VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM
The University of Kansas Student Auxiliary
V.V.A.R.: Leading the student revolt on campus against speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism, gender feminism, dormitory re-education, lying about Vietnam, and other instruments of academic oppression.
Leonard Magruder - Founder/President
Former professor of psychology - Suffolk College, N.Y.
Member: National Association of Scholars
CONTACT: Magruder44@aol.com - Phone: 785-312-9303
MORE FAIRY TALES FROM CBS - a V.V.A.R. SPECIAL ON MEDIA HYPOCRISY
by Leonard Magruder
November 13, 2003
John LeBoutillier of NewsMax yesterday wrote: “CBS’s decision to cancel the Reagan movie is a great victory for the conservative movement over the left-wing, so called mainstream media.”
It seems that CBS was intending to trash Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a new miniseries containing unflattering material totally made up by its two homosexual producers. But so many people complained that the network has canceled the series.
The stars of the show gloated about how controversial their film would be. James Brolin said his portrayal of Mr. Reagan was partly inspired by the Reagan puppet on the British satirical show “Spitting Image.” Judy Davis, who plays Nancy Reagan, pompously said she hoped the film would teach Americans to scrutinize their elected leaders more carefully. It reminds one of George Crile, editing his film,”Uncounted Enemy” (see below), screaming at the image of General Westmoreland,”I got you! I got you! I got you!”
In the Manifesto of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, placed on record with the White House in 1982, we touched on the biased reporting of the Tet Offensive and then went on to make other remarks about bias in the documentaries of that era. These remarks seem to be still relevant, as follows: (below) ( Note: Bernard Goldberg, who wrote the recent book”Bias”about CBS, has just come out with a new book, “Arrogance: Rescuing America From the Media Elite.”)
From the 1982 Manifesto:
“Mr. President (Reagan):
The bias of the television industry is best seen in its documentaries. In the classic case of “The Selling of the Pentagon,” a clear propaganda attempt to discredit the defense establishment, material was blatantly falsified and distorted. In”Hunger in America,” much of the material was outright faked. In “Project Nassau” (filmed, but not broadcast), a network gave $200,000 to finance an active conspiracy to invade a foreign country in an attempt to embarrass the American government. “Washington Behind Closed Doors,” ostensibly fiction, was transparently nothing but a venemous attack on President Nixon. In”Holocaust,” the message that it was a Christian plot was barely disguised.
The film”Kent State” failed to mention President Nixon’s television address on the need for the Cambodian incursion. His explanation made good sense to any adult as an elementry military exercise to save the lives of American soldiers being forced to withdraw as a result of turmoil on the homefront and was approved by a majority of the public. It was one of the most successful offensives of the war. That hundreds of American campuses erupted in violence and destruction at the news of this event, causing the deaths of four students at Kent State, was either the most shameful display in our history of callousness towards one’s own countrymen at war, or conclusive evidence of how students had been misinformed by their faculties. Nor did the film show anything of the inflamatory, treasonous rhetoric of the S.D.S. or what was said in faculty led”teach-in,” where students were told that the incursion was an “invasion.”
Collectively the facts show that the television networks are dominated by a world-view hostile towards traditional Judeo-Christian and democratic values and that they actively seek to impose their vision on the rest of America. In this they serve as propaganda arms of the academic establishment.
As Theodore White, noted author of “The Making of the President” series recently said in “Newsweek,” “There is a new avante garde which dominates the heights of national communication and has come to despise its own country and its traditions.”
On occasion, as in the case of Vietnam, the university and the media act as an unelected countergovernment, certain that they only know what is best for the nation. But if the world view that they share is in fact closer in its basic philosophical assumptions to that of totalitarianism than to that of most Americans, the danger is obvious. They can misinform and mislead the nation.There is, therefore, good reason to fear that in another time of crisis, the univerisity and the media, unless reformed, may again allow themselves to be manipulated by enemy propaganda, or exploit the situation to further ideological interests hostile to the national interest. This is a matter of national security, demanding immediate attention.”
Manifesto - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform - 1982
But by far the most outrageous lies in a TV documentary is seen in the CBS production”The Uncounted Enemy.” Following is the story of that battle, excerpted from the V.V.A.R. 10-part series,”Vietnam and the Media”:
“On Jan. 23, 1982, eight months after Professor Magruder resigned his position at Suffolk College, N.Y. to protest that media and campus had lied about Vietnam, CBS ran a 90-minute documentary on prime time television titled, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” produced by George Crile and narrated by Mike Wallace. The program charged that U.S. military intelligence in Vietnam under orders from General Westmoreland had conspired to deceive President Johnson, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Congress and the American people by systematically underreporting enemy strength to make it appear that Westmoreland was winning the war. This was done, CBS claimed, through the reduction of estimates of infiltration in the five months prior to the Tet Offensive, and by deleting from the Order-of-Battle village civilians who supported the Viet Cong; the SS and the SSD. The purpose of the deception, according to CBS, was to lead people into believing that the U.S. was winning a war which in fact, according to CBS, it was losing. This “conspiracy,” said Mike Wallace, led to complete unpreparedness for the Tet Offensive, unnecessary loss of American soldiers, and in the final analysis, to the loss of the war.
The program was believed without reservation by almost the entire American press. “From The Nation to The Wall Street Journal,” said Renata Adler in Reckless Disregard, “no serious journalist or publication called any element of the ninety-minute program into question. Editorials simply treated the broadcast as true.” This was massive testimony to the nation’s depth of ignorance on the Vietnam War, as a result of years of distortion by the media. They had lied so often on the subject they were all in a fog.
Professor Magruder, a student of the Vietnam War, immediately recognized the large number of serious discrepancies and outright lies in the film. Stunned, he realized that CBS had just given him a classic example of the kind of lying by media and university that he had just given up his job to protest and immediately began research to expose the film.
On March 28, 1982, 150 copies of a 21- page single-spaced article documenting that the CBS film had been one long series of lies from beginning to end were hand delivered by Mr. Magruder and his students throughout the upper echelons of the New York media, as well as sent through the mail. Among those receiving copies at CBS, in addition to CBS executives, were Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and George Crile. Executives and newscasters such as Frank Reynolds, Sam Donaldson, Roger Mudd, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and John Chancellor of ABC and NBC also received copies, along with executives, editors, and columnists of “The New York Times,” “Newsweek,” “Newsday” and “The Washington Post” Approximately thirty copies were delivered to leading columnists such as Tom Wicker, Harriet Van Horne, and Anthony Lewis.
The fully documented article proving that CBS had lied to the American people on a massive scale, just as they had often done during the Vietnam War, and particularly during the Tet Offensive, was immediately covered up by the entire New York media establishment.
On May 29, 1982, two months after this cover-up the story broke with a cover article in “TV Guide,” “Anatomy of A Smear: How CBS Broke the Rules and ‘Got’ General Westmoreland,” by Don Kowit and Salley Bedell, based on copies of CBS interviews for the film. The article, while not as lengthy or detailed as the Magruder expose, was nevertheless more than enough to show that the CBS documentary was in serious trouble.
The article showed that CBS had paid and then coached persons in what to say, had deliberately angered Westmoreland to make him appear guilty on film, had refused to include in the film corrections that he has requested, refused to include evidence by Walt Rostow that Johnson had been fully informed as to the increased infiltration, the upcoming Tet Offensive, and the Order-of-Battle controversy, had lied about its efforts to contact General Phillips Davidson, head of intelligence in Vietnam, and had rejected testimony by George Carver, head of CIA intelligence that would have totally invalidated the thesis of the CBS film.
General Westmoreland, who received his copy of the Magruder expose late, wrote Professor Magruder a personal letter in which he stated,”You have done an exhaustive bit of research and I congratulate you. I am sending your letter and its enclosures to my lawyer.” (letter, Sept. 13, 1982)
In his expose Magruder wrote that in the film Mike Wallace failed to tell his viewers that the entire thesis of the CBS film, based on a charge made by Sam Adams, a CIA analyst, had been thoroughly investigated and dismissed by the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975 and fully aired at the time in the press. Adams, a Harvard graduate sympathetic to the leftist views of antiwar leaders, and who testified on behalf of Daniel Ellsberg at his trial, had hoped by his estimate of 600,000 Viet Cong to force Johnson to pull out of the war. He strongly believed in the Marxist concept of the ‘people’s revolution’, and consistently tried to prove through his figures that it was the ‘people’ who were fighting, unaided by the North, the same naïve myth propagated by the campus ‘peace’ movement and the New York media cult.
Wallace also failed to inform his viewers that Adams, in an article in “Harper’s Magazine” in May 1975 and again at the House investigation, was primarily concerned that the CIA, not General Westmoreland, had suppressed his estimate of Viet Cong strength. The subtitle of his article was “A CIA Conspiracy Against its Own Intelligence.” James Graham, of the Board of National Intelligence in the May 1975 issue of “Harper’s Magazine” charged Adams with conveying a “misleading impression of a single-handed and lonely struggle to get the truth out about the war to the White House against the massive opposition of countless knaves and cowards.” The truth, said Graham, was that,”In my twenty-five years in the CIA I never saw an analyst given more individual attention, more opportunity to present his evidence and state his case.” But his case was so bizarre that no one would buy it, except for Mike Wallace, and CBS.
Wallace never told his viewers that at no time had the CIA ever taken Adam’s estimate of 600,000 Viet Cong seriously. This estimate upon which the CBS film rested was dismissed by President Johnson’s own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and both branches of the CIA; the Directorate of Intelligence and the Office of National Estimates. The key statement in the film by Wallace that the CIA was “at war with Washington to accept Adams estimate,” was a lie.
Quoting from President Johnson’s memoirs, “The Vantage Point,” Magruder showed not only that Westmoreland had kept Johnson and the American people informed as to the conditions in Vietnam, but that Johnson was fully informed of the Order-of-Battle controversy, the increased infiltration of Northern regulars, and the general timing and purpose of the approaching Tet offensive. Both Johnson and Westmoreland in their books had criticized the U.S. media for not passing on to the American people their warnings about the coming Tet Offensive. Johnson, for example, in a speech to the Australian Parliament, told them the offensive was coming. The press would later use the public dismay over Tet (which they themselves created) as an excuse to try to discredit earlier optimistic statements by Johnson and Westmoreland. The press deliberately neglected their warnings about Tet in order to set them up for this criticism.
A number of sources were cited by Magruder where CBS could easily have found official military record of the increased infiltration which Mike Wallace charged Westmoreland with suppressing. He also showed that Maj. Gen. McChristian, who was portrayed in the film as having his intelligence warnings suppressed by Westmoreland, leaving the military unprepared for the Tet Offensive, was quoted by Jack Anderson in a column on Oct 31, 1975, as saying,”There was sufficient data to predict the offensive in the spring of 1968,” and that Westmoreland took his information, “very seriously.”
The CBS film was a final desperate attempt by the media to nail down the ‘peace’ movement’s view of the war. It backfired miserably, resulting in complete exposure of exactly how the media, as Mr. Magruder stated at the time of his resignation in protest, had lied about Vietnam. The falsification in this film of the Tet Offensive as a defeat was a repeat of how CBS had misportrayed the offensive at the time..
So incompetent was Adams that in his article he estimated American lives lost in the Tet Offensive at 10,000. The accepted figure is 1,289. The enemy lost 40,000, in what Walter Cronkite called a”stalemate.”
The entire thesis of the CBS-Wallace film, that it was a conspiracy by the military to conceal enemy strength to support Johnson’s claim of progress that led to a devastating surprise victory by the Communists at Tet, and that the Adams estimate was then accepted, leading to Johnson’s resignation and ending the war, is one long, sustained lie, as Westmoreland said,”a cruel hoax… reprehensible and irresponsible.” The film was an insult to the intelligence of the American people and a slander against those who served in South Vietnam, by the very ones who did the most to betray both national interests and the American people.”
On Sept. 13, 1982, General Westmoreland sued CBS for 120 million dollars for libel. It was with great satisfaction that Mr. Magruder sat back on Oct. 10, 1982, and watched (on ABC) the first of a parade of generals and colonels who would testify that CBS had lied. The trial, which ended with an apology to Westmoreland by CBS, destroyed the credibility of CBS for decades to come.”
But they never stop trying. In this attack by the left on the Reagans, however, the public has put its foot down.
A more detailed account of this issue may be found in the 10-part series, Vietnam and the Media.
This article may be reproduced in any form.
Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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