The irony of David Halberstam

Roger Kimball casts a cold eye (very cold) on the “sentimental rubbish” that the press gave us after Halberstam’s death.

A dissent on David Halberstam

I discussed Halberstam’s Vietnam reporting a few months ago:

Vietnam: a different sort of revisionism


A fragment of history, lost, never to be recovered

Vietnam reporting

Long before that, I noted that his career trajectory helped make defeatism part of the mental bias of ambitious military reporters:

What is not often discussed is how professional ambitions make journalists defeatists. When wars go well, the uniformed military receives the praise. It is they who enter into history. We remember Nimitz and Patton, not the correspondents who wrote dispatches about the victories at Midway and Bastogne.

In contrast, Vietnam made the careers of David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, and Neil Sheehan. Exposing military failure and atrocities makes the journalist the hero not the chronicler. It is a powerful temptation, one which could cause a reporter to lose proportion and distort the meaning of events. Yet this is not something that seems to get discussed much.

Kimball points to this article by Hilton Kramer who also is not a Halberstam fan. One passage was interesting because of its insight into the journalism racket and for its perverse historical echoes.

What I was expecting that day over lunch were some sage observations about the way the policy of détente, following upon the debacle in Vietnam, was affecting the situation in Europe. But as the wine flowed and our conversation became more animated and confidential, the subject that was uppermost on the mind of my luncheon companion, who had spent many years in both Eastern and Western Europe, turned out to be something else. Rather to my surprise, I was suddenly treated to a long and acute analysis of what was happening to the Times’s foreign news coverage as a result of the Vietnam War. This was a subject that had clearly become a cause of considerable worry and professional chagrin for this writer, whose journalistic experience went back to the Second World War and who harbored few illusions about the kind of suffering and social wreckage that Communism had brought to the millions whose lives it had come to dominate.

The vehement, free-wheeling tirade to which I was treated that day touched on many particular people, editors as well as reporters, and many specific episodes, but its essential points were the following: The Vietnam War was proving to be a disaster for the Times’s foreign coverage. The paper had to send in all those reporters in relays to cover the war. Many of them were young men who had little or no experience of the world. They knew nothing about politics and even less about war. There were exceptions, of course, but very few. Some had never before had a serious foreign assignment or seen any military combat. At one point the Times had even sent in a fashion reporter from its Paris bureau. Communism was an abstraction to them. They thought the real enemy in Vietnam was the USA. They weren’t Communists themselves, but they proved to be complete suckers for the anti-anti-Communist line that was now ascendant in the Western press. History for a lot of these guys began with the election of John F. Kennedy, and most of them thought Bobby Kennedy was a saint. In Vietnam, they had three ambitions: to get out alive, to win a Pulitzer, and to see America defeated. Their whole view of the world was shaped by Vietnam. They saw the world divided into good guys and bad guys, and we were the bad guys. Then, when they had finished their stint in Vietnam, they had to be rewarded with assignments to more glamorous foreign capitals, where they were likely to understand even less than they had in Saigon, and where they seldom knew the language, the history, or the culture of the countries they were writing about. This was the kind of comic-strip coverage of foreign affairs the Times was now getting. All in all, it was probably a good thing that newspaper readers were now less interested in foreign affairs than they used to be. It was keeping the circulation of misinformation at a lower level than it would otherwise be.

I can’t say that this conversation changed my view of the world, but it certainly changed the way I read the foreign news columns of the Times, and not only the Times. It wasn’t until a little later, as I watched some of these Vietnam-era correspondents ascend to positions of power on the paper, that I realized they were bringing the same good guy-bad guy scenario, with America as the bad guy, to their coverage of the domestic scene as well.

If Kramer’s lunch companion was right, then the Times was repeating the mistakes of the US Army which helped set the stage for the Vietnam quagmire. After World War Two, the Army’s system of Professional Military Education went into decline. By 1962, this had produced a generation of officers ill-equipped to confront the strategic and operational challenges of counter-insurgencies and limited wars. It was these under-educated generals that Halberstam railed against in Vietnam and in his later books.

In the Spring 1998 issue of Joint Forces Quarterly, Lieutenant General Leonard D. Holder, Jr., and historian Williamson Murray explained why the service schools suffered this fate:

Despite the tributes U.S. military leaders lavished on the role of PME in preparing them for World War II, education fell into decline after the war. The Cold War with its monolithic dependence on nuclear weapons, which required little adaptation, was one reason. With a constant threat, there was less cause to study the complexities of strategy and war, particularly given the fact that America emphasized deterrence rather than combat. More-over, a generational shift in the l950s brought the junior officers of World War II to command positions. They had joined the military in the 1930s and gone to war as lieutenants and captains with-out receiving PME and returned home as colonels and generals. As a result, many discounted the role of PME in military professionalism. By the late l950s, the services had allowed professional military education to drift.

So it turns out that Halberstam and Co. were not that different from the hubristic, ignorant generals that populate their books and news stories about Vietnam.

There is one key institutional difference. The Army and other services went to great lengths to discover, learn, and teach the lessons of Vietnam. The journalist guild, however, still pretends that their heroes such as Halberstam got it right the first time in 1965.