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
Part 4 - Subject: How CBS suppressed the Magruder expose of “The Uncounted Enemy.”
“You have done an exhaustive bit of research and I congratulate you” –General William C. Westmoreland
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 in a fog.
Professor Magruder 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 he had just given 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 liberal media establishment.
On May 29, 1982, two months after the cover-up of the Magruder exposé, 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 exposé, 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. It also proved that the statement in the film by Col. Gaines Hawkins that he had been given an enemy troop estimate ceiling by Westmoreland was contradicted four times by statements from Hawkins to George Crile as found in the interview transcripts and that CBS had deliberately inserted a response by Westmoreland where it did not belong in an effort to discredit him.
When General Westmoreland received his copy of the Magruder exposé, he 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 exposé, 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.” Said Rufus Taylor, Deputy Director of the CIA from 1966 to 1969, in a letter of response to the Adams article in the July, 1975 issue of Harper’s, “We could perceive no merit in presenting Sam or his conclusions to the President.” Wrote James Graham, of the Board of National Intelligence in the same issue of Harper’s, “His assumption that these findings were generally accepted within the CIA is a distortion of the facts.” He 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 failed to tell 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 not true. George Crile, the producer of the CBS film, had to have known these facts. He had been editor for the Adams article in Harper’s in 1975, from which all of the above statements were taken. Furthermore, all of this had to have been known by most of the liberal columnists, such as Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, who had received copies of the Magruder exposé, as much of that exposé was based on their own articles published at the time of the House investigation of the Adams charge. They knew that the CBS film was a smear against Westmoreland based on lies, yet they said nothing as it served their ideological purposes.
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 at all times, 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 [for information on the intelligence operations conducted by American reconnaissance forces in the Saigon area prior to and during the 1968 Tet Offensive, see the documentary, Silent Victory]. 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. 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 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 (and the university), as Mr. Magruder stated at the time of his resignation in protest, had lied about Vietnam. The falsification in the film of the Tet Offensive as a defeat was a repeat of how CBS had portrayed the offensive at the time [again, see the documentary, Silent Victory].
So incompetent was Adams that in his article he estimated American lives lost in the Tet Offensive at 10,000. The accepted figure is 927. Magruder pointed out that a final CIA evaluation of Adams as an analyst, shortly before his resignation under pressure, described him as “marginal” at conducting research, and as having lost “balance and objectivity.”
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, labeling the film “vicious, false, and contemptible.” Mr. Magruder now knew that his resignation to protest that the media had lied about Vietnam was about to be vindicated in one of the largest suits ever filed against the media. Westmoreland had stated in his letter that he had sent the exposé Magruder had sent him to his lawyer, Dan Burt. On Feb. 4, 1984, Mr. Burt wrote to Mr. Magruder thanking him for his analysis. It is possible that Burt may have used the exposé as a guide in planning his attack on CBS, as up until the time of the trial the Magruder exposé remained perhaps the best detailed account of the lies in the film. Therefore, it is understandable that it was with great satisfaction that Mr. Magruder sat back on Oct. 10, 1984 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-News for decades to come.
This article may be reproduced in any form.
Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
Part 10, Vietnam and The Media
Part 10a, Vietnam and The Media
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