Media, Military, and Protest in the Vietnam War Era

Introduction

The American Vietnam War (1965–1975) was a complex affair that encompassed many themes and issues—from the fight to contain Communism, which was very much on the minds of many Americans, to the problem of the draft and rising protests against the war. As perception of the war changed over time with the help of media interventions, both the myth of the war and the reality of war intersected and became interwoven in a complicated tapestry of conflicting ideas, rumors, and facts. The Vietnam War was simultaneously a war of political incompetence, military atrocities, and government lies, and also a war in which heroism still appeared and American ideals were pursued.

The Role of the Media

Following the conclusion of the "Good War," American soldiers were idolized, their heroics and charisma captured in iconic images like the hoisting of the flag at Iwo Jima or the kiss between a sailor and a nurse in Times Square at the war's end. The life of the soldier was romanticized, and numerous Hollywood films were produced that helped to create the myth of the American soldier and of World War II as the "Good War." However, with the Vietnam War, all of that changed. The Cold War had drained much of the enthusiasm for military conflict from the American consciousness, and a rising distrust of the government was destroying whatever myths of heroism still remained.

Beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, followed by the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy later in the same decade, the 1960s proved to be a turbulent time. A war abroad was the last thing Americans wanted—especially when there was so much conflict at home. Moreover, a war in the jungles of Vietnam was far different from a war in the European theater, and far less glamorous, thanks to real-life footage captured by photojournalists who were able to bring the war home in a far more realistic way than had happened in the 1940s.

The Pentagon Papers

The media also helped to leak information regarding the government's cover-up of how the war was actually progressing. While Presidents Johnson and Nixon tried to give the impression that the war was going well and that America was winning against the Communists, the Pentagon Papers—obtained by Daniel Ellsberg and leaked to the New York Times—told a different story. They revealed untold carnage, thousands of American lives lost, little actual ground gained, and immense waste, cost, and sacrifice. The media thus painted the war in a way that was deeply damaging to the myths that had been constructed during World War II.

Matters were made worse when the government responded to these revelations with underhanded tactics—including ordering "a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist to find discrediting information about Ellsberg."¹ This was the beginning of a series of crimes that would eventually embroil the President in the Watergate scandal and thoroughly disillusion the American public of whatever trust remained in government authority.

My Lai

The My Lai massacre was another revelation that shaped the perception of the Vietnam War, and the media was again instrumental in exposing it. The slaughter of Vietnamese men, women, and children by American soldiers was a travesty of the sort the U.S. had simply not witnessed during the "Good War." There was nothing to romanticize in such reports. My Lai embarrassed the American public and triggered resentment toward soldiers among those who were already opposing the war. The media helped shape the image of the Vietnam soldier as rabid, murderous, and inhumane—a stark contrast to the virtues and honor the public wished to project on the world stage.

My Lai and the Pentagon Papers together caused Americans to lose respect for soldiers, for the military, and for the government that had drawn them all into this conflict and had then proceeded to lie about how well it was going. The visuals provided by the media—of dead Vietnamese children and elderly civilians—showed the grim face of war and left a lasting scar in the public consciousness.

Military Failures and Unconventional Tactics

The United States had not been prepared to fight a guerrilla-style campaign in the jungles of Vietnam. The U.S. military sought to wage a World War II–style conflict in a terrain that was unfamiliar and held by an elusive enemy. Rather than the pin-down-and-attack campaigns it preferred, the military found that Vietnam presented a challenge unlike anything it had previously encountered. To counter the guerrilla war it faced, the U.S. turned to unconventional tactics—most notably Operation Ranch Hand—employing chemical warfare in hopes of gaining an advantage over the jungle terrain.

Operation Ranch Hand

Operation Ranch Hand was designed to defoliate the jungles and fields of Vietnam, thereby stripping away the North Vietnamese forces' key advantage: the terrain. The most commonly used chemical agent was Agent Orange, which was dropped over Vietnam from 1965 to 1971.² Agent Orange had severe adverse health effects on American troops, including increased rates of cancer. By the end of the 1970s, veterans were filing claims against the government for the health consequences they were suffering as a result of the U.S.'s use of chemical warfare. This only deepened the public fallout from the war and reinforced the perception that the military was not operating wisely or responsibly in Vietnam.

The Tet Offensive

The Tet Offensive of 1968 also played a pivotal role in reducing public support for the war. It completely caught the Americans by surprise and led directly to President Johnson's decision not to seek re-election.³ The Tet Offensive demonstrated that the U.S. was out of its depth and exhausted in terms of military strategy and preparedness—a situation unlike anything experienced during the relatively brief American involvement in World War II.

Congressman Henry Reuss, a Democrat from Wisconsin, expressed his total shock as reports of the Tet Offensive began to circulate at home. He angrily asked, "What the hell's going on here… I thought we were winning this war!"⁴ Images broadcast through the media, showing South Vietnam engulfed in chaos as the enemy attacked, added to the collective sense that the U.S. military was ill-equipped to handle the Vietnamese Communists. The war had been dragging on and people at home were exhausted by it. Johnson, as the war's most prominent political champion, became its first major political casualty; Nixon would ultimately become the second.

Conclusion

The Vietnam War had been an attempt to contain Communism, the defining ideological threat of the Cold War era. Vietnam had taken that Cold War and made it hot—which was more than many Americans were willing to bear, especially given that this war was unlike any the U.S. had previously fought. As the military turned to new and controversial tactics such as chemical warfare, the media reported on the war in ways that generated profoundly negative feelings at home. The revelations of the Pentagon Papers, the horror of My Lai, the shock of the Tet Offensive, the health consequences of Agent Orange, and the tragedy of Kent State all converged to create the perception that the Vietnam War was not only unwinnable, but shameful. Ultimately, it was this collapse of public trust—driven in large part by media exposure—that spelled the end of American involvement in Vietnam.

Notes

¹ Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (Oxford University Press, 1997), 292.

² Schulzinger, A Time for War, 193.

³ Michael H. Hunt, A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 85.

⁴ Schulzinger, A Time for War, 262.

⁵ Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 204.

⁶ Nguyen, Hanoi's War, 174.