Like an urban myth about alligators in the sewers or a quaint folktale of uncertain origin, the idea that "the media lost the Vietnam War" has long been axiomatic in right-of-center political, military and civilian circles. The belief that press coverage of Vietnam was somehow a major factor in that defeat has contributed mightily to keeping the Vietnam War undead whenever the possibility of U.S. military intervention arises. Reams of scrupulous data and analysis demonstrating that the U.S. press was in fact almost unanimous in its support of cold war ideology long into the Vietnam conflict has never converted the "media lost the war" believers. As with any self-fulfilling prophecy, regardless of the truth of this notion it has become true in its consequences. It has cast a long shadow over all subsequent press access to combat zones and inspired government public relations and information management strategies to achieve new and alarming heights.

The belief that the press was undermining U.S. efforts in Vietnam began early in the 1960s, when reporters who included David Halberstam, Peter Arnett, and Morley Safer filed reports that were occasionally at odds with official U.S. government accounts or told stories (Safer’s report on the Zippo-torching of huts in Cam Ne) that the government preferred remain untold. Halberstam became the poster boy reporter for these "subversive" journalists, and by 1963 the Kennedy white house was appealing directly to the publisher of the Times to pull Halberstam from Saigon.

A closer reading of Halberstam’s work during that period, such as that done by John MacArthur, actually shows Halberstam "clearly, not as a subversive, but as an excited young cold warrior, very much on the U.S. government team." (119) But Halberstam’s mark had been made, in effecting letting him have it both ways: a subversive by reputation, a cold warrior in fact. This is not to question Halberstam’s journalistic contributions at the time, which were not insignificant, but rather to point out that his reporting was all framed within the cold war belief system that questioned only the strategies for the execution of the war and not its basic premises. Halberstam's 1965 book The Making of a Quagmire amply illustrates this view.

The most common argument made against the "media lost the war" hypothesis is based on analysis of the content of newspaper and television news broadcasts during the Vietnam years. Daniel Hallin and Lawrence Lichty are among those who document that no more than one-fifth of television news showed combat footage, and an even smaller portion showed any dead or wounded. Likewise, in editorial commentary on television the "hawks" greatly outnumbered the "doves," especially prior to the 1968 Tet offensive, after which in Hallin’s accounting the balance shifted from four to one in favor of administration war policy to two to one against it.

This might all be true: cold war reporting frames, small percentages of combat images, an editorially hawkish media. But it might also be the case that media representations of the war did indeed influence public opinion, especially at crucial times such as Tet. It is disingenuous to worship at the alter of the power of contemporary media on one hand and on the other argue that public opinion is formed primarily by the percentages of pro or con arguments and images. How many dead and wounded pictures does it take to effect a viewer’s opinion or feeling on a topic? Maybe not many. Because LIFE magazine’s combat photography was wrapped in hawkish text was it rendered less powerful? Which messages get through? Which messages stick? Which messages or aggregates of messages actually change minds? Behavior? The answer is that even today, assaulted by the billion dollar marketing machiavellians, we just don’t know.

Contrary of the received wisdom of progressive media critics, it is more than likely that the media did, indeed, play a part in ending the Vietnam War, and – further – that this was a good thing. So the military and government information managers who took away the "media lost the war" lesson from Vietnam had at least part of it right – media matters. One part they never got right was that an unwinnable war was not a war that could be won by the media or by anyone else short of an unthinkable cost. And let us not forget another part the infocrats didn’t get -- or didn’t remember -- or didn’t want to get: that press coverage can and should communicate to the people it represents in such a way that the citizenry can make informed choices.

Post-Vietnam Press Syndrome

The lesson the military learned from its belief about the role of the media in the Vietnam War was that when it comes to the press, the less the better. First amendment rights have been diminished dramatically in the decades since Vietnam, culminating in that strangest of unwars, the Gulf "War." But there were small practice combat engagements in the 1980s, where newly sophisticated press and public opinion management plans could be given a trial run.

In the 1982 Falklands War, the British conveniently kept their press correspondents on board various Royal Navy ships, and subsequently heavily censored the meager dispatches. The U.S. did even better in the October 1983 invasion of Grenada – the invasion was not even announced until after it had begun. This total news blackout was followed by extremely limited press access. The main rationale for the invasion was that the island had become a supply depot for massive quantities of Soviet and Cuban weapons , but by the time the press got in to observe the sheer untruth of this justification, it was too late to make any difference to a story already well told and out there. To his credit, White House communications director David Gergen resigned over the fact that he had been lied to by his superiors.

Complaints from the press following the Grenada invasion resulted in a government commission that created a "National Media Pool" that was to figure heavily in Gulf War censorship. Meanwhile, it got a trial run in December 1989 when U.S. troops invaded Panama with the intent of ousting Manuel Noriega. The "media pool" was delayed, detained, and otherwise kept from the action in any way possible. Almost all of the footage released was from U.S. military sources. Estimates on the number of Panamanian dead ranged wildly from 200 to 4,000. No one could get in to see. One reporter who was held hostage by Noriega loyalists wrote to Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis Lapham that "I certainly saw more as a hostage than I could have as a journalist."

These practice runs fed directly into the draconian measures used to control press coverage of the Gulf War. Pentagon spokesmen Pete Williams and Captain Ron Wildermuth were said to be much influenced "by the notion that an uncensored American press had ‘lost’ the Vietnam War by demoralizing the public with unpleasant news." (Mac. 112) Williams exerted masterful control over the press corps by mitigating his consistent resistance and obfuscation with a bland and congenial personality. As a result, despite some resistance from a smattering of more progressive publications, press coverage of the Gulf War was censored by a witches brew of pool reporting, limited access, delays, bureaucracy and red tape, and favoritism. Especially insidious and effective was the Bush administration’s "yellow ribbon" campaign that equated disagreement with U.S. policy to lack of support for the troops, further paralyzing dissent. Add to this the jingoistic tone and mini-series feel to television coverage of the build up to war, and you have one of the more regrettable periods of American journalism.

But as Hallin wrote about Vietnam, even though information was fragmentary and diffuse, a clear and careful reader could learn a lot about what was happening both in front of the curtain and behind the scenes before and during the Gulf War.

Citizens in the Trenches

The Bay Area has a well-deserved reputation for political activism. On average, during the 1980s and 90s San Francisco City Hall received requests for more than one demonstration permit per day. Bay Area anti-war veterans – most of them Vietnam vets – are among the most passionate and quick to mobilize, and within two weeks of Iraq’s August 2, 1990 seizure of Kuwait, a large coalition of veterans organizations had met and put the wheels in motion to initiate whatever actions necessary to prevent the U.S. from going to war with Iraq. By the end of August, the Bush administration had made it clear that the U.S. planned to attack militarily "if talks fail." Largely because its veteran leadership, San Francisco became the most visible city in the U.S. for anti-war activity, culminating in a march of more than 100,000 citizen protesters down Market Street.

In September of that year I was teaching a large undergraduate course on Political Communication at San Francisco State I offered this class each fall term because the November elections of any year provided great grist for the classroom discussion mill and San Francisco is a priceless living laboratory in which to learn about political communication in America. But this term it was to be even more so, because by the start of fall classes in mid-September the war drums were beating loudly. One practice in the Political Communication class was to spend part of each session reviewing the current newspapers together, often the New York Times but, in truth, more often the local San Francisco Chronicle, whose Hearst-forged quasi-tabloid style was more familiar to Bay Area sensibilities than the staid gray lady. In any case, we were more interested in surveying what people were actually reading than in evaluating what they should be reading by the criteria of textbook or prestige journalism.

Some of the students in Political Communication had also been students the preceding semester in a course called "Vietnam: Rhetoric and Realities," which looked specifically at media coverage and popular culture representations of that war. One of the books for that class was Daniel Hallin’s The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam. Hallin’s finest chapter in a fine book, indeed, is called "’It Does Not Imply Any Change of Policy Whatever’." The title is taken from a National Security Administration memo of April 5, 1965, that instructed that "the [military] actions themselves should be taken as rapidly as practicable, but in ways that should minimize any sudden appearance of sudden changes of policy. . ." Hallin then offers forty pages of examples of how this strategy was implemented, with every troop build-up being minimized, denied, or set lower than a previous announcement to play the expectations game. Almost immediately in September and October 2000, the students familiar with Hallin’s analysis began tracking what the Bush administration was saying versus what it was doing.

John MacArthur’s book The Second Front on propaganda and press censorship in the Gulf War documents how the Pentagon restricted press coverage of the Gulf War and some ways in which it managed public opinion. Being neither press nor government but rather citizens, teachers, and students, we thought of ourselves more as the citizens in the trenches trying to make sense of the incoming information from all sides.

It was clear that the Bush administration had a rhetorical dilemma. On one hand, it had to communicate to Saddam Hussein that it would go to any length to oust him from Kuwait, and at the same time had to send a message to the American people that this would entail no significant cost. As a senior State Department official acknowledged "we have two very distinct audiences. Saddam Hussein is listening to all of this and you hope he cracks or falls on the floor and comes to Jesus But at the same time you have to be careful with the domestic audience." Under these circumstances, mixed messages, concealment, and disinformation are typical and strategic responses to the dilemmas of mixed motives and audiences.

Mixed messages were so common in the build-up to the Gulf War, that the Political Communication class started bestowing "Reverse Rhetoric" awards for news items reporting that the government was taking an action that it was at the same time denying or calling something else. Students competed vigorously to find the best among many candidates for the award. A few examples: (award-winning phrase in bold)

October 26, 1990. Headline: U.S. Says It Could Send 100,000 More to the Gulf. Defense Secretary Cheney is quoted in part: "We want to have the capability for the president to make the decision to use other options should that become necessary in response to a provocation." . ."Later in the day, his chief spokesman at the Pentagon, Pete Williams, denied that the secretary’s remarks indicate a new phase in the military buildup."

November 15, 2000. Headline: Troop buildup doesn’t signal war, he says. Fears in congress grew after Bush decided to send 150,000 more troops to the gulf to add to what he called an "offensive capability." Bush tried to soothe congress saying that he "has not changed his policy in the Persian Gulf and has not decided to take military action. Last week’s decision to augment our forces was not a decision to use military force. . .but was a change in strategy to make the threat of offensive action more credible to Saddam."

November 16, 1990. Headline: ‘Imminent Thunder’ "American troops were to come within 25 miles of the Kuwaiti border in the latest military exercised ‘Imminent Thunder’ by the Pentagon. . .It will involve all four branches of the U.S. military – including 16 ships and 1,100 aircraft. Navy spokesman Commander J.D. Sickle denied that the exercise is not designed to be a provocation to Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait." "There is no particular real world significance," Van Sickle said of the exercise.

The class also made note of what was not being reported (or being reported rarely and marginally) during the war build-up: historical context about the gulf region, cultural information about Iraq or Kuwait, information about the U.S. arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, gender race and class issues in the military, anything about Saddam Hussein that lacked devil-horns, almost anything about dissent. A case in point: one student had attended an anti-war rally with 10,000 others on a Saturday. She rushed home sure that she would see it on the news, reporting back in disbelief "It wasn’t there! It wasn’t anywhere in the media!"

On the other hand, media cheerleaders pulled out everything but the pom poms.. A LIFE magazine cover head shot of a Gulf War G.I. was a thoroughly Disneyfied version of the combat covers of the 1960s.

Newsweek’s fold out skull and crossbones map of Iraq took the prize, we all agreed, being especially noteworthy for its lack of identifying similar U.S, weapons caches. Peter Jennings was the only network anchor who did not speak of the American/Allied forces as "we." Lacking much real news, broadcast graphic designers had a field day giving a look and sound to the mini-series war. Americans who only a few years earlier were new to computer games and graphics now could relate to those images almost as a new form of photography, which was handy because real photographs were few and far between. University of Massachusetts researchers found not surprisingly that the net effect of this was that the more television a person watched during this period the less he knew about the facts of the situation in the Gulf, and the less he knew the more likely he was to support Bush administration policy.

Words themselves bore scrutiny. Linguist George Lakoff said at the time, "metaphors can kill, especially when they are followed by bombs." Since it is culturally acceptable to attack someone in self defense, language during the Vietnam war and since always characterizes the U.S. as defending, making reprisals, being reactive, responding, retaliating. It is the familiar "he hit me first" defense. The Gulf War expanded this vocabulary by giving us "smart bombs" (which turned out to have an I.Q. of about 7), "surgical strikes," "collateral damage," "triple-A" (anti-aircraft artillery), "scuds," and "softening up" the enemy and "degrading" his capabilities. All of these words emphemize a reality far more brutal, such as the "collateral damage" of hundreds of civilians killed as a result of the less-than-surgical bombings of a military targets by less-than-smart bombs.

We were aware during the war build-up that some media writers and organizations – including Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The Village Voice and L.A. Weekly – had taken legal action against the Pentagon claiming the press restrictions were unconstitutional, but none of this meant much to the citizen in the trenches who was just trying to figure out how not to go to war. Important to the thinking of this period was the unchallenged belief (later shown to be wildly exaggerated) that hundreds of thousands of rabid Iraqi "Red Guard" soldiers stood ready to attack and that the Iraqis were so heartless they had pulled hundreds of babies out of incubators in Kuwait and left them to die. This latter unsubstantiated tale was brought to the U.S. public largely courtesy of the public relations giant Hill and Knowlton, who were paid eleven million dollars by Kuwait to drum up support for this kingdom where women cannot even drive. Kuwait was not a country that the average American would be inclined to shed blood for, and thus needed and got the best public relations consultants money can buy. In its quest for image enhancement, Kuwait funded not only more than one hundred Hill and Knowlton executives in twelve offices, but also another twenty or so public relations, law, and lobbying firms.

The Rhetorical Rollercoaster to War

Much is now known about press censorship during the Gulf War and about the Kuwaiti public relations initiative, but was the White House military victory over Iraq also a psychological victory over the American people? Many media critics have explicated the vast governmental public relations machinery designed to manage both the press and public opinion on a daily basis. During the months leading up to the Gulf War, charges of media manipulation were widespread, but little documentation beyond overt censorship and disinformation has ever become available.

There is no question that public opinion was managed during the prewar buildup with the same sophistication and zeal as the deployment of troops and weaponry. But how? While public opinion polls never favored a military solution during the prewar months, the "emotional roller coaster" people experienced during the fall 1990 buildup kept public opinion off-balance and neutralized antiwar mobilization efforts. The Nation editorialized on 12/3/90 that the point of this "roller coaster ride plotted by President Bush" where "radical military escalations are followed by reassurances of peace" was "to create so much confusion that rational public response is impossible."

Those at the opposite end of the political spectrum reported a similar emotional ride. "Operation Yellow Ribbon" founder Gaye Jacobsen remarked in a November 1990 television interview that "the roller coaster is emotional. Those of us with loved ones in the Middle East are going crazy."

Students in the Political Communication class had observed a similar phenomenon. One of them remarked "every time I think I will be able to get my friends organized to do something against this war because the news looks so grim, the next day some kind of optimistic headline will appear and it takes all the wind out of my sails." Understanding nods went around the room when he said this, and I began to wonder if public opinion wasn’t intentionally being whipsawed to keep people off balance, making any kind of decisive action difficult.

"Don’t Think about a Monkey"

In communicational terms, a roller coaster experience describes a predictable responses to a series of mixed messages, in this case juxtaposed messages threatening war and offering peace. Decades of clinical experience and experimentation on double binds, hypnotherapy, brainwashing, and even Zen practice confirm that keeping people psychologically confused and off-balance through a series of mixed messages makes them especially open to suggestion. This phenomenon can be invoked for good or for ill. Double bind messages can drive people crazy, but Zen koans can drive them to enlightenment. Hypnosis can harm, heal, or even entertain. But the common thread is that by paralyzing our everyday decision making skills, contradictory messages -- especially delivered repeatedly over time from a credible source – can create a profound vulnerability, dependence, and inability to act except as directed.
All of this is well known especially in clinical psychology, so one must assume that government public opinion-makers are versed in these change strategies in the same way they have mastered marketing and public relations techniques. There was no question that the Bush administration had to keep a firm grip on public opinion during the war build-up, and babies torn from incubators stories might not be enough. Given all this, what was the relationship between the reported "emotional roller coaster" experience and the course of public opinion during the Gulf War build-up? My hunch was that while the U.S. military buildup followed a steady upward trajectory from August 1990 through January 1991, lead news reports during the same period would reveal a pattern of continuous fluctuation between war and peace messages.

With the initial help of my class and the eventual collaboration of graduate student Adam Colby, I set out to discern if this roller coaster ride was more real than imagined. Since we were already reading the San Francisco Chronicle daily, we collected all 167 front page headlines from 8/2/90 through 1/15/91. We were trying to recapture some of the readers’ initial reactions to the major message of each morning in terms of how much it gave the impression that "war" or "peace" was in the offing. The Chronicle’s tabloid-style headlines seemed well-suited to tapping into such first impressions because their simplicity and succinctness make a single response possible, especially when compared to the more discursive New York Times headlines which are harder to categorize.

Our approach was simple. We asked ten regular newspaper readers to sort the 167 headlines into one of four categories:

• Bad News – Sounds Like War
  e.g. 8/8/90 "GIs Ordered to Saudi Arabia"

• Mixed News – Could Mean War or Peace
  e.g. 9/18/90 "Air Force Chief of Staff Fired"
  

• Good News – Sounds Like Peace
  e.g. 10/2/90 "Bush Offers Opening to Saddam"
  

• No News – Message Unrelated to Gulf Crisis
  e.g. 10/6/91 "Bush Allows Shutdown of Government to Begin"
  
  

There was close to 90% agreement among the people who sorted the headlines, and a subsequent cross check of New York Times headlines yielded a nearly identical result.

When the results were plotted chronologically, it became apparent immediately that a roller coaster metaphor for prewar sentiment was more nearly a literal representation of the good news/bad news headline pattern. In all, 41% of the headlines were "bad news," 17% "mixed news," 10% "good news," and 32% "no news," and there was nearly continuous fluctuation during the five and one-half months studied. A frequent reaction from people seeing the zig-zag pattern of the headlines plotted along a timeline was "That’s exactly how I felt! All over the place!"

Other patterns emerged around the dozen "good news" peace points that occurred with nearly rhythmic regularity every few weeks during the months under study. With only 10% of the total headlines judged "good news," the prognosis for peace was never rosy, yet optimism and denial were widespread and these periodic peace points took the steam out of incipient antiwar activism. Strikingly, nearly all of the peace points appeared immediately before or after strong ‘bad news’ headlines, forming a dozen pairs of "war/peace couplets:

• 08/16 Iraq Hurls More Threats

• 08/17 U.N. Chief Steps in to Media Gulf Crisis
  

• 08/20 Iraq Offers to Release Some Foreigners
  

• 08/21 President Assails Iraq for Holding Hostages
  

• 08/30 Iraqis Claim Women, Children to be Freed Today
  

• 08/31 U.S. Plans to Attack if Talks Fail
  

• 11//04 Iraq Offers to Free Hostages in Exchange for No Attack
  

• 11/05 Defense Department to Call up Reserve Combat Units
  

• 11/19 Saddam Says He Will Free Hostages by March – Bush
  Calls Plan ‘Cruel’
  

• 11/20 Soviets Stall Bush on Gulf Attack
  

• 12/03 Baker Sees ‘Excellent Chance’ that Iraq Will Be Put
  Out of Kuwait
  

• 12/04 Cheney Says War is Surest Way to Free Kuwait
  

• 12/10 950 Mideast Hostages Fly to Freedom
  

• 12/11 Hostages Arriving Home – U.S. Says Crisis Isn’t Over
  

• 12/16 Iraq Cancels Peace Talks
  

• 12/17 Iraq-U.S. Peace Talks Still Possible, Baker Says
  

• 01/02 Gulf Showdown Most Urgent Issue Since World War II,
  Bush Declares
  

• 01/03 U.S. Suggests a Compromise on Iraqi Talks

• 01/05 Iraq Agrees to Gulf Talks
  

• 01/06 Bush Warns that ‘Time is Running Out’ to Avoid War
  

• 01/10 U.S. Iraqi Talks Fail in Geneva
  

• 01/11 New Tries for Gulf Peace

 

These patterns of pairing and oscillation can be explained in part as a series of messages to play to Bush’s two primary audiences of the American people and Saddam Hussein, whose cooperation required acceptance of contradictory signals. As noted earlier, while Hussein had to be led to believe that the U.S. would stop at nothing to defeat him, at the same time in order to neutralize anti-war inclinations the American people had to be convinced that their cost would be negligible. This need to speak with forked tongue drove the communication strategies of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations during the Vietnam War and the Bush administration had obviously learned its valuable lessons.

Kennedy and Johnson also went to great lengths to keep the Vietnam issue out of domestic politics, a fact that came to mind when a second look at the roller coaster headline timeline brought into focus an anomalous flat stretch of almost no fluctuation during the five-week period preceding the November 6th election. During this time there was little headline news about the Gulf crisis. In fact, the percentage of "no news" headlines was more than twice the overall average (70% vs 32%) and more than three and one-half times that of "no news" headlines either side of the five-week pre-election window (70% vs 20%).

In other words, in the month before the November 1990 election, the Gulf Crisis virtually disappeared from the headlines, replaced largely with budget problem headlines that reveal a sequence of squabbling and changes of course, for instance: 10/10 "Bush Waffles on Higher Taxes"; 10/11 "Bush Shifts Again on Taxes." Time may still tell how much of the budget controversy was manufactured to keep the unpleasant prospect of war out of the minds of the impressionable American electorate, but by design or default war news took a back seat during this crucial time.

Bob Woodward reported in The Commanders that at least by October 24th Bush told Cheney "he was leaning toward adding the forces necessary to carry out offensive operations" but that "nothing could be announced for two weeks, until after the November 6th elections, because any more would be assumed to be an attempt to influence the elections." [311]

The demonization of Saddam Hussein was another requisite action on the public relations front, and Hussein’s unsavory character made the task a relatively easy one. However, the headline study calls into question the perception of Hussein as the sole and unilateral aggressor, at least rhetorically. In fact, Iraq-sourced headlines (e.g. "Iraq Agrees to Gulf Talks") were nearly four times more likely than U.S.-sourced headlines (e.g. 1/13 "Bush Wins Vote on War") to be judged "good news – sounds like peace." Conversely, U.S.-sourced headlines were more than twice as likely as Iraq sourced headlines to be judged "bad news – sounds like war." In other words, Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait notwithstanding, from a strictly "who said what" perspective the U.S. was far more aggressive in the war of words. The fact that Saddam Hussein is still in power more than a decade after the Gulf War and that George Bush the "victor" lost his 1992 reelection bid is still food for thought.

"By God, We’ve Kicked the Vietnam Syndrome"

Most people had not heard of the "Vietnam Syndrome," a term coined by Henry Kissinger, until George Bush announced to a group a state legislators on March 1, 1991 that we had "kicked it." In the post-Gulf War euphoria, in the words of one career military officer, "I think this war has healed the wounds of the Vietnam War. Our country really came together spiritually." [3/2 A1]
What most people seem to mean by the "Vietnam Syndrome" is a reluctance to commit American combat forces overseas because Americans are adverse to seeing pictures of dead and wounded young people, especially theirs, and especially on foreign soil. Vietnam was such a debacle in the end, no matter who you pin it on, that it has become a verbal stop sign in any conversation entertaining the possibility of military intervention. "No more Vietnams!"

The Vietnam Syndrome may have been kicked but there is plenty of evidence it is not down for the count. Richard Holbrooke, in his memoir of the 1995 negotiations to end the war in Bosnia referred specifically to the 1993 deaths of eighteen American GIs in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Holbrooke wrote how "the scars from that disaster would deeply affect our Bosnia policy. Combined with Vietnam, they had left what might be called a ‘Vietmalia Syndrome’ in Washington." [217] How can reluctance to go to war be a bad thing? At the very least, it makes the process a more thoughtful one.

The Pentagon and the White House both learned their Vietnam lessons well when it came to press censorship, public relations, and information management during the Gulf War. Outright censorship was aided and abetted by a sophistication in broadcast graphic design and a cultural acclimatization to video game viewing which had grown during the 1980s from nothing to a billion dollar industry. The Gulf War was the perfect TV war – very screen friendly, more of a sporting contest: great team and toys, clear good guys and bad guys, minimal pain and inconvenience, all of it adapted for a short attention span. CNN’s extraordinary live coverage of the bombing of Baghdad, a story told compellingly in producer Robert Weiner’s Live from Baghdad, was the only notable exception to the effective media shutout, but by that time the "war" was fait accompli. and even this live spectacle had a Fourth-of-July feel after all the preceding simulation journalism that framed it.

We do not have the Pentagon Papers for the Gulf War (yet), and it remains to be seen how much of the emotional rollercoaster was a function of government public opinion management strategies and how much was due to chance or typical of most symmetrical escalations of conflict. Still, questions remain.

How much of a role did the White House play in keeping the Gulf Crisis off the front pages during the pre-election weeks? Was the American public so blinded by the dehumanized face of the enemy that Iraq’s overtures for peaceful resolution were completely discounted? What was the White House program for controlling public opinion and neutralizing dissent? Does the attribution of intent even matter once we establish the powerful effect of mixed message strategies?

Whatever the case, the military devastation of Desert Storm could not have been accomplished without the complicity and consent of the American people and press, whose propensities for denial and diversion make public opinion management a demagogue’s dream.

Selected Works of Carol Wilder