We can have a party and have home movies. We've just a few minutes more to go. This is the last tape.

All this doubt I think culminated in the Tet Offensive, and I think that there are two reasons why the NVA did Tet the way it did. I mean, who will ever really know. But I think clearly the fact that it was timed for the 1968 primaries is one of...is one reason.

The second reason is I think any reporter who covered Vietnam always knew that the other side, the Viet Cong or the NVA was terrifically tough but very little of it showed on American film because they used to like to fight in the farther extremities of the country and they liked to fight at night because they liked to protect their human resources. They had never had airplanes or artillery or tanks so...and we did, so therefore they had to use night as their great protection.

So what was interesting about Tet was that they changed. I mean, all the American television cameras had always failed to catch the strength of it. I mean, in fact, our colleague, Bernie Kalb of CBS used to have a phrase, the wily VC got away again. It was a title for a can of film. The wily VC got away again.

In Tet they deliberately fought in the city day after day which meant it could be televised and thus a far higher price to them in terms of loss of men, because we could therefore use our air and artillery, our real technological power far more effectively, nonetheless our cameras would show how tough they were...and I thought that that was the significance of Tet.

The other thing about Tet, because we talked earlier about the fact that there was a mind set back home, that reporters in fact had problems with their editors. The reporters were younger, they were reflecting reality. A feeling in the boondocks but the editors were a generation older, they were World War II mentality or a little bit more cold war.

You know, the question is, did...how accurately did reporters cover the Tet Offensive. Well, very accurately. It was a very stunning victory for the other side because it showed that despite all the administration's promises that the war was virtually over, that there was light at the end of the tunnel, that even half a million men didn't work. That the other side controlled the rate of the war, it could keep coming.

And it was very important thing because it affected not Peter Arnett, not Neil Sheehan, not Ward Just, not Frank McCullough. Who it affected was Henry Grunwald of Time, even Otto Fuerbringer. It affected Walter Cronkite of CBS. It affected John Chancellor, it affected Ben Bradlee who was something of a hawk, if that is the phrase. Or certainly pro...or certainly dubious about critical reporting.

I mean it affected a generation that was older and a generation that was more establishment and it affected the readers. It had nothing to do with the reporters. It was a very intuitive sense that the other side had the resiliency to keep coming and if half a million men really didn't do it and that the whole war was disproportionate and anybody who doesn't understand that about Tet really doesn't understand the battle.

That this society at home was stretched too thin. I mean, that this tiny war, the tail was wagging the dog. The little tiny extremity, the 51st state, was beginning to absorb and pull down the other fifty states. The fabric of the society for a variety of political reasons was simply stretched too thin and Tet was the thing that finally snapped it.

But in a sense you're saying that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese to a large extent staged Tet as a media event.

Well, what I'm saying is that I think there was an intuitive awareness on their part of our media coverage. On the other hand if you want to talk about media events, nobody staged media events like you know, Robert S. McNamara, Lyndon B. Johnson, I mean, you know, if there was a defeat in the war or if there was...the senate foreign relations committee...Lyndon removed the whole cabinet to Hawaii.

You know, he'd grab Air Marshall Keon..."I want coonskins." I mean, media events, I mean, we spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars on you know, people paid for by your tax dollars and mine, working in the defense department and the military as spokesmen, staging media events.

I mean Joe Alsop would come to the country and they'd lay on generals to take him around. I mean, I used to...we used to laugh, Neil Sheehan and me. I mean, we used to talk about taking visiting journalists, these feather merchants who'd come in for a week and they'd take them to the Maxwell D. Taylor memorial strategic hamlet and you know and meet...I mean, a sanitized Potemkin village of Vietnam that they would be taken to. I mean, they would take...they'd fly over reporters from small towns, knowing that they didn't have sources of their own and they were terribly vulnerable to the briefings and the indoctrinations.

I mean, Vietnam was a terrible...was a long playing, finally unsuccessful media event of the United States government for a long time. And in that media event only a very small handful of reporters were really trying to put their foot on the brake and say, "hey, media event or no, this is reality and it doesn't work."

And you've got to understand that for...I mean, that there is a real thing called the White House press service and if you are a reporter trying to do an honorable job for a serious institution like the Times or CBS or Newsweek or the Washington Post, you go out and you do a really good, tough story about what's happening in the Delta.

Meanwhile there's some guy from a wire service, probably from your own paper, sitting in the five o'clock briefing and the major's coming in saying, "gentlemen, today we had an air strike in the north. 200 planes...we destroyed thirteen bridges, two bicycle tire factories, 400 kilos of rice." I mean he hasn't seen it, nobody's seen it but everybody...later that story, you know, "200 American bombers winged North Vietnam today destroying thirteen bicycle..." I mean, whatever it is, and that story would go to every paper in the country.

So you were always fighting an uphill fight against this enormous government propaganda agency or lying machine, or media factory, paid for by your own fun-loving tax dollars.

How do you think Vietnam changed the way reporters reported afterwards, in other situations?

Well, I believe that there is a lineal connection between Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett and myself that goes down through to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I think that Vietnam is the beginning of a great connection to Watergate.

And it means that, you know, that you can have, you can challenge the essential viewpoint of the presidency, of the executive branch, and you can if you work hard enough bring legitimacy. I mean, you could, you know, you have anonymous sources and they have official sources. But you keep working at it and if you have truth and reality on your side, you can win.

And I think people like Bradlee in Washington Post and some of the New York Times and other editors were emboldened to trust their reporters more. Time Magazine is a good example. Time Magazine with Sandy Smith, Hayes Gorey and a few others did a brilliant job covering Watergate. In direct contrast to the dreadful job that they'd done in Vietnam.

And they were emboldened to A) challenge the official version and secondly, to trust their own reporters in the field. And I think this is very important. I mean, there are two enormous connections. Here you have this super American government, highly centralized, you know, some people call the imperial presidency, enormous media possibilities of the presidency dominating everything else on the landscape.

And in both Vietnam and Watergate, it is not the President versus the opposition party. It is not the President versus the Congress of the United States, certainly not in the important earlier years, but it is the President versus the press and I think these connections are very real.

I mean, I feel quite connected in that sense to Woodward and Bernstein and I suspect they to people like Neil and me. I think there is a line that reaches there.

I think we can cut it.

...the great line of Lodge's. He says, he says, "You can fall in love with the girls, but don't fall in love with the country."

That's a good line. That's a very good line.

Go ahead, David. You just take off.

The reporters were young. None of us had reputations. We had a wonderful story. I mean if you were going to invent a story with romance combat, danger, excitement, confrontation with the president, you would have invented Vietnam. The best story in a way of a generation maybe with he exception of Watergate. And there we were and we knew we had a slice of it. We knew it was exciting.

And it was funny, Kennedy would try to get your job, but you didn't care because you were in love with the story. And Harkins would attack you and you didn't care because you knew you were on to something and you knew it was important, you knew you were right. You knew your sources were so damned good.

We were twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. We would work eighteen hours a day. None of us was married. I mean, all we had was the story, a total belief in what we were doing, the excitement of it.

I mean, it was a rare moment that came the once to us. We knew, we knew in a way we'd never had a shot at something like that again, that we were extraordinarily lucky as journalists to even have that one shot and we really did know that we had it right, that our sources were good, and we were I think in a very nice way fearless.

I mean we were not afraid of the McCarthy period. We were too young for that. We were not afraid of being, not being invited to the ambassador's house or being social pariahs. Our loyalty was not up. We didn't care about being editor of the New York Times or editor of the Washington Post.

Our loyalty was to ourselves, to our profession, to the friends of ours who were sources in the field who were getting killed and in an extraordinary way we were very clean. I mean, innocent almost. We were almost innocent. But it was a wonderful moment to be a journalist.

I think it would be good here just to go on with this, if you could describe some of what the life was like. You remember that ghastly little office where you and Neil worked? I mean, just...

Wonderfully, we had this...

Wait, wait a second. Start...give it a beginning.

I worked very closely with Neil Sheehan of the UP and we had this terrible little office. I think it was the only office in all of Vietnam that wasn't air conditioned and there was an overhead fan. It was a great meeting place.

We had a friend named Ivan Slovitch who was commander of the first armored helicopter company. Slovitch came down one day...and was absolutely appalled that we didn't even have hot showers so he had delivered a hot shower which was installed by his company so we wouldn't smell so bad and have a hot shower.

It was kind of exciting. You'd go out in the morning and you'd cover battles...I remember flying back with Ivan one day and we were flying back and he said, "you want to come to dinner tonight?" I said, "Sure." He said, "Terrific."

He turned to my friend Mert Perry. Said, "Mert, you want to come?" "Can't. Got to have dinner with my wife." Mert looks at his watch and says, "we're flying and we've just been shot at for an hour." Mert looks at his watch and says, "but I'm an hour late." Says Mert, "what's your home phone number?" "22408."

So Ivan gets it. "This is Red Dog one calling Charlie Camp Two. Come in Charlie Camp Two." Comes in. "Can you call Mrs. Merton Perry - call her Darlene - at 22408 and tell her that Mr. Perry will be a little bit late for dinner tonight." Wonderful. It was a time, it was an extraordinary moment.

I mean, we learned, we were young kids thrown in over our heads. I remember once there was a Columbia University symposium on what affected you, what turned you around in the war. "Look," I said, "I was a twenty-seven year old kid thrown in over my head."

I went there...Neil Sheehan and Homer Bigart, my predecessor, once went down to the Mekong Delta, My Tho. Three days a very famous victory was going to be...great media event sponsored by the MACV, the American command in Saigon. And so the very first day there is a victory, thirty VC killed.

The second day it's quite clear that the ARVN won't fight at all and on the third day they just flat cut and run. So the next day, they're driving back to Saigon in the car and there's Neil who is twenty-five years old and he's just gnashing his teeth and muttering no story...muttering.

So Homer Bigart who is, you know, the greatest reporter of a generation, he's fifty-seven years old. I mean, he has seen it all. Pulitzer prize, World War II. Pulitzer prize, Korea...you know, Homer can really smell it a mile away. "What is the matter Mr. Sheehan, is something bothering you?" "Ah, well there's no story. I wasted all these three days. No story," says Sheehan. "Ah," says Homer. "Mr. Sheehan, there is a story. It doesn't work. That's your story, Mr. Sheehan." I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that.

Cut.

Good.

If she has any sense, she's asleep. Thank you, but I don't think there's any problem.

You rolling?

Yeah, no sooner...

If you didn't take that...

Hold on.

Do you think there's some role that the press can play, the media can play in averting a situation like Vietnam?

Well, it's hard to say whether the press would have performed better had there been more reporters there in the earlier days, when it really made a difference. I mean, sending hundreds of reporters by 1965 and '66 when it's at, you know, the barn door is...the horse is out and you close the barn door...I mean, by then it doesn't make any difference. We're there and we're impaled.

The real important part was '61, '62, '63. You know, whether there were a few more reporters the outcome would have been different I don't know. I don't think the society was really ready to accept the fact that it didn't work.

I first thought you might have had reporters telling...you know, you might not have gotten reporters who were as critical as we were. You might have gotten reporters who were more willing to accept the official version. I'm just not sure. I have my doubts.

I've never believed that, you know, journalistic excellence is in proportion to the number of reporters. In fact I have a feeling it's in the inverse because...inverse proportions...because sometimes the fewer journalists the better because if you get too many you get into a kind of madness of competition and that might drive you to cover some of the dumber briefings whereas this way when there are not too many reporters you're able to follow your own drummer a bit more. So I've never by any means had a belief that you know, there should have been more.

On the other hand, that the Washington Post did not have a full time reporter in '62 is really scabrous. And the fact that Time and Newsweek were so long had stringers. There was no American resident television reporter as late as almost '64. I mean there really...I was the first permanent, fulltime reporter for...who was really there...

More?

No, that's it. Fine. Ah, we've got...yes, we've got him listening to all the questions.

So don't we need him any more?

I think that's all we need.

Fine.

You don't need his shoulder?

But we need you.

Let me just sit here for a second and get...God.

I just thought of something.

Terrific. I hope you'll pay me a lot of money.