One cold January morning some years ago, an ad in the local paper caught my eye:

Old LIFE Magazines on Vietnam War $35.00 takes all.

This might not be a remarkable ad to find in a city newspaper, but in the remote coastal area where I lived – fifty miles from the nearest stoplight --- it was a peculiar message to see among the classifieds for firewood, well digging, and satellite TV.

It was a lazy Superbowl Sunday, so I called the phone number out of curiosity. A woman answered, inviting me to drive down that afternoon to take a look. My house was filling fast with football fans, so her offer was especially attractive. I drove south on the winding coastal highway, turning up a long gravel driveway to her house, perched on the seaward hill with an enviable bluewater view. Only a few thousand people lived along this thirty mile stretch of Mendocino County coast, and most of us knew each other. This woman was new in town.

We stood in the garage of her half-finished house, making our introductions and surveying the contents of a large box that held a thick stack of LIFE magazines and dozens of assorted clippings. I judged that the woman was in her late twenties, too young for the "Vietnam Generation" and probably too old to be the daughter of a vet. Maybe a sister. I told her about my interest in Vietnam, then asked about hers.

"Oh. I don’t really have any special interest. I found them. I was clearing out my house in Buffalo getting ready to move out here, and I took some junk to a dumpster behind a local shopping center. And there they were. The magazines and other stuff. In the box. Next to the trash but not dumped out. Something told me they would mean something to somebody, and I didn’t know anything about Vietnam but I guess I thought I should. So I took them and moved them all the way out here with me. It was kind of a crazy thing to do, but I’m glad you can use them."

I had told her about a class on the Vietnam War I was teaching at San Francisco State, and that my part of the course focused on how the war was portrayed in American popular culture. LIFE Magazine would be perfect for the students. I thanked her profusely and turned to leave when she stopped me. "No, wait. I want you to have these, too. These were with the magazines." She held out a packet of letters, letters home from a young marine serving in combat in 1967. "I don’t know what happened to him. I didn’t want to sell them with the magazines, being personal letters, but I want you to have them. I don’t know why they were thrown away."

The Collection

The minute I got home I sat on the floor with the box and took inventory with archeologicalcare. Twenty-eight LIFE magazines, soon being eagerly passed around the Superbowl guests, several of them vets. One of them didn’t watch a minute of the game over the next two hours as he pored over issue after issue. It was a pretty heavy duty collection, concentrated from between 1966 and 1968 and including some of the finest combat photography of Henry Huet, Tim Page, David Douglas Duncan, and Larry Burrows.

The collection also included a copy of Newsweek with a fiery Khe Sanh cover, a New York Times "Week in Review" from 2/21/65 with extensive coverage of Vietnam issues, a miscellaneous gung ho magazine called Vietnam in Pictures that was the print equivalent of The Green Berets, a newspaper clipping of the first boy in their town to die in Vietnam, [list other print contents].

More compelling were the letters. Twenty-three from the young marine to his parents, half a dozen from his wife to his parents, several letters from the mother of the marine that she had sent to him in Vietnam and been stamped "return to sender," and even one letter from the mother to President Lyndon Johnson.

It was clear that the contents of this box had belonged to the mother. They had been carefully chosen and saved. Why had she thrown them away? Or maybe she had died and someone else had tossed them. But who? Why would anyone throw away the letters from a war?

Having gone through the contents of the box, a mother’s memories of her son’s Vietnam combat, I got to know her in a strange way, this middle class devout Catholic woman with a penchant for military strategy. It was as if I had crawled inside her information space and for a time and from the corner of a room seen that part of the world as she had seen it. I read the notes she had made on her boy’s letters home, noting the number of days each took to arrive and his locations during that time. She was obviously struggling with the geography, trying to pinpoint where he was and track his movements. I read him begging her not to send any more packages – eight had arrived at once – and trying not to hurt her feelings while asking her to stop "generaling" him. Mother the military strategist, it seems, offered her tactical suggestions not only to LBJ.

Sharing in the personal documents of a mother with a son at war offers insights into some of life’s most private moments. Taken as a text, this collection allowed me to reconstruct the way in which she reached out to understand a world that had sent her son in harm’s way. It was not by accident that LIFE magazine figured so heavily in her world view.

The Coffee Table War

Vietnam has been called the "living room war" because it was the first war to be televised into people’s homes, and there is no question that television coverage had an enormous impact on public opinion in the United States. But television was still in its early adolescence in the 1960s; thirty minute news broadcasts did not begin until 1963, and the then-supreme three networks were not broadcasting fully in color until 1967.

In today’s television audience terms, a Nielsen rating of more than 20 – meaning 20 million sets tuned to your channel --- is a rating home run. No network approached those numbers in the 1960s but another medium did: LIFE magazine, which in its heyday reached 36% of all U.S. families, with an estimated weekly readership of 22 million, a greater market penetration than any network either then or now.

LIFE was so ubiquitous that it was taken for granted as a staple of American culture. It was transparent; part of the wallpaper. At the doctor’s or dentist’s office, on your neighbor’s coffee table, LIFE magazine was as much a part of American values as motherhood and apple pie, and it played a special role in bringing the Vietnam War home. Vietnam was a coffee table war, too.

William Prochnau in his study of Vietnam War correspondents Once Upon a Distant War called LIFE "the premiere publication of Middle America," "flossy, glossy" and "an unabashed propaganda organ for The American Way or, at least, the view of it as seen by its messianic founder and publisher Henry Luce." The New York Times served the elite readership; LIFE was there for everyone else.

In the 1960s, LIFE was not just an example of a magazine, but virtually a medium unto itself. In those years just before the domination of television became complete, LIFE represented a transitional medium between print and visual worlds, making it a unique vehicle for communication. LIFE was as visual as television, but with the added dimension of written text and the presence of a physical reality that – unlike TV – could be touched, turned, and read over and over again. Print media deal largely with issues; television with symbols. LIFE dealt in both. Because of LIFE’s ubiquity and unique graphics + text formula, there is no question it had considerably greater influence on American public opinion about the Vietnam War than is generally acknowledged.

This suited Henry Luce just fine, who had always thought of Time/LIFE as an unofficial arm of the government. Loudon Wainwright called LIFE a "virtual house organ" in its coverage of World War II over more than two hundred issues. Luce was famously chauvinistic and anti-communist during the Cold War, turning his magazine editorials into open letters to the presidents of the United States. And he knew them all.

 

Heroes and Hello Dolly

Studying the magazine collection, (which I later completed), one could readily see that LIFE went through several very different moods in coverage of the Vietnam War. Until 1965, the theme seemed to be "Heroes and Hello Dolly." This is the period when the mother of the young marine wrote to the president:

 

January 17, 1965

President of the United States
Mr. Lyndon B. Johnson
White House
Washington, D.C.

Mr President:

Last fall one of my pupil’s brothers was the first Western New York casualty in Viet Nam. In a letter that he had written to his mother, he stated that the Viet Cong came out of nowhere.
My son will soon enter the Marine Corps upon graduation from college and we discussed the element of surprise. Then research started about how Asiatics would fight. We read about the Tartars and their invasion of Europe. . .To conceal their footsteps or horse markings they use caves. . .Further research divulged that many times pits were covered with young trees. . .Their tunnel openings or cave openings may be along these watersheds. . .The most faithful and policing dog is the Irish Wolfhound. . .
I approached my grade if they would like to write our President a letter on the subject of caves. Enclosed letters are repetitive but one surprised me with his research on chipmunks. . ."Chippy" may be worth studying...
I wish I were an expert to help more, but please accept our sincere interest in our united nation.

Most respectfully yours,

Mrs. Michael Pace

 

At almost the same time, in the LIFE issue dated January 8, 1965, Editor-in-Chief Hedley Donovan wrote "To L.B.J.: What IS Our Aim in Vietnam?" "Only the president," he wrote, "by insulating our policy and boldly implementing it, can stop the process of Vietnamese disintegration and a growing U.S. mood of to-hell-with-it."

This was still early 1965, with only 23,500 American "advisors" in Vietnam. Also in the collection was the New York Times "Week in Review" section of February 1, 1965 featuring "The Debate Over our Vietnam Policy" that stands even today as a remarkably thorough analysis of the issues. This was the week Lyndon Johnson said "we seek no wider war," words that would return to haunt him. In February 1965 the Times broke with the Johnson administration and editorialized "a great debate on the Vietnamese war is now raging all over the United States," concluding that "the course of sanity is explore the initiatives opened up by Secretary General Thant and General deGaulle for negotiations to seek a neutralization of Vietnam and all Southeast Asia." A map of anti-U.S. demonstrations in ninteen different cities around the world as well pointed editorial cartoons look in hindsight like handwriting on the wall so clear that the consequences of escalation were inevitable. This "Week in Review" section was part of the mother’s collection, the only New York Times clipping in the box.

In the same month, on February 26, 1965, LIFE featured a group photograph of sixteen proud and dashing pilots posed in front of a fighter plane next to a dramatic shot of a soaring MIG with the caption "Into a New Blue Yonder – Objective: Red Sanctuary." This heroic image was not unlike an article from August 1964 on "Heroes of the Gulf of Tonkin." During this time, the war is still a portrayed as a "clean" war with vigorous young troops posing proudly. The more clinical air war is featured over the minimal military actions on the ground and there was less emphasis on combat coverage with the notable exception of Larry Burrows’ April 16, 1965 searing photo essay of a helicopter crew under attack and Horst Faas’ July 2, 1965 pictures of war dead and wounded.

1965 was a critical year in the course of the Vietnam War. While in a broader sense there might have been the force of some historical inevitability, it was still a conflict with still fewer than 50,000 troops committed, a president who stated "we seek no wider war," and world opinion strongly opposed to expanded American military involvement. The first 3,500 ground combat troups were committed to provide "security" for the Da Nang air base in March 1965, and the critical threshold had been crossed.

In Daniel Hallin’s study of coverage of the war during this period, he concludes that a "faithful reader of the New York Times – someone who read it thoroughly every day" could follow the policy debate and see that escalation was immanent. But what about everyone else? As late as 1964, two-thirds of all Americans had given "little thought" to Vietnam. Hallin’s study of news coverage during this period concluded that the facts about Vietnam policy "emerged in the news in such fragmentary form it is hard to see how the average member of the public. . .could have had more than a hazy awareness of the momentous decision the administration was making." (p.77) To complicate this lack of information and confusion, Hallin documents that every government escalation during this period was accompanied by a neutralizing statement indicating that it represented "no change of policy whatever." Every escalation in troop engagement was accompanied by increased administration attempts to manage information and public opinion.

The New York Times may have broken with government policy early in 1965 with its call for negotiation, but the magazine of the people, LIFE, stood editorially steadfast with the administration. The very week that the first Marine batallion landed at Da Nang, Hedley Donovan editorialized that "in this latest phase of the Vietnam crisis President Johnson has shown admirable toughness and skill." Called "Shape of a Vietnam Policy," the piece relentlessly belittled opponents of a U.S. policy that "seemed almost entirely isolated by so-called ‘world opinion’": "Peking was bellicose, Moscow minatory, DeGaulle avuncular, U Thant inept and intrusive." These "meddlings" were from the "noisy maw of world ‘world opinion’" and Johnson had "properly refused to bow to the premature pressure to negotiate." What was at stake, in Donovan’s view, was "the credibility in Asia of an American commitment." It is little wonder that even a conscientious reader would find "the facts" nearly impossible to sort out.

Peter Pan in Vietnam

By October 1965, more than 100,000 U.S. combat troops were in Vietnam, and even the editorial writers for the Times had for the most part closed ranks behind the president. The window for early resolution had closed. "This is Really War," editorialized the Times. But it is clear that this escalation had not entirely sunk in, nor had the meaning that this was "really war."

If there is one document that should be placed in a time capsule to memorialize the mixed messages being received by the American people about the Vietnam War at this crucial time it is the October 22, 1965 issue of LIFE magazine. The cover reads "Mary Martin in Vietnam" with a subhead "Vietcong Ambush." The cover photograph by Charles Moore (shot from above and behind) is of Mary Martin wearing a flowing flowered gown, outstretched arms rising, as she poses Madonna-like over hundreds of G.I.s seated on the tarmac at Nha Trang air base. In the background is a mammoth B52 bomber that spans the width of the page. Beneath the plane’s landing gear in small point type: "Hello Dolly’ at Nha Trang."

Inside the issue are back to back stories – "’Hello,Dolly!’ – and Hellish Ambush" that juxtapose photo essays on Mary Martin taking her bows at a production of "Hello Dolly" in Nha Trang followed by a four page spread including some of the most horrifying gore from an ambush taking place at about the same time in Bien Hoa, where the Dolly troupe had performed several days earlier.

The "Hello Dolly" end of this gruesome synchronicity was the brainchild of producer David Merrick. Shana Alexander (who was along) reported that when the Russians canceled out of a State Department-sponsored Dolly tour with the company already in Tokyo, Merrick called the White House to see if the fan-in-chief might want to book the show into Vietnam. "Oh yes, that’s the show that has my song in it." And thus the arrangements were made.

This bizarre theatrical event might not add up to a Machiavellian scheme to make the war look like fun, but it does suggest a certain naivete and denial that "this is really war." At the very least, it was not an inspired decision to put one of America’s best loved entertainers in the middle of a combat zone, but somehow it seems the war just was not yet taken very seriously. Shana Alexander wrote "it was difficult for me to view the whole tour as anything but an episode in a musical comedy." Of course, she also wrote of being there during the "very height of the war," and as we now know 1965 was merely the very beginning.

"The War Goes On"

Marine Corps School
Quantico, Virginia
July 20, 1966

Dear Mom and Dad,

Well, we are in the thick of it now. We’ve started our training schedule and it’s really great. And it will get better.
Now, we go from about 7:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. We have physical training and mostly classroom, but soon we get out in the field. Saturday we go to the rifle range for live fire. I’m really looking forward to it, this has got to be the best life on earth.

Enclosed is our training schedule for this week as I thought you might like to look at it. Well, that’s about it for now, I’ll write more over the weekend. Take care now, both of you.

Love,
Andrew

In March 1965 the first U.S. 3500 ground troops were deployed to Danang. By the end of that year there were 184,000 combat troops in Vietnam and by the end of 1966 the number had risen to 385,000, peaking in 1968 with more than 536,000. This massive escalation under the command of a president who said at its start "we seek no wider war" was accompanied by growing anti-war dissent. The administration’s public opinion management strategy during this period, largely successful, was to avoid any appearance of crisis by making all policy decisions appear routine, incremental, and automatic. (p. 31)

LIFE published twenty-eight covers on Vietnam between 1964 and 1969. Half of these were in the years 1966 and 1967, the period of most rapid troop build-up. The mood of "heroes and Hello Dolly" was clearly changing, shown starkly in the February 11, 1966 black and white cover by Henry Huet of two wounded and heavily bandaged G.I.s with the caption "The War Goes On." A weariness was creeping into the text that had been absent before. The long and gritty photo essay inside was the most sobering coverage to date.

Sometimes you really have to wonder if Henry Luce read his own magazine during this period. John MacArthur observes "such was the self-confidence of the United States during Luce’s American Century. Horrifying pictures of war could be published, but the Johnson administration kept sending more troop ships. Uncensored reporting seemed to shock virtually no one’s conscience, and certainly not the editors of Time Inc." (p. 127)

The most graphic LIFE cover and photo story ever published on Vietnam carried the date October 26, 1966. Shot by Larry Burrows, later to die in the war, and Co Rentmeester, the cover read "Invasion DMZ Runs into the Marines." The images suggest something else. On the cover is a head shot of a tattered Marine cradling the head of another marine so bandaged that only his nose can be seen. The story inside includes some of the most vivid and gruesome war photography ever published in the mainstream media.

This is the Vietnam that the young marine encountered in February 1967 shortly after he arrived in country stationed near Da Nang.

23 February 1967

Dear Mom and Dad,

The last few days have been very busy indeed. One of my men’s father’s died and we were occupied with getting him off on emergency leave. . .
Last nite we got hit. A lot of firing and all but we didn’t get any bodies. No one here was hit so we are lucky there.
Today I went to the rear for a court martial. While back there I was talking with a friend from Quantico and he had some very bad news for me. Al stepped on a mine and has lost both legs. It really burns me that these gooks won’t come out and fight but they ruin a man with a stinking booby trap. Another friend of mine was killed 36 hours after we got here.
It’s a lousy war but what can we do. They tell us to make friends when I’d rather go down to the village with a flame thrower. That really burned me up about Al, but there is nothing I can do now. I’m trying to get his address and will let you know when I do. But some day those who are the cause of this will pay. I’ll do my best to see to that. . .
It’s 10:00 p.m. and time to check post. I go around and make sure all positions are manned and all are awake. So take care now and write soon. I hope you are both well and keeping busy – I do.

Love,

Andrew

This personal disillusionment of one Marine was a microcosm of growing disillusionment both private and public with the course of the war. But there was a long way to go. By the end of 1966, 5008 Americans had died; by the end of 1967 16,000. By the end of 1969 the figure was over 40,000, with more than 18,000 U.S. combat fatalities yet to come.

LIFE communicated a steady stream of mixed messages through these years. The official editorial stance of the magazine was supportive of the administration nearly until the end. LIFE published thirty-six Vietnam editorials. Editor in Chief Hedley Donovan was something of an expert on Vietnam and had been there several times. While deferring of necessity to his expertise, most of his editorial staff were opposed to the war long before LIFE made its own anti-war statement of sorts in 1969. So in an official text-based way, LIFE was a conservative if not hawkish publication. The inside articles conveyed a more balanced message. But the pictures themselves told a very different story.

In the early 1930s, Henry Luce became preoccupied with what he called "picture magic" and with the idea of the "candid camera." He intuitively understood the power of photojournalism, though the idea for a picture magazine is actually credited to his wife Clare Booth Luce. The creation of such a magazine depended on several technological innovations: the introduction of small cameras (specifically the Leica), the ability of paper companies to make coated paper in rolls, and a process for quick drying inks. These technologies came together in the November 23, 1936 inaugural issue of LIFE.

Interestingly, the format of the magazine owed much to the movies. Specifically, Luce had introduced a monthly filmed newsreel "The March of Time" as a promotion for Time Magazine, and his staff worked backwards from the film format in designing LIFE. Luce wanted LIFE to be "all the newsreels on your knee." Picture stories were called "acts" in a peculiar theatrical reference. Luce wanted LIFE to embody "charm" and "relaxation." Above all, "LIFE is here to inform," he wrote, "indeed, it exists to harness a whole new art of communication to the business of informing."

But how did LIFE inform about the Vietnam War? Did the pictures tell the story? The text? The editorials? How did it function as a medium to bring the "coffee table war" home? A great deal of attention has been given to the differences between print and television as communication mediums. Print is more linear, more complex, capable of sustained information and argumentation. Of course, it can also exploit the tabloid style, but tabloid headlines that can be gulped in one look are closer to images than words.

Television as a medium privileges symbols, images, and dramatic narrative, and it appeals to a much wider and down-market audience. Television blurs news and entertainment with greater ease than print. Television is the medium of the sound bite, and they have been getting consistently shorter over the years. Television images are fleeting, ephemeral. Our collective consciousness of memorable television moments is a rather short list, indeed. Television news was far more consistently supportive of administration Vietnam policy than the major newspapers. On television, the war was presented as more of a morality play, "while the coverage of a paper like the Times had a dry and detached tone, television coverage presented a dramatic contrast between good. . .and evil." (Hallin p. 118)

But where does this leave LIFE as a medium? With both text and photography, it had elements of both television and print with several additional features. Image persistence is one distinctive feature of LIFE’s Vietnam photography. Unlike fleeting television footage, the combat photography of a LIFE cover or story could be on view for weeks. Images could be studied and reread, with details emerging over time. LIFE’s combat photography was sending a message quite different from its editorial position in the sense that most combat photography is by definition "anti-war."

At the same time, the very persistence and ubiquity of LIFE might function as a message frame that in fact neutralizes – even legitimizes -- the more extreme images and renders them more routine and less dramatic. Combat photography within the context of a middle-brow magazine that featured all manner of other subjects from fashion to football becomes just another set of pictures. This process of desensitization to images has become so pervasive over the years that attention itself has become a highly prized commodity.

All media seem to work in mysterious ways because there is rarely a one to one correspondence between a message in any medium and its observable effect. It is the exception for any one message to register a significant impact on the viewer or listener. Hearing "fire" in a crowded theater or "I love you" for the first time from a friend might have an observable direct effect. But typically, any single message is but one piece of a vast environment of information bits where our "message" on any give topic is an aggregate of data from a variety of sources. Thus we cannot know precisely what effect the LIFE magazine collection had on the thinking of the mother of the young marine, but we can know that they were important enough for her to keep over many years.

"Don’t Worry"

The last letter from Vietnam in the mother’s collection is dated April 21, 1967:

Dear Mom & Dad,

Well here we are again on the move. I got back from that last little operation only to pack up and move again. Now we are northwest of Hue and due to go out on an operation tomorrow. We’ve been on operation Big Horn and I think this new one is to be called Shawnee, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t really matter. Little is known from a name. Apparently this will be quite a big operation, though. . .
That’s about all I have for now so once again I must say don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. I don’t know how long this next operation will be. The word is anywhere from 3 to 30 days, so take care and don’t worry. All is fine and I am healthy and fine. Take care now and write soon.

Love,

Andrew

Then the letters stop. The next letter in the collection was written May 4, 1967, from the mother. It reads in part "Andrew, we hope all is well with you and your platoon. News is not good for Marines." The letter was returned in an envelope stamped "Returned to Sender – Moved Left no Address."

The collection ends with a yellowed newspaper clipping headlined "Falls Residents Visit Son Wounded in War."
Mr. And Mrs. Michael Pace have returned from St. Albans L.I. where they visited their son, 2nd Lt. Andrew Pace, USMC, who is a patient in the Naval Hospital there.

Pace has been medically evaluated back to this country after being wounded in Vietnam on May 4th. He was on a reconnaissance assignment with his platoon several miles west of Hue when he was wounded. . .
This chilling ending to the collection moved me to go to some lengths to learn what had happened to the young marine and his mother. Was he an alienated Vietnam vet living in the woods? A businessman? Was he dead?

Through a fortuitous series of telephone inquiries, I located him and his family. To say the least, they were surprised to hear from a woman on the other side of the country who had come into possession of a box that had been tossed out in Buffalo. His wife was especially appreciative, and we subsequently exchanged several letters. The once young marine was now a colonel assigned to NATO – a career officer. And the box? The collection? He told me "Yes, it belonged to mother and when she died I threw it out. Do whatever you want with it and then burn it all. It means nothing to me."

LIFE Comes Out

It took LIFE Magazine until 1969 to publicly turn the anti-war corner with its classic issue "One Week’s Dead." The LIFE editorial staff had always been "dismayed" (Loudon Wainwright’s word) at the way the magazine had covered the war and "many on the staff felt that much more should be said, that LIFE should speak up for withdrawal."

New Managing Editor Ralph Graves had the idea of doing a story on all of the American dead killed in one week, an idea he knew would be difficult to get past Hedley Donovan. They chose the week May 28 – June 3, 1969, and dispatched stringers and correspondents to get in touch with all 242 families and do a photo round-up. Donovan was not to know of the project until a basic layout was completed. Collecting the photographs was filled with "heartbreaking ironies," but only about twenty families wanted nothing to do with the idea.

When Donovan was finally called in to see the preliminary pages and copy, he took a long time reviewing the material, finally saying to Graves "All right. Thank you." And with those words Donovan both changed LIFE’s editorial policy toward the war and sanctioned an unforgettable issue of the magazine, with page after page of yearbook size pictures – thirteen pages in all – of boys from across the U.S. who had died in a single week in Vietnam.

In 1972 LIFE magazine published its final weekly issue. With its former advertising dollars diverted to television and printing and postage costs soaring, the magazine had been losing money for years, and there was no saving it. We can’t know precisely what role it played in the formation of public opinion during the Vietnam War, but there is no question its vivid and compelling coverage made a difference.

Reflecting back to the mother of the young marine, I marvel that I am writing this chapter in Hanoi while at this moment my own twenty year old son is visiting Hue, Danang, and Marble Mountain on his own as a tourist. What a terrifying world it must have been thirty years ago for all mothers and all sons and all of those who loved them, and what an eternal lesson that experience should remain.

--August 2001

Selected Works of Carol Wilder