I hit Washington in midsummer 1965 and found the city to be slow, southern slow, and the AP bureau to be riveting and fast. I had spent my last year in Chicago monitoring the reporting out of Washington and marveling at the speed and accuracy of reporters such as Frank Cormier, Walter Mears, and Harry Kelly, names little known today, who covered the presidency, Congress, and politics. Their important stories, often initially dictated as bulletins, seemed to me to be exquisite wire service matter—just fact after fact, with no analysis, presented in clean, spare prose under rat-a-tat pressure. The wire services invariably gave America its first knowledge about a vital event at home or abroad, and I was envious of the swagger of the old pros as they dashed from a major news event to the nearest pay phone and smoothly dictated a thousand-word account.
I spent the first week or so obligatorily hanging around the bureau, which was on the ground floor of a creaky office building on Connecticut Avenue eight blocks or so from the White House. My real job, on the overnight rewrite desk, would start on week two. Most of the AP’s reporting about the government moved from Washington on the national, or A, wire. I had just spent two years in Chicago scrambling and pleading to get my stories on that wire. Of course there was a municipal government and the city had professional sports teams, but in general local stories about politics or sports were relegated to a secondary AP wire for lesser matters, known as the B wire. That’s where I began my reporting career in Washington. One afternoon that first week, I was sent to cover a Shriners parade that threaded through downtown Washington and onto the great mall behind the White House. I understood that the Shriners did a lot of valuable charity work and supported children’s hospitals around the nation, but a parade is a parade, and it was brutally hot and sunny. I was happy to bump into another young reporter named Leonard Downie Jr., who, on his first day at The Washington Post, also had been shoved into parade purgatory. (Downie would end his career as executive editor of the Post and the author of a series of insightful books about the media business.) I filed a much too cheery story about the parade that ended up, untouched by any editing, under my name on the B wire—my first Washington byline.
That first week I also met Don Sanders, the day city editor who, like Carroll Arimond, let his work speak for itself. He wrote occasional reviews of the performing arts, as seen in Washington, but his skill at shaping stories and anticipating the news made him the go-to guy of the Washington editing desk. He would prove to be someone who shared my dire views about the growing American involvement in the Vietnam War.
The rewrite desk was a mandatory stop for newcomers like me, and it involved taking the major Washington stories of the day, as filed by the bureau’s reporters for the nation’s morning newspapers—those with deadlines beginning at 7:00 p.m. on the East Coast—and rewriting them overnight for the afternoon papers, with deadlines the next morning. It was easy work if there was a new development—even something as obvious as writing that “President Johnson returned last night from a triumphant visit to…” But if the story was static, the goal was to find something new—for instance, by trying to reach senators and public officials late at night by telephone. Sometimes there were dozens of stories to be turned around for the next newspaper cycle, and the overnight crew consisted of me, a fellow rewrite colleague, and a rewrite editor who was content to funnel our stuff onto the A wire. It was okay for a month or two, but the work quickly became dry, rote, and lonely. I started my night shift an hour or so before my wife returned from her work.
On the plus side, I was in Washington in the serenity, safety, and openness of the mid-1960s. On the Saturday night of my first weekend off, my wife and I wandered into an unpretentious Italian restaurant near my office. I immediately recognized the much older guy seated at the small table next to us as Earl Warren, the chief justice of the United States. I figured what the hell and introduced myself to him, and explained that I was a reporter brand-new to Washington, and my brand-new wife had just begun a job as a psychiatric social worker. Warren introduced his wife and we chitchatted on and off throughout the meal. It was like talking to grandparents I never had. He wanted to know about my job and how it came to be. Brash as I was, I still did not dare ask him about his workday. It felt good, though, to learn that even in the upper stratosphere of Washington people were people. I would soon put that knowledge to work.
We had rented a small condo in a new housing development in Washington’s integrated southwest, and, ironically, our immediate neighbors included Thurgood Marshall, another Supreme Court justice, who, on behalf of the NAACP, argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that found racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. Other neighbors included a prominent British journalist and the Pentagon correspondent for Time, who would often host what I later learned were off-the-record dinner parties for senior members of the Johnson administration.
Meanwhile, I decided to jump-start my boring job by doing what I did in Chicago—find a story that no one else had and write it while also doing the required rewrites. In early August, six weeks or so after getting to Washington, I tracked down Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, at the time the high point of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The ever-shrewd King told me, and untold numbers of terrified politicians in the South and the North, that he planned within a month to register 900,000 Negroes to vote. He had just finished a tour of Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Washington, he said. “It was my first real hard look at the North. I have seen hundreds of thousands of faces, all expressing a great sense of hope in spite of terrible living conditions…and I do not yet see the kind of vigorous programs alive in northern communities that are needed to grapple with the enormity of the problems.” My story flew off the A wire, and King’s remarks were all over America. No one said boo in my office. A few weeks later, once again on my own, I interviewed Bayard Rustin, a visionary of the civil rights movement in America who was deeply involved in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, when hundreds of thousands of whites and blacks gathered to see King give his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin told me he was going to take the civil rights fight to Congress. The task of integrating schools and getting more jobs for Negroes, he said, “will require votes, planning, and billions of dollars from Congress….Most of the big problems must be solved by moral and financial aid from Congress.” That story, too, made headlines.
I slogged away that summer and fall on the rewrite desk but made it a point to try to reach the key players who were quoted in the various stories I had to rewrite, whether they dealt with a legislative issue, a dispute on military spending, or anything else. My goal was to punch up the story by adding to the inherent controversy, if there was any, or by more fully delineating the issues involved. The high point of my efforts came in late December 1965, after the announcement of a thirty-hour cease-fire in the Vietnam War. Congress was out of session for the Christmas holiday, and many senior administration officials had also left town. There was time to kill on the rewrite desk, so I went on a mini telephone rampage. I cheekily called Vice President Hubert Humphrey at his home in Minnesota and got him—he may have had a hot toddy too many—to talk about extending the cease-fire until Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, which was to begin on February 1, six weeks away. I got calls for peace, with varying caveats, in telephone interviews with John McCormack of Massachusetts, the Speaker of the House; Gerald Ford, the House Republican leader; and Leverett Saltonstall, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was fun to do, made some news, and spread a little more Christmas cheer. The war continued.
My hard work won me a promotion, and in early 1966 I was freed from the overnight desk and put on general assignment. I made a few out-of-town trips to cover conferences at which a major Washington politician, almost invariably Bobby or Teddy Kennedy, was to speak; I also reported for a day or two for one of the AP’s client newspapers that wanted special coverage of a congressional debate about an issue of vital local interest. In all, I covered, when needed, politics, Congress, civil rights—I cared deeply about the difficulties and dangers facing those involved in the civil rights movement—and the inequities and other shortcomings of the draft. In the summer, barely a year after I had come to Washington, I was told that Fred Hoffman, the bureau’s longtime Pentagon correspondent, was going off on a six-month assignment and I was to start working there immediately, under his tutelage, and then take over the beat. At last, I was going to be writing about the rapidly expanding American commitment in Vietnam. I felt strongly even then that the war was the wrong way to confront Soviet-style communism, but I knew I would be able to separate my personal views from my professional responsibility as a reporter.
Most of the correspondents covering the Pentagon had been on the job for a decade or more and saw themselves as military experts. The key, then and now, was access, and the beat reporters had plenty of it. There were cozy and friendly off-the-record meetings with Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford Motor Company who had been secretary of defense since Jack Kennedy took office, and his deputy, Cyrus Vance, a Yale College and Law School graduate who came from a prominent family. There were also what seemed to be almost daily briefings for the press corps by senior generals and officials on all subjects, from Vietnam to social issues; the American military was praised by social scientists for its progressive role in integration and education. Fred Hoffman, as the senior wire service reporter, had earned the right to ask the last question at news conferences and the like; it was he who decided, often on a cue from a press officer, when to end such sessions. As Fred’s replacement, I inherited that responsibility.
I was stunned—even astonished—by the Pentagon pressroom, which had the earmarks of a high-end social club. It seemed stunningly sedate. The correspondents were clustered in an overcrowded ghetto down the hall from the office of McNamara’s press secretary, Arthur Sylvester. The hall was known as the “Correspondents Corridor” and featured photographs of past and present war reporters. Most of the guys smoked pipes, or wanted to, I thought. Len Downie would later tell it like it was in depicting the atmosphere in the pressroom when I arrived there in mid-1965. “Most major stories written by Pentagon correspondents on national issues reflected only the official point of view,” Downie wrote in The New Muckrakers, a study of investigative reporting that was published a year after the Vietnam War ended. “With a few notable exceptions, Pentagon reporters, especially at the time Hersh was assigned there, have seldom tried to balance that view with more critical appraisals from dissenters within the civilian or Pentagon ranks or from expert outside observers.”
I was also as tame as I could be until Hoffman took his leave. By then, the Johnson administration’s commitment of troops and dollars was constantly expanding, amid evidence that the war was not going as well as expected. The number of Americans drafted in 1966 reached a staggering total of more than 382,000, and more than 385,000 Americans were on duty in Vietnam by the end of the year. Dissent was growing on college campuses across the nation. I would learn, after doing the My Lai stories in late 1969, that the wanton murdering of civilians began very early, literally within days of the first marine landing on the beaches at Da Nang in March 1965, but nothing of that sort had been published.
My first break with tradition came early, when Sylvester’s office trotted out a senior marine general who had returned to his staff job in Washington after a short visit to Vietnam. The general was going on and on about the imminent success of the war but made no effort to back up his opinion with a fact. After fifteen or so minutes, it seemed clear to me that the only story that would emerge would be about yet another general claiming victory in the war. Thus, when the officer finished his presentation and asked for questions, I stood up and, invoking my right as the senior AP correspondent, thanked him for his time and walked out. My gesture made it clear that I felt there was nothing to be gained by asking questions, to which he would have familiar answers. There was a moment or so of hesitation, and my colleagues followed me. There was hell to pay, of course, from Sylvester’s office, and muttering about getting me off the Pentagon beat, but I insisted to one of Sylvester’s aides that the briefing had been a waste of time and most of my colleagues knew it, but were too polite to say so.
There was a far more important story hiding, as many stories always do, in the open. It revolved around navy pilot retention in the Vietnam War. America was spending as much as half a million dollars to train each navy pilot in the art of landing on and taking off from aircraft carriers, and as the loss rate in the war grew steadily, pilots were putting in for retirement as soon as possible. The targets were increasingly being seen as asymmetrical, in the sense that their destruction was not of much value to the war effort. One key primitive bridge in Thanh Hoa province of North Vietnam was targeted hundreds of times by navy jets, beginning in mid-1965, with significant losses, before finally being put out of commission in 1972.
I picked up on the official double-talking about the aircraft loss rate shortly after getting to the Pentagon when McNamara announced a $700 million investment in more fighter planes, most of them for the navy. I quoted him as explaining that the navy still had a lower loss rate than expected, but more missions were flying and thus more planes were being shot down. I checked out the McNamara analysis with a staff member of the House Armed Services Committee whom I had met while on the general assignment beat. His informed assessment, based on classified data, he said, was much more direct: “We’re going to lose more Navy planes than we thought.” I reported that.
My continuing interest in the navy losses and McNamara’s dissembling on the subject eventually led me to Clarence “Mark” Hill, a navy captain who was at work on a long-term project for McNamara dealing with the shortage of pilots. Hill’s deputy at the time was a brilliant junior navy officer named John M. Poindexter, who held a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology. (Poindexter’s career would crash two decades later when, as an admiral, he was indicted during the Iran-contra scandals in the Reagan administration.) Hill understood, as I did, that many navy pilots, convinced that their targets in Vietnam were not worth the risk involved, were eager to get out of the service as quickly as possible. It was a story that no one at the top wanted to hear, or have told. But Hill’s office had provided testimony and backup statistical data to a committee or two in Congress, and he pointed me to the right committee and the right set of hearings.
The subsequent series of articles in 1966 for the AP on the navy’s problems with pilot retention marked me to some at the Pentagon, and to some of my newspaper colleagues, as an antiwar activist. In fact, I also learned a lot about military integrity and honor from Mark Hill, who was as conservative as any officer I knew when it came to social issues. Hill fervently objected to the notion that there was something racist in the navy’s tradition of recruiting Filipino sailors to serve as mess stewards for navy officers aboard ship, and he wasn’t sure African Americans would make good pilots. But he also valued integrity and truth, and as such he taught me a great deal about the war.
In the fall of 1966 there had been yet another vicious battle in South Vietnam involving a North Vietnamese ambush of an army company—some one hundred soldiers strong—on patrol. More U.S. troops were ordered in, with even greater casualties, before attack planes and helicopters could drive off the enemy. The newspaper accounts of the battle were grim. I, as the senior guy for the AP, was invited for a midday chat with McNamara and Vance, along with five or six other correspondents from the major media. The two key American officials in charge of the war provided a more positive account: Far more enemies than Americans had been killed, they claimed, and the general in charge of the operation had been given a battlefield promotion from a one-star to a two-star general. McNamara explained that, of course, neither he nor Vance should be cited by name or title in our dispatches, which would suggest the two of them were trying to whitewash a bad day. Thus ensued a brief discussion between some of my colleagues and the men running the war about how best to attribute the information. The reporters seemed glad to help out. It was my first background session with McNamara and I kept my mouth shut. I also followed the formula for attribution that had been agreed to—something like “senior officials said.”
My article was published in time to make the final edition of the afternoon Washington Star, then the main competitor to the more prosperous and highly regarded Washington Post. Late in the day Captain Hill showed up in the doorway of the Pentagon pressroom, caught my eye, and signaled for me to join him in the hallway. As we began walking around the endless corridors, Hill wanted to know where on earth I had gotten the information that was published. I did not hesitate before naming McNamara and Vance. Hill was stunned. He was at that time assigned to Systems Analysis, a special unit set up by McNamara that called for military requirements and issues to be reduced to their component parts and analyzed piecemeal for better understanding. There were senior officers in the military who saw the office as a convenient vehicle for McNamara to avoid relying on military advice. I would learn later that Hill had already been promoted to admiral (it was known as being “frocked” in the navy) and was awaiting the right job, at admiral’s rank, to become available. With that in mind, what he did next took extraordinary courage and involved an extraordinary trust in me. After swearing me to secrecy, Hill put his promotion at risk by revealing that the involved general had been cashiered—summarily fired—for his refusal to understand the ambush as the crisis it was, leading to a feckless decision to order a second company into the ambush in the vain hope of mitigating the slaughter. The second unit had also been mauled, with high casualties. Hill then told me that the cover-up of the debacle included an on-the-spot promotion for the general, who was then immediately reassigned out of Vietnam. It was a farce.
I remember being angry, of course, but also more than a bit frightened: I had no idea of the extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand. I was dealing with a dilemma that reporters who care and work hard constantly face: America needed to know the truth about the Vietnam War, but I had made a commitment to an officer of integrity. Of course I kept my mouth shut because my professional, and moral, obligation was to protect Hill. I should note that Hill, who retired as a three-star admiral in 1973, passed away in 2011; otherwise I would have had to ask for his approval before revealing his role in my education as a reporter—an approval that I believe he surely would have given. Hill got the assignment he was waiting for a few months after our hallway chat, as commander of the USS America, an aircraft carrier. He and I would stay in touch for the next four decades.
Even if Mark had given me permission at the time to write what he told me, without quoting him by name of course, it would have been very difficult to do so. I had made a number of visits to his office, and Sylvester had ordered all senior military officers and civilian officials in the Pentagon to immediately report every visit by a reporter. In practice, this meant that if I went to a general on a Tuesday and got some relevant information and wrote about it the next day, Sylvester’s office would know—whether the general was cited in my dispatch by name or not—that the general had most likely been the source. In order to protect that general, or Mark Hill, if he would have authorized me to use the information he had, I would have had to spend days visiting generals and admirals for spurious reasons in an effort to mask the source. The McNamara/Sylvester edict was a huge element in discouraging serious investigative reporting and essentially forced the reporters to rely more and more on officially arranged interviews and the various news conferences that seemed always to be at hand. Sylvester made it easy for the Pentagon press corps to do the minimum. There was an obvious way to beat the system, of course—contacting senior officers and officials at home. In the year I reported from the Pentagon, that seemed to be done rarely.
IN THESE LAST FEW MONTHS of 1966, I made an important new friend, I. F. Stone. Our first encounter was very typical—for him. My wife and I had been out late on a Saturday night, and the telephone rang early the next morning, before six o’clock. My fear was that it was an AP editor in New York asking me to check out a military story published somewhere in the world. That happened far too often. Instead, the caller introduced himself as Izzy Stone and asked if I had seen the fascinating story on page whatever it was in either The Philadelphia Inquirer or The Baltimore Sun. Izzy, I soon learned, got up early on Sunday morning and drove to a downtown newsstand that sold national and international newspapers. This call was his way of telling me that he had seen something in my reporting that suggested I might be a kindred soul, in terms of being more than a little bit skeptical of the reporting on the Vietnam War. Izzy was fond of long walks, and we soon began taking them together. We talked incessantly about how to do better reporting, and I was in the hands of a master; it was to the shame of the mainstream media—and my pipe smoker colleagues in the Pentagon pressroom—that his biweekly reports and analyses, as publisher of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, were viewed as little more than a nuisance.
The most telling crisis of my young career took place at the end of the year. On December 12, 1966, Harrison Salisbury of the Times arrived in Hanoi; he was the first mainstream American journalist to be granted a visa since the marines had invaded the South. Two days later he wrote about seeing evidence of massive American bombing in Hanoi, with obvious civilian casualties. The Pentagon’s response was immediate and fierce: categorical denials of any American bombing inside the city limits of Hanoi, along with a suggestion, widely repeated in the press, that Salisbury and the Times were serving as propaganda agents for the enemy. I was going to the briefings with “American officials”—usually one or two of the men at the top—and reporting their anonymous denials, which eventually included the hard-to-fathom notion that any damage to civilian structures in Hanoi had been caused by errant anti-aircraft missiles that had been fired at American bombers by the North Vietnamese.
A week or so later a Pentagon official reluctantly acknowledged, as I dutifully wrote, that some civilian areas in the North might have been damaged by American bombings, but he insisted that only military objectives had been targeted. Meanwhile, Salisbury, who would stay in North Vietnam until early January, was roaming around the country and consistently providing more evidence of civilian bombing. He further reported on Christmas Day that the American bombing had been going on for months. An “on the spot inspection” indicated that American attacks had led to civilian casualties in Hanoi and elsewhere “for some time past.” Four days later Salisbury reported that the city of Nam Dinh, fifty miles south of Hanoi, had been repeatedly bombed for more than a year, resulting in eighty-nine civilian deaths, as many as five hundred wounded, and more than twelve thousand homes destroyed.
I assumed, following the Mark Hill dictum, that there was much truth in the Salisbury dispatches and very little in the official denials I had been faithfully recording, like a good stenographer. I had been invited to a conference a few months earlier on the media and the military at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and shared a dinner there with a senior admiral serving in a most sensitive post at the Pentagon. I sensed his ambivalence about the war and expressed my concerns about the lack of integrity at the top of the Pentagon. The admiral made it clear, without saying as much, that he shared my view.
After the New Year’s holiday, I spent days interviewing various officers and civilians in Pentagon offices for whatever rational story I could conjure up, with the intent of creating a misleading record for Arthur Sylvester’s henchmen. I then telephoned the admiral’s secretary and asked for an interview. He agreed to see me, as I thought he might; I was sure he knew what I wanted. He’d had it with the lying; it was as simple as that. He told me that there were many post-bombing photographs (known as BDAs in the Pentagon, for bomb damage assessments) that confirmed the extensive damage to civilian targets that Salisbury had revealed. He also told me that McNamara, in the wake of the Salisbury report, had put a five-mile circle around downtown Hanoi and the navy and air force pilots were under orders not to bomb within that circle.
I knew I had a very important story, but I also understood I had to get confirmation. More pretend interviews were necessary before I contacted a young air force general I knew and liked, for his willingness to be totally open and outspoken about his conviction that only air force bombing missions had been effective in the war. I told him that it was my understanding that navy pilots were convinced that their bombing attacks in the Hanoi area had been far more accurate than the bombs dropped by the high-flying air force. The BDAs, the air force officer said, could not have been clearer in showing the extent of navy bombs that had missed their target inside Hanoi, creating extensive damage to civilian sites. He eventually showed me a few of the photos, pointing out direct hits and bomb craters that indicated a miss. Interservice rivalry had led me to some truth, but I had to provoke it to get there.
I discussed what I had learned with Don Sanders, the editor for whom I’d been writing since I got to the Pentagon, and he said, very simply, “Write it.” We both knew that there would be pushback, not only from the Pentagon, but from my peers on Correspondents Corridor. I had not helped matters by publishing a strident defense of Salisbury, while also attacking McNamara’s integrity, in the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly newspaper that had been gaining status and a growing audience among Catholics and others for its antiwar stance. I wrote the essay under a pseudonym, at the request of Bob Hoyt, the newspaper’s editor. Hoyt had reached out to me before Christmas, presumably because of my AP dispatches, and offered to publish anything I wished. He could not have picked a better time to make the pitch, because I was frantic with frustration at having to file story after story of official denials about the Salisbury dispatch—denials that I felt strongly were lies. I hated to write under a pseudonym, since I believed then and still do that anything worth saying is worth saying in a real voice, but I also knew what I had written for Hoyt would create anger among my colleagues, who would immediately figure out who had written the piece, which was published under the byline of Richard Horner.
The dispatch, published January 4, 1967, under a Washington dateline, violated every understanding about the sanctity of background sessions with McNamara and others in the Pentagon. It began this way:
One of the very highest Defense Department officials was exercising his not inconsiderable charm at a cocktail party in the department’s concrete lair along the Potomac River. At his feet lay a cluster of hard-bitten reporters, ready to laugh at the slightest provocation.
“What about the charges we bombed Hanoi?” asked one newsman. At the time of the party, the U.S. was still steadfastly denying the North Vietnamese charges that American war planes had killed or injured more than 100 civilians during raids on Hanoi Dec. 13 and 14.
Well, said the government official affably, he had learned one thing when he served in World War II: bombs never go where they are aimed. Now, 20 years later, the state of the art has improved, he added with a bright party grin: bombs occasionally go where they are aimed.
Some of the reporters laughed. Others quietly gagged on their drinks.
There was a personal reason for my anger toward McNamara. Earlier that winter my wife and I had gone skiing for a long weekend in Colorado. We had little money to spare and did the trip on the cheap, crashing with a college pal who had rented a condominium at Vail, flying on a low-cost ticket, and renting a car from a budget outfit whose check-in desk was a long bus ride away from the Denver terminal. We landed during a heavy snowstorm, good for skiing but bad for driving. Initially we were the only passengers on the bus to the rental office, but at a second stop another family got on—McNamara, his wife, and their two teenage children. I was knocked out; here was a guy from Camelot who was going skiing on the cheap. There was no Pentagon plane, no security, and no one to help him put on the tire chains that were essential for driving in the mountains in heavy snow. I was pretty sure he barely knew me, if at all—at that time I had seen him up close only a few times and never one-on-one—but I introduced myself as the new AP guy, got a nod, and that was that. I was awed by his integrity— no glitz at all—and his obvious desire to be a good husband and father to his immediate family when on vacation. It was hard for me to accept that this decent-seeming man was so willing to look the other way when it came to war. This added to my dismay at his response to Salisbury.
I knew that publishing the anecdote in the National Catholic Reporter was a form of professional suicide. The article quickly made the rounds in the Pentagon, and of course those at the cocktail party knew who had asked the question about the bombing in Hanoi, and of course everyone knew that McNamara had analyzed U.S. bombing efficiency and effectiveness as an air force officer during World War II. I was glad then and now that I had the guts to write the piece.
Enter Neil Sheehan, who had left UPI for the Times in 1964 and, after another year in Vietnam, had been assigned a few months earlier as the newspaper’s Pentagon correspondent. It did not take long for the two of us to connect. As I said, he was one of my journalism heroes, and he saw me as someone who was trying to cope. I cannot imagine the extent of his shock, as a combat reporter unafraid to challenge his government’s conduct of the war, at finding the Pentagon pressroom inhabitants to be so spineless. I made a point of introducing Neil to the few officers and civilians I had come to know who shared my dire view of the chances for American success in Vietnam.
The crunch came when I finished writing the first of what would be two articles that I thought would change or end the debate about Salisbury’s reportage: one about the BDAs I had seen and a second about McNamara’s order restricting the U.S. bombing in Hanoi. I’d shown a draft of the first article to Neil in advance and told him I hoped that the Times, which rarely used wire service copy on sensitive issues, would do something—anything—with it. Don Sanders made sure that the wire service’s report for Sunday, January 22, included an advance notice to editors of an exclusive dispatch from the Pentagon about American bombing in North Vietnam. My story, which moved hours later on the A wire, quoted intelligence sources as revealing that the United States had aerial photographs showing extensive damage to civilian structures in North Vietnam. There were specifics provided to me: At least fifty-nine civilian structures near a targeted railroad line close to Hanoi had been bombed, with evidence that many bombs had not hit their primary targets. The photos depicted only three bomb craters inside a targeted rail yard, with no fewer than forty craters found outside the yard’s perimeter. The obvious conclusion was that less than 10 percent of the bombs hit their primary target. The story also supported Salisbury’s report of major damage to civilian areas in Nam Dinh.
I knew there would be a flurry of action in Arthur Sylvester’s office as soon as the story began moving on the A wire; his office included a bank of Teletype machines that provided immediate access to the wire services’ reports. I heard nothing from Sylvester but was told later that he had gone to my ultimate boss, Wes Gallagher, the general manager of the AP, to register a complaint about me. Sheehan came up to me after my story moved on the wire and said he’d been asked by the Times’s foreign desk to check out my story. In the peculiar language of the Times, as I would learn when I worked for the newspaper, that meant that Sheehan, if he were able to independently confirm the dispatch, should rewrite it for publication under his byline for the front page of the Sunday paper. Instead of doing so, Sheehan asked me—I’ll never forget his words—if the article that appeared on the wire under my byline was precisely the same as the story I had filed. I said yes, and he said he would wait twenty or so minutes and then tell his foreign desk that he had checked out my story and it should be run in the newspaper. Sure enough, the dispatch, marked “By the Associated Press,” appeared prominently displayed on the Times’s front page the next morning. That did not happen often. I heard nothing from the AP big shots in New York.
Four days later, I dropped what I thought would be a stunner—an article flatly declaring that McNamara, in response to the furor over Salisbury’s dispatches, had ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the men who direct the nation’s armed forces, to ban all U.S. bombing missions within five miles of the city of Hanoi. I quoted someone I described only as “the source” as telling me that the new restrictions were “the result of everything that’s gone into the press. It shows that we’re taking into consideration what’s being written” by Salisbury. Don Sanders knew the dispatch would be attacked as soon as it moved on the A wire, and he came up with an ingenious idea. Why not wait until five thirty or so in the afternoon—morning newspapers on the East Coast would be planning their front page by then—and file it as “urgent,” assigning the piece a level of importance that was a notch below a bulletin, but one that gave me, as the Pentagon reporter, priority over all other stories moving or scheduled to move on the A wire. The next scene was out of a Mel Brooks farce. The wires around the world were pounding out my story when a wild-eyed Sylvester, then just a few weeks from retirement, came running into the pressroom and jammed his forefinger at me. “We know what you’re doing, you son of a bitch,” he said. I do not remember his next words, but the gist was that he would call my bosses in New York and that would be the end of me. I did not get mad at him in return; I understood he was a creature of the men at the top—McNamara and Vance.
Meanwhile, my dispatch of more than twelve hundred words had finished moving on the wire, and Neil Sheehan walked up to my desk, totally deadpan, with the same sequence of questions. It went something like this: Is the story you filed to your editors the same one that appeared on the Teletype? I said yes. Sheehan told me he again would tell his editors that he had checked out the story and it should be run on page 1. The next morning I woke up to find my article displayed even more prominently on the front page under a headline that read, “U.S. Bars Attacks in Area in Hanoi.” The piece did not hinder the bombing of North Vietnam for very long. McNamara had been scheduled for weeks to give testimony that morning before Congress on the Pentagon’s annual posture report—a summary of crises that could arise—and as usual he met with the press beforehand. He immediately denied my story, saying that American bombers had not been banned from bombing within a five-mile limit. He repeated the denial after his testimony. The pressure on me was intense, and I passed a message to my friendly admiral and managed to get reassured, very quickly, that there was, indeed, such a limit, and fought off any possibility that a faint heart in the AP would seek a published correction or clarification. It was not until the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971 that I learned the basis of McNamara’s denial. The navy had been assigned the task of drawing up the five-mile ban, but navy ships chart their course, as they have forever, on the basis of nautical miles. The other armed services use statute miles when computing distances. A nautical mile is greater, by 15 percent, than a statute mile. I had written “mile” instead of “statute mile.” McNamara’s denial prevailed, and the Washington press corps, for varied reasons, shrugged off the evidence that Salisbury, and the smug New York Times, got it right. No wonder we lost the war.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised by my colleagues. I knew Neil Sheehan was an exception to the rule. I got a good sense of what the rule was when I was invited over the winter to participate in a seminar on the war at, I think, Tufts University. One of the panelists was a senior military correspondent for a leading mainstream newspaper, and at some point a student asked him what he thought of the Vietnam War. “I don’t have an opinion,” he said, explaining his job was to cover it objectively. I was stunned. Of course he had an opinion; it was a war he supported. It was a classic double standard: If you supported the war, you were objective; if you were against it, you were a lefty—like I. F. Stone—and not trustworthy.
Within a few weeks, I was informed that Gallagher had set up a special investigative unit that would be run out of Washington and I was to join it. I protested, but Fred Hoffman was returning to his job as the AP’s chief Pentagon correspondent, and that was that. (Hoffman retired in 1984, during the Reagan administration, and almost immediately returned to the Pentagon as a senior official in the office of public affairs.)
Arthur Sylvester retired on February 1, 1967, after six years on the job as McNamara’s senior press aide. He published an essay in The Saturday Evening Post ten months later in which he brutally mocked the Pentagon press corps: “I don’t know a newsman who has served the government as an information officer in the Pentagon who hasn’t been dismayed at the evidence of shabby performance by what he used to think of with pride as his profession….For six years I watched cover stories [promulgated by his office] go down smooth as cream, when I thought they would cause a frightful gargle.”
There was no learning curve among the men in the Pentagon running the war.