I-Search Paper (What events in journalism affected the Vietnam War )

Introduction

Ended nearly 45 years ago, The Vietnam War remains one of the most controversial conflicts in the history of the United States. Born and raised in Vietnam, I’m deeply interested in the history of my homeland and how it came into conflict with one of the world’s biggest superpowers. Throughout my readings and learning of the war, what struck me was the shift in American public opinion and the presence of journalists and war correspondents in the war. While I had an inkling of what may cause such a phenomenon as most of my historical education on this topic was taught in Vietnam, history is not the same everywhere else. By 1973, with the withdrawal of U.S. forces, more than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the conflict, more than half of them were civilians. The war divided both countries, as the Vietnamese battle each other for unification and Americans protesting for peace or war, leaving a bitter taste in both societies that is still visible today. How did things come to be? What contributed to this divide in American support for the war anyway? My biggest guess was mass media and the attitude of journalism at the time.

The United States was plagued with social unrest throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as civil rights leaders questioned the very nature of equality and democracy. The maturity of television further impacted the image of the U.S. government, as journalism takes on a new face with its new medium, turning to investigative journalism, research, interviews, and analytical essays rather than official press conferences. As we covered in Module 25, television had matured to the point that there were 52 million TV sets in American homes, one in almost nine out of ten households, and war is good for the journalism business. Often dubbed as “The First Television War”, the conflict in Vietnam was regarded as a hallmark in journalism history with the use of portable hand-held video recorder and daily reports that shows American the realities of war on the ground. Many journalists who visited South Vietnam during the war were not primarily interested in the culture or the way of life practiced there but in the conduct of the war and the disparity between official accounts of it and what journalists were seeing on the ground. The war was widely known as an uncensored war, as Americans saw firsthand not only the devastated landscape but the fighting, the casualties, the suffering right on TV. War footage, pictures, dozens of articles all attributed the fact that the nature of journalism at the time contributed to the retreat and failure of the U.S. Government. CBS and Associated Press, for example, detailed how American companies destroyed an entire Vietnamese village, burning the huts and hustling people out of their homes. The sources I found during my initial research showed that camera crews were much closer to the front than their WWII counterparts. In World War II, morale was high, therefore cameramen stayed in non-combat areas, showing the more upbeat and happier side of the war. Combined with the fact that soldiers see more average days of combat than WWII, combat areas were more brutal and constant.

As I started my research, most articles pointed me towards two primary sources that answer my question, the pictures of the atrocities at My Lai, and Walter Cronkite’s call for the U.S. government to pull out of Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive. So I wondered, how did these two events affect the outcome of the Vietnam War? Why was the American public perception of this war so different from previous conflicts? Did social unrest at home cause Americans to public distrust the government? The research and sources I found gave me more than just answers. They gave me an adventure back in time, to see how and what Americans at home experienced during the war.

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The Search Story

I began my search with a simple google search, with key terms such as “journalism in the Vietnam era,” “television in the Vietnam war.” The first website that provided me with ample information was the blog of the U.S. National Archives, recommended to me by the professor. It was an article going over how Vietnam was the first war in history that television became a large role in reporting. According to the article, news networks strived to have exciting, dramatic, and impactful stories. To achieve such a feat over their competitors, they’d have to exploit the most important event of their time, the Vietnam War. The war saw journalists on-site, recording and reporting the footage back to the United States only a few days later, effectively allowing Americans to live the war in their living rooms. The National Archive also provided some videos of newsreels during WWII and Vietnam. The videos were suspiciously upbeat, positive, and do not convey the negatives that the articles have pointed out. The article did point me to a great starting point that would eventually lead me to choose one of my primary sources, the My Lai Massacre in 1968 and the pictures that revealed the crimes U.S. soldiers committed. Before choosing my first source, which I decided would be an image, I read more and more about My Lai. From the Wikipedia page (again for the hundredth time), Britannica’s amazing article of the tragedy, and History.com’s summary on it, but I couldn’t find any good pictures that answered my question. I then stumbled across PBS’s website, which provides colored images of My Lai, taken by Official Army photographer Ron Haeberle. His photographs were published to the public eye in November 1969, in which they would become key evidence in the subsequent investigation. It is quite obvious that the photo answered my question. There were many more graphic photos but out of concern for my classmates, I chose this instead because it captured how the Vietnamese people saw American troops, and how American citizens saw the unfiltered nature of war.

Primary Source #1: Pictures of My Lai

As we have covered in module 25, My Lai was an atrocity. After a lengthy cover-up by military officials and the subsequent whistleblowing by a veteran named Ron Ridenhour, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story to the public in November 1969. Now, I have read the Wikipedia page about My Lai countless times. I have seen the same pictures of dead civilians lying across the fields more times than I can count, I read about the bravery of Hugh Thompson and his helicopter crew during the massacre. Yet I couldn’t get the pictures out of my head. All the bodies of old men, women, children, infants, all on the ground, lifeless. Another human being, dead under the hands of war and hate. The reason why it’s so interesting to me is the conduct of U.S. forces in the war, and the expectations Americans had at home. History.com provided a compact summary of the event, and the various picture of the atrocities was shown to the American people on television. After the story broke out, photographs of the atrocities surfaced. The image I included is one but many pieces of evidence of the massacre. Outside of killing civilians, the American people see soldiers burning huts, hustling people out of their homes, and destroying their livelihood. Even with the best intentions, it was perhaps shocking to know that they are not the heroes they think the U.S. government is like in WWII. There was no cheering, no people were welcoming them, and yet they burn these people’s houses down, fueling the cycle of hate. The image above made both the American people and soldiers question why they were there. There was little heroism, if any, in their actions. By the time these images are shown to the public eye, the support for the war was already atrociously low. It answered my question of why American support for the war was slipping, but it left me unsatisfied. What caused the change in public opinion? The conflict that gained so much support at the beginning has now bitterly divided the country. What happened? Well, further readings lead me to believe that my next source lies in the 1968 Tet Offensive, or rather, the report of one respected journalist in the aftermath of the offensive.

Primary Source #2: Walter Cronkite’s editorial

While I did my research and reading through papers that talked about the impact of journalism on the war, I noticed a recurring name. “Walter Cronkite”. I was curious as to why this individual was credited as the man who changed a nation. I read multiple articles, from Huffington Posts to Washington Posts, Wikipedia to an amazing thesis paper by a University of Maine student, they all allude to Walter’s famous editorial on CBS. After looking around and searching for who this man was, I figured if he had a great influence on mass media, his views would have been critical in shaping American public perception of the conflict. As I read more and more, I came to learn about how a journalist's subjective views allegedly shifted the course of the war and affected even president Lyndon Johnson himself.

Until the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite believed that the war was justified and perhaps necessary. He believed what the government had told him, that the war was nearly over. There was light at the end of the tunnel, the Viet Cong could not fight anymore, our boys were going home. He was an esteemed journalist as he covered WWII and became the anchor of “The CBS Evening News” throughout the Cold War. He was a hawk, a supporter of the war, like so many of his colleagues in the journalism world. Who could blame them, war means good business. But a trip to Vietnam in the aftermath of the deadly 1968 Tet Offensive saw the old-school journalist a changed man. He had often scoffed at young journalists trying to be as cynical as they can be, but he cannot deny the fact that the end of the conflict was nowhere in sight after his visit. He could not believe that the Vietnamese were capable of an attack on this scale until he saw it firsthand. After all, the president has been saying that they are winning the war. Named the most trusted man on television at the time, Cronkite’s editorial forever changed America’s perception of the war, and so I made it my second primary source. In an obituary on July 18, 2009, just one day after his passing, NPR posted his closing thoughts on CBS’s February 27th, 1968 broadcast. As I listened to the broadcast and watched the colored clips on YouTube, I noticed a sense of melancholy in his tone and frustration in his eyes. In his speech, which was part of an editorial called: “Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?” Cronkite delivered the words that many historians attributed to changing the American public opinion of the war:

To see one of the most trusted men on television share his beliefs, and realizing that the end was nowhere in sight flipped the American perception. The government had lied, the war was not over, their sons would not be going home anytime soon, or at all. Following Cronkite’s report, President Lyndon B. Johnson was reported saying “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”. Several weeks later, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.

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Reflection

Reflecting on the topic, I found myself deeply informed about the American experience during the war. Investigative journalism is a powerful tool to keep our leaders accountable. The unfiltered broadcast of the war and its controversies changed the face of the nation forever. While not all Americans trusted the government before the war, the main sentiment was that the U.S. was doing the right thing, stopping the evil spread of communism. What they found was denying the independence of a nation, and involved themselves in a civil war in which they have no stakes. Countless lives lost, atrocities committed, and nearly a decade of social unrest, the war proved to be influential in American society. It could not have happened without a free press and mass media. Americans cannot trust what their government said anymore, and a free press is necessary for a democracy. The conflict changed the face of war itself. Subsequent U.S. conflicts after Vietnam saw very limited and censored reporting, with the Gulf War and War in Afghanistan shrouded in mystery, rarely broadcasted to the public eye like decades prior.

I learned that historical research is an arduous yet enjoyable task. As a history enthusiast, doing historical research allows me to know more of the things I didn’t know. The research process begins with me asking about television, but it evolved to asking about journalism as a whole and how Americans perceived the war. I have to be honest, I find it challenging to comprehend and relate to what Americans saw on television because it feels so distant, so upsettingly hollow. Or perhaps we are so used to violence on television nowadays that pictures of atrocities don’t have that much of an impact anymore. But for the Americans in the Vietnam era, it did make an impact, and people took action. The primary sources answered my curiosity as to why American society was in so much conflict domestically, and the connection between journalism and the realities of war on television proved to be a formidable force in influencing public opinion.

In an age of disinformation, misinformation, and a president that accuse anything he doesn’t like as “Fake News”, it is important to look back and understand why a free uncensored press and informed citizens can change a nation. As philosopher George Santayana goes: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Primary Sources #1: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mylai-massacre-evidence/

Primary Sources #2: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106775685 (Audio)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn2RjahTi3M (Video)