Q&A with The Huffington Post's Andrea Stone
Monday, June 11, 2012 at 8:43PM Andrea Stone, senior national correspondent for The Huffington Post, spent more than two decades with USA Today; she has covered a variety of stories, including U.S. troops in combat.
Q: As someone who has covered several wars, did you have a sense that the Vietnam legacy played a role in how the military waged those later wars, and if so, how?
A: As a reporter for USA TODAY, I was in the White House Rose Garden when President George H.W. Bush named Gen. Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although he will always be known as the first African-American in that position, he would later be known for the so-called Powell Doctrine. It says that military force should only be used after all else fails and then only when there is a direct threat to national security -- not just for humanitarian purposes.
Taking lessons learned as a young Army officer in Vietnam, Powell insisted that there be strong public support for going to war and that the U.S. spare no expense to overwhelm the enemy with disproportionate force. He also called for a clear exit strategy before going in. The Powell Doctrine informed the 1991 Persian Gulf War -- a short, massive blow against Iraq that liberated Kuwait even as it left Saddam Hussein to fight another day.
But it was soon discarded by the Clinton administration, which intervened in the Balkans over Powell's objections. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said to him, ''What's the point of having this superb military that you've always been talking about if we can't use it?'' I was embedded with U.S. ground forces in Albania during the Kosovo War, a conflict that NATO fought and won from the air. There was much debate over sending in those Apache helicopter gunships amid fears the American public wouldn't stand for the kind of casualties deploying the might bring. In the end, they were never used and advocates for limited war -- from the air -- won the day.
The Vietnam legacy doctrine took an even greater pummeling under President George W. Bush, when his secretary of State, Colin Powell, was put in the unenviable position of arguing for war at the United Nations under the pretense that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. I was in Doha, Qatar, at the time, reporting from U.S. Central Command headquarters. Just a few months before, I had been in Kabul, Afghanistan, where allied forces went in with a Powell-like "shock-and-awe" campaign to oust the Taliban after 9/11. It was December 2002 and most of the war correspondents had already decamped to Baghdad. It was then that the war in Afghanistan turned into just the sort of quagmire those who fought in Vietnam vowed should never happen again.
Q: Do you think their Vietnam service was a negative factor for Al Gore, John Kerry, and John McCain during their presidential bids?
A: Al Gore's service in Vietnam played a bigger part in his father's unsuccessful bid to be reelected to the Senate as a leading anti-war voice on Capitol Hill. By the time the younger Gore ran for president -- and I traveled with his running mate Joe Lieberman as a reporter for USA TODAY -- most of the focus related to Vietnam was about George W. Bush and his service during the war in the Texas Air National Guard. In the end, the controversy wasn't enough to deny Bush the presidency.
Vietnam war service was a much bigger factor for John Kerry and contributed, inconceivably to his supporters, to his resounding defeat in 2004. I wrote about Kerry's Vietnam experience for the newspaper and covered the charges by the partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that the Navy veteran lied about his record. Kerry symbolized a nation torn from within over the war. He was a decorated and combat-tested veteran with three Purple Hearts who burst onto the national stage by turning against the war, throwing away his medals and famously asking a Senate committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
Fast forward nearly three decades. Stung by right-wing charges that Bill Clinton had been a draft dodger, Democrats in 2004 thought they could easily neutralize the political Achilles Heel of the baby boomer generation by nominating a bona fide war hero in Kerry. Boy, were they wrong. What happened next would make "swiftboating" a shorthand noun for false and scurrilous political attacks. Four years later, when former POW John McCain ran for president, Vietnam was relegated again, perhaps once and for all, to the back-burner.
Having never questioned the war and taken his place as the Senate's leading hawk, McCain's service would have little impact on the campaign -- except in that it underscored for younger voters of how old the Republican candidate was and how, compared to the post-boomer Barack Obama, he came from another, passing generation.
Q: If a veteran of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars were to seek the White House in the future, do you think their service would be viewed in a favorable light, and if so, why?
A: I do think so, but I no longer believe war service is the resume builder it once was, especially for Democrats. I covered the pre-Swift Boat swiftboating of Sen. Max Cleland -- a triple amputee from Vietnam whose GOP opponent, the current senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, unseated him with TV ads picturing him with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In 2006, I was on the campaign trail in Illinois with Tammy Duckworth, an Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq and was one of several recent veterans running that year. She lost and, after a stint at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is running again for Congress against a Tea Party incumbent, Rep. Joe Walsh.
Rep. Patrick Murphy, the first Iraq War veteran elected to Congress, found that credential went only so far during his rematch with Republican Mike Fitzpatrick. The two-term congressman, whose 2010 re-election campaign I covered for Politics Daily, was unseated. In April, the former military lawyer lost a bid for the Democratic nomination for Pennsylvania attorney general against a political newcomer with no military record, former Lackawanna County prosecutor Kathleen Kane.
At a time when those under the age of 40 grew up without the fear of being drafted and fewer and fewer Americans, let alone elected officials, know anyone in or have served in the all-volunteer military, having a war record has become less important for those with political aspirations. That said, despite the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, the veterans of the post-9/11 wars have been treated far better than those who returned from Vietnam. Back then, opponents of the war often failed to separate the war from the warrior, even though many who fought had no choice. Today, because few want to return to the more egalitarian draft, there is a greater appreciation for the sacrifices of those who voluntarily join the military and fight for the rest of us. But that also means voters are less likely to consider military service as a must-have on a politician's resume.
Q: What has and hasn't changed for women war correspondents over the course of your career?
A: First, I don't see myself as a war correspondent as much as someone who has covered wars as part of a larger career that has included national news and politics. That said, I would say that war reporting has become a common choice for many young women, a "no-brainer" if you will, for a generation of journalists that grew up assuming they could cover anything. I imagine it was tougher for the women of the Vietnam generation, who were just getting off the society pages and filing lawsuits to be treated equally with men in the newsroom.
One challenge for the current generation of Western women combat correspondents is navigating the cultural norms and expectations of the Muslim world, where many of the most recent conflicts have taken place. As a woman reporter in the Middle East, I’ve always felt like “the third sex” because I could go where native women could not but still wasn’t considered one of the men. But aside from knowing not to shake hands with a devout Muslim and dressing appropriately for the setting -- abayas and scarves to lower your profile -- the rules are the same as for men.
And the main one is how to keep yourself safe. Despite all the ink and gigabytes used up when CBS correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Cairo during Arab Spring protests, I agree with my friend Tina Susman. A veteran combat correspondent who was kidnapped in Somalia and is a former Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Baghdad, she says women journalists are less concerned about being raped as maimed or killed by a bomb -- just like their male counterparts.
Q: As someone who worked for USA Today for many years and now works for the Huffington Post, do you think daily newspapers can survive?
A: I do, but not in the form of dead trees. For years, newspaper people -- including myself -- fought against the digital tide, to no avail. Newspapers, with a few exceptions, will not exist as we knew them growing up. USA TODAY, which once was the cutting-edge technology of its day, is struggling to survive. That saddens me for I spent most of my career there. But I left nearly three years ago because I saw the handwriting on the wall and it was etched in digital. I believe we should worry less about the form that our news arrives in and more about the content of it.
While The Huffington Post under AOL has made an admirable effort to hire journalists -- and gave veteran print journalist David Wood enough time and space to write a series on wounded soldiers that one the website its first Pulitzer Prize -- it remains to be seen whether the resources and ambitions of such websites can match traditional print media's ability to get the news. HuffPost sets the standard for social media and interactive, two-way journalism. There is much to be said for this democratizing trend. But I also reject the notion that everyone is or can be a journalist and I worry that readers don't always see the distinction -- especially in a world where bad information as well as good can go viral in instants. And then there is the changing philosophy from mainstream objectivity toward "point of view" journalism. Older journalists may question the trend but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Q: Anything else you'd like to tell us?
A. I appreciate your asking for my take. And since you two make such a great father and daughter duo, I thought you might find this piece I did about my father's World War II service interesting. It doesn't touch on such lofty themes as presidential decision-making as does your book. But it does address, in personal terms, another "haunting legacy" of Vietnam: how a generation soured by that conflict has come to reclaim the stories of their parents' "good war" and, in the process, find a piece of themselves.
Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.
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