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< ----------- Some Guy ?! ............ !!!!!!!!!! : https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/opinion/lyndon-johnson-vietnam-war.html" Lyndon Johnson’s Living Room War . "
By Chester Pach " On May 31, 1967, an ABC news anchor, Frank Reynolds, introduced a film report from Vietnam in an unusual way. He told viewers that they were seeing something unprecedented — a war that television was bringing into their living rooms.
Some TV reports about the war were unsettling, like the story that followed Reynolds’s introduction. It showed a medic’s frantic but futile efforts to save the life of a fallen Marine during a battle at Con Thien, near the demilitarized zone.
Reynolds declared that TV journalists had a responsibility to cover the Vietnam War with “all its horrors,” but their goal was neither to shock viewers nor sensationalize the news. Instead, Reynolds believed that evening’s story showed the deep bonds between American troops in combat.
But President Lyndon Johnson had a very different view.
President Johnson was obsessed with how television covered the war. He monitored the newscasts on banks of three televisions in the Oval Office — one tuned to each major network. He even had them installed in his hospital room when he had gall bladder surgery.
Johnson complained that television’s war coverage was misleading and one-sided. Stories about American artillery barrages that devastated villages or search-and-destroy operations that went awry were common, he insisted, while enemy atrocities went unreported.
The president thought that ABC did a better job of reporting the war than its two major competitors. But what he saw on CBS and NBC so infuriated him that he made the fantastic allegation that those two networks were “controlled by the Vietcong.”
By mid-1967, Johnson worried that TV reporting was so biased against him and the war that it was undermining popular support for his Vietnam policies. He decided that success in Vietnam would have to be achieved in American living rooms, not just on the battlefield.
Johnson was so concerned about TV reporting because he knew that Vietnam was the first war during which a majority of Americans relied on television as their main source of news. In the mid-1960s, most people considered TV “more believable” than newspapers, probably because, as the NBC producer Reuven Frank explained, it could transmit experience. The morning paper might describe the results of a battle; television could show the courage of soldiers or the suffering of distressed civilians.
By the beginning of 1967, all three networks had expanded their evening newscasts from 15 to 30 minutes. Vietnam became the big story on these programs as the number of troops in the country increased to over 400,000 by midyear.
In Vietnam, journalists didn’t have to submit their stories to military censors for clearance as they had during World War II and the Korean War. Information officers thought that they could ensure fair reporting by developing good working relationships with journalists and relying on a policy of “maximum candor consistent with security considerations.”
Military-media relations in Vietnam fell far short of these hopes. In July 1965, Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Sylvester told journalists in Saigon, “If you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, you’re stupid.” Reporters soon questioned the reliability of information at the official afternoon briefings about the war, which they disparaged as the “Five O’clock Follies.” When asked in 1967 why there was no news censorship as there had been in previous wars, Johnson replied sardonically, “Because we are fools.”
The president was so concerned about critical news stories that he failed to appreciate that the evening newscasts often showed American victories in battle. He lamented television’s lack of interest in “the fighting man’s compassionate concern for the Vietnamese,” even though features about American troops rebuilding village schools or providing medical care to ailing peasants were staples of TV news.
But he wasn’t wrong, entirely: By mid-1967, the evening newscasts showed that the war was exacting a mounting toll on American troops. A day after the story about the medic and the dying Marine at Con Thien, the weekly casualty report revealed record losses, including 313 Americans killed in action.
It was easy for Johnson to connect the bad news on TV with troubling information in the polls. An enduring misconception is that popular support for Johnson’s Vietnam policies did not crumble until the Tet offensive in early 1968. In fact, as early as January 1967, polls showed that by a margin of 43 to 38 percent (the remainder undecided), Americans disapproved of Johnson’s handling of the war. By July, support for Johnson’s Vietnam policies had fallen to 33 percent.
Many of Johnson’s critics wanted a negotiated settlement or a withdrawal from the war; others advocated stronger military action. Most were probably weary of a war that had become increasingly costly and controversial and had no end in sight. A Gallup Poll in June showed that half of the American people did not understand the purpose of the war. One-fourth doubted that South Vietnam would survive after troops departed.
As spring turned to summer in 1967, there was more bad news from Vietnam on the evening newscasts. For example, the CBS correspondent Murray Fromson reported from Ken Hoa about the chronic problem American advisers had getting South Vietnamese troops to fight aggressively.
Discouraging news also came from Cam Ne, a village that had already produced one of TV’s most sensational stories. Two years earlier, CBS’s Morley Safer had ignited a controversy when he questioned whether Marines burning the huts of anguished peasants during a search-and-destroy operation in Cam Ne was the way to win Vietnamese hearts and minds. In July 1967, NBC’s Howard Tuckner informed viewers that the South Vietnamese government had decided to destroy Cam Ne and move its residents to a new “peace hamlet,” which he described as a “concentration camp.”
Administration officials attributed these depressing stories not to the difficulties of the war or the deficiencies of their strategy but to reporters who were cynical and antagonistic. The problem was journalists who “had a tendency to search for a critical story that might lead to a Pulitzer Prize.”
Johnson took some of the criticism of the war effort personally. When CBS showed a film report in which the correspondent Bert Quint asserted that the war was a stalemate, Johnson charged that Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor, was out to get him. When the president met with a group of visiting Australian journalists, he declared, “I can prove that Ho Chi Minh is a son-of-a-bitch if you let me put it on the screen.” But the TV networks “want me to be the son-of-a-bitch.”
In late summer, with a presidential campaign season approaching, Johnson decided to make a new effort to persuade the American people that American forces were making progress in the war. He told aides to “sell our product” and “get a better story to the American people.” What the American people saw on television would determine their support for administration Vietnam policies.
Johnson took the lead in selling progress in Vietnam. He dismissed TV reports about a stalemated war while insisting that official reports showed American troops were achieving their objectives. In a November news conference that many observers considered one of his most effective performances on television, Johnson traced an upward slope with his hands while asserting, “We are making progress.” Other prominent civilian and military officials appeared on camera with the same message. For example, Gen. William Westmoreland traveled to Washington and told an audience at the National Press Club that “we have reached the point where the end begins to come into view.” Continued progress would allow American troops to begin coming home within two years.
But television reports from Vietnam often challenged these confident assessments. In a story about the death of an American soldier in a firefight near the coastal town of Hoi An, CBS’s John Laurence questioned what the war was accomplishing. “There are a hundred platoons fighting a hundred small battles in nameless hamlets like this every week,” Laurence declared. “And in the grand strategy of things, this firefight had little meaning for anyone but the redheaded kid who was killed there.” ABC’s Roger Peterson offered his own skeptical assessment as he prepared to return home after months of reporting from Vietnam. He found the South Vietnamese government “as corrupt and inefficient as its predecessors” and predicted that its army might require “a decade or two” to be “an effective fighting force.”
Despite such critical stories, the Johnson administration had used television to achieve some success in American living rooms during the final months of 1967. Polls showed declining popular discontent with the president’s Vietnam policies and rising confidence that Americans troops were making progress in the war. The Johnson administration had achieved those results by raising expectations of continued good news from Vietnam. In early 1968, the Tet offensive shattered those expectations. Television brought the Tet offensive “with all its horrors” into American living rooms in shocking and sensational ways.
Michael Arlen popularized the term “living-room war” while writing for The New Yorker during the 1960s. Arlen praised much of the reporting from Vietnam, but wondered how much three-minute stories contributed to public understanding of the war. A half-century later, we have no conclusive proof that television had a decisive effect on public attitudes toward Vietnam.
We do know, however, that TV reports made a deep impression on one crucial viewer, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was the first president, but hardly the last, who thought that what people saw on television might be as important as what actually happened on the battlefield. "
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Chester Pach is a professor of history at Ohio University and is the editor, most recently, of “A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
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