The uncensored war

As the U. S. escalated its intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s, the media's coverage ramped up too. Soon, the war permeated the homes of millions of Americans — by television, radio and newspaper. This week, we hear about what happened during the Vietnam War, and how the stories made visible during that time, forever transformed the way America engages with warfare. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Rund Abdelfatah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Since these words were first penned, the vision of America has been determined by people testing these ideals against the realities of everyday life. And in the mid to late 20th century, the Vietnam War put those ideals to the test. The war forced Americans to confront questions about governmental power, the realities of warfare, and what happens to democracy when citizens disagree with their leadership.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television.

• 1:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  The war entered the homes of Americans through televisions, newspapers, and radio. Images of what was actually happening in Vietnam changed the way Americans thought of and engaged with the war. And it changed the way the story of war was told.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  We might see Vietnamese peasants in obvious anguish, distressed, grieving, but mostly the Vietnamese who featured in American news broadcasts were silent.

• 1:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today on the show, the Vietnam War. What happened in Vietnam and how it changed America's relationship with war and the responsibility of journalists on the ground. That's coming up after a quick break.

• 2:23Speaker 00

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• 3:22Speaker 06

  American journalist Austin Tice vanished in Syria over a decade ago. For years, we've been searching for him, and now we finally have some answers. This is the prison that Austin was in. Oh, my God. We found Austin's file. Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4, on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:53Speaker 06

  War in South Vietnam.

• 3:55Speaker 07

  An ugly war in a far-off place to which the United States is deeply committed. It's 1964. U.S. military advisers have already been in Vietnam for over a decade. By the spring of 1964, the Vietcong had reached a strength of an estimated 60,000 troops and controlled

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Nearly sixty-eight percent of South Vietnam's villages and emblems.

• 4:20Speaker 07

  Successive US administrations said they were in Vietnam to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia. And things weren't going well. But most Americans weren't paying much attention to the conflict.

• 4:34Speaker 04

  This is a war that begins in a very sort of slow way that initially was largely ignored.

• 4:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Susan Kurethers, historian at the University of Warwick and author of the book, "The Media at War."

• 4:47Speaker 07

  Jim Crow, political assassinations, voting rights, those domestic issues were much more top of mind. But then...

• 4:56Speaker 03

  On the night of August 4th, 1964, President Johnson appeared on national television.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me...

• 5:09Speaker 07

  Following a disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin involving an exchange of fire between US and North Vietnamese ships, Congress, with near unanimous support in the House and Senate, then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate military involvement in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. And suddenly, the draft was ramped up.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  And more and more thousands of Americans went and sent there.

• 5:38Speaker 07

  Which led more Americans to ask questions about the war. And news outlets responded.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  It first appeared that the Marines had been sniped at and that a few houses were made to pay.

• 6:06Speaker 07

  Film reels would be flown to Tokyo for quick editing and developing, and then flown to the US. There were three main networks broadcasting news from Vietnam: ABC, NBC, and CBS. And the big publications like The New York Times and Time Magazine also sent their reporters there.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Blue didn't want to come to Vietnam, and he'd much rather be a businessman than a soldier. But right now, he's in charge of the lives of 21 men.

• 6:33Speaker 07

  Most of the reporting focused on the US perspective: American soldiers, policy, military strategy.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  We might see Vietnamese peasants in obvious anguish, distressed, grieving. But mostly, the Vietnamese who featured in American news broadcasts were silent.

• 7:02Speaker 07

  A flurry of alternative and international media outlets were also reporting from Vietnam. Many staff correspondents were headquartered in Saigon.

• 7:12Speaker 07

  The full fury of the war has scarcely touched Saigon. It attracts visitors, GIs on leave, and even American tourists anxious for a feel of the war.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party on top of the roof of the best hotel, the Carabelle. There was roses and champagne and all kinds of wonderful things. You'd think you were at home, you know. But then, over the edge of the parapet, you could see these flares coming up. And the question was whether it was incoming or outgoing. You would never know till it happened.

• 7:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Frances Fitzgerald. She goes by Frankie. In 1966, Frankie flew to Vietnam sort of on a whim. She was 26, from a wealthy family, and curious about the world. So she decided to take a break from her local reporting job in New York to travel to Southeast Asia, wanting to see the place where her father had deployed during World War II. She went to Thailand, Laos, and eventually landed in Vietnam.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  I thought I would just spend a month there, do an article or two, pay my airfare back. But when I got there, I found I couldn't leave. I mean, I'd never seen a war before, of course, and it was all too fascinating.

• 8:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Unlike in previous conflicts like World War II, the US military made a conscious decision not to formally censor journalists. They saw Vietnam as more of a limited conflict, not a full-scale war.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  Every evening, a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier of rotting fruit and onto the sidewalk.

• 9:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frankie arrived with a still film camera and a typewriter she'd packed into her suitcase. And as a freelance journalist, she could pretty much report whatever stories she wanted.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  It just occurred to me that the thing that was missing was that the American high command knew nothing about the Vietnamese. Behind her, the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back, past the facade of new houses, into a maze of thatched huts and tin-roofed shacks called Bui Phat, one of the oldest of the refugee quarters.

• 9:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  She got articles printed in The Village Voice, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine, centering the Vietnamese perspective.

• 9:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  So walk me through, like, how did you actually go about getting that perspective? Because I'm assuming you didn't speak Vietnamese?

• 9:59Speaker 05

  Well, I found, I mean, I found several interpreters along the way. That wasn't hard to do because people wanted to do that. You make a lot of money that way.

• 10:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  And how would you know if someone was a good interpreter if you don't speak Vietnamese?

• 10:14Speaker 05

  I could feel it.

• 10:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frankie would travel around the South Vietnamese countryside with her interpreter, hoping to connect with people. But she wasn't always welcomed with open arms.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Americans do not normally walk through the slums, not the real slums, like those in the outlying areas.

• 10:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  She remembers going into a community where refugees were living in makeshift homes, built on planks atop a marsh.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  They were angry at being displaced from their villages and put in this marsh. Gigantic sewers, lakes full of stagnant filth.

• 10:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  And suddenly...

• 10:52Speaker 05

  A pebble sails out and falls gently on the stranger's back. It is followed by a hail of stones.

• 11:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  She began getting pelted with stones.

• 11:03Speaker 05

  I was sort of offended by it, in the sense that I thought, what have I done? But I could very well understand, if I had to live in such a place, I perhaps would be throwing stones too.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  These refugees lose their lands, their families, their ancestral homes and the structure of their lives.

• 11:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Frankie says the key to finally connecting with people was just continuing to show up.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  They would realize that you were not going to come and blow up the village.

• 11:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  How did you approach fact checking? Either things that the local Vietnamese people were telling you or the things that the US military or the Vietnamese local police were telling you?

• 11:52Speaker 05

  Oh, sometimes it was absolutely impossible. You just have to do the best you could, find other sources that said the same thing. I think we're given certainly away by our editors. There was a rule that you couldn't prove anything in a story by quoting a Vietnamese.

• 12:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wow, so it was pretty explicit that if your source was a Vietnamese person versus an American commander, let's say,

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  the two statements are not equal.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  Not equal, not equal.

• 12:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  And there were times when she felt the reality she was witnessing would be too unbelievable to her readers.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  I went to see the civilian hospital. And then, you know, I see all these Vietnamese on beds outside their rooms with terrible burns, which they had from napalm.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  You know, to describe it right here is almost impossible for me. It was so awful. I didn't know what to do.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  I reported some of it, but just not the really gruesome details.

• 13:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Why did you leave the most gruesome details out, do you think?

• 13:11Speaker 05

  Well, because I felt that it wouldn't be credible, really. I didn't have an organization behind me.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  Everybody had this internal censor which sort of said, you know, how far can I go with this?

• 13:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Is journalism's role to push the conversation if that's where the truth is leading, or is it to meet people where they are until they're ready to hear the sort of bigger ecstatic truth?

• 13:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Well, it's probably to do the first, but at the expense of not having it printed at all.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  To one people, the war would appear each day, compressed between advertisements and confined to a small space in the living room. The explosion of bombs and the cries of the wounded would become the background accompaniment to dinner.

• 14:12Speaker 07

  In 1972, Frankie published a series of articles in The New Yorker detailing her years of reporting from Vietnam that were then turned into a book called Fire in the Lake, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  For the other people, the war would come one day out of a clear blue sky. In a few minutes, it would be over. The bombs released by an invisible pilot with incomprehensible intentions would leave only the debris and the dead behind.

• 14:41Speaker 07

  It was the first major book by an American profiling Vietnam, its history, its people, the impact of the war on them. At the time, Frankie described the book as a, quote, "first draft of history."

• 15:02Speaker 07

  Frankie's book was part of a chorus of reporting that had been fueling a growing anti-war movement for years.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  So many Americans are not only opposed to the war, but vehemently out on the streets.

• 15:17Speaker 07

  Public opinion had dramatically begun to shift going into 1968. US troop numbers were at an all-time high, and then came the Tet Offensive.

• 15:29Speaker 07

  Communist forces swept through more than 100 South Vietnamese cities, towns, and villages. American and South Vietnamese troops fought them back, and the North suffered huge losses.

• 15:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was militarily a win for the US, but optically, it was a resounding defeat. Reporters sent back photos that shook the American public. In one, a South Vietnamese soldier stands over a North Vietnamese prisoner, pistol in hand, carrying out an execution. Another shows bloodstains, bullet holes, and dead bodies at the US Embassy.

• 16:05Speaker 07

  Susan Carruthers says, for much of the war in Vietnam, the news media...

• 16:10Speaker 04

  was absolutely beholden to this Cold War template that the United States was there to try to prop up the leak at South Vietnam. And that changes only really after the consensus on Capitol Hill itself has started to break down. Editors are more willing to sort of push the boundaries of the sayable, the showable.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

• 16:40Speaker 07

  About a month after the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman for CBS Evening News, known then as the most trusted man in America, recorded this broadcast after a trip to Vietnam.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  It is increasingly clear to this report that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

• 17:11Speaker 07

  After hearing this broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." And within weeks, he decided to not run for reelection.

• 17:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  The war continued for another seven years, until 1975, when the US withdrew the last of its combat troops. Journalists were credited with and blamed for ending the war. They had risked life and limb, often without the safety of a military escort, to report the truth. More than 60 journalists paid the ultimate price for it. The Vietnam War came to be known as the Uncensored War, forever changing the way Americans see, understand, and engage with the story of war.

• 18:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear the full episode featuring the experiences of war reporters, check out From the Front Lines. And be sure to join us next week when we meet the ultimate superhero.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  He's not someone who has always known power. So he is someone who knows what it is like to be the one getting sand kicked in their face. He's on the side of the little guy. Time for Captain America to go to work.

• 18:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Captain America and what his story tells us about being American today? That's next week. Don't miss it.

• 18:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by Kiana Moradam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Rande Abdelfattah. Thanks for listening.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  This message comes from Found. Found provides modern business banking with built-in bookkeeping, invoices, contractor payments, and tax tools. Categorize expenses, track receipts, invoice clients, and send payments right where you bank. Join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamlined their finances with Found. Open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D dot com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Lead Bank, member FDIC.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  This week on Up First, we're in the final days before the midterm elections, and this is one of the wonderful things about politics, one of the wonderful things about humanity. We have all this data, we have all this information, and nobody really knows what's gonna happen. We're gonna follow it, day by day, through Election Day and beyond. And you can listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.