Volume 4, Number 6 · April 22, 1965
Vietnam: An Exercise in Self-Delusion
By I.F. Stone
The New Face of War
by Malcolm W. Browne
Bobbs-Merrill, 284 pp., $5.00
The Making of a Quagmire
by David Halberstam
Random House, 312 pp., $4.95
The morning I sat down to write this review, the Washington Post (March 25) carried the news that Malcolm W. Browne had been arrested and held for two hours by South Vietnamese Air Force officers at the big U. S. air and missile base at Da Nang. The incident is symbol and symptom of the steady degeneration in the conduct of the Vietnamese war. These two books by two newspapermen who won Pulitzer Prizes last year for their coverage of the war, Browne for the Associated Press, David Halberstam for The New York Times, record the agony of trying to report the war truthfully against the opposition of the higher-ups, military and civilian. The books appear just as the war is entering a new stage when honest reporting is more essential than ever, but now restriction and censorship are applied to black it out. Da Nang, the main base from which the war is being escalated to the North, was officially declared 'off limits' the day before Browne's arrest and newsmen were told they could not enter without a pass obtainable only in Saigon, 385 miles to the south. 'Newsmen,' the dispatch on Browne's arrest said, 'doubted such a pass existed.' The incident occurred only a few days after the highest information officer at the Pentagon claimed that its policy on coverage of the war was 'complete candor.'
Review, 3756 words
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