U.S. Failure in Vietnam

There is one view that perhaps the media, with its vivid coverage of the atrocities, had a role in undermining U.S. foreign policy. When the Public Broadcasting System broadcast a 13-part documentary in 1985 that examined the role of the television media in covering the Vietnam War, there was a protest and the Accuracy in Media group tried to obtain airing of a documentary which re-butted the program. Accuracy in Media and such books as Tet: Turning Point in the Vietnam War by Don Oberdorfer, Big Story by Peter Braestrup, and Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: the Unmaking of a President by Herbert Schandler made an argument in disagreement. They portrayed the media and it's television coverage of the Vietnam War as tasteless, sometimes inept, and too often ignorant and going for sensationalism. The Accuracy in Media documentary, "Television's Vietnam: Impact of the Media," calls the Vietnam War a commercial joke where the television medium reasoned that they could make money if there was smoke in the picture. It was argued that coverage of Tet was simplistic, while Khe Sanh was exploited as a television hit. The networks claim that television was a mirror in Vietnam, while others claim that television launched visual missiles that caused pessimism in the U.S. and undermined the

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ed the war and made for a U.S. military defeat instead of a negotiated peace that might have preserved South Vietnam. Hence, Baritz argues, a failure of America's leaders was at least partially responsible for America's failure in Vietnam. This failure of American policy and leadership helped bring about failure of the United States in Vietnam (Baritz 178-222). In addition, Baritz points to problems in the high levels of the military. The military thought of everything as being a military problem and assumed that the United States was invincible and could not lose. Members of the military also were giving President Johnson assurances that the American people were behind him in stepping up the war on Vietnam. It was the belief of the American military that American military actions would determine the results in Vietnam. This feeling persisted despite evidence that Ho Chi Minh and his men were prepared to resist the Americans for decades, just as they had resisted and prevailed against the Japanese in the 1940s and the French in the 1950s (Baritz 132-177). A lack of understanding of the nature of guerrilla warfare and the history of the Vietnamese also prevailed at the level of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who prepared
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Approximate Word count = 2325
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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