Period 8: Vietnam Short Answer Essay Practice
Directions: Use your knowledge of the Vietnam Conflict and the quotes below to answer A, B, and C on the back of this paper.
“The intensely negative coverage of the Vietnam war influenced both politicians and the public. Americans depended on television to see and understand the war, but the death and destruction they saw appeared as irrational killing when prospects for the war became increasingly negative. Therefore, the majority of Americans withdrew their support for the war after the Tet Offensive. War coverage declined from 90 percent of all newscasts to 61 percent from Richard Nixon's election through February 1969. Though the media had been covering the anti-war movement before 1968, it now overshadowed the war itself. Draft-card burning and demonstrations provided television with fresher conflict, human impact, and moral issues. With the massive loss of public support for the war, politicians initiated withdrawal policies. Television no longer focused on combat, but on the political process. From 1965 to 1969, the percentage of combat stories had been 48 percent; from 1970 until the end of U.S involvement, only 13 percent of news stores involved soldiers in combat. By 1975, the U.S public was left with one climactic image of their soldiers in Vietnam: losing the war as Saigon fell.” - Erin McLaughlin
“The majority of Americans, it appeared, neither wanted to talk or think about their nation's longest and most debilitating war--the only war the United States ever lost. The originator of the containment policy that drove this war, later, George R. Kennan's depiction of the Vietnam War was as ‘the most disastrous of all America's undertakings over the whole two hundred years of its history.’ Initially, the humiliating defeat imposed by a nation Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had described as "a fourth-rate power" caused a loss of pride and self-confidence in a people that liked to think of the United States as invincible. So did the economic woes then afflicting the United States, which many blamed on the estimated $167 billion spent on the war. President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to finance a major war and the domestic programs of the Great Society simultaneously, without a significant increase in taxation, launched a runaway double-digit inflation and mounting federal debt that ravaged the American economy and eroded living standards from the late 1960s into the 1990s. The conflict weakened public faith in government, and in the honesty and competence of its leaders. Indeed, skepticism, if not cynicism, and a high degree of suspicion of and distrust toward authority of all kind characterized the views of an increasing number of Americans in the wake of the war. The military, especially, was discredited for years. -Harvard Sitikoff
A)Explain the impact on American society as contrasted by McLauglin and Sitikoff.
B)Describe one psychological impact or event affecting Americafrom 1968 to the presentnot already included in the quotes.
C)Describe one event affecting American politics from 1968 to the present not already included in the excerpts.