145 Vietnam
Perhaps no single issue contributed more to public disillusionment than the Vietnam War. The “domino theory”—the idea that if a country fell to communism, then neighboring states would soon follow—governed American foreign policy. After the communist takeover of China in 1949, the United States financially supported the French military’s effort to retain control over its colonies in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. But the French were defeated in 1954 and Vietnam was divided into the communist North and anti-communist South.
The American public remained largely unaware of Vietnam in the early 1960s, even as President John F. Kennedy deployed over sixteen thousand military advisers to help South Vietnam suppress a domestic communist insurgency. This all changed in 1964, when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution after a minor episode involving American and North Vietnamese naval forces. The Johnson administration distorted the incident to provide a pretext for escalating American involvement in Vietnam. The resolution authorized the president to send bombs and troops into Vietnam. Only two senators opposed the resolution.
The first combat troops arrived in South Vietnam in 1965 and as the war deteriorated the Johnson administration escalated the war. Soon hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed. Stalemate, body counts, hazy war aims, and the draft all catalyzed the anti-war movement and triggered protests throughout the United States and Europe. With no end in sight, protesters burned their draft cards, refused to pay income tax, occupied government buildings, and delayed trains loaded with war materials. By 1967, anti-war demonstrations drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands. In one protest, hundreds were arrested after surrounding the Pentagon.
Vietnam was the first “living room war.” Television, print media, and liberal access to the battlefield provided unprecedented coverage of the war’s brutality. Americans confronted grisly images of casualties and atrocities. In 1965, CBS Evening News aired a segment in which United States Marines burned the South Vietnamese village of Cam Ne with little apparent regard for the lives of its occupants, who had been accused of aiding Viet Cong guerrillas. President Johnson berated the head of CBS, yelling “Your boys just shat on the American flag.”
While the U. S. government imposed no formal censorship on the press during Vietnam, the White House and military nevertheless used press briefings and interviews to paint a positive image of the war effort. The United States was winning the war, officials claimed. They cited numbers of enemies killed, villages secured, and South Vietnamese troops trained. American journalists in Vietnam, however, quickly realized the hollowness of such claims (the press referred to afternoon press briefing in Saigon as “the Five O’Clock Follies”). Editors frequently toned down their reporters’ pessimism, often citing conflicting information received from th