Michael S. Sweeney by The Military & the Press

Author:The Military & the Press [Inconnu(e)]
Language: fra
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-29T22:26:37.025000+00:00

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THE GREAT DIVORCE

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to a jarring phone call. Veteran correspondent Homer

Bigart, covering the latest war, had called to complain that

Sheehan’s story had overshadowed his own dispatch. The

senior reporter demanded that Sheehan get dressed and

accompany him to the battle zone to count bodies. At My

Tho, they found fifteen.

Sheehan took the lesson to heart. At the 1963 battle of

Ap Bac, the communists fought in a sustained, coordinated

attack for the first time. American-led South Vietnamese

forces lost four helicopters in five minutes, took serious ca-

sualties, and refused to press an attack, allowing the vast

majority of the outnumbered Vietcong to escape. Yet Amer-

ican military spokesmen portrayed the battle as a victory.

Admiral Harry Felt criticized Sheehan’s downbeat wire re-

ports, saying, “You ought to go down and talk to some of the

people who’ve got the facts.” Sheehan replied, “You’re right,

Admiral. That’s why I went down to Ap Bac every day dur-

ing the fighting.”

Similarly, Felt suggested at a press conference that Mal-

colm Browne, the AP’s lead reporter in South Vietnam, had

wandered out of the mainstream of official news. “Why

can’t you get on the team?” Felt asked.

Halberstam and Charlie Mohr of Time magazine fought

to get their carefully reported accounts published intact

despite the home front’s tendency to lend more credence to

official military versions than to the work of young war re-

porters. Mohr quit after Time, which had continually edited

his stories to change their tone from negative to positive,

criticized the press corps in Saigon. (Mohr accused the mag-

azine of “shelling its own troops.”)

Halberstam’s paper took another tack. Instead of sanitizing

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