Revelations from former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s forthcoming memoir is generating a lot of media buzz. Buzz in particular about “the media” itself. McClellan claims that the national press was “too deferential” to the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Salon blogger Glen Greenwald has run with the McClellan issue and used it as another arrow in the quiver of his sweeping indictment of the aforementioned “rancid and worthless... establishment journalists of today.” Greenwald has been especially critical of the New York Times for their:

“profound (and confessed) journalistic failures of the NYT in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and it is, without question, one of the worst scandals in that paper's history -- perhaps its worst.

The New York Times indeed has a long history of journalistic failures. However, I would argue that Walter Duranty ranks number one on that list just ahead of Herbert Matthews.

Greenwald’s exemplar of a true journalist, as opposed to the “rancid” type is former New York Times reporter David Halberstam. For Greenwald Halberstam’s body of work, along with Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow, in Vietnam is the epitome of real journalism. Greenwald frequently quotes from Halberstam’s speech to the Columbia School of Journalism, where he talks about how he stood up the military brass in Vietnam and challenged them, unlike contemporary reporters with the Bush Administration.

Lost in Greenwald’s litany of encomiums to Halberstam, is that fact that he and the other sainted Vietnam era journalists were dupes of a North Vietnamese communist agent Pham Xuan An. Pham Xuan An supplied North Vietnamese intelligence with:

a steady stream of military documents and reports to North Vietnamese authorities, writing in invisible ink and leaving the material in containers at designated spots around Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam War historian Mark Moyer argues:

Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow inadvertently caused enormous damage to the American effort in South Vietnam—making them the most harmful journalists in American history. The leading American journalists in Vietnam during 1963, they favored American involvement in Vietnam, in stark contrast to the press corps of the war’s latter years. But they had a low opinion of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and decided that he would need to be removed if the war was to be won. Brazenly attempting to influence history, Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow gave Diem’s opponents in the U.S. government negative information on Diem in print and in private. Most of the information they passed on was false or misleading, owing in part to their heavy reliance on a Reuters stringer named Pham Xuan An who was actually a secret Communist agent. The journalists convinced Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to accept their reports in place of much more accurate reports from the CIA and the U.S. military, which led Lodge to urge South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup. Press articles suggesting that Diem had lost his principal ally’s confidence made the South Vietnamese generals receptive to coup plots — the Vietnamese elites generally misinterpreted American news reporters as official spokesmen of the U.S. government.

In his book Triumph Forsaken, based on newly released North Vietnamese sources, Moyar persuasively argues that the 1963 coup and US-backed assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was a disastrous mistake. Contrary to the traditional school of thought, Diem was not the monster Halberstam and historians portray him to be. In fact, Diem was a skillful, if authoritarian leader, who actually saw success against the Viet Cong in 1962. Diem eliminated the communist agents who remained in the South after the 1952 partition and he cultivated a successful officer corps, which led to the 1962 battlefield successes against the Viet Cong. Most Vietnamese shared Diem’s traditional ideology and it was not nearly as harsh and radical as Ho Chi Minh’s land redistribution, which murdered tens of thousands. After Diem’s assassination, the new regime purged the capable Diem loyalists from the government and military, consequently negating South Vietnam’s advantage over the Viet Cong and PAVN.

Clearly, David Halberstam belongs on the list of The New York Times journalistic failures. He may not have been a willing dupe as Walter Duranty for Stalin and Herbert Matthews for Castro, but Halberstam was a dupe nonetheless for the North Vietnamese.

Greenwald’s constant caterwauling about the journalistic failures of establishment journalism like the New York Times may have a point. However, Greenwald torpedoes his own argument by extolling the journalistic virtue of David Halberstam, who in many respects represented the very “rancid” journalism Greenwald finds so offensive.

The irony here is rich considering the title of Greenwald’s next book is Great American Hypocrites.

Topics: Vietnam , Journalism , David Halberstam

Feed

Comments

Peace Kills

2 comments

April 21, 2:05 PM

Charles Derber and Yale Magrass have an interesting oped in that other newspaper. They call on Democrats to “renounce the morality of militarism,” whatever that means, and “engage in straight talk about war and war heroes.” They... Read More
Topics: Vietnam , anti-war movement , John McCain