The New York Times’s correspondent in Vietnam in the early years of the war was a young, brash, and brainy reporter named David Halberstam. Still in his twenties when he arrived in Vietnam, Halberstam had acquired a decent amount of experience as a correspondent covering the civil rights movement in the South and war in the Congo. Before these few years of reporting, however, his only newspaper experience had been as a reporter and later managing editor of Harvard’s student newspaper. Halberstam was considered headstrong and sometimes arrogant, even by friends and colleagues.1 Only three assignments and four years after joining the New York Times, Halberstam thought enough of himself as a journalist to refuse an assignment from his editor, Arthur Gelb. In fact, Halberstam did not just refuse the assignment—he even crumpled up the paper on which the assignment was written and handed it back to his boss, remarking, “I’ve just won the Pulitzer, and you’re sending me to Buffalo?”
Halberstam’s self-assurance was not something he picked up in Vietnam or realized when he received the Pulitzer Prize for his report- ing there. On the contrary, he arrived with his ego and self-confidence in hand. It was these two qualities, in addition to his intelligence and skill as a journalist, that positioned him to become America’s first big Vietnam reporter. He quickly became a journalist-celebrity (which may explain how his bloated, rambling prose made it past the red pens of his book and magazine editors).
Halberstam made his position on Vietnam known from the very start, and given that he was public about these opinions from the first months of his time “in country,” he expressed his views as quickly as he formed them. Richard Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador and assis- tant secretary of state, arrived in Vietnam in 1963 as a junior diplomat and quickly made contact with Halberstam. “Halberstam was only 29,” Holbrooke later recalled, “but he was already the dominant figure among an influential group of journalists who reported what they observed even when it contradicted the official version of the war put out by the military.”
In an article written after Halberstam’s death in 2007, Holbrooke told the story of his first meeting with the Times’s Vietnam correspondent and his close friend, Neil Sheehan of United Press International (UPI), who would later take Halberstam’s place as Vietnam correspondent for the Times.4 “They were tall and intense and noisily exuberant,” Holbrooke wrote. “They knew they were covering the biggest story in the world, with very few competitors. They knew the official version was wrong, and they were going to get the truth.”
During the conversation, discussion turned to the different people and forces involved in Vietnam, specifically who the journalists thought could be relied on for information, and who was unreliable and disliked. “At that time they still supported the war. They wanted those who were lying to the public, both the corrupt South Vietnamese government and American military commanders, to be held accountable,” Holbrooke recounted. “They especially despised the senior commander, World War II veteran, Paul Harkins, and after giving me some advice—‘Don’t trust anything those bastards tell you’—David [Halberstam] and Neil [Sheehan] spent most of the night denouncing Harkins.”
That same night, as the hours fell away, Halberstam and his soon- to-be successor, Sheehan, got more and more drunk on wine. At one point, the two journalists “conducted a mock trial of the four-star general [Harkins]” for what they called “incompetence and dereliction of duty.”
“In his rumbling, powerful voice, David pronounced Harkins ‘guilty’ of each charge, after which Neil loudly carried out the ‘sentence’: execution by imaginary firing squad against the back wall of the restaurant.”
That night, the reporters imagined themselves to be judge, jury and even executioner of the forces in Vietnam that they opposed, despite the fact that they had been in the Southeast Asian country for little more than a year. Even though the mock trial and sentencing were made in fun, the drunken joking of two twenty-something journalists, the ersatz events turned out to be a surprisingly accurate reflection of how things would later turn out: Harkins would be stripped of his position just a year later and the “corrupt South Vietnamese government” that Halberstam and Sheehan railed against would be overthrown in 1963, its leaders unceremoniously executed in the back of a truck.
What happened between Holbrooke’s first meeting with Halberstam and Sheehan in May 1963, when the reporters expressed their disgust with Diem’s government and the need for him to be overthrown, and the October coup of that same year was not all that complicated (at least not by the standards of a coup occurring in the midst of a major war). All it took was the arrival of a Boston Brahmin diplomat named Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a group of repressed but politically motivated Buddhists, a core of power-hungry South Vietnamese generals, and two young New York Times journalists eager to put their stamp on events, in order to create a sea change in Vietnam.
In the days before the coup, Richard Holbrooke noted that Halberstam and Sheehan were not just in the know about the coup but acted, in the days before it, as if they were a part of the conspiracy. Holbrooke wrote, “In late October 1963, in a fever pitch of excitement, David and Neil took me to lunch, and, whispering conspiratorially, told me that a coup against the Saigon government would begin right there and then. Every few minutes one of them would run outside to look for troops marching on the presidential palace. When lunch ended without a coup, Neil left for a brief vacation in Tokyo and David stayed on. The coup happened a week later, exactly the way they had predicted, and David won a Pulitzer for his work that year.”9
The involvement of Halberstam and Sheehan in the coup d’état was not just direct—it was also explicit. The journalists themselves, if not boasting, spoke confidently about their role in overthrowing the Diem government in their later articles and books. The two (especially Halberstam) had trained their sights on the Diem government, which they regarded as brutal and authoritarian, and went to great, and ultimately very effective, lengths to weaken the regime.
