...was there a long time.

Got it always wrong.

And he got it wrong, and he ah...I guess we could spare Keyes. Although Keyes, you know Keyes wrote this autobiography which is so revealing. You know what the most revealing thing about it was the title. It was called Not Without the Americans. You know, forty years in Asia...

No, I mean, and he learned, and he...Keyes was terrific. You could go out with him all day long and he'd get everything right, and then at 5:00 he'd start saluting the American flag. If they'd bring the flag down, he'd salute. Always went with the flag.

I went with Keyes to China one time in '73. I didn't go with him, they put him on a group, in the group I was travelling with. And we get to some really remote place in China, and the Chinese would always end up...

Did you have any specific problems with editors?

You have to understand that I was very much a point man for all this conflict between a very powerful executive branch and right wing and the press, because there was a small handful of reporters and I was the New York Times person which meant that I was the person served most often to the President of the United States for breakfast. So that my reporting became what was known as controversial.

And that was very difficult and I was also...the Times editors were made very nervous by it. You have to understand that I think I was twenty-eight years old at the time. They...and I was audacious and there's a lot of ego in me and drive and I'm combative and I'm combative not just with ambassadors and generals but I'm combative with my own editors.

Turner Catledge, my former managing editor once said of me rather kindly, "David is almost as good a reporter as he thinks he is." And I cite that because yes, it was a kind of constant ongoing pressure. They would print what I was writing and they were very good about that in a way.

You know, they...I mean, intuitively something was happening, and they somehow sensed it but they were being dragged into something they did not want. They were printing it but they didn't quite believe it.

And I remember in the fall of '63, Marguerite Higgins came out for the Herald Tribune and we should note that Marguerite Higgins was very much a Pentagon spokesman...I think she was married to an Air Force general at the time. She was also I think a very dedicated conservative and I think quite a serious Catholic. So she hated the idea of what we were reporting. And those were her identifiable credentials. Almost everyone knew that she was not just a straight reporter but she was a real voice of a certain segment.

And she went down to the Mekong Delta in a day or two and she...and I had a long, long identifiable thing, almost I'm proudest of...series of articles for more than a year chronicling the collapse of the ARVN forces in the Mekong Delta. I mean systematic...I mean I'm very, very proud of it. It's a very accurate portrayal of a collapse of an army, and it went on month after month and I had terrific sources there. I mean there just weren't better sources.

So she goes down there and she's there a week and suddenly there's just nothing but stories that appear in the Herald Tribune saying you know victory on its way, you know, finding out whatever colonel wants to get... general...and quoting him as saying, you know, victory on, here, near at hand, the VC are in retreat, and crazy kind of stuff. And so the Times very nervously began to send me cables, saying, you know, Higgins today says, you know, victory near, VC being routed. What say you?

I got about one or two of these and I finally sent a cable saying you mention that woman's name to me one more time in a cable I will resign, repeat, resign. I can still see myself typing it. I was very full of myself. And I mean it, repeat, mean it. You know, Halberstam.

And then about five letters saying please Halbert, cool down, they sent over I think Gerry King from Hong Kong to cool me down. We really still love you but I mean can't you...can't you get one of your colonels to use his real name? Can't we have somebody instead of one of your anonymous colonels, which is sort of like Ben Bradlee saying to Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward, couldn't your nice Mr. Throat please let us use his name.

I mean it was a great storm and it was...you know...people in the Pentagon were leaking...generals would leak stories, Higgins, Marguerite Higgins says that young boy Halberstam was shown a photograph of Viet Cong bodies and he burst into tears. I mean, there was no such thing. And I wish in a way somebody had shown me a photograph of Viet Cong bodies and I wish I had burst into tears. I mean, I wish I had the sensibility then about the war and the killing that I have now but I didn't and I mean, it was the kind of thing, attacking even your manhood.

And then of course there is the moment that the President of the Untied States asked the publisher of the New York Times to pull me out. Now you have to understand about John F. Kennedy, that he was wonderfully manipulative of the press. I mean the press performed in Washington as badly in the Kennedy Administration...I mean he really got this enormous benefit of the doubt because he was charming, articulate, he'd gone to the same schools, had the same professor, read the same books, everybody loved him. I mean he really handled that.

He played that press corps like a yo-yo. And the one thing he couldn't control was this little group out in Saigon. We didn't give a damn about Kennedy. I didn't give a damn about being invited to Hickory Hill or think...I mean, I didn't care whether Jackie was wonderful or they were inviting you know de Gaulle or somebody like that...I mean, André Malraux for dinner.

I mean, that there was this wonderful...it didn't matter in Saigon. People were dying, friends of ours were dying in the rice paddies and it was clearly what the Kennedy people were saying was bullshit.

Now, Kennedy was very shrewd. He would tell people like Arthur Schlesinger that the only way he could find out what was going on in Saigon was reading Sheehan and my cables. How come I can only find out the truth in the New York Times but not from my ambassadors.

At the same time it was very clear that he was on his way to a first class foreign policy failure. I mean, it was just out of hand and it was collapsing and the same kind of thing that would happen later in Watergate where once the thing collapses everybody starts running to the lifeboats trying to save his or her own soul, and on the way stopping only to leak stuff to reporters. I mean it's...it was a reporter's dream, because we had every source connected.

And there every day on the front page would be a story of the collapse and he was going crazy. So about the fall of 1963, October I think, the new young publisher of the Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known as Punch, who has I think by chance had been made publisher of the Times because his brother-in-law that they thought should have been publisher has died. So suddenly Punch is put into the ah, into this new job. He's taken over for his first meeting with President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and he's very nervous.

I mean Punch is the guy everybody, you know, they've never taken seriously at he Times and they've put in charge of the air conditioning unit, you know. He's the guy that no one takes seriously. And he's nervous and he says to Scotty Reston, "Scotty, what do I say to him? He's president of the United States." Scotty says, "Punch, don't worry. He's going to ask you about your kids and you ask him about his kids." Punch says, "that's good, that's good."

So Punch walks in and Kennedy says, "What do you think about your young man in Saigon?" "Oh, we like him fine." "You don't think he's too close to the story." "Oh no, no, no." Of course they did really, they were really very nervous. "Oh no, no, we don't think he's too close to the story."

"You weren't just gonna be thinking of sending him to Rome or Paris by any chance were you?" "No, no," said Punch. So this is the good part of the Times, sometimes they're nervous and uncertain but I think they're very good on direct pressure.

I mean if you make a direct thing, as Kennedy did trying to pull me out of there. I was scheduled for a month's vacation at the time and I got an immediate cable saying under no circumstances could I have it, that by no means look like we were caving in to the administration. But they were very, very uneasy.

And it's no fun, I mean, listen, I mean later it became very, very legitimate for reporters to take on the Embassy to take on the war, to take on those military statistics and assumptions. In those days it was really...I mean to say the kinds of things that we were saying, which was that it wasn't working, it didn't work or that it was connected to the French Indochina War.

That was really radical in those days in the early '60s. I mean that was, I mean we were the most radical possible viewpoint that the center of a society and I mean the center of society or organizations like the New York Times, CBS, AP could possibly absorb. We were the outer extremity of it. And those were...I mean there was an enormous amount of pressure and I mean, you felt it every day.

I wonder if you could go into the story of Charlie Moore and Time.

Well, it was not just John Kennedy and the Pentagon that loved Vietnam. It was Harry Luce and Time who loved it. I mean in fact, I think Kennedy had a lot of doubts about Vietnam.

I think he you know I think he knew that you do not want to get caught in the same footsteps as the French and I don't think he wanted to see his administration sucked into the rice paddies of Indochina. And so, I think he said what he thought in those days was politically the minimal commitment he could.

I think the Luce publications really were enthusiastic about the war. I think there was a kind of American jingoism, that they really symbolized. I thought it was the true voice of Christian capitalism.

If you were a correspondent in Moscow in those days, as you might have listened to Pravda to get the true voice of Soviet politburo. If you were a foreign correspondent in America and you didn't want the Voice of America liberalism or the government, but the true unconscious voice of the center of American Christian capitalism. I think Time Magazine was.

And Time Magazine you know thought that all the world A) wanted American values and B) that American power could do anything and that we had an inherent role and responsibility to teach these people what was right for them in Vietnam. And you know Otto Fuerbringer was a very conservative, powerful figure who saw none of the nuances of the complexity of a guerrilla war...

Excuse me David, could you identify him more?

Otto Fuerbringer was the managing editor of...more Luce than Luce. I have a colleague named Stanley Karnow who once tried, who was then in Hong Kong bureau chief of Time Magazine and Karnow came back to the New York office and wanted to try and explain about the complexity of the war and the fact that probably the American commitment under Kennedy probably wasn't going to work and Otto just waved them aside and said you know, you don't have to worry about that. We'll just, you know, we'll just...we have the seventh fleet out there and we'll just pummel them into the ground with this seventh fleet.

I mean the idea that the American power which was white and technological would just be absorbed to the degree it was by the rice paddies, by a guerrilla war, was inconceivable to these men. It was a generational thing, again, and to men who cannot see outside their own spirits and souls.

So having said that, I mean, as we wrote from Vietnam, we offended not just Kennedy and we offended the defense department, but we offended the executives of Time Magazine which thought that the war, a worthy war should be done and could be done and we were the problem. Now, what Time Magazine traditionally did in a situation like this is it used its press department like a club.

So when Charles Moore who was a very distinguished Time Magazine correspondent out there filed some very negative stories, Time Magazine didn't just fail to print his reports, printed rather more optimistic appraisals, they thereupon decided that Moore was part of the problem and they wrote these savage press pieces, entirely dictated in New York.

I mean the files coming from the Saigon reporters about how well the reporters were doing there, were thrown out and in a way virtually Fuerbringer dictated this piece, saying you know, the war is being won and the only problem is this negative innocent young, left wing press group and out of this...I mean it was very, very, very rough hardball.

I mean it's no fun to find out you know that you are almost unpatriotic, that you are doing the devils work. You know, you don't likely if you're a young reporter take on the government of the United States anyway and here was a thing that really virtually questioned your patriotism. Plus your professional ability. And out of this both Charlie who's a very distinguished reporter, resigned and Mert Perry, the fulltime stringer resigned. I mean it was a great, great cause célèbre.

Mind you, Time Magazine really loved that war, stayed with it. No amount of defeat could change its views. There were certain people who the more the war was lost the more optimistic they became and it never seemed to limit their credibility.

I mean there's a columnist, I mean Joe Alsop who is the most imperial and imperious of American columnists and I mean he's a great power, at least he was a great power in Washington. I think not in the least because he was something of a bully and Joe would every year predict you know imminent victory. You know, light at the end of the tunnel, you know, victory in six months.

And every year the Viet Cong would get stronger and Joe would predict victory one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve years...every year an annual prediction of victory. Every year victory is further away, doesn't stop him, doesn't make him think twice, doesn't make him, you know, change his position.

And doesn't in the curious world of Washington where social contacts and bullying and snobbery are so important, never injured his credibility. Astonishing.

Cut. Just a little left.