[Part I here.]
The 60s in Vietnam represented a sea-change in attitude towards the military, and not only on the fringes of the Left. Respected mainstream jounalists began to see their task less as transmitting information and more as questioning authority, especially of the military brass and the civilian leaders at Defense in Washington. In many cases, those in charge were considered not just incompetent and/or confused, but purposeful liars, deceivers, and betrayers of the fighting forces under them whose lives were being wasted in a cause already known to be lost.
This press agenda took its full form not in the early days of the war, but after the PR debacle of the Tet offensive and the real debacle of My Lai and the initial investigatory coverup of that terrible event. Tet caused the trusted and avuncular Walter Cronkite to leap over the heretofore rigid boundary between reporting the news into opinion journalism. In Cronkite’s opinion, Vietnam had become a lost cause.
I’ve devoted a great many words to Cronkite’s Vietnam conversion (see this and this). In his famous Tet broadcast of February 1968, Cronkite spoke wearily of the nation’s loss of trust in those in charge of the war. This disillusion was also his own:
We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.
The sense of betrayal is sharp. And, indeed, as I wrote yesterday, General Westmoreland in particular was the culprit here with his too-optimistic pronouncements about victory being close at hand. Prior to Tet, the astute North Vietnamese correctly calculated that they need not actually win the war in the conventional sense; all they needed to do was cause the perception that it would be longer and harder than Westmoreland and company had indicated. And so Tet was planned to do just that, and it succeeded wildly in its aims, despite decimating the forces of the North. Continue reading →
