the news coverage was wrong. Suppose that Tet had actually been a massive setback for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, but journalists had been so surprised by the breadth and ferocity of the attacks that they assumed the communists were victorious. If the public were to learn about such inaccuracy, would Johnson and his war policy be vindicated? In terms of influence, what would it mean about the role of television and other news media, and how would this affect policymakers’ decisions about information management in the future?
We will later see how a “Vietnam syndrome” – an offspring of the credibility gap of the Johnson years – had significant effect on some future wars. For now, it is useful to consider flaws in the news coverage of the Tet offensive, which many historians today consider to have been a military defeat for the communist forces that were unable to hold territory or spur a popular uprising in the South. They did, however, achieve political success because they were perceived as victorious by many journalists. The United States and its allies had previously relied on misleading information to create expectations that could not be fulfilled. The communist forces were able to puncture that balloon.
The principal analyst of Tet news coverage and its impact was Peter Braestrup, who was Saigon bureau chief of the Washington Post during Tet. His book, Big Story, was published in 1977 in two volumes. In it, he meticulously chronicles events during Tet and how they were covered. Among his conclusions:
Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. Essentially, the dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam (rebroadcast in commentary, editorials, and much political rhetoric at home) added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies. Historians, on the contrary, have concluded that the Tet offensive resulted in a severe military-political setback for Hanoi in the South. To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other – in a major crisis abroad – cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism.66
Valuable lessons about what not to do can be found in the flawed news reports. The journalistic errors were partly attributable to mutual distrust between press and government. Even when the government-supplied information was accurate, many journalists were so skeptical that they were inclined to treat it as being misleading. Johnson’s failure to understand the breadth of the enlarged information universe is also significant. With the addition of radio and then television, the news media environment had become less forgiving of leaders who did not understand it and respond to its demands. Braestrup wrote of this: “In contrast to John F. Kennedy during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, or to Franklin D. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, [Johnson] started by setting a hesitant tone – which did not go unnoticed in the media. Initially, the President sought to repeat his 1967 public-relations strategy, dominating the media with reassuring statements about Vietnam by subordinates.”67
Johnson did not recognize that the increase in the number of news venues meant that information would be more difficult to manage. The information pie now had more slices from which the public could choose. By the late 1960s, it was impossible to dominate the information flow as some of Johnson’s predecessors had been able to do. Television, for instance, had already helped to amplify the debate about Vietnam at home, as when NBC in 1966 had televised five hours of testimony by George Kennan, retired diplomat and critic of the Johnson war policy. Kennan told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the national television audience that “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”68 That was the kind of message that was now, to Johnson’s distress, reaching the American public more consistently.
When Johnson had been, in Robert Caro’s words, “master of the Senate,” he was largely able to control the political atmosphere in which he worked, including much of the information related to the Senate’s business. As president, on a vastly larger playing field, he learned painfully that he did not retain that kind of power, and without it he could not fight “his” war as he wanted to.
The cases examined in this chapter are by no means the only examples of information affecting public support for or opposition to a war. What does emerge, however, from this chapter is evidence that, as information flows become more diverse and pervasive, they are more difficult for political leaders to manage.
Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that the myth that “the press lost the Vietnam War” survives a half-century after it was born. Johnson’s abdication has haunted more recent US presidents, and also has served as an object lesson for other governments. The result: consistent, forceful, and increasingly sophisticated efforts to control information at war.
Notes
1 1 For additional material about wartime information’s effects, see (among others) Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer, Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime (London: Routledge, 2004).
2 2 See Ronald D. Asmus, “Power, War, and Public Opinion,” Hoover Institution Policy Review, February/March 2004, www.hoover.org/research/power-war-and-public-opinion; Philip Seib (ed.), War and Conflict Communication (London: Routledge, 2010), 171–305.
3 3 Philip Seib, The Global Journalist: News and Conscience in a World of Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 121.
4 4 Quoted in Piers Brandon, The Dark Valley (New York: Knopf, 2000), 624.
5 5 Philip Ziegler, London at War, 1939–1945 (London: Pimlico, 2002), 126, 154.
6 6 Edward R. Murrow, This Is London (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941), 161, 163. See also Philip Seib, Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006).
7 7 Murrow, This Is London, 163.
8 8 Murrow, This Is London, 167, 169–70.
9 9 Murrow, This Is London, 172, 173, 178.
10 10 Murrow, This Is London, 180, 182.
11 11 Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Enigma, 2001), 170.
12 12 Susan Dunn, A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days that Mobilized America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 8–9.
13 13 Cloud and Olson, The Murrow Boys, 97.
14 14 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 250.
15 15 Hadley Cantril, “Public Opinion in Flux,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 220 (March 1942), 138, 146.
16 16 Cantril, “Public Opinion in Flux,” 144, 145.
17 17 Cantril, “Public Opinion in Flux,” 141, 147, 150.
18 18 Cantril, “Public Opinion in Flux,” 138.
19 19 A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986), 174.
20 20 Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston (New York: Random House, 2003), 52.
21 21 Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 157–8.
22 22 Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 75.
23 23 Paul W. White, News on the Air (New York:
