by Peter Arnett
KOMOR: Tell me, tell me about your relationship with George Esper. Because he feels, I think, to this day that you were his mentor, in a way. And so, and so one returns the favor, as you go along, in mentoring people, in return for those mentors that you were lucky to have. What was George like? When did he come over?
ARNETT: George came to Vietnam in 1965. A West Virginia boy; his father, family had worked in the coal mines. But he was the child who made it through college. Various small AP bureaus; volunteered for Saigon, and he was sent there in mid-1965. I mean, he initially, you know, initially became friendly to me because I gave him what he felt was, you know, significant advice. I remember visiting him in his hotel room, soon after he arrived, and he had been out on a trip with, on a patrol with the, with the Vietnamese troops. He had come back, and he was full of himself, and I went into the bathroom to use the toilet, and I noticed his muddy boots were in the bidet. And I said—and I came out, and he said, “You know, Peter, these, these French, they even have a special appliance to wash your damn boots.” I pointed out to George that a bidet was for more than just washing boots. [Laughs] But he felt—from then on in, he looked to me for advice about, you know, modern living. [Laughs] The—you know, George was, you know, one of the truly dedicated, you know, AP people, who came to Vietnam. Well, in a way, I feel sort of similar to him, in which that, you know, I felt that you take a story and you, you know, you shake it like a dog shakes a bone, you know, you’re not going to let it go. And George had that similar feel to a story. He just wanted to grip it. And with George, it was a matter of just leading him in the right direction. And say, “George, you know, we need you in Danang; the Marines are going to do this.” So George would be up to Danang, and you would get everything you ever wanted to know about what the Marines were doing in that operation. Not only would you get whatever you needed to know, but you would get it in a competitive period, he was the most competitive journalist I’d ever seen, and he would compete with UPI and everyone else, you know? And he diligently, fervently, believed that the most important role he had in life was to serve the requirements of the AP, which was to serve—to get the story. George is actually still like that, if you—now he’s in retirement, but if you give him, you know, a suggestion that maybe he should look someone up, or maybe he should—he’ll grab it and do it fervently. But, you know, for a wire service like the AP, who, who needed diligence, and who, you know, needed industry and competitiveness, George was the man. In addition, he was the most decent of people, until you crossed him. And there’s one famous story of George. He was dictating from Danang late in 1965, at the newly opened press center, notable because there was only one telephone line from Danang to Saigon, which was one more than from Saigon to the headquarters in New York; there were no telephone lines. You could rarely call. And this one telephone line from Danang to Saigon was used often by all the media, because by late ’65, with the first of, the first 100,000 of half a million U.S. troops having come in, there was a lot of people wanting to use the phone, particularly UPI, and television networks. So I remember George was dictating a story to me about some press conference the Marines had just had, and I heard someone, some noise in the background, and George said, “Excuse me.” And I heard more noise, and a thump. And then he got back on the phone, and I said, “What was that?” “Oh, nothing.” We later learned that an ABC correspondent had tried to take the phone away from George, telling him that he’d been on it for an hour, and that was too long, so George, you know, decked him right there on the spot. [Laughs] And went back to the phone. Without, you know, missing a beat. “Nothing, Peter, nothing. Just continue.” But his generosity of spirit, I mean, impressed all. He was a beloved figure, but a very competitive figure. And there are the stories of legion about, you know how—I remember one particular story in ’67, when we heard from a White House source that President Johnson was going to visit Cam Ranh Bay. Now, you could imagine that security was very strict when the president went anywhere, particularly a place like Vietnam. It’s like when President Bush made his one visit to Iraq, no one knew about it until he was well gone. So, Johnson was on his way to Cam Ranh Bay. We got a tip. But not even the White House press corps knew that he was going. But, so, George figured, you know, “We’re going to get this story first.” So we called up the Cam Ranh Bay airport, and got the airport duty officer and said, “General Esper here. Is the president there yet?” “Well, sir, his plane is just coming in.” “Well, stay on the line! I want to know if everything’s all right. Give me a report on what’s happening.” So, this officer, who was standing, you know, overlooking them, “Well, President Johnson’s arrived. He’s being greeted by General So-and-So, and there’s a, there’s an honor guard and, you know, and the president’s shaking hands, and moving around, and he did this, and he huddled with someone, and he met President Thieu, and”—“Well, thank you, Colonel.” So—but he still kept him on the line, while busily typing, and then as the colonel said, “Well, the plane’s just taking off,” it was a, you know, like 25-minute visit; George had the story prepared, boom. Instantly. [Laughs] President Johnson. That is George! Of course, the AP White House people were very disconcerted and unhappy that when they got back to Thailand, they’d been scooped. With all the details. [Laughs]
KOMOR: And I seem to remember that he got him to read the text of his remarks over the phone.
ARNETT: I believe that was even the case. A text of his remarks over the phone.
KOMOR: Yes.
ARNETT: That had been given in advance.
KOMOR: Yes. I guess you have to have—“Would you like to hear?” Because he—yeah.
ARNETT: Yeah! “Would you like to hear, by the way, what he said?” [Laughs]
KOMOR: [Laughs] Yeah.
ARNETT: Well, you know the story—it was just a marvelous, but this is—“General Esper here.”
KOMOR: Yes.
ARNETT: So, he could do that. George, who seems at time passively—responsive—unresponsive—actually has a lot going on in his brain, and he could write really dramatically, and good stories. The—you know, George spent more time in the bureau than out, because he was such a diligent editor and writer that he would use that phone, you know, better than anyone else I had ever seen. I remember, there was a story that came out of Washington of a B-52 pilot who had refused to fly. And he had been grounded. In, in, in Thailand, at one of the—Udorn, Thailand, one of the B-52 bases. George got him on the phone. Again by saying, “General Esper here,” you know, and he got the guy on the phone. And got an exclusive from, [laughs] from this pilot that had been put into solitary, but they’d given him a call from General Esper, you know, to reprimand him. And George got the whole story. But he was capable of doing that. And there was constantly many, many stories of George’s ability. But by staying in the bureau, you know, this, this meant that he, he became secondary to the field correspondents. You know, so I’d be out covering the war, and getting great stories, and George would be back in the office, helping, doing the overnight report. Now, George being such a decent man, filled with humility, never challenged that. He never demanded to go out on the story, to get—for a change. He was willing to put up with all that. So that’s why, at the end of the war, it was such a great pleasure for me to be in Saigon. For many reasons, I wanted to be in Saigon in April of ’75, when the Vietnam War came to an end; when the communists ultimately struck down through the many South Vietnamese provinces to encircle Saigon and then pounce, come in, with all the U.S. forces leaving. Excuse me. So, I was sent in to help the coverage in the last weeks. George Esper was there, Ed White, and Matt Franjola, who was a stringer who had come in. And as the, as the crisis neared it, its, you know, the completion of the war, AP ordered most people out. But they let George and I and Franjola stay. And when it became clear that the communists were coming in, George said to me, “Peter, you know, you’re the senior man here; you’re the best; you do the big story.” And I said, “George, no. You’ve sat at that de
sk, you know, for 10 years. You’ve put your name on every overnight story, and no one knows who you are. You write the story.” Next day, headline of The New York Times, front page: “Saigon Falls,” by George Esper. It was one of the great moments, you know, in any headline collection. “Saigon Falls,” by George Esper. So, it was so—I was so happy to see that all those years on the desk brought—which was a fabulous headline. I mean, that’s through history now. And it’s George Esper on that story. Now, George is inordinately grateful to me; he keeps saying that, that, and publicly, that “It was Peter Arnett; he should have got a Pulitzer for the fall of Saigon.” Rubbish! I got my Pulitzer years earlier. George deserved a Pulitzer, actually, for his excellent reporting, he did. In addition to doing the roundup, he did superb eyewitness accounts of suicides and so much else. But he still gives me credit. But that’s George, you know? He, he, he is so, you know, so willing, so humble. He’s got so much humility.
KOMOR: I want to ask you a fairly—a big question, on a huge topic, but we haven’t discussed too much the nitty-gritty of coverage of Vietnam. But, in hindsight, I wonder if you have any observations about the Vietnam coverage as a whole, and how it was handled. And perhaps how has, how have you seen war coverage change since Vietnam? And obviously, it’s a humongous topic.
ARNETT: The AP Vietnam coverage; the American media Vietnam coverage was distinctive in a special way. This was the first war, the first modern war—and I include all of the wars of the 20th century as being modern wars—where the media held government, government officials, and military officers, and military officials, accountable for their decisions. World War I, World War II, Korea: strict censorship, limited commentary, limited factual transmission of information by the media. They went along with it, because those three wars, World War I, II and Korea, were looked upon as wars of national security; the fate of the nation was involved in those wars. There needed to be, you know, a national effort, and that included censorship of the media, which under the Constitution or, in the eons of time since the Constitution had been written, came to understand that in special occasions you can censor the press. So, reporters in those three wars essentially were part of the military. They got military rank; officers, depending on the place within the news media the reporter occupied, would be a senior officer or a junior officer. And they marched to the media’s—to the military’s drummer. The stories were censored; there was self-censorship; that was understood. And in fact, this was seen as a necessary ingredient of previous coverage. I remember John Steinbeck wrote a book called, you know, The War That Was, or words to that effect.* And in it, there was a preface that I actually read soon after I got to Vietnam, in which he said, “The war the media wrote about, World War II, was not the real war. The real war ended up, you know, in the editor’s wastepaper basket.” And he, he explained why that was, and he also suggested it was probably necessary to do it, but the point is, so much of the brutality and the stupidity of these wars, the earlier wars, was not reported. Because it was deemed of national security, and you just could not shake resolve, and anything negative, too negative, could hurt opinion back home. It was seen, argued by the authorities, and they got away with it; the media went along with it. Let’s go to Vietnam. The primary reporters of the Vietnam War, and I’m talking about Halberstam of the Times, and those who followed him at the Times; Malcolm Browne at the AP, and those who followed him; Time magazine; Newsweek. These were reporters who came up during the civil rights struggle in the ’50s. Quite a few of them had been covering the South. They’d also all been in the military. Because I’d served two years in the military, all reporters, at that time, was compulsory military service. So, they were all very familiar with the military; had their own feelings about the military that weren’t very patriotic, because certainly the military in the late ’50s, you know, service had become very routine. You know, as the young people in the United States were you know, moving out in their own directions—the civil rights struggle; other issues had come to the fore; women’s rights. There was a, sort of a fervent, you know, desire by young Americans to bring change. This was evident in the young reporters. They’re the ones who came to Vietnam in the ’60s. And with that attitude, they immediately began challenging government. So that when I got to Vietnam in ’62, Malcolm Browne was writing stories saying, you know, “The U.S. Embassy is lying because they’re bringing in helicopters and tanks to help the South Vietnamese and saying it’s not so.” So David Halberstam would come in, and go to the Mekong Delta, and saying, “You know, all the American advisers that I talk to say that we’re losing the war there. The Vietnam—Viet Cong are growing in ability, you know, they have controls.” And me, being an observant young reporter, picked up on all that. This made Vietnam different: challenging authority, challenging the embassy, challenging the government. So, by the, by 1963, President Kennedy was demanding The New York Times pull David Halberstam out of Vietnam, because he didn’t like his coverage. He said, “Halberstam is too negative,” particularly writing about the Buddhist crisis, and its impact on the presidency of Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, you know, was calling on the AP to pull me out of Vietnam because my reports were seen as being negative and what made it worse, I was from New Zealand. Of course, New Zealand was an ally; it had, you know, four or five thousand troops in Vietnam [laughs], but that wasn’t the issue. Every day on the ticker, on his—in the teleprinter in the Oval Office, you know, Johnson would read these AP dispatches, and every now and again they had a Peter Arnett story, or a John Wheeler story, and others that challenged the conventional wisdom, and that made him, made him very unhappy. But not just the AP and The New York Times. Newsweek, Time magazine started to, you know, to look at this war as being, you know, misspent money, misspent lives. This hadn’t happened before. This was also unique. And the ability, then, of journalists to analyze and challenge government in what was, you know, a war seen to be the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time carried over into the ’70s, with Watergate, where Washington Post reporters felt emboldened to challenge authority right at home. [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein challenged the authority of the president in Washington. Not without difficulty; they had to convince their own editors that what they were doing was significant. Now, the effect of Watergate, and the effect of Vietnam coverage, carried over into the ’80s, with strong critical coverage of Americans’ involvement in Central America; with the Iran-Contra affair, supporting the Contras against the Nicaraguan government; going on to the first Gulf War; and then going on to the ’90s; and it was only, really, 9/11 that changed the picture, where journalists and where mainstream media—people, reporters, editors, you know, felt confronted by terrorism, that altered the picture to some degree. But those years from the early ’60s to early in the 21st century were really years of challenging, significant, important journalism that, that helped really disclose what government was doing abroad; the mistakes it was making, and, you know, and bringing the public into a greater understanding and a greater role to play in how government acted abroad. There’s no doubt about it.