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Excerpt from "American Twilight: A Memoir of Another War" by Steven Schmidt

Independent Reporting and Independent Spirits

During the Vietnam war, stories like Jonathan Schell’s New Yorker exposé describing the destruction of the village of Ben Suc had been published prior to My Lai, but were not widely distributed. Of the hundreds of accredited correspondents in Vietnam, few cabled or sent back video footage covering war’s impact on civilians and conduct of the war apart from the war’s progress, weapons used and estimated enemy body counts. When the My Lai story was distributed by independent, foundation-funded Dispatch News Service, did it result in broader media coverage of the reality of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos? Absolutely not. In fact, the shock of war, the atrocities, death, destruction and lies as a real picture emerged, the mainstream American press retreated. The number of correspondents accredited by the MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) dropped every year, from 600 plus in 1968-69, to less than 300 by 1972. In mid-1974 only 35 correspondents remained. Although there were major escalations of the war between 1969-73, creating some 3 million new refugees, Americans were being told that the war was winding down, while the numbers of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians being killed, maimed and made homeless were at record levels.

In 1971, more civilians were killed and made homeless than any comparable time in history, according to international organization reports. The American people heard next to nothing about this. While killing was at its height, the news coverage was at its worst. U.S. editors and TV producers, and their parent companies, had decided there wasn’t going to be spending on any additional series of investigative stories covering the character of the war machine. The goal of announced U.S. policy was the destruction of the “rebel economy and social fabric” and “pacification” of the people in the countryside. The Air Force carried out over 12,000 raids a month in 1969. Few in the world’s most ‘advanced’ societies ever got their minds around what it meant to deliver death and destruction on such a level. At a time when nearly every structure in North Vietnam, outside Hanoi and Haiphong, was being targeted and/or demolished, one could find the U.S. press quoting McGeorge Bundy that the U.S. bombardment was “the most restrained in modern warfare.”

Perhaps, given this madness, it took a film like Apocalypse Now to render the horror into a vivid reality that could be felt with a semblance of understanding, albeit years after the war had ended. I remember John Milius, the film’s writer in 1969, who at USC film school was well known for a glory-of-war point of view. His scripts over the years created classic American war heroes, but when Francis Ford Coppola took the original Milius’ Apocalypse screenplay and turned it into a journey ‘up river, into the heart of darkness’, it was less Milius and more a snapshot of strange days. Martin Sheen plays Captain B.A. Willard, 4th Recon Company, 10th Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade. Colonel Kharnage, played by Robert Duvall, strides into view and orders Gunners Mate Third Class Lance Johnson, from Malibu, to surf as mortar shells fall. Duvall is impervious to the danger, appreciating “the smell of Napalm in the morning”. The front cover of Life magazine shows Marlon Brando, Kurtz in the movie, in super close-up with pockmarked face, lifeless eyes and shaved head.

The film that ope ns with Jim Morrison’s song, The End, closes with cascading acts of horror. Perhaps future generations who watch this vision of hell in Vietnam will momentarily understand the sickness of war. The terrible physical and psychological wounds of veterans who return home do not begin to account for the damage of war on body and soul. As the U.S. Veteran’s administration under serves returning troops, we watch a new generation who know little to nothing about the Vietnam war as it was initiated and fought, go to war without much reflection on the consequences of war for tens of millions of people a few decades earlier, an incalculable level of destruction that will carry on for generations. We do not see how ‘war from afar’ is conducted, we do not feel the concussion, hear the booms, smell the results and typically our eyes glaze over when we read the statistics, but some at home can project the consequences. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, before he went to jail, had it right to think there were conspiracies. There was a network of people who rose up against the conspiracy and paranoia in the offices and underground bunkers of the White House. When the President and his men violated the laws and Constitution, few Americans objected, they believed the stories emanating from the White House until they learned the extent of the lawlessness.

For years, as the war escalated, the American people wanted to believe what they were being told, of the necessity of war, the righteousness of the cause, the truths they believed because they were the words of US Presidents and leaders. It took the revelations of Sy Hersh, Dan Ellsberg, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to set the record straight and turn Americans toward a road of skepticism leading toward impeachment of a sitting president.

Years later, I watch the pattern again. We’ve learned little about how power can corrupt. The founders of the nation were sensitive to concentration of power and consciously attempted in the drafting the Constitution to prevent the abuse of power through checks and balances. In 1973 the U.S. Congress passed the “War Powers Act” responding to the abuse of power and actions of the President in Vietnam. Arthur Schlesinger in his book The Imperial Presidency would write of “presidential po wer so specious and peremptory as to imply a radical transformation of the traditional polity.”

Roger Morris, who served in Nixon’s White House as a national security advisor, resigning in protest with Anthony Lake and Bill Watts when Kissinger-Nixon launched the secret invasion of Cambodia, also has written extensively of the “imperial presidency” and recalled in an April 2003 column entitled “From Republic to Empire” that “by the mid 1970s, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon had left Washington in disrepute. Congress reasserted itself in the War Powers Act, which limited the unilateral power of the president to go to war and take certain other steps. Presidential authority shrank under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. As Capitol Hill and the White House divided between Republican and Democrats, the traditional shifting balance between the legislative and executive branches continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. An imperial presidency seemed the relic of a bygone era. Now George W. Bush has sharply reversed that history. His empire began with the surrender of Congress, a collapse almost as sweeping as the fall of the Baghdad regime… the White House was ceded sovereign authority to justify and launch full-scale hostilities – a right vested by the Constitution in the Congress precisely to prevent such fateful power falling to any one president and a handful of advisers.”

[Update: Roger Morris and I share political affinities… We’ve collaborated and Roger’s analyses of Mideast and Near-east conflict is hard to match in its depth. His political biographies are award winning. We’ve co-authored a wide-ranging national security policy piece for the Green Institute – Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for A New World – a foundation for the 2006 conference in DC entitled "Surviving Victory". Conference participant/contributors included Roger, Winslow Wheeler, Charles Pena, Susan Rice (in 2009, Ms. Rice was to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, then National Security Advisor in 2013); Julia Sweig and Steve Clemons of the Washington Note.]

Looking back today to the war in Vietnam, for years few stood up to challenge the escalation and flag waving positions of the media. Few spoke of the civil war or the historic opposition of Vietnam toward China. During the war in the Far East, opposition from Congress was rare. A handful of brave senators, count them on one hand, William Fulbright and Eugene McCarthy, Congressmen such as George Brown, Jr. and Wayne Morse did speak out. Speaking out in the mid-sixties against a war that was sold as a war against a monolithic Communist empire came, of course, with a high price. The Cold War was being waged and Vietnam was a battle in a multiple-front war against ‘godless’ communists.

Later, just a few years after the Bay of Pigs and a nuclear ‘showdown’ where the two nations came close to mutual annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. escalation in Vietnam and deaths of hundreds of thousands and public opposition finally moved Congress to reluctant opposition to the policies of Johnson, McBundy and Rostow, Nixon and Kissinger. Brave young men and women stood up to oppose a government that had lied about cause of war, reasons for war, intelligence for war and had, as result, broken its trust with the people. What went missing were the facts of the war. In June of 1971, the Pentagon Papers corrected the record and the N.Y. Times and Washington Post began to publish these documents. The initial volley was a battle of ‘freedom to publish’, a constitutional crisis, in fact, as the U.S. government brought its full weight and authority against one man and his attempt to publish a history of the Vietnam war. The Nixon administration would resort to censorship, censorship prior-to-publication, setting aside the First Amendment and arguing “national security” demanded that the history of the war, to be revealed in Ellsberg’s document, now being called the Pentagon Papers, be enjoined, stop the presses…

The government clearly had reason to block publication – the Pentagon Papers revealed the multiple deceptions of the war as it was, in fact, initiated and waged. The papers proved conclusively that Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon, the State Department, the Pentagon, all were involved in a cover up. Dan Ellsberg’s personal, whistleblower’s decision to ‘declassify’ the papers was an act of conscience and courage. He chose to stop ‘following orders’ (he was working to compile a primary source history of the war at the order of Robert McNamara) and he acted to release the facts to the public in an attempt to bring democratic discussion and debate to the gravest of subjects – war and peace. The American people and community of nations, as a result, came to see the war as misguided policy waged within a deceitful web of lies…

The cold war mentality ran deep. The nation was at risk of attack, it was alleged Vietnam was connected to China which was connected to the Soviet Union, and harsh measures were justified – war was called for in the halls of Congress as if Vietnam was an imminent threat to the US. Let the ‘domino of Vietnam fall’ and next it would be the United States at risk of falling… Amazing that the argument held sway, looking back now, but there it is, fear and loathing…. Yet in times of perceived threats and the drums of war, there’s no greater need for an informed public. The war in Vietnam, undeclared by Congress, should have been debated for what it was. The facts needed to be put in front of the American people, yet the ‘facts’ of war were rarely communicated. We went to war knowing little of the region, history, cultures, the ancient rivalries, antipathy between Vietnam’s people and the Chinese, not alliance with the Chinese, the conflicts between ethnic groups, tribes and religions. The war in Southeast Asia brought home war as it is being waged again today – with little knowledge and much disinformation about the Mideast and Near-east or the history, the internal conflicts, the level of threat. The layers of risk the U.S. places itself in is comparable in a way to the Soviet spending in Afghanistan over a decade of failed war. We spend like mad men as we attempt to subjugate peoples that have not been subjugated throughout history. How many Americans care of know about the complexity of our current wars and whether our efforts, as they are, are worth the price being paid today and tomorrow?

• I miss it, the Cold War. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning.

– Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, Rabbit at Rest, John Updike

The right to speak out on war and peace is without doubt what the founders had in mind when they drafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Criticizing government is fundamental to democracy. Under the First Amendment, as “the highest law of the land”, there is no greater offense than censorship and prior restraint. If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he’d tell you as he wiped inked - stained hands on his printer’s apron: the protection of the right of free speech derives from rights that form the foundation of a free people in a democratic society. There could be no more dangerous action than to grant the government overarching rights to unlawfully control free speech and freedom of the press. I.F. Stone, the incorruptible commentator and writer of an unmatched investigative news journal, put it bluntly: “The first rule of journalism is that governments lie.” George Seldes wrote of the bedrock need for strong, unwavering truth tellers. His “In Fact” publication regularly spoke to this need for facts - for Sy Hersh-style reporting as a foundation for democratic decision-making. Democracy demands independent watchdogs, investigative reporters, prying questions, open eyes and healthy skepticism. Going back to the American Revolution, dissenting voices were the power that threatened the King – and delivered a democratic Republic. Conservative Tories supported the crown and business-as-usual - while writers and patriots, courageous voices and ‘pamphleteers’ like Tom Paine stood up to King George and the dominance of the British Empire to proclaim, “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Freedom of speech was not proclaimed from a soapbox but from dissent and activism, the sine qua non of democracy in action. Dictators and kings, generals and British imperialists were confronted by a vox populi speaking truth to power. The American revolution, and a ‘radical’ tradition, was born of dissent, committees of correspondence and pamphlets printed within shouting distance of the Liberty Bell.