Who Were the Saigon Correspondents and Does It Matter?

Abstract

Who were the Saigon correspondents? Until now, everyone has had their own opinion, and much has depended upon each individual’s view of the Vietnam War. The former U.S. commander in South Vietnam and the subject of much criticism in the press of that day, General William C. Westmoreland, has had little good to say about them. “Fifty-one percent were under twenty-nine,” he asserted in 1972. “For the most part, they had little or no experience as war correspondents.” Peter Braestrup, a former bureau chief for the Washington Post in Saigon, disagreed with Westmoreland, but he had his own point of view. According to him, many so-called war correspondents in South Vietnam were anything but reporters. Instead, a high percentage of them were messengers, translators, technicians and cameramen, and back up staff members of all sorts, not journalists. Braestrup added that many legitimate reporters were on the scene for only short periods of time, often less than a week. This was just long enough to give their work at home some semblance of cachet but hardly enough for them to learn much about the war. Many other so called correspondents, Braestrup added, were not reporters at all but the spouses of correspondents. They took accreditation as journalists to gain access to the Saigon PX, which was open only to the military and to fully accredited members of the press. In the end, Braestrup said, fewer than one quarter of all the reporters present in South Vietnam were really working journalists.