Arthur Sylvester retired on February 1, 1967, after six years on the job as McNamara’s senior press aide. He published an essay in The Saturday Evening Post ten months later in which he brutally mocked the Pentagon press corps: „I don’t know a newsman who has served the government as an information officer in the Pentagon who hasn’t been dismayed at the evidence of shabby performance by what he used to think of with pride as his profession.… For six years I watched cover stories [promulgated by his office] go down smooth as cream, when I thought they would cause a frightful gargle.“
There was no learning curve among the men in the Pentagon running the war.
—Seymour Hersh, Reporter, (New York: Vintage Books, 2018), 62.
Note that Sylvester is describing a Pentagon press corps as unquestioningly swallowing lies throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.