Context for Mr. David Tweedy’s letter to Harold T. Johnson

Mr. David A. Tweedy wrote to Harold T. (Bizz) Johnson in December of 1969 highlighting the media’s effect of how soldiers were perceived, the constricts of legislative terminology, and the propaganda of the Vietnam Conflict.

Tweedy writes “They [the media] have distorted and twisted every news media and picture that has appeared on the news and in the paper of our boys in Vietnam”. Kathleen McClancy writes in The Iconography of Violence: Television, Vietnam, and the Soldier Hero, “The Vietnam War expanded and dominated foreign policy just as television news was expanding to a half-hour format and surpassing newspapers as the primary source of information for Americans.” Although Tweedy’s description of the media rings with his own brand of bias, McClancy further writes that, “Vietnam was both the first and the last time “war” (generally signifying the horrors of combat) would be brought to the viewer so intimately or so immediately. Furthermore, the continual combat footage from Vietnam is believed to have influenced public opinion of the war so negatively that continuing the intervention became impossible for the American government.” Here McClancy discusses the intimacy of the conflict that the media was bringing to people’s homes for the first time. Although she writes that the media exposure influenced the anti-war sentiments of the early 1970’s, here Mr. Tweedy has been influenced to continue support for the troops and states “whether it is right or wrong is beyond my comprehension.”

Something I found interesting about Mr. Tweedy’s letter was his call of attention towards the terminology used for the Vietnam Conflict, “They are not allowed to fight this conflict as a war but are used as mediators at our expense and their blood.” In Dale Andrade’s, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam, he writes that the U.S. congress did not establish the conflict as a war because the U.S. intention was not Vietnam itself, but the prevention of a Communist influence from China. The lack of congressional approval meant a lower budget for military efforts, which angered some Americans, such as Mr. Tweedy.

Tweedy goes on to further state that “The people here [Americans] ought to stand behind them [the troops] and give them credit instead of holding protest on honoring the propaganda that has and is being spread throughout this country of ours by a misguided few with distorted pictures and unproven words of evidence.”  The media, along with an array of posters, were the medium through which much of the propaganda surrounding the war came through, such as Walter Cronkite’s CBS News Special Reports. Guy Raz, a host of NPR said of Cronkite’s news report on February 27, 1968, “Cronkite did something that changed America’s perception of the Vietnam War.”