In a two-part post, Neo-neocon traces the historical roots of the MoveOn smear against General Petraeus back to the Vietnam War, and General William Westmoreland, concluding the first post with these paragraphs:
Petraeus does not equal Westmoreland. In fact, even Westmoreland’s less-well-known successor, Creighton Abrams, he of the second act of Vietnam, did not equal Westmoreland.
But the anti-commander die was cast on the Left, not to be discarded. People often accuse generals of being so rigid in their thinking that they are fighting the previous war rather the present one. Petraeus, however, is an excellent example of a general who does not appear to have this problem. One can hardly say the same for the Left.
Neo-neocon begins her second post in the series by noting that the sense of betrayal that Westmoreland engendered triggered a permanent change in the way that journalists understood their role as well:
The 60s in Vietnam represented a sea-change in attitude towards the military, and not only on the fringes of the Left. Respected mainstream jounalists began to see their task less as transmitting information and more as questioning authority, especially of the military brass and the civilian leaders at Defense in Washington. In many cases, those in charge were considered not just incompetent and/or confused, but purposeful liars, deceivers, and betrayers of the fighting forces under them whose lives were being wasted in a cause already known to be lost.
This press agenda took its full form not in the early days of the war, but after the PR debacle of the Tet offensive and the real debacle of My Lai and the initial investigatory coverup of that terrible event. Tet caused the trusted and avuncular Walter Cronkite to leap over the heretofore rigid boundary between reporting the news into opinion journalism.
[my emphasis]
I believe that she is right about this, although she should have included Watergate as another major cause of the transformation. I think, though, that even after the Vietnam/Watergate era there remained a vestige of integrity in news reporting, and we are witnessing its death in this decade.
