The Pentagon Rivals Hollywood at Telling War Stories

By Tom Engelhardt, University of Massachusetts Press. Posted September 22, 2007.

Soon after World War II began, at the request of Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, Hollywood director Frank Capra launched the production of a series of official propaganda films to explain American war aims. They went under the general title, Why We Fight. The "why" was purely informative in nature. In it lurked not the faintest hint of a question, only of a powerful answer.

Over two decades later, in 1965, in the midst of an already bloody, stalemated war in Vietnam, the U.S. government released another official propaganda film, modeled on the Why We Fight series, with the title, Why Vietnam. But there the similarities ended. No longer was the making of such a film a simple matter of fleshing out American verities -- that the enemy was aggressive and savage, that victory was assured, that postwar goals were obvious. Doubt had, by then, crept deeply into what had once been an American tale of triumph that had seemed like nothing short of a centuries-old birthright.

Although this film, too, finally appeared without a question mark, by then questions, doubts of every sort, lurked everywhere, barely below the surface. Thanks to an article at the time by a State Department East Asian specialist, James Thomson, Jr., we know that the issue of acknowledging that question mark, already deeply embedded in an American public wondering why indeed we were in Vietnam, was argued out in the most literal way within the administration of Lyndon Johnson. "My most discouraging assignment in the realm of public relations," he recalled, "was the preparation of a White House pamphlet entitled Why Vietnam, in September, 1965; in a gesture toward my conscience I fought -- and lost -- a battle to have the title followed by a question mark."

But there was no way to get rid of that mark or the doubts that only grew more prominent as the war years lengthened. After Vietnam, the Pentagon, licking its wounds, started a campaign to blame that question mark on a traitorous media (which had supposedly stabbed it in the back) and began planning to bring it to heel and so take the question mark out of our culture. The following excerpt from the new afterward to my book, The End of Victory Culture, just reissued and updated, takes into account the way that culture of triumph returned in the era of the younger Bush, only to crash and burn in record time in Iraq, and focuses on that Pentagon campaign.

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It turns out to be no small trick to create a warstory that will stick to the public's ribs these days. Despite decades of well-planned, well-financed post-Vietnam efforts to create a lasting tale of American triumph, the Pentagon is still running hard with no end in sight. In 1982, still licking their Vietnam wounds, convinced that the war had been lost largely thanks to traitorous media coverage, pentagon officials watched the British military win a one-sided victory over Argentina in the isolated south Atlantic and defeat the press at the same time. With reporters largely confined to a naval vessel and unsympathetic journalists left behind, the British military (their eyes on our Vietnam experience) almost completely controlled the flow of war news. Inspired, our military began to plan to give better war.

It has been said that each of our many wars and interventions since the Reagan administration ordered the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 has proved yet another living laboratory for the military-industrial complex; for the testing of ever newer, ever more powerful, more technologically sophisticated generations of weaponry. The practically sub-nuclear MOAB (nicknamed the "Mother of all Bombs"), for instance, was rushed from its testing grounds in Florida to the Persian Gulf region just days too late for use in the invasion of Iraq. Its first battle tests will have to await our next frontier war -- even if that frontier turns out, once again, to be in the oil heartlands of the planet.

A similar testing-out process has been under way, war by war, in terms of media coverage. The pentagon's first impulse, following the British example, was simply to deny war to the media, and so in a sense to the public. As the British had sidelined the press in the Falkland Islands, so for the invasion of Grenada the pentagon "pooled" reporters, then placed them offshore and did not allow them to watch, film, or cover events for several days. This was but the crude beginning of an attempt to rebuild the imagery of war as something thrilling to Americans (as the Army itself was being rebuilt as an all-volunteer force that would again capture public esteem), but it also held powerful elements of left-over, Vietnam-era anger and revenge against the media. War coverage was being managed as a form of punishment.

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Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

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