MEDIA WINERS COMPLAIN BUT AMERICANS RECALL VIETNAM

Since the war started in the Persian Gulf, I've had occasion to catch the big-time gurus of the national media several times on C-SPAN, or some other network, speaking as usual in highly self-congratulatory tones about their work. At some point in these discussions, the subject of Vietnam comes up. Because so many of the leading network correspondents and other media gurus covered the Vietnam War, the discussion gets interesting at this point.

Sooner or later, someone asks whether the media didn't play a role in America's defeat in that misbegotten, no-win war in Southeast Asia. The typical media response takes one of two forms: the media types either a) flatly deny that their biased coverage affected the course of the war and its disastrous results for the cause of freedom; or b) (this one's espoused by more forthright media types) they admit that media coverage did have the decisive effect, and flat-out argue that the American defeat was a good thing. Let's consider a few of the most candid media commentators, in the light of the known war-winning strategy of the North Vietnamese.

Eminent New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in his column of April 30, 1975: "They (the reporters and the cameras) brought the issue of the war to the people, before the Congress and the courts, and forced the withdrawal of American power from Vietnam."

Robert Elegant of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "For the first time in modern history the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all on the television screen."

Ian Ward, of the London Daily Telegraph, had this to say: "Never has distortion in the press reached such limits through both willful and unintentional means, and, as a result, the Western press emerged as the most effective weapon in Hanoi's arsenal."

These journalists were describing the stated North Vietnamese war strategy, which relied for its most crucial effect on the homefront in America, as communicated through the national news media, especially television news.

Or listen to Cyrus Sulzberger, a veteran foreign correspondent, as he explained in his New York Times column in may, 1969:

"The real (North Vietnamese war) objective ... is to achieve victory on the main battlefield, which is neither military nor in Vietnam, but political and in the United States ... The particular contribution of Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap to this strategy has been realization that great powers engaged in small wars are more vulnerable at home than on the battlefield. Therefore each Communist offensive is aimed directly at American public opinion ... Such strategy calls for fighting on a secondary military battlefield in order to destroy by erosion a primary battlefield."

Truong Nhu Tang, a former Vietcong minsiter of justice, explained the role the 1968 Tet Offensive played in this strategy:

"We had been preparing for the Tet offensive since 1966 to create pressure and to help the anti-war movement in the United States. We needed to deliver a dramatic blow so that public opinion in the world and the United States would turn against the American government ... After the Tet Offensive, all of our divisions ended up without even half their forces. I believe that the Americans at Tet did not sustain great losses of human lives, but from the political point of view it was a very heavy blow for President Johnson's government ... So what we lost on the military front we won on the diplomatic and psychological front the mass media, the press, television and the liberals in the United States."

General Vo Nguyen Giap, the famous commander of all North Vietnamese forces, has echoed this same theme:

"The war was fought on many fronts. At that time, the most important front was American public opinion."

Embedded deep in the American consciousness is a fundamental understanding of the role played by a too-often duplicitous national news media during the Vietnam War. Then as now, most Americans had plenty of sympathy with LBJ's Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who, in a moment of overwhelming frustration during those terrible years, turned on a hostile commentator and blurted out: "Whose side are you on?!"

That's why the whining of so many media types about the military's restricting media access during this war is finding few sympathetic listeners in Middle America. Turning the national media against America and against this war remains the fondest hope of one Saddam Hussein. Thankfully, for lots of reasons, it's unlikely to happen this time.