Letter from Washington

For two weeks now, the Pentagon has had on file numbers of photographs of the weapons and other matériel American and South Vietnamese forces have uncovered in Cambodia. The joint moves into the Fishhook and Parrot’s Beak areas of Cambodia turned up incredible supplies of 120 mm. mortar shells, antitank mines, antiaircraft machine guns and 140 mm. rocket launchers in addition to stores of rifles and ammunition. The public information services of the Pentagon have informed the news services and newspapers around the country that these photographs are available. But as of this writing, two weeks after the word had gone out, none of the papers or the wire services had responded. (That’s not quite accurate: UPI took one picture.) The two magazines that have published the Pentagon-provided photographs are the conservative U.S. News & World Report and Human Events. Since it was to clean out these arms depots that President Nixon decided to send U.S. troops into Cambodia, this kind of photographic evidence that the mission has been successful would tend to swing opinion Mr. Nixon’s way. The lack of interest among the responsible newspapers in the country would seem to indicate a different kind of news management— the kind Mr. Agnew speaks of.

Pentagon sources also report—and there has been little or no news coverage of this—that a major side effect of the Cambodian operation has been a rise in troop morale in Vietnam. The average combat soldier is not a very complicated person. He can figure out that every weapon that is captured in Cambodia is a weapon that won’t be used against him. And as the totals of captured equipment reach the tens of thousands of tons, his spirits go up.

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For two weeks now, the Pentagon has had on file numbers of photographs of the weapons and other matériel American and South Vietnamese forces have uncovered in Cambodia. The joint moves into the Fishhook and Parrot’s Beak areas of Cambodia turned up incredible supplies of 120 mm. mortar shells, antitank mines, antiaircraft machine guns and 140 mm. rocket launchers in addition to stores of rifles and ammunition. The public information services of the Pentagon have informed the news services and newspapers around the country that these photographs are available. But as of this writing, two weeks after the word had gone out, none of the papers or the wire services had responded. (That’s not quite accurate: UPI took one picture.) The two magazines that have published the Pentagon-provided photographs are the conservative U.S. News & World Report and Human Events. Since it was to clean out these arms depots that President Nixon decided to send U.S. troops into Cambodia, this kind of photographic evidence that the mission has been successful would tend to swing opinion Mr. Nixon’s way. The lack of interest among the responsible newspapers in the country would seem to indicate a different kind of news management— the kind Mr. Agnew speaks of.

Pentagon sources also report—and there has been little or no news coverage of this—that a major side effect of the Cambodian operation has been a rise in troop morale in Vietnam. The average combat soldier is not a very complicated person. He can figure out that every weapon that is captured in Cambodia is a weapon that won’t be used against him. And as the totals of captured equipment reach the tens of thousands of tons, his spirits go up.