APPENDIX A
Jan. 30, 2006
The Associated Press Oral History Program
Interview conducted by Valerie S. Komor, Director, AP Corporate Archives
KOMOR: Good afternoon, Peter. I’m here with Peter Arnett at the headquarters of The Associated Press; it is Monday, January 30th, 2006, and Peter and I are going to chat about his time at The Associated Press. But, Peter, tell me first, where were you when you became a stringer for the AP? Was that your first job at the AP?
ARNETT: Yes, I was a reporter for the Bangkok World newspaper in Bangkok from 1958 to early 1960. And during that period, when really there was very little interest in Asia from the part of the United States, very few AP reporters were in Asia at that point. There was one reporter at the AP bureau, Tony Escoda was his name, a Filipino-American, really bright young man, and he employed me to do some stringing work. When he couldn’t get out of the office, he’d call me, and I would do stories on the political situation; occasionally interviewed visiting celebrities. And was—that’s where I really began my association. 1958.
Two years after that, early in 1960, I went to live in Vientiane in Laos, because the Bangkok World newspaper had started a Sunday newspaper called the Vientiane World. They were trying to develop a market in Vientiane, which is the capital of Laos, which had a large American community at that point, a couple of thousand diplomats, military people. It seemed to be a, a, you know, a potential market, certainly, for advertising and readership. So I agreed to go up to edit this paper in Vientiane. It turned out that I was one of two reporters who lived there; there was an AFP correspondent and me. There was no one else. Whereas in Bangkok, which was a much more flourishing city, it was commonplace for reporters to come through; there were reporters based there. Little Laos had no one, even though at that time, Laos was becoming the center of attention for the United States. In fact, when President John F. Kennedy was elected, and had a—his first long meeting with Dwight Eisenhower, the outgoing president, Eisenhower reportedly told him, you know, “Don’t worry about Vietnam. Laos is going to be the center of your problems. Because Laos—the communist Chinese are building a road through the northern area; you’ve got a communist revolutionary group called the Pathet Lao that are developing, and we’ve got a pro-American military government in Vientiane that you have to support.” So, even though it was becoming the center of attention within the U.S. government, generally it was looked upon as sort of a quiet, lost little place. And it was there in Laos where I further cemented my relationship with the AP, because I was the AP correspondent there, they didn’t have any local person. So they called upon me to cover events for them. There weren’t a lot of events, but when they did happen, they would message me, and I would cover the initial newsbreaks, and if necessary, they’d send in correspondents from Hong Kong or Bangkok or Tokyo, depending on how big the story got. But I would be the first, you know, the first source that they would use.
KOMOR: And how long did you do that, Peter?
ARNETT: I was there for the rest of the year, basically. And the operation of the Vientiane World, plus the U.S. political military operation was to end later that year, because there was a coup d’état by a disaffected battalion commander of the royal Lao military. His name was Captain Kong Le; he had a paratroop battalion. He hadn’t been paid for months; he got so angry that he pulled a coup d’état in Vientiane, and took over the government. Even though I had known Kong Le, and drank a few beers with him [laughs] earlier that year, he called me in and said, “Well, the Vientiane World is financed by the CIA; get out of town.” It wasn’t financed by the CIA, but the CIA assistant station chief’s wife worked for the mag—for the publication as a gossip columnist. So, they were half right. So I left at that point. Now, that coup d’état also solidified my relationship with the AP. Because—Vientiane, Laos, was the back of beyond in terms of communication in 1960. There was a post office with a very tenuous phone connection to the outside world. But when the coup d’état came, that phone connection stopped. Now, in earlier crises, we’d been able to go to the U.S. Embassy and use their transmission lines to get at least, sort of, a small paragraph or two out. But because of this coup d’état, the embassy was very embarrassed; they were frightened; they wouldn’t let us in the embassy. So I had no recourse but to file my story in Thailand where you had post offices in the border region, which is just across the Mekong River from Vientiane, that we could file our stories. You could pay them money, and they would telex them. But you did have the Mekong River as a barrier, it was a mile across. Part of it was sandy; part of it was open current. So I just took off one morning with the AP story, swam across the river…
KOMOR: Where did you put the story while you were swimming?
ARNETT: Hitched a ride on a truck, from the little village across from Vientiane to Udorn, which was about 60 miles south. Filed the story, and got a beat. I remember the San Francisco Chronicle had a headline on Page 3, “The First Dispatch From the War-Torn Laotian Area” by Peter Arnett, and I don’t—I did that in successive days, but I started taking news stories for The New York Times, because they had arrived; for a couple of other papers, plus AP. And I think that impressed the AP, as certainly my derring-do. It also impressed the AP senior executive for the area, a man called Don Huth, who ran the Southeast Asian operation out of Singapore. So Don, whom I’d bumped into a few times, a few months later talked to me, and asked me if I was sort of interested in getting more permanent employment. And I did have mixed feelings at the time, because I sort of returned to my dream about going to Fleet Street. And this was reinforced by having met various British correspondents who had come through: The Daily Mirror, the Daily Express. And they were just gung-ho, party guys. You know, they—whereas American journalists were serious, looking for the facts, these Britishers…
KOMOR: Did not appeal to you. They, they appealed to you.
ARNETT: Yeah, they wanted to tell colorful stories, and they, and they—and I sort of figured, “Hey, this is sort of more my style.” So, I remember asking one of them from the Daily Express, a man who I’d gotten to know because I had been also stringing for the Daily Express, I asked him about recommending me to the paper in London. Because I said, “I want to go to London; I’ve saved some money, and I want to work for the Daily Express.” And he said, “Sure, I’ll recommend you.” But he says, “You know what’s going to happen? You’ll go to London. They’ll hire you. And if you’re really good, after five years, they’ll send you right back here. Why leave? Stay here.” And on that advice, I looked around for work, and ultimately got the offer from Don Huth to go to Indonesia, midyear in ’61, to be the correspondent in Indonesia for the AP. It was a local hire arrangement; I was being reasonably well paid by local standards. But it was sort of a local hire, so on that basis, for example, I paid my own fare down to Jakarta. The AP wouldn’t come up with the money. What I actually did, I got a ride on Thai Airways and wrote a puff piece for their magazine to cover the cost of the fare. Just one other story I’ll tell you in Vientiane, Laos. I mentioned earlier, I was the only correspondent. The only—one of the two reporters, the other being a Frenchman. This occasioned sort of requests from both Reuters and UPI, who were competing with the AP, for me to help them out. I didn’t have any particular, you know, strong relationship with the AP, they would pay me for whatever I sent. And I felt at the time, “You know, I need the money,” and so I made an arrangement with Reuters and UPI that if something came up, I would file for AP first. Then I would file for Reuters, a little more. And then finally, if I had the time, I’d send something for UPI. But I felt, you know, that my loyalty was primarily with the AP, they’ll get the first break. They’ll get 10 minutes to use the story. And so, I remember on one occasion, when Prince Souphanouvong, who was then the communist leader, later, by the late ’70s, he became president of Laos, because the Pathet Lao ultimately won the Laotian war. But he escaped from prison. And early hours of the morning, when I learned about it, I filed two or three paragraphs for the AP: “Urgent: Souphanouvong Escapes.” Big beat. Then I filed a little more detailed for Reuters, but, you know, later in the morning, and then finally, for UPI, I sent a little more. So, next day, I got three messages back at my headquarters at the, at the Constellation Hotel, which was where the reporters would hang out when they came to town. And the first was from the AP, which is, “Thanks, you [were] 10 minutes [ahead] of Reuters, congratulations.” And Reuters messaged me, “You were late on breaking development, but ultimately made up with detail,” and the third from UPI said, “Thanks for helping out.” [Laughs] So, I never did that again. But it was—I was sort of taking care of everyone. Of course, when I joined The Associated Press the next year, my loyalty was totally…
KOMOR: Was totally…
ARNETT: To the organization.
KOMOR: And when did you arrive in Saigon? Do you remember the day?
ARNETT: I flew to Saigon on June 26, 1962, on what I presumed would be a temporary assignment. At that point, Vietnam was a very small-bore involvement for the United States. When I got there, there [were] maybe 5,000 military advisers, spending maybe a million dollars a day. But in different countries around the world, in 40 or 50 other countries, there were American advisers, as many as 500 or a thousand, helping friendly governments organize their armed forces. And the Kennedy administration was still very concerned about Laos. In fact, there was a—Averell Harriman, then a special ambassador for the Kennedy administration, had gone to Geneva and organized a deal with the Laotian authorities, the three ruling factions, that basically neutralized Laos, and allowed a coalition, sort of left-wing government to take over. By moving Laos out of the way with this political solution, the US Government was clear to concentrate all its efforts on saving South Vietnam from communism. And this didn’t happen until, say, mid-’62, so Vietnam was still on the back burner. So, I went to Vietnam presuming to be a temporary assignment. I had visited Vietnam earlier, as a tourist, in 1957, when I’d first got to Southeast Asia with my then-girlfriend Myrtle. And after the pleasures and fun in Thailand, and in Cambodia, where you had Buddhist people, you know, seemingly easygoing and pleasant, going into Vietnam was, it was then a war zone. The French had been fighting there for a decade; there was barbwire everywhere; there were, there were block houses with troops. And the population of Saigon in the marketplaces and around the hotels seemed very negative and difficult. With good reason at that point, they’d been sort of involved in conflict, you know, since the 1930s—occupied by the Japanese, reoccupied by the French, you know, fighting the French. So when I was asked to go back there in ’62 I figured, “Ahh. It’s sort of an imposition.” But, if the AP wanted it, I would do it, but I much preferred the more friendly climes of, you know, Bangkok or Cambodia or Singapore, or even Indonesia. There was also the issue of Malcolm Browne, who at that point, as far as the AP people in the region were concerned, was something of a intellectual bore. Why? Mal was like Ivy League, from Swarthmore College, with a degree in chemistry. And no one else in the AP—none of the Americans in the AP had been to a school like that; most of them, if they’d gone to college, were from the Midwest. I hadn’t been to college; I’d come right out of high school into the news business. And Mal was somehow distant with people who had visited; he sort of kept his own counsel. He was this tall, six-foot-three blond, sort of, detached attitude. And he wrote very long pieces for the AP. Thousands of words—two or three thousand words long about his adventures going out with Vietnamese troops, going to the highlands. And to the disgust of many AP people in the region, they would run on the wire. Why did they run? Because Wes, who was taking over as president at that point, adored Mal; figured out that, you know, he was adding immensely to, you know, the value of the AP report by writing these pieces, and fully supported him. But the regular AP guys are saying, “What’s a 3,000-word story doing on the wire?” So, for all those reasons, I felt that, you know, life with Mal may not be easy, because he was so very different from other AP people I’d worked for.
KOMOR: Do you—was Mal more or less on his own by the—when you arrived? Was it a—or was Horst [Faas] already there?
ARNETT: Now, when I arrived—I arrived in Saigon from, from Bangkok. The same day Horst arrived, but he came in from Laos. So, we missed each other at the airport, but we ended up in, in the Caravelle Hotel together. I had not met Horst prior to that time. He had taken over from the, the AP photographer for the region, Fred Waters, who was a beloved figure, you know, a pleasant drunk who took an occasional picture, but, one of the boys; one of the holdovers from World War II and Korea. As were most of the AP staff out there at the time. But Mal Browne represented something new, Ivy League, intellectual.
KOMOR: Right.
ARNETT: A bore. A man who is not prone to go drinking with the boys very much.
KOMOR: Did you like Mal?
ARNETT: So, all I had heard was the scuttlebutt, that somehow Mal was a downer. And this was something like, the new AP, and, particularly from a man like Fred Waters, the AP photographer who had been in Saigon but whose job was now lost because Horst was brought in, you know, and Horst was brought in because of his energetic coverage of Africa and Germany, and he’s a very brave, bold, smart man. So, the old guard was starting to shift, and Horst and Mal represented that. And I was sort of an appendage, brought along. I got on immediately with Mal, because I enjoyed his, his intellect. You know. He didn’t talk about drinking and girls all the time; rarely of the time. He was into the story. He gave me fascinating documents and books to read about the Viet Cong and the, the history of the war. You know, he was very productive; wrote superb analyses. And allowed me to go and do what I felt I needed to do. Now, he would give me guidance; in fact, he did the wonderful, the wonderful, how would you call it? The wonderful memo that he wrote, the, the—what we call…
KOMOR: Well, the, the bureau manual.
ARNETT: OK. He wrote the wonderful bureau manual, basically for me. He wrote it before I got there. Because he figured at that point in time, June of ’62, that the war was starting to build up to a degree that most journalists didn’t understand. So Mal put together that bureau manual, to prepare. And this was Mal. So I got into the bureau; he said, “Hello.” We chatted a little; he gave me the bureau manual and says, “Go and read that, and see you tomorrow.” And the bureau manual was wonderful, it gave advice about what cocktail parties to go in, in Saigon; who to believe in the embassy; what parts of the cities to go for different things. And then, of course, the battlefield; how to conduct yourself under fire. One wonderful example was he said, “If you’re in a paddy field, crawling through the grass with the troops, and you hear gunfire, don’t put your head up to see where it’s coming from, because you’ll be the next target.” Wonderful stuff like that. That was Mal, I, I mean, who else in the AP would have ever bothered doing that kind of manual at that time? So, I read the manual, and I found that Mal encouraged me to do enterprise reporting; to travel to the highlands and around the place. He—we shared responsibility for the daily news product, you know, covering the obvious events that had to be covered; the press conferences, the visits, the battles. But we fared, and within a few months, I think we were part of a wonderful team. I mean, he didn’t argue with me; I didn’t argue with him. And I really understood that he was, you know, he was—he was doing the kind of journalism that I hadn’t realized existed. Demanding accountability of the local officials and government. You know, the intellectual capability he showed in researching, you know, what—not just what motivated the enemy, but weapons used. You know, he had, he had important skills that made his, you know, his stories come alive. That’s why they were being used on the AP, not just because Wes Gallagher favored him. And I picked up on that, you know, from the beginning. Because I really—I was like a sponge, sucking in all this information. New Zealand, and Australian, and Thailand journalism; provincial, cautious, noncontroversial. But here was Mal Browne, who had covered the civil rights movement in the South as a young reporter; who’d covered the Bay of Pigs and had been to Cuba, coming to Vietnam and saying, you know, “The ambassador, the generals have to be accountable.” At the press conference he’d ask difficult questions. You know. He would write stories [laughs], you know, pointing out the discrepancies in the official picture. And he would—and he had a great writing style. So I really modeled myself on Mal. And—for the next four years, because he did stay in—running the bureau until 1965. And to this day, he remains a great pal. In fact, I try to see him whenever I can, but I, you know, still respect him enormously. And he’s had a great career, of course, later with The New York Times. But that was my beginning. Now, in addition, I was so fortunate to be part of an influx of very bright young American journalists. David Halberstam came a few weeks after I was there; he moved in, working out of the Saigon AP bureau. One reason, because The New York Times usually worked out of AP, because of the close relationship, and secondly because he had a personal relationship with Horst Faas from coverage in the Congo, the previous year. So he knew Horst very well; in fact, they got a house together; shared the house. And also, there was Stanley Karnow, who became, you know, the great historian of the Vietnam War, but who worked for Time magazine. He was a frequent visitor out of Hong Kong. And Neil Sheehan, who was then a young UPI reporter, who would hang around, and there was just a handful of us. We’d have coffee together. There was no big partying there; there was no big drinking. You know, we weren’t—this was a different sort of crowd. You know, they, they were just enjoying being part of what they figured was a very significant story, and it became significant very quickly, with a series of major battles in the countryside, where the Viet Cong emerged as a, quite a formidable force, plus the deterioration of the ability of the president of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, to maintain control. And you had a rising Viet Cong movement, guerrilla movement, then you had an angry Buddhist movement that, that opposed this Catholic dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem. And the story quickly morphed into, you know, the most significant one in U.S. foreign policy, and remained that way, really, for the next decade. So I was sort of cushioned by this group of brilliant young journalists. And I learned from them; I’m a quick study. [Laughs] But I learned from them, and I really admired them, and to this day they remain friends of mine. Halberstam, Sheehan and Karnow, you know, I really, I was so lucky to fall into the hands of such bright people. Because our lives are shaped by our mentors and my mentors happened to be journalists my own age. And I quickly learned to believe in what they believed in, you know, information; the truth of it; the worth of taking a risk—the importance of taking risks for information, to tell the truth. And this attitude pervaded a successive wave of reporters coming to Vietnam. In the AP, you had a whole group of—John Wheeler came a few years into the war, and then Richard Pyle, and so many others, that I could go through a whole list.
KOMOR: Tell me, tell me about your relationship with George Esper. Because he feels, I think, to this day that you were his mentor, in a way. And so, and so one returns the favor, as you go along, in mentoring people, in return for those mentors that you were lucky to have. What was George like? When did he come over?
ARNETT: George came to Vietnam in 1965. A West Virginia boy; his father, family had worked in the coal mines. But he was the child who made it through college. Various small AP bureaus; volunteered for Saigon, and he was sent there in mid-1965. I mean, he initially, you know, initially became friendly to me because I gave him what he felt was, you know, significant advice. I remember visiting him in his hotel room, soon after he arrived, and he had been out on a trip with, on a patrol with the, with the Vietnamese troops. He had come back, and he was full of himself, and I went into the bathroom to use the toilet, and I noticed his muddy boots were in the bidet. And I said—and I came out, and he said, “You know, Peter, these, these French, they even have a special appliance to wash your damn boots.” I pointed out to George that a bidet was for more than just washing boots. [Laughs] But he felt—from then on in, he looked to me for advice about, you know, modern living. [Laughs] The—you know, George was, you know, one of the truly dedicated, you know, AP people, who came to Vietnam. Well, in a way, I feel sort of similar to him, in which that, you know, I felt that you take a story and you, you know, you shake it like a dog shakes a bone, you know, you’re not going to let it go. And George had that similar feel to a story. He just wanted to grip it. And with George, it was a matter of just leading him in the right direction. And say, “George, you know, we need you in Danang; the Marines are going to do this.” So George would be up to Danang, and you would get everything you ever wanted to know about what the Marines were doing in that operation. Not only would you get whatever you needed to know, but you would get it in a competitive period, he was the most competitive journalist I’d ever seen, and he would compete with UPI and everyone else, you know? And he diligently, fervently, believed that the most important role he had in life was to serve the requirements of the AP, which was to serve—to get the story. George is actually still like that, if you—now he’s in retirement, but if you give him, you know, a suggestion that maybe he should look someone up, or maybe he should—he’ll grab it and do it fervently. But, you know, for a wire service like the AP, who, who needed diligence, and who, you know, needed industry and competitiveness, George was the man. In addition, he was the most decent of people, until you crossed him. And there’s one famous story of George. He was dictating from Danang late in 1965, at the newly opened press center, notable because there was only one telephone line from Danang to Saigon, which was one more than from Saigon to the headquarters in New York; there were no telephone lines. You could rarely call. And this one telephone line from Danang to Saigon was used often by all the media, because by late ’65, with the first of, the first 100,000 of half a million U.S. troops having come in, there was a lot of people wanting to use the phone, particularly UPI, and television networks. So I remember George was dictating a story to me about some press conference the Marines had just had, and I heard someone, some noise in the background, and George said, “Excuse me.” And I heard more noise, and a thump. And then he got back on the phone, and I said, “What was that?” “Oh, nothing.” We later learned that an ABC correspondent had tried to take the phone away from George, telling him that he’d been on it for an hour, and that was too long, so George, you know, decked him right there on the spot. [Laughs] And went back to the phone. Without, you know, missing a beat. “Nothing, Peter, nothing. Just continue.” But his generosity of spirit, I mean, impressed all. He was a beloved figure, but a very competitive figure. And there are the stories of legion about, you know how—I remember one particular story in ’67, when we heard from a White House source that President Johnson was going to visit Cam Ranh Bay. Now, you could imagine that security was very strict when the president went anywhere, particularly a place like Vietnam. It’s like when President Bush made his one visit to Iraq, no one knew about it until he was well gone. So, Johnson was on his way to Cam Ranh Bay. We got a tip. But not even the White House press corps knew that he was going. But, so, George figured, you know, “We’re going to get this story first.” So we called up the Cam Ranh Bay airport, and got the airport duty officer and said, “General Esper here. Is the president there yet?” “Well, sir, his plane is just coming in.” “Well, stay on the line! I want to know if everything’s all right. Give me a report on what’s happening.” So, this officer, who was standing, you know, overlooking them, “Well, President Johnson’s arrived. He’s being greeted by General So-and-So, and there’s a, there’s an honor guard and, you know, and the president’s shaking hands, and moving around, and he did this, and he huddled with someone, and he met President Thieu, and”—“Well, thank you, Colonel.” So—but he still kept him on the line, while busily typing, and then as the colonel said, “Well, the plane’s just taking off,” it was a, you know, like 25-minute visit; George had the story prepared, boom. Instantly. [Laughs] President Johnson. That is George! Of course, the AP White House people were very disconcerted and unhappy that when they got back to Thailand, they’d been scooped. With all the details. [Laughs]
KOMOR: And I seem to remember that he got him to read the text of his remarks over the phone.
ARNETT: I believe that was even the case. A text of his remarks over the phone.
KOMOR: Yes.
ARNETT: That had been given in advance.
KOMOR: Yes. I guess you have to have—“Would you like to hear?” Because he—yeah.
ARNETT: Yeah! “Would you like to hear, by the way, what he said?” [Laughs]
KOMOR: [Laughs] Yeah.
ARNETT: Well, you know the story—it was just a marvelous, but this is—“General Esper here.”
KOMOR: Yes.
ARNETT: So, he could do that. George, who seems at time passively—responsive—unresponsive—actually has a lot going on in his brain, and he could write really dramatically, and good stories. The—you know, George spent more time in the bureau than out, because he was such a diligent editor and writer that he would use that phone, you know, better than anyone else I had ever seen. I remember, there was a story that came out of Washington of a B-52 pilot who had refused to fly. And he had been grounded. In, in, in Thailand, at one of the—Udorn, Thailand, one of the B-52 bases. George got him on the phone. Again by saying, “General Esper here,” you know, and he got the guy on the phone. And got an exclusive from, [laughs] from this pilot that had been put into solitary, but they’d given him a call from General Esper, you know, to reprimand him. And George got the whole story. But he was capable of doing that. And there was constantly many, many stories of George’s ability. But by staying in the bureau, you know, this, this meant that he, he became secondary to the field correspondents. You know, so I’d be out covering the war, and getting great stories, and George would be back in the office, helping, doing the overnight report. Now, George being such a decent man, filled with humility, never challenged that. He never demanded to go out on the story, to get—for a change. He was willing to put up with all that. So that’s why, at the end of the war, it was such a great pleasure for me to be in Saigon. For many reasons, I wanted to be in Saigon in April of ’75, when the Vietnam War came to an end; when the communists ultimately struck down through the many South Vietnamese provinces to encircle Saigon and then pounce, come in, with all the U.S. forces leaving. Excuse me. So, I was sent in to help the coverage in the last weeks. George Esper was there, Ed White, and Matt Franjola, who was a stringer who had come in. And as the, as the crisis neared it, its, you know, the completion of the war, AP ordered most people out. But they let George and I and Franjola stay. And when it became clear that the communists were coming in, George said to me, “Peter, you know, you’re the senior man here; you’re the best; you do the big story.” And I said, “George, no. You’ve sat at that desk, you know, for 10 years. You’ve put your name on every overnight story, and no one knows who you are. You write the story.” Next day, headline of The New York Times, front page: “Saigon Falls,” by George Esper. It was one of the great moments, you know, in any headline collection. “Saigon Falls,” by George Esper. So, it was so—I was so happy to see that all those years on the desk brought—which was a fabulous headline. I mean, that’s through history now. And it’s George Esper on that story. Now, George is inordinately grateful to me; he keeps saying that, that, and publicly, that “It was Peter Arnett; he should have got a Pulitzer for the fall of Saigon.” Rubbish! I got my Pulitzer years earlier. George deserved a Pulitzer, actually, for his excellent reporting, he did. In addition to doing the roundup, he did superb eyewitness accounts of suicides and so much else. But he still gives me credit. But that’s George, you know? He, he, he is so, you know, so willing, so humble. He’s got so much humility.
KOMOR: I want to ask you a fairly—a big question, on a huge topic, but we haven’t discussed too much the nitty-gritty of coverage of Vietnam. But, in hindsight, I wonder if you have any observations about the Vietnam coverage as a whole, and how it was handled. And perhaps how has, how have you seen war coverage change since Vietnam? And obviously, it’s a humongous topic.
ARNETT: The AP Vietnam coverage; the American media Vietnam coverage was distinctive in a special way. This was the first war, the first modern war—and I include all of the wars of the 20th century as being modern wars—where the media held government, government officials, and military officers, and military officials, accountable for their decisions. World War I, World War II, Korea: strict censorship, limited commentary, limited factual transmission of information by the media. They went along with it, because those three wars, World War I, II and Korea, were looked upon as wars of national security; the fate of the nation was involved in those wars. There needed to be, you know, a national effort, and that included censorship of the media, which under the Constitution or, in the eons of time since the Constitution had been written, came to understand that in special occasions you can censor the press. So, reporters in those three wars essentially were part of the military. They got military rank; officers, depending on the place within the news media the reporter occupied, would be a senior officer or a junior officer. And they marched to the media’s—to the military’s drummer. The stories were censored; there was self-censorship; that was understood. And in fact, this was seen as a necessary ingredient of previous coverage. I remember John Steinbeck wrote a book called, you know, The War That Was, or words to that effect.* And in it, there was a preface that I actually read soon after I got to Vietnam, in which he said, “The war the media wrote about, World War II, was not the real war. The real war ended up, you know, in the editor’s wastepaper basket.” And he, he explained why that was, and he also suggested it was probably necessary to do it, but the point is, so much of the brutality and the stupidity of these wars, the earlier wars, was not reported. Because it was deemed of national security, and you just could not shake resolve, and anything negative, too negative, could hurt opinion back home. It was seen, argued by the authorities, and they got away with it; the media went along with it. Let’s go to Vietnam. The primary reporters of the Vietnam War, and I’m talking about Halberstam of the Times, and those who followed him at the Times; Malcolm Browne at the AP, and those who followed him; Time magazine; Newsweek. These were reporters who came up during the civil rights struggle in the ’50s. Quite a few of them had been covering the South. They’d also all been in the military. Because I’d served two years in the military, all reporters, at that time, was compulsory military service. So, they were all very familiar with the military; had their own feelings about the military that weren’t very patriotic, because certainly the military in the late ’50s, you know, service had become very routine. You know, as the young people in the United States were you know, moving out in their own directions—the civil rights struggle; other issues had come to the fore; women’s rights. There was a, sort of a fervent, you know, desire by young Americans to bring change. This was evident in the young reporters. They’re the ones who came to Vietnam in the ’60s. And with that attitude, they immediately began challenging government. So that when I got to Vietnam in ’62, Malcolm Browne was writing stories saying, you know, “The U.S. Embassy is lying because they’re bringing in helicopters and tanks to help the South Vietnamese and saying it’s not so.” So David Halberstam would come in, and go to the Mekong Delta, and saying, “You know, all the American advisers that I talk to say that we’re losing the war there. The Vietnam—Viet Cong are growing in ability, you know, they have controls.” And me, being an observant young reporter, picked up on all that. This made Vietnam different: challenging authority, challenging the embassy, challenging the government. So, by the, by 1963, President Kennedy was demanding The New York Times pull David Halberstam out of Vietnam, because he didn’t like his coverage. He said, “Halberstam is too negative,” particularly writing about the Buddhist crisis, and its impact on the presidency of Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, you know, was calling on the AP to pull me out of Vietnam because my reports were seen as being negative and what made it worse, I was from New Zealand. Of course, New Zealand was an ally; it had, you know, four or five thousand troops in Vietnam [laughs], but that wasn’t the issue. Every day on the ticker, on his—in the teleprinter in the Oval Office, you know, Johnson would read these AP dispatches, and every now and again they had a Peter Arnett story, or a John Wheeler story, and others that challenged the conventional wisdom, and that made him, made him very unhappy. But not just the AP and The New York Times. Newsweek,Time magazine started to, you know, to look at this war as being, you know, misspent money, misspent lives. This hadn’t happened before. This was also unique. And the ability, then, of journalists to analyze and challenge government in what was, you know, a war seen to be the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time carried over into the ’70s, with Watergate, where Washington Post reporters felt emboldened to challenge authority right at home. [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein challenged the authority of the president in Washington. Not without difficulty; they had to convince their own editors that what they were doing was significant. Now, the effect of Watergate, and the effect of Vietnam coverage, carried over into the ’80s, with strong critical coverage of Americans’ involvement in Central America; with the Iran-Contra affair, supporting the Contras against the Nicaraguan government; going on to the first Gulf War; and then going on to the ’90s; and it was only, really, 9/11 that changed the picture, where journalists and where mainstream media—people, reporters, editors, you know, felt confronted by terrorism, that altered the picture to some degree. But those years from the early ’60s to early in the 21st century were really years of challenging, significant, important journalism that, that helped really disclose what government was doing abroad; the mistakes it was making, and, you know, and bringing the public into a greater understanding and a greater role to play in how government acted abroad. There’s no doubt about it.
KOMOR: Do you see that AP had a specific role to play in that—fulfilling that great journalistic ideal? Was it, did it operate differently from other news organizations? And how is it different?
ARNETT: The AP in the 1960s and ’70s was basically as it is today: the rock of coverage. I mean, today, all American mainstream news organizations look to the AP wire for guidance; for the latest news. Now, maybe they’ll look at CNN, if they want a press coverage live, and a—if, they’ll look at the other 24-hour networks if there’s a big developing story, if there’s a Katrina.** But basically, day in and day out, the AP wire is the guidepost; the example. The unchallenged, you know, truth, as best being determined, of what’s going on. And this was the case in the 1960s. It also applied to the AP during the previous wars. Don’t forget the AP operated under censorship. It didn’t challenge censorship because it was understood that in wars of national security, you have censorship. But bearing that in mind, they would push the censor, you know, to get more information into the report, but there was an understanding. You’re censored? OK, we understand that, but let’s try and get a little more on the wire than you would normally get. Like, when I was in Baghdad for CNN in the first Gulf War, I was the only reporter there. So, the Iraqis would say, you know, “You’re allowed two minutes a day to report and we want to censor what you write.” “OK, so this is what I’m going to write, but you know, I have to get on the air, and I have to talk about a few other things.” “OK.” So you keep expanding the perimeter, as best you can. And that’s what the AP did in World War II and World War I. The important thing though, is to admit that you’re under censorship. So, when I was in the Gulf War, every report I did, CNN said “under censorship.” And in World War II and World War I, it was understood by the public and everyone that there was censorship in place. There was a general in charge of censorship. There was never any pretense that there wasn’t censorship. You know. It was a requirement that news organizations remembered, that as Walter Cronkite has said, “You still had the reporter’s presence with the 101st Airborne when they leaped in at, you know, D-Day, you know, June 5, 1944.” Cronkite was with them. So their report was censored, but the point is, he was there, he had his notes; sooner or later, you could write your book, or give the bigger picture. It’s simply the information you had was, you know, significant, you know, you had to be a time delay on it. So, there was no pretense. We knew they had—you had censorship. In Vietnam, there was no time delay. There was no censorship. Why wasn’t there any censorship? Well, the succession of U.S. governments: the Kennedy administration; the Johnson administration; the Nixon administration, refused to admit there was a war on. It was sort of a police action. It was an insurgency. It was never officially perceived as being a war. And Secretary of State Dean Rusk mentioned after the war, when asked why hadn’t censorship been imposed, he said, “Well, we didn’t want to bring the focus of the war up to the level where if we—the imposition of censorship would have brought into place so many other requirements. You introduce censorship, you introduce mobilization, and you have to bring so much else into play when you have censorship in this democracy.” They didn’t want to do that. They didn’t quite know what they were doing in Vietnam. There was no plan to win the war, so they had to live with a media that challenged what they were doing. And the media was basically saying, you know, “Get out of here!” You know, that, that, that was climaxed after the Tet Offensive in February of 1968, when Walter Cronkite had come back from a tour of the war zone, and on CBS said, you know, “We’re losing this. What are we doing there? It’s not working.” And Walter Cronkite was a voice that was more respected than Lyndon Johnson’s at the time, so Johnson just declined to run for office again. [Laughs] It was—so this was—what the AP brought then, was, and the other media, was an insistence that, you know, the facts should not be concealed. If the government felt it was such a big issue, go ahead and, go ahead and impose censorship. Don’t ask us for self-censorship. The worst censorship is self-censorship. It’s like me going to—in Iraq, and seeing a beheading, or seeing some terrible action, and not talking about. Particularly, it was done by American troops. It’s concealing the Abu Ghraib pictures, because it’s not in the national interest to do it. It’s not our job to do that. If the Pentagon wants to impose censorship, do it, but with the understanding that, you know, that the nation trusts your best judgment. And it, it’s—and will hold you accountable. If the media is asked to self-censorship, who’s accountable? You know, this is not good. And throughout the Vietnam War, Wes Gallagher was unwilling to impose self-censorship. He was unwilling to tell us, “Well, guys, go to the field, but don’t report any atrocities you might see committed by Americans.” You know? You know, “Let’s not—let’s have a more optimistic assessment of where we are in 1967.” You had President—you know, you had Lyn—you—General William C. Westmoreland, then the commander in Vietnam in November of 1967, came, told Congress, “We’re winning the war; there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” Did Wes Gallagher say, “Hey, why don’t you do something that supports that?” No! He said, “Is that right or wrong?” I did a piece which said it was wrong. You know? So. But he didn’t—what he challenged, what he demanded of the AP staff was that you had to be correct. And I saw Wes a few times; I’d come back to the States; he would come to Vietnam, and he’d say, “Peter, you’re a great reporter. Don’t ever be wrong. You’re so—there’s so many people who don’t like what you’re doing that if you were wrong we won’t be able to do anything to hold you.” I didn’t do anything wrong. [Laughs] So. Not in Vietnam anyway. And so, it was. That was the attitude. “We’ll go with the reporters; they’re risking their lives. We’ll go with what they’re reporting to us. And this is how it has to be in a democratic society.” And I think this was an incredibly important standard that the AP certainly helped—or led. The AP led the reporting. I mean, we had the more reporters; more photographers; we were first with the story more often than UPI; we—the analyses we did held up, still hold up. You know, we gave 4 dead, 18 wounded to the story, and we’re willing to do that. And this was a wonderful commitment. And, and it was, and, it, it was a necessary commitment, you know, and it was, and something that we can all be proud of. I’m proud of it; Richard Pyle’s proud; Esper is proud. Every AP reporter who served in Vietnam, that was their proudest time of their career. With good reason! Because we really believed in, you know, our requirement to tell the truth of what’s going on; demand accountability; get to the bottom of what’s happening. And don’t forget, the Vietnam War was over a course of time; it was from, basically, ’62 to ’75. It was a long time, a lot of challenging—it was a challenging time. It’s sort of like Iraq today; it’s very challenging. And Vietnam was challenging, but I think from beginning to end, I think the media held up pretty well. And historians have agreed with that assessment. There are those on the right side of the spectrum who blame the press for losing the war. But even military historians, in their volumes they’ve written about the media, conclude that we were on top of it all. If there’s any challenge, it’s the fact that information came out that shouldn’t have. But that’s not up to us to determine. It’s up to the authorities to, you know, to either not do those things, or have kind of controls that the public is aware of, that we’re aware of, but which require accountability eventually.
KOMOR: Thank you, Peter.
ARNETT: My pleasure.
Compiled by Sarit Hand, Coordinator, The Associated Press Oral History Program, AP Corporate Archives. Oct. 08, 2009.
* Once There Was a War (1958).
** Hurricane Katrina (2005).