64. Letter From the Assistant Director, Africa, United States Information Agency (Reinhardt) to all USIA Public Affairs Officers1
You are scheduled shortly to receive a 16mm color print of the excellent 55-minute “CBS Report” by Charles Collingwood, telecast in the U.S. on December 2, entitled A Timetable for Viet-Nam.3 As the circular4 announcing this to you makes clear, the Agency attaches particular importance to this film. May I ask you please to give it your personal attention.
A number of you have noted in the past that Viet-Nam was not a lively issue in your country, and that for USIS to do much programming on the subject was only to risk focusing attention on it where now there was little or none, possibly with unfavorable results as far as attitudes toward the U.S. were concerned. If this is still your judgment of the situation, you may choose not to program this film, or at any rate to program it only to a very limited degree.
But I would like to be very sure that you are sure of this—you, your Ambassador and other members of the Country Team. My own impression, I must say, is that Viet-Nam is on people’s minds almost everywhere these days, with the U.S. role not widely understood or respected, to put it mildly, and that effective programming by USIS [Page 139] to correct misimpressions is therefore very much needed almost everywhere.5
If effective programming on the topic is indeed called for in your country of assignment, then A Timetable for Viet-Nam should be useful to you. It strikes us, at any rate, as being an unusually effective TV-style report on how South Viet-Nam really is becoming a viable entity politically, socially, economically and militarily, and on how the President’s plans for U.S. military disengagement therefore stands a reasonable chance of success—and not just as a disguised defeat.
The report is not in any sense an official briefing. CBS made it, and aired it to the American people, quite independently of any element of the U.S. Government. It is frankly critical of some aspects of the U.S. and South Vietnamese performances. It is not dogmatic; it acknowledges uncertainties, problems, dangers. Its predictions of success are heavily qualified. Its handling of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese is measured, not shrill. All of this makes its basic points the more persuasive, we find.
Would you in due course please give me your evaluation of the usefulness of this film. If there were differences of opinion about it, within the Country Team, what were they? How did you try to program the film, if at all? (Note in the circular that television rights have been obtained for several African TV posts; CBS withheld these rights only for those countries where it felt it could market the program commercially.) What were the results?—how many showings, where, to what kinds of audiences, with what reactions from them?
Sincerely,
- Source: National Archives, RG 306, Director’s Subject Files, 1968–1972, Entry A1–42, Box 12, Director’s Office—Circulars 1970. Limited Official Use; Official-Informal. The letter is PAO Letter #58.↩
- Reinhardt handwrote “(each PAO in Africa)” next to the salutation line.↩
- Shakespeare described the “CBS Report” during his April 7 testimony, in support of USIA’s FY 1971 budget request, before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations: “This was a 1-hour program, with CBS sending over a group of cameramen and people headed by Charles Collingwood. They spent 6 weeks in Vietnam. They came up with a documentary called ‘Timetable for Vietnam’ which in my judgment was very forceful in presenting the American position in Vietnam and the validity of it. It had a very high credibility factor because it was not made by USIA.” He continued: “Normally a documentary of that sort is marketed by CBS in routine fashion throughout the world. In this case they gave us the direct projection rights for minimal cost. We have had extraordinary success with it, prestige showings on the part of our Ambassadors, showing at our America houses, and things of that nature.” (Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce, the Judiciary and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1971 Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations House of Representatives Ninety-First Congress Second Session, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1970, p. 63)↩
- Not found and not further identified.↩
- An unknown hand underlined this sentence.↩
- Reinhardt signed “John” above this typed signature.↩