Vietnam War: Yes, the Media Did Undermine the War Effort
This essay is an answer to an article in “War on the Rocks” by Arnold R. Isaacs claiming that “U.S. journalists didn’t lose the war, celebrate the enemy, or vilify American soldiers”.
In the article, Isaacs seeks to counter “[t]he common claim […] that Vietnam war reporters in general sympathized with the Communist side, saw U.S. troops as war criminals, and contributed to the American failure by critically undermining public support at home”. Of course, this amounts to immediately shifting the goalposts from a discussion of “U.S. journalists” in general to one of just war reporters, so let us avoid that pitfall and talk about the American media as a whole. Isaacs tells us that,
[a]s the Army history confirms, Radio Hanoi broadcast a fairly accurate account a few weeks after the killings, but no one in the Saigon press corps checked it out until a U.S.-based writer, Seymour Hersh, broke the story many months later after learning that the Army was prosecuting 1st Lt. William Calley for the My Lai shootings.
Without being myself intimately familiar with the media landscape at the time, I still find it understandable that American journalists should not have taken reporting by a Vietnamese propaganda station seriously. While the story of the My Lai massacre may have taken longer than it should have to come into the public eye, in other respects this example directly contradicts Isaacs’s case and supports the contention that the American media were too harsh on the U.S. war effort. Writes Ben Wattenberg for the American Enterprise Institute:
In both [the Vietnam and the Iraq] war[…], much of the media coverage was crazed. My Lai involved a few hundred people, Abu Ghraib fewer than that. But these events dominated news coverage, which tended to ignore the larger meaning of what was going on.
Indeed, while Isaacs stresses that the story of My Lai first appeared in a relatively marginal outlet, it was nearly immediately afterwards picked up by a number of mainstream media outfits.
Isaacs is also wide of the mark with his claim that American journalists did not sympathise with the Communist side. How else would one explain Sydney Schanberg’s New York Times article, published in 1975, which proclaimed: “Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life”?
Then, of course, Isaacs does not mention the media’s coverage of the Tet offensive. Historian Michael Kort, in his book “The Vietnam War Reexamined”, observes what a spectacular defeat the Tet offensive caused the Communist forces in Vietnam. “The offensive was intended to inflict
a major defeat on US and South Vietnamese forces, cause enormous
casualties, and spark a general uprising that would bring down the
Saigon government” (Kort 2018: 154). In reality, “[d]espite achieving
surprise, the attacking Communist forces were soon defeated — in most
places within days or even hours — suffering staggering losses in the
process. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the Communists” (ibid.). Moreover, according to Kort,
Revisionists and orthodox commentators alike agree that Tet was a military defeat for the Communists. They also agree that what for Hanoi was a major tactical defeat on the battlefield in South Vietnam became an even more important strategic victory in the political arena in the United States: Tet seriously undermined support for the war in the United States, demoralized President Johnson, causing him to end his policy of sending more troops to Vietnam and to withdraw from the 1968 presidential race, and thereby led to the process of US disengagement from the war (Kort 2018: 155).
This suggests that a false perception of the situation in Vietnam had major consequences for the USA’s conduct of the war. The crucial question, however, is what caused this perception. According to Kort, the U.S. media were at fault. He writes:
Peter Breastrup is the author of The Big Story, a two-volume study of
reporting during the Tet Offensive that is the definitive work on the
subject. He writes that reporting by American journalists as a whole
amounted to “a distortion of reality — through sins of commission and
omission — on a scale that helped shape Tet’s political repercussions in
Washington and the Administration’s response.” Breastrup adds that bad
as the print media was, “TV was much worse. TV was always worse.
The emotive demands of the medium and the commercial demands of
holding an audience worked against calm and dispassionate reporting” (Kort 2018: 157).
It also seems that, contra Isaacs, the American media did regard American soldiers as war criminals. According to James Jay Carafano,
In the Vietnam era, opponents chose to demonize the military. The war, they said, was “evil,” and thus so was anyone who fought in it.
When John Kerry told the Senate in 1971 that American soldiers had “razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan,” he was simply mimicking the rhetoric of the day.
Of course, Isaacs’s proposition that the American media did not “contribute[…] to the American failure by critically undermining public support at home” depends on his notion that the influence of anti-war commentary on public opinion was not significant for the conduct of the war by the USA — see his previous article, titled “Peace Marchers Didn’t Turn U.S Policy Around”. If this is accepted as true — even though it conflicts with Kort’s account — “pacifism” in American society could still have affected the course of the war by raising North Vietnamese morale. According to Stuart Elliott’s report on a 1977 “reception [in New York] designed to revive the antiwar movement”,
David Dellinger, the master of ceremonies for the reception, bragged to thunderous applause that when he visited Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), a North Vietnamese officer told him that the American peace movement had “inspired” the forces fighting in the jungle when they had almost given up hope.
To conclude, Isaacs is wrong. The American media substantially undermined the American war effort in Vietnam through biased coverage. The media performed a similar disgrace with regards to Cambodia. Jeff Jacoby notes:
The New Republic told its readers that the ouster of Lon Nol [which entailed the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power] should be of no concern, since “the Cambodian people will finally be rescued from the horrors of a war that never really had any meaning.’’
Hopefully, the U.S. commentariat can learn from its past mistakes in order to do better in the future. Acknowledging errors committed is probably a good first step in that direction.
Reference
Kort, Michael. 2018. The Vietnam War Reexamined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.