A week or so later a Pentagon official reluctantly acknowledged, as I dutifully wrote, that some civilian areas in the North might have been damaged by American bombings, but he insisted that only military objectives had been targeted. Meanwhile, Salisbury, who would stay in North Vietnam until early January, was roaming around the country and consistently providing more evidence of civilian bombing. He further reported on Christmas Day that the American bombing had been going on for months. An “on the spot inspection” indicated that American attacks had led to civilian casualties in Hanoi and elsewhere “for some time past.” Four days later Salisbury reported that the city of Nam Dinh, fifty miles south of Hanoi, had been repeatedly bombed for more than a year, resulting in eighty-nine civilian deaths, as many as five hundred wounded, and more than twelve thousand homes destroyed.
I assumed, following the Mark Hill dictum, that there was much truth in the Salisbury dispatches and very little in the official denials I had been faithfully recording, like a good stenographer. I had been invited to a conference a few months earlier on the media and the military at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and shared a dinner there with a senior admiral serving in a most sensitive post at the Pentagon. I sensed his ambivalence about the war and expressed my concerns about the lack of integrity at the top of the Pentagon. The admiral made it clear, without saying as much, that he shared my view.
After the New Year’s holiday, I spent days interviewing various officers and civilians in Pentagon offices for whatever rational story I could conjure up, with the intent of creating a misleading record for Arthur Sylvester’s henchmen. I then telephoned the admiral’s secretary and asked for an interview. He agreed to see me, as I thought he might; I was sure he knew what I wanted. He’d had it with the lying; it was as simple as that. He told me that there were many post-bombing photographs (known as BDAs in the Pentagon, for bomb damage assessments) that confirmed the extensive damage to civilian targets that Salisbury had revealed. He also told me that McNamara, in the wake of the Salisbury report, had put a five-mile circle around downtown Hanoi and the navy and air force pilots were under orders not to bomb within that circle.
I knew I had a very important story, but I also understood I had to get confirmation. More pretend interviews were necessary before I contacted a young air force general I knew and liked, for his willingness to be totally open and outspoken about his conviction that only air force bombing missions had been effective in the war. I told him that it was my understanding that navy pilots were convinced that their bombing attacks in the Hanoi area had been far more accurate than the bombs dropped by the high-flying air force. The BDAs, the air force officer said, could not have been clearer in showing the extent of navy bombs that had missed their target inside Hanoi, creating extensive damage to civilian sites. He eventually showed me a few of the photos, pointing out direct hits and bomb craters that indicated a miss. Interservice rivalry had led me to some truth, but I had to provoke it to get there.
I discussed what I had learned with Don Sanders, the editor for whom I’d been writing since I got to the Pentagon, and he said, very simply, “Write it.” We both knew that there would be pushback, not only from the Pentagon, but from my peers on Correspondents Corridor. I had not helped matters by publishing a strident defense of Salisbury, while also attacking McNamara’s integrity, in the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly newspaper that had been gaining status and a growing audience among Catholics and others for its antiwar stance. I wrote the essay under a pseudonym, at the request of Bob Hoyt, the newspaper’s editor. Hoyt had reached out to me before Christmas, presumably because of my AP dispatches, and offered to publish anything I wished. He could not have picked a better time to make the pitch, because I was frantic with frustration at having to file story after story of official denials about the Salisbury dispatch—denials that I felt strongly were lies. I hated to write under a pseudonym, since I believed then and still do that anything worth saying is worth saying in a real voice, but I also knew what I had written for Hoyt would create anger among my colleagues, who would immediately figure out who had written the piece, which was published under the byline of Richard Horner.
The dispatch, published January 4, 1967, under a Washington dateline, violated every understanding about the sanctity of background sessions with McNamara and others in the Pentagon. It began this way:
One of the very highest Defense Department officials was exercising his not inconsiderable charm at a cocktail party in the department’s concrete lair along the Potomac River. At his feet lay a cluster of hard-bitten reporters, ready to laugh at the slightest provocation.
“What about the charges we bombed Hanoi?” asked one newsman. At the time of the party, the U.S. was still steadfastly denying the North Vietnamese charges that American war planes had killed or injured more than 100 civilians during raids on Hanoi Dec. 13 and 14.
Well, said the government official affably, he had learned one thing when he served in World War II: bombs never go where they are aimed. Now, 20 years later, the state of the art has improved, he added with a bright party grin: bombs occasionally go where they are aimed.
Some of the reporters laughed. Others quietly gagged on their drinks.
There was a personal reason for my anger toward McNamara. Earlier that winter my wife and I had gone skiing for a long weekend in Colorado. We had little money to spare and did the trip on the cheap, crashing with a college pal who had rented a condominium at Vail, flying on a low-cost ticket, and renting a car from a budget outfit whose check-in desk was a long bus ride away from the Denver terminal. We landed during a heavy snowstorm, good for skiing but bad for driving. Initially we were the only passengers on the bus to the rental office, but at a second stop another family got on—McNamara, his wife, and their two teenage children. I was knocked out; here was a guy from Camelot who was going skiing on the cheap. There was no Pentagon plane, no security, and no one to help him put on the tire chains that were essential for driving in the mountains in heavy snow. I was pretty sure he barely knew me, if at all—at that time I had seen him up close only a few times and never one-on-one—but I introduced myself as the new AP guy, got a nod, and that was that. I was awed by his integrity— no glitz at all—and his obvious desire to be a good husband and father to his immediate family when on vacation. It was hard for me to accept that this decent-seeming man was so willing to look the other way when it came to war. This added to my dismay at his response to Salisbury.
I knew that publishing the anecdote in the National Catholic Reporter was a form of professional suicide. The article quickly made the rounds in the Pentagon, and of course those at the cocktail party knew who had asked the question about the bombing in Hanoi, and of course everyone knew that McNamara had analyzed U.S. bombing efficiency and effectiveness as an air force officer during World War II. I was glad then and now that I had the guts to write the piece.
Enter Neil Sheehan, who had left UPI for the Times in 1964 and, after another year in Vietnam, had been assigned a few months earlier as the newspaper’s Pentagon correspondent. It did not take long for the two of us to connect. As I said, he was one of my journalism heroes, and he saw me as someone who was trying to cope. I cannot imagine the extent of his shock, as a combat reporter unafraid to challenge his government’s conduct of the war, at finding the Pentagon pressroom inhabitants to be so spineless. I made a point of introducing Neil to the few officers and civilians I had come to know who shared my dire view of the chances for American success in Vietnam.
The crunch came when I finished writing the first of what would be two articles that I thought would change or end the debate about Salisbury’s reportage: one about the BDAs I had seen and a second about McNamara’s order restricting the U.S. bombing in Hanoi. I’d shown a draft of the first article to Neil in advance and told him I hoped that the Times, which rarely used wire service copy on sensitive issues, would do something—anyt
hing—with it. Don Sanders made sure that the wire service’s report for Sunday, January 22, included an advance notice to editors of an exclusive dispatch from the Pentagon about American bombing in North Vietnam. My story, which moved hours later on the A wire, quoted intelligence sources as revealing that the United States had aerial photographs showing extensive damage to civilian structures in North Vietnam. There were specifics provided to me: At least fifty-nine civilian structures near a targeted railroad line close to Hanoi had been bombed, with evidence that many bombs had not hit their primary targets. The photos depicted only three bomb craters inside a targeted rail yard, with no fewer than forty craters found outside the yard’s perimeter. The obvious conclusion was that less than 10 percent of the bombs hit their primary target. The story also supported Salisbury’s report of major damage to civilian areas in Nam Dinh.
I knew there would be a flurry of action in Arthur Sylvester’s office as soon as the story began moving on the A wire; his office included a bank of Teletype machines that provided immediate access to the wire services’ reports. I heard nothing from Sylvester but was told later that he had gone to my ultimate boss, Wes Gallagher, the general manager of the AP, to register a complaint about me. Sheehan came up to me after my story moved on the wire and said he’d been asked by the Times’s foreign desk to check out my story. In the peculiar language of the Times, as I would learn when I worked for the newspaper, that meant that Sheehan, if he were able to independently confirm the dispatch, should rewrite it for publication under his byline for the front page of the Sunday paper. Instead of doing so, Sheehan asked me—I’ll never forget his words—if the article that appeared on the wire under my byline was precisely the same as the story I had filed. I said yes, and he said he would wait twenty or so minutes and then tell his foreign desk that he had checked out my story and it should be run in the newspaper. Sure enough, the dispatch, marked “By the Associated Press,” appeared prominently displayed on the Times’s front page the next morning. That did not happen often. I heard nothing from the AP big shots in New York.
Four days later, I dropped what I thought would be a stunner—an article flatly declaring that McNamara, in response to the furor over Salisbury’s dispatches, had ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the men who direct the nation’s armed forces, to ban all U.S. bombing missions within five miles of the city of Hanoi. I quoted someone I described only as “the source” as telling me that the new restrictions were “the result of everything that’s gone into the press. It shows that we’re taking into consideration what’s being written” by Salisbury. Don Sanders knew the dispatch would be attacked as soon as it moved on the A wire, and he came up with an ingenious idea. Why not wait until five thirty or so in the afternoon—morning newspapers on the East Coast would be planning their front page by then—and file it as “urgent,” assigning the piece a level of importance that was a notch below a bulletin, but one that gave me, as the Pentagon reporter, priority over all other stories moving or scheduled to move on the A wire. The next scene was out of a Mel Brooks farce. The wires around the world were pounding out my story when a wild-eyed Sylvester, then just a few weeks from retirement, came running into the pressroom and jammed his forefinger at me. “We know what you’re doing, you son of a bitch,” he said. I do not remember his next words, but the gist was that he would call my bosses in New York and that would be the end of me. I did not get mad at him in return; I understood he was a creature of the men at the top—McNamara and Vance.
Meanwhile, my dispatch of more than twelve hundred words had finished moving on the wire, and Neil Sheehan walked up to my desk, totally deadpan, with the same sequence of questions. It went something like this: Is the story you filed to your editors the same one that appeared on the Teletype? I said yes. Sheehan told me he again would tell his editors that he had checked out the story and it should be run on page 1. The next morning I woke up to find my article displayed even more prominently on the front page under a headline that read, “U.S. Bars Attacks in Area in Hanoi.” The piece did not hinder the bombing of North Vietnam for very long. McNamara had been scheduled for weeks to give testimony that morning before Congress on the Pentagon’s annual posture report—a summary of crises that could arise—and as usual he met with the press beforehand. He immediately denied my story, saying that American bombers had not been banned from bombing within a five-mile limit. He repeated the denial after his testimony. The pressure on me was intense, and I passed a message to my friendly admiral and managed to get reassured, very quickly, that there was, indeed, such a limit, and fought off any possibility that a faint heart in the AP would seek a published correction or clarification. It was not until the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971 that I learned the basis of McNamara’s denial. The navy had been assigned the task of drawing up the five-mile ban, but navy ships chart their course, as they have forever, on the basis of nautical miles. The other armed services use statute miles when computing distances. A nautical mile is greater, by 15 percent, than a statute mile. I had written “mile” instead of “statute mile.” McNamara’s denial prevailed, and the Washington press corps, for varied reasons, shrugged off the evidence that Salisbury, and the smug New York Times, got it right. No wonder we lost the war.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised by my colleagues. I knew Neil Sheehan was an exception to the rule. I got a good sense of what the rule was when I was invited over the winter to participate in a seminar on the war at, I think, Tufts University. One of the panelists was a senior military correspondent for a leading mainstream newspaper, and at some point a student asked him what he thought of the Vietnam War. “I don’t have an opinion,” he said, explaining his job was to cover it objectively. I was stunned. Of course he had an opinion; it was a war he supported. It was a classic double standard: If you supported the war, you were objective; if you were against it, you were a lefty—like I. F. Stone—and not trustworthy.
Within a few weeks, I was informed that Gallagher had set up a special investigative unit that would be run out of Washington and I was to join it. I protested, but Fred Hoffman was returning to his job as the AP’s chief Pentagon correspondent, and that was that. (Hoffman retired in 1984, during the Reagan administration, and almost immediately returned to the Pentagon as a senior official in the office of public affairs.)
Arthur Sylvester retired on February 1, 1967, after six years on the job as McNamara’s senior press aide. He published an essay in The Saturday Evening Post ten months later in which he brutally mocked the Pentagon press corps: “I don’t know a newsman who has served the government as an information officer in the Pentagon who hasn’t been dismayed at the evidence of shabby performance by what he used to think of with pride as his profession….For six years I watched cover stories [promulgated by his office] go down smooth as cream, when I thought they would cause a frightful gargle.”
There was no learning curve among the men in the Pentagon running the war.
· SIX ·
Bugs and a Book
Working on the AP’s new investigative team would have been a dream job if I hadn’t been abruptly pulled away from the dream job I had at the Pentagon. I’d emerged from my brief army experience as a private with skepticism about the officer corps; those for whom I worked were either at the end of an undistinguished career or just out of officer candidate school and inexperienced. The officers on duty at the Pentagon were more intense, more ambitious, and more in the world. I learned a lesson as a Pentagon correspondent that would stick with me during my career: There are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the Constitution and not the President, or an immediate superior. They deserved my respect and got it. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.
There was a remarkable group of young reporters who would dominate the coverage in the Washington bureau by the end of 1967. Two of them, Gaylord Shaw and Jame
s Polk, would leave the AP and win Pulitzer Prizes for their respective newspapers in the next decade. A third colleague, Carl Leubsdorf, would become the chief political reporter for the AP and move on to have a distinguished career as a bureau chief and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. But those three were not on the AP’s investigative team in early 1967; my new colleagues were strangers to me. It mattered little because I knew enough about myself to know that I was not much of a team player, and the concept behind the new unit was teamwork. I also thought that the initial editor of the group, for whom I’d worked on night rewrite when I first got to Washington, was a misfit—an unambitious, incurious fellow who would take no chances and would not be a success.
I would survive, I thought, if I could get on the road, working on a long-term project that had some connection to the military and would put the Pentagon contacts I had made in play. I had already figured out the core lesson of being a journalist—read before you write—and was a follower of the reporting being done in the news section of Science magazine, a weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In mid-January 1967, a gifted reporter named Elinor Langer published a two-part series on the perils of the Pentagon’s chemical and biological warfare (CBW) research program, whose budget had tripled between 1961 and 1964. The program, centered on the U.S. Army, was responsible for the Kennedy administration’s growing use of defoliants and herbicides in South Vietnam, whose long-term side effects, as I had learned while covering the Pentagon, were not known. Some of the air force units that sprayed the stuff over contested jungle areas and combat zones had a slogan that reeked of sarcasm: “Only we can prevent forests.”
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