The First Casualty

By STANLEY W. CLOUD WASHINGTON

A famous saying has it that truth is the first casualty in any war. Not only do national leaders like to employ overblown rhetoric to justify their decisions to send troops into combat, but once the shooting begins, those who must pull the triggers or staff the home front seem to prefer heroic mythology to the reality of fire and death. Understanding this, war correspondents from Homer to Ernie Pyle have tended to rein in their normal skepticism, serving up instead what both the government and the public want to hear.

That tradition changed somewhat during the Vietnam War, with its confused purposes, enterprising reporters eager to roam in harm's way in search of the truth, and absence of military censorship. In fact, there are those who argue that Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, that the nightly TV footage of body bags and burning villages turned hearts and minds against the war. Hardly surprising, then, if the Pentagon should try to avoid the pattern of Vietnam by keeping the press on a short leash whenever American troops go into action.

To some extent, the press, chastened by public hostility, is less - confrontational about American military policy than it used to be. In addition, reporters face systematic constraints on their efforts to cover U.S. military operations that they would never have tolerated in Vietnam. Partly to blame is the pool system, set up after the Grenada invasion, in which a small group of correspondents, under the Pentagon's rules, is permitted to cover the initial stage of any military action involving U.S. troops. Every time the pool has been called up to report on a real crisis, its work has been severely and unnecessarily thwarted.

In Saudi Arabia the pool members weren't delivered to the area until at least five days after the U.S. deployment began. Pentagon "escorts" sat in on interviews. The pool had to abide by a long list of rules, including a ban (later rescinded) on using the name and hometown of any soldier interviewed.

The Defense Department blamed much of the trouble on the sensitivities of the Saudis. But many journalists suspect that the unstated purpose of the pool is to prevent serious coverage, at least in the early stage of any military action. Says Jonathan Wolman, the Associated Press's Washington bureau chief: "The Pentagon doesn't want this thing to work. If they can send in tanks, planes, ships and thousands of troops, they can send in 11 reporters and photographers at the start of an operation." Washington Post managing editor Leonard Downie Jr. calls the pool "absolutely useless." He believes restraints on the press were created in an attempt to emulate the British government's success at controlling the press during the Falklands war.

If so, the tactic seems to have worked. The normally feisty press has hardly ruffled a feather in protest. Worse, as former network correspondent Marvin Kalb wrote last week in the New York Times, there is "a certain whiff of jingoism on the airwaves and in print." Nor did the situation improve when the Pentagon pool was supplanted by the 300 or so "unilaterals" -- nonpoolers -- who have been admitted to Saudi Arabia since the crisis began. For one thing, the rules and limits on access that applied to the pool have largely remained in effect for all journalists. Reporters had neither the freedom nor logistical means -- nor, it sometimes seemed, the Vietnam-era gumption -- to scour the potential battlefronts in search of stories. For another, even in the 110 degrees desert heat, a different sort of media circus seemed to be opening. At one point, TV crew members shoved aside Senator Sam Nunn during his visit to a Saudi air base in order to get a better "visual." Said a U.S. military official to a reporter afterward: "Sometimes you don't do yourselves any favors at all with some of this ragtag, rat-pack journalism."

Doubtless there are those in the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his press spokesman, Pete Williams, who support the role of a free press during a military operation -- in theory anyway. But many officers see reporters as just another enemy. The "irrational" military code, says retired Marine Lieut. General Bernard Trainor, is "duty, honor, country -- and hate the press."

Finding ways to control the press -- and the truth -- has become an important element in the strategy of both sides in the current showdown, as Saddam Hussein's clunky attempts to become a media superstar have shown. His TV appearances with the hostages were intended to tug at the heartstrings of foreign viewers and create a high-minded, peace-loving image. Saddam last week granted CBS's Dan Rather an interview in the presidential palace in Baghdad and, among other things, tried to justify his invasion of Kuwait. "The Kuwaiti rulers were actually trying to destroy Iraq," Saddam asserted. His self-serving declarations surely failed to convince most of his Western audience. But his efforts to win the hearts and minds of world opinion showed that he too knows that media manipulation is an important element of any showdown in the post-Vietnam video age.

With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York and Jay Peterzell/Saudi Arabia