Covering Vietnam nearly killed Kerry Gruson. Deep into my research, I traveled from Durham to Miami to meet her in her home after exchanging a few emails. Compared to North Carolina, Miami was noisy, humid, and bright—I stayed in a neighborhood full of painted bungalows and murals and freeway sounds. Gruson lived in a high-rise apartment with terra-cotta floors and two wide decks with water views, on a causeway looking out over downtown Miami. Her attendant came to the door to greet me, and as I approached Gruson in the next room, I realized I’d need to get close; her disability necessitates either leaning in to hear her or having her speak through a microphone. I put together my recording equipment and settled in next to her wheelchair, mic in hand.
There was a blue theme: Gruson’s wet blue eyes, soft around the pupils, were like the water that surrounded us, glittery and deep. She pointed out the birds soaring over the causeway, swooping toward the bright water. “I miss sailing,” she said—she used to have a boat called Blew Bayou. It took me a minute to adjust to the way she speaks—not just softly, but slowly, with some strain to get each word out. Her cadence and the way she holds her head at almost a forty-five-degree angle are a result of what Gruson calls her “accident” at the end of the Vietnam War.
She’s told the story of her accident many times, and I actually came to Miami to ask about something else. I found out about Gruson from a newspaper article that appeared long before her accident. In 1969 she was in the Wall Street Journal talking about objectivity. The date was October 21, the headline: “Journalists: Objectivity and Activism.” “Objectivity is a myth,” declared Gruson, then a twenty-one-year-old reporter at the Raleigh News and Observer. Kerry’s father, Sydney Gruson, an executive at the New York Times, was also quoted. “Pure objectivity might not exist, but you have to strive for it anyway,” Sydney told the writer of the article, Stanford Sesser. The conflict between father and daughter over whether journalists could be activists was emblematic of the times, and the article went on to describe what it called a “widespread debate,” largely divided along generational lines, over whether journalists should be involved in the issues of the day such as Vietnam, women’s liberation, and civil rights. At Time, Inc., 462 employees had signed a petition asking to use the company’s auditorium for an event during a day of protest against the war. Time granted the request.
“To say that newspapermen aren’t allowed to think just because they’re newspapermen is completely ridiculous,” Gruson said, criticizing her father’s decision not to allow a group of New York Times reporters to host a similar event in the Times auditorium.
Gruson came by her gutsiness honestly: both of her parents had been successful journalists, her mother, Flora Lewis, was the first woman to become a New York Times bureau chief (in Paris in 1972); her father, a foreign correspondent who later became Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger’s right-hand man at the New York Times. Gruson was born in England, where her parents had moved to cover the end of WWII, and grew up moving around the world—her younger siblings were born in Israel and Mexico, and she was schooled in Poland and Germany. By the time she was twenty-one, she was worldly and fearless. She says jokingly of her parents, “They bred their own contradiction.” She doesn’t remember being interviewed for the Wall Street Journal article, but she does remember how she felt at age twenty-one: the Vietnam War was well underway, and she was obsessed with ending it.
Many argue that “objectivity” is just an ideal to strive toward: a combination of being detached enough not to bend the truth to our desires, and meticulous enough to track down and triple-check the facts. It’s a way to get to the truth, a methodology and an aspiration. Of course, methodology and meticulousness are key to good reporting; even as a nonbeliever in “objectivity,” I wouldn’t propose that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Reporters may be interpreters, but interpretation is still a skill: you can learn to check in with multiple sources, track down hard-to-find data, and double-check facts, and you can get better and more careful in these practices. It’s the ideal of detachment and remove that Gruson took issue with, but her mother, Flora Lewis, believed fiercely in the aspiration of “objectivity,” detachment and all. As Lewis wrote in 1984 in the Chicago Tribune, “Objectivity may be a humanly unattainable goal, but it is worth the constant striving.” Her view was especially influenced by her experience covering fascist and totalitarian governments abroad—without a constant pursuit of objectivity, Lewis believed, you could too easily descend into working as a mouthpiece for the government. For her, the ideal of a detached, uninvolved individual reporter was a way to protect the truth.
But can anyone be truly detached from a story? I was surprised to learn that depending on whom you ask, the Vietnam War was either the victory of objectivity or the end of objectivity for US journalists. Broadly speaking, people on the left tend to see Vietnam reporting as a victory: a courageous press overwhelmed government propaganda to bring the story of an unjust war home. People on the right tend to see Vietnam reporting as the end of objectivity: reporters, predominantly antiwar, were a damaging, biased influence that contributed to shifting public opinion against the war, making it unwinnable. But there’s still another way of looking at the war: today some historians believe that the predominant dynamic during Vietnam was that of press censorship, not press freedom, and that the US successfully manipulated journalistic coverage throughout the war. Daniel C. Hallin’s study of Vietnam coverage in The “Uncensored War” focuses on how journalists collaborated with authority figures even as they experienced unprecedented access to the war front.
Arguably the beginning of the 1960s, the period during which Kerry Gruson became a journalist, was the heyday of journalistic “objectivity” in the US. Since the Second World War, there had been a sense of “consensus” among liberal institutions and establishments, a strong political center reflecting the values of white America. In line with this, most national outlets and local newspapers strove to present their reporting as nonpartisan, unbiased, and fair. But this was a tenuous and temporary arrangement at best, and in the ’60s it began to break down. College kids like Gruson were getting turned on to civil rights and Black Power, and it seemed like half the country’s young people were being sent off to war while the other half were protesting.
By the end of the 1960s, nobody agreed on the basic facts of the situation: Was the US winning or losing? How many people had died? Everyone had an opinion on the war, and facts were constantly called upon in support of those opinions, which meant the reporters on the ground in Vietnam played a very important role. And as historian Clarence R. Wyatt explains in his book Paper Soldiers, there may have been lots of war correspondents in Vietnam, but the job was in many ways even harder than it looked. Press coverage from the war front provides evidence for just how sticky the question of objective, neutral reporting is; in Vietnam, the warring parties fought over even the most basic facts.
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One of the most well-known Vietnam correspondents, journalist Peter Arnett, renowned for his Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the war, was constantly caught up in this battle over fact. Arnett was a self-described “rough-hewn” kid from New Zealand, a shoe-leather reporter who’d been living in Asia for years already before he was brought on to cover Vietnam for the AP in 1962. In pictures he looks hobbit-like and gruff, wide-eyed, and his memoirs are a study in masculinist memory (women are generally described in terms of their looks, or the price of having sex with them).
At the time, the US was advising and steering the South Vietnamese to fight the North but had yet to send any American ground troops over to fight. Still, the situation was already a mess. When Arnett arrived, the AP’s Saigon correspondent, Malcolm Browne, handed him a twenty-four-page document: “A Short Guide to News Coverage in Vietnam.” As recounted in Arnett’s memoir, the pamphlet gave a vivid sense of the challenges for journalists. “You will find quickly that most ‘facts’ in Vietnam are based at least in part on misinformation or misunderstandings.” Browne’s guide cautioned against depending solely on official sources, noting that “figures on casualties and reports of military engagements are especially subject to distortion. In covering a military engagement you must make every effort to count the bodies yourself before accepting any tabulation of results.”
Arnett was just twenty-six, but he was already dogged, filing stories for the AP from the battlefields and jungles of Vietnam, building a network of official and unofficial sources, witnessing the violence and drama of the ramp-up of the war. His reports were assiduously factual, often based in firsthand observation. As he tells it, he was not invested in protecting either the American or South Vietnamese government, or the North Vietnamese.
But a reporter’s opinion on the war wasn’t the only factor that affected what stories and facts came back across the wires. As Wyatt writes, truth in Vietnam was a tangle, and partly because the US and South Vietnamese governments wanted it that way. Wire reporters tended to focus on combat, and the pressure to file stories daily meant that they were often willing to take information hand-fed to them by government sources in press conferences without the ability or time to independently verify it. The alternative to press conferences was battlefield coverage, Arnett’s specialty. But that, too, had significant limitations—a key one being that this war was never fought on a neatly defined front, so winners and losers were rarely clear. Reporters viewing a single skirmish or attack could scarcely begin to explain its meaning in context.
Wyatt also points out that most English-language reporters showed up with no knowledge of local cultures or of the Vietnamese language, and they rarely remained for more than eighteen months, depending on translators and fixers to get them closer to local knowledge. Location also limited reporters’ information: most reporters for English-speaking outlets worked in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. A North Vietnamese perspective was rarely reported in the war, and reporters who did travel to Hanoi and publish the results of interviews with Vietcong leaders were often excoriated at home both by the government and by fellow journalists, ironically criticizing them for depending too much on official sources.
Thus, in spite of Browne’s warnings against it, many reporters depended heavily on US military sources for a series of facts, and those facts often didn’t add up to a clear picture. For government officials, and even some reporters, what was true mattered less than what was good for the US war effort. Public information officers for the US military had their own agenda: they needed public support and a justification for growing numbers of American deaths. Sowing doubt and red-baiting journalists who were critical of the US war strategy became a part of their jobs. As the war dragged on and became less and less winnable for the US and South Vietnamese, military officials went after reporters who breathed even a hint of pessimism and rewarded with access those who repeated the official line of optimism. The military meted out just enough facts that reporters had a story, but not enough that they had a full picture of what was going on. As editor William Tuohy of the Los Angeles Times complained: “We’re drowning in facts here, but we’re starved for information.”
In many ways, this was the most significant limitation of “objective” reporting in Vietnam: anything US journalists reported—especially if it reflected negatively on the war effort—could have a direct influence on the war effort, which depended heavily on public support to continue. That meant every choice about which sources to trust, and which facts to rely on, was a judgment call based on the anticipated reaction of the US government, which imposed its own definition of objectivity: a “fair” story would take US claims at face value and not contradict the narrative that the war was going well.
As a result, Arnett’s reporting, which exposed some of the US’s missteps in Vietnam, became a target of accusations of bias. In 1965 he and Morley Safer, then a CBS TV reporter, both got on the wrong side of the government. Safer filed a report on US soldiers burning North Vietnamese villages to the ground while innocent villagers stood by and watched. Arnett broke a story on US soldiers experimenting with chemical weapons. President Lyndon Johnson himself called up the president of CBS News about Safer, reportedly waking him up early in the morning and saying, “Your boys shat on the American flag,” and accusing Safer of being a Communist. Arnett was investigated by Johnson’s FBI, but background checks on Safer and Arnett turned up nothing, and the Johnson administration tried in vain to tie them to the Vietcong as well as to find errors in their reporting. The AP’s personnel chief, Keith Fuller, sent along a warning from New York that Arnett and his editors should take extra care to “balance” their reports.
This desired appearance of “balance” could take precedence over telling stories that were true. In one case, after Arnett and AP photographer Horst Faas witnessed and photographed a horrifying scene in which American soldiers beheaded a Vietcong fighter and danced around the severed head, AP foreign editor Wes Gallagher removed the most gory and controversial parts of the story and declined to run the photos. His concern was that the piece “had too heavy a taste.” Arnett disagreed, but let it slide; certainly, it wasn’t helping his relationships with official sources to constantly run stories making them look bad. In 1970 Arnett finally became truly fed up with the AP’s timidity. One day he witnessed US soldiers looting a Cambodian town after an air raid, boisterously stealing from the blown-out remains. The foreign editor killed the copy about looting, sending a memo to Saigon referencing a “highly charged situation in the United States regarding Southeast Asia” and stating that the AP “must guard our copy to see that it is down the middle and subdues emotion.” Arnett expressed his displeasure with the censorship to his higher-ups, then leaked the whole story to Kevin Buckley at Newsweek.
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Decades later, Peter Arnett would describe his own work in terms of a sort of classical objectivity: “From the beginning of the war to the end I looked at Vietnam as a news story, not a crusade for one side or the other. I believed that gathering information was a worthwhile pursuit, and truth the greatest goal I could aspire to.” But not long after the Cambodia incident, Arnett writes, he felt his own detachment “cracking.” “I feared that I would no longer be an unbiased observer, that my reporter’s values were swamped in the bloodshed. Like others who had become disenchanted before me, I felt anger that the war seemed impervious to solution, that the reporting and terrible sacrifices seemed to do so little to end it.” By the time he stopped covering Vietnam, he’d been reporting in-country for twelve years.
Despite his commitment to the ideal, Arnett would later be fired twice for supposedly lacking “objectivity”: he got the boot from CNN in 1999 and from NBC in 2003. The CNN firing came after Arnett participated in a documentary critical of US forces’ use of chemical weapons in Laos. The NBC firing came just after the beginning of the US war in Iraq, when Arnett went on state-sponsored Iraqi television and criticized the US coalition’s plan of attack. NBC first defended his comments as an example of a reporter providing analysis, but after Fox News made firing Arnett into a cause, NBC did just that.
And even in objectivity’s supposed golden age, the ideal was elusive. In spite of the tough work of reporters like Arnett, a remarkable amount of information about Vietnam was either never reported or never even known: casualty numbers, enemy counts, even basic questions such as who won or lost a battle were contested in the moment, with governments on both sides lobbying journalists to tell their version of the story. Even Arnett could only trust what he could see with his own eyes, and no single reporter could be present on every front. Telling one true story about Vietnam was an impossibility; getting across multiple true stories, flashes of fact or narrative, was a tough job even for a whole press corps.
The binary framing of “objectivity” (Was it or wasn’t it objective? Was he or wasn’t he an objective reporter?) reveals a part of the problem, because Vietnam isn’t the story of victorious truth in news reporting or of propagandistic lies—it’s the story of both. And just as it had in the 1930s, objectivity quickly became a blunt weapon rather than a subtle ideal. US authorities used “objectivity” to accuse reporters of bias, while reporters used “objectivity” to defend themselves against those same accusations. It’s not clear that either practice brought the public closer to the truth.
It’s a paradox that continues today. Reporters, especially daily news reporters, produce partial truths by necessity, but then we are expected to have asserted absolute truth. When someone doesn’t like our partial truths, we’re accused of being biased. Then, like Arnett, we defend ourselves by saying we are not biased, even though we know it’s an impossible dream.
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While Peter Arnett was trekking through the jungle watching the horrors unfold, Kerry Gruson was a college student, writing for the Harvard Crimson and engaging in endless discussions about the war and its discontents with her campus friends. She spent the summer of 1967 in Alabama, reporting for a civil rights newspaper called the Southern Courier. The following year there was a presidential election; Johnson was out and his VP, Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon. By the time Gruson graduated, in the spring of 1969, opposition to the war was at a fever pitch. A stubborn opponent of the war, Gruson decided she couldn’t go into her intended career in diplomacy. Instead, she followed in her parents’ footsteps and became a reporter, returning to the South to work at the Raleigh News and Observer.
In the fall of 1969, a large coalition planned a protest, a “Moratorium on Business as Usual,” set for October 15. At that point, a poll showed a majority of Americans saw the war as a mistake, but that didn’t necessarily mean they advocated a hasty withdrawal. A far larger percentage supported a crackdown on protests. Gruson wore a black armband to work on October 15 in solidarity with the protests, though she told the Wall Street Journal that “most North Carolinians thought she was mourning a dead relative.”
And even though she didn’t like her parents’ philosophy of objectivity, being a journalist during this time period felt important.
“Journalism is not just a profession, it’s a mind-set, it’s how you look at the world,” she told me in Miami. She had been raised to question things, to be a contrarian. “I liked to be outside, not be a part of the crowd. So it was not just a hereditary thing, but also a question of temperament. I would not have made a very good diplomat.” She loved her job in Raleigh, investigating labor conditions and environmental problems and crimes and cops.
Still, already at twenty-one she was sure enough of her views on objectivity to oppose her father in a public forum. “My father of course, as a part of the Times, held that objectivity was sacrosanct. And I, in part because of my background, because I’d been brought up in so many different cultures, I saw the world as a very complex place, where cultures and histories interact to change your vision of reality,” Gruson said. “I was much less sure of what was right, what was wrong. . . . I felt that subjectivity really determines your vision of the world, that you see the world through your own eyes.”
She wasn’t disciplined or fired for her stand on “objectivity,” and later Gruson moved from North Carolina back to Boston, where she worked at the Boston Herald, then at a small alternative weekly called Boston After Dark, and then a more mainstream weekly, the Boston Phoenix. She continued to agitate against the war and to support the movements for civil rights and women’s rights. “From being an objective journalist, I became what I call a committed journalist,” Gruson said, a journalist who was committed to social change.
In Boston she was restless. The damage of the war in Vietnam stuck with her, and she wanted to go there, to report on the wind-down of the war and its aftermath, which she felt was being overlooked by the press. She wasn’t sure what it would look like, but she knew she had to go to Vietnam. “I felt strongly that you can’t stand by on the sidelines when you perceive wrong; you have to act.”
This was the trip that changed everything. In 1974 she said good-bye to a man she loved, lined up freelance gigs with a few papers including the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, and set off for Vietnam via Hawaii. In Hawaii she decided to start working, talking to returning troops. One evening she invited a Green Beret to her hotel room to interview him about his combat experience. In a sudden trauma-induced flashback, he mistook her for the enemy in a war zone, attacked her, and tried to strangle her. The soldier left her for dead in her room. When Gruson came to, she was in a hospital in New York. The attack left her paralyzed in much of her body, initially unable to speak, walk, or hold things in her hands.
Gruson still doesn’t remember the attack—she had managed to stumble out of her room and onto the street in Waikiki, and her life was saved by an officer who found her and sent her to the hospital, thinking she was jacked up on drugs. Later her mother—ever a journalist—spent time in Hawaii putting the story back together, figuring out as much as she could of the what and why of it all. The veteran who attacked her was deemed unfit to stand trial due to his mental state and spent a few months in a mental institution before being released. She’s never spoken to him again, but these days Gruson sees both herself and her aggressor as victims. “It wasn’t an attack or a vicious attempt to do me harm. It really was an accident. I felt we were both victims of the war,” she said. Seeing it that way helps her feel empathy for the man who took away the life she thought she’d have—she describes transforming anger into empathy again and again. “It gave me a deeper understanding of the meaning of the war.”
Gruson didn’t stop working as a journalist. As she recovered from the accident, she relearned how to speak and gained control over a few limited motions of her hands and body. She moved to Miami and worked on a local paper, until her father later helped her get a job in the New York Times’ new Miami bureau, where she was a news assistant for more than three decades, occasionally filing a story of her own. In 1985 she wrote a first-person feature story for the New York Times Magazine about her accident and her recovery, her voice humble and introspective. “My friends talk to me of my ‘courage,’” she wrote. “This puzzles me; I have never felt very courageous.” She retired from journalism in 2005 and has since shifted her focus to athletics—she initially raced sailboats and went scuba diving but more recently has concentrated on endurance sports, marathons and triathlons, building teams comprised of both the able and the “differently able” (a term she prefers over the disabled, explaining that we all have abilities as well as disabilities). In 2015 she cofounded a nonprofit called ThumbsUp International to involve more people in that work.
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Gruson remains insistent, even after her decades at the New York Times, that “objectivity” is the wrong goal. “It’s a useless ideal, I think. Because it is void of compassion, and compassion is necessary in human relations. . . . If a journalist can look at the world with compassion, you can get things changed, and change is necessary.”
By the end of our interview, I adapted my body somewhat to Gruson’s worldview—I found myself leaning in close to listen, holding my head to the side at an angle to make direct, parallel eye contact with her. Her speech includes long pauses and it can be hard to tell when she’s still partway through an idea, so she flicked her bright eyes my way to indicate when she was done with a thought. In a way, her life has been all about looking at other people’s worlds and ways of life from the outside, an experience that, approached with humility, reminds you constantly of your own subjectivity. She grew up cross-culturally, and now looks at the world oceans away from where she started—an American at home, rather than abroad; a woman with disabilities; a lifelong journalist whose career was interrupted and life forever altered by the story she always knew she needed to tell, the story of US intervention in Vietnam.
Much ink has been spilled around the idea of journalists changing or influencing the story in Vietnam. Kerry Gruson makes me think, in the rawest terms, about what happens when the story changes us. “My accident shifted my perspective on the world, on my future, on everything I see and do,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s a bad thing, just a different perspective. I see my physical disability as a positive, because it opens my eyes to a different perspective, literally.”
Gruson loves to talk about black and white, light and shadow—she’s fascinated with shadows, showing me pictures of the shadows on her morning runs with friends pushing her, the long, thin shadow of a friend of hers who has no arms, the jaunty shadow of the cart she rides in to run marathons. “I love the interplay of light and dark,” she said. She loves shadows because they change; because they are gray areas; because they give us a different perspective. They show how the shape of a thing always depends on the light in which it’s seen.
I keep turning over the questions in my mind: Was Vietnam an example of the power of objectivity to reveal an unjust war, or just another battle over versions of the truth, in which propaganda had a role on all sides? Could anyone be clear-eyed, and was it helpful, as Gruson’s father insisted, to promote the idea that a clear-eyed view was possible? If objectivity idealizes a flat, unmoving picture, Kerry Gruson idealizes ambiguity, a picture of the shadow rather than the thing itself.
There were too many true stories in Vietnam for most journalists to assess their meaning, or even describe their basic context. What readers and TV viewers back home ended up seeing was not a clear view through the glass windowpanes of objectivity, but a series of flashes and images, viewed as through dark water. There was confusion and distortion, but there was also simply too much to know, and not enough light to cast on it all. It occurs to me that the truth is like an ocean—ever-changing the deeper you go, unrecognizable at each new stage of light and darkness. In the end the whole picture is unknowable, and those who claim to know it are probably telling tall tales. The story of Vietnam is a humbling reminder that nobody owns the truth, just as nobody owns the ocean. Even those who try.
“I’m a scuba diver,” Gruson said, when I shared the metaphor. “I experience in very physical terms what you’re talking about.” Gruson scuba dives even though she is mostly paralyzed from the neck down.
Maybe this is what all journalism is: describing the world’s shadows, seeking a story out of our limited view of the light. Certainly that’s what journalism in Vietnam was like. Nobody knew anything for sure, in part because of the role of propaganda, in part because of the fog and fear and danger of war, and in part because of the limitations of journalists themselves. I felt like Gruson was the kind of journalist I wanted to become—aware of her limitations and her perspective. Gruson is comfortable in the gray areas. Perhaps objectivity would be the right goal in a static, unmoving world; but to Kerry Gruson, and to me, the purpose of telling stories is, in part, to change the world.
I look around and I see a sea of subjectivity; I have a million questions. I told Gruson what I was struggling with: that this kind of constant inquiry is hard to stick with when you’re trying to make it as a writer—not just because of the frame of objectivity, but because of the way news moves on the internet, the way facts and ideas are sold. Being sure of things, in this media environment, is a form of currency. President Trump cashes in on it all the time: “Fake news!!!” he tweets out with confidence. Headlines blast us with statements of sureness: “Everything you know about food is wrong,” or “Five reasons to love San Diego,” or “Hillary lied.” I rarely see space for the quality of being unsure, for the expression of true inquisitiveness. As soon as we become too sure of ourselves, we stop asking questions. And isn’t that what the reporter should do in the world—ask questions, approach things anew? And just try to be fair and do right along the way?
“The question then becomes, fairness to whom?” Gruson said, flicking her eyes at me and smiling while we watched the light move against the ocean waves through the windows. Neither of us tried to answer the question.