Overview

The anti-war coalition of the left-wing of the Democratic Party and the elite media wants America to see Iraq as Vietnam, and has been trying to sell that vision during this election cycle. Because of the rise of the New Media, however, the anti-war forces have been exposed for what they are. It turns out that the Vietnam anti-war candidate and the Vietnam anti-war media have been lying to the American people for 35 years about that war and the US military.

Rathergate and SwiftBoatVets are, in a way, exactly the same story about three decades of lies and distortions. In Vietnam, they won. The issue in 2004 is whether the Vietnam anti-war coalition can get away with it again. Fighting in Iraq has led to refighting the Vietnam War to get the truth out. Fighting in Iraq has led to the revelation of a harsh reality: the anti-war coalition has been willing to boldly and brazenly lie for 35 years in order that America not be victorious in her wars. Fighting in Iraq has forced a bitter conclusion upon America: in Vietnam the country chose defeat, based partly on lies, distortions, and half-truths, and even in 2004, the men offering them have thought they were powerful enough to keep doing it without being questioned.

The anti-war candidate

We have a lot to be thankful for in the candidacy of John Kerry. His insistance in focusing on the Vietnam War has been a godsend to this country, in part because it enables us to see clearly that Iraq is not Vietnam, and in part because through Vietnam we have come to a clear understanding of the character of the man.

Vietnam was a decade long war in which over 2.5 million Americans served, many by conscription, and 58,000 Americans died. Comparing that to the 18 month insurgency in which 1000 brave American volunteers have died dishonors both groups of war dead. Despite the obvious fact that Iraq is not Vietnam militarily or in strategic importance, the Democratic candidate’s ads seek to portray Iraq as a quagmire where the essence of his plan is to “get out.”

However, the Kerry campaign has succeeded in making clear that both Vietnam and Iraq are wars about freedom and democracy, and that the US military is one of the greatest instruments for freedom and justice in the history of the world. Team Kerry did this unwittingly, of course. By shining the light on the Democratic candidate’s 4 months and 12 days in Vietnam, Kerry invited scrutiny both of the quality of that service and its counterpoint in Kerry’s anti-war activities in the early seventies.

Kerry’s fantasy biography Tour of Duty led to Unfit for Command by John O’Neill and the SwiftBoatVets, and even Kerry’s official biographer now concedes that “John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was.” The blogosphere finished the job the was started by the SwiftBoatVets’ virtually entirely true allegations. Kerry’s candidacy, during which he has never apologized — unlike Jane Fonda — for his disgraceful 1971 allegations against US forces in Vietnam, has delegitimized much of the Vietnam anti-war movement.

The Vietnam anti-war movement, by the way, was in large measure grounded in self-interest, not idealism. It became intense only after President Johnson cancelled graduate school deferments for 1968. As contemporaneous reporting in the Harvard Crimson demonstrates, the end of the deferments threw elite university students and professors into the frenzy of sit-ins, takeovers, and demostrations that began in 1968. Walter Cronkite’s verdict on Vietnam earlier that year gave moral cover to many men whose motives were grounded in narcissism, if not cowardice.

The anti-war media

On February 27, 1968 Walter Cronkite gave his famous verdict on Vietnam because of the Tet Offensive, which as we now know, was a North Vietnamese Battle of the Bulge and an American victory:

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

President Johnson said in response: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Ronald Reagan said that Cronkite or CBS should have been indicted for what he said. But at least Cronkite offered it openly as only an opinion: “an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective.” This stands in distinction from CBS’s subsequent acts which I will mention, because, unlike a newspaper, CBS does not have an editorial page in its news presentations. It represents the Evening News, CBS Reports, and 60 Minutes as news programs, presenting objective journalistic truth, not editorial opinion. This is a critical point, and why CBS’s behavior is particularly reprehensible, from Vietnam to Iraq.

It is breathtaking to consider that the shoddy reporting and anti-military, anti-war bias at CBS has flourished and remained virtually unchecked from 1968 until Rathergate. Consider a few examples:

There was the disgraceful Selling of the Pentagon in 1971, as dissected by John Podhoretz. The broadcast used dishonest editing and other techniques to make the Pentagon “sound inept, stupid, wrong, vicious.” It also included this chestnut, recycled in Rathergate:

A Democratic congressman from Louisiana named F. Edward Hebert, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, supplied some footage to Davis and his team of an interview he had filmed with a former Vietnam POW. Davis told Hebert’s press secretary “the videotape would be used for a POW special on CBS.” Outraged to have been used by CBS to aid its case that the Pentagon was improperly marketing itself, Hebert went on the attack. CBS re-aired the show a few days later with 20 minutes of responses after the airing by Hebert and others–followed by a rebuttal by CBS News president Richard S. Salant, who said pointedly on the air that “no one has refuted the essential accuracy” of the show.

There was the disgraceful The Defense of the United States series in 1981, about which Lt. Colonel Evan Parrott wrote three years ago:

The anchorman for the series was Dan Rather, who stated that he hoped the “Defense” series would “start the debate rolling in every town and city in America”1 about defense spending in general and the Reagan buildup in particular. Special antipathy was directed toward the nuclear aspects of defense. That this program caused the current debate over nuclear weapons is questionable. There is no question, however, that, very much like “The Selling of the Pentagon,” it was awash in hyperbole and distortion, inadequately supported by a parade of so-called experts.

There was the disgraceful 1982 The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, in which:

In the spring of 1982, a CBS News employee disclosed to TV Guide that producer George Crile had violated network standards in making the program. The 24 May story by Sally Bedell and Don Kowet, “Anatomy of a Smear: How CBS News Broke the Rules and ‘Got’ Gen. Westmoreland,” stipulated how the production strayed from accepted practices. Significantly, TV Guide never disputed the premise of the program. The writers attacked the journalistic process, pointing out, for instance, that Crile screened interviews of other participants for one witness and then shot a second interview, that he avoided interviewing witnesses who would counter his thesis, and that answers to various questions were edited into a single response.

General Westmoreland graciously and mistakenly settled his libel suit against CBS.

Finally, we have Rathergate, notable, not for its uniqueness, but for its being only the latest in shameful behavior at CBS.

It’s not just CBS that is guilty: it’s the entire elite media

This indictment of CBS is also an indictment of the other elite media outlets — they all thought and acted alike on Vietnam, as they mostly do on Iraq. As Lyndon Johnson said in 1969 (quoted in Podhoretz), and continues to be true of their thought today:

[W]e have in this country two big television networks, NBC and CBS. We have two news magazines, Newsweek and Time. We have two wire services, AP and UPI. We have two pollsters, Gallup and Harris. We have two big newspapers–the Washington Post and the New York Times. They’re all so damned big they think they own the country.

It took the blogosphere to expose CBS, but the story has been available to the Mainstream Media for a third of a century.

Conclusion

We’ve been lied to for at least 35 years, beginning with Walter Cronkite’s pronouncements about Tet and the CBS hit pieces, through John Kerry’s fictitious war crimes, and culminating — only this year — with the exposure of both Kerry and CBS as serial liars with parallel agendas. It is very sobering indeed that these powerful men and institutions were not exposed until 2004, and in fact thought they would remain unchallenged even this year.

The New Media have been instrumental in unmasking Kerry and CBS, not only through instantaneous fact-checking and peer review of journalists, but through their having reached the size and scope that they can now set an agenda and frame issues for a mass audience.

If the New Media had been three decades ago, the United States might have chosen victory in Vietnam.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2004 at 4:16 am and is filed under General, New Media, Red Shift, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.