a journalist talks about where we came from and are headed
a journalist talks about where we came from and are headed
Fooling America: A talk by Robert Parry
Given in Santa Monica on March 28, 1993
Tonight I'd like to talk about what I was doing in the 1980's. I was a reporter for the Associated Press. I started with the AP back in 1974, and covered El Salvador.
I went over to the State Department to review their methodology, and what I found was that the way they got their figures was that they took the total number of people who had presumably died within a period of a month or so, and then each time the guerrillas would claim on a radio broadcast that they had killed some soldiers, if there was a battle going on and they said "We killed ten soldiers" and then the battle kept going on and it was twenty, and then it was fifty, and then another one of their stations would say fifty, what the State Department did was they added up all the numbers. And so they were able to create these false figures to suggest that the government that the Unites States was supporting was not as culpable as the human rights groups and particularly the Catholic church in ES were saying.
It began a pattern of deception from the very beginning. Even when there was something horrible happening in those countries. Even when hundreds, thousands of human beings were being taken out and killed, the role of the US. government became to hide it, to rationalize it, to pretend it wasn't that serious, and to try to discredit anyone who said otherwise. And the main targets of that were the reporters in the field, the human rights groups, and to a degree, those of us in Washington who were trying to examine the policies to figure out what was really happening and what was behind this. I remember again after the new administration came in and of course Secretary Haig made the remarkable comment that the four churchwomen were perhaps running a road block, which is how they'd gotten killed.
And even people in the State Department who at that time were investigating this fairly honestly - they had not yet been purged - were shocked that the Secretary would say such a thing because they knew what the circumstances were even then. They knew that they'd been stopped, they knew that they'd been sexually assaulted, and shot at close range. None of that, of course, fit the image of running a road block, and exchange of fire.
But the reality became the greatest threat, even at that stage, to what the new administration wanted to accomplish, and what they wanted to accomplish was I think something they felt strongly about ideologically which was their view that the communists were on the march, that the Soviets were an expanding power, that you had to stop every left wing movement in its tracks and reverse it. And they were following of course the theory that Jean Kirkpatrick had devised that the totalitarian states never reverse and change into democratic states, only authoritarian ones do, which as we know now is perhaps one of THE most inaccurate political theories.
It's best if you're having a political theory, not to have it disproven so quickly, you know it might be best if you would, maybe fifty years from now you wouldn't really know as much. But Jean Kirkpatricks's was disproven very quickly but it was still the driving force behind the administration's approach to a number of these conflicts, and their justifications for going ahead and trying to conduct what became known later as the Reagan Doctrine which was to sponsor revolutionary operations or what am I saying, counterrevolutionary operations in many cases in various parts of the world and in the Third World in particular.
In ES of course, which was my first focus and the first focus of this policy, it was to protect a very brutal government which was at that time killing literally from a thousand to two thousand people a month. These were political murders; they were done in the most offensive fashion. I think any American, any average American, would have been shocked and would have opposed what his government was doing. So it became very important to keep that secret, or to minimize it, or rationalize it or somehow sanitize it.
So what we saw, even at that early stage, was the combat that was developing and the combat in terms of the domestic situation in Washington was how do you stop the press from telling that story. And much of what the Reagan administration developed were techniques to keep those kinds of stories out of the news media.
In some cases, as we saw later, in late 1981 of course there was, what is now fairly well known, the massacre in El Mazote. And this was a case where the first American trained battalion was sent out over Christmas time in 1981 into rebel controlled territory and it swept through this territory and killed everybody, everyone they could find - including the children.
When two American reporters, Ray Bonner and Alma Jimapareta (?), went to the scene of this atrocity in January of 1982, they were able to see some of what was left behind and they interviewed witnesses who had survived, and came out with stories describing what they had found. This was of course extremely upsetting to the Reagan administration, which at that time was about to certify that the Salvadoran military was showing respect for human rights, and that was necessary to get further funding and weapons for the Salvadoran military.
And I was at those hearings which occurred afterwards, on the hill, and when Tom Enders who was then Assistant Secretary Of State for Inter-American affairs gave his description of how the State Department had investigated this and had found really nothing had happened or that they had found no evidence of any mass killing, and they argued with great cleverness that the last census had not shown even that many people in El Mazote - there were not the 800 or so who were alleged to have been killed - only 200 had lived there to begin with, and many still lived there, he said. Of course it wasn't true, but it was, I guess in their view, necessary - it was necessary to conceal what was going on. And, it became necessary then, to also discredit the journalists, so Raymond Bonner, and Alma and others, who were not accepting this story, had to be made to seem to be liars.
They had to be destroyed. And the administration began developing their techniques, which they always were very good at - they were extremely good at public relations, that's what's they had - many of them had come from - the President himself had been an advertising figure for General Electric - and they were very adept at how to present things in the most favorable way for them.
But what we began to see was something that was unusual I think even for Washington - certainly it was unusual in my experience - a very nasty, often ad hominem attack on the journalists who were not playing along. And the case of Bonner was important because he worked for the New York Times, and the New York Times was one of those bastions of American journalism - this was not some small paper, it was not some insignificant news figure. So there began an effort to discredit him and the Wall Street editorial page was brought into play, Accuracy In Media was brought into play, he was attacked routinely by the State Department and White House spokespeople, there were efforts to paint him as some kind of a communist sympathizer, the charge would go around that he was worth a full division for the FMLN - the Salvadoran guerrillas - he was treated as an enemy - someone who was anti-American, in effect. And sadly, it worked.
I was in ES in October of '82, I was down there to interview Roberto Dobesan, who was head of the death squads, and I was with a conservative activist, and after that interview we had lunch with the head of the political-military affairs office at the Embassy and the officer was then head of the military group, and on the way back to the hotel, they were boasting about how they had "gotten" Ray Bonner. "We finally got that Son-of-a-Bitch," they said, and at that time his removal had not yet been announced, so it was very interesting to hear that they knew what was about to happen, and he was, in fact, removed by early 1983, and then he was sort of shunted aside at the New York Times and eventually left.
So the message was quite clearly made apparent to those of us working on this topic that when you tried to tell the American people what was happening, you put your career at risk, which may not seem like a lot to some people, but you know, reporters are like everybody else I guess - they have mortgages and families and so forth and they don't really want to lose their jobs - I mean it's not something they aspire to. And the idea of success is to keep one of these jobs and there are a lot of interesting perks that go with it, a certain amount of esteem, you know, as well as you get paid pretty well. Those jobs in Washington - you can often be making six figures at some of the major publications, so it's not something you readily or easily throw away, from that working level.
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What I think is the bottom line of both books is that we are in great danger of losing our grasp of reality as a nation. Our history has been taken away from us in key ways. We've been lied to so often. And important things have been blocked from us. It WAS important to know that those little children were killed in El Mazote.
I have four kids, and I know what they mean to me, and it's always been a part of my journalism that I don't want - that if any of my sons will ever be taken off to war someplace, I want it to be done for a real reason - not because somebody made something up. But I also feel for people who lose their kids anywhere. And I think that the idea that our government would be complicit, not just in the killing, but in this very cynical effort to lie about it, and hide about it, and pretend it didn't happen, and attack those who find out that it did happen, is in many ways almost worse. It is something that, as a democracy, we can't really allow to happen.
The main problem, at this point, is that we have a set of establishments in Washington that have failed us, as a people. Obviously the executive branch did it because it had its goals, and agendas, and it wanted to do these things, and maybe in some cases they were right. But they shouldn't have lied to us. They shouldn't have tried to create a false reality to trick us into this. Congress failed because it didn't have the courage to stand up and do oversight and perform its constitutional responsibilities.
But what is perhaps most shocking to Americans is that the press failed. The press is what people sort of expect to be there as the watchdog, the final group to sort of warn us of danger. And the press joined it. And the press saw itself - in the Washington press corp I'm talking about - saw itself at the elite levels as part of the insider community.
And as that evolved and then grew in the 1980's, the press stopped performing its oversight responsibilities. And I think we have to figure out some way, as a people, to change that. There've been actually more changes I think in the political structure - whatever anyone thinks of Mr. Clinton, at least there's a change there. And he has different priorities. And in Congress there's even been some change.
But the press has gone from being when I got there '77 as a Watergate press corp, with its faults, with being maybe a little too overly zealous in pursuing some minor infraction, but still - it was there as the watchdog. What we have now, and its continuing into this new era, is the Reagan-Bush press corp. It's the press corp that they helped create - that they created partly by purging those, or encouraging the purging of those who were not going along, but it was ultimately the editors and the news executives that did the purging.
It wasn't the White House or the State Department or the Embassy in El Salvador that drove Ray Bonner out of the New York Times; it was the New York Times executives who did it. And throughout that whole era it wasn't the State Department or the White House that ruined Paul Allen's career at NPR, it was NPR executives. And this was the case all the way around Washington. The people who succeeded and did well were those who DIDN'T stand up, who DIDN'T write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people. And I think that's what we all have to sort of look at to see what we can do to change it. I think it will take a tremendous commitment by the American people to insist on both more honest journalism, more straightforward journalism, but also maybe even new journalism. There has to be some other way - some other outlets. In a way, I've grown to despair at the possibility of reforming some of these organizations. Maybe it can happen, but I think ultimately, we're going to have to see a new kind of media to replace this old one.
End of talk. There followed a question and answer session - one of which was to the point of this newsgroup. He was asked for his opinion on the Kennedy assassination.
Parry: He's asking what I might think about the assassination of President Kennedy. And I guess my answer about that would be I don't know. One of the great tragedies of losing our history which is what's been happening throughout our lifetimes, has been that, because of this sort of 'conventional wisdom' or 'conventional reality' that exists, certain things are not explored. I guess in '63 the conventional wisdom was of course that it was a lone gun acting by himself - a crazy man. And so the Warren Commission, like many other government investigations since, basically just reinforced - ratified that belief. They may have been right - I mean, I don't know. [Man interjects "there've been over 600 books on the subject written ] -I know! I've read some of them. But - all I'm saying is that if investigations aren't done properly within a certain period of time it's very hard to do them. I had a friend who was at Time/LIFE during that period and he was following up on the connections to New Orleans. But Time/LIFE was so angry about anyone even THINKING that there might be another part of this story, that he used to have to put down different stories on his expense accounts - like if he would to go to New Orleans to interview some of these guys that might have information he'd have to say he was there for the Mardi Gras or something. He couldn't say he was there for the assassination of President Kennedy because he would have been considered some kind of a nut!
And in answer to a question about maybe the people don't really want to know the truth or take responsibility to pressure the powers that be to tell the truth:
Parry: I think probably a lot of people don't want to know. I agree with that. I think, because, it's hard to know. And I would hear that a lot. That would be an argument that would be used a great deal in the 80's after Iran-Contra was going along - it would be that people were bored, they were tired, they didn't want to hear about it anymore. My feeling though is that it was the responsibility of the reporter to tell the people what he could about important events as fairly and as completely as possible. And it was less my responsibility to decide what they should know or shouldn't know, or even wanted to know, but to make an honest judgment about what was historically of importance and tell them what I could. And even if it's 10% of the public that wants to know, they deserve to know. I don't think you should do polls to find out what people want to hear and then tell them what they want to hear. I think to some degree the press needs to inform the public about stuff that's important.
In answer to "do the people know they're being lied to":
Parry: Well basically, the American people I think, from the polls, believe - first of all they WERE interested in Iran-Contra, much more so than the press wanted to think. I remember once at Newsweek a poll showed 1/3 of the people following the story closely, 1/3 following them a little bit, and a 1/3 of them not following them at all, and they said - well, you see 2/3 of the people aren't following them very much at all, so therefore, you know - there were arguments that were kind of turned and twisted to make it appear that the public didn't really want to know. I think the public DID want to know. Ollie North's book was a bestseller - a number have been bestsellers - that shows that they're interested. Plus, I think, they have a tremendous distrust of how the government's functioned and they want to know when they've been lied to. It may not be that they care as much about all the details, but they sure care if a man who is running for President has lied to them in a major way, and expect the press to try to make a good-faith effort to discover that, and not to sort of go along and say gee, it would be too disruptive if people knew that.
