Media coverage's influence on American public opinion during the Vietnam War

Impact of Media Coverage on the Vietnam War Then we got into the Vietnam War, which is still causing arguments involving: the people who supported it but didn’t fight in it, versus the people who didn’t support it but did fight in it, versus the people who didn’t support it and didn’t fight in it, versus the people who supported it and might have had to fight in it if ever the Indiana National Guard had been called up, which was of course a distinct possibility, and so on. – Dave Barry, 1997

Introduction The epigraph above reflects the diversity of opinions about the war in Vietnam, but these conflicting perspectives did not occur overnight but were rather the result of media attention. The nationwide jubilation and celebrations that followed America’s victory over the Axis powers in World War II had already faded when the country became involved in yet another costly and bloody conflict halfway around the world in Korea during the early 1950s. It is little wonder, then, that the American people had become weary of grisly daily news reports describing new casualty figures from the War in Vietnam by the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, the patriotic zeal that lingered among the Greatest Generation kept support for America’s involvement in Vietnam relatively high until the mainstream media in general and Walter Cronkite in particular argued that the war protesters were right and the War in Vietnam was wrong. The purpose of this study was to provide a systematic review of the literature concerning the impact of media coverage on the prosecution and outcome of the Vietnam War, including pivotal moments such as the Tet Offensive and Walter’s Cronkite’s condemnation of the war in 1968. Finally, a summary of the study’s findings and their implications for media coverage of armed conflicts today are presented in the conclusion. Review and Analysis By any measure, the mainstream media had an enormous impact on the prosecution and ultimate end of the Vietnam War. The increasingly relentless coverage of the conflict helped to sway public opinion as the war progressed, but it is clear that the United States had become mired in a war from which there was no easy extrication. This predicament was also characterized by several factors that made the Vietnam War unique, including most especially the facts that at the time, it was the longest war in American history at the time and it was the last military engagement in which the country still used mandatory conscription to fill its military ranks. In truth, no other event in U.S. history, except for the Civil War, was so profoundly divisiveness for the American people, and the process began nearly as soon as American’s involvement in Vietnam. For instance, according to Schulzinger, “Controversy over the war brought vast changes to the U.S. in the 1960s. The war profoundly affected every institution in American life: universities, Congress, the presidency, the Democratic Party, the armed forces, labor unions, religious organizations, and the mass media” (p. 215). The controversy that was involved in the War in Vietnam was multifaceted, but focused primarily on the morality of a global superpower exerting its military might against a third world country, as well as the inordinate numbers of African Americans who were being drafted to prosecute the war. In fact, The Vietnam War saw the highest proportion of blacks ever to serve in an American war. During the height of the U.S. involvement, 1965-69, blacks, who formed 11 percent of the American population, made up 12.6 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam (African Americans in the Vietnam War, 2018)..

While the impact of the war was broad-based across America, its effect on the mass media and vice versa transformed in fundamental ways as the war progressed and the body toll mounted. Although the evening news initially reported a steady stream of yet “another American killed in Vietnam today” during the early phases of the war, the general public’s attitude about the war remained relatively positive and most middle-class Americans tended to believe their leaders were doing the right thing – or at least what they perceived to be the right thing. In this regard, Schulzinger adds that, “At the beginning of U.S. involvement in the war most Americans trusted their leaders to make appropriate choices, and the public held most large organizations in high regard” (p. 215). In truth, ordinary Americans had no real reason to believe otherwise at this time, especially since the so-called “Silent Majority” was riding a wave of prosperity under the leadership of the U.S. government. For example, Schulzinger points out that, “The prosperous white middle class created by the post-WW II economic expansion maintained an abiding faith in the future” (1997, p. 215)..Moreover, despite evidence of the smolderings of the looming Civil Rights Movement during the early 1960s, a majority of Americans of all races and classes believed that the U.S. government had succeeded in containing the global threat represented by the Soviet Union and the burgeoning Warsaw Pact since the end of World War II (Schulzinger, 1997). This consensus was largely the by-product of a mainstream media that ignored or downplayed any perceived wrongdoings by the federal government in favor of positive reporting that played to the middle-class American audience. Indeed, even the vast majority of public authorities believed that the United States was pursuing an appropriate course of action in a hostile world where the enemy was known and the Cold War lines in the sand were clearly drawn due in large part to the positive coverage by the mainstream media (Schulzinger, 1997). The complexities of the geopolitical sphere that existed during the Cold War were overlooked to a large extent in favor of boiling down the issues for consumption by the American public in ways that encouraged support for the government and marginalized anyone who believed otherwise as being unpatriotic at best and communists at worst (Schulzinger, 1997).. By the late 1960s, though, as the body count in Vietnam continued to climb and tens of thousands of more troops were added to the swelling ranks of the armed forces, public attitude about the War in Vietnam began to change to significant ways. For instance, Schulzinger reports that, “By 1968, this landscape had changed beyond recognition. A sizeable portion of the public no longer believed that government officials waged the Cold War properly. Many thought that the war in Vietnam had become a burden which the country no longer could afford” (1997, p. 216). The mainstream media contributed to this changing perception by labeling Americans who supported the war as “hawks” and those who opposed it as “doves,” with the former advocating an even greater military presence in Vietnam to “win it once and for all” while the latter calling for a gradual reduction and eventual cessation of America’s involvement in Vietnam through a peaceful, negotiated settlement with the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front, popularly known in the United States as the “Viet Cong” (Schulzinger, 1997). As noted in the introduction, though, the American public was not necessarily divided into just two camps of thought about the Vietnam War; rather, public sentiment about the war existed along a continuum that was defined by the hawk and dove extremes, with some Americans falling somewhere in between. Nevertheless, even as late as January 1968, a majority of Americans, the hawks, still believed that the Vietnam War was winnable, and the United States should do whatever was necessary to achieve this military and political outcome (Schulzinger, 1997). Such “hawkish” thinking would continue to characterize American public opinion until February 1968, when the war began a downward spiral from which there was no escape. Just as D-Day demarcated the Second World War in the minds of the American public, so too did the Tet Offensive that raged between January and February 1968. For instance, according to Clifford (2007), “In every American war, one battle defines the conflict in our national memory. Regarding the Vietnam War, one need only mention the Tet offensive to evoke memories of courage but not of victory. Tet has become the symbol of the futility, if not the outright failure, of our war in Vietnam” (p. 125). Notwithstanding the costly stalemate that ended hostilities in the Korean War, outright failure in war in general was anathema to mainstream Americans who were accustomed to prevailing over evil wherever or whenever it raised its head in the world, but the Faustian American victory achieved in the battle of the Tet Offense underscored the harsh reality that America was not going to be able to win the Vietnam War regardless of how many more American lives were expended in the attempt. While Americans at home watched the events of the Tet Offensive unfold in near real-time on television, it became increasingly apparent to many viewers that this was not supposed to happen because the military and political leaders had insisted all along that not only was America winning the war in Vietnam, the end of the victory tunnel was clearly in sight (Hammond, 1998). A number of events would transpire in the months and years to come, but the Tet Offensive representing the beginning of the end of the hawkish majority in the United States. In fact, even mainstream Americans who did not fully understand what had happened during the Tet Offensive quickly came to realize that U.S. forces in Vietnam were not winning the war so much as they were sitting ducks for an enemy with seemingly inexhaustible reserves. In this regard, Hunt (2010) emphasizes that during the Tet Offense, “NLF forces attacked cities all over South, including Saigon, but are beaten back with heavy losses. American media and public opinion register shock” (p. 7). In response to the Tet Offensive and the other high-profile problems that were being reported in Vietnam, including a growing heroin epidemic among U.S. troops and rampant marijuana use, CBS dispatched the country’s most respected anchorman, Walter Cronkite (so trusted he was known to many Americans as “Uncle Walt”) to South Vietnam to determine the facts about what was actually happening on the ground. Following his return to the United States, Cronkite ended a special CBS episode on the Tet Offensive with his empirical observations about the war that would have repercussions across the country and even into the Oval Office. The transcript of Cronkite’s conclusion that follows below was yet another shock to an American consciousness that was searching for the truth amid a sea of governmental half-truths, distortions, cover-ups and outright lies about the war in Vietnam: To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. . . . To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. (as cited in Friedman, 2010, p. 3) Acknowledging Uncle Walt’s powerful sway over American public opinion, following Cronkite’s broadcast President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have confided to his staff that, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1. President Lyndon B. Johnson watching Walter Cronkite’s historic denouncement of the Vietnam War: February 27, 1968 Source: http://www.iancfriedman.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Screen-shot-2010-02-26-at-11.07.35-AM.png In addition, Cronkite would further galvanize American public opinion a few months later when he denounced the police brutality at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in Chicago when he became “visibly upset” during the broadcast as thousands of demonstrators were savagely beaten on national television (Mitchell, 2009). It would be nice at this point in the paper to report that the impact of the press on the war in Vietnam was so powerful that Johnson recognized the futility of prosecuting the war in Vietnam any further as a result of Cronkite’s indictment and that the war was immediately ended and all American troops were brought home safely. Unfortunately, the historical record makes it clear that the war would drag on for several more bloody years, but the impetus to bring about a swift end to the war gained further momentum as the mainstream media continued to report the ugly side of the war to an American public which had become numb from the bad news. Lawmakers too were loudly calling for a sensible solution to America’s involvement in Vietnam, but it was clear by this point that the United States had tied itself in a geopolitical knot from which there was no easy escape (Hunt, 2010). Moreover, the Vietnamese knot became truly Gordian in dimensions in early 1969. Besides the Tet Offense, one of the more pivotal events that would transform any remaining hawks into doves occurred in March 1969 when the American public first became aware of one of the darker sides of the Vietnam War as details of the My Lai massacre were reported by the American and international press. The fact that ordinary, red-blooded American troops were capable of viciously murdering innocent Vietnamese old men, women and children and that U.S. Army authorities had concealed the massacre for a full year sent yet more shock waves through the U.S. psyche during this especially turbulent period in the country’s history. In this regard, Willbanks (2014) reports that: On March 16, 1968, U.S. soldiers from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment of the 11th Brigade, Americal Division swept through the village of My Lai. By the time the day was over, more than 500 elderly men, women, and children had been slaughtered. For many Americans, the My Lai Massacre became a symbol for all that was wrong with what they considered an immoral war. (p. 104) Indeed, even the most zealous hawks became hard-pressed to defend the United States’ role in Vietnam after My Lai even following President Nixon’s ordering the release of Lieutenant William Calley, the Charlie Company commander, from a military stockade and transferred to a house arrest status, also as reported by Uncle Walt as shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2. Walter Cronkite reporting on Lieutenant William Calley’s release from a military stockade where he had been imprisoned for his role in the My Lai massacre Source: “The Real Story of the My Lai Massacre” [video] Other pivotal events, however, also occurred in early 1968 that helped reshape the American public’s views about the war following Richard Nixon’s assumption of the U.S. presidency in January 1969. To his credit, Nixon inherited a nightmare of global proportions in Vietnam and he sought to identify viable strategies to end the war without appearing to engage in any actions that would even have the appearance of a humiliating defeat for the United States, and this effort would define his early presidency from the outset (Hunt, 2010). While he searched for a final solution to end the war, Nixon pursued the gradual replacement of American forces with Vietnamese in a process termed “Vietnamization,” but as the media accurately concluded at the time, this was simply prolonging the national agony and did not represent real progress in ended the war (Hunt, 2010). In fact, as the months passed, Nixon would escalate the war further still through by bombing suspected Vietnamese camps and supply lines in Laos and Cambodia (Hunt, 2010). It is difficult to say whether the mainstream media played a role in minimizing America’s expanded actions in Southeast Asia at this time any further or simply managed to exacerbated them, and this issue is still being debated today. For instance, Heubner (2005) points out that, “Many scholars and other observers of U.S. press coverage of the Vietnam War have criticized the media for showing either too much or too little” (p. 150). The reality of the situation at this point in history, however, was that television was just coming into its own as a media resource and there was in fact a great deal to cover when it came to the military and behind-the-scenes action in Vietnam. It is readily understandable, then, that a majority of Americans were receiving their information about the war in Vietnam from television rather than newspapers for the first time in history, and that the executive branch of the federal government came to view the mainstream media as an enemy (Vietnam and TV News, 2011). This governmental perspective of television as the enemy was further reinforced when gruesome events such as the execution of an alleged Viet Cong prisoner by the South Vietnamese National Police Chief was presented on the prime time news across America, with the iconic image depicted in Figure 3 below riveting the nation’s attention of just how medieval the situation on the ground was in South Vietnam.