The Press in Vietnam as Agent of Defeat: A Critical Examination

Abstract

In the years since the Vietnam War has ended, a belief has grown up that press coverage of the war so distorted the reality of what happened in South Vietnam that the American people lost heart and gave up. Modern technology provided the press a means of indirectly involving the American public with the war on an almost hourly basis, the former U.S. Commander in South Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, observed in 1972. war was literally piped into the living room, bedroom, and kitchen of most Americans. Lt. Gen. Phillip B. Davidson (U.S. Army, Ret.) adds in his recent book, Vietnam at War, that the constant force of destruction, suffering, and blood brought into American living rooms horrified and dismayed the American people. Recoiling, so the theory goes, the American public abandoned South Vietnam to its enemies.' A former American diplomat, Martin F. Herz, in The Vietnam War in Retrospect (1984), denies that news media coverage caused the failure in Vietnam, but still believes that the press played an important role. The emergence of high speed telecommunications, including the rapid transmission of still pictures and moving pictures was significant, he says, raising an entirely new question about our ability to win any future war, except perhaps a very short one (p. 37). Harry Summers makes much the same point in his book, On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (1981). Westmoreland, in a recent talk at James Madison University, likewise emphasized the point. The impact of television on American public opinion was so powerful during the war, he added, that when Walter Cronkite announced during the Tet Offensive of 1968 that he believed the conflict was no longer winnable, the statement destroyed the American public's will to continue to resist the Communist aggression in South Vietnam. Peter Braestrup's book, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (1977), especially in an appendix on public opinion by Burns Roper, argued convincingly that the public made up its own mind about the war, irrespective of what the press said. By roundly criticizing news coverage of the enemy's