The Herbert Affair

He seemed to be the perfect soldier, a hero in Korea and in Vietnam. Then he was driven out of the Army, his career ruined because he tried to prevent his superiors from concealing war crimes against the Vietnamese. That was the story a television producer persuaded his superiors at CBS should be presented to a nationwide audience. As the producer and his associates began assembling the facts, they found it changing into a very different story, one that left the reporter disillusioned and the hero threatened with decanonization. The producer here tells how the case unfolded for him, from his first, convincing interviews with Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert, through intensive researching of Herbert’s alarming charges against fellow Army officers, to a dramatic confrontation between Herbert and some of those who disputed him on the CBS program, Sixty Minutes, shown on February 4 of this year. It is a tangled story, to say the least. One of its lesser anomalies: Herbert’s book Soldier, now profitably riding the best-seller list, is published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, which is owned by CBS, the organization that has done the most to attack the book’s integrity.