The Halberstam Caveat

whom you fool

a supplement to

The Expertocrats Dragging America into the Vietnam Horror Chamber

Halberstam’s 20-years-later overview

David Halberstam first reported from Vietnam in 1962.   By ’64, he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting.

Among other subject areas that he had covered, Halberstam came to write several books on sports topics, including Summer of ’49, about the pennant race between the Yankees and Red Sox; The Education of a Coach, about Bill Belichick, head coach of the Patriots; and Playing for Keeps, about basketball superstar Michael Jordan.

In researching for his book The Glory Game, about the classic 1958 NFL championship game between the NY Giants and the Baltimore Colts, he lined up an interview with Yelberton Abraham Tittle, Jr., the legendary quarterback who’d played on the college gridiron for LSU and as a pro for Baltimore’s old AAFC (All-America Football Conference) team, then throughout the ’50s for the San Francisco 49ers, and in the early ’60s for the Giants.   Right after giving a talk to journalism students at UC Berkeley, Halberstam got a ride from one of ’em to Y. A. Tittle’s office across the Bay in Palo Alto, and just after coming off the Dumbarton Bridge, another car slammed into his while it was going through an intersection, and he was killed.   (Frank Gifford, who’d played for the Giants in that championship game, finished the book and dedicated it to Halberstam.)

A couple years earlier, at the beginning of 2005, he sits down before a large crowd for an interview—with particular focus on his book The Best and the Brightest.   It’s being conducted by Ben Bradlee—a reporter for the Washington Post and Newsweek through the ’50s and early ’60s and managing editor and executive editor of the Post from ’65 till the early ’90s. [*5]

The first thing that Bradlee tells, as introduction, is:

David and I spent some time earlier this year at Harvard teaching.   The subject was—uh—lying.

.   .   .

We instead called it an inquiry into lying.   And David made some enormously valuable contributions.

Once the interview has gotten underway, it doesn’t take too long before Bradlee cuts back to what he makes clear is what he thinks is the—“the big”—chase:

When did you begin to think that the people weren’t telling you the truth?

And shortly thereafter—clearly wanting to really get up into it—Bradlee comes right back on in to press the point:

The thing that I’ve read in a—recently about lying, and about, therefore, reporting is the tapes that—that were finally loosened up.   Michael Beschloss put ’em in a book, really the most extraordinary reading about the Vietnam War you’ve ever read.

.   .   .

“You’ve gotta get out o’ there, Lyndon, you’ve gotta get out o’ there!”   And that is Senator

.   .   .

Dick Russell from Georgia telling the president of the United States that he has to get out of it.   And the president’s answer: “I know it, Goddam’ it, I know it!!”

.   .   .

He sure as hell didn’t tell the world that he knew it.

.   .   .

But subsequently they made this massive increase in, in sending 205,000

.   .   .

205,000 more soldiers there.   But what if you would—you all—we all, had known that, if we’d know of that?

In Halberstam’s response, he notes an observation by long-time New York Times correspondent, columnist, and bureau chief James Reston (referring to him by his nickname of Scotty) and gives his take on an assessment of the veracity of William Westmoreland, who commanded US forces in Vietnam from 1964 to ’68 and was the Army chief of staff from ’68 to ’72.   And at one point in the middle of his answer, he turns to Bradlee and assents that he realizes how candid and blunt Bradlee is being about the administration’s lies and about lying in general:

I think you got into lying on troop levels from the very beginning.   Scotty Reston had used the phrase of how thin Lyndon could slice the salami.   And I—I thought that, for instance, the CBS show that got—the CBS Westmoreland show—that had Westy lying to Lyndon was in fact wrong—that Westy was giving, late in the war, Lyndon the information that he wanted.   I think they created a vast lying machine.

Now, the problem with creating a lying machine (so you’re—I know you’re frank about lying) is

you don’t fool the North Vietnamese

and you don’t fool the Viet Cong

and you don’t fool reporters on location

and, in the long run, you don’t fool your own people.

Who you end up fooling is yourself.

And you make a prison—and an isolation ward—where only you and your trusted few operate.   And only people who tell you what you wanna hear can get to the table.   And everybody else is kept aside—and kept out.

And that’s the really dangerous thing of lying.   And we may be witnessing it again.

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