"We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see"
About this Quote
Patriotism, in Sheehan's telling, doesn’t look like flag-waving. It looks like refusing to let power launder failure into optimism. The line is built on a deliberate provocation: he and other reporters wanted America to win in Vietnam "just as much" as the official advisors did. That claim flips a familiar accusation on its head. Journalists weren’t outsiders rooting for defeat; they were insiders to the stakes, driven by a different theory of victory - one where reality is an asset, not an inconvenience.
The subtext is a diagnosis of how wars are lost in democracies: not simply on battlefields, but in the information system. Sheehan frames truth-telling as strategy. If you confront bad tactics, inflated body counts, and a crumbling South Vietnamese government honestly, you might adjust, de-escalate, or stop digging. Denial, by contrast, becomes a kind of operational sabotage - leaders protecting their careers and narratives while the costs compound.
His "moral outrage" isn’t performative. It’s the ethical snap that happens when firsthand evidence collides with official insistence that you didn’t see what you just saw. Naming "this general and the ambassador in Saigon" grounds the conflict in specific gatekeepers of perception - a military command and a diplomatic front office whose job, increasingly, was to manage the story.
Coming from Sheehan - later tied to the Pentagon Papers and the credibility gap - the quote sits in the late-1960s moment when the press stopped treating briefings as reality and started treating them as a contest over it. The intent is clear: to reclaim journalism as a form of national duty, and to indict the lie as a weapon turned inward.
The subtext is a diagnosis of how wars are lost in democracies: not simply on battlefields, but in the information system. Sheehan frames truth-telling as strategy. If you confront bad tactics, inflated body counts, and a crumbling South Vietnamese government honestly, you might adjust, de-escalate, or stop digging. Denial, by contrast, becomes a kind of operational sabotage - leaders protecting their careers and narratives while the costs compound.
His "moral outrage" isn’t performative. It’s the ethical snap that happens when firsthand evidence collides with official insistence that you didn’t see what you just saw. Naming "this general and the ambassador in Saigon" grounds the conflict in specific gatekeepers of perception - a military command and a diplomatic front office whose job, increasingly, was to manage the story.
Coming from Sheehan - later tied to the Pentagon Papers and the credibility gap - the quote sits in the late-1960s moment when the press stopped treating briefings as reality and started treating them as a contest over it. The intent is clear: to reclaim journalism as a form of national duty, and to indict the lie as a weapon turned inward.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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