Reed Irvine - Editor
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On July 15 CBS released its long awaited response to the criticisms of its documentary on General William C. Westmoreland, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception." The response was disappointing. CBS had said it would look into the complaint that the program was badly flawed immediately after a January 26 press conference in Washington, at which Gen. Westmoreland blasted the documentary as inaccurate and unfair. However, it did nothing until TV Guide's May 29 issue appeared with a cover story by Don Kowet and Sally Bedell titled "Anatomy of A Smear: How CBS Broke the Rules and 'Got' Gen. Westmoreland." CBS refused to comment on the charges made in the TV Guide article, which were based in large part on information and documents that had been leaked from within CBS News, until it could complete a thorough investigation. That investigation was assigned to Burton Benjamin, Senior Executive Producer of CBS News.
Mr. Benjamin produced an extensive report--68 pages according to The Washington Post which CBS has refused to make public. Instead of releasing the Benjamin report, CBS News issued a 1300-word memorandum from Van Gordon Sauter, President of CBS News. This brief memo was typed double-spaced with unusually generous margins so that it stretched out to eight pages. That did not alter the thinness of its contents. The mountain had labored and brought forth a mouse.
One of the major criticisms of the Westmoreland documentary was that it marshalled evidence designed to support a predetermined conclusion. The trouble with Mr. Sauter's response is that it reached what appears to be a predetermined conclusion, and it provides no evidence whatever to support it.
Mr. Sauter states that CBS News stands by the premise of the documentary that "there had been deliberate distortion by the American military of enemy strength figures in Vietnam" while Gen. Westmoreland was the commander of our forces there. He says that the ultimate purpose of this distortion was "to under-report enemy combat capabilities in order to present a more optimistic picture of the conflict to the American people." Mr. Sauter notes that "seven retired military officers and a former CIA agent came forward on the broadcast to support the premise that these figures were intentionally manipulated." He says: "They presented compelling evidence that the enemy-strength figures had been distorted under pressure from more senior officers. Because of this documentation, we support the substance of the broadcast."
There are two things wrong with this. Mr. Sauter has softened and substantially altered the major premise of the documentary. According to TV Guide, the producer of the program, George Crile, submitted an outline for this broadcast on November 24, 1980 in which he said that it would show "how the U.S. military command in Vietnam entered into an elaborate conspiracy to deceive Washington and the American public as to the nature and size of the enemy we were fighting." In advertising this program in major newspapers on January 22, 1982, CBS said: "CBS Reports reveals the shocking decisions made at the highest level of military intelligence to suppress and alter critical information on the number and placement of enemy troops in Vietnam. A deliberate plot to fool the American public, the Congress, and perhaps even the White House into believing we were winning a war that in fact we were losing. Who lied to us? Why did they do it? What did they hope to gain? How did they succeed so long? And what were the tragic consequences of their deception? Tomorrow night the incredible answer to these questions. At last."
Promoting the program on the CBS Morning News on January 21, 1982, Diane Sawyer said: "On Saturday night, the CBS News broadcast CBS Reports will show that the American government in Washington was deceived about the enemy in Vietnam. Specifically, in 1966 and 1967, deceived about how vast their numbers were. The broadcast is called, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," reported by Mike Wallace and producer-reporter George Crile, who found at the heart of the deception not the hand of the enemy, but the American military command."
It is not clear from Mr. Sauter's memo whether he is standing by all of these charges: (1) that Gen. Westmoreland and his senior staff officers in Vietnam lied to the government in Washington about the strength of the Vietcong; (2) that they did so to make it appear we were winning a war that we were losing; and (3) that this had tragic consequences in that it left us unprepared for the scale of the Vietcong attack on January 30, 1968 known as the Tet offensive. Mr. Sauter now says that the figures on enemy strength were deliberately distorted and that enemy combat capabilities were under-reported, but he doesn't say that he agrees that Gen. Westmoreland set out to deceive "the American government in Washington." He says that the purpose of the distortion was to present a more optimistic picture of the conflict to the American people, which is quite different from "a plot to fool the American public, the Congress, and perhaps even the White House into believing we were winning a war that in fact we were losing." Finally, Mr. Sauter says nothing at all about the premise that this alleged distortion had tragic consequences by leaving our side unprepared for the scale of the Tet offensive.
Mr. Sauter further confuses the picture by asserting that it was "inappropriate" to apply the word "conspiracy" to the "deliberate distortion by the American military of enemy-strength figures in Vietnam." He does not explain why he thinks it was inappropriate, and it is difficult to reconcile this position with the statement that "we support the substance of the broadcast."
The substance of the broadcast, not merely the word "conspiracy," had been challenged by powerful evidence to the contrary provided by authoritative witnesses. Mr. Sauter concedes that there was such evidence and that the broadcast would have been better if "it had sought out and interviewed more persons who disagreed with the broadcast premise." Specifically, Mr. Sauter implies that greater effort should have been made to interview Lt. Gen. Phillip Davidson, Gen. Westmoreland's top intelligence officer during the period in question. He also told AIM that he personally believes that material in the interview that was taped with Walt W. Rostow, former special assistant to President Johnson, should have been used on the program. In his memo, Mr. Santar says only that there were conflicting views within CBS News as to whether any of the Rostow interview should have been used. Mr. Sauter also avoided discussing whether interviews that were used, such as the ones with Gen. Westmoreland and Gen. Daniel O. Graham, were edited in a way that omitted important material that refuted the major premises of the broadcast.
Mr. Sauter knows very well that Walt Rostow, General Davidson, George Carver of the CIA, Ambassador Bunker, Roger Hilsman, former Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, and many other expert and knowledgeable witnesses have denounced the premises of the broadcast. Even though he says that some of these witnesses should have been used on the program, he does not explain how CBS News answers the specific criticisms they have made of the charges made against Gen. Westmoreland. Mr. Sauter implies that the only evidence that counts is the evidence that supports the predetermined CBS position. He says, in effect, "Our judgment will not be swayed by contrary evidence; don't expect us to explain why. Just trust us."
1. Does CBS really think that Gen. Westmoreland tried to deceive his superiors in Washington about the strength of the enemy in view of statements by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, Walt W. Rostow, and George Carver, a top CIA official, that they knew all about the debate over the order of battle in 1967 and that the White House and other government offices had access to not only Gen. Westmoreland's intelligence reports but also the raw data on which they were based?
In a letter published in The New York Times on February 7, 1982, Prof. Rostow said that the conclusion that Lyndon Johnson had been victimized by "mendacious intelligence" before the Tel offensive was false. "and those who produced the documentary know it is false." He added: "President Johnson was fully aware of the Vietcong order-of-battle debate, at the center of the CBS documentary. It concerned the size of logistical and local forces, not the VC main force units or the North Vietnamese forces. It was at my suggestion that General Wheeler ordered an effort to reconcile the Washington and Saigon estimates at a Honolulu meeting. It was precisely because order-of-battle estimates were so inherently difficult that we relied on the widest possible range of intelligence, never on the order-of-battle numbers alone. CBS is quite aware of all this from its own research and from a three-hour taping session with me on Jan. 24, 1981, in New York." It is indicative of the level of morality at CBS News that, according to Mr. Sauter's memo, "Those responsible for the broadcast say that the (Rostow) interview cast no light on its premise.... There are within CBS News conflicting opinions as to whether portions of this interview should have been used."
Unless GBS has some evidence that Messrs. Bunker, Rostow, and Carver are all lying, it should forthwith retract the charge that Gen. Westmoreland deceived Washington about the Vietcong strength.
2. Does CBS recognize that there is evidence that the figures for Vietcong combat strength estimated by Gen. Westmoreland's staff were more nearly correct than the far higher figures favored by its paid consultant, the former CIA analyst, Sam Adams?
Gen. Westmoreland says that in his interview with Mike Wallace he told Wallace no fewer than eleven times that the forces that the enemy threw into the Tet offensive were considerably smaller than our intelligence estimates of their total strength, demonstrating that our estimates were, if anything, too high, not too low. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, who was on Gen. Westmoreland's staff as an intelligence officer, has said that he agreed to be interviewed for the CBS program only on the condition that he is given a chance to make that same point and that his statement to that effect would be used on the air. Gen. Graham said that was agreed to by CBS. He told them on camera that the highest estimate of enemy forces committed in the Tet offensive was 85,000, even though they had thrown everything they had into the battle. The military had estimated the Vietcong strength at less than 300,000. Sam Adams had insisted that the correct figure was 600,000. The military's estimate was plainly closer to the truth.
These statements by Gen. Westmoreland and Gen. Graham were not used in the program. Mr. Sauter did not mention them or explain why they were not used. Unless CBS News can produce evidence to refute the contention that Adams' figure was far too high and the military estimate was closer to reality, CBS should promptly retract its claim that the military estimate was deliberately distorted to understate enemy strength.
3. Can CBS News refute the assertions of both military and civilian experts that the order-of-battle debate and the way in which it was resolved in August 1967 had no bearing whatever on the Tet offensive?
Walt W. Rostow summed up the views of these experts in his letter to The Times, in which he said: "The only surprise at Tet was that the Communists attacked as many as 40 provincial capitals. Most of the attacks were on a small scale and easily turned back. The surprise was not the scale of the Vietcong forces revealed but the bold imprudence of the effort: an unlikely diffusion of resources that resulted in a disaster from which the VC (and their political cadres) never recovered."
CBS continued to try to portray the Tet offensive as a disaster for the United States. Asked by Diane Sawyer on the CBS Morning News on January 21 what difference the alleged distortion of intelligence figures described in the CBS documentary had made, Mike Wallace replied: "It made a big difference as far as Tet was concerned.... We all know what a disaster Tet was. Westmoreland still says it was a military victory. The fact is that it was a political bombshell here in the United States. It changed the minds of an awful lot of people about the war."
True, but only because people like Walter Cronkite were telling the public that we had suffered a defeat, when, in fact, we had won just as great a victory as we did in World War II in repulsing the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Producer George Crile was more honest than Mike Wallace in admitting this. Crile told Diane Sawyer: "Well, the irony is, that it's possible to say that Tet was a great victory for the United States. We killed enormous numbers of them. But because the government had been, in effect, propagandizing the American public for that whole year before the event, it came as such an overwhelming shock to see an enemy of that size surfacing and attacking so boldly everywhere that it just demoralized the whole country." However, this had far more to do with the way the media reported the attack than with the actual strength of the enemy forces.
Unless CBS can demonstrate that the enemy strength in the Tet offensive was far greater than had been expected by our military and can show that because of this we suffered a serious military setback, it should promptly retract the charge that there was a distortion of intelligence data that led to tragic consequences for us in the Tet offensive.
TV Guide cited eight specific violations of journalistic ethics or CBS News guidelines by the producers of the Westmoreland documentary. We will list these below and indicate how Mr. Sauter handled them in his memo.
1. CBS began the project convinced that there was a conspiracy and ignored contrary evidence. Mr. Sauter does not discuss this charge except to say that the broadcast would have been better if more persons who disagreed with the CBS premise had been interviewed. This appears to be a tacit admission that the charge is correct.
2. CBS paid a $25,000 consultant fee to Sam Adams without adequately investigating his 14-year effort to prove his conspiracy theory. Adams was used as a witness, but the viewers were not told that he had been paid. Mr. Sauter does not discuss the charge that the investigation of Adams's crusade was inadequate. He notes that Adams was identified to the viewers as a consultant, but he notes that he was not identified as having been paid. He thinks he should have been.
3. CBS rehearsed Adams before his on-camera interview, a violation of its guidelines. Mr. Sauter denies that Adams was rehearsed. TV Guide writer Don Kowet insists that the rehearsal took place, and he has named producer George Crile and researcher Alex Alben as having gone over with Adams the questions he would be asked by Mike Wallace. Maybe Mr. Sauter doesn't define that as a rehearsal. He doesn't say what evidence he has showing that Kowet is wrong.
4. CBS was dissatisfied with its first on-camera interview with George Allen, a witness used against Westmoreland. They showed him films of what other witnesses supporting their premises had said and persuaded him to do another interview. Mr. Sauter admits that this happened. He considers this to be a violation of the letter or the spirit of CBS News Standards.
5. CBS asked friendly witnesses soft questions and grilled hostile witnesses "with prosecutorial zeal." Mr. Sauter says there is honest disagreement on this point. He told AIM that Burton Benjamin believes some witnesses were "coddled."
6. CBS showed Gen. Westmoreland reacting to a statement about a meeting at the Pentagon when he was actually commenting on a different meeting that had taken place in Saigon. Three separate meetings involving Gen. Westmoreland and two of his staff officers were woven together to make them appear to have been a single pivotal meeting. Mr. Sauter acknowledges this happened and was a violation of guidelines. TV Guide says that showing Westmoreland reacting to the Pentagon meeting was crucial to proving the conspiracy charge, since it suggested that he knew that at that meeting intelligence estimates of enemy strength had been arbitrarily slashed. Mr. Sauter does not comment on this, but he says that none of the violations changed the substance of the broadcast.
7. CBS did not give Gen. Westmoreland adequate advance information about the topics they wanted to discuss in their interview with him, sending him a letter at his hotel in New York the day before the interview listing several topics for discussion, only one of which was the topic they really intended to discuss. Mr Sauter did not comment on this.
8. The interview with Westmoreland was edited by CBS to make him look bad, omitting his most convincing explanations, and in one case using against him a figure that he had recalled incorrectly and for which he had sent a correction by mail a few weeks after the interview and six months before the broadcast was aired. Being unprepared for a grilling about 14-year old intelligence data. Westmoreland recalled the rate of infiltration of enemy replacement troops from the North in the fall of 1967 as 20,000 a month. Reminded that on Meet the Press in November 1967 he had put the rate at around 6,000 the General said he would have to look the figure up. He did so, and sent Wallace and Crile a letter and attachments to correct his misstatement that the rate had been 20,000.
Wallace and Crile ignored this correction. They used the General's statement that the rate was 20,000 as proof that he had been lying in 1967 when he said the rate was only 6,000. (The rate had risen to 20,000 in January 1968). Wallace compounded this by repeating on the CBS Morning News on January 21 that Gen. Westmoreland had contradicted the official record and confirmed what another officer had told him "about a massive increase of North Vietnamese regulars prior to Tet."
Mr. Sauter responds to the charge that this was a deliberate ignoral of Westmoreland's effort to have his faulty recollection of a 14-year-old statistic corrected by saying of General Westmoreland's note: "In fact, the letter itself requests no correction, nor does it contend the General misspoke. But accompanying the letter were numerous documents relating to enemy-infiltration figures. It remains a judgmental decision whether a Westmoreland memorandum included within these documents would have served to clarify the General's position." Mr. Sauter neglected to point out that the General had told Mike Wallace, "I would have to look at the reports before I could answer that question." after the disparity between his Meet the Press answer and his answer to Wallace was noted.
On June 9, 1981 Westmoreland sent Crile and Wallace a letter in which he said that after the lapse of 14 years he had been unable "to speak with precision on the details" of some questions. He attached several papers dealing with these items including five pages of official reports on monthly infiltration rates. Westmoreland appended a note to these pages saying that they showed that the figure he used on Meet the Press in November 1967 was "generally correct" and that the rate did not reach 20,000 a month until January 1968.
The New York Times quotes Crile as saying that the import of this letter "went right by me and Mike." That is hard to swallow. Even if they had failed to read the letter and its attachments, they should have called Westmoreland to ask him if he had located the correct figure before including in the documentary his statement that the rate was 20,000 a month.
The handling of this question alone, not only by Wallace and Crile, but by Mr. Sauter, raises very serious questions about the ethical standards that prevail at CBS News.
The credibility of CBS News has been severely damaged by the attack on General Westmoreland. There is ample evidence that the flaws in this documentary stem from practices that are common in other documentaries and in "Sixty Minutes." Mr. Sauter's memo fails to acknowledge this. Indeed, he fails to acknowledge the most serious of the flaws--the practice of reaching a conclusion and then hunting for the evidence to support it.
Mr. Sauter did announce one reform. A new position, Vice President, News Practices, is being created in CBS News. That person will review and evaluate complaints, both internal and external; to insure that CBS's journalistic efforts are sound. He will be the ombudsman that AIM has long recommended that CBS appoint. We made this recommendation for the first time in a shareholder resolution in 1976. We welcome this move, but we don't think it is enough. What is now required is more openness. For example, all unedited transcripts of interviews for documentaries should be available for public inspection, along with the initial outlines for each project. CBS would have gone on forever insisting there was nothing wrong with the Westmoreland broadcast if TV Guide had not succeeded in getting access to transcripts and other documents that proved how biased the editing had been.
It will be difficult to persuade CBS and other networks to take this step. But an excellent beginning would he to persuade them to release the Benjamin Report on the Westmoreland broadcast. It is unconscionable that this be kept secret. If CBS really values its credibility, it will come clean and let the public see what Mr. Burton Benjamin's investigation really disclosed.
Write to Thomas H. Wyman, President, CBS, 51 West 52nd St., New York, N.Y. 10019. Urge CBS to come clean and make the Benjamin Report public.
AIM REPORT is published twice monthly by Accuracy In Media, Inc., 1341 G Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005, and is free to AIM members. Dues and contributions to AIM are tax deductible. The AIM Report is mailed 3rd class to those whose contribution is at least $15 a year and 1st class to those contributing $30 a year or more. Non-members subscriptions are $35 (1st class mail).
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine, August-I 1982
MURRAY BARON, AIM'S PRESIDENT, AND I HAD A MEETING WITH THOMAS H. WYMAN, THE President of CBS, Van Gordon Sauter, President of CBS News, Gene Jankowski, President of the Broadcast Group, Robert Chandler and Roger Colloff, Vice Presidents of CBS News on the afternoon of July 15. By chance this was the afternoon that CBS finally released its statement responding to the TV Guide article on the Westmoreland documentary. I had hoped that the statement would be released prior to our meeting so that we would be able to discuss it, but that was not to be. Mr. Sauter gave us an oral summary of what the statement would say, but we did not feel that we should try to get into a detailed discussion of it without having studied the actual document. When we were given a copy of the document at the close of the meeting we found that it did not say much more than what Mr. Sauter had already told us. It was an exceedingly thin state- ment for such a weighty subject. The world had waited six weeks while Burton Benjamin completed what was supposed to have been a very thorough investigation of the charges, but Mr. Sauter's statement did not really tell us what Benjamin had discovered.
IT IS INCREDIBLE TO ME THAT CBS WOULD HAVE THE NERVE TO SUPPRESS BENJAMIN'S ENTIRE report and expect to restore its credibility with a 1300-word summary that failed to provide a reply to most of the fundamental questions that had been raised. I find it equally shocking that our great media organs have not demanded the release of the full report. They have not even commented on the irony of an organization that is in the forefront of insisting on the public's "right to know" arrogantly telling the world that the Benjamin Report will be treated as if it were a top secret defense document. I understand that extraordinary measures have been taken to insure that no copy leaks out.
THE QUESTION IS WHY IS CBS BEING SO SECRETIVE ABOUT BENJAMIN'S FINDINGS. ONE HAS to suspect that they are profoundly embarrassing. If they really support Mr. Sauter's conclusion that the main premise of the Westmoreland documentary emerges unscathed, then surely it would be to the interest of CBS to reveal the evidence for all to see. My opinion is that there is no way that a respectable investigation could support such a finding. As we show in this issue of the AIM Report, the evidence demolishing the major premises of the documentary is powerful. It is my view that either Benjamin found that the charges made by the documentary were unsustainable or that it was felt that his defense of the broadcast was so weak that it was decided that the report would have to be suppressed. CBS News would try to mollify Gen. Westmoreland and its critics by withdrawing the word "conspiracy" but would hold to the contention that Gen. Westmoreland and his staff deliberately understated the strength of the enemy forces. That doesn't make much sense, but the CBS officials apparently hoped that no one would notice.
WE ARE URGING ALL THE READERS OF THIS REPORT TO WRITE TO THOMAS H. WYMAN, THE President of CBS, Inc., to urge him to have the Benjamin report released. I hope that you will participate in this effort. Failure to release the report will certainly provide grounds for the suspicion that CBS is perpetrating a coverup. I don't think CBS can hope to recover its credibility by covering up past wrongdoing and protecting those responsible. This will be a Watergate for CBS. The coverup may prove to be more damaging by far than would a frank and open admission of what the investigation revealed.
ON JULY 3, I SENT A LETTER TO CBS OUTLINING THE ISSUES THAT MR. BARON AND I WANTED to discuss at our meeting on July 15. The first question I posed was this: "Are you prepared to concede that there is abundant evidence that in the process of producing your documentaries, accuracy and fairness have not always been scrupulously honored? Are you prepared to concede that new institutional procedures are required to insure that producers of documentaries do not sacrifice accuracy and fairness for the sake of producing a dramatic show?" This was introduced with the observation that the common formula for making documentaries and segments of "60 Minutes" is to assemble evidence to support a predetermined conclusion, ignoring, editing out, or downplaying evidence that is contrary to that conclusion.
I HAD HOPED THAT THE BENJAMIN INVESTIGATION OF THE WESTMORELAND DOCUMENTARY WOULD lead to the admission that this was the formula for that program and to the recognition that this was not a unique case. We did not find that the CBS officials we met with were at all inclined to make any such admission. We discussed the Mike Wallace Profile of Jean Seberg as another obvious example of this formula. To my surprise Messrs. Chandler and Colloff were unyielding in their insistence that there was nothing wrong in having excluded from that program all the evidence AIM had dug up that indicated that the FBI was not responsible for Jean Seberg's troubles. They even defended the editing of the tape of the telephone conversation between Seberg and her Black Panther boyfriend to make it conform to their assertion that Seberg was talking about someone else's pregnancy, not her own. What this indicated to me was that there had been no real soul-searching at CBS News as a result of the traumatic experience with the Westmoreland program.
THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED BY A COLUMN WRITTEN BY TV CRITIC TOM SHALES OF THE WASHING- ton Post. Shales, obviously speaking for members of the staff of CBS News, raised the question of why CBS News had risked imperiling the morale and reputation of its staff by even investigating the TV Guide charges. He answers: "Because, extremely knowledge- able insiders say, Black Rock--CBS corporate headquarters in New York--applied immense pressure on Sauter to do so, for reasons that remain dark and mysterious and, to some within CBS, frightening." Shales says that Sauter "spent day upon day hammering out the compromise memo that was released last week." He quotes one insider, as saying that there is "a sea of piranha who would love to find a wound in broadcast journalism at the moment and rip it open." Shales adds: "If they're going to be this sheepish and equivocating about investigative reporting, maybe CBS News should also start apologizing for 'Harvest of Shame,' 'The Selling of the Pentagon,' 'The CIA's Secret Army' (produced by Crile), 'The Defense of the United States' and other landmark documentaries that have made CBS News unquestionably the most respected organization in broadcast journalism."
IN THESE WORDS WE SEE THE UNREPENTANT SPIRIT OF CBS STAFFERS WHO APPARENTLY DON'T want to accept the fact that the public is no longer willing to put up with the kind of journalistic trickery that characterized "The Selling of the Pentagon," a 1971 documentary that set off a Congressional investigation of CBS's editing practices. The result was a new set of CBS News guidelines that prohibited the tricks that the producers of that documentary practiced. The flap over the Westmoreland documentary has also produced a reform--the employment of an ombudsman by CBS News, who will have the title of vice president for news standards. AIM has been pushing that for six years, and we applaud the adoption of our suggestion by CBS. But it won't be enough as long as the attitude of the staff is as described by Shales.
WE ARE GOING TO NEED THAT "SEA OF PIRANHA," ALERT MEMBERS OF AIM WHO WILL CONTINUE to bring pressure on CBS, its affiliates and its sponsors when CBS News produces such unfair programs as "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," "People Like Us," and "Central America in Revolt." I was rather pleased to see that Mr. Shales referred to me in his article as "a big fish in that 'sea of piranha. '" I have written to The Post to say that I will hang this statement alongside Ben Bradlee's letter calling me "a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante." This kind of accolade is evidence that we are doing our job: We are different from critic Shales, who when asked why he had praised "People Like Us" without checking its accuracy said: "I have to take CBS and Bill Moyers at their word because they're as reputable as you can get."