On arrival in Hanoi, Salisbury set out at once to learn the results of the American air strikes on North Vietnam that had occurred on September 13 and 14. The North Vietnamese contended that the center of Hanoi had been bombed. The Pentagon denied it, saying the bombers had hit legitimate targets in the industrial outskirts rather than the urban areas. In his first dispatch, filed on Christmas Eve after viewing a number of sites where houses had been damaged by bombing or rocket fire inflicting civilian casualties, Salisbury stated: “Contrary to the impression given by United States communiqués, on-the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing has been inflicting considerable civilian casualties in Hanoi and its environs for some time.”
The first site that Salisbury visited was in the area of Pho Nguyen Thiep Street in the Hoan Kiem quarter of Hanoi, a three-minute drive from the old Metropole Hotel, so familiar to me from my stays there in the 1950s. He reported that about three hundred thatch and brick homes and huts along the Red River embankment, possibly a quarter of a mile from Nguyen Thiep Street, were hit on December 13. On that site, he reported, four persons had been killed and ten injured, most of them while at work or hiding in a large shelter. The damaged houses lay along the western approaches to the key Paul Doumer (Long Bien) Bridge, and Salisbury speculated that American pilots possibly were aiming at the approaches to the bridge just outside the Hanoi city limits. Salisbury also inspected a house on Hue Lane in the Halba Quarter that had been hit on December 2, and he reported the death there of one person and the wounding of seven others, including two children. Perhaps because he had been witness to the destruction of the German blitz of London in World War II, he cited the casualties and damage in Hanoi as relatively light.
His reporting rendered its great impact in its implication that the Pentagon had been lying and misleading the American public in asserting that the so-called precision bombing had not hit the urban areas or caused civilian casualties. Salisbury also interviewed Premier Pham Van Dong, quoting him as declaring that North Vietnam was ready to fight for another twenty years to prevail in its “sacred war,” an assertion that undercut predictions made by the Johnson administration that the North Vietnamese would bend to American power.
The Salisbury dispatches, published at a time of bitter divisive debate in the country over the administration’s conduct of the Vietnam War, produced an enormous uproar. The Pentagon and the State Department challenged the credibility of Salisbury’s reporting. Arthur Sylvester, the Pentagon press secretary, referred to the New York Times as “The new Hanoi Times.” His office conceded that some of Salisbury’s observations might prove to be correct but charged that his reports, which lacked attribution, were based on North Vietnamese propaganda. Secretary of State Dean Rusk made a late-night phone call to Arthur Sulzberger, asking the publisher pointedly if Salisbury was asking the right questions. “I hope so,” Sulzberger replied. After the call, Sulzberger telephoned Daniel and asked him to contact Rusk and obtain from him any questions that he would have Salisbury put to the North Vietnamese. Rusk furnished a list of questions which were sent to Salisbury unmarked as to their source, but it arrived too late. When Salisbury returned to the United States, he met with Rusk and reported that Pham Van Dong had indicated, as the Vietnamese premier had conveyed more explicitly earlier to Chester Ronning, that Hanoi might be more amenable to peace negotiations if the United States halted the bombing of the North unconditionally.
The Washington Post among many others in the media questioned the reliability of Salisbury’s reports, asserting that his casualty figures, which lacked attribution, were similar to those contained in Communist propaganda pamphlets. Daniel retorted in a statement: “It was apparent in Mr. Salisbury’s first dispatch—and he so stated in a subsequent dispatch—that the casualty figures came from North Vietnamese officials. Where else could he get such figures in Hanoi?” Very privately, Daniel summed up the uproar in a memo to executive editor Catledge, who was abroad, noting that “the Publisher was perturbed” about Salisbury’s dispatches, and detailed how he was handling the nationwide fire storm which they had ignited. “Getting into Hanoi was a journalistic coup,” Daniel said. “Harrison, as might be expected, very promptly dug up some interesting facts that weren’t known before. He disclosed that there was considerably more damage to civilian areas than Washington was quick to acknowledge that this was so. At the same time, he obviously gave comfort to North Vietnam by affording an outlet for its propaganda and the point of view, and comfort to those who are opposed to the bombing, and opposed to the war . . . and as you know, Harrison has complicated matters by failing in his first dispatches to attribute casualty statistics and other controversial information directly to those from whom he received it. I asked him in a telegram to do this, and he has subsequently complied . . . The desk was instructed not to print anything without attribution or, if the attribution was obvious, as it was in most cases, they should simply put it in.”
Daniel, who had begun to read Salisbury’s dispatches before they were published, instructed editors in another memorandum to do “everything we can in coming weeks to balance the Salisbury reports.” The Times then ran a front-page story by Hanson W. Baldwin, our military analyst, who was one of the most vociferous critics of Salisbury’s reporting. He quoted Pentagon sources describing Salisbury’s accounts as “grossly exaggerated.” On all sides, by Washington officials and the media, the challenges to Salisbury’s reporting centered on lack of specific attribution.
In one of the most frustrating turns of my career as foreign editor, I was absent from New York when Salisbury did his reporting. I was at home in Scarsdale on Christmas Day and then left on a long-planned first tour of our bureaus in Eastern and Western Europe. After my return to New York on January 24, I was apprised of some of the details of how Salisbury’s dispatches had been handled by the Foreign Desk. But it was not until September 2007, more than forty years later, that I learned for the first time precisely what happened on the Foreign Desk on Christmas Eve when Salisbury’s first dispatch landed. Possibly to avoid embarrassing some of the desk editors on duty that night, the full account had been withheld from the top editors.
I learned the full story when I met with Evan Jenkins, who had been on the Foreign Desk on that Christmas Eve and handled Salisbury’s copy. Jenkins thereafter had become one of my assistant foreign editors and later became a senior editor on the paper’s central News Desk. At our reunion he was consulting editor, the chief copy editor, of the Columbia Journalism Review. There was a standing joke between me and Jenkins, an old friend, that he had spoken to me after midnight more often than my wife. When I served as assistant managing editor and later managing editor, Jenkins, working on the News Desk during what is called in newsroom jargon the “night trick,” would call me if there was a major news break or a question of changing the front page of the newspaper.
I met Jenkins, at his suggestion, at a bistro near the Columbia campus, where he told me his untold story. Salisbury’s first report from Hanoi arrived late Saturday, Christmas Eve, after the close of the first edition. The article was published in the late editions of Sunday, Christmas Day, and evoked no manifest stir, possibly because it had not made the first edition, which was the edition normally distributed in Washington. The dispatch was not seen in the capital until the next day. Yet there was another reason why the dispatch did not immediately evoke controversy. The copy editor assigned to handle Salisbury’s first dispatch was Evan, who had joined the Times only six months earlier from the Long Island newspaper Newsday. As he read it, he became deeply concerned by the lack of attribution for some key aspects of the dispatch. He found himself confronted with both journalistic and personal dilemmas. Here he was, editing the work of not only one of the Times’s most brilliant and experienced reporters—Salisbury had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for his reporting from Moscow—but also someone who was an assistant managing editor. Ironically, one of Salisbury’s routine duties in the newsroom was to provide Clifto
n Daniel, the managing editor, with a postmortem of the previous day’s paper for the purpose of spotting and culling out just the kind of flaws that Jenkins now saw in the Salisbury dispatch. Fully aware that the dispatch, once published, given the heated debate in the United States on Vietnam policy, would draw the most critical inspection, Jenkins balked at signing off on it. Consultations then took place with many-sided implications. Jenkins pointed out to his supervisor on the desk, Cleve Mathews, that Salisbury was reporting details about the American bombings that he could not possibly know through personal observation yet he had not attributed the reports. Jenkins had just been advised by another supervisor, the desk slot man, as he was handed the Salisbury dispatch for editing: “Evan, it’s my experience that the best way to deal with Salisbury’s copy is to hook the paragraphs, fix the syntax, and otherwise leave it alone.” Agitated, Jenkins told Mathews that he would rather quit than put the dispatch into the paper in its existing form. Mathews then took the copy to Larry Hauck, the editor in charge of the paper that night. He was a member of what was known then as the Bullpen, composed of the most senior news editors. When Hauck came to him on the desk rim, Jenkins pointed out several of the flaws in the copy. Hauck said: “Edit the damn thing the way it needs to be edited.” Jenkins then inserted phrases in the dispatch which made it clear that much of the information about casualties and damage Salisbury was reporting came from the North Vietnamese. He also bracketed in a paragraph which quoted a State Department acknowledgment, issued just two days earlier, that the possibility of accidental bombing could not be ruled out. The changes made the story acceptable in keeping with the Times’s journalistic standards.
Two dispatches from Salisbury, which Jenkins did not edit, arrived subsequently on Monday, December 26, one having been filed the day before but delayed in transmission. Both were published in the paper of Tuesday, December 27, but this time the “leave it alone” approach apparently prevailed, and there were no insertions of attribution.
Waiting for me in late January upon my return from my trip was a rather anguished note, dated Monday night (December 26) from Jenkins. It turned out that he had not read the second and third dispatches, had not edited them, and had not seen them until late that night. In his memo, with a tear sheet from the Tuesday paper attached, Jenkins said: “I am enclosing samples of what I consider to be unfortunate reporting. In the places I’ve encircled, it seems to me Salisbury is reporting conclusions and not known fact.” But he added: “I ought to make it clear that I’m inclined to accept almost everything he said, including the conclusions.”
After our talk that September afternoon in 2007 when he told me his story, Jenkins sent me four documents. One was a recap of what he told me. With it was a clip of Salisbury’s first dispatch with penciled markings of the editing done by him. Another was a copy of the Monday, December 26, memo he sent me, which had been lost in the files of forty years ago.
Despite the challenges to his reporting, Salisbury’s dispatches swelled the growing public opposition to the war and heightened distrust of the claims of progress being made by the White House and the Pentagon. The historian Barbara Tuchman would later comment in her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, that after Salisbury’s reporting from North Vietnam, “Johnson’s ratings in the polls for handling of the war slid into the negative and would never again regain a majority of support.” But the attribution issue probably cost Salisbury a Pulitzer Prize, an accolade which I believe he deserved for his enterprise and the substance of his reporting. Turner Catledge was serving on the Pulitzer Prize Board when Salisbury lost out in the voting. The board turned aside the 4–1 recommendation of the International Reporting Jury and voted 6–5 against the Salisbury entry. In his memoir My Life and The Times, Catledge, who had recused himself from the deliberations in keeping with the board’s conflict-of-interest rules, said he believed that members of the board who were supporting the war had voted against Salisbury for political reasons. However, he conceded that the Times had made an editorial slip in that Salisbury provided no attribution for the figures on civilian casualties in his first dispatch, making himself vulnerable to his critics. He argued that apart from personal observations, the information in Salisbury’s dispatch obviously could come only from the North Vietnamese. He noted that the rest of the fourteen dispatches which Salisbury filed from Hanoi and the eight from Hong Kong were adequately attributed. Catledge himself erred in his memoir. The lack of attribution which drew fire was not in the first dispatch, edited by Jenkins, but in the two that arrived next, which were published as filed.
The fourth document which Jenkins sent me was a copy of a letter he sent on December 16, 1996, to John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s, in connection with an article MacArthur was writing for the Columbia Journalism Review. It said, in part: “Topping, who had finished a foreign correspondent’s career when he became foreign editor earlier in 1966, was also nominated for a Pulitzer prize that year for a series reporting on the slaughter of supposed Communists in Indonesia. I remember that it was very good. I was the grunt editor on that one, too. The Pulitzer advisory board, having rejected Salisbury even though he should have been a shoo-in, could hardly give the prize to another Times entry. So the prize for 1966 went to a Christian Science Monitor correspondent [John Hughes] for his coverage, as it happened, of the slaughter in Indonesia.”
Three months after I met with Jenkins, I was devastated when I received a message from David Jones, the former national editor of the Times, informing me that Jenkins had died of cancer. Evan had not told me that he was terminally ill. He had arranged to meet with me before his death, evidently because he wanted to be sure that I knew and perhaps would record the full details of what happened that Christmas Eve in the Times newsroom. At a memorial gathering several days after Evan’s death, I recounted his story to his family and friends. I told them that Evan was the kind of editor that made the New York Times a great newspaper.
On November 30, 1966, two months after my appointment as foreign editor, I wrote to Clifton Daniel in effect asking for a mandate to undertake a major reform of the foreign news report and restructuring of the desk. In my memorandum to him, I said: “As the world becomes more complex, our reporting tasks multiply and the competition for space increases correspondingly. To fulfill our function as the paper of record, we should progressively become more selective as to the detail we publish. We must also develop appropriate forms of summary reporting if we are to open space for the growing number of subjects that demand attention. The social, intellectual and technological revolutions are moving nations more than politics and our report does not adequately reflect that perspective. Too much detail is slipping into papers, which is of ephemeral interest and does not significantly inform or stimulate our readers.”
The mandate I requested for change was forthcoming from Daniel, who had been a correspondent in London and Moscow and saw the need for reform of our foreign news operations. A significant paring of the foreign report, which I instituted immediately, was to dispense with the lengthy texts of diplomatic notes exchanged among nations, which had been a hallmark of the Times as the paper of record but, I felt, added very little to our readers’ understanding of events.
My reshaping of the report began in 1967 with a restructuring of the Foreign News Copy Desk in New York. The Foreign Desk I inherited was staffed with editors who seemed to function in the most routine, dispirited manner. I ruled strictly against copy editors tampering with the substance of a story, but I expected them to do more than correct punctuation and spelling. There was often a need to go back to correspondents on their stories to close gaps, question unsubstantiated assertions, fix the structure of a piece, or ask for follow-ups. But treated often by Times executives as little more than a collection of hacks—not an unusual attitude toward copy editors at many newspapers—our Foreign Desk editors often hesitated to engage with reporters in the field. Curious about these faceless people on the rim, I asked each to su
bmit a detailed personal résumé. To my delight, I found these unknowns were possessed of an extraordinary range of talents and expertise. While earning a living on the copy desk, some were employed part-time as teachers or writers and editors at other publications. One of the most outstanding of the editors was Allan Siegal, who handled the critical late-night trick. Siegal left the paper for a time to join ABC, but I was instrumental in bringing him back to the Foreign Desk. It was an act I look back at with great satisfaction. Siegal eventually became an assistant managing editor serving as the longtime arbiter of style and standards in the copy editing of the paper. Looking to exploit my newly discovered resources on the Foreign News Desk, I assigned each of the copy editors to work as an area specialist and arranged opportunities for them to do independent research. Enjoying greater mutual respect, editors and reporters began working more closely together. The copy showed very marked improvement, and there was a greater flow of story ideas.
In June 1968, following the restructuring of the desk, I distributed a lengthy memorandum entitled “Foreign Desk Guidelines” designed to govern the content of the report and asked all correspondents to comment. It covered everything from the techniques of interpretive reporting, to the structure of stories, to closer collaboration with the copy desk. At the core of the guidelines was the statement:
To survive in the competition with electronic media, news magazines and the suburban press, which are attracting an increasing share of public attention, we must offer something more. If we are to remain the leader in foreign news reporting, we must add new facts and dimensions to our coverage. Specifically, what can The New York Times, with its unique staff, resources and public service tradition, do to better serve the reader? Governments will determine in large measure whether mankind can solve its great problems of security, law and material wellbeing, and, therefore, we should remain deeply concerned with the conduct of governmental affairs. However, we can be less preoccupied with the daily official rhetoric of the capitals. We should report more about how the peoples live, and what they and their societies look like, how their institutions and systems operate. Our report should reflect more fully the social, cultural, intellectual, scientific and technological revolutions, which, more than the political, are transforming the world society. And to comprehend, our readers must have more than sophisticated interpretive writing.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 42