The Lincoln Plawg

Wednesday, October 16, 2002 04:54 a.m.

Credibility Gaps, Old and New: McCarthy, Vietnam - and Iraq

I've a copy of a fascinating little book, published in 1971, called The Unholy Hymnal, in which statements of dubious veracity from the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, mostly concerned with the Vietnam War, are paired with explanations of the true position [1].

The book's own credibility is somewhat diminished, however, by the astonishing assertion in the foreword that

In previous periods of history, as Walter Lippman has noted [I can't find a reference for this], there seems to have been no need for such a phrase.

Supposedly, LBJ ushered in

both a quantitative and a qualitative change.

Problem is, journalists of the generation of the author [2] had a considerable personal interest in distinguishing the Johnson-Nixon era from earlier times when they had quite happily regurgitated undigested every scrap, be it fillet steak or pig-swill, that any branch of government put out for them, under the pernicious doctrine of objective reporting.

Journalists of that and earlier generations were doubly culpable in that there was an equal gap - call it an honesty gap - between the evidence they had about what was going on and what they told their readers. Not direct and incontrovertible evidence, perhaps, but good enough to damage the credibility of government actors sufficiently to open them up to questioning.

Joe McCarthy

Take the case of Sen Joseph McCarthy. Of course, the credibility gap with Tailgunner Joe that continues to this day is that he didn't start McCarthyism - he came way late to the party in 1950 as a little known and less regarded freshman Senator whose main achievement was to have finished off the La Follette dynasty in Wisconsin in 1946. Both the Smith and McCarran Acts were passed by Democratic-majority Congresses and signed by Democratic Presidents; HUAC was still active (though less gaudily so than hitherto) in the Democratic-controlled 81st Congress, and Truman had introduced the regime of loyalty oaths for the government service in 1947.

The Wheeling, WV speech of Thursday, 9 February 1950 was too a feeble a seed to take root in any but the most fertile soil.

But the fact that the

205....members of the Communist Party...working in the State Department

became 207

bad risks

in Denver on the Friday, and

57 card-carrying members

in Salt Lake City later that day; and his mention of four names in a speech at Reno on February 11, whom he spun to journalists as Communists, but deliberately avoided calling Communists in his speech, were all quite sufficient to put the average political journo on notice right from the start that McCarthy was not to be believed.

And some wrote as much at the time. As early as the following Tuesday, February 14, the Washington Post editorial, under the title Sewer Politics, accused McCarthy of

foul play....Rarely has a man in public life crawled and squirmed so abjectly.

The vast majority, however, were playing Sergeant Joe Friday and asking for, and printing, just the facts: which, under objective reporting, were the words the Senator said - whatever the absurdity or internal contradictions.

[All of this taken from the excellent Joe McCarthy and the Press by Edwin Bayley, pp17-32.]

So, if there was never a time at which McCarthy wasn't under suspicion as a manipulator of facts, if not an outright liar, why weren't Pulitzer-hungry journos falling over themselves to expose him at every turn?

Some had a good go (like Murray Marder and others from the Washington Post); but their impact was evidently limited for a good while. Bayley blames institutional factors (the way the wire services operated and the use the newspapers made of them) and the general post-War climate of fear staying the hand of the average publisher.

But, in essence, people believed what they wanted to believe - a story consistent with the Commie threat narrative they'd got accustomed to - on and off - since the Woodrow Wilson days of the Espionage Act and the Palmer Raids. And the average publisher was no Clayton Smith.

Vietnam

Again, though most of the facts were classified at the time, there was sufficient material in the public domain during the critical period running up to the definitive commitment of US combat forces in 1965 - not to mention information available 'on background' from official sources - to allow journalists to ask searching questions. (The Uncensored War by Daniel C Hallin covers the period.)

For instance, as early as May 1961, Johnson had been despatched to Saigon on a fact-finding mission to make nice with Ngo Dinh Diem. While in South Vietnam, he publicly compared Diem to Winston Churchill (it's that man again!). Back on the plane, so the story goes (reference searched for high and low....), he was quizzed on the remark by one of the journalists, and was supposed to have replied to the effect that Diem was

the only son-of-a-bitch we got out there.

This admission evidently did not shake the listening journos' confidence sufficiently to get them questioning what they were being told.

By mid-1963, no inside information was needed to see that Diem was devoid of both legitimacy and authority, ineffective militarily against the Communists (Ap Bac), and unnecessarily repressive towards his own people (Pagoda raids) (interesting CIA paper on Johnson's Decision To "Go Big" in Vietnam covering 1963-1965). If Homer Bigart's motto was correct, and the Kennedy Administration's policy was Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem (as it then seemed to be), the US effort in SVN was already more than half submerged! (Diem's successors were, equally obviously, not up to the job either.)

Journalists based in SVN, such as David Halberstam, wrote critical pieces from this time on; but they were up against the editorial line of their papers and op-ed writers, which was pretty much uncritical of US policy - and often hostile to criticism coming from reporters whose judgement had supposedly been warped by spending too much time 'in the field'.

Even when a prestige source like Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield called for a rethink of policy in SVN (as apparently happened after the November 1963 coup against Diem), the story was buried in the inside pages of the New York Times.

The (supposedly 'unprovoked') Tonkin Gulf Incidents were reported in strict accordance with official US reports. In particular, US newspapers made no use in questioning such reports of the public complaints by North Vietnam about the OPLAN 34-A raids mounted against its coast.

The twin explanations given by Hallin for this lack of probing journalism - Cold War ideology and objective reporting - go only so far. One needn't have doubted the ultimate goal of policy - stemming the global spread of Communism - in questioning the strategy employed by the US in SVN. (Even though Halberstam and Co criticised particular US policies and actions, they were for some time generally supportive of US military involvement in the country.) And expressions of doubt from 'official sources' like Mansfield could have been used as cover for such questioning.

There was (so far as I am aware) no equivalent to the Washington Post McCarthy 'Sewer' editorial during the key period running up to the commitment of major ground forces. As far as I know, the only journalist questioning the Administration version of events in the weeks following the Incidents was maverick 'radical' I F Stone [3] - who, needless to say, did not have quite the profile or clout of the Post!

Iraq

Things are rather different today. No Cold War, much less popular deference to authority, a multiplicity of news and comment media (much of it online): surely the current news environment is as hostile to a persistent credibility gap as a global perfect market to the arbitrageur?

After all, running a credibility gap is only bearable to a government so long as it isn't being effectively called on it; or if its voters are of a mind to ignore those calls.

Right now, the Bush Administration is currently being called on a goodly number of dubious statements relating to Iraq (as previously discussed) - and by prestigious news organisations, too (including the Washington Post).

And, according to the polls, the public is far from convinced that the Bush Iraq policy is without flaw. In the New York Times-CBS poll previously mentioned, 51% thought that Congress wasn't asking enough questions about the policy (Q58 - a worrying 20% thinking it was asking too many!).

However, if the American public's support for war against Saddam is soft, its reservations and doubts seem unfocussed, despite the breadth and depth of the opinions available to it.

My hunch (no source, not for want of looking!) is that the prime news source for most American citizens is local TV news; whilst 'if it bleeds, it leads' may be an oversimplified characterisation of its news agenda, nevertheless I'd be surprised to see much time in a 22 minute local news bulletin given over to teasing out the strands of the aluminium tubes or the Atta Prague meeting stories!

What could turn this unfocussed popular unease towards the war into outright, faxing-Congressmen opposition? A whole mess of inconsistencies and evasions won't do it - we've got that already! Written proof of the Administration's intention to deceive? Email encourages stupidity, but I wouldn't hold my breath. An Administration figure like Colin Powell bailing? Perhaps - but would it ever happen?

The bleating of the Usual (liberal) Suspects merely consolidates the War Party's hold on opinion - much like the opposition of Sen Wayne Morse - according to Stanley Karnow, the Typhoid Mary of Capitol Hill! [4] - to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution reassured its supporters that they were right.

Perhaps what is needed is a guy (or three) from the Right, a solid friend of the armed services with a record of support for US military action, to choose the right moment (whatever that is) to declare his opposition to the Administration's plans.

Back in 1964, the telephone recordings in the LBJ Library show that the President's mentor, Sen Richard Russell (D-Ga) - a man about as far from a peacenik as it was possible to get! - confided to Johnson his deep concerns about getting out of SVN once combat troops had been deployed in large numbers (conversation on May 27 1964 at 10.55 am: transcribed in Beschloss Taking Charge (p363ff), streamed here)

Russell kept his doubts private - his present-day equivalent, if there is one, would be under less institutional pressure to do so.

There is something similar online
'Albert E. Kahn (1912-1979), a journalist and author sympathetic to socialism who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era'
In A Time Of Torment (1967) p195 - nothing online that I could find
Vietnam - A History pp380-94