The Vietnam War has been described as a "television war": the phrase is in the title of a cameraman's memoir discussed at the US National Archives in 2017. This guide uses the US National Archives' public programme on television journalism in Vietnam, the text of Walter Cronkite's broadcast after the Tet Offensive as published by the University of Houston's Digital History project, and the journalists' own recollections recorded by the National Archives.
The television war
In late 2017 the US National Archives opened an exhibition, Remembering Vietnam, built around what it described as 12 critical episodes in the war. The Archives said the exhibition traced the policies and decisions of the people who directed the conflict, and set out to help explain why the United States became involved, why the war went on so long and why it was so divisive for American society. The exhibition remained open until 6 January 2019.
Alongside it, the Archives held a programme titled "Conflict Journalism in South East Asia". In his welcome remarks, the Archivist of the United States said the evening would examine the role of the television journalist during the Vietnam War and how it influenced later conflicts. The programme was built around a book by an ABC News cameraman whose title used the same phrase this guide began with: On the Frontlines of the Television War.
The people behind the camera
Television news from Vietnam depended on crews as much as on correspondents. The cameraman whose book was discussed, Yasutsune "Tony" Hirashiki, worked for ABC News from 1966 to 2006. The Archivist's remarks describe him as present at virtually every major event during his years in Vietnam, and the National Archives' report of the evening says he covered the war for nearly a decade.
Hirashiki first wrote and published the book in Japanese, his native language. At his request, the producer and author Terry Irving rewrote it in English. The panel that discussed it included Ted Koppel, the journalist and former anchor of Nightline, and Barrie Dunsmore, a journalist who covered foreign affairs for 30 years, with Irving as moderator. Irving himself had started in the early 1970s as a motorcycle courier for ABC News, carrying film.
That detail is a reminder of how the system worked: television pictures from the war travelled as newsfilm that had to be carried by hand, not as live transmissions.
The Cronkite broadcast of 1968
The broadcast most often associated with television's role in the war was made by Walter Cronkite of CBS News. Digital History at the University of Houston publishes the closing commentary of his television special of 27 February 1968, made after a trip to Vietnam to see the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. The text it reproduces comes from Reporting Vietnam: Part One: American Journalism 1959-1969, an anthology published in 1998.
Digital History describes the report as highly critical of US officials and as directly contradicting official statements on the progress of the war. In the commentary, Cronkite called his analysis speculative, personal and subjective. He described the Tet Offensive and several other current operations as draws, said he had been too often disappointed by the optimism of American leaders to trust it any longer, and concluded that the United States was "mired in stalemate". He suggested that the rational way out would be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honourable people who had kept their pledge.
Digital History also reproduces a National Archives photograph dated 20 February 1968 showing Cronkite and a CBS camera crew using a jeep as a camera dolly during an interview with the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, during the Battle of Hue City. The picture shows the same working arrangement the National Archives panel described: a correspondent, a crew and their equipment moving with the troops.
Report or opinion?
Cronkite labelled his closing words as personal and subjective. The distinction between reporting what was seen and offering a judgement about it is one that recurs in the history of war reporting, and it returns in the guide on embedded reporting, where a 2003 study measured how much of the coverage was factual and how much was commentary.
Whose perspective?
The National Archives' account of the panel records a point Ted Koppel made about the book. Koppel said he believed the American news business had a bias towards covering the war from the American perspective, and that Hirashiki's book offered a different view because it was written by someone who was not American and who understood that the country had a local population with its own thoughts and feelings.
Hirashiki spoke about neutrality from the other side. According to the Archives, he said that for much of his time in Vietnam he kept some distance, covering the war from behind the lens, until a close friend was killed in an ambush and the war became, in his words, his war. He said it was very difficult to remain neutral while covering a war. He also told the audience that when the war ended and he could go home, he felt he was abandoning the people of Vietnam.
Censorship, codes and danger
The panel discussed the practical conditions of the work. The National Archives lists the subjects: lost colleagues, the limited role women were able to play in covering the war, and the gap between the views of news executives at home and those of the people in the field. The journalists also talked about danger in Cambodia, about censorship, and about the codes they used to pass information for their stories.
Koppel described one such conversation: over about 20 minutes, he and a colleague used references to American comic-book heroes to exchange the details of a massacre without saying so directly. The anecdote shows a familiar pattern from the world wars in a new setting: journalists working within, and around, the limits placed on what they could transmit.
What this guide does not claim
A great deal has been written about whether television coverage changed American public opinion about the war, and in which direction. The sources cited on this page record what was broadcast and what the journalists later said about their work. They do not measure the effect of that coverage on viewers. This reference therefore makes no claim about how far television influenced public opinion, government policy or the course of the war, and readers should treat confident claims in either direction with care.
The same restraint applies to the war itself. This page describes how the war was reported, not who was right in it.
Where the records are
For readers who want to go further, the institutions cited here point to the main kinds of evidence:
- The US National Archives holds records documenting the US experience of the conflict, including photographs, textual and electronic records and audiovisual recordings, and the records shown in Remembering Vietnam.
- Broadcast transcripts and contemporary journalism have been collected in printed anthologies, such as the one Digital History cites for the Cronkite text.
- Memoirs and recorded panels, like the 2017 National Archives programme, preserve the journalists' own accounts, which are valuable and also, like all memory, partial.