Danger: Revisionists at work. Raymond Bonner doesn’t want to talk about the lumps he picked up in the early 80s in El Salvador. But the two papers that made his life difficult back then have taken to massaging the past, each faulting the other but not itself.
From the point of view of the White House, the timing of this article was intolerable. Bonner wrote that the carnage appeared to be the responsibility of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, the first trained by American advisers. The same edition of the Times carried the state of the union address in which President Reagan vowed that “America will not conduct ‘business as usual’ with the forces of oppression” (though Reagan had in mind communist oppression). A day later the administration was required to certify to Congress that human rights in El Salvador had continued their steady advance, thereby qualifying the regime for tens of millions more dollars in American support.
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The 1982 elections notwithstanding, the war in El Salvador ground on for another decade without contradicting Bonner’s first impressions of it. Scott Simon, who covered the war for National Public Radio, told us last week, “The rebel movement grew out of systematic and deliberate atrocities by government troops. You couldn’t be a reporter in El Salvador and miss that story. If you missed that story you weren’t any kind of reporter.”
Doug Cassel, a Chicago lawyer, was a special counsel to the commission. He told us what it discovered in El Mozote: bones of about 200 identifiable victims in the hamlet itself and another 300 nearby, plus remains of an uncalculated number of other victims, their skeletons torn apart by shells.
We called Rosenthal about this, and he was furious. “It’s not on this paper he needs to be vindicated. It’s all bullshit!” roared the Times’s former top editor, now a semiretired editorial columnist. “The implication Mr. Bonner was fired or pushed out from the New York Times is a lie. He never was. It’s a myth established by something called the Columbia Journalism Review. I never received a request from anybody in or out of government to remove him. That’s a total falsehood. He was unhappy with working in New York–unfortunately.”
“Everybody was calling me and saying, ‘Don’t you feel vindicated?’” Bonner told us this week, when we reached him at his new home in Warsaw. “I don’t want to become some sort of hero to anyone. That’s the point I was trying to make [to Scott Simon]. What happened to me is not that significant.”
