Embedded Files
Volume 5| Issue 1 - Media
Written by David Amos. Edited by Anushka Minshull.
On November 13th 1969, writing for the St. Louis Dispatch, Seymour Hersh recounted the story of a ‘ 26 years old mild-mannered, boyish-looking’ Lieutenant named William Calley. According to the report, Calley and his company had entered the dusting of hamlets collectively known as My Lai, and proceeded to murder in cold-blood 106 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women and children. Following an investigation into the claims made by Hersh, General William Peers deduced that war crimes had been perpetrated, including but not limited to, ‘individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming, and assault on noncombatants.’ The final death toll was estimated at around five hundred.
Hersh’s report, and the articles that followed, are undeniably visceral. Yet there exists an element of surgical detachment within the pieces. There is little emotive language, rather a chillingly salient and coherent reproduction of facts, with the measured tone in direct juxtaposition to the rabid and frenzied reality of the massacre. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant pieces of journalism with regards to the War, not only for its content, but also for the spasmodic moral debate it sparked, which often centred around how My Lai could be reconciled with the wider context of American exceptionalism.
A popular angle espoused in many sections, was that My Lai marked a moral nadir and fundamentally challenged notions of American exceptionalism. The New York Times decried it as one of America’s ‘most ignoble hours’, and Time commented upon the ‘crisis of confidence’ that had affected the collective sense of moral virtuousness and superiority. Retrospectives commenting upon the massacre still refer to it as the juncture at which America lost the moral high ground and lost her innocence.
That the idea of a loss of innocence dominated discourse is certainly intriguing, and laden with a certain amount of bathos, for it would suggest that the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, the Jim Crow laws, McCarthyism, and the only act of atomic warfare in human history were not appalling enough to warrant the loss of American virtuosity. Chomsky was particularly scathing of these arguments, and wondered ‘is it an exaggeration to suggest that our history of extermination and racism is reaching its climax in Vietnam today?’
However, it was not only a galling lack of historical awareness that shaped media commentary. It has been suggested that it was only for superficial reasons such as William Calley’s weak chin, increasingly flabby physique and receding hairline at the time of his court marshal that prevented him from been afforded more favourable media coverage, as had been enjoyed by more photogenic war criminals such as Robert Rheault. Rheault was photographed for the cover of Life magazine, exhibiting the brooding intensity of the classic American antihero, complete with a silently smouldering cigarette slightly blurring his features. The accompanying article placed him within a ‘moral twilight’, imbuing Rheault with an almost mythic presence. It was thus a time to be thankful for both the casual inanity that could be so pervasive within the mainstream media, and the fact that Calley did not possess the jaw-line of an all-American quarterback.
A more disturbing strand of reaction attempted to turn the My Lai Massacre into what Kendrick Oliver has termed an exercise in ‘catharsis, […] a rite of passage into self-knowledge and maturity.’ Of course, the desire to learn from one’s mistakes is something to be applauded, rather than criticised. However, by relying upon some particularly tenuous intellectual gymnastics, the massacre was legitimised; rendered just, and this assertion was extrapolated to the extent that My Lai perversely came to be construed as an example of American morality. Through this warped logic, My Lai did not discount and undermine American exceptionalism, rather it became a teleological necessity that proved American exceptionalism. Time magazine pompously asserted, ‘only the nation that has faced up to it’s own failings and acknowledged its capacities for evil and ill-doing has any real claim to greatness.’ Jonathan Schell, writing for the New Yorker, noted the growing trend to see My Lai in terms of an ‘initiation ceremony […] as if committing great crimes were part of being a great nation.’ An anonymous advertisement placed in Time defiantly stated, ‘I am ashamed. But I am proud. I am an American.’
The analysis of press reaction to My Lai offers a particularly revealing insight into the moral dimensions of the war. There is a tendency for the media in general to indulge in a fair degree of self-congratulation over the manner in which it reported the Vietnam War, and much of this is justified. However, in the desperate clamour to make sense of My Lai, to place it within the framework of an idealised America, there was certainly a tendency to attempt to justify and legitimise the atrocity.
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