As
we remember and thank the men and women who have served our nation in the
military, we frequently hear the word “courage.”
Most often “courage” is used
to describe heroic acts in combat.
Today we are saluting a public radio
reporter who had the courage to defend freedom of the press.
Rick
Fredericksen retired from Iowa Public Radio (IPR) in 2016 after 21 years as a
News Director, capital correspondent, statewide arts reporter and the creator
of the Iowa Archives, a seven-year
project to discover historical Iowa voice and sound recordings.
Before
he returned to his native Iowa in 1995, Fredericksen was best known as an
American writer and radio, TV and print correspondent who was based in Southeast
Asia. He arrived in Vietnam in 1969 and worked as a War News Editor for
American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN), the US military’s radio and television
service.
Fredericksen
enjoyed working as a foreign correspondent. After leaving the Marine Corps in 1970,
he worked on and off for over two decades as a journalist-for-hire based in Bangkok.
He became Thailand Bureau Chief for CBS News.
While
in Vietnam, he was one of a small group of American soldiers who made history
by revealing the US government’s censorship of news on AFVN radio and TV. This
is today’s story.
In
2013, Fredericksen wrote an article titled, All
the News that is Fit to Air, for Vietnam
Magazine [link], a publication for Vietnam War veterans. In the article,
Fredericksen his internal campaign to expose the restricted flow of news on
AFVN. His work led to a congressional investigation and changes in the ways war
news in presented.
What
follows is an abridged and slightly edited version of Fredericksen’s article. You can download a
pdf of the original story (which we recommend) here.
Note:
Fredricksen’s words are in BOLD
type.
In their
quest to “tell it like it is,” young newsmen with the American Forces Vietnam
Network raised important questions about the nature and limits of military
censorship
By Rick Fredericksen, Published in December
2013
ON A NOVEMBER MORNING, 50 years ago [in
1963], two young military broadcasters arrived for their radio shift in Saigon.
The wire machine held news that would unsettle the world: President John F.
Kennedy had been assassinated. News- man Bob Andreson quickly pulled some copy.
Lee Hansen, host of the Dawnbuster show, opened Andreson’s microphone so he
could read the bulletin to listeners. Or so they thought.
In their haste, they’d neglected to turn
on the transmitter. So they quickly signed on Armed Forces Radio Saigon (AFRS),
and Andreson announced the news again, this time over the air. According to
Hansen, he and Andreson were both “bawling like babies” and had simply
forgotten to flip the switch. Throughout the morn- ing, they provided news
updates on the unfolding tragedy.
Just three weeks earlier South Vietnam’s
President Ngo Dinh Diem had been assassinated in a coup. That day, rather than
broadcasting the news, the radio staff was on the roof watching the action at
the nearby Presidential Palace. Gunfire could be heard when announcers opened
the microphone and instructed Americans to stay off the streets because of a
“civil disturbance.” But that was it.
Why cover one assassination and ignore the
other? The uncomplicated explanation is censorship. Or, if you prefer, “news
management.” “We were told by headquarters not to run
that news.”
In subsequent years, the fledgling AFRS
radio operation grew into a far-reaching broadcast system renamed the American
Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN), providing news, music and entertainment to the
U.S. armed forces, along with a huge shadow audience of Vietnamese and other
nationals.
AFVN’s on-air jingle made a powerful
declaration: “From the Delta to the DMZ.” No other unit could make that claim.
And no other unit had the power to shape
public opinion quite like AFVN. As more troops arrived, more affiliates signed
on to serve them, including television stations.
Fighting intensified and the war became
increasingly political; there was more sensitive news, more controversy, and
news management became more like censorship.
When I arrived in March 1969, destined to
be a teenage war correspondent, the censorship controversy was still a simmering
internal matter. I would soon become entangled in the most unabashed military
protest of the Vietnam War. It had nothing to do with being antiwar and
everything to do with being anti- censorship, a cause championed by a young,
idealistic band of military newsmen, all enlisted, except for one young
captain.
Spark News: Fredericksen describes the word games
AFRN had to play with the news:
A policy initiated in the pioneering days
of AFVN. It was maintained throughout the war. Here is a partial list of banned words and
terminology.
• [You could not] say “White House” to
describe [the building at] 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The reason explained to me
was that even to English-speaking people in Asia, the term ‘White House’ could
intellectually become ‘Crystal Palace.’” That would have made the Oval Office
the throne room, the president a monarch and U.S. troops in Vietnam the king’s
soldiers. So, “White House” became “official house.”
 |
AFVN announcer Spc. 4
Danny Drobnick (April, 1970)
|
• The nation we were deployed in had to be called the
“Republic of Vietnam,” never “South Vietnam.”
• “Napalm” had to be replaced with “selective
ordnance.”
• “Search and destroy” missions became
“search and clear.” •
• The fierce battle for “Hamburger Hill”
was too descriptive, so AFVN used the map reference of “Hill 937.”
The list of words that were forbidden eventually included “withdrawal” and “pullout.” We were told these words
made it seem like the Americans were deserting the Vietnamese people. Even Paul
Harvey’s news and commentary was deleted on those occasions when he referred to
Vietnam as “the dead-end war.”
Captain Randall Moody was in charge of the
AFVN newsroom at a critical juncture in late 1969. He described the scene:
“There were 550,000 Americans
there, and my feeling was we were more than just another public relations arm. This
was just after the 1968 Tet offensive, which sort of shot a hole in the idea we
were winning the war. So by just reporting what was going on, something that
didn’t make the military look good, there was a lot of pushback.”
Moody was regularly called down to the
Office of Information when his newscasters strayed too far.
One day at the daily press briefing, the
loss of six helicopters was confirmed, and on that night’s AFVN TV news
broadcast, news editor Toney Brooks reported that “the U.S. Command was having helicopter problems again.” Several
other helicopters had crashed earlier in the week.
[A senior official] called Moody the next
morning. He told Moody the ‘helicopter problems’ statement was editorializing
and made General Abrams very unhappy.”
[The senior official] said the story
didn’t put the U.S. in a very good light, because we’re really having helicopter
problems.
[Moody] a 24-year-old captain stood his ground and
said: “I’m not in the business of putting
any-
one in a favorable light; that would be
editorializing.”
Internal dissension worsened in
the
newsroom during 1969, in part because of the sheer volume of sensitive
stories: the secret peace talks in Paris, U.S. planes bombing targets in Laos,
the first troop withdrawals and inten- sifying antiwar protests back home.
The officers running AFVN were under a lot
of pressure to keep the stories grounded in truth but also presented in the
most positive light. But AFVN news relied heavily on the commercial networks
for content: ABC news film, videotapes from CBS, the wire services and all the
major network radio newscasts. Their war coverage tended to be grimmer and not
always attributable to “official sources.”
 |
AFVN NEWS
TEAM IN LATE 1969
From left:
(standing) Bob Lawrence, Paul Baldridge, Lynn Packer
and Rick
Fredericksen (seated) Tom Sinkovitz and Hugh Morgan
|
Bob Lawrence, a reporter with seven years
experience in news back in the states, came to AFVN in late 1969. He learned
quickly that AFVN had a “shadow audience,” the Vietnamese military and the
Vietnamese government.
Spark News: Fredericksen hade become the producer of
AFVN TV's evening newscast. Lawrence was the on-camera anchor.
It was Saturday night, Jan. 3, 1970, and
Lawrence shared the set with sportscaster Tom Sinkovitz. At the end of the
news, Lawrence calmly looked into the camera and read a shocking personal
indictment charging commanders in Vietnam with censorship. Lawrence
said:
“I have found that a newscaster at AFVN is
not free to tell the truth, and in essence, to tell it like it is.”
He spoke with conviction and appealed to
the audience for help.
“We’ve been suppressed and
I’m probably in trouble tonight for telling you the truth. I hope you’ll help
stop censorship at AFVN and any American station under military rule.”
The incident was reported around the
world. Walter Cronkite featured it on
the CBS Evening News, America’s
highest-rated newscast.
According to news reports at the time,
Lawrence was escorted to a bleak room with blanketed walls, a tape recorder and
a mattress on the floor. He said interrogators told him they questioned one guy
for 20 hours, “but we cracked him.” “I can believe you’re doing this to spies,
but not American people,” Lawrence replied. “I can’t believe General Abrams
knows about this—and the president.”
To avoid further charges of trying to
silence us, they actually allowed Time magazine to photograph Lawrence,
Sinkovitz, Maxwell and me on the wood-paneled AFVN news set.
Meanwhile, Rep. John Moss of California
initiated a congressional inquiry. Lawrence was shipped to Kontum to become a
chaplain’s assistant and was never formally charged. All other participants,
including Fredericksen, were taken off the air and reassigned.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Rick
Fredericksen has published several books. His most recent, Broadcasters: Untold Chaos, is available now wherever books are sold.
You
can hear the coverage the incident from ABC Radionews here.
For
more about AFVN, please visit a comprehensive tribute website here.
You
can see TV news coverage on this YouTube video:
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