...in the early sixties was a curious kind of thing, where you were at once involved in this enormous combat with the American mission and with the government, you were covering an extraordinarily dangerous war. Because the casualties among correspondents in that war in relationship to ah, American combat casualties I think is the highest in American history. I mean every time you got on a helicopter, ah you were risking your life.

So you were doing all that. At the same time it was a wonderful assignment, quite romantic. It was a small group of press corps, about five...

Cut. There was a buzz.

Sorry. My watch. Sorry.

What? What happened?

No, it was my watch alarm clock. Of all things. I'm sorry, I was planning to get up at 2:30. 3:30. We'll just start...

Sorry about that.

I'm sorry!

What happened in the best families?

You might start to talk a little about the city, you know, kind of...

Okay, Stan.

You first went to Vietnam in the early 1960s. What was it like there then?

Well it was a really quite complicated assignment because it was at once romantic, I mean there you are covering this exciting story, this quite romantic city, Saigon, which had a...you know...a wonderful touch of both being Asian and French culture and sort of beautiful tree-lined streets in Saigon.

The sense of...the dark sense that was to come with the huge American commitment had not yet come, and there was a certain romantic quality, and yet you were involved in combat with the American Embassy constantly, combat with the government - we were the enemy of the people in effect - and we were covering a very dangerous war. I mean, the number of American correspondents killed in this war in proportion to American combat deaths I think it's the highest in history. It was a very dangerous thing.

So that it was a curiously dangerous, romantic assignment, I mean it was a cherished assignment. I mean...and obviously things happened and you were fighting for the freedom of speech, you were fighting against great odds to tell, to give an accurate portrayal of a very complicated society in a war that was not being won, in fact barely being fought. It was a very moving time.

You get up in the morning and you go out to Tan Son Nhut and get on a helicopter at three or four a.m. and the sun would roll up on the Mekong Delta. I remember my colleague, Horst Faas, the great German photographer, told me once, "you will not believe the Mekong Delta. You know the beautiful rice paddies, the farmer, the water buffalo, the docks, the the fish in the canal, everything," he said, like a page out of the Bible." You go down there and then suddenly in this biblical setting, you know, be in a fire fight and you'd come back that night and you go out to a wonderful French dinner with some beautiful Vietnamese girl.

I mean it was at once romantic and unreal and very tough. I mean it was a very hard-edged assignment. And we were the enemy of the people. Enemy of the government. American and Saigon.

Could you explain that a little more, why we...why were you considered the enemies?

Well, because I think the Kennedy Administration and later the Johnson Administration, and the Diem government had everyone else lined up. I mean the Diem government was a kind of clumsy, authoritarian or totalitarian state where nobody really spoke in opposition to the government. Diem was always being reelected by 99 percent.

Everybody in the American Embassy was...I mean the American government in Washington was, had an essential policy of public relations. If you could not win the war on the ground, you could at least win it in public relations and make it look like it was going well. So there was a very calculated and orchestrated policy of people saying how well the war was going.

You know, someone would arrive with the airport, they'd fly in a general. They didn't fly the general in to learn what was going on. They'd fly him in so he could come down the steps of Tan Son Nhut Airport and say "I'm glad to be here in Saigon where there is a great movement toward victory...President Diem has all his people behind me...inevitable victory...light at the end of the tunnel..." that kind of stuff. My friend Neil Sheehan who was only about twenty-five years old at the time would nudge me and say, "ah, another foolish Westerner come to lose his reputation to Ho Chi Minh."

Anyway, it was an orchestrated public relations account in which it was the lying machine. Washington would tell Saigon what it wanted to hear. And sure enough Saigon would very quickly tell Washington what it wanted to hear and Washington would say isn't it marvelous it's all going as well out there as we thought.

And then the one sour note. The one thing that was not being controlled was this small handful of American reporters. And, you know, they would always say...McNamara would say, "my only problem out there is the American press." And the American ambassador once told me, "Mr. Halberstam, you're always looking for the hole in the doughnut." Of course, there was no doughnut, there was only this hole. I mean, would that there were a doughnut there.

We were the enemy. At one meeting Harkins I think in 1962, General Harkins who was the American commander then, a rather ordinary man, was meeting with Mr. McNamara or Secretary McNamara in 1962 in Hawaii. "Ah, we're doing well, Mr. Secretary, we're doing well in this program and we're doing very well in that program, and the strategic hamlet...I mean, we're really...the program's going well." "No problems at all, general?" "Well, my one problem is the American press."

And it was a constant pressure trying to find our sources, trying to stick it to us. And it gradually became very personal, they would try and find our sources, they began to try and destroy our credibility politically, they...it got...our reputations, indeed our manhood, I mean, the stereotype of us.

Remember, we were very young. A small handful. None of us had big reputations. I mean, you talk about Neil Sheehan now, and he's a distinguished reporter. Peter Arnett, he's a distinguished reporter. Malcolm Browne, I mean they all won Pulitzer prizes, they're all famous. It's a legendary group.

Then, we were young. Our average age was twenty-six, twenty-seven. Nobody had ever heard of us. So the idea was, you know, who are these young men. We can crunch them. They're not famous. They sit around the Caravelle bar all day drinking and reinforcing their own doubts.

But with all of this opposition from the Embassy and from the Diem government, you succeeded nevertheless in getting stories. How were you able to get...where were your sources?

We had terrific sources. We had all the people in the American Embassy that the American Embassy should have been listening to. I mean we had a thousand and one Deep Throats.

I mean the phrase Deep Throat was not yet current, but I mean, you had two levels in Saigon. You had policy which Saigon was reflecting back to Washington. Therefore you'd go and see the American ambassador, you didn't get reality, you got policy. You went to see General Harkins and you got a terrific four star and you got policy.

And then you went out in to the field and there you get, moving up what really was happening. I mean a captain goes out and risks his life for the Vietnamese battalion and he's not going to come back and con you. And suddenly you're a colonel advising a division...American colonel advising a division and he's got young captains going out and risking their lives and he's not going to lie to you.

So the moment you gain their respect that you will be straight and won't ruin their careers and you'll protect their names, I mean, every passionate officer in Vietnam was our source. Everybody who cared. Those who cared more about reality and what was happening and the young men under their command than they did about their own careers, those were our sources and we had them everywhere and they came to trust us.

They would try and go through the channels and then they would find that Saigon did not want to hear their reporting. They would push it down. And then rather reluctantly they would begin to talk to us. And you would have a scenario almost.

Somebody would come in the country and you'd go down and see him and he's, "I've heard about you reporters...I don't want any part of you guys and you're against the team. We're on the team." You'd go and see him two or three months later and he'd be a little disillusioned and he'd say, "well, you know it really isn't working so well." By the fourth or fifth month and particularly if you kept going back and you went out in the field and shared the danger, and shared the hardship, and took those risks, they'd tell you the truth.

I mean if I went down and tried to interview some battalion advisor in My Tho, the seventh division area, they wouldn't tell me anything the first time. But if I go out in the field with them and we spend overnight and the ARVN, the Vietnamese army does not fight very bravely, in fact it cuts and runs or avoids a battle as it was wont to do, I mean, he's not going to come back and bullshit me. I mean, he's going to tell me straight. So we had terrific sources. We had a great little intelligence network of our own.

What about among the Vietnamese?

Oh, we had very good sources there.

Cut.

Sorry you're going to have to...

That's all right.

Sorry about that.

That's all right, just as long as you say...don't say, "I want to make this perfectly clear."

Mr. Karnow, I'm glad you asked that question. I've...that's a question that's bothered me, Mr. Karnow, and when I, when I see Mr. Deng Xiung Phu at the White House with President Carter, I'm going to bring that up. I'll have a glass of your water, a sip of your water for a second there.

I'll repose the question about Vietnamese sources. But try and remember to start off...yeah, I know...so that I can get cut out. I've got a very small ego, you know, I don't want to be in this thing very much.

Why don't we start again. You'll ask the question again, Stan.

Yeah. You might mention a few names, David, if you want.

Well, I did a little bit, like...you know...

Well, I'd like to get into...maybe we can go back to Nolting a little bit.

Okay, sure. We can do whatever, I mean, you're in charge.

I think Nolting deserves whatever...no, no. You...

I mean, you guide as you want.

I mean we'll go back, I'll go back and ah... As a matter of fact before I get to Vietnamese sources I'll ask you about ah...you might get a, do a little characterization of Nolting.

Sure, sure.

Are we going to get Nolting on this show?

I think you'd get him.

I think we'll get him.

I would think he'd want to talk.

Piss in our face.

He's so stupid.

Where is he now?

Down at the University of Virginia, I last heard, teaching economics there. God save the economists from the University of Virginia.

Well, he is a Virginian.

Yes he is.

He's a Virginian, oh.

That he is and nothing more. Oh, God, he really is.

He's the Virginian.

Yes. The Virginia gentleman.

Actually, what about...Since we're talking history here, if you want to mention some names of people in the Embassy who are good sources, go ahead. I mean, they may as well get some credit...

Okay, we're rolling.

Okay? What was it like dealing with the American mission in those days?

Well, I think...Let me, let me state that over. I think you have to remember that Ambassador Nolting saw us as the enemy. To the ambassador, the press corps was the enemy. He wanted to see as little of us as possible. He had no understanding of all of what we were doing or why, he was not a man who had any roots in Asia himself.

I think you...To understand the American Embassy there, you have to understand the devastation that the McCarthy period had wrecked upon Asian officers in the State Department. I think...everybody in 1961, '62 at the coming of the Kennedy Administration assumed that McCarthy was in the past, McCarthyism. It was seven years since the senate had censored him.

The damage that he had done by his assault and Dulles' acquiescence to him in taking anybody out of the Far Eastern area who had any background, who knew what had happened in China, the coming of a modern China over a feudal China and the replacing it with people who had in effect a European vision of Asia, of communism, anti-communism, because that's what Nolting was.

He was a man of NATO and you know, we're going to have an alliance that ties all these countries together...and the idea of communism as a kind of border crossing threat as opposed to that which it was in Saigon and Vietnam, nationalism...I mean he was very much a product of the era and the American Embassy was very much a product of the era.

One of the things that always struck me about our reporting in Vietnam was that those of us who were young, although we were political reporters and not military experts, our military reporting really was better. It was more prophetic and more accurate and the reason was our sources were better. A reporter can't be any better than his or her sources.

And the problem you had politically was there no good political sources in the Embassy because anybody who might have said, "Vietnam is like China. It is a modern society on the rise against a feudal one and we are on the wrong side and the French took all the nationalism from day one when they defeated...you know the Vietminh took the nationals over when they defeated the French and therefore we are always going to be on the wrong side." That kind of person didn't exist.

In retrospect I fault my reporting more on the failure to make the connection to the French era and what the period did to the nationals than anything else that I did. But we had no source. The Embassy was devoid of people like that. I mean they were all people who in fact wanted to obliterate the past, not understand it.

What about the Vietnamese? How did you work with them? What were your sources among the Vietnamese?

Well, Vietnam in 1962, Ngo Dinh Diem's Vietnam was a feudal society in the final stages of collapse, kept alive really only by enormous injections of American aid and finally American blood and manhood. And as it came apart, I mean, it was a very divided society.

That which divided them was far more powerful than that which united them, as opposed to the modern communist nationalist Vietnam that was on the rise where the things that united them were far stronger than the petty jealousies. Which meant that you had terrific Vietnamese sources although they were not always motivated by the highest ideals.

You were getting factionalism and brother against brother, cousin against cousin, tribe against tribe, Catholic against Buddhist. You had terrific sources. Your only problem was sorting it out. But the one thing you realize was that society did not hold.

That it was very...That the only people who defended the society were Americans. The only people who defended Diem were Americans. That was a society without a center. And that the only energy was being supplied by the Americans. That's a very dangerous statement, particularly if you're in a political war.

When you look back on that period and you yourself have the reputation of being a dove on Vietnam, were there really doves among the reporters?

Well, there weren't doves and I think most of us...

Start, start it over again.

Let me start that over. The thing you have to understand first about Vietnam in 1962, '63 was that they were not doves and hawks. They didn't exist yet, that most reporters in fact accepted the American presence.

By the way, I'd like to footnote and say that I'm not sure in fact that reporters should be hawks or doves or should...that the New York Times should have had a correspondent out there who was against the president. That's like saying Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward should have been doing Watergate and should be saying Nixon should be impeached. I think their job was to come up with the evidence as our job was to come up with the evidence.

But what is interesting is how in effect in terms of the larger policy how mild what we were reporting was. We weren't saying we shouldn't have been there. Although in my heart of hearts now retrospectively I wish I had.

What we were saying was it doesn't work, President Diem is, despite the American propaganda machinery a terrible, clumsy instrument. We are losing the war, in fact we are not even fighting it. That the enemy, the other side, the Viet Cong is getting steadily stronger day by day. There's got to be perhaps a better way.

I mean if anything we're saying there ought to be a better way. I fault us not for the dove/hawk thing because I think finally the American press out there performed pretty well. I think anybody who wanted to know whether what we were doing and why we were doing it had a pretty good idea, really. I mean I think the reporting is really pretty remarkably accurate in retrospect.

Our fault is much more on not tying it to the French Indochina War. I am haunted by that. If I could change every story I wrote, I would do it and I would add this one paragraph: the second paragraph would say this and this happened and then the paragraph would say none of this makes any difference anyway because the Americans are here in the same footsteps as the French. They are fighting in the footsteps of a colonial war. It is neo-colonial war.

The French war managed to give the other side all the nationalism of the country and therefore what we do and how we fight makes no difference. I wish I could insert that paragraph in. It was a lack not so much of hawk or dove. It was a lack of one extra level of political, analytical penetration.

What...

Cut. Good.

Is that the, ah...tape?

Running out of tape. We'll take a little break.

Okay.