Another Dissection - Home Bigart

The article I'm looking at is 'Vietnam Victory Remote Despite U.S. Aid to Diem,' by Homer Bigart, first published July 25, 1961, in The New York Times.

Not just any reporter, not just any newspaper

Who was Homer Bigart? I didn't know until I looked him up and found a 1991 eulogy in the American Journalism Review:

Bigart, who died last April at age 83, won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his World War II coverage and one for his coverage of the Korean War. In a career that spanned the late 1920s through the early 1970s, first at the New York Herald Tribune and later at The New York Times, Bigart became a legend among his fellow journalists not only because of the quality of his work but also because he was so clearly a newspaperman's newspaperman.

Homer Bigart was not just any reporter. He was seasoned by two wars, he was highly experienced, honored by the the journalism profession, at death, a 'legend' among his peers.

Homer Bigart was the reporter on the spot for the New York Times. Is that a big deal? The Times was—and is—the most prestigious paper in the US, not a regional newspaper, but the chief newspaper for the entire country, read and followed closely by policymakers in the government, think tanks, people actually running things, and by the highly educated nationwide, and by the owners and editors of other newspapers throughout the country. In a way, it has the power to 'create' reality, at least in the minds of many well placed people.

Creating Reality

So what does this privileged mouthpiece for the real world do back in 1962? He starts like this:

The United States, by massive and unqualified support of the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem, has helped arrest the spread of Communist inurgency in South Vietnam. But victory is remote. The issue remains in doubt because the Vietnamese President seems incapable of winning the loyalty of his people. (58)

Then he quickly paints by numbers. Someone—he doesn't say who is deciding this—on our side, is expanding the military:

By the end of the this year … 205,000 regular forces, 72,000 Civil Guard, 82,000 Self-Defense Corps… more helicopters, armored personnel carriers and other gadgets to enhance mobility, more sentry dogs to sniff out guerrillas, more plastic boats for the delta region, more American advisors with fresh, new tactical doctrines. (58)

against the other side, 'The Vietcong (Vietnamese Communist) guerrillas':

25,000 guerrillas who have no artillary, no anti-aircraft guns, no air power, no trucks, no jeeps, no prime movers, and only basic infantry weapons … and no substantial outside aid. (58)

And yet, 'victory is remote.' Why?

Visions of ultimate victory are obscured by the image of a secretive, suspicious, dictatorial regime. (59)

The rest of the article gives tangled evidence that the Diem regime is in the way of American efforts to stop The Communists from taking over South Vietnam. However, throughout the article, there is evidence of another story, that the Diem regime is against the population who are for the insurrgents and that the US is being forced to intervene with increasing violence

A 'secretive, suspicious, dictatorial regime'

Let's start to understand the world of Homer Bigart using the paragraphs quoted above. Despite 'massive and unqualified support' the 'Vietnamese president seems incapable of winning the loyalty of his people' because his is 'a secretive, suspicious, dictatorial regime.'

Bigart's language creates a tangle in the mind of the reader: to be 'incapable' one must be demonstrating effort and the desire to 'win the loyalty' of the real human beings in the country but failing. Is this what one would expect from a 'secretive, suspicious, dictatorial regime?' Does Homer Bigart suggest we should expect a dictator to try to win the loyalty of his subjects?

Insurrections without a cause

What causes the Communists insurrection? Bigart offers no help here. At the end of the article, he addresses a possible cause, but again in euphemistic language:

In the relatively quiet years between 1955 and 1958, when the Communist insurrection supported by North Vietnam began, South Vietnam made some modest economic progress. Saigon looked relatively prosperous. But United States economic aid was slow to reach the villages. And Ngo Dinh Diem did little to generate enthusiasm for his regime. (67)

This leaves the reader clueless as to what was going on in those years. What was this 'secretive, suspicious, dictatorial regime' doing in the countryside, where this insurrection was catching hold?

Signs are clear enough?

Bigart notes an inconsistency in the picture: Communists are attacking, but the rural population is not rallying to government, their defenders, but does not suggest a reason. He does note that 'the press is rigidly controlled and there is no freedom of assembly' presumably one reason it is hard to what the population thinks. However, he reports that in one attack

guerrillas moved into position in daylight, prepared the ambuscade in full view of the road and waited three hours for the convoy to appear. They must have been observed by scores of peasants. Yet no one informed the garrison in Bentre. Could this have happened if peasants felt any real identification? A family living at the scene said it was threatened with death if it informed. But the Vietcong probably would never have undertaken this action without full confidence that the peasants were with them, or at least indifferent. (60)

In fact, the opposite happens, as Bigart notes. When the government presence is felt, in the form of the army, the population flees:

Observers of sweeps by the Vietnamese army through the Mekong delta provinces are often struck by the phenomenon of deserted villages. As troops approach, all flee except a few old men and children. No one offers information; no one hurries to put out flags. Most of the rural area is controlled by Vietcong, whose agents will move back as soon as the troops have departed.

The rural population is quite likely sympathetic to the insurgents and flees from government forces. Bigart does not say why, but has euphemistically called this a 'lack of enthusiasm'  and summarizes the situation for the reader this way: 'In some areas, signs of dissatisfaction are clear enough.'

Clear enough? Not for Bigart.

Although he has already called the Diem 'regime' secretive and dictatorial and notes that it is heavily militarized, is suppressing the press and assembly, and is unsupported by the rural population who flee the army, he has failed to give any reason why. Instead, the story he his building so far is that the 'regime' we are supporting with massive military aid is not able to win the loyalty of the people who are for some reason dissatisfied with the government.

This, this right here, is how a reader is given information and simultaneously disabled from making sense of it. 

Two plus two does not equal four

Why does the rural population flee the Army. Bigart doesn't say. However, he knows why—or should—since he says a few paragraphs later:

generally the Communist rebels are indistinguishable from peasants. Thus, many of the "enemy" dead reported by the South Vietnam Government were ordinary peasants shot down because they fled from villages as the troops entered.… Some may have been Vietcong sympathizers, but others were running away because they did not want to be rounded up for military conscription or forced labor."(64).

Why does he tell us this at this point when he is questioning government claims for enemy casualties? Why didn't he mention this when he introduced the idea of 'dissatisfaction' with the government? Couldn't his readers then see that 'dissatisfaction' might be fear and rage at having people killed, conscripted and forced to work at gunpoint?

Bigart's reality includes skepticism about the government's claims of success in the fighting, but he can not build a picture of a government brutally indifferent to the population and at perhaps at war with it.

'Security:' Language to subvert the obvious

The next paragraphs talk about the importance of 'securing the countryside.' How are they doing this?

Diem is well aware of the importance of securing the countryside. His brother has visions of concentrating peasants into "strategic hamlets" ringed with mud walls, moats and barbed wire. The object is to isolate peasants from the Communists. Brother Ngo Dinh Nhu urged the creation of 8,000 hamlets by the end of the year. (60).

Does this sound like an attempt to 'win the loyalty of his people,' people who, it has already been admitted, are likely to be with the insurgents? That is what we are left to believe. Would this lead people to 'dissatisfaction?' Bigart gives the facts, the government is attempting to dislocate tens of thousands of people by force and isolate them in camps, and yet the only frame for understanding this is either incompetence or security.

What do 'Americans' think of this?

While appalled by the dreary regimentation of life in these fortified villages, most Americans are convinced that the strategic hamlet is part of the answer to the pacification problem. They hope to persuade the President that forced labor on hamlet defenses is not the way to win the affection of the peasants. (60)

'Secure the countryside' by isolating the peasants, who, Bigart admits, are probably with the insurgents. And a few paragraphs later he reports that these people are being murdered by the army or rounded up for forced labor. The cute language, 'enthusiasm,' 'dissatisfaction', 'loyalty,' 'observers struck by deserted villages' is not reporting; it is evasion.

So what do Americans propose:

that a trust fund be set aside to insure that emergency relief, food, blankets, medicine, or perhaps defense materials such as barbed wire and cement would reach the new villages in the first critical weeks. (60)

This is how reality is invented. 'Emergency relief' in the 'first critical weeks.' People are being uprooted and interned—perhaps 8,000 villages—to isolate them from those they side with by a dictatorial government, without getting support by that government, and this is a 'critical emergency' 'perhaps' needing 'defense materials' and 'relief.'

Unthinkable truths

Does Bigart help his reader make sense of what the US is doing?

In Bigart's world, separating a population from its insurgency is the pacification problem. This is 'defense.' So, what should be 'clear' if you follow his language, is this: Americans are defending a 'dictatorial regime' from a popular insurgency. The pacification problem is that 'forced labor' enslaved in a 'dreary regimentation' to defend a 'dictatorial regime' isn't working. But in this reporting, that picture is called 'not winning the affection' of the population. The euphemism is functional. It lets Bigart avoid the obvious and unthinkable truth about what the US is doing.

Bigart reports the facts, but lives in such a world that makes those facts incomprehensible, both to himself and to other 'Americans.'

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Americans are trying so hard, but this guy…

Diem is the problem. How? First, the suspicious dictator president is getting in the way of the military machine that the US is setting up in Vietnam. 'All major troop movements, all officer promotions, must have his approval.' He moves around troops, is afraid of a military coup, and makes 'use of general reserve troops' to secure the Presidential palace from other parts of the military, and to launch 'futile one-shot operations based on faulty intelligence and conducted with slipshod planning.'

Bigart illustrates with an example in which a convoy is 'wiped-out' by the guerrillas just forty miles from Saigon, the site of the presidential palace, but a follow-up by the military was delayed two hours because the general reserve needed the dictator president's approval. The guerrillas escaped.

This episode was a 'bitter revelation for Americans.' —'Americans?' Which? He doesn't say but presumably, all Americans, including his readers, as one singular point of view is put forward. Thus the reader is corralled in with those he talks of later: the leaders of the US advisory group, the American aid mission, US President Kennedy's military advisor, 'Washington,' the US Ambassador, the US Defense Department, the US Secretary of Defense, and the US Vice president. Why doesn't he say 'planners of the US government intervention in the South of Vietnam?'

What follows is a listing of the problems this unconditionally, massively supported suspicious dictatorial president is causing Americans.

By last year, the Communists controlled most of the countryside. The Vietnamese President was forced to ask for greatly increased military aid. President Kennedy responded by rushing thousands of United States military personnel to South Vietnam to serve as advisers and instructors. A united States Military Assistance Command was established under Gen. Paul Donal Harkins (67)

The final, confused prognosis, is that because Diem is not 'an inspired leader' and since there is no 'anti-communist alternative' the US may have to 'ditch Diem for a military junta' or fight the Communists themselves, and like the French before them, ultimately loose, 'lacking the endurance' for a jungle war.

Diem 'did little to generate enthusiasm for his regime' between 1955 and 1958 (67) and 'some feel the Vietnamese President cannot give his country the inspired leadership needed to defeat the Vietcong' (66).

An aside on objectivity

The journalists that gathered to honor Homer Bigart after his death obviously thought highly of the 'newspaperman's newspaperman.' Here is another extract:

As for Hiroshima, where he was one of the first reporters allowed in after the bomb was dropped, Bigart was curtly dismissive of those who would rewrite history. "At the time we thought it was just a hell of a good raid, just another big bomb. We were still full of the war spirit and Japan was an all-out war. We felt we had to win it and that we had to practically exterminate the enemy. I'm very suspicious of people's expressions of shock now. They've forgotten how we felt then."

Admirable frankness, at least regarding those who would 'rewrite history.' But what about those who write history, at least in the sense I spoke of above: reporters are the voice of reality. As the above anecdote shows, Bigart was rooting for the cause, 'full of the war spirit,' feeling 'we' had to 'practically exterminate the enemy,' even though in this case the enemy was a civilian city, which Bigart had to know.

How do the other 'we,' the ones who want our government to follow the norms of international law and decency, how do we defend ourselves against reporters who share the intentions, hopes, and ferver of those they report on?

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The article, "Vietnam Victory Remote Despite U.S. Aid to Diem", was written by Homer Bigart, and appeared July 25, 1962, in The New York Times. I read it in an anthology, Reporting Vietnam. Part One: American Journalism 1959-1969, in the Library of America series, (c) 1998, pgs 58 - 67.

The eulogy on Homer Bigart is available online, The American Journalism Review, "The Quiet Exit of Homer Bigart", November, 1991.