David Halberstam Interview (page: 3 / 5) Pulitzer Prize for Journalism	Print Interview

Neil Sheehan called his book about the war A Bright Shining Lie. What was the big lie about, as you saw it? Do you know?

David Halberstam: I think that the big lie of war began in Washington. It began with the fear of McCarthyism, the fear of the Democratic Party that if it "lost" a country, as it was blamed in China -- "lost a country" to the Communists, it would be attacked and driven out of power. In other words, there was a historical process, the coming of a modern China that took place in the '40s, the victory of Mao over Chiang Kai-shek. Because the Democrats had been in power for so long, the Republicans, eager for an issue, seized on that, that the Democrats had been "soft on Communism." They used that issue quite unscrupulously, in a very ugly way, and it got into the bloodstream. Vietnam is the direct product of that.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The Democratic administration did not care really about Vietnam, and I don't think it, in its heart of hearts, when it really examined the information, believed this thing could be done, but what it did not want to do was lose Vietnam and therefore be attacked by the Republican center, someone like, of all people, Richard Nixon who would have attacked them. So they made this commitment. The great big lie was trying to see a war, which was an extension of Vietnamese nationalism, as if it were a cold war battle, i.e., we were the west, they were the Communists, and that didn't work. I mean, we said that, "Western forces, pro-Western, pro-democratic forces against Communists," and that would be the headlines, going back to the French Indochina war. "Western forces drive back Reds!" But that's not how the Vietnamese saw it.

They saw this as nationalism versus neocolonialism, and we were, in the words of my friend Bernard Fall, who was killed there -- a great historian of that war -- we were walking in the same footsteps as the French, although dreaming different dreams.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We did not think we were fighting a colonial war, but we thought we were fighting to be good guys and to help them out and then go home. But to the Vietnamese, we were white, we were Caucasian, we were there to stop them from their destiny. And the other side, because it had driven out the French, had title to all the nationalism, and, therefore they were the heirs of a revolution. The American government would never admit that this war was a revolution, and that therefore we were on the wrong side of a revolution. So if you want one big lie, that is the big encompassing lie. Therefore, from the start, the terminology was wrong, the "western forces," "pro-democratic forces," "Communist Reds." They were the heirs. Ho Chi Minh was seen by his people as George Washington, and he was the heroic figure, and their system worked and ours did not. When we sent our young men, these wonderful young men, 500,000 young men who fought brilliantly, beautifully, with great courage, they were doing it with great courage and personal loyalty in a hopeless cause. It's a very sad story.

A very sad story. You mentioned your fallen friend, Bernard Fall. You not only risk the ire of the government when you write about a story like Vietnam. You risk your life.

David Halberstam: I thought it was worth it. I think all of us did. I don't think you just take on the government of the United States. First off, you cover the war. You had to go out, you had to be in the field, and you had to see it. You could not get the truth in Saigon. The people in Saigon, by and large, were part of the American hierarchy, and they told you exactly what their superiors wanted. We had a bad policy, as I've just said. So we created a lying machine in which Washington told Saigon what it wanted to hear, and the American generals and ambassadors, hearing that, set up a curve of reporting. Instead of reporting flowing up -- "This is the truth, we tell the superior," and it works upward, and then they tell Washington -- it was the reverse. The circulatory system was reversed.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Washington tells Saigon at the top what it wants to hear. Thereupon, Saigon at this level, going down level by level, tells people what "You will report or you will not be promoted." The military has a great deal of power to affect promotion, and we would watch this. We would be with these guys who were captains, and a general would be coming from Washington the next day, and he'd be wanting to inspect and get a progress report. I would be with them, and they would be debating on how much truth to tell, because if they told the real truth, they might get in trouble, not from their immediate superior, but by the person from the Saigon command who came through. So you had this false reporting. You had to go out into the field to get the truth. The people in the field would tell you the truth because they were angry, and they were bitter. They were pissed. They were watching their fellow young Americans fight and die in a war where the Vietnamese, cynically or otherwise, were not fighting or were incompetent. So you could get the truth. So you had to go out there just to get the story.

I know I felt this way particularly. I was a signature figure of that war because, in the American media in the early '60s, The New York Times was a disproportionately powerful paper, much more so than it is now. You have to understand that the Herald Tribune -- which had been its great rival, with a great team of foreign correspondents -- was dying. It was almost dead. There wasn't a Tribune reporter there. The Washington Post, which was to become a great national newspaper, was not yet one. It had one foreign correspondent and only a handful of national correspondents. Ben Bradlee had not yet made it a great paper. It didn't have a correspondent there. That was true of the Los Angeles Times. It was also true of The Wall Street Journal. The media and the networks were not yet powerful. They were still just beginning to feel their power. They were going at that time from 15 minutes to 30-minute news shows. They were going from black and white to color, and they didn't have the satellites.

So we were the one paper with 40 or 50 foreign correspondents. We had power. People in Washington read The New York Times at breakfast. So my dispatches, which were not necessarily any different or better than Neil Sheehan's or Peter Arnett's, had an impact. Because of that, I became the point man, disproportionately, for what I was writing, because of the impact in Washington.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. As this tension built and I became the enemy of the government, and my stories went under more and more criticism from Washington and Saigon, there was an additional moral, ethical burden on me, if I was taking on the government of the United States, just to be out in the field more than anybody else. To be there, to see battle, to put myself on the line. The one thing I could not afford, it seemed to me, given the way I had been raised up, and the kind of values that I had had imposed upon me in my childhood and in my professional apprenticeship -- I could not be an armchair person sitting in Saigon doing it theoretically. I had to be out in the field, seeing more battles, if possible, than anybody else at that time. Later, Peter Arnett saw more combat than anybody else, but I had to be there. It was implicit in my role. It was very deliberate on my part.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

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