I'm surprised they never had you on in its early days.

I think they asked me and I don't think it was going to connect, or that...I think maybe the issue on Vietnam is they wanted to do it. Was Roger Fisher doing it then?

Yeah.

Well, A) I think Roger was not necessarily wild to have someone else on Vietnam, and I think...and whatever it was, it didn't connect, I mean, and I'm not a...there's an element of...

If you go into Shaplin, David, identify him. I mean, Robert Shaplin of the New York...Veteran correspondent of the New Yorker. Like you did with Alsop.

There were some correspondents who were out in Vietnam for a long time, in fact had even been out there during the French period. How would you judge their performance?

Well, I think one of the vulnerabilities of reporters is that they're human beings and they, if they're good and they're assertive, they have sources and - Vietnamese for example - and they begin to become attached to these Vietnamese and they begin to see the country of Vietnam through the prism of their sources.

These are quite articulate, educated, sophisticated Vietnamese who want a Vietnam that's very much like these American reporters want a Vietnam. A Vietnam in the image of American parties, liberal, not communist, not right wing but kind of a nice modified social democracy.

I think that all of us including myself were vulnerable to this kind of thing of wanting what Graham Greene calls in a wonderful book The Quiet American, the third force. Something between what the communists of Vietnam on the other hand and the kind of right wing dictatorship on the other.

All of us I think were prey to this and a very good example of it, someone who stayed with it much too long and to far too great a degree I think let it affect his reporting and the prism really of those four or five Vietnamese that he knew obscured the prism through which the two million Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta who never factored in, who spoke no English, had never been to an American college, is....Bob Shaplin of the New Yorker.

Now he's a serious, well thought out man. He works very hard but I think his Vietnam was very much the Vietnam of a handful sort of Dai Viet, that's a sort of social democrat, almost Trotskyite group, you know, liberal, intelligent, very nice, spoke some English. It's a Vietnam we would all want to live in. That Vietnam went down the tube a long time ago.

I mean maybe there was a hope for that kind of Vietnam in '47, or '48 or '49, if the Americans had used their leverage against the French to try and keep it from being a war. But there was no middle ground.

I mean this was one of the things that nice liberal Americans tend to forget, that at a certain point the options are closed and by then it's a matter of is it going to be a communist Vietnam, Communist-Nationalist Vietnam or are you going to end up pouring off all your resource and getting a Vietnam that nobody likes.

And in fact neither Vietnam is a society that you particularly want to live in and I think we ourselves, enlightened, sensitive to Asian sensibilities, wanting them to be treated with dignity and have the freedoms we do, got our timetable and their timetable crossed and saw Vietnam not that was possible or in their image, but a Vietnam in our image.

When Henry Cabot Lodge came in August '63, he really made a tremendous impact on the press. You were working there at the time. Do you think that he was using the press?

Well, everybody uses the press...

Well, start with Lodge again.

I mean...if the question is, did Henry Cabot Lodge use the press, the answer is yes. Everybody uses the press. In journalism and in government everyone is using everyone. I mean the reporters are using government officials that are their sources, the government officials are using the reporters.

And just to digress, I mentioned earlier my friend John Vann who was sort of the early Deep Throat of the Mekong Delta. And when he was leaving Vietnam to go home after his tour, I walked to the airplane with him and it was very passionate because we'd been very close and I said to him I was always worried when I was a reporter that I might hurt him, that I might just go too far and it would be the end of his career.

And he looked at me and he gave me a very flinty look and he said, "you never hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt." Which meant that he'd been calibrating it to the edge. A very tight kind of careful thing.

Lodge came in and he did use reporters and and he used them with some skill. It was very easy because Nolting with his ignorance and his arrogance and his snobbery because he was a great snob, and no sense of modern society, modern American communications had so antagonized the reporters. I mean he treated us as if we were sort of lower class people and that Virginia town he was with.

Well Lodge had already decided before he was coming I think that Diem was no good and would probably have to go. He also knew that he had to deal with reporters. And so from the moment he got there he was very good with us and he would have us to lunch.

I remember going over there very early with Neil Sheehan and we just sat and talked for a long lunch and he asked us what we thought what was happening and we gave a sense of what was going on...we didn't tell him what to do but gave him a sense of the country. And he said well, Mr. Sheehan and Mr. Halberstam, that's pretty much what I think is happening too. Which was an extraordinary admission given the previous administration.

At any rate...I mean he used the reporters with some skill but I mean only because it...we were using him with some skill, as well. Trying to get information, trying to get a sense. He came at a moment when the Diem government was in collapse.

The question really...I think the government was going to fall. I think things were out of control, the forces against it were far too powerful. The question was would the Americans expedite that fall or would they make a kind of last minute attempt to shore up Diem.

I think that Lodge just thought Diem was incompetent, the family poisonous, which it was. I mean, remember, you're talking about Diem, you're not just talking about this kind of odd cloistered little mandarin figure himself. You're talking about this horrendous family. The Ngo Dinh Nhu, Madame Nhu...I mean, someone once said of the family every member of the family has his or her role and Diem's role is integrity. I mean, he was the front man, the good guy...everyone quote respected Diem. That was the line.

But I think Lodge thought he had to go and his family had to go, that the family was poisonous and I think that he was enraged by the fact that even while he was in effect on the way out, that Nhu had made the strike against this Buddha, ah, the Buddhist pagodas and you know, knocked down all the...and locked up the monks.

And I think Lodge took that quite personally and a challenge. And decided, you know, that alright, you got the first lick in and I'll get the next one. And I think he created a policy where we would systematically begin to cut the ties that supported Diem.

Diem's only legitimacy was Americans, so if the Americans turned down the legitimacy, that's like you turn down the amplifier on a record player and just turn it down and begin to send out code words to the Vietnamese that you know, that we don't think that Diem is indispensible and very quickly his disappearance will be expedited.

We did not as some have claimed try and participate in the assassination. In fact Lodge very carefully the night of the coup I think worked very hard to save Diem's life. I think Diem who had tricked his generals once or twice before thought he could do it one more time and he failed to do it. But I mean, there's no doubt that we, you know, expedited Diem's fall although I must say it was going to happen anyway. I mean he had nothing left to support him. That society had turned on him. Even his own best generals.

Let's go on to a great change that took place in Vietnam in '65 when American troops went in. How did that change the nature of the media coverage?

There are really two stages in the media coverage of the war. The first is when it is an American advisory commitment and is a small American commitment of abut 15,000, 20,000 Americans and there's a small American press corps, five or six reporters. I think they're distinguished men.

Charlie Moore, great reporter. Closest thing now on the New York Times to Homer Bigart. Peter Arnett, Pulitzer prize winner for the AP. If there were a just God he would have won the Pulitzer twice but they decided that if he won it twice...he really had won it a second time...they decided if he won it a second time he might up winning it a third time, he'd have to retire it and nobody else could get it.

Peter was wonderful...tough, strong, fearless, and never got morally exhausted by the war as some of us did. Neil Sheehan, you know, the best young reporter I think I've ever seen who broke finally the Pentagon Papers. Malcolm Browne who won a Pulitzer prize. Horst Faas, great German photographer for the AP. I mean, it was really...it's quite a club.

What was interesting about that early group is that whatever else, it was clearly a Vietnamese war, and white men were clearly ancillary. And you knew finally that it was a political war and that it was Vietnamese and it was a matter of whether the side...quote "our side" unquote could finally, you know, get enough motivation and leadership to challenge the Viet Cong or the NVA which had going back to the French Indochina War, you know, fifteen years of winning on...in political war.

Then you get the second stage which is the coming of American combat troops. Starting in really the spring of 1965 under Lyndon B. Johnson. President of the United States, minister of patriotism, Lyndon was really quite wonderful. It wasn't enough just to be president of the United States. He had to be minister of truth and minister of patriotism too.

He used to tell people how...they used to brief reporters going out there..."Go out there...I want you to be good for your country, I want you to do something good for your country. Don't be like those boys, Sheehan and Halberstam. They're traitors to their country."

Lyndon was wonderful. He had many roles. I mean, Lyndon really wanted to be the anchor man of a news show...This is Lyndon Johnson, CBS...Lyndon Johnson in Saigon covering the Vietnam...I mean, he was larger than life.

Alright. You grew under Johnson to American combat commitment and you're going up to 500,000 men. And you suddenly begin to get an entirely new press corps. And it's very big. I mean, virtually battalion strength.

I mean, 300 guys waiting to be fed at the five o'clock follies. The daily briefing they have where some major gets up and says, "Gentlemen, you know, 500 bombers winged over in North Vietnam," and they know that the major can't verify any facts he's giving out, but they can attribute it anyway so what does it matter. It's like going to the zoo and watching the seals being fed. You throw them a fish and they take it even though they really don't want that particular fish.

I mean, you go through...Anyway, you come in battalion strength as journalists and it's a huge new commitment. And you have a whole generation of reporters coming out there for the first time and they are not covering a Vietnamese war, they are covering the Americans. The first team is there, the big number one, the big red one, the first team.

And there's this kind of belief when the first white soldier hits that country, when the first American bomber flies over, that these little raggedy ass yellow men in their black peasant suits they'll know and they'll quit. But there's a belief that Americans can do it and that the story is American. And they, and these guys cover Americans.

Now some of them do brilliantly. I mean, there is never going to be greater war reporting than Michael Herr's book, "Dispatches." I mean, and there's a whole...I mean, bravery, talent, sensibility. There's some quite distinguished reporting of useless valor. Of useless valor, of people for whom the prism is no longer Vietnamese, it is Americans and who watch Americans, but the only thing they're doing is watching Americans fight very valiantly in a hopeless cause.

And they don't care about Vietnam. The Vietnamese don't even factor in. And one of the curious things about that war is as though there is a tiny group, in the early days, and I've mentioned some of their names, and there were hundreds to come later, that most of the really sort of special and distinguished reporters come from the early days because they always thought of it in Vietnamese terms. And the others saw it as American terms. And those were hopeless terms.

And they were very good and they were very brave but like the young men who were fighting the war, it was wasted valor. And it was, you know, you covered combat, you didn't cover politics. Politics were important and it was brilliant coverage of a losing war, but they didn't know it.

The idea that all this energy, this wonderful Cam Ranh Bay, this First Air Cav mobile, the greatest division in the history of mankind...I don't doubt it. I mean, they raped five other divisions for noncoms to put the First Air Cav together, and a squad in the Cav I think had enough armament equal to a company in World War II. I mean the greatest division in the history of mankind in terms of armament. I mean, the idea that this wouldn't work. And beyond them it didn't matter. It didn't matter.

There's a new dimension at this point, too, which is television.

Ah yes. My friend Michael Arlen calls it...

Start again with my...repeating my statement.

The first television war. My friend Michael Arlen calls it the living room war. I mean it's extraordinary. I mean suddenly, live, you know, Bonanza has run too long on television and you've had westerns and Gunsmoke. And we have a new western running. It's called the Vietnam War. And it's, you know, terrific.

For the beginning television is very much on the team. Lyndon loves television. Lyndon takes us to war on television. Lyndon bombs the north at the time of the Tonkin Gulf.

And there's Robert S. McNamara, schoolteacher of the world, with his little pointer up there, you know, after the fact, showing these little puffs of smoke, assuring us that the bombs have accurately fallen just where he wanted them to, and we'll like the bombing and we'll like the war. I mean, television which is a very centrist medium does not - licensed by the government - does not lightly challenge the norms of the government.

And there's Walter Cronkite goes out there very early in '65 and is real GI Joe reporting... "Soldier, where you from?" "Well, Mr. Cronkite, sir, I'm from Waycross, Georgia." "Soldier, do you like being out here?" "Well, Mr. Cronkite, I feel it's a job we got to do. I don't want to be here but Mr. Cronkite if anybody is going to do it, we better do it and we better do it here rather than out in San Diego." "Thanks soldier."

I mean, Walter's a very good journalist, but he was four star covering their four star, and Walter thinks that...I mean, I think he accepts the essential government norm, and television was on the team and television put on Bundy and McNamara and Field Marshall Rostow. All the acolytes got on any time they wanted.

And it was only very slowly, going into 1966 that the disproportion of the war began to really show. And the camera really caught something. You know, that we were inflicting enormous pain and hardship upon the VC...I mean upon the Vietnamese population. That it didn't work. It was disproportionate.

I mean, there's a great moment when Morley Safer who's a very good, good television journalist. Morley goes up one day in I guess 1965 to Da Nang and he hitches a ride up there and he asked some Marine he asks, "anybody got anything going?" And this Marine says, "Yeah, I got something going up tomorrow. Little town called Cam Ne."

So Morley goes along with him and he gets there and they get in some village and there are the American soldiers just tearing that damned village apart, setting fire to the hutches...I mean, no answering fire, no answering fire. Just totally Americans just butchering the town.

And I mean it is shattering. I mean the American myth is that we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. We wear the hats. You know, there's a thousand John Wayne movies that they're, you know, they're the primitives and we're the cav with white hats that rides up at the last minute. They're the savages and suddenly there are the Americans who were the savages. We're wearing the black hats.

We're setting fires to hutches. There's women and children in there. Screaming. So...I mean it's shattering and CBS shows it.

And I mean the phone rings off the hook all night. "Our boys wouldn't do things like this." And there are a lot of obscene phone calls and indeed one of the obscene phone calls is the next day, and it is to Frank Stanton, the president of CBS and it is from his great friend and his very close friend Lyndon B. Johnson.

The phone call rings in Stanton's house and Stanton says, "Who is this?" The voice says, "Frank, this is your president and your boys shat on the American flag yesterday." "What do you mean? What do you mean?" And Lyndon was absolutely convinced that Morley was a communist. Well, he finally found out that he was just a Canadian...I knew he wasn't an American.

And Lyndon really believed that they paid this American lieutenant to do it, that the communists...someone had gotten to him. I mean he was carried away a little bit. So it was moments like this that really caught the disproportion of the war and it began to affect people.

And finally you get the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings under Fulbright in February, March of '66 which again raises for the first time and amplifies serious centrist establishment, doubt. Because after all Bill Fulbright, Albert Gore, Gene McCarthy, Frank Church, Wayne Morse, I mean those are serious, legitimate figures. I mean here are senators...it wasn't so much that they made a case against the war, it was the failure of the government under their questioning to make a case. And that becomes the great educational moment and amplifying doubt.

And very slowly the society moves and as it moves, television moves too and it begins to bring home the ugliness of this war and the question of whether A) it can be done and B) is it worth it. And I think it culminates in Tet.

And it has always seemed to me that the other side, the NVA or the Viet Cong in fact scheduled the Tet Offensive with two things in mind. One, the primaries of the 1968 year, but secondly, one of the things you have to remember is that they always fought in the countryside at night, so you could never get them on film. By the time the cameramen arrived it would be too late and they'd be...our friend...

Sorry. Sorry. We ran out.