A GENERAL REFLECTS ON WAR, MEDIA

About six months before Lyndon B. Johnson’s death in early 1973, the ailing former President met one last time with Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam until mid-1968. Over breakfast, Johnson unhappily reflected on the war.

As Westmoreland recalls it, Johnson “really let his hair down,” saying that “one of the biggest mistakes he’d made was not imposing censorship--which really surprised me.”

The war ended with the fall of Saigon 10 years ago this week. Westmoreland, now 71 and retired, thinks that television, “a new dimension” in war reporting, was a major factor for the ever-decreasing public support for U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

But he says he never recommended censorship of print and broadcast reports from Vietnam, even though he seriously considered it. There were several reasons, he says, including that “It was not basically a military matter. It was a political decision that had to be made.”

Unlike reporters in World War II and Korea, correspondents accredited by the U.S. military in Vietnam never had to submit their battlefield stories for official scrutiny before publication or broadcast. They only had to agree to comply with ground rules that primarily dealt with the reporting of troop movements and military operations.

Westmoreland says that his command couldn’t unilaterally impose censorship because that had to be done by the “sovereign power”--South Vietnam--and U.S. officials never sought approval of that from the Saigon government.

Even had the request been made and approved, he adds, network and wire service reporters could easily have gotten around censorship by taking commercial flights out of Saigon and filing from nearby points--Hong Kong, Tokyo or Bangkok.

Their accreditation could be suspended or revoked, although retired Maj. Gen. Winant Sidle, Westmoreland’s press chief in Saigon, says only nine journalists, all from print, had their credentials suspended during the war for violation of the ground rules.

But if reporters felt that the story was worth it, nothing stopped them flying out of Saigon to file it, Westmoreland says.

“In other words, what I’m really saying is that even though if censorship had been imposed, the rug could have been pulled out from under us, and quite frankly I think those of us responsible for trying to impose it would have looked rather foolish.”

Had censorship been imposed, says Sidle, the work would have been done by special Army Reserve field censorship units similar to those of World II. Each was equipped to handle television, radio and print stories on military operations, he says, and “they were all set to go--had the stamps, scissors, all of that.”

As U.S. troop strength increased in Vietnam, so did the ability of print and broadcast reporters to get around. Seats for them were booked on military flights. At times, helicopters were specifically assigned to fly them to and from battlefields.

The reporting grew increasingly critical, often outraging both the military and top U.S. civilian officials, and, as Westmoreland says, “There were times I was very disillusioned by what I considered very unfair reporting” by both TV and print reporters.

But the military’s assistance rarely was withheld. The reason, he says, was that early in the military buildup in Vietnam, the U.S. Mission in Saigon, having ruled out censorship, decided on a policy of maximum cooperation with journalists--up to and including PX privileges for accredited correspondents.

“I felt that if we cooperated with them--we didn’t have anything to hide--we could expect fair and objective reporting,” he says. “And I would say in general that was forthcoming”--he wryly smiles--”but not in all cases.”

The relative lack of journalistic constraints in Vietnam was a far cry from the military censorship imposed on broadcast and print journalists in World War II--the first war covered by the then-new medium of radio.

Or in Korea, which, although Vietnam is commonly thought of as the first televised war, is where the first efforts of network television to cover a war really began.

In those earlier wars, censors could excise portions of print and broadcast reports on grounds of security or what they deemed might be of aid and comfort to the enemy. By today’s standards, that would be considered shocking.

However, Larry LeSueur, a CBS Radio correspondent who reported live from the Normandy beachhead on D-Day in 1944, says that the censorship he experienced in World War II “never was seriously bad.”

A wartime colleague still reporting for CBS, Richard C. Hottelet, agrees with that assessment. He can recall “a silly episode” here and there. But he doesn’t recall any examples of censorship that “made me bite my fingernails to the quick.”

Two broadcast reporters who covered the Korean War, NBC’s Irving R. Levine and George Herman of CBS, respectively describe the censorship in that war as “benign” and “very informal,” although a colleague, CBS’ Robert Pierpoint, strongly disagrees.

Pierpoint, who says he opposes censorship “in any form” and thus is “a little feistier” about it, recalls that censorship in Korea was strict, often maddening, and that “I must have had one fight a week about it.”

What might have happened had he come across in Korea the same kind of controversial story that Morley Safer of CBS reported from Vietnam in 1965--the burning of peasant houses in Cam Ne by Marines who said they’d taken fire from the hamlet?

“It would have been heavily censored and I would have had a hell of a fight,” Pierpoint says. The military, he feels, would have said the story “would have caused morale problems” for U.S. forces, which was on the list of no-nos for correspondents.

Because there was virtually no censorship in Vietnam, he says, “I think I have to say that the American public was better informed about the war” and got “a more honest, realistic view of what was going on in Vietnam.”

Hottelet, who covered World War II as a radio reporter for CBS and was in Vietnam in 1966 as a television correspondent for the network, says that since Vietnam “was not a declared war, there was no way of imposing wartime censorship. . . .

“They (U.S. officials) had no legal basis for censorship. I’m sure they would have loved censorship, but the absence of it was part of the price they paid for keeping it an undeclared war.”

However, he rejects any suggestion that reporters in World War II basically were cheerleaders, not prone, as were their Vietnam counterparts, to critical reporting about the American effort.

“That’s unfair,” he says. “When things didn’t go well, we reported they weren’t going well. And don’t forget, everyone is affected by the climate in which he lives and works, and there was no doubt about World War II. . . . It was a clean, well-defined war.

“Whereas in Vietnam, everything was abnormal.”

Westmoreland is not certain what may happen if the United States ever gets into another undeclared war: “That depends on the circumstances at the time . . . but I do believe there will be very serious consideration given to some sort of censorship. What form it will take I don’t know, and how it will be decreed is another matter.”

But it’s something both sides, the government and print and broadcast journalists, will always have to cope with as a legacy of Vietnam, he feels.

“The thing that makes us what we are is the First Amendment,” he says. “We would not be the type of society we are if we did not have a free press.

“On the other hand, if you get into a conflict that’s going to take time, going to have wear and tear on the society, with the sacrifice involved in it, that open society could become a liability in the context of a national undertaking.

“I think basically it’s a dilemma, it’s a paradox. And I would say, philosophically, as you look at America today and the long reach of history, one of the big challenges we’re going to have to face is whether we’re going to have our cake and eat it, too.”