 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Don Carlton, Executive Director of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. Well, good afternoon. The Briscoe Center is delighted to sponsor this session this afternoon, which is titled The War and the Fourth Estate. We're especially proud to sponsor the session because the center houses a valuable archive of papers and photographs documenting the history of the American news media, including the papers of Walter Croncott and Morley Safer and the photographic archives of Eddie Adams, Dirk Halstead, Steve Northup, and David Kennerly. The Briscoe Center has produced an exhibit of documentary material selected from these and other collections relating to the various aspects of the Vietnam War. This exhibit is titled Vietnam, Evidence of War, and it's currently on display on the third floor of the LBJ Library. So I invite all of you who are attending the summit to come and visit our exhibit while you're here. Now today, we're honored to have two renowned journalists on our panel who will explore the crucial role that the media played in shaping perceptions of the Vietnam War. Those panelists are Peter Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning correspondent who has spent nearly a lifetime covering wars and international crises for major American news organizations. Arnett covered the Vietnam War for the Associated Press for 13 years from the buildup of U.S. military advisors in the early 1960s to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Arnett wrote more than 2,000 news stories from Vietnam for the Associated Press and he has written several books, including his autobiography, Live from the Battlefield and his memoir on the Vietnam War called The Fall of Saigon. And then Dan Rather. My friend Dan Rather has been a fixture in broadcast news for over six decades during which he has won every major journalism award. Dan has interviewed every president since Eisenhower and he's covered almost every important date line of the last 60 years, including of course extensive coverage of the Vietnam War. Dan spent 43 years at CBS, 24 years of which he served as the anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News. Today he is founder, president and CEO of News and Guts, an independent production company specializing in non-fiction content. Our moderator is Andrew Sherry, who is vice president of communications at the Knight Foundation, which is the country's leading funder of journalism and media innovation. As a journalist, Sherry was based in Hong Kong, Hanoi, Nampin, Nicosia and Paris. First for AFB news agency and then Dow Jones, where he became a regional editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. One of his most memorable assignments included covering the opening of Vietnam. Please join me in welcoming our panel today. Well, thanks for that intro. It's really great to be here. We are very fortunate to be here with two reporters whose long and storied careers actually personify the healthy tension between a free press and government. Just a word on format. I wanna spend the first half of the panel asking, I'm gonna be leading the questions of two of them so we can bring out the range of insights that they have to offer, which really go from experiences in Vietnam to the evolution of the relationship between the press and the military and later conflicts to look forward at what the fragmentation of the media landscape and its implications are. Now, Peter, you were in Vietnam from probably your first reporting trip was 1962 before the US military buildup and you didn't leave until 1975 after the fall of Saigon. Yeah, basically, yeah. So why don't you set the scene for us? With the really- You know, I was here through the conference all yesterday and here for Henry Kissinger's presentation and overnight I made a few notes because it happened a long time ago but I think it's clear from the panel discussions of this conference so far that important policies of President Kennedy Johnson and Nixon involving Vietnam were carefully concealed from the American public. To maintain what I call a deception, the media policies of all three presidents attempted heavy-handed news manipulation and intimidation of reporters in the field and their superiors back home. The objective was to proceed with actions in Vietnam that have publicly debated would meet resistances to home and concern abroad. Now, our leaders endeavored to compel a powerful news industry with its long tradition of bold war reporting to bend to the whims of policymakers making questionable judgments on issues important to the American public. Judgments often made far from the battlefields. In earlier significant American wars, the government with official censorship took upon itself the burden of deciding what news was fit to print, what information gathered by reporters in the field might harm the security of military operations or what might not to keep on message in terms of achieving the overall objectives and keeping the support of the public at large. But not for the war in Vietnam, an enterprise deemed too sensitive politically to... Sorry, let me say that again. The war in Vietnam, an enterprise deemed too sensitive to justify censorship. So from the beginning, as early as June 1962 when I arrived in Saigon, assigned to the AP Bureau, there were the beginnings of the credibility gap plaguing media and military relations that only worsened as the years went by. In the course of our discussions this afternoon, I know we'll track this evolved situation and that continue to plague American media relations. But I'll conclude these initial remarks by quoting a letter sent to President Kennedy on June 18, 1963 by the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Herbert Drucker, then editor of the Hartford Courant, in which he refers to an incident during a Buddhist protest in Saigon to the policies of President Ngo Dinh Siam mid-1963 when I was beaten up by plainclothes police and was later arrested with my AP colleague Malcolm Brown and held on assault charges. Mr. Drucker's letter in part said, quote, in recent weeks, as you were aware, Mr. President, there have been charges that Vietnamese secret police pummeled, knocked down and kicked American reporters and smashed their cameras. The letter concluded, it is not yet certain that all possible efforts are being made to prevent further deliberate obstacles to free reporting. Whatever the difficulties we urge you to bear in mind the need for the American people to have the fullest possible factual information from South Vietnam, no matter what anyone may think is right or wrong about the situation there. This letter not only represented the full support of the mainstream media for open reporting from Vietnam at that time, but remained the view of editors and TV producers at home who supported the work of journalists in the field for the entirety of the war. Well, I hope people in the audience have been taking notes as well because we will open it up for questions and comments at the end. That was an interesting insight about the importance of the support that you got from the mainstream media. Dan, I'm really interested in hearing, you went back and forth between Vietnam and New York. I'm interested in hearing how different was it the first time you arrived. How, what type of reception did you get for your reporting back? And how much did your network support you in telling what you felt was the complete story? Well, I went to Vietnam first time in October of 1965 and stayed the better part of a year. I was back another three times after that, but never for that long. It answers your question. When I went to Vietnam, it was very clear to me and it remained very clear to me throughout all the time I was there that I had the complete unmitigated support of not just this CBS News as a division of CBS Inc, but the full support of the corporate entity that owns CBS News. At that time, William S. Paley, who had founded CBS News was still head of the corporation, but there never was any question whatsoever about having support of quote, the brass back home. That was a long CBS News tradition. They helped establish it as the predominant position of electronic journalism in general. Just, there wasn't any doubt about it. That when I went the first time, I was unprepared to cover the war. Perhaps it can be said that most correspondents are unprepared to cover the war. I had covered war before. I had covered the India-Pakistan War in the summer of 1965, but this was the first time that I had been privileged and I used the word measurably to cover American men and women. At that time, it was almost exclusively men in combat. To say I was unprepared is to understated. But I remember the first time, it was three days after I arrived, I quickly went north to I-Corps and covered an operation, which is to say a combat operation near Tom Key. And that was the first time that I had seen in-person eyewitness to war in which my neighbors and the young sons of people all over the country was involved. And to be perfectly honest about it, I never got over the shock of it. Real mud, real blood, real screams of the wounded, moments of the dying. That when I saw the first wounded American that I'd ever seen in combat, I have no apology for saying, I first threw up and then I wept. What was the impact that your reporting was having back in the United States? Or you also, Peter, you were writing for the Associated Press, which means sent all around the world. What kind of feedback were you getting on the impact of your storytelling? Well, on the first three months I was there in 1962, we were getting messages from a Washington bureau saying, how come their coverage in Washington of the government of the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House was 180 degree different from ours on what was happening in Vietnam. Now, well, personally, those of us who are in Vietnam really were not concerned too much about our reporting buddies in Washington. We were really concerned about what we were seeing in the field. When I was assigned to Vietnam, where's Gallagher the AP president said, Peter, report the truth, report what you see, and we'll support you all the way. When I arrived, of course, there was Neil Sheehan was working for UPI, David Halberstam came in for the New York Times, Malcolm Brown for the AP, with a great photographer, Horst Fass, Stanley Carnow was coming in and out of Hong Kong for Time Magazine. All of us were reporting what we were finding in the field, what were we finding? American advisors who were 10,000 when I arrived would come to Saigon or we'd meet in the field, who would start complaining about the reluctance of the South Vietnamese military to sort of listen to their advice. There was an incident at the Battle of Up Bach on the first few days of 1963, where several American helicopters were shot down and Americans were killed on the ground. We were tipped off by one of the helicopter pilots who called us from Tanzanute to tell us about it. Now, Neil Sheehan and the Reuters guy flew on a helicopter to the scene. I drove down to Up Bach, 40 miles south of Saigon, with Steve Stibbins, a Texan who happened to be working for the Stars and Stripes at the time and his Jeep. Now, we got our information from the Americans on the ground and the information we were getting also politically was that the American role in Vietnam wasn't working. I'll add one other point. In December of 1962, the Senator, Speaker of the Senate or Leader of the Senate, Mike Mansfield visited Vietnam with a team. He asked to meet us at the Carrival Hotel. We thought he wanted us to brief him. He briefed us on what he felt were the negatives about the Nodin Xeem regime. The information he had picked up all week during his visit. He criticized the American Embassy. And what was interesting, he went back and briefed President Kennedy on his version of the war, which was very similar to our version. This didn't stop the pressure because soon after that President Kennedy called the managing editor of the New York Times asking you to help us stand be reassigned. This phrase is a very important point that Peter's just made when you asked me when I first got up to Vietnam. But from the very first moments I was in Vietnam, the distance between what was the reality on the ground, what you bore witness to, and what was being spoken in Washington and what was being talked about all over the country was that such variance, it was a shock, it was a shock that never subsided. That the longer you were in Vietnam, the more you had to say to yourself, what I'm seeing is not matching what the politicians are saying. And as I say, the longer I was there, the greater this gap got. And I'll give you a quick anecdote. I was going forward now when I came out of Vietnam after the first time being there for almost a year. Very shortly I was made the White House Correspondent for CBS News, I had been briefly before, but at any rate, I was an associate of President Johnson said, you know, perhaps you'd like to come to the briefing room downstairs, so-called situation room, and we can give you a briefing on what's going on. I found that somewhat curious that they were going to give me a briefing of what was going on by people who had never been there. Or had only been there for a very short time. At any rate, I'll try to keep it short, but it's never left my mind and it underscores much of what Peter's just referred to. So I was second down the situation room and walked up a rostal of a good and decent American, very intelligent, intellectual gentleman, gave a briefing on the battlefield situation. Well, he pointed with his pointer to one particular place on the Cambodian border near what later became known the Hook, this little piece of Vietnam goes into Cambodia. And he was describing, quote, this is the success of our armor there. I'm saying to myself, one of two things is very evident here. Either, and I hate to use the word, either he's lying through his teeth or he is vastly misinformed because just before I had left Saigon, I had been in that very area, which is swampy, believe you mean, nobody takes armor in there. They had many armor, but in short, just as an anecdote, I think that encapsulates what it was. I give Professor Rostal a benefit to doubt. I think he actually believed it. But from that moment on, when I went back to Vietnam later on, I always had that in mind. Now, right there was the nut of the problem, if you will, that people who had been there, people like Peter Barnett, and let me pause and say, there has never been a braver, a more correspondent, more valor than Peter Barnett, who was there for all those over the years. But the kind of thing that Peter and Malcolm Brown and Neil Cheehan and Howard Stamblin reported, was it such variance that if you had any decency as a journalist at all, you had to say to yourself, listen, I've been there. I've spent almost more than a year there, almost a year there. And what I saw does not match this briefing that I'm getting. Now, the briefing, if that's the briefing the President got, then we can see how the problem developed over years. So what do you think it is that made the relationship between the press, military, and government so different in Vietnam than it was, say, in World War II or Korea? Because, it seems like some of the military assumed that it was a problem with society or with the press, but there could be other arguments that the nature of the conflict was fundamentally different, so it led people to behave differently. Which do you think? Well, I'll answer that. Censorship is the difference. Exactly. I remember talking to Walter Cronkite about censorship and World War II, and he says, I didn't particularly like it. He says, I did have access to the whole war. He flew into Normandy, I believe, in a glider on D-Day. But he said, at least I had access to the war, and after the war, we could come out and we know all about it. I mentioned censorship was not introduced into Vietnam. I interviewed Dean Roscoe after the war, who was Secretary of State, formally. And he said, well, he didn't feel the climate, political climate in America at the time, would have supported that kind of honorous restrictions involved in having censorship of a war theater. Okay, well, without censorship then, we were free to go and report stories where we could find them. What is not understood? That each American division that landed in Vietnam came from hometown, from Fort Bragg to the first cab or Fort Hood for the fourth division, the 25th Infantry Division, the Pineapple Division from Hawaii, those soldiers wanted the folks back home to know what they were doing in Vietnam. The information officers from these units would come to Saigon and lobby for the attention of the media. I'm sure Dan was invited many times. The Marines had a very successful operation to invite journalists. All of the units wanted our appearance. On the course of my time in Vietnam, I wrote over 2,000 stories. Many of them were written with these troops in the field and kept getting invited back. So in terms of the antagonism between the military and the media, it didn't exist in Vietnam. Did you feel antagonistic in any unit you went to? No, no, quite to contrary. And this is a strong point. With television, even more than print and I give great credit to the photographers who we in the session, following this session. But in television, you have to have the pictures. And in Vietnam, as a journalist, we had an ideal situation and I think the military thought they had an ideal situation. Peter's point that the military wanted you to be up front. They wanted you to be in the middle of combat. They wanted you to film it. It was all film, not videotape because we were still operating the film. Here's the way it worked with television. That we could go anywhere in Vietnam that we wanted to go. We were basically in the hitchhiking business, mostly by helicopters, sometimes by plane, once in a while by ground convoy. But you can go anywhere. As a consequence, we reported individual correspondent to report and I did myself from I-Corps in the far north, all the way to the Mekong Delta to the south and everything in between. The military during the Vietnam War was eager for correspondence to see the war as it was and to have that transmitted back to the States. They were eager. Now, on the question of censorship, I do agree that the big difference was in World War II and in the Korean War, there was censorship. No censorship during the Vietnam War. And frankly, I think the American people were served much better by the circumstances in Vietnam, be it the press and the military than perhaps they ever had been. But one decent, intending, honest people could differ about that, that's my own opinion. But here's the point that it's frequently said, well, in the military and what led to restrictions on the press, for example, compare Govor I, the war roughly in 1990 period, the first Gulf War, the military's whole mindset had changed to they didn't want correspondence to see combat. And they successfully prevented news coverage of what I would call upfront Ernie Pile kind of dog face what the average soldier is going through. They didn't want the public to see, so there was a sea change to use a cliche between Govor I and what had happened in Vietnam. The military thought they had learned a lesson. They learned the wrong lesson. Their lesson was, listen, keep the press out. Don't let the press see what the war is like. And in terms of Vietnam, one of the things that the military and the administration, whether it's Kennedy Johnson or Nixon administration, didn't want you to see was the effects of the war on civilians. Listen, anybody who's seen war knows this truth. War is idiotic. It's terrible. It's ghastly. It's savage for everybody involved. But those who suffer the most are women, children, and old people. And the military never wanted you to see the civilian casualties. They never wanted you to emphasize that. So going forward to the Govor I in the rough period of 1990, it was our job, the military public affairs officers who were given the job, you keep the press out. Keep the press out from anything approaching frontline combat. And for God's sake, don't let them see any civilian casualties. I have a couple of points quickly to make. I've written down a few. But with Dan being here, but I'll tell the story he should tell, that Morley Safer, our treasured colleague who I hear is quite ill these days. But he's from Khamnaya Village in Vietnam in 65. That was shown on CBS. And President Johnson watched it, picked up the phone in the early hours of the morning and called the president of CBS who was built up. No, he called Dr. Frank Stanton. Frank Stanton is the president. Second man down in the corporate order. Frank, your boy this morning shat on the flag because of the nature of this report. I'll just give you a few other things. The Johnson administration in 65 tried to limit the coverage. The AP was a prime target, my organization. My own reports, graphic reports that Dan has been talking about, riot gas experiments and the military operations early in the war, equipment failures, weapon shortages. So angered Washington that President Johnson ordered the FBI at one point to rate through my life looking from subdued to silenced me. He did the same with John Chancellor. Now AP headquarters was aware of the generalities of the criticism, but only much later did we learn the extent of White House unhappiness. Press Secretary Bill Moyers, a revered journalist later, and I'm sure a good pal of yours, observed in 1965 memo when he was press secretary, the president, that the coverage of CBS corresponded Mollie Safer and me, Peter Arnett, was quote, irresponsible and prejudiced, unquote. And because we were foreign born, we did not have the basic American interests at heart, because Mollie was from Canada. Now Moyers promised to tighten things up and the president scrolled good on the message. Now I was indeed foreign born from New Zealand, but some of my old schoolmates were officers in the Kiwi New Zealand forces in Vietnam who were in Australia in combat alongside US soldiers. Now when presidential assistant Jack Valenti heard that the AP president, Wes Gallagher, was coming to the White House to meet to discuss White House criticism, Valenti wrote, quote, you might wanna bring up the problem of Peter Arnett, who has been more damaging to the US cause than a whole battalion of Vietcongs. Okay, for the meeting, Wes Gallagher was prepared to counter the criticism bearing a briefcase filled with photos and facts supporting the disputed stories. The day prior to the meeting, two AP member managing editors reported to Gallagher that the president had volumely to complain to them about my coverage. The AP chief went to the meeting anxious to resolve this issue. Now the American president and Gallagher were a formidable pair, both with all tough people, tough-minded, but the luncheon went on and drew to an end with no mention of the war. Gallagher said at last, Mr. President, I understand you are being critical of some of AP's stories from Vietnam. Oh, no, the president replied. I think the AP is doing a great job. Not willing to challenge the president and what he'd been told a few days earlier by the managing editors, Gallagher said, well, I just want you to know, Mr. President, that the AP is not against you or for you. Well, Wes Johnson replied, that it's not quite the way I like it. Can I say Johnson? That is fantastic. Here, if I may, I think that one important thing rings through here. Let's take the great Morley Sabre report on the burning of village huts, which was a shot. The difference between yesterday, Vietnam, and today is very important without being preachy for every citizen to understand. While it's true that President Johnson picked up the phone and gave Frank Stanton, the second man down in the CBS corporate entity, gave him unmitigated hell about the safe report, applied maximum pressure. At no time was even the slightest indication that Bill Paley, who owned the company, or Dr. Stanton, who ran the company, was going to influence coverage in any way. And that was true of NBC, and ABC was not the news organization then that it is now, but nonetheless, the point can be grasped that quality journalism, whether it's covering war or anything else, particularly times of war, quality journalism begins with an owner, a publisher, a leader who has guts, who will back his reporters. And through the length and breadth of the Vietnam War, it was all kinds of pressure put on corporate leaders, such as Bill Paley. And I know of no instance in which they caved to it. Now, you rack forward now, we're talking 50-some-odd years later, the whole corporate structure of so much of national distribution news is controlled by a few very large international congloments. There's a whole different atmosphere. Journalists are operating in a different kind of arena in which, all too often, there are exceptions, but all too often, the corporate leadership doesn't have the sensitivity about the value to society, to American society, of a truly independent, fiercely fighting independent unnecessary press. During the Vietnam War, that existed with the owners at almost every corporate level. I'm sure I would say it no longer exists that way. I think it is an interesting point that there was very little press criticism within the military, even, during the actual coverage of the war. I mean, there were reporters everywhere. And we were welcome. We're willing to take any kind of risk for a story. And we were often with soldiers who just appreciated our company. It was only in the latest stages, really, the Nixon presidency, when the US, with withdrawing, with no real victory in sight, that the tension started to materialize between the military and the. I have a quick note here from William Hammond, who's one of the most prominent military historians of the Vietnam War. He did a two-volume official study. And he wrote in one book, in the end, what happened in Vietnam between the US and the military, on one hand. And the news media, on the other, was symptomatic of what happened in the United States as a whole. He mentioned that at the beginning, the US had supported the war effort, as did most Americans, the idea of containing China and Russia behind an anti-communist Vietnam. And he said that with many deaths and under the influence of many deaths and contradictions, directions in the public changed and significant portions of the leadership in American society moved to repudiate the earlier decision. And even, you know, news organization, newspapers that had supported the war started to turn against it. And Hammond mentioned that the military and the government was unable to follow this idea that the war was not worth continuing. And with most of the soldiers out, those who were remaining behind in Vietnam, whether in the embassy or in the military units, they stayed to retrieve whatever national face they could. Those of their members most emotionally tied to the failed policy fixed their anger upon the news media, the most visible exponent of the society that appeared to have rejected them. The recriminations we see today became the most inevitable result. So it was only after the war that we had these numerous meetings between the media and the military arguing about policy and so forth. It was because we lost the war, but won the war. You know, the press wouldn't have faced the kind of criticism that still exists today. That's fascinating. You both have brought up a number of actually very significant things regarding the war in the fourth of the state and some significant changes over time. I mean, you talked about how, when you go to the first Gulf War, the military had learned some good lessons from Vietnam, like have a defined objective and have a plan for pulling out afterwards. But the lesson that they took toward the press was to basically isolate them by only allowing embedding or mostly allowing embedding. I think you could also even suggest in the Iraq War, government took it to another level, almost went on the offensive with information about weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to be accurate. But just looking at that, how much of the things around the Iraq or in the Iraq invasion was that people in the Pentagon playing the New York Times or was also the press caught up in somewhat of a patriotic fervor post 9-11, things like that, and actually dropped the ball? Well, I think the latter is the greater truth and I want to make it clear that in this criticism of the press in general, during the period leading up to the Iraq War and the early stages of the Iraq War, I do not accept myself from the criticism about it. But at the time we got to the invasion of the Iraq War, there were certainly exceptions. The Mavinti group, for example, was an exception. But by and large, by the time we reached that point, American journalism in general, I'm sorry to say, had lost some of its spine. And there was, we and I speak for myself and others, noting there's some exceptions. Got caught up in questions that would arise in your mind, but you say, you know, if you raise those questions, you're going to pay a very heavy price. I've used this metaphor before, but because it's one that works, that to ask the tough question, and to ask the tough follow-up question, because frequently a follow-up question elicit more than the original question, you were going to have a sign put around your neck, unpatriotic, liberal left-wing, bomb-throwing Bolshevik or something. So that built in, this is not by way of excuse. There are no excuses by way of explanation that we, to mix metaphors, we lost our guts in anyways. It was, listen, you know that the questions need to be asked about this, but this train is rolling, we're going to war. And the price, while every journalist knew it, and in every newsroom it was palpable, but nobody wanted to talk about it, was a certain amount of, I'll use the word, cowardice. It was, if you question this too much, if you don't get on board this invasion train moving here, you're going to wind up metaphorically, like in South Africa once, when the worst of the South African civil war was underway, they would put a burning tire around people's neck who descended with whatever the power structure would do. So metaphorically, as a journalist, you said to yourself, you're going to get, if not that sign marking you as an unpatriotic person, you're going to have this burning tire put around you. I repeat, this is not by way of excuse, it's by way of explanation. So the press in general, once again, noting that there were some exceptions, said, listen, the president of the United States says that it's about stopping possible nuclear war, chemical warfare, and there was also talk of being tied in with al-Qaeda, which also turned out to be untrue. But having said that we lost our guts or if you like the spine metaphor better, when a president of the United States, who after all is not only head of state, but head of government, when he says something and when the whole administration was orchestrated for one point of view, then any voices of dissent, press or otherwise, got obliterated and most of us didn't speak up when we should have spoken up, we didn't ask the right questions. So when I say the latter part you describe, was it a case of everybody, frankly, we Americans, a little afraid to use the word propaganda, but there was an immense propaganda campaign to build American public opinion for the war. And I compliment those in journalism who stood up at the time in the face of that, but overwhelmingly American journalists did not, including myself. The first Gulf War really changed the whole nature of foreign coverage. And it represented the American media, certainly the one that CNN and Ted Turner was creating in the 80s and ultimately Tom Johnson was supervising, decided to expand the restraint beyond American involvement and say the conflict of war such as Iraq to cover the other side, to look at both sides of the story. This hadn't happened in the past. Now Saddam Hussein and his people invited CNN to stay and actually other media were included, that it was CNN that decided to stay in Baghdad. And why did we do that? One was the vision of Ted Turner who believed that CNN could be a vehicle to get both sides of international stories in particular. The other was that we had the technology to actually effectively do live coverage of a war theater. This hadn't happened before, the 67th satellite. This was helped by Tom Johnson, your own Tom Johnson people who had taken over CNN a few months earlier and he had used his contacts to have one of the first cell phones which was a 80 pound in a box sent to Baghdad. And we were able then when the war started to cover it despite great objections from the US government and others and opponents of moving in that direction to give the other side coverage. My interview with Saddam Hussein during the war attracted a lot of criticism but Dan had interviewed him prior to the war and didn't attract any criticism at all, right? There were a rack change from being a story to be covered that the moment American troops were in action, it became a forbidden territory but not to Ted Turner, not to CNN. So I was the only reporter for much of the war in Baghdad covering with a wonderful team of CNN personnel covering it live. The second gold war in 2003, there were 40 other live television units and the whole nature of international coverage changed because the communications allowed the reports from ordinary people all across the globe. I think the effect of this, there was a negative effect on the US military because they closed up the access to their own people and because of this barrage of information they wanted to control it. But by doing that, journalists say in Iraq who were really unhappy with the embedding and would go and were reluctant to do much coverage with the US because they were rarely allowed in any kind of action. You couldn't take any pictures of wounded Americans or any American casualties, but however reporters could go all over the countryside. I think most Pulitzer Prizes given for international coverage, including this year's from the New York Times, was for stories about ordinary people living in victims of the war. And all these stories added up to essentially a criticism of America involvement. So it's been an explosive mixture of technology and what we're seeing today. Well, we haven't talked much about technology but in thinking about Vietnam, our subject of the day, it's been more than 50 years ago but in Vietnam keep in mind there was no live battlefield coverage. Everybody now is, they accept live battlefield coverage or at least on scene coverage. But in Vietnam, I mentioned earlier we're in film. If as a correspondent, you covered Tam Ki which I mentioned earlier, you filmed the battle. There was no putting it up on the satellite in Vietnam. There was not only were there no cell phones, there were virtually no telephone contact. Yes, if you happen to be inside God and stood in line at the government telephone building you get it. There was only communication basically by telex machine. So the film, you filmed Tam Ki, you put it on the helicopter in a CBS News, we had yellow grapefruit bags which we may appoint to say everybody we run into. You see a yellow grapefruit bag, get it to Tanzanute airport in Saigon and trans ship it to Tokyo. Forget the picture, you film at Tam Ki one day. The film has to find its way, it's sort of begging its way to Saigon where a jet plane takes it to Tokyo. In Tokyo, it's transferred to a flight to San Francisco. The flight to San Francisco gets to New York. So generally speaking, there were a few exceptions of this leader on the war, but generally speaking, whatever you saw on the evening news was at least three or four days. Oh, compare that to today where if the story is three or four days old it's probably not gonna see air. The lack of communication, not just for journalistic enterprises that pushes to say no telephone service to speak of, no satellite access to speak of, translated also to a sense with troops in the field and I always wanna come back to the soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen who fought this war, but there was a sense of loneliness, a sense of being an alien land which is almost totally different from today. A soldier today on a frontline combat thank and get up on Skype and he can talk to his children on their birthday, on their birthday while he's in the combat region. My point is that this is so far from the reality of coverage in Vietnam that it frequently gets overlooked but it's worth considering we talk about the media and the press in general with Vietnam but the difficulties of getting the story out, nevermind the pressure from the administration and the propaganda efforts and all of that, just the physical problem of getting reports out, even for the AP, if Peter's in the field and it was not unusual for all of you who are correspondent worthy of the name, you're not gonna cover the war from Saigon or even for that matter, if the Marine enclave in open I-Core tonight, you've got to be in the field. Well, the problem of getting your report from the field to someplace where it could be transmitted back to the United States was a Herculean proposition on a day-to-day basis. I think one of the problems is that you have official statements and commitments of troops to one player or another and it's difficult to find the kind of investigating or to get public interest in the kind of investigating reporting or inside stories that were common in Vietnam. So the public is missing out on the kind of explanation picture that was important. It's important to their understanding. What I think is lacking today in coverage, what you do not see anymore are what we call the hometown stories about soldiers in action, the daily routine, the sort of the Ernie Pyle kind of reporting. I meet officers in Vietnam, they say, where's the Ernie Pyle of Vietnam? And a lot of people I know wanted to be the Ernie Pyle of Vietnam. Including myself. Including me. But you don't have anyone even considers that. You don't see those stories because if you're embedded with the US military, they don't encourage soldiers to talk about much. Maybe about football and stuff. That's lacking in the American public and the families of those men who are over there, missing out on getting a sense of the view of what's happening. Well, again, I think this is a point worth pondering. That during the Vietnam War, soldiers, including officers with the possible exception of flag rank officers, which is to say generals, soldiers were free to talk to reporters any way they wanted to. Today, even platoon commanders are schooled on how to quote, how to handle the press. And they operate on a set of rules. In Vietnam, I want to bear witness to, captains and sergeants were the keys to knowing how the war was going. Length and breadth of my own time in Vietnam, I never had anybody feel great officer below tell me anything other than what they really thought of this group. Now, it was not uncommon. You're taking incoming mortar rounds or heavy fire or something. And the captain, how's it going captain? He might say, and I'll clean this up with this audience. He might say, we're getting our butts kicked here. Now, and the coverage would reflect that they were getting their butts kicked in that particular area, if you will. What is now, first of all, you probably couldn't get to a frontline situation where you're taking incoming heavy combat. Secondly, if you got there, the captain would be very reluctant to talk to any journalist because he's been taught since OCS, be careful of the press. And that seeps down to the sergeants and people down below them. So it's a whole different dynamic. Vietnam, the advantage of getting into the field is you could find out what was going on, what was really going on, as opposed to what somebody wanted to believe was going on. So where do we go from here? We've initiated a lot of those changes between the relationship during the various wars. You've talked about the changes in corporate structure where you have news divisions owned by basically big entertainment companies. All these have made a difference. And then you mentioned technology, which has now produced a complete fragmentation of the media landscape. But we've also talked about something which may be lost. A lot of this conversation has seemed to be about conflict between press and other entities. But you've spoken before about the role the press plays in building trust in a democratic society so it can actually function. If that is at the root of what the Fourth Estate is all about, how do we move toward building that or rebuilding it in the current context? That's a very good point. And what I think has to be done is renegotiating between the mainstream media, the important media organization and the military about how to approach the story of young Americans committed to war in several countries whose story is not being told. Today, when you have an incident overseas like the SEAL Team Six does something we're never told about it. You wait five years for the books to come out. I think there's been 15 to 20 books on the death of Ben Laden. And even, so there's a delay in learning what these boys are doing over there. And I think there should be, Pentagon should get together with media operatives and talk about how do we improve the embedding to where we get to tell the story more about what these young people are doing. I mean, this is the biggest story for America. Young men set overseas, 300 I think going to Syria soon. Some will give their lives. Now what they're doing is far more important than all the political campaigns being launched at this moment that dominate the new. No question. Got it. Amen to that on a macro picture talking about. It is true that in a society such as ours, a constitutional republic based on the principles of freedom and democracy, it's absolutely essential, never more imperative than during wartime, that there be a high degree of communicable trust between the leadership and the lead. And what happened in Vietnam, a lot of that communicable trust that been built over the years during the Depression, during the World War II period was fractured and got worse as time went along. Your question is, when we move from here, well, one, you know, better heads than mine would have to come up with a lengthy answer to that question. But you could begin with political leaders, whether they be Republican, Democrat, mugwump, independent or whatever, understanding how vital it is to build that trust with the public. And you can't build that trust if you run an administration, whether it's this county judge, your president of the United States, if you're operating behind the scenes in an atmosphere and you create an atmosphere leader of deceit and lawlessness. And it's an unfortunate unpleasant truth, but it is the truth. It's a Vietnam War on. And we went from the Kennedy administration where it basically started through the Johnson administration. By the time we got to the Nixon administration, there's no joy in saying this. The record is now very clear. You had an administration led by a president who did deal in deceit, who did deal in lawlessness. And reaching, repairing this split between trust with the public and the leadership, look, reporters are trained to be skeptical, not cynical but skeptical, to ask questions. And the responsibility of citizens, I'm not going to preach on it, is also to be skeptical. Yes, you should always say, well, okay, that's what they're saying. What's the truth behind them? But with political leadership, it begins there. There has to be a rededication to the understanding of it. You can't go to war, you can't sustain a war, much less have any hope of winning the war, unless there is what I call this high degree of communicable trust between the leadership and lead. Go to the invasion of Iraq. What the president said were the reasons for going into Iraq were not true. Now, people can argue, well, did he know it was not true or not? But whether he did or didn't know what was true or not, he had plenty of reasons to question it. So we've had this fraction between leadership and I think for the foreseeable future, this is going to cause us continual problems. Sometimes war is imperative. America's entry in World War II was not a choice. It was an imperative. But one, having the public recognize what war is, what it really is, and my concern about television coverage of war is it tends to flatten war out. It lacks, there are many advantages to television coverage of war, but in general, television coverage lacks perspective of context, particularly in historical context. And the very fact that you have a flat screen, it's kind of hard to describe it. I think the lead, Eric Chevrolet, once said with the television camera, the viewer has to understand when he's looking at, say, war coverage, that the camera's a little like a flashlight. The camera shows you what's at the end of the beam, but it doesn't show you what's above, below, or at either side of the beam. So understanding the limitations of television coverage, and then back to your question, which I've heard of some, this business of building trust, it's gonna be slow, but we have to start sometime, and one man's opinion now would be a good time to start. I have a last comment quickly. I wanna tell you that new generation of young journalists being produced by this university and others around the United States are up to the challenge. They wanna get out, the successes of Dan Rather and myself and David Halberstam, they wanna emulate what we do. They're ready to go out, and with the cooperation of the military and the news industry, they wanna get out and tell the story about American boys overseas, and I hope that will happen. Well, what we feared would happen, we ran out of time without taking this farther. So you'll have to find Dan or Peter afterwards to ask them questions, or if you're still mad at them at their coverage of Vietnam from the Johnson administration, you can pull them aside there too. But please, please join me in thanking them for a fantastic and insightful panel. Thank you guys.