VIETNAM WAR
The Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, was America’s
longest, most contentious foreign war. Four U.S. presidents
deployed more than two million combat personnel to South
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, at a peak force in 1969 of
543,054 combatants, resulting in 58,152 U.S. combat deaths
and 153,303 seriously wounded, not including civilian casualties. Indochinese casualties on both sides were in the millions. Yet, Vietnam received scant press attention until the
United States took over the war in 1965. Americans’ ignorance of the growing U.S. commitment could be viewed as
a major failure of American journalism.
Despite many challenges, Vietnam War correspondents
continued a tradition of outstanding American war reporting and were honored by many Pulitzer Prizes, the foremost
American award for journalistic excellence. Press casualties in Vietnam, especially among risk-taking photographers, outpaced those of any other American war.
Following withdrawal of French colonial rulers from
Vietnam in 1954, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
saw Southeast Asia as the place to contain the spread of
global Communism. His administration financed the anticommunist regime in South Vietnam of nationalist leader
Ngo Dinh Diem. Colonel Edward G. Lansdale helped Diem
to take control of the southern capital of Saigon. However,
Diem’s government was handicapped by political corruption and lack of popular support. Despite more American
weapons, advisors, and aircraft (U.S. pilots secretly flew
combat missions) over the next several years, Diem’s army
failed to stop Communist rebels, who viewed Diem as a
puppet of U.S. imperialism.
In 1960 the rebel guerrillas, nicknamed the Vietcong,
pledged to overthrow Diem and to reunify Vietnam. Communist North Vietnam sent weapons and political organizers into the south over a network of footpaths known as the
Ho Chi Minh Trail. President John F. Kennedy responded
by increasing the contingent of U.S. military advisors to
16,300 and by sending new helicopters and armored personnel carriers.
A military coup in late 1963 left Saigon in chaos. The
Vietcong took control of most of the countryside. Bolstered by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), the Vietcong
threatened South Vietnamese cities, so President Lyndon
Johnson authorized sustained bombing of North Vietnam
(Operation Rolling Thunder) and sent U.S. combat troops to
South Vietnam in 1965. A large contingent of Western correspondents, photographers, and television crews accompanied the troops, and Vietnam became front-page news.
The U.S. military commander, General William C.
Westmoreland, believed that mobile force deployment by
helicopters and overwhelming firepower eventually would
deplete the enemy, so he disregarded the political struggle.
The Vietcong viewed its struggle as primarily political and
exploited the propaganda value of civilian casualties to win
support of the Vietnamese peasants. Three years of bloody,
indecisive combat caused the United States to realize its
attrition strategy would not work, but it took another five
years to withdraw from the conflict, leaving the Saigon
government to defend itself in 1973. Saigon capitulated in
1975. Political relations between reunified Vietnam and the
United States were normalized in 1995, but the war’s legacy
of doubt and regret remains.
The Diem Regime
From 1960 to 1965 only a handful of American wire service
and newspaper correspondents regularly covered events in
Saigon.
On January 2–3, 1963, the biggest setback of the war to
date for Diem’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)
at the village of Ap Bai in the Mekong Delta showed that
the Vietcong were improving their tactics and weapons.
The U.S. Army advisor at Ap Bai, Lieutenant Colonel John
Paul Vann, leaked his criticism of ARVN leadership to Neil
Sheehan of United Press International (UPI). As ARVN
setbacks and political resistance to Diem mounted, Military
Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in Saigon hardened its stance toward the Saigon press corps. In July 1964,
Barry Zorthian, MACV’s chief public affairs officer, tried
to regain journalists’ confidence with his new “Maximum
Candor” press policy. Free travel and tours of Vietnam
were provided for several dozen newspaper editors. But
candor slowly gave way to obfuscation, and a credibility
gap emerged between the official MACV line and eyewitness accounts. The correspondents came to regard the daily
MACV briefings in the Rex Hotel in Saigon as little more
than public relations exercises, which by 1966 acquired the
irreverent nickname “five o’clock follies.”
Diem was a Roman Catholic who suspected Buddhists
of collaborating with the Vietcong to overthrow his government. He used the Mat Vu secret police of his brother,
Ngo Dinh Nhu, to persecute Buddhist pagodas. Malcolm
Browne’s Associated Press (AP) wire photo of the ceremonial self-immolation of Buddhist monk Quang Duc in
Saigon on June 7, 1963, stunned newspaper readers around
the world and won a Pulitzer Prize for Browne in 1964.
Unmoved, Diem continued his repression, and more monks committed ritual suicide for the cameras. The Mat Vu targeted the western media for reprisal. The Diem regime’s
most strident critic, David Halberstam of the New York
Times, feared for his life and went into hiding. Halberstam’s
reporting was honored with a Pulitzer Prize in 1964.
U.S. Escalation
By December 1965, Johnson increased U.S. forces in
Vietnam to 184,300, which were followed by hundreds of
American journalists, all hunting for a story. On March
20, 1965, AP reporter Peter Arnett and photographer Horst
Faas saw ARVN troops carrying gas canisters into combat.
The gas turned out to be non-lethal tear gas used to control
civilian crowds. MACV refused comment. The AP released
the story two days later. Media sensationalism about illegal
“poison gas” could have been averted if MACV had disclosed use of the gas. Both Arnett and Faas accompanied
troops often into the field for their pictures and stories. In
1965, Faas won a Pulitzer Prize for his combat photography
in South Vietnam. The following year, Arnett won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Westmoreland believed that superior U.S. technology
eventually would win a war of attrition, so he sent “search
and destroy” missions to wipe out enemy units. On August
3, 1965, a Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) television news crew accompanied one such mission. Millions
of American viewers were shocked by correspondent Morley Safer’s so-called “Zippo lighter” filmed report showing Marines nonchalantly burning the village of Cam Ne
near Danang. Military leaders felt the report made U.S.
soldiers, not the Vietcong, look like immoral aggressors.
MACV accused Safer of manipulating the situation, but
Safer actually had deleted some violent scenes from his
report. Westmoreland wanted to clamp down on the media,
but the Pentagon feared a hostile response and continued
with voluntary news guidelines and pandered to journalists
who made the military look good.
Beginning in January 1966, a national television audience watched the war policy debate of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democratic Senator
J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. Fulbright had brokered
the president’s war powers in the Congress, but now he had
second thoughts. The proceedings had little effect on public
opinion, and Congress waited another three years to limit
war appropriations.
Late in 1966, detailed dispatches and photographs
filed from North Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi by Harrison Salisbury, assistant managing editor of the New York
Times, showed devastated civilian areas and untouched
defense works, which contradicted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s claims about “surgical” bombing strikes.
The administration counterattacked by accusing Salisbury
of near-treason. A board of publishers caved in to this pressure and in 1967 revoked Salisbury’s Pulitzer Prize for
his Hanoi reporting. Months later the architect of Rolling
Thunder, McNamara, repudiated the bombing campaign to
a Senate subcommittee, to the disbelief of hawkish senators. The admission cost McNamara his job.
Turning Point: The Tet Offensive
Despite Westmoreland’s confident declarations about a vanquished foe, the Vietcong proved strong enough in January
and February 1968 to attack simultaneously in dozens of
cities and military outposts throughout South Vietnam. A
Vietcong suicide squad held the U.S. Embassy in Saigon for
more than six hours. On February 1 in Saigon, AP photographer Eddie Adams and National Broadcasting Company
cameraman Vo Suu photographed General Nguyen Ngo
Loan, chief of South Vietnam’s national police, executing
a Vietcong officer. Adams’ photograph dominated newspapers the next day and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. In Hué,
Communists held a fortress known as the Citadel for twentyfive days of the most savage fighting of the war. Later were
revealed the mass graves of nearly three thousand Hué citizens murdered by the Vietcong during its political purge in
the city. Despite admitting it had been caught off guard by
the enemy offensive, MACV claimed tactical victory during Tet. For a time, Americans patriotically rallied around
their flag, but disillusionment soon set in.
Westmoreland believed the attacks on cities masked the
enemy’s real intention to capture the remote U.S. mountain base at Khesanh near the demilitarized zone separating North and South Vietnam. He reinforced the Khesanh
garrison and prepared emergency replacements. When the
NVA attacked in strength, Westmoreland ordered saturation bombing of the perimeter—the most intensive strategic
bombing campaign to that date in the history of warfare.
When the enemy withdrew after a nine-week inconclusive
siege, the base was abandoned, triggering charges that
Westmoreland had wasted the lives of U.S. servicemen to
defend a meaningless outpost. Westmoreland was replaced
by General Creighton W. Abrams in June 1968.
Westmoreland never forgave the media, particularly
television, for doubting his assessment of the Tet Offensive.
In 1982, he filed a $120 million lawsuit against CBS News
for libeling him in a documentary, The Uncounted Enemy:
A Vietnam Deception. CBS based its report on claims of
former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Sam Adams,
who said the general had intentionally underestimated
enemy strength prior to the Tet Offensive in order to justify
his optimism. After eighteen weeks of testimony in a New
York courtroom, CBS settled out of court. However, a pall
on Westmoreland’s reputation lingered.
CBS television news anchor Walter Cronkite personally
inspected the Tet action and returned to New York convinced of the war’s futility. On February 27, 1968, Cronkite
broke with journalistic objectivity by broadcasting his opinion that the United States was mired in a stalemate in Vietnam. Losing Cronkite’s support stunned Johnson, who was
facing a reelection campaign. On March 31, 1968, Johnson
addressed the nation on television and announced that he
would not seek another term. On November 5, 1968, Richard M. Nixon won the presidency by promising Americans
an honorable end of the war.
Vietnam War Controversies
The most controversial battle of the Vietnam War was
fought in May 1969 on a mountain named Dong Ap Bia
near the Laotian border. Repeated heavy bombardment
and twelve frontal assaults over nine days were needed to
overcome the enemy’s mountaintop position. News reports
repeated the Marines’ mocking nickname for the mountain,
“Hamburger Hill.” The battle became a public relations
nightmare for the Nixon administration when Senator Ted
Kennedy of Massachusetts decried the battle’s senseless
waste of American youth. Some of the battle’s veterans sent
letters of support to Kennedy.
A sensationalized incident captured headlines for months
and increased disillusionment over the war. On June 20,
1969, Colonel Robert B. Rheault and seven of his “Green
Berets” in the Fifth Special Forces Group executed a suspected North Vietnamese spy named Thai Khac Chuyen
at the request of a station chief of the Central Intelligence
Agency. Because Rheault lied to MACV about the affair,
Abrams had the soldiers arrested for murder. The story broke
in the New York Times in August. After MACV refused comment, civilian attorneys of the accused suggested to the press
that Abrams was motivated by a personal vendetta. Congress
received protest letters from families of the accused. The
Green Berets case soon swelled into a general debate on the
war. After several months, President Nixon intervened, and
the soldiers were released for lack of evidence.
The June 27, 1969, “Faces of the Dead” issue of Life magazine is believed by many to have influenced the American
public as much as any other media event of the Vietnam
War and is remembered as the zenith of Life’s journalism.
The magazine featured the photographs of most of the 242
U.S. troops killed during the previous weeks of fighting.
The dead soldiers’ innocence was captured in pictures
from high school yearbooks and personal memorabilia. No
editorial copy was needed to communicate a compelling
anti-war message. Because the military draft deferred college students, the faces of the dead were disproportionately
working class.
The worst war atrocity in U.S. history was uncovered by
Seymour Hersh on November 16, 1969. Hersh’s syndicated
story told of the murder of more than five hundred Vietnamese peasants during a search and destroy mission on
March 10, 1968, in My Lai, a hamlet in the northern part
of South Vietnam. In a news release in September, 1969,
the Army announced the arrest and pending court martial
of U. S. troops and Hersh followed up this lead. He confirmed that a massacre had occurred when he interviewed
an officer accused of personally executing 109 of the villagers, First Lieutenant William Calley. Follow-up stories
revealed photographs of the massacre by an Army photographer and accusations of a cover-up by the Army. Calley’s
case became a referendum on the war. A military court
convicted Calley, who was paroled in 1975. Hersh won the
1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
Vietnamization and U.S. Withdrawal
In July of 1969, Nixon announced his war plan: the ARVN
would take over the fighting, while U.S. troops assumed
garrison duties and eventually withdrew. Although a French
attempt at “Vietnamization” in the early 1950s had failed,
Nixon maintained that superior U.S. firepower would make
it work this time. Even the South Vietnamese doubted their
chances against the NVA.
The change of mission for U.S. troops, plus a greater
reliance on conscripts, hurt morale and discipline. With
announcement of troop withdrawals, an American soldier’s
personal mission was reduced to surviving his yearlong
tour of duty. The Saigon government profited from trade
in narcotics, so many GIs used drugs to relieve the tensions
of combat duty, which further reduced combat readiness.
On November 13, 1970, a broadcast by CBS reporter Gary
Shepard about widespread pot smoking at Firebase Ares
caused a national scandal back home.
Low morale was blamed for outbreaks of GI insubordination. The first reported incident in August 1969 concerned
the Twenty-third Infantry Division stationed in Song Chang
Valley south of Danang. An AP story by Peter Arnett and
Horst Faas stated that Alpha Company had refused to renew
its attack after five attempts to recover a downed helicopter had been turned away by ferocious enemy fire. Military
spokesmen claimed the mutiny was limited to a few men,
but the soldiers told reporters the entire company balked.
Nine days later a second unit refused its orders. Several
newspaper columnists dismissed the incidents and blamed
Arnett and Faas for harming GI morale.
The anti-war movement was losing patience with apparent lack of progress to end the war. On October 15, 1969,
massive war protest “moratoriums” were staged in Washington, D.C., and other major cities. Attention from the
national media served to legitimate anti-war sentiments.
Nixon addressed a national television audience on November 3 and asked the “silent majority” of Americans to trust
him to win an honorable peace in Vietnam. The speech
restored his standing and deflated the protestors, who staged
another moratorium on November 15.
Another televised Nixon address six months later
shocked the nation and sparked protests on college campuses across America. On April 30, 1970, Nixon announced
a combined U.S.-ARVN ground invasion of Cambodia to
suppress NVA sanctuaries. Although intended to bring the
war to swifter conclusion, the operation’s long-term effects
were to cause civil strife in America and to destabilize the
neutralist regime of Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom
Sihanouk. On May 4, 1970, a violent clash between students
and national guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio
left four students dead and seven wounded. Undergraduate John Filo won a Pulitzer Prize for his photo of Mary
Vecchio decrying the death of fellow student Jeffrey Miller.
The image was transmitted by the AP and became a bitter
icon of the Vietnam War.
Nixon wanted to show that his “Vietnamization” policy was working. He proposed an ARVN incursion into
Laos with U.S. air support to interdict enemy strongholds.
Launched on January 29, 1971, Operation Lam Son 719 targeted the Laotian town of Tchepone fifty kilometers northwest of the old U.S. base at Khesanh. Hoping to surprise
the enemy, Abrams embargoed all news coverage of the
operation. Reporters protested that the huge ARVN convoy hardly could have escaped the enemy’s attention. The
reporters were right. The North Vietnamese were prepared
to repel the attack and inflicted heavy losses, especially
of U.S. helicopters. Eventually Nixon ordered Abrams
to loosen his press restrictions. Pilots were authorized to
transport journalists to the battle zone. On February 10,
a helicopter with the first load of photographers was shot
down with all lives lost, including Life magazine’s Larry
Burrows, AP’s Henri Huet, UPI’s Ken Potter and ARVN
Sergeant Vu Tu. An NVA counterattack on February 19
routed ARVN troops and transformed Lam Son into a public relations fiasco for the White House. Nixon later told
Kissinger that their worst enemy seemed to be the press.
In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing
installments of the Pentagon Papers, a forty-seven volume
classified internal analysis of Vietnam War miscalculations, which were turned over to Times reporter Neil Sheehan by their author, former Defense Department official
Daniel Ellsberg. A federal injunction stopped publication
on grounds of national security and theft of government
property. The Times got around the injunction by giving
the documents to a rival paper, the Washington Post. Two
weeks later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to dismiss
the injunction because the papers, though embarrassing to
the government, did not threaten national security.
Due to thawing of relations with Red China and the Soviet
Union and a preliminary breakthrough in Paris peace talks
with the North Vietnamese, Nixon won a landslide reelection victory in 1972. On January 23, 1973, Nixon and Kissinger proclaimed “peace with honor” in formal agreements
to be signed on January 27 in Paris by all warring parties.
The United States agreed to withdraw, leaving the ARVN
to defend its own country. Nixon guaranteed continued air
and logistical support. The release of U.S. prisoners of war
commanded the news agenda for months. The search for
U.S. soldiers missing in action was concluded in 1995.
Despite these foreign relations victories, Nixon was
forced to resign in disgrace on August 9, 1974, after the
press uncovered White House malfeasance in the so-called
Watergate scandal. As soon as Vice President Gerald R.
Ford was sworn in as the new chief executive, he reassured
South Vietnam of continued U.S. support, but Congress
already had begun cutting war funding. Eight months later,
Saigon collapsed before an NVA assault on April 30, 1975.
News film of frantic refugees, rooftop evacuations, and
helicopters jettisoned from aircraft carrier decks symbolized for the American people a quarter century of failed
government policies and the end of innocence.
Press Impact during the Vietnam War
Democracies cannot fight long wars without public support. As messengers of bad news about the Vietnam War,
the media inevitably were caught up in the war’s controversy and marked by it. The war spawned several mistaken ideas about the wartime role of the American press,
which persist despite having been thoroughly debunked by
scholars.
The incorrect notion that the American television networks brought home the horrors of war to the American
viewing public, thereby handicapping a military solution,
was born in 1966, when Michael J. Arlen’s New Yorker column referred to Vietnam as America’s first “living-room
war.” In fact, the networks were skittish about violating viewers’ sensibilities. Subsequent analyses of newscasts showed
that most news programs avoided graphic violence.
Another persistent misunderstanding casts Vietnam War
correspondents as belligerent, anti-establishment critics
who broke rules to make the government look bad. Research
shows the vast majority of journalists cooperated fully with
MACV’s guidelines. Only six journalists of the thousands
certified by MACV were stripped of their credentials.
Perhaps the greatest myth about news coverage of the
Vietnam War, one that nevertheless has guided U.S. military planners since, was promulgated by Spiro T. Agnew,
Nixon’s vice president. Agnew accused the American press
of serving the enemy cause by influencing U.S. public opinion against the war. Opinion polls conducted throughout the
conflict showed that the news media actually trailed behind
the public in its growing disapproval of the U.S. war effort.
Critical news commentaries late in the war merely served to
confirm already held anti-war attitudes.
Vietnam was the only uncensored U.S. war in the posttelegraph era. Government press handlers’ efforts to be
open with correspondents eventually were confounded by
Washington’s desire to cast the war effort and its South
Vietnamese ally in the best possible light. A credibility gap
resulted. Many correspondents found their questioning dispatches toned down or disregarded altogether by stateside
editors, who were persuaded by the more optimistic “big
picture” painted by MACV and the Pentagon.
The Pentagon decided free press access prevented an
otherwise certain military victory in Vietnam. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff appointed a former MACV press officer to
lead a panel on the issue. In 1984 the Sidle Commission’s
recommendations for limited press pools in conflict zones
were sold to the American public as reasonable safety measures and were key to the military’s mastery of press access
during the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991.
Further Reading
Cook, Russell J. The Vietnam War (The Greenwood Library of
American War Reporting, Volume 7). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Fawcett, Denby, et al. War Torn: Stories of War from the Women
Reporters Who Covered Vietnam. New York: Random
House, 2002.
Hallin, Daniel. The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Hammond, William M. Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military
at War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.
Just, Ward S. To What End: Report from Vietnam. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968.
Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History, 2nd. rev. ed. New York:
Penguin Books, 1997.
Landers, James. The Weekly War: Newsmagazines and Vietnam.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.
Prochnau, William. Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett — Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles. New York: Vintage
Books, 1996.
Reporting Vietnam (Part One: American Journalism 1959–1969,
Part Two: American Journalism 1969–1975). New York:
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1998.
Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Wyatt, Clarence R. Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the
Vietnam War, rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995.
Russell J. Cook