Repression, like politics, makes strange bedfellows. Consider CBS. A monolith whose sins against public sensibilities crawl the trough from silencing the Smothers Brothers to hiring Edward “Ned” Hamlin as News Coordinator of Broadcast Research “in a position in which he will have ready access to the CBS News film library, including outtakes.” (Mr. Hamlin was, until recently, an employee of the CIA since 1965, climbing high enough in the ranks to direct research projects on Latin America, and—for the last year—was on assignment from the CIA’s Office of National Estimates to the National Security Council. No conclusions are to be drawn from this tiny item secreted at the bottom of a column in Variety, of course. The inferences, however, are painfully, ominously obvious.)
How strange it is, then, to find ourselves allied with CBS in the battle of the mouth gag. For since Spiro the Mad began his rabid frothings against anti-Administration comment on the networks, the only one of the three major nets to not only refuse to bow in the direction of the White Pentagon, but also to step up its criticism of Nixon and his saber-rattlers, has been CBS.
And this past week Americans were treated to a display of battling-back-at-the-bully that leads me to some effusive praise of an otherwise chicken-shit organization. Last week, CBS defied the Pentagon. And they won. And it was a nice thing to see.
For those of you who may have missed the brouhaha, I’ll fill in the details.
On November 3, 1969, CBS News aired a film clip narrated by correspondent Don Webster, in which a South Vietnamese soldier brutally stabbed a wounded, captured Viet Cong prisoner. It didn’t make much of a splash, Silent Majority-wise…just one more fish-eyed gook type sliced open…fuck’m. But the Pentagon went straight up the wall, did a fingernail hang and promptly fielded an accusing finger: CBS was guilty of falsifying the film.
Spiro-primed, the Pentagon (drunk with a seemingly unstoppable inertia which, had it a voice, would say if you can’t store nerve gas in Oregon, send it to Alaska…tell the American people the Minutemen missiles won’t be fielded till late in July, and plant them in April…and break your ass to get that damnable Cooper-Church bill subverted and weakened and defanged and clobbered and killed) leaked to such soul-purchased columnists as Jack Anderson and Richard Wilson that the CBS news department had (a) faked horror scenes from Vietnam on at least three occasions, (b) planned a “staged invasion” of Haiti so they could film it as a special, © “staged incidents of police brutality” during the 1968 Democratic Convention, and (d) arranged to film an illegal pot party in Chicago. But more than these charges, the White House and the Pentagon were pissed off at CBS because, unlike ABC and NBC, they have refused to cooperate with witch-hunting, whitewashing Army investigators in revealing their news sources. The White House doesn’t like that. It smacks of freedom of the press; and as one of those “secret” White House memos (that always seem to get leaked, in the style of hypocrisy pioneered by American Presidents as far back as Rutherford B. Hayes, but brought to its fullest flower by LBJ and Nixuleh…mickeymouse politics, cynicism-weaned younger folk call it) puts it: CBS shouldn’t be allowed to use “freedom of the press” to get away with “fraud by the press.”
Well, hell, friends. On Thursday night, May 21, on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the youth protest and antiwar and up-against-the-wall-with-Spiro factions all climbed into the same big king-size bed with CBS for a mutual gang bang using the Pentagon as trollop. Whoooopee!
The Pentagon charged the film shown was not of American helicopters, they were Australian. Or if they were Yankee, they were Medevacs. They charged the film was not of a fire fight, it was a South Vietnamese grenade practice maneuver. And they charged the VC was already dead. (And since we saw that South Vietnamese soldier pull out the knife and jam it in again, this must mean mutilation of bodies is okay. But then, after all, those Orientals “think differently” and who are we to condemn their inscrutable manner? We are only to intrude in their inscrutable wars, apparently.)
CBS refuted every point. Handily. The choppers were quite clearly attached to the 187th Assault Helicopter Squadron based out of Tây Ninh. They proved it wasn’t a training maneuver by pinpointing the date and location of the filming—October 1969, near the village of Bau Me, four miles north of the district town of Tr?ng Bàng in H?u Nghĩ?a Province. And CBS fielded the accusation that there were no American advisers standing by and watching the atrocity by rerunning the film clip, stop-action, see that man there? Well, he’s wearing a patch on his right shoulder of the U.S. First Air Cavalry Division.
And when it got right down to the core of the presentation, CBS flipped the Pentagon its own screaming bird by not only naming the soldier, but his rank, serial number, andan on-the-spot interview with the slob in which he admitted having done it. He spoke with some pride.
His name is Nguyen Van Mot, a sergeant first class, HQ Company, Group 21, South Vietnamese Regional Forces, serial number 178-704. As CBS put it, through the mouth of the much-maligned Webster, who was narrating: “Not only is Sergeant Mot still on duty, but he was named soldier of the year for 1969 for all regional forces in three corps.”
It figures.
And when Webster questioned a first lieutenant who has been with Mot’s unit since February, CBS viewers were treated to the following delicious interchange:
Webster: What kind of a soldier is Sergeant Mot?
First Lieutenant Richard Showalter: Sergeant Mot typifies, I think, the hard-nosed, hard-core…what you might say, Vietnamese soldier. If I had a company of Sergeant Mots, I think everybody could go home over here in…within the next year…without a doubt.
Webster: Among his own troops he has a reputation of being very tough…a killer. Is he really tough?
Showalter: Ah, definitely so. Ah, if he finds a prisoner or anything in a bunker or anything…ah, if we can get some firsthand information from him, Sergeant Mot’s the man to find him and the man to get the information.
Webster: What does Sergeant Mot do when you do take a prisoner?
Showalter: Well, Sergeant Mot, as you know, is a short, kind of a husky character in comparison to his Vietnamese counterparts and ah, he is forceful to a degree, but this is necessary since the information we can gain out here firsthand is most important to us, and ah…he…ah…can definitely get his point across to the prisoner.
Tasty, eh? To be sure, Sergeant Mot can get his point across; but it’s doubtful how much information he can get from prisoners (unless he receives spirit messages), because CBS then ran a bit of the film they’d excerpted…the prisoner shortly after Sergeant Mot had left the scene: the poor sonofabitch had been sliced open and gutted, from neck to sternum.
Well, why go on. The Pentagon got caught with its mouth gag showing. It tried to intimidate one of the three largest disseminators of mass information in America, and it didn’t pull off the job. CBS fought back and whipped the piss out of the Secret Masters of the Universe.
All of which goes to make two very obvious points.
The first is that for anyone who cares to examine what is coming down de facto, it is apparent that all of Spiro’s protestations notwithstanding, the Administration is trying (and probably succeeding more often than we know) to regulate the news, exercise police state repression, and keep the mindless mass convinced everyone is lying save them.
The second, and more encompassing, is that the forces being brought to bear on us to keep us in line will not stop with far lefters, with militants, with Black Panthers, with hippies, with dissidents, or even liberals. Those forces will continue sweeping straight across the boundaries and begin trying to silence the moderates, the middle-of-the-roaders, the conservatives, and finally be left with none but the most slavishly devoted of the right-wing lunatics.
This kind of hammering of our rights into a shape more acceptable to a President who throws a fit of pique when someone catches him with his paws in the cookie jar…this kind of censorship and flummery…this kind of brutalizing intimidation cannot be allowed to continue. It is to be hoped that CBS’s example will serve to toughen the moral fiber of its two rivals, and the battle won will be taken as a signal to the more humane elements in our government that now, right now, this moment, is the time to bring to an ass-grinding halt the onrush of totalitarianism being used to steamroller freedom in this country. Greased by the military-industrial whatever, this forward plunge of lunacy and intimidation can end only with all power in the hands of a cabal whose members will all wear the faces of Spiro Nixon and sport screaming eagles on their epaulets.
Well done, CBS, you otherwise crummy bastards.