VIETNAM started out as a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. In the early Sixties, the world's attention was elsewhere: Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, the imminent threat of nuclear war, the glamour and excitement of Camelot on the Potomac.
Because it was seen as a small story, those news organisations which bothered to set up shop in Vietnam tended to send young and relatively inexperienced reporters.
They may have been young and green but they were also hungry and aggressive and they hadn't had time to become absorbed into the "club" formed by (some) reporters and the Establishment.
Unlike the second World War and Korea, this time the reporters refused to get "on the team". Week in, week out, they chronicled the lies and self deception that lay at the heart of US policy in Vietnam. They never fell victim to "the deadly need to become an insider".
But they got precious little thanks from politicians, diplomats and the military. One of the central figures in the book is John F. Kennedy, who raged against the reporters who wouldn't get "on side" yet believed their version of events over the accounts given by his own officials. Kennedy's assassination means we will never know if he would have extricated the US from the Indochina quagmire in time. He does not come well out of this book, which portrays him as the prisoner of his own propaganda, increasing the US military commitment and ignoring the storm clouds gathering overhead.
Another tragic figure in the saga was the US press attache, John Mecklin, a good man caught in an evil situation. An embassy official directed him to tell the reporters how to write their stories. "It's like trying to tell a New York taxi driver how to shift gears," Mecklin replied. "Then," the official shot back, "the correspondents not only are bastards, they're un American bastards."
Other figures now seem foolish and almost comical, yet at the time the likes of Henry R. Luce with his Time empire, and US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara (who has since recanted) were driving forces behind the disaster. The book has a telling epigraph, the opening sentence of a cover story written by the Time correspondent, Charles Mohr, in 1963: "Vietnam is a graveyard of lost hopes, destroyed vanity, glib promises, and good intentions." But the sentence was not published.
Reporters often wonder how their stories are "going down" and what the reaction is on the other side of the wall in official circles. Thirty years on, with the benefit of access to official documents, Prochnau can give chapter and verse.
Ironically, the reporters' portrayal of the corruption and incompetence of the government of Ngo Dinh Diem was used by the Averell Harriman faction back in Washington as a justification for assisting in Diem's overthrow, thereby involving the US more deeply than ever in the whole tragic mess.
This book is written with the style and verve of a good novel. Prochnau "did time" in Vietnam himself, though at a later stage. His central characters are the abrasive mover and shaker, David Halberstam of the New York Times, and the sensitive, probing Irish American, Neil Sheehan of United Press International. They went on to write two classic studies of the Vietnam debacle, Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, and Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie.
Halberstam conducted an epic battle not only with officialdom but also with his own newspaper. William Prochnau is firmly on his side but, reading between the lines, it is hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for the desk people back home who had to deal with him.
The author conveys the Hemingway like exuberance and bravado of Saigon's foreign press corps as they covered the epic story of their generation. Amid exotic surroundings, the scent of danger, the whiff of intrigue, the whir of the helicopter blades, they could sense their reputations growing with the story. Some were unashamed seekers of adventure, although the German photographer Horst Faas always denied saying: "Vott I like iss boom boom. Oh, yes."
The book is more than a study of an isolated group in a war that, like all wars, will be forgotten too soon. It chronicles a change of approach in US journalism to a more adversarial mode that would help make the Watergate expose and the publication of the Pentagon Papers possible. It depicts what the author calls the "ruinous optimism" of US foreign policy at the time. And it is a story of youthful adventure seen through the prism of hindsight and maturity.
Back in Washington, most of the journalists were smitten by the Kennedy charm. Pierre Salinger, the President's press secretary, spoke thirty years later of how he would deflect awkward questions: "I'd simply tell a joke. Everybody would laugh and that would be the end of the story." The Saigon reporters were about to change all that, although they were dismissed as a handful of second and third stringers who couldn't call their publishers by their first names.
This is a good story, well told and well worth reading.