Foreign Correspondents: The Saigon Story

Some day there will be novels about that hardy band of U.S. correspondents covering the war in Viet Nam in 1963. Presumably, being fiction, they will make everything clear and have everything come out right. But today, telling the truth about the Saigon press corps is a difficult job.

There is a story there, and it is currently the biggest intramural story in U.S. journalism—the most argued-about and debated press story since the hue and cry over “managed news” last year.

Personally, the correspondents are serious, somewhat on the young side, energetic, ambitious, convivial, in love with their work. So in love, in fact, that they talk about little else. They have a strong sense of mission.

Last week they turned out in response to a tip and covered the latest Buddhist suicide by fire. While the press corps tried to comply with the crowd’s pleas—”Take pictures! Tell Mr. Kennedy!”—plainclothesmen moved in to confiscate their cameras. As they tried to protect their equipment, Grant Wolfkill and John Sharkey of NBC and David Halberstam of the New York Times were beaten; all three required hospitalization. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge made a prompt protest to the Vietnamese government.

Time Bomb. Sometimes, however, the correspondents’ sense of mission gets them into a different sort of trouble. It raises the question: Have they given their readers an unduly pessimistic view of the progress of the war and the quality of the Diem government?

It is not an idle question, for Washington policymakers, receiving considerable conflicting information of their own, have relied a good deal on what they have read in the public prints. One White House adviser says that, for him, the Times’s Halberstam is a more trust worthy source of battle information than all the official cables available in Washington. Hearst Editor Frank Conniff wrote that the New York Times’s reporting on Viet Nam had misled the President; it was, he said, “a political time bomb,” just as the Times’s coverage of the Castro revolution in Cuba represented the Times’s “loaded present to President Eisenhower.”

These two views bracket an important part of the Saigon story—and indicate its emotional flavor.

Anti, Anti, Pro. The story began some months ago, even before the Buddhist uprising brought additional correspondents to the scene. Both wire services’ correspondents, the A.P.’s Malcolm Browne and U.P.L’s Neil Sheehan, got into heated arguments with their home offices over their coverage. Recently the A.P. told Browne to take a month off to quiet down. There was tension in many a newspaper office—and plenty in Saigon.

Worried by their correspondents’ insistent anti-Diem, anti-Nhu, pro-Buddhist, we’re-losing-the-war attitude, editors began sending other hands to Saigon for a fresh look. One of the first such visitors was the New York Herald Tribune’s Maggie Higgins, who complained: “Reporters here would like to see us lose the war to prove they’re right.” She went out into the field in an effort to get “the seldom-told other side of the story,” a story, she insisted, “that contrasts violently with the tragic headlines and anti-Diem ferment in the big cities.”

When the Times queried their man in Saigon for his opinion about Maggie Higgins’ views, Halberstam became exasperated. Any more questions about “that woman’s copy,” he cabled, “and I resign, repeat, resign.”

Other papers sent reporters with fresh eyes. The Wall Street Journal dispatched Igor Oganesoff and Norm Sklarewitz; John Cowles’s Minneapolis Tribune sent Robert Hewett. Conniff and the rest of the Hearst task force set out for the Far East. So did Columnist Joe Alsop, a talented reporter and longtime Asian expert. Alsop characterized the Saigon correspondents as “young crusaders.” He wasted no time reminding his readers that “it is easy enough to paint a dark, indignant picture without departing from the facts, if you ignore the majority of Americans who admire the Vietnamese as fighters and seek out the one U.S. officer in ten who inevitably thinks that all foreigners fight badly. The same method used to report the doings of the Diem government has naturally been even more effective, since a great many of these doings have been remarkably misguided.”

Collective Judgment. The press in Saigon was obviously making news in itself, and in its Sept. 20 issue, TIME assessed their work. By then, neither the correspondents’ emotional involvement nor their privately outspoken attitude toward the Diem government was seriously denied. TIME found the Saigon reporters to be working hard under extremely difficult conditions, but also found them such a tightly knit group that their dispatches tended to reinforce their own collective judgment, which was severely critical of practically everything. What they reported about the course of the war was seriously questioned in Washington; what they wrote about the deterioration of the Diem government (not sufficiently emphasized in the TIME story) was correct —and confirmed all around, even unintentionally by Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu (TIME cover, Aug. 9) as she made her noisy way around the world.

In emotion-taut Saigon, the TIME story was resented. Charles Mohr, TIME’S Southeast Asia bureau chief, resigned. The Saigon reporters were not without their spirited defenders. The Times’s Scotty Reston called his colleague Halberstam “brilliant,” and Louis Lyons, 66, the retiring curator of Nieman Fellowships at Harvard, described him as “absolutely prophetic.” Newly arrived Ambassador Lodge said: “The regular press here is appealing, brave, tremendously hard-working.”

No Apologies. As the argument about the reporting from Viet Nam continued, the Hotel Caravelle’s eighth-floor bar, which serves as an unofficial Saigon press club, began to fill up with unfamiliar faces. The visiting observers found resident newsmen in a fighting mood, quick to defend their every dispatch. U.S. officials have constantly lied to them, they said, and the U.S. embassy has shunned them for years. They play up gripes from junior officers in the field but consider General Paul Harkins, Commander of the U.S. Forces in South Viet Nam, too evasive for his statements to be taken seriously. They seldom bother to see Diem government officials because, they say, the effort only gets them either more lies or runarounds. They have no apologies for their total dislike of the Diem government, but regardless of their personal feelings, they insist, their reporting has been as accurate as the confusing conditions permit.

The argument and emotions went on last week even as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General Max well Taylor, Chairman of the J.C.S., came home to report, even as President Kennedy made it clear that the U.S. is determined to dig in for a long and winning war, determined to find a way to deal with the bad political situation it must continue to live with in Viet Nam.