Not the Vietnam War

War correspondents aren’t what they used to be, and modern presidents, the Pentagon, and evidently a majority of American citizens like it that way.

In the Civil War, Mathew Brady and his crew roamed the battlefields with their big primitive cameras and produced a classic photographic record of the conflict. Reporters and photographers went in with the troops in World Wars I and II, although their dispatches and pictures had to pass through military censorship.

In Vietnam, there was no censorship, and television was an added factor. Reporters and photographers hitched rides on assault helicopters and recorded the favorable and the unfavorable (notably gruesome scenes of dying U.S. servicemen and a group of U.S. Marines setting fire to a peasant hut). The trouble with the Vietnam War was that we lost. Some military and civilian leaders still blame the press for the American defeat. They overlook the fact that the war had been an ill-conceived, unpopular, seemingly endless venture that was probably doomed from the start. Never again, they decided. They insisted on tight restrictions on press coverage of future wars.

Grenada, in 1983, was a test of total wartime news management. U.S. forces invaded the Caribbean island and subdued a small Cuban and Grenadian garrison, jailed the left-wing government’s leaders and safely shipped home American medical students studying there. They barred reporters and photographers from the island and held incommunicado any who got there on their own. The operation was viewed as a great success. Only afterward did it become known that confusion in the landing left the students open for many hours to capture or injury.

By the time of the Gulf War, which was popular, brief and almost free of American casualties, the Pentagon and major press organization had worked out a “pool” arrangement, in which a small group of press people would accompany the forces on selected operations and share censored reports back at the press camp away from the fighting.

This time, there is no need for censorship, since there’s not much American press to censor. The nearest American reporters and photographers can get to the action is in the strip controlled by the Northern Alliance, and there’s not much action there so far. Now, it is obvious that special forces and commandos can’t do their quick and deadly work with TV cameras watching every move. But as the war goes on there will be a place for the press. When there is a success, Americans will want an on-the-scene report, not just a military briefing. And when there is a mess-up or setback – and there are always some of those – Americans should have independent news reports, not just the contradictory claims by the Taliban and

the Pentagon.

If it is a long war, as President Bush and his aides are preparing us to expect, some reports and pictures of American war heroes in action will help keep up national morale. Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should take advantage of the fact that this is not the Vietnam War, in which press and public were critical and skeptical. This one is in defense against a malignant enemy that has gravely injured us repeatedly and can and will injure us again.

In this war, the American press is a gung-ho supporter – Marvin Kalb, the former CBS correspondent and author of a recent study of the Washington press corps, says maybe even too gung-ho. In a recent column in The Washington Post, he raised the question of whether a patriotic press should cut back on questioning government policy and actions. He concluded: “Journalists perform the highest act of patriotism and operate at the highest levels of professionalism when they subject all government handouts and pronouncements to the sunlight of honest and truthful inquiry – and then fearlessly report the results. That is their job, during times of peace or war.”