During the decade before full-scale U.S. involvement, war reporting in Vietnam was fraught with challenges. This was a formative period for journalism in the Vietnam War, when only a small cadre of reporters were on the ground and the truth often proved elusive. In this episode of Explaining History, we explore how American correspondents operated under censorship (both formal and informal), how official manipulation shaped their stories, and how some British and international reporters managed to sidestep these constraints to uncover hidden truths. Drawing on Philip Knightley’s classic study The First Casualty, we will see that the first casualty of war is indeed the truth – especially in the conflict that unfolded in Vietnam between 1954 and 1964.
Embedded Correspondents and Early Censorship in Vietnam
Even before U.S. combat units officially arrived, American journalists in Vietnam often worked embedded within the U.S. Military Assistance Command’s framework. The number of American newsmen was very small – fewer than two dozen even as late as 1964 – and they relied heavily on military transport and information. Many reporters spent much of their time in Saigon, getting their stories from the U.S. Public Affairs Office’s daily briefings (derisively nicknamed the “Five O’Clock Follies” for their often farcical optimism). These early briefings exemplified how Pentagon control over information shaped the narrative. The military would present glowing reports of progress that rarely matched the reality in the field.
American correspondents were nominally free to roam and report – since there was no formal wartime censorship regime (Congress never declared war on North Vietnam). However, official manipulation and pressure filled the gap where formal censorship was absent. A vivid example involved New York Times reporter David Halberstam. In 1963, when Halberstam tried to cover a South Vietnamese army operation supported by U.S. helicopters, the American command barred him from direct reporting and instructed him to simply write that it was a victory. Halberstam was outraged by this attempt to control the story. In a letter to the U.S. ambassador, he noted that it was absurd to cite “security” as the reason for silence – “You can bet the V.C. knew what was happening… Only American reporters and American readers were kept ignorant,” Halberstam protested His determination to report the real war on the ground put him at odds with Washington; President Kennedy even pressured the Times to replace him with a more compliant journalist (a request the paper refused).
By the early 1960s, journalists and the Vietnam War were locked in a delicate dance. Young reporters like Halberstam, Neil Sheehan (UPI), Malcolm Browne (AP), and Peter Arnett (AP) formed a new breed of war correspondent who challenged the rosy official statements. They reported setbacks such as the 1963 Battle of Ap Bac, contradicting the U.S. military’s upbeat communiqués. Their reporting, however, did not come without consequences. Some U.S. officials and military brass saw these journalists as adversaries. They sometimes faced retaliation through restricted access and character attacks. (For instance, Halberstam’s critical dispatches earned him public rebukes from older, more pro-government journalists and even calls from Saigon’s leadership to have him reassigned.
Behind the scenes, U.S. authorities exerted control over information in subtle ways. Daily press briefings in Saigon touted inflated body counts and “victories” that reporters in the field knew were dubious. Key facts – like the true size of the U.S. advisory presence or covert operations – were often hidden. AP correspondent Peter Arnett later recalled how, in 1962, reporters saw evidence of a growing American military footprint that “wasn’t supposed to exist.” When a ship delivered U.S. helicopters to Saigon, a summoned American official simply denied seeing anything at all. This climate of denial meant that reporting what was happening took courage.. Arnett and his colleagues repeatedly ran into military secrecy and censorship efforts aimed at keeping the U.S. escalation under wraps (the Pentagon was quietly increasing advisers in violation of the 1954 Geneva AccordsGeneva Accords Full Description:The Geneva Accords were the diplomatic conclusion to the war on the battlefield. Major powers, including the Soviet Union and China, pressured the Vietnamese revolutionaries to accept a partition of the country rather than total victory, fearing a wider escalation that could draw in the United States. Critical Perspective:This agreement represents the betrayal of local aspirations by Great Power politics. The division of the country was an artificial construct imposed from the outside, ignoring the historical and cultural unity of the nation. By creating two opposing states, the Accords did not bring peace; rather, they institutionalized the conflict, transforming a war of independence into a civil war and setting the stage for the disastrous American intervention that followed., so it strove to prevent reliable coverage from getting out).
Over time, correspondents learned that upsetting the official narrative could even put them in danger. South Vietnam’s government did not hesitate to harass journalists who exposed uncomfortable truths. During the Buddhist crisis of 1963, for example, American reporters were beaten and punched by Saigon’s police while covering anti-government protests. “The American government didn’t give a damn about us,” Arnett later said of these incidents, noting that Washington officials stood by while their Saigon allies roughed up the press – because silencing troublesome reporters made it easier to “win” the war on their terms. In short, early Vietnam correspondents operated in an environment of informal censorship, intimidation, and information control.
Some of the key obstacles journalists faced in Vietnam during 1954–64 included:
- Official secrecy and denial: U.S. officials routinely withheld or denied facts. (For instance, an embassy spokesman in Saigon claimed “I don’t see anything!” as helicopters arrived, rather than admit to U.S. buildups) Reporters often knew the truth but struggled to get officials to confirm it.
- Intimidation and harassment: Both the South Vietnamese regime and U.S. mission tolerated rough treatment of reporters. Journalists were sometimes physically assaulted or detained for covering sensitive stories, with U.S. authorities turning a blind eye. This created a climate of fear and self-censorship.
- Pressures to toe the line: Correspondents who wrote critical pieces risked losing access. Military press officers (like the Pentagon’s team in Saigon) would brand uncooperative journalists as unpatriotic. The daily “Five O’Clock Follies” briefings pushed a one-sided narrative, and those who challenged it could be ostracized.
- Editorial hesitance back home: Even when journalists filed hard-hitting stories, American editors sometimes spiked (killed) those reports for being too negative. It was later noted that with hundreds of journalists in Vietnam, entire aspects of the war (like the secret bombing in Cambodia) went unreported for years due to military secrecy and a lack of aggressive scrutiny.
Despite these constraints, the most enterprising U.S. reporters did manage to expose cracks in the official story. Their persistence laid the groundwork for the more skeptical Vietnam reporting that would come later in the 1960s. Yet, as we’ll see, they were often outmaneuvered by officials – and sometimes outflanked by their foreign counterparts.
British Reporters: A Different Perspective Outside the U.S. System
While American correspondents were embedded in the U.S. military’s information apparatus, some British and other international reporters enjoyed a surprising advantage: they operated outside the U.S. chain of command. This independence often enabled them to pursue stories and truths that their American colleagues could not.
Philip Knightley observed that British journalists had more leeway in Vietnam precisely because Britain was not a combatant. They did not have to maintain access to U.S. military sources in the same way, and their home offices were less likely to be pressured by Washington. One striking example came in 1965, just as the war was escalating: James Cameron, a veteran British journalist, and cameraman Malcolm Aird decided to go where no American reporter could at the time – North Vietnam. They raised their own funds to film a report from Hanoi, showing the war’s impact from the communist side. Cameron’s bold move earned him scorn from the U.S. establishment (he was castigated as a communist “dupe” for reporting from the enemy’s capital), but he later remarked that such criticism was a badge of honour. “Only when they call you a dupe… did you know you’d broken the great mould… and maybe you’d got it right!” Cameron quipped, proud that his independent reporting challenged the prevailing narrative.
Other British correspondents and media outlets also managed to print stories that U.S. media found too hot to handle. Famed war correspondent Martha Gellhorn – although American by birth – experienced this firsthand. In the mid-1960s, Gellhorn wrote a series of brutally honest articles describing the suffering of Vietnamese civilians caught in the war. No major U.S. newspaper would publish them; editors complained the reports were “too tough for American readers.” Frustrated, Gellhorn turned to the British press. The Guardian in London agreed to run all five of her articles – providing a British outlet for truths that were effectively censored in America. The South Vietnamese government was so displeased with her frank reporting that they barred Gellhorn from returning to Vietnam, ending her career there. It was an ironic twist: a journalist had to rely on a foreign newspaper to tell American readers the unpleasant realities of a war their own country was fighting.
British photojournalists added to this more unvarnished coverage as well. Larry Burrows, a Life magazine photographer from the UK, produced some of the most searing images of the early war (from the aftermath of battles to the toll on civilians). And Philip Jones Griffiths, a Welsh photographer, focused on documenting what the war did to Vietnamese villagers – work that American outlets initially shied away from for being “too harrowing”. Griffiths eventually published his photos in a book Vietnam Inc., which was a revelation to many readers outside the official bubble; as a result, Saigon banned him from the country. These cases illustrate that operating outside the U.S. military’s embedded framework gave British and other international reporters more freedom to pursue the truth – though sometimes at the cost of being denied access afterward.
In short, British journalists (and a few maverick Australians, Canadians, and French) often reported with a skeptical distance that served the truth. They were not bound by American patriotic sensibilities or Pentagon briefings, so they could write frankly about subjects like civilian casualties, corruption in the South Vietnamese regime, or the perspective of the North. Their reporting provided a crucial reality check during 1954–64, previewing the more critical press coverage that would emerge later in the war. It also underscored an important dynamic: when one nation’s media is constrained during a conflict, foreign press can sometimes fill the gap by shining light on what’s really happening.
The First Casualty: Truth, Indifference, and Revelation
Philip Knightley’s study The First Casualty famously documents how truth becomes a casualty of war, and early Vietnam coverage was no exception. Despite some courageous reporting, the overall picture presented to the American public in 1954–64 remained sanitized and often misleading. Many U.S. correspondents, even if not overtly censored, avoided questioning the morality of the war or digging into atrocities being committed in their midst. Knightley argues that the U.S. media in Vietnam “not only avoided commenting on the morality of American intervention but also stood idly by while atrocities were being committed.” In other words, there was a striking indifference – a reluctance to probe too deeply into civilian suffering or question whether the “good guys” might be doing bad things. This journalistic hesitance meant that horrific events like widespread civilian massacres and the use of napalm or Agent Orange received little coverage until much later.
Indeed, some of the war’s worst episodes (such as the My Lai massacre of 1968, in which hundreds of Vietnamese villagers were killed) only became public well after the fact – and not through the Saigon press corps at all. It was a freelance American journalist back home, Seymour Hersh, who finally broke the My Lai story in 1969. As one analysis noted, with over 600 reporters in Vietnam by the late 1960s, it was striking that a massacre like My Lai went unreported on the ground for over a year. In retrospect, correspondents admitted that many of them knew of atrocities or abuses but kept quiet, or their editors “spiked” the stories, fearing they were too shocking. Only once Hersh’s scoop opened the floodgates did Vietnam reporters flood the wires with atrocity stories they had “known about or witnessed” but not reported earlier. This was a sobering indictment of the press’s performance.
Why this indifference or delay in truthful reporting? Part of it was the context of the early 1960s: Vietnam was not yet front-page news, and American audiences (and editors) were largely apathetic about a simmering conflict in a distant land. As the Britannica observes, Vietnam only became a subject of large-scale U.S. news coverage after 1965; prior to that, public interest was low and most reporting “was actually supportive of the U.S. effort.”. Reporters who did criticize the war effort risked being labeled unpatriotic, which tempered aggressive watchdog journalism. Additionally, the racial and ideological lens of the time made some correspondents unconsciously downplay Vietnamese suffering. Knightley points out that American military propaganda dehumanized the Vietnamese (friend and foe alike) with racist terms, creating a climate where “the only good one was a dead one”. This toxic mindset dulled the urgency to report crimes against Vietnamese civilians. It “inevitably led to My Lai,” Knightley writes – and it explains why it took an outsider to finally expose such crimes.
The legacy of war reporting in Vietnam’s early years is therefore mixed. On one hand, intrepid journalists opened cracks in the official narrative – for example, exposing that the war was not the easy win U.S. officials claimed. On the other hand, the press as a whole failed to question the war’s premise and human cost until it was very late. When we consider the period 1954–64, we see a press corps largely indifferent or acquiescent to the widening war, with notable exceptions. As Herman and Chomsky later argued, the media in those years often “rallied to the cause, portraying murderous aggression as a defense of freedom”. Dissenting voices were rare.
By shining a light on this history, we come to appreciate the role of journalists who did push back against censorship and propaganda. Their efforts in the early 1960s laid the groundwork for the more confrontational journalism and public skepticism that emerged later in the decade. In Vietnam, the truth was often contested terrain – but thanks to a few determined correspondents (and some help from outsiders like British reporters), the fog of war occasionally lifted. The lesson from Knightley’s The First Casualty is clear and timeless: in war, truth is vulnerable. For those reporting from Vietnam before the American “big war” began, telling the truth required persistence, bravery, and sometimes an outsider’s perspective. As the war escalated beyond 1964, that hard-won truth would become ever more crucial in shaping public understanding of the conflict.
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