Operation Passage To Freedom - Media and Public Relations

Media and Public Relations

The United States reaped substantial public relations benefits from the mass exodus, which was used to depict the allure of the "free world". This was enhanced by the comparatively negligible number of people who voluntarily moved into the communist north. The event generated unprecedented press coverage of Vietnam. Initially however, the press coverage was scant, and Admiral Sabin bemoaned the lack of promotional work done by the US Navy to publicise the evacuation among the American media. At one point, a journalist from the Associated Press travelled from Manila to Haiphong, but was ordered back by superiors on the grounds that Americans were not interested in the subject.

However, over time, the media interest grew. Many prominent news agencies sent highly decorated reporters to cover the event. The New York Times dispatched Tillman and Peggy Durdin, while the New York Herald Tribune sent the Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporters Marguerite Higgins and Homer Bigart. Future US embassy official John Mecklin covered the event for Time Life. The press reports presented highly laudatory and emotional accounts of the mass exodus of Vietnamese away from the communist north. Time Life called the mass migration "a tragedy of almost nightmarish proportions ... Many went without food or water or medicine for days, sustained only by the faith in their heart."

In the American Catholic press, the migration was given front page coverage in diocesan newspapers. The accounts were often sensationalist, demonizing the communist Viet Minh as religious persecutors who committed barbaric atrocities against Catholics. Our Sunday Visitor called the "persecution" in Vietnam "the worst in history", alleging that the Viet Minh engaged in "child murder and cannibalism". San Francisco's Monitor told of a priest whom the Viet Minh "beat with guns until insensible and then buried alive in a ditch". Newark's The Advocate posted an editorial cartoon titled "Let Our People Go!", depicting mobs of Vietnamese refugees attempting to break through a blood-laced fence of barbed wire. Milwaukee's Catholic Herald Citizen described two priests who had been chained together and "suffered atrocious and endless agony". Other papers depicted the Viet Minh blowing up churches, torturing children and gunning down elderly Catholics. One paper proclaimed that "the people of Vietnam became a crucified people and their homeland a national Golgotha". The Catholic media also ran stories about Buddhist refugees who converted, hailing it as proof of their religion's superiority.