The Fromson File

President Obama’s swift response to the McChrystal interview in Rolling Stone avoided a disaster that could have crippled his Administration. That he did not was a sign, not of his weakness but his strength. It was his ability to evaluate the challenge and quickly recover with the imaginative choice of General David Petraeus to succeed the ousted commander in the field that was so compelling and contrary to the image that has been emerged of the president in recent months.

Like all stories, there probably is another side to it that in time will emerge. The question is why did as shrewd a soldier as McChrystal choose to self-implode in an off-beat publication with an interview that he had to know would wreck his career? Was it his frustration with having too many so-called experts streaming into Afghanistan and reporting back to Washington with their own perceptions of what was happening on the ground?

Special Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a man of strong opinions and insufferable arrogance, is not the kind of a man a decorated general with an enormous ego of his own could tolerate for long. Ambassador Karl Eichenberry, the former commander of military operations in Afghanistan, made no secret of his own displeasure with the way the war was being fought. He repeatedly second-guessed McChrystal in his communiqués, both to the White House.and the State Department from where Hillary Clinton had to be heard.

All of this perhaps was compounded by the presence of too many journalists who were embedded with McChrystal’s army. They were critically unable to see the downside, both of the General’s personality and strategy.

Less than 24 hours before President Obama fired McChrystal, I attended a preview of a new and widely-praised documentary entitled “Restrepo” The film was produced and directed by veteran journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Heatherington who won the Grand Prize at the Sundance Festival this year. They spent nearly a year, attaching themselves to a platoon of B Company, 2d Battalion of the 517th Regiment of the 187th Airborne Brigade. To digest their unit identification and to have audiences understand what an engaging and courageous number of American soldiers were was the core of the film. What made it so powerful was the interviews with individual soldiers, away from the field of combat but re-assigned later in Italy. It gave the young men an opportunity to reflect about what they had endured in their own calm words. That enriched the texture of the film. Viewers could come to appreciate the dangerous and risky nature of the mission to which the young soldiers had been assigned. But we were never told why they were sent there, and (I’m not sure) neither were the soldiers. Neither Junger or Heatherington ever questioned whether the operation was worth the life of one American, nor did we hear any such reflections of that nature out of the mouths of the soldiers. Restrepo, by the way, was the name of a medic in their platoon who was killed early during their march into the mountains.

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By the end of the day, the career of General Stanley McChrystal will be over. If not, President Obama will be sowing the seeds of even more confusion and disagreement over his policy in Afghanistan than he has had until now.

Following the emergence of the controversial interview with Rolling Stone magazine in which McChrystal showed little diplomacy in describing other Administration officials involved in Afghan policy, the President has been left little wiggle room. He cannot possibly allow the impression of dissension to continue without appearing to be weak or indecisive, not at a time when so much negative news about Afghanistan is appearing on the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers almost every day and McChrystal’s most vocal ally is President Hamid Karzai.

It reminds me of the last major confrontation between a U.S. president and one of his top generals in the midst of the Korean War. It was Truman versus MacArthur. Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur in which the four-star general thought he was bigger than the nation’s elected leader. Granted McChrystal has not gone that far. He has not even criticized President Obama. But where discretion was called for, the commander of all forces in Afghanistan did not remember his history.

In October 1950, President Truman had a war on his hands in Korea that was growing in unpopularity when he ordered MacArthur to meet him on Wake Island in the middle of the Pacific. Truman wanted to remind his general who was in charge. The message did not take. Six months later, after assuring the President that the Chinese Communists would not enter the Korean War and then they did, MacArthur publicly advocated the use of nuclear weapons against the Chinese and threatened to bomb the mainland. Truman had enough. He fired the general. It was shocking news across the nation. The man from Missouri was pitted against a genuine military hero of the Pacific War who had accepted the surrender of Japan on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri.

It ignited a nationwide storm of criticism, mostly from Republicans. I was on my way to Korea as a GI draftee when MacArthur was greeted by a tickertape parade in Manhattan. House Speaker Joe Martin then invited MacArthur to address the U.S. Congress that was televised nationally. In his closing remarks that have remained in the history books, the general declared: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

McChrystal’s plight may be something less serious, except to say the controversy over Afghanistan is mounting at a time when McCrystal has chosen to draw swords with just about every prominent member of the Administration. The General does not seem to have as many allies and the President, faced with a multitude of other problems, is running out of time. The principle of civilian authority is at stake.

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It’s difficult to realize how good Southern California had it back in the days when Channel Two — then KNXT — introduced television viewers every weekday night “from the mountain to the sea” to the Big News. It was the hour-long creation of Sam Zelman, then its news director. It was a tribute to the viewers’ intelligence. Sam employed Joe Benti, Maury Green, Ralph Storey and Bill Stout. to report and analyze the news. A first- rate group of producers and editors made KNXT the ideal model of what a television station’s news programs ought to be. Bob Wood, the station manager who later would become the president of CBS News in New York and give the nation “All in a Family,” recognized the value of Zelman’s concept. John Hart was named to open a Washington bureau and Bob Simmons to report regularly from Sacramento. No one complained about budgetary problems back then. KNXT management and the network bosses willingly underwrote the model. But then something happened to television news departments elsewhere several years later when they lost their souls to a man named Frank Magid.

They used to call him the news doctor, but when Magid first showed up Los Angeles and other major television markets across the country in the late 1960s, serious news directors used to cringe and say, here comes Doctor Death. But their bosses, the station managers, were different. They lacked Bob Wood’s vision. Their ears perked up when Magid showed up. He was like a visiting potentate. He brought with him, they thought, a cure for sagging ratings of their morning and evening news programs. Forget that it was a lack of imagination. Simple, said the television consultant from Iowa: forget all the serious stuff and substitute it with stories about crime, sex, gossip, scandal and acrobatic whales. Throw in weather, traffic and sports. Then put gabby, sometimes perky, anchormen and women in front of the cameras to read the teleprompters on the false premise that they actually were responsible for reporting the news. That was the ticket. Who cared about the public or journalistic excellence. The stations made money and so did Magid.

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The obituary page is the one I’d just as soon not read. It usually announces bad news. The latest obit certainly was one of them to me. The headline said, “Frederick C. Weyand, 93, Vietnam Commander Dies,”

Having reported on more than a dozen wars, I’ve come in contact with a countless number of generals. But Fred Weyand was a memorable one, an acquaintance that I daresay blossomed into a friendship, beginning with our first conversation at a cocktail party during the height of the Vietnam war in August 1967. Here’s the way, in part, how I described it in an Op-Ed piece, titled Name That Source, that appeared in the New York Times on December 11, 2006:

“…He whispered to me, “Westy just doesn’t get it The war is unwinnable. We’ve reached a stalemate and we should find a dignified way out.” He was referring to General William Westmoreland, the commander of United States forces in Vietnam…” Weyand was willing to expand his views with me and R.W. (Johnny) Apple of the New York Times when we flew down to the Mekong Delta to talk to him off the record. We agreed and it was a pledge that we kept for more than 40 years until days after Apple died when I convinced the general to release us from our commitment of confidentiality out of respect for Johnny.

Here, in part, is what he told us:

“I’ve destroyed a single division three times. I’ve chased main force units all over the country and the impact was zilch. It meant nothing to the people. Unless a more positive and more stirring theme than simple anti-Communism can be found, the war appears likely to go on until someone gets tired and quits, which could take generations.”

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