Room 1: The Origins of the Credibility Gap (1968–71)
Walter Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam”
1968 was a pivotal year in the Vietnam War — and in the relationship between between the media and the White House. In January 1968, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, a series of ceasefire-breaking attacks across the South, including the U.S. embassy in Saigon. This shocked CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, who reportedly said, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war!” After the offensive, Cronkite decided to go to Vietnam to draw his own conclusions. His February 27 special report concluded that “it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate” and that the only way out was to negotiate.
In post–Tet Offensive polling, popular support for the war flipped to net negative. (This is based on a Gallup poll which asked respondents whether they thought the Vietnam War was a mistake. In December 1967, 45% said yes and 46% said no, for a net +1% approval of the war. In Feberuary 1968, 46% said yes and 42% said no, for a net −4% approval.) While this is a notable milestone that coincided with the offensive, looking at graphs of Gallup’s opinion polling on the war, there’s no single obvious factor that turned the public against the war, but rather a cascade of critical press coverage in the late 1960s that hadn’t really existed before.
While it may not have caused the public to turn against the war in Vietnam, Cronkite’s report is still representative of the shifts in popular opinion regarding the war at this time, and of the growing willingness of the press to question the White House’s official narrative on the war.
(Sources: Achenbach, Erskine)
The New York Times’s first article on the Mỹ Lai massacre
In the late 1960s, there were other Vietnam War developments that stood in stark contrast to the messaging being put out by the White House. Just as the Tet Offensive caused Cronkite to question whether the U.S. was actually winning the war, the Mỹ Lai massacre was an indefensible atrocity that caused significant negative press coverage of the US military’s actions… when the press finally found out, that is.
On March 16, 1968, American troops in the village of Mỹ Lai were ordered to kill everyone they found. They were told they would only find Viet Cong troops and sympathizers, but in reality, there were no soldiers there at all. Over 500 civilians were killed. Congress didn’t find out about the atrocities until 1969, when Ron Ridenhour, a helicopter gunner who had heard about Mỹ Lai from other soldiers, blew the whistle to several government officials. The press — and thus the American public — didn’t find out until a year and a half after the massacre, when the New York Times published a very brief story from The Associated Press about the arrest of Lt. William Calley, one of the officers involved in the massacre, on page 14 of the September 7, 1969 issue. The story might have ended there had reporter Seymour Hirsh not received a tip about Calley’s trial that eventually led him to break the story to the public that November. (Hersh would later join The New York Times, where he reported on the Nixon administration.)
In addition to hurting the U.S. military’s public image, the Mỹ Lai massacre changed media norms regarding war coverage. The media no longer felt pressure to cover up their country’s war atrocities, or more broadly to kill stories that could harm government interests. This change would have implications later on for the Pentagon Papers as well as Watergate.
(Sources: the artifact itself, Milam, Cushman, Frankel)
The Pentagon Papers
Full text available at https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers
The Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force was written toward the end of the Johnson administration as a history of US involvement in Vietnam. The report, which would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers, confirmed that the government had been lying to the public from the beginning about the U.S.’s chances of victory from the beginning. Other revelations from the Papers include that the U.S. was involved in a 1963 coup that overthrew South Vietnamese leader Ngô Đình Diệm; and that contrary to Congress’s original 1964 mandate “to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression,” the Defense Department described US goals in Vietnam in 1965 as:
- 70%—To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).
- 20%—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
- 10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
- ALSO—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.
- NOT—To “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay if asked out.
Defense contractor Daniel Ellsberg shared portions of the report with The New York Times beginning in March 1971. The Times’ first article, written by Neil Sheehan and published on June 14, 1971, revealed that the Johnson administration decided to begin bombing Vietnam before the 1964 election. Shortly afterwards, the government sued to block the newspaper from further publication of the papers on national security grounds. The case made it to the Supreme Court, who issued a sharply-divided 6–3 decision that ruled the Times and 18 other newspapers were allowed to continue publishing the papers.
It’s tempting to connect the government’s fight against the press’s disclosure of the Pentagon Papers as a front in Nixon’s war on the media, but Nixon biographer Roger Morris says that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had to convince Nixon to take action — Nixon felt releasing the papers mostly just made the previous Democratic administrations look bad.
The common thread in the Tet Offensive, the Mỹ Lai Massacre, and the release of the Pentagon Papers was the growing credibility gap, a phrase which referred to the growing distrust of the official government line by both journalists and the general public. The credibility gap would soon receive another important test in the form of Watergate.
(Sources: Morgan, lecture notes, Gallagher et al., Becker, State)