The Real David Halberstam

For what seems like forever we have been taught to celebrate David Halberstam as the intrepid journalist who blew the lid off the Vietnam War.  He wrote about how The Best and the Brightest betrayed the United States in their fumbling little war in Vietnam.

Actually, it wasn’t like that at all, according to Mark Moyar, author of an expose about Halberstam, Triumph Forsaken.  It was Halberstam and his buddies in Saigon who committed the central blunder of the war.  It was they who agitated to get Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem removed. 

[T]hey had a low opinion of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and decided that he would need to be removed if the war was to be won.

So they briefed their pals in the US government and told them that Diem was no good.

Most of the information they passed on was false or misleading, owing in part to their heavy reliance on a Reuters stringer named Pham Xuan An who was actually a secret Communist agent. The journalists convinced Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to accept their reports in place of much more accurate reports from the CIA and the U.S. military, which led Lodge to urge South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup.

Unfortunately, the removal of Diem screwed things up.  His assassination created a power vacuum and a purging of Diem loyalists.

After Diem’s assassination, the South Vietnamese fared very poorly in their war against the Communists, which was why the U.S. eventually had to send half a million troops to South Vietnam.

So Halberstam and his pals had to do a bit of coverup.  They developed the story that things were going to hell in Vietnam before the Diem assassination.

Based on a few faulty pieces of evidence, they contended that the South Vietnamese war effort had crumbled before Diem’s overthrow, not after it. No one of influence succeeded in pointing out that these men’s own articles in 1963 contradicted this claim.

It is a tragedy that David Halberstam should have lost his life in an auto accident.  But if Moyar’s story is true it is outrageous that Halberstam attempted in such a disgraceful way to influence US policy in Vietnam.  And it is tragic that he succeeded.  It is criminal that he then proceeded to cover up his manipulations and succeeded.

What happened to the journalistic passion for the truth?