Tet coverage. When North Vie tnam invaded South Vietnam in 1972, it was scarcely noted by the news media that the Hanoi politburo had tacitly admitted the failure of guerrilla warfare and that the much despised ARVN — under Vietnamization — fought well against the Northern legions.

Nor has the rest of the dreary story been well reported. Frantic to end the war, Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese to sign a peace treaty by giving President Nguyen Van Thieu secret assurances that U.S. military force would redress the balance if the North broke the peace. But Watergate forced Nixon from office, and an impotent President Gerald Ford lacked the means and the will to fulfi11 his predecessor’s commitment. If there had been any chance that the ARVN could successtully resist on their own without American air support the second conventional invasion from the North in 1974, it ended when Congress strangled the South Vietnamese forces by halting all appropriations.

Can a line be drawn from the reportage of the young correspondents in 1962- 63 to the tragic ending in 1975? A closing note by William Prochnau says the 5, 000 reporters who followed the little band he chronicles “deserve their own story.” Indeed, they do, but it should be done by a Peter Braestrup, a Guenter Lewy, or some other scholar free of romantic illusions.

Robert D. Novak is a veteran reporter and columnist and a commentator for CNN.