The attack had succeeded probably better than the North Vietnamese realized, because, though it was a military failure, it was a media success. At a loss to explain this kind of suicide warfare, U.S. intelligence officers at the time concluded that this lone successful aspect must have been its goal, that the North Vietnamese had launched the Tet Offensive to win a public relations victory. The results were dazzling. Today we are accustomed to war appearing instantly on TV, but this was new in 1968. War had never been brought to living rooms so quickly. Today the military has become much more experienced and adept at controlling media. But in the Tet Offensive, the images brought into living rooms were of U.S. Armed Forces in shambles, looking panicked, being killed.
By February 1968, Cronkite on CBS and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC were experiencing the highest ratings they had ever known. At a time when fifty-six million American homes had televisions, Cronkite was reaching more than eleven million homes and Huntley/Brinkley was reaching more than ten million homes. Expensive satellite transmissions instantly relaying footage from Japan to New York City were being used regularly by all three networks for the first time that month. The government could no longer control the public image of the war. New York Times television critic Jack Gould wrote, “For the huge TV audience the grim pictures unfolded in the last week cannot fail to leave the impression that the agony of Vietnam is acute and that the detached analyses of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who appeared yesterday on ‘Meet the Press,’ could be incomplete.”
The print media was also giving more attention to the war than they ever had before. Harper’s magazine and the Atlantic Monthly put out special Vietnam War issues. Harper’s entire March issue, on sale in February, was devoted to a Norman Mailer article about the antiwar movement that powerfully criticized U.S. policy. Atlantic Monthly’s entire March issue was devoted to a piece by Dan Wakefield also about antiwar sentiment. Though both magazines were more than a century old and neither had ever done single-article issues, both said it was a coincidence that they were producing such issues at the same time on the same subject.
Photography was being used in this February explosion of media as it rarely had been before. The normally black-and-white Time magazine used color. The Tet Offensive happened to coincide with an internal debate at The New York Times. The photo department wanted the paper to use more than occasional small and usually cropped pictures, and after much arguing, the Times agreed that if they were supplied with pictures worthy of it, they would give a big picture spread.
Photographer Eddie Adams was roaming Saigon in morning light with an NBC crew when he came upon Vietnamese marines with a man in tow, his arms tied behind his back, badly beaten. Suddenly Adams saw the chief of South Vietnam National Police, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, draw his sidearm. The prisoner turned a downcast eye as General Loan held his arm straight out and fired a bullet into the man’s head. Adams had photographed it all. He developed the pictures and placed them on the drum of an electronic scanner that sent them to New York and around the world. The Times agreed that these were unusual pictures worthy of a different kind of spread. On February 2 a photo ran on the top of the front page of a small man, hands bound, face distorted by the impact of a bullet from the handgun in General Loan’s outstretched arm. Below ran another picture of a South Vietnamese soldier, grief on his face as he carried his child, killed by the Viet Cong. On page twelve was more—three pictures marked “Prisoner,” “Execution,” and “Death,” showing the Adams sequence of the killing. These photos won more than ten photojournalism awards and were and still are among the most remembered images of the war.
The world was learning what this war looked like in more detail than had ever happened in the history of warfare. Later in the year, John Wayne released a film on Vietnam, The Green Berets, starring and co-directed by himself. Renata Adler, reviewing for The New York Times, declared the film “stupid,” “false,” and “unspeakable.” Richard Schickel in Life magazine agreed with all of these adjectives but further stated, “The war being fought here bears no resemblance whatever to the reality of Vietnam as we have all, hawks and doves alike, perceived it to be through the good offices of the mass media.” Neither John Wayne nor any other American filmmaker had ever needed to contend with this before. Up until then, most war films did not look like the real thing, but now, even if the war was in a distant land, the public would know because it had seen the war.
1968 was the first year Hollywood filmmakers were permitted an unrestricted hand in the portrayal of violence. Censorship regulations were replaced by a ratings system so that Hollywood warfare could be portrayed looking as gruesome as network television war, though the first films to use the new violence, such as the 1968 police thriller Bullitt and the 1969 western The Wild Bunch, were not war movies.
Another problem with war films was that every day the public was picking up better war stories in the news media than they could find in the Hollywood war clichés. The fast talker from Brooklyn and the quiet “What are you going to do after the war?” scene did not stand up to real stories such as that of Marine Private Jonathan Spicer, a funny, offbeat son of a Methodist minister in Miami. Spicer refused to fight and so was assigned to be a medical corpsman. The scorn of his fellow marines was soon silenced because Spicer seemed to be fearless, dragging wounded marines out of the line of fire, protecting them with his own body. One March day in Khe Sanh, a shelling began as the corpsmen were trying to evacuate wounded, and Spicer was ordered into his bunker. When the marines were trapped in Khe Sanh, each time they tried to evacuate wounded, the Viet Cong would shell. Spicer saw the marines were having trouble getting the wounded loaded, so he ran over to help and was caught in a shell burst. At the field hospital only yards away, Spicer was pronounced dead. Such field units are not set up for major surgery and normally only patch up the patient and send him on to a full hospital. But this doctor thought he could save Spicer and opened his chest, massaged his stopped heart, plugging up a hole with his finger until he could stitch it closed, and brought the young man back to life. This was not a Hollywood story, though, and three days later Private Spicer, nineteen years old, shipped to a hospital in Japan, died of his wounds.
Now that people could watch the war, many did not like what they saw. Anti–Vietnam War demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands were becoming commonplace around the world. From February 11 to 15, students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University held a four-day hunger strike to protest the war. On February 14, ten thousand demonstrators, according to the French police, or one hundred thousand, according to the organizers, marched through Paris in the pouring rain, waving North Vietnamese flags and chanting, “Vietnam for the Vietnamese,” “U.S. Go Home,” and “Johnson Assassin.” Four days later, West Berlin students did a better job of imitating American antiwar rallies when an estimated ten thousand West Germans and students from throughout Western Europe chanted: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”—reminiscent of the American “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.” Ho Chi Minh had called his movement the National Liberation Front. German student leader Rudi Dutschke said, “Tell the Americans the day and the hour will come when we will drive you out unless you yourselves throw out imperialism.” The demonstrators urged American soldiers to desert, which they were already doing, applying to Sweden, France, and Canada for asylum. In February, the Toronto Anti-Draft Program mailed to the United States five thousand copies of its 132-page paperback, Manual for Draft Age Immigrants to Canada, printed in the basement of an eight-room house by U.S. draft dodgers living in Canada. In addition to legal information it gave background information on the country, including a chapter titled “Yes, John, There Is a Canada.” By March even the relatively moderate Mexico City student movement held a demonstration against the Vietnam War.
American antiwar poster depicting a draft card being burned
(Imperial War Museum, London, poster negative number LDP 449)
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The Selective Service had been planning to call up 40,000 young men a month, but the number was ballooning upward to 48,000. The Johnson administration abolished the student deferment for graduate studies and announced that 150,000 graduate students would be drafted during the fiscal year that would begin in July. This was a severe blow not only for young men planning graduate studies, among them Bill Clinton, a senior at Georgetown’s School of Government who had been appointed a Rhodes Scholar for graduate study at Oxford, but also for American graduate schools, which claimed they would be losing 200,000 incoming and first-year students. One university president, remarkably free of today’s rules of political correctness, complained that graduate schools would now be limited to “the lame, the halt, the blind, and the female.”
At Harvard Law School Alan Dershowitz began offering a course on the legal paths to war resistance. Five hundred law professors signed a petition urging the legal profession to actively oppose the war policy of the Johnson administration. With 5,000 marines in Khe Sanh surrounded by 20,000 enemy troops who could easily be replaced and resupplied from the northern border, the seven days ending February 18 broke a new record for weekly casualties, with 543 American soldiers killed. On February 17, Lieutenant Richard W. Pershing, grandson of the commander of American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, engaged to be married and serving in the 101st Airborne, was killed by enemy fire while searching for the remains of a comrade.
President Johnson was slipping so far in the polls that even Richard Nixon, the perennial loser of the Republican Party, had caught up to him. Nixon’s most feared competitor in the Democratic Party, New York senator Robert Kennedy, who still insisted he was a loyal Johnson Democrat, gave a speech in Chicago on February 8 saying that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. “We must first of all rid ourselves of the illusion that the events of the past two weeks represent some sort of victory,” Kennedy said. “That is not so. It is said the Viet Cong may not be able to hold the cities. This is probably true. But they have demonstrated, despite all our reports of progress, of government strength and enemy weakness, that half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons, are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000.”
As the Tet Offensive went on, the question was inescapable: Why had they been caught by surprise? Twenty-five days before Tet, the embassy had intercepted a message about attacks on southern cities including Saigon but did not act on it. A sneak attack during Tet was not even a new idea. In 1789, the year the French Revolution erupted and George Washington took his oath of office, Vietnamese emperor Quang Trung took the Chinese by surprise by using the cover of Tet festivities to march on Hanoi. Not as undermanned as the Viet Cong, he attacked with one hundred thousand men and several hundred elephants and sent the Chinese into a temporary retreat. Wasn’t Westmoreland familiar with this widely known story of Quang Trung’s Tet Offensive? A small statue of the emperor, a gift from a Vietnamese friend, stood in General Westmoreland’s office. Again in 1960, the Viet Cong had scored a surprise victory by attacking on the eve of Tet. Holiday attacks were almost a tradition in Vietnam. North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap had started his career catching the French by surprise on Christmas Eve 1944.
Now the same General Giap was on the cover of Time magazine. On the inside was a several-page color spread, an unusual display for Time magazine in the sixties, showing dead American soldiers.
“What the hell’s going on?” said CBS’s Walter Cronkite, reading reports from Saigon off camera. “I thought we were winning the war.”
In a year with no middle ground, Walter Cronkite remained comfortably in the center. The son of a Kansas City dentist, Cronkite was middle class from the Middle West with a self-assured but never arrogant centrist point of view. It became a popular parlor game to guess at Walter Cronkite’s politics. To most Americans Cronkite was not a know-it-all but someone who did happen to know. He was so determinedly neutral that viewers studied his facial movements in the hopes of detecting an opinion. Many Democrats, including John Kennedy, suspected he was a Republican, but the Republicans saw him as a Democrat. Pollsters did studies that showed that Cronkite was trusted by Americans more than any politician, journalist, or television personality. After seeing one such poll, John Bailey, chairman of the Democratic National Committee said, “What I’m afraid this means is that by a mere inflection of his deep baritone voice or by a lifting of his well-known bushy eyebrows, Cronkite might well change the vote of thousands of people around the country.”
Cronkite was one of the last television journalists to reject the notion that he was the story. Cronkite wanted to be a conduit. He valued the trust he had and believed that it came from truthfulness. He always insisted that it was CBS, not just him, that had the trust of America. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, since it had begun in 1963, was the most popular television news show.
A difference in generations labeled “the generation gap” was not only dividing society, but was apparent in journalism as well. Author David Halberstam, who had been a New York Times correspondent in Vietnam, recalled that the older reporters and editors who had come out of World War II tended to side with the military. “They thought we were unpatriotic and didn’t believe that generals lied.” Younger reporters such as Halberstam and Gene Roberts created a sensation, both in public opinion and in journalism, by reporting that the generals were lying. “Then came another generation,” Halberstam said, “who smoked pot and knew all the music. We called them the heads.” The heads never trusted a word from the generals.
Walter Cronkite was from that old World War II generation that believed generals and which Halberstam had found to be such an obstacle when he first started reporting on Vietnam. But, though his thirty minutes of evening news did not reflect this, Cronkite was growing increasingly suspicious that the U.S. government and the military were not telling the truth. He did not see “the light at the end of the tunnel” that General Westmoreland continually promised.
It seemed that in order to understand what was going on in Vietnam, he would have to go and see for himself. This decision worried the U.S. government. They could survive temporarily losing control of their own embassy, but the American people would never forgive their losing Walter Cronkite. The head of CBS News, Richard Salant, had similar fears. Journalists were sent into combat, but not corporate treasures.
“I said,” Cronkite recalled, “well, I need to go because I thought we needed this documentary about Tet. We were getting daily reports, but we didn’t know where it was going at that time; we may lose the war; if we’re going to lose the war, I should be there, that was one thing. If the Tet Offensive was successful in the end, it meant that we were going to be fleeing, as we did eventually anyway, but I wanted to be there for the clash.”
Walter Cronkite never saw himself as a piece of broadcast history or a national treasure, any of the things others saw in him. All his life he saw himself as a reporter, and he never wanted to miss the big story. Covering World War II for United Press International, he had been with the Allies when they landed in North Africa, when the first bombing missions flew over Germany, when they landed in Normandy, parachuted into the Netherlands, broke out of the Bulge. He always wanted to be there.
Salant’s first response was predictable. As Cronkite remembered it, he said, “If you need to be there, if you are demanding to go, I’m not going to stop you, but I think it’s foolish to risk your life in a situation like this, risk the life of our anchorman, and I’ve got to think about it.” His next thoughts were what surprised Cronkite. “But if you are going to go,” he said, “I think you ought to do a documentary about going, about why you went, and maybe you are going to have to say something about where the war ought to go at that point.”
The one thing Dick Salant had been known for among CBS journalists
was forbidding any kind of editorializing of the news. Cronkite said of Salant, “If he were to detect any word in a reporter’s report that seemed to have been editorializing at all, personal opinion, he was dead set against it—against doing it at all. Not just mine. I’m talking about any kind of editorializing of anybody.”
So when Salant told Cronkite his idea for a Vietnam special, Cronkite answered, “That would be an editorial.”
“Well,” said Salant, “I’m thinking that maybe it’s time for that. You have established a reputation, and thanks to you and through us we at CBS have established a reputation for honesty and factual reporting and being in the middle of the road. You yourself have talked about the fact that we get shot at from both sides, you yourself have said that we get about as many letters saying that we are damned conservatives as saying that we are damned liberals. We support the war. We’re against the war. You yourself say that if we weigh the letters, they weigh about the same. We figure we are about middle of the road. So if we’ve got that reputation, maybe it would be helpful, if people trust us that much, trust you that much, for you to say what you think. Tell them what it looks like, from your being on the ground, what is your opinion.”
“You’re getting pretty heavy,” Cronkite told Salant.
Cronkite suspected that all the trust he had earned was about to be diminished because he was crossing a line he had never before crossed. CBS also feared that their news show’s top ratings might slip with Walter’s transition from sphinx to pundit. But the more they thought about it, the more it seemed to Cronkite and Salant that in this moment of confusion, the public was hungering for a clear voice explaining what was happening and what should be happening.
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