Jim DIEugenio at VMI on 9/2

[Paul Rigby]

From April 2007: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/to...comment=100857

The Guardian has long been the CIA's most important pipeline to the British left; and Godfrey Hodgson, first as The Observer's correspondent in the US, then as the foreign editor of The Independent, a dutiful British hack regurgitator of US establishment pap. Put them together on the subject of the recently deceased David Halberstam and there could be only one outcome lucid, confident, CIA-serving tosh.

A reliable indicator of the accuracy of the Hodgsonian obit in yesterday morning's edition of the paper (p.31) is to be found in the photograph and caption which accompanied. It is the front cover of a reissue of Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" foreword by noted truth-seeker Senator John McCain, no less under which lies the following caption: "Halberstam, on the cover of his 1972 book about flawed US foreign policy, was scrupulously fair in his reporting." In fact, the figure in the photograph is obviously, unmistakably, Robert Strange McNamara.

Halberstam's grotesquely inflated reputation rests on two aspects of his career: His work as a correspondent for the New York Times, Langley's paper of anti-record, in Vietnam, 1962-64; and the subsequent books and journalism derived from that period. An honest examination of both compel a very different accounting and conclusion to those furnished by the sycophantic Hodgson.

In the establishment parallel universe occupied by such as Hodgson, American journalism of the Cold War era existed in a CIA-/Mockingbird-free zone: There was no Agency recruitment in US universities; plum foreign assignments were offered purely on merit; and reporters didn't spy, or act as mouthpieces, for CIA foreign (and domestic) policies. Thus Halberstam could not conceivably have been talent spotted by the Agency at Harvard, sheep-dipped in the south as a remarkably well-informed cub reporter of civil rights activism, then sent to Congo to cash in this credibility as a hard-right CIA mouthpiece. No, such an interpretation is paranoid nonsense and without foundation. Or is it? In the case of his Congo posting, the contemporaneous example of the Scripps-Howard group suggests otherwise.

In mid-1960, S-H's correspondent in the Congo, D'Lynn Waldron, was acting as a courier for the increasingly besieged Lumumba, ferrying his defiant, pitiful entreaties for assistance and understanding over the border for transmission to Washington. She was recalled. In her stead, Richard Starnes, not long resigned as the managing editor of the group's one-time bellwether, the New York World-Telegram & Sun, was offered the post at meeting with the S-H executive, and former OSS-er, Oland Russell, and a CIA officer. Starnes declined. In his place went Henry Taylor, Jr., ex-ONI, who was to be killed in fighting shortly after his arrival in early September 1960. In short, then, the CIA had an intense and active involvement in which journalists went to the Congo in the period. And the CIA had a policy for the Congo, one which ran utterly counter to everything Kennedy had argued for, first as a presidential candidate; and subsequently, in turn, as President-elect, then President.

In the Congo, Halberstam produced precisely the kind of journalism exterminatory US neo-colonialism required in its quest for uranium tri-oxide and the like. In the NYT's in-house paper, Times Talk, we find such classic contributions as "It's Chaos for a Correspondent in the Congo" (October-November 1961) and "Congo Boondocks: Land of Cannibals and Diamonds" (William Prochnau. Once Upon a Distant War: Reporting from Vietnam (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1996, p.509). Africans, the less than subtle subtext had it, just couldn't be trusted to run a country, particularly one full of strategic, or merely desirable, minerals. On the same assignment, according to serial flatterer Prochnau, Halberstam "played mostly by the old rules. He checked in regularly with the CIA men, and, in the accepted fashion of the day, thought nothing of doing a little routine information trading" (Ibid., p.150). Did this closeness cease upon Halberstam's move to Saigon? Hardly.

On his second day there, Prochnau earlier disclosed, Halberstam went to lunch with "the CIA's Saigon station chief, John Richardson" who gave him "an unexpectedly good lead" (Ibid., p.133). A little further on, we learn: "By now his CIA contacts from the Congo had begun to flock to the hot new action in Southeast Asia like bees to honey. Vietnam was a spook's dream…" (Ibid., p.169). Interestingly, the Times of Vietnam, in its detailed expose of the abortive CIA-orchestrated coup planned for August 28/29, 1963, had this to say: "Beginning in January of this year, it is reported American secret agency "experts" who successfully engineered the coup d'etats in Turkey, Guatemala, Korea, and failed in Iran and Cuba, began arriving in Vietnam, taking up duties mostly in the U.S. Embassy, U.S.O.M., M.A.A.G., and various official and unofficial installations here" ("CIA Financing Planned Coup D'Etat: Planned for Aug. 28; Falls Flat, Stillborn," Monday, 2 September 1963, pp.1). Had those Agency coup experts also served in the Congo, to thwart Kennedy's backing for the UN?

Whatever the truth of that conjecture, there can be little doubt that Halberstam's closeness to, and affinity for, the Agency endured. His first book derived from his posting in Vietnam, Making of a Quagmire (NY: Random House, 1965), is littered with testimony to the relationship:

pp.221-225: extended defence of CIA's role in Saigon.

p.222: "…many CIA agents in Saigon were my friends, and I considered them among the ablest Americans I had seen overseas or at home."

p.241: "That night I had drinks with two friends in the CIA. They were exceptionally bitter…"

p.262: "Our basic information, coming from several sources close to the CIA…"

p.263: "…more than a year later, another CIA friend claimed that…"

In later years, Halberstam sought to distance himself from the charge of acting as a CIA mouthpiece in Vietnam, telling Prochnau that fellow reporter, UPI man Neil Sheehan "had better CIA sources. I had better military because I could travel more…" (Once Upon a Distant War, p.277). Any sense of reassurance was somewhat undercut by the earlier admission that his acknowledged lead source, Colonel John Paul Vann, was "a blunt, essentially conservative, at time almost reactionary man…much of our information came from men like Vann" (Making of a Quagmire, p.164). In any case, Vann was recalled from South Vietnam in early April 1963.

Sheehan, like Halberstam, formed part of a journalistic clique that worked assiduously for the overthrow of a Diem government engaged in protracted peace negotiations with Hanoi; and its replacement by a military junta that would prosecute the war with more vigour. That the clique worked hand in glove with the Agency was never more clearly demonstrated than in the aftermath of the publication of Richard Starnes' Arrogant' CIA Disobeys Orders in Vietnam on 2 October 1963. Two members of the clique, Halberstam and AP's Malcolm Browne, were at the forefront of the CIA's defenders in the pages of the NYT. Halberstam's contribution to whitewashing the Agency's open revolt ran as follows:

New York Times, Friday, 4 October 1963, pp.1 & 4

Lodge And C.I.A. Differ on Policy

Ambassador and Agency's Chief in Saigon Clash on Conduct of the War

Saigon, South Vietnam, Oct. 3 Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the head of Central Intelligence Agency operations in Saigon do not agree on United States policy for Vietnam.

The Ambassador would be happier with a new C.I.A. chief. [The present C.I.A. chief in Saigon is believed to be John Richardson.]This is not a problem of personalities. What is involved is in part the traditional relationship, sometimes of rivalry, between the State Department and the C.I.A. In part it involves the problem of whether the C.I.A. should be primarily a straight intelligence network, or have operative functions; whether there should be separate chiefs for intelligence and operations.

It is believed here that Mr. Lodge feels that when a man is assigned to an important and, in this case, difficult operative function, the requirements of that post conflict with the objectivity and disinterest required of an intelligence chief.

There is no evidence that the C.I.A. chief has directly countermanded any orders by the Ambassador. Assertions that he has are denied in all quarters here.

Rather, even amid the current controversy, it is acknowledged that the C.I.A. chief, for more than a year, has carried out the extremely difficult and taxing job of working closely with Ngo Dinh Nhu. In this aspect of his duties he has done a superior job, say the other members of the mission. It is the basic contradiction between this role and that of an intelligence chief that is at stake.

Informants here say Mr. Lodge has told Washington he wants a new chief, and that the C.I.A. is fighting back hard. The matter is believed now resting with the White House.

It is believed here that Mr. Lodge and the C.I.A. chief see this war effort in somewhat different lights. Likewise, they see the proper function of a C.I.A. chief in different lights.

It is also true that in recent weeks in Saigon, as a major re-evaluation of United States policy has been taking place, the American mission here has tended to become the theater, on a small scale, of the traditional conflict in Washington of the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A.

Part of the present struggle over the C.I.A. chief is believed to have a parallel in a struggle by Mr. Lodge against Maj. General Paul D. Harkins to establish himself as the real as well as the nominal head of the American mission here.

At the moment, some sources say, there is a growing effort to make the C.I.A. the scapegoat for the unhappy events of the last six weeks. When Government forces raided Buddhist pagodas on Aug. 21 the C.I.A. seemed confused about what was going on. There followed the demand by Washington that Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife be pushed out of the Government, defiance of that demand by Ngo Dinh Diem, and Washington's decision to go along with the regime.

Some persistent enemies of the intelligence agency are accused of using recent events as an opportunity to voice their bitterness against the agency.

Many persons in Saigon contend that in general intelligence operatives here are at the highest caliber, and say they have played vital roles in some of the most successful programs of the complicated counter-insurgency machinery.

The piece is fascinating not least for the extent to which it confirmed the justice of the charge made in Frank Coniff's New York Journal American column of 26 August 1963 that Halberstam had "resurrected from oblivion good old reliable sources,' and idiomatic usage that was, alack, fast disappearing from the reporter's arsenal. We stopped counting in Saturday's Times after 11 hits by good old reliable sources' or his less sturdy brother, plain old sources.' Mr. Halberstam has done us all a favor by restoring new vigor to a rapidly fading journalistic cliché" ("New York J. A. Takes Issue With New York Times," Times of Vietnam, 3 September 1963, p.1). In his 4 October defence of the Agency, Halberstam ran the gamut of euphemisms for the CIA: "all quarters here"; "some sources"; "Many persons in Saigon"; "other members of the mission"; and "Informants here."

First in his 4 October 1963 riposte to Starnes, then in his 1965 book, Making of a Quagmire, Halberstam was unwilling to concede that Richardson, at the time of his recall by Kennedy, was a firm advocate of Diem's overthrow. That concession was to be slipped in to his 1972 magnum opus, The Best and the Brightest (NY: Random House, 1972 edition): "Even the CIA chief, John Richardson, who until recently had been so close to Nhu, was a surprising advocate of a coup, and a prophet that the coup would come and come quickly" (p.264). It was this book that provoked Warren Hinckle, editor of Ramparts, to one of the great book reviews of the 1970s:

"What critical reporting there was about Vietnam dealt with questions of the efficiency or practicality of the means of American policy but did not question its ends. It is a measure of the level of press criticism of America's great Vietnam misadventure that David Halberstam was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for calling Madame Nhu a bitch. Halberstam, long the war's most celebrated critic, chastised the corrupt Nhu family and poked the wind machines of the General's public relations machinery while still accepting the basic ideological tenets of American policy. In an Esquire interview in 1964 Halberstam worried that this pretty little country will be lost.' In his earlier book, The Making of a Quagmire, said Halberstam the war critic: The lesson to be learned from Vietnam is that we must get in earlier, be shrewder and force the other side to practice the self-deception.'

I would not nitpick Halberstam were it not for his recent and nauseating criticisms of those liberal Establishment types who made America's Vietnam policy that they were the victims of some weepy, ill-defined hubris that kept them from seeing the fatal flaw in the whole undertaking that the formulates in his trendy best seller, The Best and the Brightest, which must rank as one of the great bullxxxx books of all time. Halberstam adroitly skips over the fact that the American press establishment had its own best and brightest in Vietnam (not the least of them Halberstam) during those years of folly a decade of electronic, plugged-in and satellited reporting that exhibited the same arrogance or, if we must, hubris of the ideology of the men whom Halberstam now so artfully brushes with the vanishing cream of tragedy."

Warren Hinckle. If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade: An Essential Memoir of a Lunatic Decade (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1974), pp.162-163.

Real history is in Hinckle. For the CIA fairy tale, see The Guardian and the equally appalling Hodgson.