professor towbin explains how ernie pyles work continue to influence american war were orders during the vietnam war and beyond. this class is just over an hour. i want to start with this point. president roosevelt died on the 12th of april, 1945. this is a few weeks before world war ii in europe was over, a couple of months before world war ii in the pacific theater was over. roosevelt made it almost to the end. reporterlater, the ernie pyle was killed in the western percent thick -- pacific by japanese gunfire. these were not equally dramatic events for the country. days remarkable that takes

after roosevelt died, the president who had been president for 12 years, the new president issued a statement of the white house of bereavement recognizing the death of ernie pile, a reporter. he said the nation is saddened by the death of ernie pyle. no man has so well told the story as american fighting men wanted it told. theecame the spokesman of ordinary american in arms. to nevers genius obscure men who made them. there were lots of other eulogies. maybe the best of them was written by a famous poet of the era, randall gerald. we could not help realizing that 's work was an

aesthetic triumph. most people will in the fullest emotional and moral sense some of the had never happened before , that they could never have imagined without it, a war. this isn't ernest hemingway. this was just a working newspaperman turning out six articles a week, week after week. yet he achieved a kind of closeness with the american people that no other writer did. died, manypyle people thought they had lost a close, personal friend. what i want to do, instead of talking now how to do journalism , i want to talk about how this one journalist made such an impact. especially what that means about the portrait, the understanding

the publicr ii received. how that affects the way journalists do their jobs as war correspondents. first, background. he was old for a war correspondent. he was just turning 40 years old when the war began. he was a little guy, skinny. bald. he had this long face. nobody would look twice at. he had never been to war before. he had never been in the military. he had been too young to serve in world war i.

he grew up on a farm. he wanted to get away from rural life. he went to college. he went to bloomington. he decided he would like to become a journalist. he was successful at that as a young guy starting out in the 1920's. he went to work for the scripps howard newspaper chain. he was good at it. not especially a superstar. in the middle 1930's, editors let him start the job that he wanted, to be a roving travel correspondent. he and his wife drove all over writing everyday feature stories about the people they

met, the people ernie spent time with, the places they saw. sometimes they saw funny things, sometimes sad. nothing particularly spectacular. but he did gain a following as a columnist, writing six days a week for the scripps howard paper, which is a significant chain. not a famous name, but successful. then world war ii begins. his first overseas work was before the u.s. got into the war, before the japanese attack on pearl harbor. this was in 1940. he went to england, where germany was bombing england and he wrote about the bombing of london. he started to attract more attention around the country. then he went back home. pearl harbor was attacked. the war began. pyle at that moment was in the midst of a personal crisis. his marriage was shot. he was married to a very bright

and interesting woman who was also highly neurotic and an alcoholic. ernie was having affairs with other women. so, he decided to go back to war, really as more of an escape from his own personal life than because he had any great yearning to become a war correspondent. so, first he went to england. pretty soon after that, and american forces were first engaged in battle on the european side of the war. this was in north africa. ernie went along. he thought he would go for a few weeks and then he thought he would continue a hopscotchey tour around the world. but he quickly realized he had a feeling for writing about the soldiers he was covering. he followed a routine of just visiting army camps, hanging out with soldiers for a few days,

then retreating to a press camp and writing a series of columns about what he had seen. this was not the norm for reporters covering world war ii. really for most reporters covering any war. it has been said that war correspondence is a lot like sports reporting. there is the game story -- who was winning, who was losing, how was the team doing? then there is the locker room story. featuring the lives of the personal athletes. it is a little crude to compare the two, but it's not a bad analogy. ernie as a columnist was not writing the game story. he was not the reporter saying how well are we doing, are we winning the war, what happened in yesterday's clash of arms. he was writing the feature stories about soldiers. he had a little bit more time to spend time with fighting men, to reflect on what he was seeing, and then write about it more thoughtfully and with more care.

well, something about what he was doing really clicked with the american public. it was somehow just the right combination of writer and subject. ernie started to become very popular very fast. all of his old scripps howard fans around the country were reading him and his work went into syndication, which means it could be bought by other newspapers. as time went by, scores and scores, more every month, newspapers picking up his column. pretty soon you could read ernie pyle's column no matter where you lived in the country, and a great many people did. he continued to do the same kind of writing he had done before the war, which was just to write about ordinary people, but in this case they were soldiers and the reading public at home was intensely interested.

again, it was about, everyday activities. what these soldiers did to clean up their mess tents, where did they sleep, where did they eat? as the battle in north africa heated up, he did write about battles, but again it was with this personal angle he usually took. there are very few of these columns through this time where you stop and say, oh, my god, what a lovely piece of writing, what an amazing work of journalism. it was the cumulative power of his work that brought people back day after day. people got the sense they were seeing the war as their room relatives and friends were experiencing it. remember that this war, far different from the wars in iraq and afghanistan.

it took someone from every family in the country. if you were here at home, you had a brother, a boyfriend, a husband, a son, a grandson, many friends who were overseas. in the european theater or the pacific theater. and you were worried about them, you were scared for them. and you were desperately interested in knowing, how are they? what is life like for them? is this terrible war changing them? being in touch with pyle's column was a way of being in touch with your own service members overseas. this is what a reviewer said about one of his books. his columns were quickly collected in compilations and became bestsellers. the reviewer said "ernie is a small-town guy in the tradition of will rogers. ernie looks on the best side of things" -- that was not so true as the war went on. "he writes the equivalent of letters home in a drowsy

monotone, no more dramatic than a letter and just as irresistible. he writes what you would see yourself, provided you had ernie's keen imagination and his deep, sympathetic understanding." this continued all through 1943 into 1944. he followed forces invading sicily and followed forces in the invasion of italy. he spent a good amount of time in italy. a lot of his asked writing came out of there. when the allies invaded the french coast at normandy in june 1944, he went along. his influence just grew and grew. understand, this is happening over two years. when he said in the column that he thought soldiers serving in

combat ought to get extra pay, congress passed a law that said the combat forces should get extra pay. when he said combat forces should get an extra stripe on their sleeve, congress followed through and did so. so, this fellow had enormous reach. he was the one filtering the war for the american public, more than any other reporter. many reporters started to imitate pyle. his style started to spread. he was the one forming the popular impression of what the war was like. here was the question. what was he telling them? what was the image of world war ii the american public got through ernie's odds? -- eyes. i want to read a few passages. ernie's writing went through phases in the war.

what he developed toward was writing a kind of popular mythology of the american g.i. as a new sort of hero. not the dashing hero of 19th century wars, not the soldier who was out for glory. this was very different, a very different kind of war. industrial war with gigantic artillery exchanges, ships at sea, and terrible weapons of destruction. artillery shelling, machine guns, and so forth. pyle's soldiers going through this ordeal he portrayed as suffering servants of the country, going through hardship and misery for the sake of their country. it took him a while to get to this point. he went into the war like most of us would have, entertaining old-fashioned ideas of war as glamorous, glorious, in histories anyway.

let me read you a passage about how he got thinking about that. he was in north africa. he had been there a couple of months. there was a period of holding on before the battle resumed. ernie had a headquarters where he looked through some american magazines, a couple months old. pretty clearly a "life" magazine. here is what he wrote. "it was full of photos and stories of the war, dramatic tales from the pacific and russia and right from our own african front. the magazines fascinated me and when i had finished, i felt an animation about the war i had not felt in weeks. from the magazine, the war seemed romantic and exciting,

full of heroics and vitality. i know it really is, and yet i don't seem capable of feeling it. only with the magazine from america can i touch the real spirit of the war over here. there we are at the front and yet the war is not dramatic to me at all. so, i don't know. is war dramatic, or isn't it? certainly there are great tragedies, unbelievable heroes, even a constant undertone of comedy. it is the job of us writers to transfer all of that drama back to you folks at home. most of the other correspondents have the ability to do it, but when i sit down to write, here is what i see instead. men at the front suffering and wishing they were somewhere else. men in routine jobs just behind the lines, bellyaching because they can't get to the front, all of them desperately hungry for someone to talk to besides themselves, no women to be heroes in front of, damn little wine to drink, just toiling day to day in a world full of

insecurity, discomfort, homesickness, and a dull sense of danger. the drama and romance are here, of course, but they are like the famous falling tree in the forest. they are no good unless there is someone around to hear." this is the theme ernie would pursue more and more. he was the one who would translate the soldiers' hardship for the people at home. once he began to get past those preconceptions about war being glamorous and glorious, he starts to look at the war with fresh eyes. one of the things that he sees, to his surprise, is that war is not glorious. but there is something many soldiers who have been through combat come back and tell us about, which is war is an enormous spectacle to look at.

there is a kind of attraction to war, and attraction that even as you are scared out of your mind and appalled by what you're seeing, you can't help but have your sights riveted by it. i want to read you an example of this from ernie's writing. this is a description from a very important stage of the battle in france, a couple weeks after the invasion of normandy, after d-day. american and british troops had massed to make what they called a great breakout. they established their huge beachhead around the peninsula and now it was time to push out across france. and it would began with an enormous wave of bombing. bombers attacking the german lines, who have to defend against the american and british advance.

so, the first thing was to drop all of these heavy bombs on the germans, and then the attempt would be to break through that line after they had been shattered by bombs. the infantry would push through on the ground. that is where ernie and a lot of the other war correspondents were, waiting at the jumpoff point, to try to race through this hole created by the bombers. he writes, "we were still in country so level with hedgerows so tall they were simply no high spots." hedgerows are the big walls of foliage between french armed fields. "so tall there was simply no high spot, neither hill, nor building from which we could get a grand sense of the bombing as we used to do in sicily or italy. so one place was as good as another. having been too close to these things before, i compromised and picked a farmyard about 200 yards from the kick off line.

-- 800 i would have given every penny, every desire, any hope i had to be another 800 yards further back. our front lines were marked by long strips of colored cloth on the ground to mark our airmen. the dive bombers hit it just right. they were bombing about half a mile ahead of where we stood. they came in groups, diving from every direction, perfect at times, one right after another. every time we looked, planes were circling, circling, circling over our heads, waiting their turn. the air was full of sharp and distinct sounds, cracking bombs and the heavy rips of machine guns and the splitting screams of diving wings. all fast and furious, yet distinct. then a new sound gradually

droned into our ears, a sound deep and all-encompassing with no notes in it, just a gigantic surge of doom-like sound. it was the heavy bombers. they came from directly behind us. at first they were the merest dot in the sky. we could see clouds of them in the high heavens. they came on with a terrible slowness. they came in flights of 12, 3 flights to a group and groups stretched out across the sky. maybe those waves were two miles apart, maybe there were 10 miles, i don't know. i do know they came in constant procession and i thought it would never end. what the germans must have thought is beyond comprehension. the flight across the sky was slow and study. i have never known a storm or a machine or any resolve of man that had such a ghastly relentlessness. i had the feeling that even if god had appeared this teaching

before them in the sky with arms outstretched to wave them back, they would not have turned from the irresistible course. i stood with a little group of men, ranging from colonels to privates, back at the stone farmhouse. sentry trenches were all around the farmhouse. we were so fascinated by the spectacle, it never occurred to us we might need foxholes." what happens is one of the great mistakes of the war, which is the bombers drop their bombs on the american soldiers. some americans were killed by friendly bombs. a terrible ordeal. you notice what ernie chooses to write about first is the immensity, the attraction to watching this unfold. this is an attraction to war

that soldiers and war correspondents alike have alluded to when they are honest about it. another powerful theme in ernie's work is the theme of fraternalism. we find in every war, stories like this, that ultimately what binds soldiers together is not fighting for some idea. they are fighting for each other. ernie begins to write about this more and more, and that theme of fraternal bond among the men becomes one of the enduring themes of reporting during the war. the most famous example of this is the column ernie wrote in december 1943 in italy. i want to read it to you, because this is the one that still today is often reprinted, still published, still called one of the great uses of world

war ii. ii.ieces of world war at the front lines in italy, january 10. he wrote in december. "in this war i have known a lot of officers who enjoy the respect of soldiers under them, but never have i met anyone as respected as captain henry g. waskow. he had been in the company since long before he left the states. he was very young. only in his middle 20's. he enjoyed a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him. he always looked out for us, a soldier said. he would go to bat for us every

time. i have never known him to do anything on time, another one said. i was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought captain waskow down. the moon was nearly full and you could see far up the trail and even part way across the valley. soldiers made shadows as they walked. dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed on the backs of mules. they came lying belly down on the saddle, their heads hanging, their legs sticking awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked. the italian mule skinners were afraid to walk by dead men. so americans had to walk him down. -- them down. even the americans were afraid to unlash the bodies, so an officer had to do it and ask others to help. the first one came early in the morning. they slid him down from the mule, stood him on his feet for a moment. in half-light, he might have merely been a sick man standing there, leaning on another. then they laid him in the shadow

of a stone wall along the road. i don't know who that person was. you feel small in the presence of dead men and you don't ask silly questions. we left him there by the side of the road, that first one, and we all went back to the cowshed, sitting on straw, waiting for the next mules. somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then no one said anything more about him. the dead man laid outside all day long, in the shadow of the wall. then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. four mules stood in the moonlight. the soldiers that led them stood there waiting. this one was captain waskow, one of them said quickly. two man unlashed the body. other men took the other bodies off. finally there were five laying

end to end. no covering up of dead men in combat zones. they just lie there in the shadows until someone else comes after them. the uncertain mules moved off to their olive groves and then the others seemed reluctant to leave. i sensed them moving, one by one, next to captain waskow's body. not so much to look at him, but to say something in finality to him and themselves. i stood close by and i could hear. one soldier said "god damn it." that's all he said. and he walked away. then another one said "god damn it to hell." he turned and left. another man came. he was an officer. it is hard to tell officers from enlisted men because they were all grimy and dirty.

he looked in the dead man's face and spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. "sorry." then a soldier bent over the dead officer, and he spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper, but tenderly. and he said, "i sure am sorry, sir." the first man squatted down and took the captain's hand and he stood there for 10 minutes looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. finally he put the hand down. he reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar and then he rearranged the tattered shirtfront around the wound. then he walked in the moonlight, all alone. the rest of us went back to the cowshed, leaving the dead men lying end to end in the shadow of the wall.

we laid down in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep." you see, there are two emotions, i think, at work there. dramatic currents in a story that create a sense of pathos. one is the loss of this gallant, idealized young man. the waste of war. the terrible fact that this fine man has been lost. and the other was the love that the men feel for him, and by implication for each other. so, this is ernie pyle's work in a nutshell. yes, he is saying war is an awful thing. and yet there is something else about it, too. there is something mystical, something almost beautiful, and it is the way these men feel

about each other. they are part of this otherworldly realm of powerful emotion and kinship. they are bonded together in a mystical union. so, even though pile is telling us war is really awful, he is also conveying a sense of his magnetism to us. -- its magnetism to us. now, not so much during the war, but after the war. there were critics of this kind of writing. people -- some of them were correspondents themselves who had not been as popular as ernie -- they thought that pyle had turned out too sentimental, and also he had left things out in his portrayal of the war. that was probably a just criticism. what did he leave out? not much writing about death itself.

death is always in the background. the story about captain waskow is one of the only times ernie mentioned a specific, by-name dead soldier. that was not common. he did not write very much about the terrible wounds that many soldiers received. he did not write about american soldiers behaving badly. let me read just a quick paragraph from an interview with a journalist named andy rooney, who you may know as someone that your grandparents listened to on "60 minutes" for many years. he wrote for "stars and stripes," the army newspaper for many years. in an interview not that long ago, just in the 1990's, he talked about what war correspondents did not write about. he gives this example.

"i once saw something that i didn't want to write. i was in normandy. our troops were moving forward quickly and we were overrunning german positions. we were running over german troops faster than we could take prisoners. an army moving forward cannot spare any soldiers to guard prisoners. we came to this french farmhouse and there was this cellar. we went down into the cellar and it was open. and there were five germans lying there in pools of blood with a white flag on a pole." a flag of surrender. "they had come out of the basement to surrender and they had been machine-gunned down by american soldiers. i was shocked. but i do not think the american public would understand that. i understand what happened. they were afraid. american soldiers were afraid for their own lives. here were these five germans, did not have time to take them prisoner, did not want them wandering around, shot them. understandable.

wrong, but understandable in that kind of an action. that sort of story would not have been written." and that was certainly the kind of story ernie pyle did not write. another topic he did not write about much was the topic of battle fatigue. the enormous psychological toll that is taken on soldiers who go through combat. we know now from studies that really anyone, except someone who is already psychopathic, anyone exposed to intense combat long enough is going to start to break down psychologically. and it certainly happened often

in world war ii. ernie would mention battle fatigue from time to time. the old term for it was shellshocked, coming out of world war i. but it was always in a fleeting way and he would move on, always in a kind of pitying way, as if the soldiers couldn't take it. at but the thing is, ernie knew himself what it felt like to go through this kind of thing. he himself, a couple of times clearly had what would be called battle fatigue today. once at the end of the campaign in sicily and then a year later after he spent three months in the battle for france. the first time after sicily, he wrote this. "i had come to despise and be revolted by war out of any logical proportion. i could not find freedoms among the dead men. personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events that happened. to put it bluntly, i just got too tired in the head."

the following year at the time of the allied liberation of paris after seven months of combat, hemonths of said something similar. "for me, war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and exhaustion of the spirit." ernie wrote that as the afterword for one of these collections of columns that were published as books that i mentioned. and it doesn't quite jibe with the image of the war he had been presenting in his columns day by day. what he presented in his columns was more of a mixture of the good and the bad. the comedy, the fraternalism of the war, even the strange beauty from time to time. you did not read things in ernie's columns that would leave you revolted.

this was about the time that ernie's fame was such that he was put on the cover of "time" magazine. impossible to imagine today. at the time his book came out, it was very well reviewed, became a best seller. it was a prominent reviewer who reviewed the book quite positively. he also said "one of the surprises was for pile to say war had become a flat, black depression. -- pyle while there are horrors enough in the stories, and dangers or misery, or both, one gets the sense of incredible richness, human tolerance, almost sweetness of the human nature, of these g.i. boys." so, why would ernie leave the most awful stuff out of his columns?

why would he soft-pedal the things that made him himself so depressed, so revolted that he had to leave the war on two occasions? the reasons are pretty clear. one was that there was censorship of war correspondents in world war ii. every piece of copy that reporters wrote had to go through military censors before it could be published back home. now, correspondents could talk to soldiers and officers all they wanted. they could move pretty freely around. and they did not have military public relations people watching their conversations. the censorship, the control came at the point just before publication. so, these soldiers knew they could speak freely to correspondents without fear that they might give something away that could be published in the

newspapers and give aid to the enemy, but the reporters knew what they needed to leave out. and they knew it was frowned upon to write too blatantly about the horrors of what they were seeing, for fear of damaging morale at home, for fear of provoking what was called defeatism on the american homefront. that was a big fear. we think now that everybody was fully united during world war ii. and to a large extent, that was true. but there were people that thought there ought to be a separate peace, with the germans especially. and the roosevelt administration was worried about that sentiment and was worried that at things went badly and more that sentiment would grow. so, correspondents were discouraged from doing anything that might contribute to that kind of defeatist sentiment.

another thing that held ernie and the others back was simply an matter of taste. there was a greater sense of reticence about what you could say in public print at that time then there is now. there is still a certain reticence that keeps many things out of daily journals. but at that time, it was not thought anyone wanted to read about the horrors of battle. but probably the most important thing that held me back was his his sense of was what he was doing there. i think he and the other correspondents, without even thinking about it, believed that they were playing a role in the american war effort. and so they, themselves, were reluctant to write anything that might take away from the power of that war effort, that might discourage civilians at home.

and so, what we got from pyle's writing in the end was a mythology about the war. there was a great war correspondent. some years after the war he wrote this about ernie's work. he said pyle "contributed stock figures to the waxworks gallery of american history as popularly remembered. to the list that includes frontiersman, cowboys, and babe ruth, ernie pyle added g.i. joe, the suffering, triumphant infantrymen. the portrait was centralized, sentimentalized, but the soldiers were pleased to recognize themselves, and

millions of newspaper readers recognized their sons and lovers and he provided an emotional bridge between the fighting front and the home front. he was the only american war correspondent who made a large personal impress on the nation in the second world war." that impress is still with us today. we, all of us, even you guys at your age know that image of the g.i. in world war ii. you know it. i grew up with it. hollywood embraced that image. right down to movies of our own era, steven spielberg's "saving private ryan," hbo's "band of brothers," those shows continue to present the portrayal of the infantrymen that ernie created in his writing. ernie was killed at the end of the war and it's fascinating to think about what he might have written afterward, how he might have critiqued the work of the american war correspondents in world war ii.

especially when things began to change in american foreign policy during the cold war. so, i want to jump you about 20 years forward to the early 1960's and talk a little bit about the legacy of pyle and the other world war ii correspondents during the vietnam war. now, this is a picture of david halberstam. he wrote about how the best and the brightest got into vietnam. that was later. he went to vietnam as a war correspondent, just about the time during the kennedy administration when the american commitment to fighting in vietnam was heating up.

i know this is getting to be distant history for you guys. the background is simply that after world war ii, french indochina, also known as french vietnam, a civil war began between the communists in the northern part of the country and anti-communist in the southern part of the country. a truce was declared, an uneasy peace was established, and the french withdrew, leaving two countries behind them. communist north vietnam and anti-communist south vietnam. two new countries, like the old west germany and east germany. this, like the two germany's, became a focal point in the cold war, a competition between united states on one side and the soviet union on the other. the soviet union was helping the north vietnamese and we increasingly were helping the south vietnamese. that is how it was portrayed in the u.s. and the west, a cold

war battle between the americans and the soviets and the regimes they were backing. we realized with more time what was really going on in vietnam was a civil war among competing peoples there. and this is the great difficulty that we encountered in vietnam, when he tried to intervene in a civil war that we did not recognize as such. so, david halberstam and a number of other young correspondents began to write about what was going wrong in vietnam. not that the u.s. was want to be there, but that the south vietnamese forces did not seem to want to fight, did not seem

capable of fighting. they were losing ground they after day, month after month, to the north guerrilla forces known as the vietcong. so, they wrote what they saw, following the dictum and the elements of journalism you have read now several times, the journalist's first obligation to the truth. they felt not that the u.s. was wrong to be there, but that the american people ought to know what was being done in their name and how the war policy was failing there, or at least looking like it was going to fail. the military took umbrage at this. and halberstam later told the story of how a high-ranking marine general, a veteran of world war ii himself, an older guy, was spreading a rumor around saigon, the capital of south vietnam, that david

halberstam had been seen weeping over the bodies of dead vietcong. david halberstam was outraged at this. it was not true. the general was at home. he was flying into the army base outside of saigon. halberstam met his plane. he was a big guy, tough guy. he towered over this general. he chewed him out. it took some guts to do that. he said, don't you ever spread lies like that around here again. it's not true, it never happened, and you are besmirching my name. this general looked up at him and said, well, it is not a g.i. joe kind of war, and i guess you are not ernie pyle. that was the image vietnam war correspondents were up against.

it was pyle and the others during world war ii who had written about the g.i.'s in world war ii as heroes. and now it seemed that reporters had turned somehow anti-patriotic, sympathetic to the enemy. and that was how the military increasingly felt as a small cadre of fine reporters in vietnam began to write these stories critical of american tactics and critical of the south vietnamese regime. a key fellow at the beginning was an older correspondent named homer bigart. he had been a terrific correspondent in world war ii. and more than any of the other

correspondents, he had been willing to criticize u.s. tactics and strategy in world war ii. and that took special bravery in that war. but he accomplished it. he won a lot of renown among his editors. he was not a famous name at home, but he was a reporter's reporter. he spent time in french indochina in the 1950's, got a sense of what the war was about, got a sense of the civil war in vietnam, and had written about that. and then he consented to come back in this time in the early 1960's when the u.s. was starting to get involved in a major way for a short spent, six months. bigart hated vietnam and he thought the american enterprise there was doomed. and he wrote about it honestly. he wrote about the misguided tactics, the misguided efforts

to help the south vietnamese people who did not want to be helped by the americans. and yet had a big influence on this younger group of reporters. halberstam, malcolm brown of the associated press, and bill sheehan of united press international, who was the reporter who later broke the pentagon papers story. and these three reporters took homer bigart's example and established a reputation as contrarians. going against the grain, not only of american military policy in vietnam, but the main trend of war correspondents. these were guys doing both the game story and the locker room story. what they were trying to write about, what bigart try to get

them to write was honest stories about how south vietnamese forces were losing the battle against the vietcong and the north vietnamese army. well, years went by. it was our longest war. these three went home finally, replaced by other reporters. and by the late 1960's, the u.s. was involved in a massive war in vietnam, a far larger commitment than what we have recently seen in iraq and afghanistan in terms of numbers of soldiers and military power. it continued to go wrong, as homer bigart thought it would and by the mid-1970's, south vietnam was overrun by the north vietnamese. the americans withdrew. it was an historic defeat for the american military.

now with that came a new kind of mythology about war correspondents. most americans had become sick of the vietnam war and persuaded that if it was not a moral mistake, as the antiwar protesters said, it was at least a big mess. like the war in iraq. however well-intentioned, we ought to get out off as fast as we could. there is no question the american public opinion had turned against the war. but in the military, which was abashed by what had happened, a myth grew up that it was the journalists who had sabotaged the american war effort in vietnam, starting with these three. and david halberstam became the special villain in that rogues

gallery to the american military. guys who had undermined the war effort by telling bad things about what was going on. another view that arose was the influence of television was very hard on the war effort. if you showed the american people pictures of battle, they would not be able to stomach it. people said, what if we had had movie cameras at the battle of the bulge in world war ii or iwo jima? there, too, the american public would have lost the will to fight. the thing is, when historians have gone back and looked at the actual coverage of vietnam in the newspapers and on the television networks, what they found was, there was very little gory coverage on tv.

and even in the newspapers, most reporters covering the game story, the how are we doing story, the how is the war going story, continue to pretty much write what the military said. so, it was only a minority that took this tougher stance against the war effort and became committed to figuring out their own truth about the war. nonetheless, that view of the press as having sabotaged america in vietnam influenced pentagon policy when new wars came about. the little tiny wars of the reagan administration in grenada, the brief war in panama to overthrow a dictator under the first george bush, and then the larger war under george bush, the first toward bush, the persian gulf war to throw iraqi out of kuwait when saddam

hussein invaded kuwait. in those three engagements, the press was very tightly restricted because of the vietnam syndrome in the pentagon 's mind. reporters get in the way. reporters undermined american military effort. therefore they must be kept away from the battlefield. that changed in the war in iraq, even though, especially in the persian gulf war, the press policy had seen it a great triumph because it was a quick war, a short war, in which american forces were very quickly victorious. the pentagon managed all of the imagery of the war. this was seen as successful, for a time. then some people in the military said, you know, i lot of great stories about what our guys did in the persian gulf were never told.

so, if we ever go to war again, we should open it up and encourage what came to be called "embedded reporters." that is the term we have become familiar with in our generation. embedded reporters who, like ernie pyle, would go along with individual units and see that heroism in battle. that would lead to a longer discussion of the press in iraq and afghanistan, and we have not got time for that today. what i would say though about these young turks in vietnam was that really they were pursuing the same essential strategy pyle had pursued, which was to report what they saw before them, report the truth they saw before their own eyes, following the dictum that the journalist's first obligation is to the truth.

in both cases it was within a context of supporting the country. certainly the world war ii correspondent saw themselves as being on the team. but so did these young reporters in vietnam. they thought it first that the u.s. was doing the right thing to be helping the south vietnamese, simply that the war was going badly and the public had a right to know about it. as the war went increasingly badly, war reporters began to pick up on that, on that theme. but it was all in the name of telling people the truth about what was going on in vietnam. just because reporters report the truth and the truth does not reflect well on u.s. policy does not mean journalists are unpatriotic. it is clear that pyle wrote about the war in such away that he thought it could help the

american war effort. not in the sense of propaganda, not in the sense of telling lies. in the sense of holding back certain things. in the sense of writing about these soldiers' sacrifice in a way that would encourage people on the homefront to do their share in the war. does that mean pyle was not a great writer, was not a great journalist? it depends on how you feel about this question, about the journalist in wartime. is it his, her obligation to tell the absolute whole truth, or to tell the truth in so far as it will help his or her country when the war? war?n the

this is a very difficult question. each generation that sees america go to war has to wrestle with it all over again. so, i would urge you guys to think about it. in this time of turmoil in the world, as america faces the prospect of war, military conflicts abroad. there is time for a couple of lessons. -- questions. anybody have something? yes, ma'am. this gent will come over with a microphone. >> ok. so, in one of my communications courses, we read an article about, like, embedded journalism and how most of the time when they are embedded it is somewhat biased because they feel like camaraderie with these soldiers they are following. what is the difference between being objective and neutral? how do you stay unbiased when you're with the soldiers, you know?

prof. tobin: that is a great question. i'm not sure everybody can hear it. she said she had been reading in communications cases about this policy of embedding soldiers with military units and the problem of high as that arises because the reporters come to identify with the soldiers they are covering. they feel a sense of camaraderie with them. i think inevitably reporters, if they spend enough time with individual units, will fell that sort of camaraderie and that is a kind of bias. but there is a trade-off, which is that they become more expert. they come to understand what the soldiers really are going through. and the problems that they face. so, like pyle, they feel a sense of identification with the soldiers, but they are able to write about them with greater insight.

i don't think there is a way to have one and not the other. i think that the experience in world war ii, the experience in iraq shows that. we have to accept that reporters who are right in there with soldiers, especially for longer periods of time are going to come to again if i with the soldiers they are with. -- identify with the soldiers they are with. it helps us to understand we have to read those accounts with that awareness. reporters in vietnam wrote more critically about the soldiers they were with. it did happen. sometimes they paid a price for it in terms of their reputation. sometimes they wrote great journalism. anyway, so, i'm sorry to give you that sort of -- half of one thing and have the

other. that is the only thing i have. what else? yes ma'am. >> i know he was censored by the military. did he get push back from the u.s. government or his readers for the things he did write about that may have been hard? was he ever accused during the war of being unpatriotic? >> no. tobin: no. ernie was always seen as a hero. he spent most of his time covering the army. the other services became envious of the great copy ernie was giving to the other services. the navy wanted him to come to the pacific.

they put pressure on him to do the same for their guys. no, ernie always, i don't think it was with a sense of protecting himself, but he always stopped short of writing anything that would run afoul of the military brass. i don't know how many of you have seen the great war movie, "patton." this was an old movie. george patton was an important army commander in europe in world war ii. an extremely tough guy. he was called blood and guts. his soldiers would say his guts, our blood. patton, during the campaign for sicily, was visiting a field hospital. there were two casualties there

suffering from shell shock. he thought there wasn't any such thing. anyone who claimed he was suffering from fatigue was simply a coward. he actually slapped these soldiers in the face. a number of correspondents saw that happen. others heard about it. ernie was one of them. he didn't write about it. what they did was go to general eisenhower, the commander of the whole theater at the time, patton's superior, and say this had happened, and demanded that eisenhower force patton to apologize to the soldiers. it was only written after it occurred. that is a good example of the kind of thing that other correspondents would not write.

ernie could not abide general patton and thought he was a blowhard. but he wasn't going to write that story. no, there was never a complaint about ernie. you have to understand, part of it is, the different contexts from world war ii to vietnam. the war correspondents are writing about victorious armies. not that they won every battle they were engaged from. there was a steady progression of victories. after the first few months it was clear the allies were going to win the war. it was going to take a long time, that most people expected the allies eventually would win. that was the context in which the reporters wrote their work. things were going pretty well. that wasn't the case in vietnam. things didn't go well in vietnam. to tell the truth in vietnam was different from telling the truth in world war ii.

not so much they were more committed to telling the truth, but that the truth that they had to sell reflected badly on the american military. anything else? thank you for making the special trip over to harrison. dr. campbell will see you on thursday. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> this week on first lady, we take a look at ellen and edith wilson. ellen was responsible for the building of the rose garden.

she suddenly takes ill and dies. edithent wilson remarries and then has a stroke shortly thereafter. making her primary role as his caretaker. ladies". on "first sunday on american history tv on c-span3. next on american history tv, best selling historical novelist jeff shaara discusses the latter half of the civil war, focusing on general oleum and tecumseh sherman's burning of savannah. he argues against the depiction of sherman as a villain. he talks about how slaves reacted to sherman's military victories. the smithsonian associatio