Information at War. Philip Seib

War

      During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had been the first candidate to benefit from television exposure, as “looking presidential” became a new criterion for elective office. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, became the first president to be forced to contend with television’s power during a war.

      Johnson’s long political rise – congressman, senator, vice president, president – had been a product of his mastery of political deal-making and one-on-one negotiating. As Senate majority leader during the 1950s, in the back rooms of Capitol Hill he could count votes and outmaneuver his opponents. When he became president in November 1963, he soon had to face extraneous factors over which he had little control.

      Things began well for Johnson’s presidency. In 1964, he was elected to a full term in the White House in a landslide that reflected the mood of a nation still grieving after the Kennedy assassination. With him he carried into power overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress and saw enacted an ambitious domestic policy agenda, including breakthrough civil rights legislation. But, increasingly, he was distracted by the fighting in Vietnam, a conflict from which he was determined not to “cut and run.” When Johnson took office, there were about 16,000 US troops in Vietnam. By the time he wrapped up his presidency at the end of 1968, there were 536,000.⁴⁶ As of early 1965, 225 Americans had been killed; by the war’s end, the number of US dead (including those killed in Cambodia and Laos) was more than 58,000.⁴⁷ Although estimates vary widely about the number of North and South Vietnamese combatants and civilians who were killed in the war, the total is almost certainly considerably more than 1 million.⁴⁸

As the troop numbers and casualties increased, Johnson’s political support gradually declined. The American public was receiving mixed messages about the war. From the government came upbeat reports about seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel” as the forces of democracy beat down the evil communists. But from many journalists came very different appraisals – lack of combat success for the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies and dramatic reports of a country being torn apart while American soldiers died.

      The information flows reaching the American public were different from those during the Kennedy years. News coverage of Vietnam during the early 1960s was limited in terms of news organizations’ commitments of money, people, and technology. By the midpoint of the Johnson presidency, however, the television networks were highlighting their coverage from Vietnam and were at least equal to print media in terms of influence.

      A basic premise of this book is that if a government wants to wage war, it must control – or at least influence – the information ecosystem. The Johnson administration was ineffective in its efforts to do this, partly because the president and his team did not fully appreciate the ways in which television reporting – however imperfect it might be – altered that environment.

      Someone who did understand this was Michael Arlen, television critic of the New Yorker magazine. In 1966, noting that 60 percent of Americans were getting their news about Vietnam from television, Arlen watched several weeks of network evening news coverage and came away from his viewing uncertain about the effect it was having on its audience. He saw wounded US soldiers grimacing in pain, helicopters chopping noisily above a jungle canopy, South Vietnamese soldiers firing at distant targets (with unknown results), and other pieces of information indicating inconclusive outcomes on the battlefield. “That’s the way it often is with television’s reporting of the war,” he wrote, “and it’s hard to know what to make of it.”⁴⁹ He also wrote that television’s perspective on the war was limited, and so viewers “look at Vietnam, it seems, as a child kneeling in a corridor, his eye to the keyhole, looks at two grownups arguing in a locked room – the aperture of the keyhole small; the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices indistinct.”⁵⁰

      Among Arlen’s most valuable contributions in his writings about the war were his observations about how information was affected by being delivered by television into American living-rooms. This is particularly important because it addresses how information’s impact is shaped by the environment in which it is received.

During World War II, information via radio (from Murrow, FDR, and others) had come into the living-room, but television was not yet a mass medium. Video news was available only in movie theatres as part of newsreels or government-sponsored documentaries. Consider how one watched these visual slices of war. First, going to the movies was something of an occasion; you left your home, bought a ticket, and sat in the dark amidst a large number of people, most of whom you did not know, seeing giants on the screen. This was not everyday reality. What you watched – a conventional film or a newsreel – could make an impression, but when you left the theatre you left behind at least some of the emotional power of the images and went on your way, back to more familiar surroundings.

      Watching reports about the Vietnam War on television was quite different. You were at home, in your own living-room, perhaps joined by family members. Watching television news was more a part of your life than going to the movies; maybe you tuned in almost every night. And as the TV screens became larger and correspondents focused on individual soldiers, faces of the fighters on the screen were close to life-size. Arlen wrote that viewers were watching “real men get shot at, real men (our surrogates, in fact) get killed and wounded.”⁵¹ And suppose that as part of the family group watching the evening news was a 17-year-old son – a year away from draft age and looking distressingly similar to the 19-year-old wounded soldier the family had just seen being carried off the Vietnam battlefield.

      That has emotional and political impact akin to, and perhaps greater than, the word-pictures delivered by Murrow several decades before. If you are Lyndon Johnson, you need to consider this when you contemplate ways to retain domestic political support for this war you are determined to fight. But Johnson had no television-related precedent on which to base a responsive strategy. In 1968, when he was planning to run for reelection, he found that presidential power could sometimes be overmatched by television power.

Tet

      The 1968 Tet offensive is one of the best-known episodes of the Vietnam War. It was covered intensively by American news media and was an important factor in Lyndon Johnson’s political demise. It was also, according to critics of the press, an example of how the news media can rush to judgment and deliver information that is fundamentally flawed.

On January 30 and 31, 1968, more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops began coordinated attacks in South Vietnam, targeting three-quarters of the country’s provincial capitals and most major cities, including the national capital, Saigon.⁵² In terms of shock value, the communists were immediately successful. The American military had not anticipated such a sweeping offensive, and the American public was dismayed to find that the consistently upbeat information they had been receiving from its government was clearly wrong. Because so much of the press corps was based in Saigon, initial reports from the fighting were filled with first-hand accounts of the attacks there, including the communists’ success (although brief) in breaching the defenses of the US embassy.

      Clark Clifford, who had just been confirmed by the Senate as US secretary of defense, later wrote about the deluge of bad news during the next several weeks:

       On February 18, the Pentagon reported the war’s highest one-week American casualty toll: 543 killed, 2,547 wounded.

       On February 23, the Selective Service announced it would draft an additional 48,000 men, the second-largest call-up of the war.

       On February 25, General William Westmoreland, commander of the US forces in Vietnam, told the press that he would need even more troops. General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the White House that as many as 205,000 more soldiers would be needed.53

      Other pieces of information also contributed to the appearance of chaos in South Vietnam. A widely seen photograph taken by Eddie Adams of the Associated Press showed South Vietnamese police general Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a handcuffed