An Appraisal: A Skeptical Vietnam Voice Still Echoes in the Fog of Iraq

David Halberstam, left, in the Mekong Delta in 1963, with Malcolm W. Browne of The A.P. and Neil Sheehan of U.P.I.


By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
April 25, 2007

The news reports streaming out of Vietnam in the fall of 1963 were unsettling to President Kennedy, and in a White House meeting the talk turned to a particularly irritating young reporter named David Halberstam.

“How old is Halberstam?” one of the participants asked, according to a recording unearthed by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

“About 25,” said William Bundy, a presidential adviser. In fact, he was 29.

“He was a reporter when he was in college,” said McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser and a professor at Harvard when Mr. Halberstam was a student there. “So I know exactly what you’ve been up against.”

He laughed. Mr. Halberstam, then working for The New York Times, went on to demonstrate through a series of forceful dispatches that the chaotic reality unfolding on the ground in Vietnam bore little resemblance to the upbeat accounts offered by American presidents and generals who were prosecuting the war. Journalism and, more broadly, the relationship between the American people and their elected servants in Washington, was never the same again. Mr. Halberstam, who died Monday in a car accident, set a standard for skepticism of official war-time pronouncements that carries on to this day.

During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which Mr. Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic. Indeed, reporters who filed dispatches pointing out the pitfalls experienced by American troops sometimes found it difficult to secure an embed with an American military unit. Other reporters — including this one — were sometimes excluded from official briefings inside the Green Zone.

“Frankly, part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors,” Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, said in 2004.

Mr. Halberstam and his colleagues in Vietnam, like Neil Sheehan of United Press International and Malcolm W. Browne of The Associated Press, both later of The Times, had it a lot tougher than reporters in Iraq do today, if only because they were the first. Few journalists with major American newspapers or television networks had dared to publicly question the veracity of America’s military leaders — or an American president — in wartime, least of all a 29-year-old reporter not that long out of college.

By his own account, Mr. Halberstam had gone to Vietnam a believer in the American project, but found himself increasingly disillusioned by events he was witnessing up close. The public representations made by American leaders — of numbers of Vietcong killed, of South Vietnamese soldiers trained — seemed so at odds with what Mr. Halberstam and the other reporters were seeing that they came to regard the official briefings as little more than acts of comedy.

That skepticism, in the American press, was new. “The press at the time, and by that I mean the editors, were living in the shadow of World War II,” Mr. Sheehan said in an interview. “The senior military and the senior diplomats had enormous credibility with the news media. If General Patton gave you a briefing on what he was going to do to the Germans — and he always brought the press with him, because he thought it was important — you could expect a pretty straightforward account.”

Mr. Halberstam, an intense, sometimes intimidating man, came into direct conflict with President Kennedy — who pressed to have him pulled from Saigon — and with his own editors at The Times, who sometimes questioned the divergence between his and the official accounts.

In one incident, recounted in Mr. Sheehan’s book, “A Bright Shining Lie,” Mr. Halberstam exploded at his editors in New York, who had asked him about an article filed by a competitor that more closely tracked the official version. “If you mention that woman’s name to me one more time I will resign repeat resign and I mean it repeat mean it,” Mr. Halberstam wrote in a cable.

In another incident in 1963, Mr. Halberstam filed an article about a series of arrests staged by the Saigon government that was flatly contradicted by the State Department in Washington. After much debate, editors at The Times decided to run two articles on its front page — one from Washington, based on the State Department’s version, and the other from Mr. Halberstam. “Three days later,” Mr. Sheehan wrote, “other events forced the State Department to admit that the official version had been wrong.”

Similar clashes between the Bush administration and the press have unfolded during the war in Iraq, particularly in its early phases. In late 2003 and early 2004, as security around Iraq was deteriorating, reporters in Iraq were sometimes mystified by the rosy briefings they were given inside the Green Zone. In the streets where they lived and worked, they witnessed car bombings and assassinations, while the spokesmen for the Bush administration talked mostly about smiling Iraqis and freshly painted schools.

“There were two realities — one inside the Green Zone, and the reality every day, talking to people in the street,” said Anthony Shadid, a Washington Post correspondent whose Iraq dispatches won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004. “They never did intersect.”

In speeches and television appearances, Mr. Halberstam did not hesitate to compare America’s predicament in Iraq to its defeat in Vietnam. And he was not afraid to admit that his views on Iraq had been influenced by his experience in the earlier war.

“I just never thought it was going to work at all,” Mr. Halberstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January. “I thought that in both Vietnam and Iraq, we were going against history. My view — and I think it was because of Vietnam — was that the forces against us were going to be hostile, that we would not be viewed as liberators. We were going to punch our fist into the largest hornets’ nest in the world.”

The war in Iraq, of course, churns on, and its outcome is not yet determined. But four years after the invasion, most of the rosy talk from the White House has faded away. In its place is language far more somber — and more realistic — than what came before. If the American people now have a clearer picture of the war their soldiers are fighting in Iraq, it is largely thanks to the example set by Mr. Halberstam.