-Caveat Lector-
Updated 8/26/99 7:20 PM
"THERE ARE TEARS IN MY EYES."
CNN has a new program called Dying to Tell the Story. It's a show dedicated
to the journalists who gave or risked their lives to get the story out. I
haven't seen it, but they are running ads for it pretty steadily. You can
get the feel for what they're doing right away. They are laying another
layer of treacle and hagiography on the press corps. Protectors of the first
amendment who are willing to give their lives in defense of your right to
know, or some other comic book drivel. CNN is part of that whole Freedom
Forum cult which is trying to make journalism some sort of secular
priesthood.
Go out to the Freedom Forum's "Newseum" in Arlington, Virginia and you'll
see a lot of very interesting stuff about the press - old headlines, big TVs
(gotta love really big TVs) and some great photography - but you will also
see a celebration of journalists as a special caste. The press is so
self-serving that we do not need to make these people martyrs to a great
cause. My guess is that more Peace Corps volunteers have died digging wells
than journalists "dying to tell the story."
Since I haven't seen the program yet, I don't want to jump the gun. But, as
I say, I have seen the commercial. There are some powerful images in it.
There's a shot of a man on fire. I don't know the back story, but one
wonders if it reminded anyone else of the cameramen who filmed a burning man
until they were sure they got the shot before they put him out.
But the really disturbing image is of Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a man.
Everybody has seen this picture or the film of the incident. A cruel and
angry South Vietnamese General executes what appears to be a defenseless
Vietcong prisoner. Eddie Williams, The AP photographer who snapped the
photo, earned a Pulitzer Prize for the picture. That picture helped
galvanize the anti-war effort in the United States. Hubert Humphrey, at the
time the photo was taken, was on the verge of challenging President Johnson
for the Democratic nomination for president. The photo (and subsequent NBC
film) helped stir sentiment to the point that Johnson announced he would not
seek a second term only two months later. It is one of the most powerful
icons for everything that was supposedly wrong with that war. It is
precisely the sort of professional coup that a reporter who's "Dying to Tell
the Story" dreams of getting.
Except Eddie Adams wishes he never took the picture.
After the photo was seen around the world, the AP assigned Williams to hang
out with General Loan. He discovered that Loan was a beloved hero in
Vietnam, to his troops and the citizens. "He was fighting our war, not their
war, our war, and every - all the blame is on this guy," Williams told NPR
(in what may have been the most surprisingly courageous NPR interview I've
ever heard). Williams learned that Loan fought for the construction of
hospitals in South Vietnam and unlike the popular myths, demonstrated the
fact that at least some South Vietnamese soldiers really did want to fight
for their country and way of life.
Just moments before that photo had been taken, several of his men had been
gunned down. One of his soldiers had been at home, along with the man's wife
and children. The Vietcong had attacked during the holiday of Tet, which had
been agreed upon as a time for a truce. As it turned out, many of the
victims of the NC and North Vietnamese were defenseless. Some three thousand
of them were discovered in a mass grave outside of Hue after the Americans
reoccupied the area. The surprise invasion, turned out to be a military
disaster for the Vietcong, but a huge strategic victory because of its
effect on American resolve.
But at the time, all of this was irrelevant to people like Loan. It was an
ugly, shocking assault. The execution of the prisoner was a reprisal. It was
an ugly thing to be sure, but wars, civil wars especially, are profoundly
ugly things.
Williams wrote in Time magazine, "The general killed the Viet Cong; I
killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful
weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even
without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't
say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place
on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away
one, two or three American soldiers?'"
The picture that Williams took, the picture that CNN thinks is such an
atrocious and ignoble deed, ruined Loan's life. More to the point, it didn't
expand on "our right to know." It didn't answer questions, or give us the
story. It deceived. It gave no context. It confirmed the biases of the
anti-war journalists, and they used it to further their agenda.
Loan fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon for the US. He eventually moved
to Burke, Virginia. He tried to open a restaurant in Northern Virginia, but
when the identity of its owner became known, it closed down. Protestors
circled the establishment venting their fashionable, safe, outrage.
The two men stayed in touch, and Williams tried to apologize many times.
"He was very sick, you know, he had cancer for a while," he told NPR. "And
I talked to him on the phone and I wanted to try to do something, explaining
everything and how the photograph destroyed his life and he just wanted to
try to forget it. He said let it go. And I just didn't want him to go out
this way."
General Loan died a year and a month ago. He left a wife and five kids.
Most of the obituaries were, like the photograph that ruined his life, two
dimensional and unforgiving. Williams sent flowers with a card that read,
"I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes."
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