The Press: Myth of Anti-Americanism

With mounting stridency, the British press has criticized the U.S. role in Viet Nam, portraying it as a misguided effort in a hopeless cause. But there has always been a minority of U.S. supporters, and one of them is Daily Mail Columnist Bernard Levin, an acid-tongued critic of everything from theater to world affairs.

Levin noted in a recent column that he had spent the previous night at the opera. His readers, he assumed, had spent it watching television or enjoying other pleasures. “A lot of Americans and South Vietnamese, however, spent it dying.”

The World’s Abuse. On that note, Levin sailed into British complacency. He expressed the kind of all-American sentiments that a U.S. commentator to day would voice only at the risk of being laughed out of the league of sophisticated pundits. “They spent it dying,” continued Levin, “so that you can go on watching television, reading books and helping the children with their homework, and so that I can go on listening to Wagner. I don’t know about you, but I am grateful and will now say why.” As Levin saw it, the confrontation in Viet Nam may be “confused and horrible, its aims blurred, its cost in innocent blood unaccountable. But if it is lost, if the Americans finally get tired of doing the world’s work for nothing but the world’s abuse, if South Viet Nam is left to its fate, then what will follow, as surely as Austria followed the Rhineland, and Czechoslovakia followed Austria, and Poland followed Czechoslovakia and six years of world war followed Poland, is a nuclear confrontation on a global scale between the forces at present engaged in one tiny corner of the globe.”

With that, Levin sat back and braced for a flood of criticism. In fact, he received more mail on the column than on anything else he had written in his eleven years in journalism, but he found his 450 letters running 3 to 1 in support of his position. Last week he mused over the reaction in a column for the International Herald Tribune. “We can now firmly discount the myth that practically nobody in Britain understands and supports the American stand over Viet Nam,” he wrote.

Most of his press colleagues still disagree with Levin. Evening News Columnist Kenneth Allsop suggested that “this fire-eating warrior” of the press “ought to volunteer for a suicide squad and parachute into Viet Nam.” But one barometer of popular opinion, the Daily Mirror, which heretofore had had almost nothing kind to say about the U.S. in Viet Nam, last week paid tribute in a front-page editorial to the courage of U.S. troops.