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Halberstam Finds Key Links in Iraq and Vietnam Coverage
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David Halberstam
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Published: November 21, 2006 12:30 PM ET
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent David Halberstam said Monday that government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminds him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.
"The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn't salute or play the game," he said. "And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around and they've used up their credibility."
Halberstam, who wrote about Vietnam for The New York Times, joined combat reporters from The Associated Press and other news outlets at a conference at Middle Tennessee State University.
Independent-minded reporters wrote that the war in Vietnam was not going as policymakers in Washington had hoped -- and they paid a price for angering the administration.
"The attacks on us were very, very unpleasant," Halberstam said. "There was an attack on our manhood, on our politics. We were portrayed as being communists and weak."
But reporters are often vindicated over time, he said.
"I think the truth will always out," Halberstam said. "The people who attacked us are mostly forgotten; most of them have apologized."
Robert H. Reid, an AP correspondent who has focused on Iraq for the past three years, described a deteriorating security environment there that makes it difficult for reporters to cover news outside their compound.
"The situation in Baghdad began to unravel in the summer of 2004 ... The press card guaranteed no immunity," Reid said.
News organizations are forced to rely heavily on Iraqi reporters who also face dangers amid the sectarian and tribal conflicts there.
"We're asking them to do a much heavier degree of onsite reporting than their counterparts in Vietnam and other conflicts were ever asked to do," he said.
George Esper, a former AP Saigon bureau chief, wrote more words on the war than anyother reporter and called reporting in Vietnam "journalism's finest hour, certainly AP's finest hour."
Esper, who spent 10 years in Southeast Asia, said there were several reasons why the Vietnam war was best assignment he ever had: "Excitement, adventure, being on Page 1 every day, autonomy, no routine, the camaraderie and being a member of an exclusive club of combat corespondents."
But reporters had better access to the war zone in Vietnam than in the first Gulf War, Esper said. In the current Iraq war, reporters were tethered to the units they were embedded with.
George C. Wilson, former chief military correspondent for The Washington Post,likened that experience to being "the second dog in the dogsled team."
"I could see an awful lot of that ... dog up in front of me, and a little bit to the left and right, but I couldn't break off the dogsled team and interview people," he said.
Wilson later broke off from his military unit to travel with an independent group of doctors treating the sick and wounded.
Halberstam said the country's experience in Vietnam should have alerted policymakers to the pitfalls in Iraq. Following the invasion of the country, Iraqis "have very predictably gone on and done what is important to them, not what is important to us," he said.
"I don't think there are any great surprises," he said.
Halberstam recalled being a young reporter willing to take risks while covering the war in Vietnam.
"In effect I was rolling the dice on my career in risk of my life. It's like placing a bet on yourself," Halberstam said.
Halberstam called reporters covering Iraq today "the bravest correspondents that we have ever sent out to cover a war, because it's infinitely more dangerous there than it was in Vietnam.
"In the old days, if you were in Vietnam, you could sort of rest in Saigon," Halberstam said. "There's no safe zone in Iraq."
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