Conduit in North Viet Nam

Anxious to cover both sides of the war in Viet Nam, the New York Times has tried for years to get a reporter into Hanoi. But Ho Chi Minh has consistently said no. Last week the Times finally ran a five-part series on life in North Viet Nam, but not by one of its own reporters. It was the work of James Cameron, 54, a British freelancer who was writing for the London Evening Standard. "Failing our being able to get a man inside," says Times Foreign News Editor Sydney Gruson, "this was the next best thing."

A tireless, didactic liberal of the ban-the-bomb breed, Cameron worked on Fleet Street papers before he broke loose on his own. He prides himself on getting into areas forbidden to other newsmen, and he wangled permission to visit North Viet Nam for a month this fall. His report is a rare eyewitness account by a Western journalist, but it leaves little doubt of Cameron's own emotional commitment: he firmly believes the U.S. has no business whatsoever in Viet Nam.

Double Standard. Cameron vividly captures much of the flavor of that tense, troubled country with its brooding sense of danger and its "cult of camouflage." North Viet Nam, he says, is "a land where everyone considers it necessary to live in disguise, to inhabit his own country pretending he is not there, but invisible." When he is not filing background color, though, Cameron is less a reporter than a conduit for North Vietnamese propaganda. He all but equates Hanoi, which has not been touched by bombs, with wartime London, which was hit heavily. He quotes officials, such as North Viet Nam's Premier Pham Van Dong, at interminable length, without any appraisal of what they are saying. When he passes the Russian SAM missile sites in the countryside, he loses his reportorial curiosity and does not question his hosts about them. "I talked rapidly of other things to save embarrassment."

Moreover, he tells some whoppers. Without a bit of qualification, he confidently asserts that the North Viet Nam economy is "increasing immensely,"^ while that of the South is "decaying." The comparison will be news to most observers, who are aware that both economies are in serious trouble. Passionately describing the hardships the war has brought to Hanoi, Cameron suggests that American bombers are to blame for food rationing. In fact, rice rationing was begun there in 1954. Presuming to speak for all the Vietnamese, he says, almost offhandedly, that they "chose" Communism.

His articles, described as personal journalism, are full of personal prejudices--all anti-U.S., pro-Hanoi. He is constantly outraged by American action. "What an impertinence," he writes of U.S. air raids, "what arrogance, what an offense against manners."

Convinced that Communism is the wave of the future in Viet Nam, he does not miss a chance to tell his readers that there is no alternative to letting Hanoi have its way. Bombing, he insists, can have no appreciable effect. The North Vietnamese, he says, "have a totally unshakable determination to win the war . . . they reject the machinery of compromise."

Uncritical Acceptance. The London Evening Standard ran Cameron's report under a disclaimer saying that his opinions were "not necessarily" those of the newspaper. The New York Times explained that Cameron was a British journalist, but offered no disclaimer for his observations. Nor did most of the newspapers that picked the story up from the New York Times News Service. While the Los Angeles Times ran only a two-column skeptical analysis of the series by its London correspondent, other papers generally played it the way the New York Times did: the first one or two articles appeared on Page One; the rest of the series was tucked inside. Most editors apparently accepted the reports as a fresh, factual view of the enemy. If they felt like Scott Newhall, executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, that in part, Cameron was a "receptacle for some masterly public-relations work by the officials in Hanoi," they did not say so in print.

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