Vietnam: More on the Betrayal

Perhaps “betray” is not a good word. Since Iago cannot be said to betray his loyalty since he never felt any for Othello in the first place, yet as with Iago, the journalists and their Leftist allies were seen as virtuous as Iago. Iago didn’t betray his loyalty to Othello or others, because Iago was loyal only to himself. No, Iago betrayed the trust others put in him. That is a crime that deserves death and nothing else.

A National Review article describes more of such events.

Courtesy of Doug L, a commenter at Neo’s post here.

Some highlights.

In the days following the death of David Halberstam on April 23, praise of his journalism appeared in just about every major newspaper and magazine in America. Adhering to the principle of de mortuis, I did not interrupt the paeans with remarks about Halberstam’s gross misdeeds in Vietnam, which I had exposed in a book last year. But now that the funeral period has ended, the media has made clear that Halberstam’s elevation to the status of national hero is intended to be permanent, so in the interest of national history it has become necessary to point out how much Halberstam harmed the United States during his career.

…

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.

After Diem’s assassination, the South Vietnamese fared very poorly in their war against the Communists, which was why the U.S. eventually had to send half a million troops to South Vietnam. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow quickly realized that as advocates of Diem’s ouster they could be held responsible for wrecking the South Vietnamese government, and so they devised a masterful strategy for neutralizing the accusation. Based on a few faulty pieces of evidence, they contended that the South Vietnamese war effort had crumbled before Diem’s overthrow, not after it. No one of influence succeeded in pointing out that these men’s own articles in 1963 contradicted this claim. The journalists thus succeeded in persuading the American people that Diem, rather than his successors, had ruined the country, and therefore that the press had been right in denouncing him. Newly available American and Vietnamese Communist sources, it turns out, show that the South Vietnamese were fighting very well until the last day of Diem’s life, and that their performance plummeted immediately after the coup because the new rulers purged suspected Diem loyalists and failed to lead.

…

The Vietnam-era journalists began a tradition that today’s press all too frequently upholds. We hear little from most large press outlets about American heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan—men like James Coffman Jr., Jason Dunham, Danny Dietz, and Christopher Adlesperger who have demonstrated extraordinary bravery in battle—or about our military successes there. Instead of associating the names of heroes with these wars, Americans associate the words they hear most often from the press, like Abu Ghraib and Haditha.

The media and their defenders try to counter charges of ignoring heroism by claiming that they simply report what will sell the most newspapers or attract the most viewers, and that negative stories sell better than positive ones. Yet the press does not shy away from publicizing other heroes, such as individuals who rescue people from burning buildings or donate their organs to desperately ill patients. Stories on heroism in Iraq attract great public interest because, outside of this country’s elite circles, the American public still treasures military heroism. One need only look at the size of the military-history section at a local bookstore, or the box-office figures for movies showing Americans behaving bravely under fire. Clearly, the media’s present hostility to the Bush administration and the military is such that a potential loss of subscribers or viewers will not deter them from using their power against the government.

The elipses delineate something I skipped. Read the rest, if you wish to know more.

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