236 e lusive v ictories
duration, but not so much that political pressure would force an all-out
military eff ort. He never struck the proper note. On one side, a growing
number of leaders from his own party and ordinary citizens did not see
the struggle as important enough to risk the nation’s blood and treasure,
and they looked for a way out, bestowing legitimacy on a burgeoning
antiwar movement. On the other side, the president’s fears of stirring
too much bellicosity were realized: by 1967 the largest segment of the
public favored an escalation of the American war eff ort. Squeezed
between the two extremes was the smallest group, the dwindling cohort
that backed the administration’s constrained war.
Contentious relations with the mass media did not help the admin-
istration’s eff orts to communicate its version of the war. Even during the
Kennedy years, reporters in Saigon had become skeptical about offi cial
accounts, and matters worsened once the war was Americanized. Cor-
respondents soon dismissed Westmoreland’s offi cial briefi ngs as “Five
O’Clock Follies” that bore little or no relationship to the war they
observed when they went into the fi eld with U.S. or ARVN troops. I n
part the discrepancy refl ected the nature of the war itself, with its lack
of visible benchmarks of progress; military operations appeared repeti-
tious, even pointless. Government-media relations had also changed
fundamentally since World War II: reporters no longer saw themselves
as part of the war eff ort and refused to boost public morale. Doubts
about the veracity of administration claims spread to Washington, so
that by late 1966 the press spoke openly of a credibility gap between
what administration spokesmen claimed and what was happening on
the ground. The president, miffed when media interpretations of
administration war policy deviated from the offi cial line and chagrined
by the attention given the growing opposition to the war, often lashed
out at infl uential news outlets and at individual reporters.
As an added obstacle to the administration’s eff orts to frame coverage
of Vietnam, it became the fi rst war to be witnessed in all its savagery by
the American public. Television networks had expanded their news cov-
erage, and video reports from the battlefield made for dramatic
viewing. Where censorship in the Second World War had insulated
the home front from images of dead American soldiers, in Vietnam no
such buff er existed. Scenes of mayhem and destruction became nightly
newscast fare, with very little context. Haunting images of American