A Different Kind of War: Richard Tregaskis and David Halberstam in Vietnam

At the age of twenty-eight, journalist David Halberstam received a challenging assignment from his employer, the New York Times. In September 1962 he arrived to cover a civil war in a small Asian country named Vietnam.

President John F. Kennedy’s administration had decided to increase America’s commitment to help South Vietnam fight off communist insurgents from the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, often referred to by the Americans as the Viet Cong, and Halberstam would be there to write about what happened. While in South Vietnam he also encountered one of his heroes—veteran journalist Richard Tregaskis, whose work from the frontlines of World War II Halberstam knew well.

Tregaskis visited South Vietnam from October 1962 to January 1963 to research a book eventually published as Vietnam Diary (1963). He tried to obtain a “firsthand, eyewitness look at the strange, off-beat, new-style war in which we find ourselves engaged in the miserable little jungle country called Vietnam, which our nation’s leaders have decided is pivotal and critical in our Asian struggle with Communism.”

The two journalists seemed to have much in common. Both were Harvard graduates (Halberstam class of 1955 and Tregaskis class of 1938) who had worked diligently at their craft and had seen war before—Tregaskis in the Pacific and Europe during World War II and Halberstam in the Republic of the Congo in Africa. They shared a respect for the approximately 10,000 American military personnel supporting South Vietnam, especially those young officers tasked with molding the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (simplified to ARVN or Arvin in newspaper stories) into a professional fighting force against the guerilla forces backed by North Vietnam.

Tregaskis and Halberstam also supported the Kennedy administration’s commitment to resisting communism in Vietnam and shepherding its government toward democracy. Halberstam feared that “if the Vietnamese, who are perhaps the toughest people in Southeast Asia, fell to the Communists, the pressure on the other shaky new nations would be intolerable.” He believed that just as America’s commitment to South Korea in the early 1950s had discouraged “overt Communist border crossings ever since, an anti-Communist victory in Vietnam would serve to discourage so-called wars of liberation” in other countries in the region.  

Halberstam accompanied Tregaskis on a few assignments, including a trip along the Saigon River with the Vietnamese Junk Fleet (patrol boats searching for smugglers) and a resupply mission to U.S. Special Forces bases at the Montagnard villages of Ple Yit and Plei Mrong. “He was pleasant-spoken, well-educated, of good family background,” Tregaskis noted of his colleague. “He very evidently yearned for adventure, he had a newsman’s penchant for pursuing a story, attempting analysis of facts, and trying to achieve exclusive understanding or bring out news breaks. And, if the story were bad and it were being concealed by officialdom—which it always seemed to be—dragging it out in the open.”

The young Times reporter believed it was his job, and the responsibility of other journalists in Vietnam, including such resident reporters as Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press and Neil Sheehan of the United Press International, to report on the news, positive or negative. “We were finding out stuff we didn’t want to find out,” he recalled. “We were going against our own grain. We wanted the Americans to win.” Unfortunately, he came to understand that to U.S. officials in the country, including Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, head of Military Assistance Command-Vietnam, it was vital that “the news be good, and they regarded any other interpretation as defeatist and irresponsible.”

Tregaskis must have heard the rosy scenarios outlined by the top officials in Vietnam, and Halberstam wanted him to talk to lower-ranking U.S. officers he trusted and knew would offer the visiting writer an accurate assessment of the war’s lack of progress and problems with the American-backed government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Halberstam decided to take the forty-five-year-old Tregaskis on a daylong excursion to review how the war was going in My Tho, located south of Saigon in the critical Mekong Delta. The area had been the site of a sharp engagement between the ARVN and VC at a small hamlet known as Ap Bac on January 2, 1963. The guerrilla forces stood their ground against ARVN soldiers ferried into the battlefield via U.S. helicopters, as well as troops attacking from M-113 armored personnel carriers.

In Halberstam’s estimation his day with Tregaskis had gone well, as the veteran reporter had been well informed about the severe challenges ahead, especially the ARVN’s inadequacies in the field. But Tregaskis did not react to this information as Halberstam had expected.

Years later, Halberstam recounted that the older reporter had turned and said to him: “If I were doing what you are doing, I’d be ashamed of myself.” Halberstam likened Tregaskis’s comment to being slapped in the face, especially because he had a “reverence toward World War II people and Korean War people,” noting his father had been a medic in World War I and a combat surgeon in World War II.

As for Tregaskis, he made no mention of such an incident in his Vietnam book, nor did he directly disparage the young reporter’s work anywhere in the volume. But in a review of Halberstam’s 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire for the Chicago Tribune, Tregaskis quoted Nolting’s description of the Times reporter: “He’s always looking for the hole in the doughnut,” which Tregaskis viewed as apt, considering Halberstam’s “fundamental attitude in covering the Viet Nam war: that something must be wrong rather than right with it.”

Tregaskis also included a much harsher quote from an unnamed embassy official, calling Halberstam a “young punk who’d never seen a war before and thought it should always go well. He just didn’t know about wars. It didn’t seem to occur to him that in all our American wars in the past, we had to run a little short of absolute complete democracy for the sake of winning.”

As Halberstam pointed out, however, the senior U.S. officials in South Vietnam, who had been urging reporters to “get on the team,” had lost their credibility with him and other journalists through their own mendacity. They continually lied to a group of tough, talented young reporters “whose friends are being killed, who have seen guys their own age killed, who are risking their lives themselves. Go and lie to them and then try to court-martial their sources. That will draw lines in the sand.”

Halberstam, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1964 with the AP’s Browne, pointed out that since mid-1962 some American military officers had turned to the handful of reporters in Saigon, using them as a conduit to air their complaints and skepticism to the public and government officials in Washington, DC. “The journalists kept showing up in the countryside,” Halberstam recalled, “and it was only a matter of time before they saw how hollow the entire operation was, how many lies were being told, and how fraudulent the war was.” Eventually he added, a “version of the war and the [Diem] regime, far more pessimistic, began to surface in the American press.”

President Kennedy’s aides remembered a time when the president, reading Halberstam’s stories from Vietnam in the Times, exploded with frustration: “Why can I get this stuff from Halberstam when I can’t get it from my own people?” Tregaskis maintained that top diplomats in Vietnam complained to him that the president gave “more attention to Halberstam’s dispatches than to the reports of all his own people there.”  

The uncharitable view Tregaskis held of Halberstam, and the other young reporters based in Vietnam who questioned the official, optimistic view of events from top administration officials there, seemed to be prompted by his experiences in combat during World War II; his unflinching belief to the end of his life in the need for the United States to respond forcefully to communist aggression, especially in Vietnam; and his continued admiration for the skill and bravery of U.S. troops in the field.

The product of a generation accustomed to taking at face value what its government told them, Tregaskis believed that criticizing the war belittled the courage of the troops, while Halberstam saw pointing out errors in how the war was being run as helping the troops in the field. Tregaskis also believed that casualties and defeats on the battlefield were a small cost to pay to help stem the tide of communism from sweeping over South Vietnam and throughout Southeast Asia.

Tregaskis remained committed to victory in Vietnam for the rest of his life, making regular visits to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance before his death on August 15, 1973, just a few years before North Vietnamese captured Saigon, marking the end of a long, brutal conflict.