VIETNAM GHOSTS HAUNT WHITE HOUSE

By H. N. Burdett

"Every president has had to deal with it," journalist Deborah Kalb said, setting the theme for a recent colloquim at Washington's National Press Club. "It doesn't go away."

Her reference was to the nine-year Vietnam War that concluded in 1975 with more than 47,000 American service personnel killed, over 153,000 wounded, and which continues to be the 800-pound invisible gorilla that for nearly 40 years since has been just over the shoulders of every U.S. President from Gerald R. Ford to Barack H. Obama.

It is both a cliche and an understatement to claim that Vietnam changed everything in the United States. For that war resulted in not only an unprecedented self-examination of the American character, but perhaps how the rest of the world will view the United States for generations to come.

If U.S. foreign policy is a study in incoherence - a diplomat's nightmare - blame it on Vietnam.

If the U.S. population is sharply divided whenever the drums beat for military intervention, blame it on Vietnam.

If the U.S. Department of Defense budget exceeds $700 billion, dwarfing defense spending of the nine nations behind it, Vietnam paranoia cannot be discounted.

If countless U.S. citizens have chosen to re-examine Stephen Decatur's gold standard dictum for patriotism - "Our country!. . .may she always be right, but right or wrong, our country" - Vietnam is without doubt the provocation.

Ms. Kalb and her father, Marvin Kalb, a 30-year award-winning correspondent for CBS and NBC News, have co-authored a book titled, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama. To discuss their tome for which they have conducted "hundreds of interviews" over a five-year period, they shared the NPC stage with Ted Koppel, the former 25-year anchor of NBC's Nightline and current senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

Marvin Kalb cited Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as examples of how post-Vietnam presidents responded to crises on their watch with that one defeat in U.S. military history not far from their consciousness.

When 241 U.S. Marines participating in a peacekeeping force in Beirut, Lebanon were killed in a suicide bombing on October 23, 1983, "Ronald Reagan decided to do nothing," Kalb recalls. In fact, Marines were pulled out of Beirut and put on a waiting ship offshore. "Ronald Reagan did not want the U.S. to be, as he said, 'spooked' again as it was in Vietnam."

When President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm on August 20, 1990, responding to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, he dispatched 200,00o U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia. In the following year, Operation Desert Storm quickly and decisively drove Iraq's armed forces from Kuwait in some 100 hours. Bush 41's decision was to "overload the circuit - go in, do it fast, and get out," Kalb said.

Throughout the U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that President Obama inherited from his predecessor, Vietnam has not been far from his mind.

While campaigning in 2008, Obama was accompanied by Senators Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, and Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, both Vietnam veterans, whom he questioned incessantly about that war during the 14-hour flight from Washington to the Middle East. Kalb further noted that when Obama made the decision to double down on Afghanistan, he told his National Security Council: "Afghanistan is not Vietnam."

The so-called Powell Doctrine is frequently used to compare the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War. As its namesake, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview on The Rachel Maddow Show on April 1, 2009, that doctrine denotes exhausting all "political, economic and diplomatic means" before a nation resorts to military force.

More specifically, the following must be in place: A vital national security interest threatened; a clear and attainable objective; full and frank analysis of the risks and costs; exhaustion of all other non-vi0lent policy options; a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement; full consideration of policy consequences; support of the American people; genuine broad international support.

The closing lines of Barbara Tuchman's masterful 1984 treatise, The March of Folly, cite Michigan Congressman Don Reigle and they bear repeating here:

In talking to a couple from his constituency who had lost a son in Vietnam, he faced the stark recognition that he could find no words to justify the boy's death: 'There was no way I could say that what had happened was in their interest or in the national interest or in anyone's interest.'

TWO NONPAREIL MARYLAND NEWSMEN

By H. N. Burdett

Two legendary Maryland newsmen died last month, but their obituaries failed to do them justice.

It was not the fault of the authors. The bare bones of the careers of Herbert L. Thompson and Philip M. Evans certainly could be compressed into the normal 300-400 word obit format. But what these two men meant to the craft of news gathering in their state, and most particularly to those fortunate enough to have been their colleagues, might not be adequately conveyed in 300,000-400,000 words.

Herb Thompson was an Associated Press reporter and editor for 18 years, starting in Huntington, West Virginia, the final 12 years as AP's Annapolis bureau chief. In 1967he was named press secretary and principal staff assistant to Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew. After Agnew was elected Vice President of the United States, Thompson went to Washington as his press secretary and later served as his chief speech writer. Thompson left the White House to join the U.S. Agency for International Development, serving as the Deputy Director of the USAID mission in Tunisia from 1973-1975 and Deputy Director of Public Affairs in USAID headquarters in Washington from 1975-1977. From 1978 until his retirement in 1986, Thompson was Director of Information Services for the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics at Hyderabad, India.

Early in his newspaper career, Phil Evans was also with AP in West Virginia until joining the Baltimore Evening Sun as a reporter and later was named city editor before he left to become executive editor of the Annapolis Capital. He subsequently served in managing editor posts at the Washington Evening Star, the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Washington Times. Evans returned to Annapolis, purchased the pocket-sized, black and white Annapolitan magazine, and was its editor as well as president and publisher. He expanded the publication into a full-sized, full-color magazine reflecting the spirit of the state capital with wit, charm and intelligence that mirrored his own personality and temperament. Evans left journalism to serve as a consultant in 1980 to the presidential campaign of environmentalist Barry Commoner, and in 1998 to Ralph Neas, a liberal Democrat, in his effort to unseat longtime Republican Rep. Connie Morella.

In many respects, Herb Thompson, the model family man, and Phil Evans, the bon vivant who seemed driven to living each day as though it was to be his last, could not have been more different.

Following the daily annual sessions of the Maryland General Assembly, most reporters filed their stories, ambled off to dinner, then caught up with lawmakers at various saloons scattered about the capital city. Phil Evans seldom entered a watering hole he did not like and rarely encountered a woman he could not charm. On those same nights , Herb Thompson was having a late family dinner at home with his wife and daughters, scanning a newspaper or two, watching some television and he was in his own bed fast asleep before the serious imbibation was even beginning elsewhere in town.

What Phil and Herb mostly shared was an abiding commitment to the news as the first drafts of history and, considering that initial impressions tend to endure, were fixated on these being as accurate and thorough as time and circumstance permitted.

Additional traits Evans and Thompson men had in common were a steely calmness in the pervasive chaos that frequently attends breaking news under deadline pressure, epitomizing the Hemingwayesque characterization of courage as grace under fire.

Of at least equal significance, no matter how frenetic the singular madness of staying on top of a breaking major story became, neither Herb or Phil was ever too distracted to offer solace and encouragement to a colleague who had lost the way either professionally or personally. Each had such remarkable self-confidence and control over his emotions that if anyone had ever witnessed either of them seething with anger or frustration, that experience has been one of the better kept secrets in the annals of Maryland journalism. At Phil's memorial service in Washington's National Press Club, a reporter who had been on his staff at the Evening Star recalled that he once told her: "I may not always be right, but I'm never in doubt."

I had the good fortune to meet Herb and Ann Thompson during the six months between completion of graduate school and reporting to active military duty. As the editor of the Maryland Gazette, a 28 to 32-page weekly with a fulltime staff of two -- a "society page" editor and a photographer -- I spent three days of every week covering the news and rewriting press releases in the newspaper's Glen Burnie office, and the remaining two days writing headlines and making up the paper in Annapolis, where the Gazette was printed.

Back in those days, I met Herb and soon afterward he invited me to his home for dinner. I accepted the invitation and began lamenting how I would have to decline his offer to become his assistant in the Annapolis AP bureau, which I was morally certain was in the offing. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been a dream job for a fledgling news reporter, but I had a two-year obligation to Uncle Sam.

As it happened, after dinner I went home without the expected job offer but with the adorable and charming Felicia, to whom I was introduced by my host and hostess following dessert. It was love at first sight. Felicia was a black and white kitten, the runt of the latest litter of the Thompsons' famously fertile feline who, to hear some tell it, had birthed a sizable portion of Annapolis's four-legged population.

Upon my discharge from the service some two years later, I became reacquainted with Herb. Only now I was covering state government and the legislature for the old Baltimore News Post. I found him to be a trusted fount of facts and figures concering Maryland government. My own coverage of the Maryland General Assembly for the News Post, later renamed the News American, was immeasurably bolstered by the reliable and ready resource of the AP bureau chief, whom I came to regard as a human clip service with a warm demeanor and a wry sense of humor.

Herb and I amused ourselves during lulls in the hurly-burly of legislative activity by collecting the more outrageous gaffes of state lawmakers on the floors of the House of Delegates and Senate chambers, to wit: "Let's stop beating this dead horse to death," "Correct me if I'm right," "For obvious reasons unknown to me." My personal favorite was pompously proclaimed by a portly bundle of self-importance packaged in a three-piece suit with a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from a gold vest chain. "This debate is degenerating," he thundered, "into a matter of principle."

I clearly recall Herb waxing poetic about the newly opened franchise restaurant where he could treat his wife and two daughters to burgers, fries and shakes, all for ten bucks and he got back change. He was praising Annapolis's first MacDonald's.

When I first met Phil Evans I was covering state government for the Baltimore News Post and he had the civil rights beat for the opposition newspaper, the Evening Sun. My impression was of a guy about my own age who dressed a little better than I did, had an easy smile and exuded class and breeding. From his obituary in the Washington Post, I learned that his father had worked in finance in New York; I already knew that his mother had been an opera singer. They, along with young Phil and his brother Dick, relocated to Dorchester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore where, according to the Post obituary, "his parents wanted to work as truck farmers."

What most impressed me about Phil was that he was among those rare Sunpapers reporters who actually did not appear to be using those venerable newspapers as mere stepping stones towards the acknowledged pinnacle of American journalism, the Great Gray Lady, as the New York Times was then known. A few of those obsessively ambitious young Sun reporters, like Tony Lukas and Adam Clymer, actually completed the ascent.

As time passed, Phil was anointed city editor of the Evening Sun, an event that I mark as a seminal moment. He was the first of my generation to nail down a major editorship at a Baltimore daily newspaper. Moreover, I was favorably impressed with the way Phil and his extremely competent assistant city editor, Mike Naver, led that newspaper's formidable news staff. It helped that Phil and Mike had inherited an awesome array of talent, worthy of the legacy established in the 1930s, '40s and '50s when the legendary Henry Louis Mencken attracted national attention to the gem of a newspaper that shone through the drabness of the Queen City of the Patapsco Drainage Area.

After leaving the News American to obey one of my periodic impulses to write the Great American Novel, I one day found myself married and back working for a newspaper. This time it was as the editorial page editor and columnist of the Annapolis Evening Capital. Some three years later, I felt another novel churning in my gut. Meanwhile, the newspaper was sold to a group headed by Philip Merrill, one of Kennedy Administration Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles's whiz kids at the U.S. Department of State.

Intriguing as the prospective sea change of improvement to the paper appeared, it was a mild distraction rather than a deterrent. I continued to work on my model resignation letter, intent upon expressing both my gratitude to the Capital for providing a forum to regain my journalism chops and my unwavering resolve to follow my heart. But before I could deliver my farewell epistle to the new publisher, Phil Evans, who had been on the abysmally slow track to the managing editorship of the Evening Sun, jumped ship and signed on as the executive editor of the Capital, a newspaper with a circulation well south of 30,000.

In a one-on-one meeting with Phil Evans, he outlined his grand plan for transforming the small Annapolis daily into a first-rate newspaper that would cover the burgeoning territory between Baltimore and Washington -- focusing on, in addition to the state capital, the new and growing towns of Crofton and Columbia.

Now it became clear to me why Evans had abandoned his quest to become the managing editor of one of the nation's most heralded cathedrals of journalism to cast his lot with a smaller newspaper seemingly unworthy of his sharply-honed and obvious skills. He concluded our meeting by assuring me that the Capital would be "the most exciting newspaper on the East Coast" and encouraging me to help build it into just that. He was a visionary, who saw the world through a prism of unlimited possibility: a dreamer who disdained the security of a top job at a quality newspaper and was wagering his own future on a journey through a potential minefield of headaches and heartaches where timid souls and even most angels feared to tread. I swallowed his Kool-Aid in one large gulp, promptly tore up my swan song masterpiece, rolled up my sleeves and began pounding my Underwood in earnest.

My newspaper days in Baltimore under City Editor Eddie Ballard, easily the planet's best field general on a breaking news story, were nothing short of wondrous. They provided me with a post-graduate course in my chosen field that no J-school could possibly match, and with a cast of flesh-and-blood colorful characters far too fantastic to populate a novel that might be accepted by any self-respecting literary agent, let alone any publishing house fiction editor hung up on realism. But my most satisfying years spent writing for newspapers and magazines were those in which Phil Evans was my editor at the Evening Capital and later at Annapolitan magazine.

As city editor of the Evening Sun, Phil had inherited a crackerjack editorial staff. But in Annapolis he was challenged to utilize his rare gift for spotting untapped talent that doubtless would have been overlooked by even the best of newspaper editors. He built the Capital news staff virtually from the ground up. His reconstruction project made the magician's stunt of commanding the Empire State Building to vanish look like a routine trick.

Examples: The print was not yet dry on the college diploma of a young woman Phil hired on the basis of a letter she had written home to her family and she prematurely blossomed into an exceptional education writer. He dispatched one of his reporters weekly to a state mental facility to pick up hand-written copy from one of his staff members who was briefly confined therein, with Capital readers having every reason to believe the dispatches were filed from the paper's West Street offices. He hired a Vietnam war combat veteran who frankly admits that at the time Phil gave him his job he wasn't qualified to be a copy boy, and watched him become a White House correspondent, Nieman Fellow and deputy bureau chief of a major U.S. newspaper.

E-mails from Phil Evans's colleagues I've received in the weeks since his passing validate my personal assessment: he was quite simply the best editor most of us have ever had. And Tom Stuckey, who was Herb Thompson's successor as AP Annapolis bureau chief wrote: "(Herb) was an outsanding journalist, an outstanding person, an honest man and a good person to work for. Long after he left Agnew's vice presidential office. . .he told me he quit because he had begun to have serious doubts about Agnew's honesty and could not continue to work for him." These words from those who knew Phil and Herb best are worth a thousand pictures.