James Bowman: David Halberstam and the media's ethos of irresponsibility
"For those who remember journalism back in a 1970s heyday they can't explain to to [sic] the young, [David] Halberstam's death was not just the death of a hero, it was like the death of the great Hollywood stars--Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable." So wrote Henry Allen in the Washington Post shortly after the car crash which brought about the melancholy event to which he refers. He reminds us of what a paltry thing, in journalism's little kingdom, is "just" the death of a hero--at least in comparison with the apotheosis of a celebrity. Halberstam, Hepburn, Gable. When did this trinity, rather than Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur, become America's great and paradigmatic figures before the world? The answer is at about the same time, back in the 1960s, when Halberstam was helping to revolutionize journalism. As Richard Holbrooke put it, "He made it not only possible but even romantic to write that your own side was misleading the public about how the war was going."
It would be hard to overstate the many implications and ramifications of that revealing remark, quoted by George Packer in The New Yorker, by someone who is spoken of as a potential secretary of state in a future Democratic administration. To start with: If it's now romantic to expose the falsehoods and hypocrisies of your own side, in what sense is that side any longer your own? Of course, journalistic piety would have it that the reporter doesn't take sides but is just, in Mr. Packer's words, a "fearless truth-teller." Yet in practice we know as well as Richard Holbrooke does that side matters. There are truths and there are truths. No one supposes that Halberstam could have become the equal of Hepburn and Gable by reporting on the misleading statements of the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese--always supposing he could have found any. It was because he was attacking, exposing, shaming what at the time would have been regarded, by the media culture as by everyone else, as his own side that he became famous.
Moreover, the officials he attacked occupied, however unworthily, the place of those old-fashioned, "just" American heroes whom journalists in the past had been wont to treat so deferentially. There was obviously an immense feeling of liberation and empowerment for a young man who had come to feel entitled by his powers of intellect to look down on senior military officers-- a feeling well captured by Ambassador Holbrooke in his account in the Washington Post of a memorable dinner in a Saigon restaurant in 1963 with Halberstam and Neil Sheehan:
They especially despised the senior commander, World War II veteran Paul D. Harkins, and after giving me some advice ("Don't trust anything those bastards tell you"), David and Neil spent most of the evening denouncing Harkins. After some wine, they conducted a mock trial of the four-star general for incompetence and dereliction of duty. In his rumbling, powerful voice, David pronounced Harkins "guilty" of each charge, after which Neil loudly carried out the "sentence": execution by imaginary firing squad against the back wall of the restaurant.
Such revolutionary high-spiritedness does not immediately suggest fearless truth-telling so much as it does the anarchic exuberance of youth presented with an opportunity for rebellion against what, at about the same time, we were learning to call "the Establishment." That's what made Halberstam a romantic figure at the time and since. He was a David who, looked at in the right light, had brought down the Goliath of the American military and political establishment with a well-aimed pebble. Thus it seems a bit disingenuous of Richard Holbrooke to celebrate the romance of his hero's triumph while at the same time describing as "nonsense" the view that his reporting contributed to America's humiliation in Vietnam by undermining support for the war at home. By calling him "romantic," isn't he implicitly giving him credit for just that?
There is also a paradox involved in the romance of exposing falsehood, for romance is itself a kind of falsehood. It may be a hopeful and a benign sort of falsehood, but it is still ineluctably false. By its very nature romance amounts to an exaggeration or glorification of what, looked at more closely, is at best mundane and at worst ugly or disreputable. Journalists, like novelists and filmmakers, used to romanticize warfare by closing their eyes to much of the horror of it; now they romanticize the victims of war and so undermine war's foundations by looking at nothing but its horrors. In the media's reporting of war, honor and glory have become at least as invisible as the ghastly flow of blood and viscera once were to their predecessors. Nowadays, any journalist who wants to succeed knows he is in the business not of celebrating honor or trust or heroism but of exposing whatever sordid realities may be found (or invented) beneath the appearances of those things. And if the romantic prize is now awarded to those who tell tales of war's evils, why should we not suppose that the supply of those evils will rise to meet the journalistic demand, just as the supply of heroes rose when the demand was for tales of heroism?...
Read entire article at New Criterion
It would be hard to overstate the many implications and ramifications of that revealing remark, quoted by George Packer in The New Yorker, by someone who is spoken of as a potential secretary of state in a future Democratic administration. To start with: If it's now romantic to expose the falsehoods and hypocrisies of your own side, in what sense is that side any longer your own? Of course, journalistic piety would have it that the reporter doesn't take sides but is just, in Mr. Packer's words, a "fearless truth-teller." Yet in practice we know as well as Richard Holbrooke does that side matters. There are truths and there are truths. No one supposes that Halberstam could have become the equal of Hepburn and Gable by reporting on the misleading statements of the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese--always supposing he could have found any. It was because he was attacking, exposing, shaming what at the time would have been regarded, by the media culture as by everyone else, as his own side that he became famous.
Moreover, the officials he attacked occupied, however unworthily, the place of those old-fashioned, "just" American heroes whom journalists in the past had been wont to treat so deferentially. There was obviously an immense feeling of liberation and empowerment for a young man who had come to feel entitled by his powers of intellect to look down on senior military officers-- a feeling well captured by Ambassador Holbrooke in his account in the Washington Post of a memorable dinner in a Saigon restaurant in 1963 with Halberstam and Neil Sheehan:
They especially despised the senior commander, World War II veteran Paul D. Harkins, and after giving me some advice ("Don't trust anything those bastards tell you"), David and Neil spent most of the evening denouncing Harkins. After some wine, they conducted a mock trial of the four-star general for incompetence and dereliction of duty. In his rumbling, powerful voice, David pronounced Harkins "guilty" of each charge, after which Neil loudly carried out the "sentence": execution by imaginary firing squad against the back wall of the restaurant.
Such revolutionary high-spiritedness does not immediately suggest fearless truth-telling so much as it does the anarchic exuberance of youth presented with an opportunity for rebellion against what, at about the same time, we were learning to call "the Establishment." That's what made Halberstam a romantic figure at the time and since. He was a David who, looked at in the right light, had brought down the Goliath of the American military and political establishment with a well-aimed pebble. Thus it seems a bit disingenuous of Richard Holbrooke to celebrate the romance of his hero's triumph while at the same time describing as "nonsense" the view that his reporting contributed to America's humiliation in Vietnam by undermining support for the war at home. By calling him "romantic," isn't he implicitly giving him credit for just that?
There is also a paradox involved in the romance of exposing falsehood, for romance is itself a kind of falsehood. It may be a hopeful and a benign sort of falsehood, but it is still ineluctably false. By its very nature romance amounts to an exaggeration or glorification of what, looked at more closely, is at best mundane and at worst ugly or disreputable. Journalists, like novelists and filmmakers, used to romanticize warfare by closing their eyes to much of the horror of it; now they romanticize the victims of war and so undermine war's foundations by looking at nothing but its horrors. In the media's reporting of war, honor and glory have become at least as invisible as the ghastly flow of blood and viscera once were to their predecessors. Nowadays, any journalist who wants to succeed knows he is in the business not of celebrating honor or trust or heroism but of exposing whatever sordid realities may be found (or invented) beneath the appearances of those things. And if the romantic prize is now awarded to those who tell tales of war's evils, why should we not suppose that the supply of those evils will rise to meet the journalistic demand, just as the supply of heroes rose when the demand was for tales of heroism?...