A memo signed by Westmoreland was delivered to the ABC News Bureau and to most other agencies in mid-1967 suggesting that news reports of inefficient Vietnamese ground troops were not helping the war effort. If you give a dog a bad name, he will live up to it, Westmoreland suggested, recommending that more positive reporting be done on our Vietnamese allies.

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Most of us had been with crack South Vietnamese airborne or marine units and had described them accordingly. We thought the ARVN 1st and 21st divisions were effective, but we considered the 2nd, 5th and 18th divisions slacker units, plagued with high desertion rates and questionable commanders who rarely moved aggressively out of their base camps.

Westmoreland’s ill-advised memo was largely ignored by Saigon journalists. In fact, the MACV chief of information, Maj. Gen. Winant Sidle, had strongly urged Westmoreland not to issue the memo. A television report on an ARVN unit doing nothing doesn’t make great news, however, so it was more likely that the better units got more coverage anyway.

Even after Westmoreland’s pronouncement that the chancery had not been breached, Peter Arnett and the AP seemed heavily committed to their earlier lead and continued to quote the MPs and others at the embassy who believed the sappers had penetrated the first floor. As Arnett would explain later, We had little faith in what General Westmoreland stated, and often

in the field we had reason to be extremely careful in accepting the general’s assessments of the course of a particular battle. Much of the later criticism of the press for its handling of the embassy story fell on Arnett for supposedly exaggerating the VC action with his report from the MPs. But a report is only as good as its sources, and the MPs’ fears and warnings were trusted.

Later, at the MACV press briefing, the so-called Five O’clock Follies, Westmoreland appeared in person to emphasize the huge enemy body counts as U.S. and ARVN forces repelled the Tet Offensive. But MACV had been caught manipulating enemy casualty figures before, and many reporters were skeptical.

To add to Westy’s growing credibility gap, it was also reported at his press briefing that the city of Hue, in the northern part of South Vietnam, had been cleared of enemy troops. That false report had to be retracted, as the enemy held parts of Hue for the next 24 days.

Not to be outdone by Westy’s vigorous control of the Tet story, Ambassador Ells-worth Bunker called a background briefing for select reporters at the embassy three days after the attack. Our reports from around the country indicate the South Vietnamese people are outraged by the deceitful Viet Cong violation of the sacred Tet Holiday, Bunker said, identified only as a senior American diplomat. He added, No important objectives have been held by the enemy and there was no significant popular support.

The ambassador ignored the fact that Hue was still under enemy control and,

in Saigon, residents had not sounded the alarm while 4,000 VC and NVA troops infiltrated the city. In later interviews with Saigon residents, I found none who thought the VC had been particularly deceitful in breaking the Tet truce to gain the element of surprise.

Many were, however, alarmed at how vigorously U.S. and ARVN firepower had been directed against VC targets in heavily populated urban centers of Saigon, Can Tho and Ben Tre — attacks that killed and wounded thousands of Vietnamese civilians and created a half-million refugees.

My TV and radio report on those interviews was titled U.S. mission, more out of touch with Vietnamese than ever. But it also never made it on the ABC-TV evening news. It arrived in New York but was never scheduled for broadcast and was later reported lost. It was, however, broadcast as an Information Report on the ABC Radio News Network, which tended to be more open to critical stories from the staff in Vietnam.

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