Vietnam, the living room war

By 1969, the war in Vietnam had turned, and so had television coverage. The Tet Offensive the year before had carved out a new reality in American public opinion, and it was an increasingly harsh and embittered one.

Forty years later, a distant echo of that remains on TV.

William Hammond, chief of the General Histories Branch of the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Ft. Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C., and a leading expert on media coverage of Vietnam, says journalists covering the war "became more jaundiced, and certainly when they went into the first Persian Gulf War, they were looking for all the problems that existed in Vietnam.

"TV was pretty much supportive of the Vietnam War, although it did change after the offensives in 1968 and '69. Before 1968, the anchormen and journalists talked about 'our war.' It then became 'the war.' "

Vietnam was America's first televised war and it played out in millions of living rooms - a living room war, in the phrase of critic Michael Arlen, punctuated with battle scene footage or the horrifying battlefield statistics.

Walter Cronkite would travel to Vietnam in 1968, then later issue a series of commentaries condemning the war. President Lyndon B. Johnson would famously complain that if he'd lost Cronkite, then he'd lost Middle America, though in all likelihood, Cronkite was reflecting what "Middle America" already thought by that time.

TV coverage was unshackled, as never before or since. "It was," says Sanford Socolow, longtime producer of "The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite," "the first war that this country participated in where there was free and open coverage."

With that, came a price as well. The military came to believe that the press helped lose the war, and restrictions would ensue. Those largely remain in place to this day.

For the major networks, notably CBS and NBC, the war also became one of the defining events in their own history, yielding a long stretch of coverage that flowed from the mid-1960s until 1969, when it began to ebb then finally stop when the last of U.S. personnel were evacuated from Saigon on April 29, 1975.

The networks had bureaus - their largest in the world outside New York, Washington and London - at the Caravelle Hotel on Lam Son Square in downtown Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Crews would lug bulky 16-millimeter motion picture cameras to Tan Son Nhut airport, then head out to whatever story or crisis was unfolding - like the battle of Hill 937, Hamburger Hill, in May of '69, with 72 U.S. dead and 372 wounded.

Peter Herford, who teaches journalism at Shantou University in Shantou, China, and who ran CBS' Saigon bureau in 1968-69, says, "The late '50s and early '60s were dominated by the civil rights story the way network newscasts were later dominated by Vietnam. It was a bad day for us when our stories occupied less than 50 percent of the broadcast."