American Journalism Review, April/May 2005
Does No Mean No?
A former journalist says she doesn’t want to be interviewed, but then talks freely. Should the interviewer have used her remarks?
By Natalie Pompilio
Natalie Pompilio is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
One of a reporter's basic tasks is to keep a source talking, to get past the initial refusals and hesitations and score an interview.
But what if the source is a former journalist who believes her conversation with a columnist is just a friendly talk between colleagues, not an on-the-record interview?
T.T. Nhu, a one-time San Jose Mercury News columnist who went on to work as a press secretary for Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, says she was reluctant to return calls from Scott Herhold, a Mercury News columnist, but she did so out of politeness. (The pair had never met at the newspaper.) Herhold wanted to talk about Nhu's decision to move back to her native Vietnam, a choice partially driven by her disappointment over the November presidential election results. Nhu told him she didn't want to be interviewed.
Then she proceeded to talk. In a highly quotable way. "I didn't say the magic words 'off the record,' because I'd already said 'no' to him," Nhu says. "Because he's a colleague in the newspaper business, I spoke to him frankly like I'm speaking to you. I didn't know he was writing it down."
Herhold did take down what Nhu had to say, not hiding the fact that he was typing, but, he says, "I wasn't advertising it either." Herhold devoted his November 28 column to Nhu and her decision to leave the country. The piece was important, Herhold says, because "it said something about the way people felt after the election of George W. Bush. I was trying to be sympathetic to her. I'm not quite sure why she's reacted this vehemently." He acknowledged Nhu's reluctance to talk in the first line: "T.T. Nhu really didn't want to talk to me."
Herhold then quoted Nhu as saying, "My animosity to America has been growing. America is such an incredible bully. It's doing the same things in Iraq that it did in Vietnam. America always comes down on the wrong side of things."
"It's bullying coupled with the vast ignorance of its people, who are anesthetized by television," he further quoted Nhu. "It's all about Halliburton, it's all about oil, it's all about Israel... People miss the subtleties, the nuances. All they can see is freedom on the march."
Nhu, who learned she had been the focus of the column when she saw a copy of the newspaper in an airport trash bin, was outraged. She fired off a letter to the editors, calling herself the "unwilling subject" of the column, pointing out two factual errors and saying that "it would be appropriate for the paper to publish this letter, without comment in a prominent place noting that the paper accepts the corrections and that it and Herhold regret his errors and his inappropriate use of information received that he knew that it was intended to be off the record."
The Mercury News did publish a correction for the two factual errors. But not the letter.
Herhold says he did nothing wrong. (Nhu admits that he quoted her accurately.) Although Nhu initially said she did not want to talk, "I stayed on the line and asked questions," Herhold says. "I did not say this was off the record or anything of the sort."
"One of the things you have to understand when interviewing is, 'What is the sophistication of the person on the other end of the line?'" he says. "A lot of the time, you give them a break because they're not sophisticated [about journalism]. I think T.T. Nhu is plenty sophisticated."
Herhold disagrees with Nhu's argument that she was a private citizen making a private decision to move out of the country. Her positions as a columnist and a press officer make her "of some high profile," he says. And, he says, Nhu signed off the conversation by saying something he thought implied it was OK to write about her: "The sense of it was, 'Take that for what you will.' To me, that was a clear understanding that she knew what I was doing."
(Herhold's editor, Rebecca Salner, left AJR a message saying she believed an interview with Herhold was sufficient for this story.)
Mercury News general assignment reporter Dan Reed, a friend of Nhu's, says he initially encouraged her to talk to Herhold, but she insisted her decision to move was private--not something she wanted to discuss publicly. That's why Reed was surprised to see the column. And when he heard Nhu's version of events, he was also upset.
"It struck me that if it were on the record, he would have been able to more freely fact-check things. The fact that mistakes were made suggests to me, again suggests, that perhaps he was not being forthcoming about the fact that he was going to write this," Reed says. "If he was not being sneaky, he would have interviewed her directly. I don't think he did that."
Edward Wasserman, who teaches journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, says Nhu's story provided "a way of making a point the columnist wanted to make so it was a very attractive column to write." But the somewhat incendiary tone of Nhu's words would have concerned him if he were editing the piece. "I think I would be somewhat concerned that this person has kind of unburdened herself as if to a colleague. I would be a little bit concerned that she was certainly being imprudent."
At the same time, he says, "I'm sympathetic. He didn't have a clear embargo. He didn't have a clear no-go... She didn't use the magic code words"--off the record-- "so the questions then become, 'Was there any ambiguity in his mind?' and 'Where is it that you can, in the course of an interview, confirm this is on the up and up? You can ask for a spelling, you can verify details, the kind of thing that makes it clear to the person you're talking to that you're trying to get the facts right. It seems to me the most he can be reproached for is choosing to benefit from the ambiguity."
Paul McMasters, First Amendment ombudsman for the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, agrees it's the journalist's responsibility to ensure that interview subjects know whatever they say could end up in print.
"The public should assume a journalist is never off-duty. The journalist should always make clear that they're taking notes and are prepared to write a story or a column based on the conversation going on at that moment," McMasters says. "That's why there should be a sign in the newsroom that everyone sees once or twice a day, 'Make sure both sides are playing by the same rules during an interview.'"
Speaking generally, McMasters says every journalist has been "in that complicated terrain where one side thinks one thing and the other side thinks another. Most journalists go by the creed 'When in doubt, leave it out.'.. On the other hand, I think every journalist has been in a situation where a source knew fully well what he or she was saying, regretted it and tried to shift the blame to the journalist."
Nhu, who has now moved to Vietnam, maintains she was "ambushed." She considered legal action against the newspaper but decided not to pursue it since she was leaving the country. What she really wants, she says, is an apology, in print.
"I want the paper to acknowledge the fact that when someone says 'no,'" she says, "they should respect that decision."
###
Ethiopia Forum, March 28,2010.
There were some Americans who welcomed the Baby-lift, including American aid workers in South Vietnam. Sister Susan McDonald cared for 100 infants at a Saigon orphanage. As the North Vietnamese moved closer to the city, living conditions worsened. Food was in very short supply, and gasoline was so expensive that McDonald would buy it by the quart. The orphanage depended on supplies from overseas, and when these -- including food -- were no longer forthcoming, the children's lives were at risk. McDonald had been looking for a flight to move the children in her care to safety, but commercial flights had ceased. When the military invited her to participate in Operation Baby-lift, she gratefully accepted.
On April 26, 1975, McDonald boarded a plane with 200 Vietnamese children and 14 caretakers. The plane stopped in the Philippines to get the sickest children to a hospital, and after more than a week in a refugee camp, the rest of the children continued their journey in a seated cargo plane. The babies were placed in small cardboard boxes lined with blankets. The two hundred children landed in Seattle at the end of a long and strange journey.
Tran Tuong Nhu, one of a small number of Vietnamese Americans living in the Bay Area at the time, volunteered to assist with Baby-lift arrivals in San Francisco's Presidio. She and the other volunteers were surprised to hear children talking about their living family members. Many of the children did not appear to be orphans at all.
Nhu, Miller, and others approached the federal government and adoption agencies with their concerns about the situation. When they received no response, they contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights and filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the federal government, and the adoption agencies.
Operation Baby lift. In Vietnam, poor families would sometimes place children in orphanages if they could not feed them. But in such cases, parents did not intend to give them up, and would often visit their children. Many parents, especially of Amerasian, were concerned about their childcare's safety. In some cases, parents put their children on a Baby-lift plane, and later left Vietnam themselves as refugees, with the intention of finding their children later. "Many of [the adoption records] lacked the consents from the parents," said Miller. When Mai Thi Kim brought her daughter Hiep (Heidi Bub) to the Holt Adoption Agency in Danang, she was given no papers whatsoever.
A worker with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Saigon, Bobby Nofflet, recalled the tumultuous days of Baby-lift: "There were large sheaves of papers and batches of babies. Who knew which belonged to which?"
The Baby-lift lawsuit argued that many of the children in the airlift were not orphans, had been given up under duress during wartime, and that the U.S. government had an obligation to return them to their families. Attorney Tom Miller said that he brought Vietnamese birth parents into the courtroom to plead for their children, but to no avail. Judge Spencer Williams eventually threw out the Baby-lift case, declaring it to be 2,000 separate cases, and not a class action suit. "He sealed the records, and told us we could not contact any of the Vietnamese families and let them know where their children were," said Miller.
Only in cases where parents had found their children independently could Miller's group represent them. Eventually only twelve children were reunited with their Vietnamese parents, but only after many years and lawsuits. Many children were caught in court battles between their birth parents and their adoptive parents.
For a number of Baby-lift adoptees, finding their birth parents is essentially impossible, because no records exist. In recent years, many have established connections with each other based on their shared experiences.
Part 1
People & Events: Operation Baby lift (1975)
Operation Baby-lift, A U.S government plan to transport Vietnamese orphans out of their war-torn country began in disaster. The very first flight to leave Saigon, on April 4, 1975, crashed several minutes after takeoff, killing 138 people, most of whom were Vietnamese children. Critics in Washington questioned the Ford administration's political motivations. Others criticized the government for assuming that the children would be better off in America. But perhaps most disturbing was that many of the children were not orphans at all. snatching
During the final days of the Vietnam War, the U.S. government began boarding Vietnamese children onto military transport planes bound for adoption by American, Canadian, European and Australian families. Over the next several weeks, Operation Baby-lift brought more than 3300 children out of Vietnam.
As the Communists advanced into South Vietnam, rumors about what they would do were rampant. Many South Vietnamese were desperate to escape. Children fathered by American soldiers were rumored to be in particular danger. Heidi Bub's birth mother, Mai Thi Kim, feared that her daughter would "be soaked with gasoline and be burnt." For a mother desperate to protect her mixed race child in the face of an advancing enemy, a chance to send the child to America was a ray of hope.
From the start, Americans debated the Baby-lift's purpose, execution and justification. American Ambassador to Vietnam Graham Martin claimed that the evacuation "would help reverse the current of American public opinion to the advantage of the Republic of Vietnam." President Gerald Ford made use of the photo opportunity, standing before television cameras on the tarmac at San Francisco airport to meet a plane full of infants and children.
Bay Area attorney Tom Miller, who would become involved in litigation over the Baby-lift, called it "one of the last desperate attempts to get sympathy for the war." A Congressional investigation suggested that there was "a total lack of planning by federal and private agencies." Newspaper headlines asked, "Baby-lift or baby-snatch?" and "The Orphans: Saved or Lost?" And a Vietnamese orphan character appeared in the satirical "Doonesbury" cartoons of G. B. Trudeau.
Operation Baby-lift some Americans asked whether fear made it right to take children from their homeland. A Vietnamese American journalist, Tran Tuong Nhu, wondered, "What is this terror Americans feel that my people will devour children?" Some felt that guilt may have been a motivation. Relief agencies in Vietnam were accused of being "Saigon's baby business." The New York Times quoted a Yale psychologist, Dr. Edward Zigler, who said: "We've been ripping [the children of the airlift] right out of their culture, their community... it's some kind of emotional jag we are on."
From US Agency for International Development, Operation Babylift Report 1975:
"On April 29, 1975, a class action suit was filed in the Federal District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Vietnamese children brought to the United States for adoption. The suit seeks to enjoin adoption proceedings until it has been ascertained either that the parents or appropriate relatives in Vietnam have consented to their adoption or that these parents or relatives cannot be found.
The Complaint alleged that several of the Vietnamese orphans brought to the United States under Operation Babylift stated they are not orphans and that they wish to return to Vietnam.
The action has been brought by Muoi McConnell, a former Vietnamese nurse, who allegedly interviewed Vietnamese children at the Presidio in San Francisco. The suit is supported by an ad hoc group called The Committee to Protect the Rights of Vietnamese Children. Spokesmen for the Committee are Thomas R. Miller, an attorney, and his wife, Tran Tuong Nhu, who is the head of an organization known as the International Children’s Fund. . . .
INS and the adoption agencies should be able to establish clear orphan status for most of the children brought to the United States under their auspices. Where records have been destroyed, such as those lost in the crash of the C-5A, the process of verifying the true orphan status of certain of the children may be time-consuming. There may, of course, be other children who were not transported in haste to the United States with inadequate documentation to vouch for parental consent to their adoption or to demonstrate that they are without parents or relatives. The search initiated by the INS will seek to clarify all these cases. . . .
Special Problems: Public Reactions
Not everyone was in favor of the babylift. There were allegations at the time, often based on faulty information, that the U.S. Government was engaged in a wholesale effort to remove Vietnamese children from their culture, to save them from communist ideological influence, to satisfy the desires of Americans wishing to adopt children, and to gain sympathy in the Congress for last-ditch appropriations for military and humanitarian aid to the tottering Government of Vietnam.
None of these allegations approaches the truth. The fact is that the departure of these children from South Vietnam was the continuation of an intercountry adoption program that had been going on for some years. The movement of the children was accelerated due to the growing crisis in Vietnam. But, with negligible exceptions, the children met the criteria for intercountry adoption and virtually all of them were in some stage of processing when the decision was taken to speed up the movement. . . ."
Gloria Emerson, whose book on Vietnam, Winners and Losers, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1978, offers a sharply critical view of “Operation Babylift” in this excerpt. The effort to “rescue” thousands of Vietnamese children on the eve of the U.S. evacuation was mounted by a number of U.S.-based agencies and organizations, including Holt Children’s Services, the Pearl Buck Foundation, World Vision, and the International Social Service. It was widely publicized and hotly debated after a military transport plane carrying around 300 passengers crashed on April 4, 1975, shortly after take-off from Saigon. More than 100 children were killed, along with at least 25 of their adult escorts. For other views of “Operation Babylift,” see the text of the New York Times ad that ran on April 7, 1975, the “Statement on the Immorality of Bringing South Vietnamese Orphans to the United States, April 4, 1975,” and Agency for International Development, Operation Babylift Report, 1975.
Operation babylift became a carnival: tearful, middle-class white women squeezing and kissing dark-eyed children, telling reporters that their new names would be Phyllis and Wendy and David. It is not over yet. A spokesperson for AID, the government agency providing military aircraft for the private agencies bringing the children here, and said it was an “open-ended operation.” The arrival of nearly 2000 children from Vietnam—I won’t call them orphans since we now know that some of them did indeed have parents—has aroused some of the emotions felt in 1973 when the American prisoners of war came home at last. Many people, so moved and so grateful, forgot that if the United States had not gone on bombing there would have been no prisoners. This time, only two years later, there is the same self-congratulatory spirit, a feeling of winning something at last, the need to prove to ourselves what decent people we really are. It is almost forgotten during these excited, evangelical scenes at airports that it is this country that made so many Vietnamese into orphans, that destroyed villages ripping families apart, this country that sent young Vietnamese fathers to their deaths. Now we have decided the Vietnamese we will “save” and “love” must be very pliant, very helpless. . . .
Now the welfare of a few thousand children has become a most successful propaganda effort for us to defend and support the diseased government of Nguyen Van Thieu despite the opposition to him in the South. Babies are a nicer story than the 26 million craters we gave South Vietnam, nicer than the 100,000 amputees in that wretched country, more fun to read about than the 14 million acres of defoliated forest and the 800,000 acres that we bulldozed. It does not matter at all that on television a Vietnamese foster mother sobbed bitterly and strained for a last look at the child she had cared for as Vietnamese infants were put on a plane at Tan Son Nhut. There are clearly no attempts being made to find foster parents in Vietnam who could take a child; we do not want to give money for that. . . .
Vietnamese living in the United States have tried to reason that all children in their country must be helped and this can best be done by ending the war. The first step would be to stop sustaining the government of Thieu. “You have been killing us with your kindness for twenty years,” Le Anh Tu, a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman living in Philadelphia, says. On a recent local radio talk show, called the “Saturday Night Special,” she asked listeners in favor of adoption if they really cared for the welfare of Vietnamese children, if they would be willing to return the children once peace came. The answers were shocked refusals at such an idea. . . .
We will never have the happy ending we want. President Ford’s chief refugee coordinator, Daniel Parker, the administrator of AID, suggested at a congressional hearing that 3000 to 4000 more Vietnamese children be airlifted to the United States. The confusion is immense. The argument grows a little louder, but not loud enough.
On the day of the crash of the U.S. C-5A transport plane carrying 243 children and 43 accompanying adults, a South Vietnamese army lieutenant spoke his mind. “It is nice to see you Americans taking home souvenirs of our country as you leave–china elephants and orphans,” this officer said. “Too bad some of them broke today, but we have plenty more.”
Above from The New Republic, April 26, 1975 pp.8-10.
USAID Report 1975
Background
For the past several years, seven private international and U.S. adoption agencies (Holt International Children’s Services—Holt; Traveler’s Aid-International Social Services of America—TAISSA; Friends for All Children—FFAC; United States Catholic Conference—USCC; Friends of Children of Vietnam—FCVN; Pearl S. Buck Foundation—PBF; World Vision Relief Organization—WVRO), licensed by the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, have been arranging for the adoption of Vietnamese orphans in the U.S. While AID provided some general financial support for four of these agencies, the agencies themselves were responsible for selecting orphans qualified for adoption, obtaining unconditional releases from legal guardians, obtaining the consent of the Vietnamese Government, obtaining U.S. visas, and selecting qualified U.S. parents. State agencies and state courts must, of course, ultimately approve adoptions. From 1970 to 1974, over 1,400 adoptions of Vietnamese children in the United States had been arranged this way. . . .
Operation Babylift was initiated on April 2 in response to the emergency situation resulting form the communist military offensive in South Vietnam. Prospective adopting U.S. parents were concerned that Vietnamese orphans already selected for adoption, who might be physically endangered by active hostilities, would not be able to leave Vietnam expeditiously if normal, lengthy Vietnamese exist procedures and U.S. immigration procedures were followed. . . .
Orphans Processed
Information obtained from the adoption agencies or processing centers indicates that a total of 2,547 orphans were processed under Operation Babylift. Of this total, 602 went on to other countries, leaving a total of 1,945 in the United States.
Information received from the adoption agencies brings out a number of interesting facts about the orphans processed: over 91% were under the age of eight; 57% were male and 43% female; and 20% or 451 orphans were racially mixed of which 173 (39.2% of the racially mixed) were of Black paternity. . . .
One disappointing figure is that only 34 (19.6%) of the 173 Black-fathered orphans were placed in Black homes. . . .
Deaths
Of the 2,547 orphans processed under Operation Babylift, there were nine deaths; seven whose ages were known were 20 weeks of age or younger. Considering that 51% of the orphans were under two years of age and that many of the orphans were in poor physical condition, the medical services provided during Operation Babylift were very effective. . . .
Special Problems: Adoption Lawsuit
On April 29, 1975, a class action suit was filed in the Federal District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Vietnamese children brought to the United States for adoption. The suit seeks to enjoin adoption proceedings until it has been ascertained either that the parents or appropriate relatives in Vietnam have consented to their adoption or that these parents or relatives cannot be found.
The Complaint alleged that several of the Vietnamese orphans brought to the United States under Operation Babylift stated they are not orphans and that they wish to return to Vietnam.
The action has been brought by Muoi McConnell, a former Vietnamese nurse, who allegedly interviewed Vietnamese children at the Presidio in San Francisco. The suit is supported by an ad hoc group called The Committee to Protect the Rights of Vietnamese Children. Spokesmen for the Committee are Thomas R. Miller, an attorney, and his wife, Tran Tuong Nhu, who is the head of an organization known as the International Children’s Fund. . . .
INS and the adoption agencies should be able to establish clear orphan status for most of the children brought to the United States under their auspices. Where records have been destroyed, such as those lost in the crash of the C-5A, the process of verifying the true orphan status of certain of the children may be time-consuming. There may, of course, be other children who were not transported in haste to the United States with inadequate documentation to vouch for parental consent to their adoption or to demonstrate that they are without parents or relatives. The search initiated by the INS will seek to clarify all these cases. . . .
Special Problems: Public Reactions
Not everyone was in favor of the babylift. There were allegations at the time, often based on faulty information, that the U.S. Government was engaged in a wholesale effort to remove Vietnamese children from their culture, to save them from communist ideological influence, to satisfy the desires of Americans wishing to adopt children, and to gain sympathy in the Congress for last-ditch appropriations for military and humanitarian aid to the tottering Government of Vietnam.
None of these allegations approaches the truth. The fact is that the departure of these children from South Vietnam was the continuation of an intercountry adoption program that had been going on for some years. The movement of the children was accelerated due to the growing crisis in Vietnam. But, with negligible exceptions, the children met the criteria for intercountry adoption and virtually all of them were in some stage of processing when the decision was taken to speed up the movement. . . .
Attachment A: ADOPTIONS—VIETNAM
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/archive/AIDOBR.htm
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