Throughline - The uncensored war

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

As the U.S. escalated its intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s, the media's coverage ramped up too. Soon, the war permeated the homes of millions of Americans — by television, radio and newspaper. This week, we hear about what happened during the Vietnam War, and how the stories made visible during that time, forever transformed the way America engages with warfare.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and ThruLine. I'm Randabed Vettah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Since these words were first penned, the vision of America has been determined by people testing these ideals against the realities of everyday life. And in the mid to late 20th century, the Vietnam War put those ideals to the test. The war forced Americans to confront questions about governmental power, the realities of warfare, and what happens to democracy when citizens disagree with their leadership. This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy. And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television. The war entered the homes of Americans through televisions, newspapers, and radio. Images of what was actually happening in Vietnam changed the way Americans thought of and engaged with the war. And it changed the way the story of war was told. We might see Vietnamese peasants in obvious anguish, distressed, grieving, but mostly the Vietnamese who featured in American news broadcast,

were silent. Today on the show, the Vietnam War, what happened in Vietnam and how it changed America's relationship with war and the responsibility of journalists on the ground. That's coming up after a quick break. Vietnam, an ugly war in a far-off place to which the United States is deeply committed. It's 1964. U.S. military advisors have already been in Vietnam for over a decade. By the spring of 1964, the Viet Cong had reached a strength of an estimated 60,000 troops

and controlled nearly 68% of South Vietnam's villages and endless. Successive U.S. administration said they were in Vietnam to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia, and things weren't going well. But most Americans weren't paying much attention to the conflict. This is a war that begins in a very sort of slow way that initially was largely ignored. This is Susan Caruthers, historian at the University of Warwick, and author of the book, The Media at War. Jim Crow, political assassinations, voting rights, those domestic issues were much more top of mind. But then...

On the night of August 4, 1964, President Johnson appeared on national television. Renewed hostile actions. against United States ships on the high seas and the Gulf of Tonkin, following a disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, involving an exchange of fire between U.S. and North Vietnamese ships, Congress, with near-unanimous support in the House and Senate, then passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate military involvement in Vietnam

without a formal declaration of war. And suddenly, the Dundon Johnson, draft was ramped up. And more and more thousands of American men are sent there. Which led more Americans to ask questions about the war. And news outlets responded. This is what the war in Vietnam is all about. American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy. And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television. It first appeared that the Marines had been sniped at and that a few houses were made to pay. Film reels would be flown to Tokyo for quick

editing and developing and then flown to the U.S. There were three main networks broadcasting news from Vietnam, ABC, NBC, and CBS. And the big publications like The New York Times and Time magazine also sent their reporters there. Blue didn't want to come to Vietnam, and he'd much rather be a businessman than a soldier. But right now, he's in charge of the lives of 21 men. Most of the reporting focused on the U.S. perspective, American soldiers, policy, military strategy. We might see Vietnamese presence in obvious anguish, distressed, grieving, but mostly the Vietnamese who featured in American news broadcasts were silent. A flurry of alternative and international media outlets were also reporting from Vietnam, many staff correspondents were headquartered in Saigon.

The full fury of the war has scarcely touched Saigon. It attracts visitors, GIs on leave, and even American tourists anxious for a feel of the war. I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party on top of the roof of the best hotel, the Carabelle. There was roses and champagne and all kinds of wonderful things you think you were at home, you know. But then, over the edge of the parapet,

you could see these flares coming up. And the question was, whether it was incoming or outgoing? You would never know until it happened. This is Francis Fitzgerald. She goes by Frankie. In 1966, Frankie flew to Vietnam sort of on a whim. She was 26 from a wealthy family

and curious about the world. So she decided to take a break from her local reporting job in New York to travel to Southeast Asia, wanting to see the place where her father had deployed during World War II. She went to Thailand,

Laos, and eventually, landed in Vietnam. I thought I would just spend a month there to an article or to pay my airfare back. But when I got there, I found I couldn't leave. I mean, I've never seen a war before, of course. and was all too fascinating.

Unlike in previous conflicts, like World War II, the U.S. military made a conscious decision not to formally censor journalists. They saw Vietnam as more of a limited conflict, not a full-scale war. Every evening, a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier of rotting fruit and onto the sidewalk.

Frankie arrived with a still film camera and a typewriter she'd packed into her suitcase. And as a freelance journalist, she could pretty much report whatever stories she wanted. It just occurred to me that the thing that was missing was that the American high command knew nothing about the Vietnamese. Behind her, the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back past the facade of new houses into a maze of thatched huts and tin roof shacks called buoy fat, one of the oldest of the refugee quarters. She got articles printed in the Village Voice, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, centering the Vietnamese perspective. So walk me through, like, how did you actually go about getting that perspective?

Because I'm assuming you didn't speak Vietnamese. Well, I found, I mean, I found several interpreters along the way. That wasn't hard to do because people wanted to do that. You make a lot of money that way. And how would you know if someone was a good interpreter if you don't speak Vietnamese? I could feel it. Frankie would travel around the South Vietnamese countryside with her interpreter, hoping to connect with people. But she wasn't always welcomed with open arms.

Americans do not normally walk through the slums. Not the real slums, like those in the outlying areas. She remembers going into a community where refugees were living in makeshift homes, built on planks, They were angry at being displaced from their villages and put in this marsh. Gigantic sewers, lakes full of stagnant filth. And suddenly, a pebble sails out and falls gently on the stranger's back. It is followed by a hail of stones. She began getting pelted with stones.

I was sort of offended by it in the sense that I thought, what have I done? But I could very well understand. understand if I had to live in such a place, I perhaps would be throwing stones too. These refugees lose their lands, their families, their ancestral homes, and the structure of their lives. Frankie says the key to finally connecting with people was just continuing to show up. They would realize that you were not going to come and blow up the village. How did you approach fact-checking, either things that the local Vietnamese people were telling you or the things that the U.S. military or the Vietnamese local police were telling you.

Well, sometimes it was absolutely impossible. You just have to do the best you could find other sources that said the same thing. I think we're given certainly away by our editors. There was a rule that you couldn't prove anything in a story by quoting a Vietnamese. Wow. So it was pretty explicit that if your source was a Vietnamese person versus an American commander, let's say. Yeah. The two statements are not equal. Not equal. Not equal.

And there were times when she felt the reality she was witnessing would be too unbelievable to her readers. I went to see the civilian hospital. And then, you know, I see all these Vietnamese on beds outside their rooms with terrible burns, which they had from napalm. You know, to describe it right here is almost impossible for me. I was so awful. I didn't know what to do.

I reported some of it, but just not the really gruesome details. Why did you leave the most gruesome details out, do you think? Well, because I felt there wouldn't be credible, really. I didn't have an organization behind me. Everybody had this internal sensor, which sort of said, you know, how far can I go with this? Is journalism's role to push the conversation if that's where the truth is leading,

or is it to meet people where they are until they're ready to hear the sort of bigger ecstatic truth? Well, it's probably to do the first. but at the expense of not having it printed at all. To one people, the war would appear each day, compressed between advertisements and confined to a small space in the living room. The explosion of bombs and the cries of the wounded would become the background accompaniment to dinner. In 1972, Frankie published a series of articles in The New Yorker detailing her years of reporting from Vietnam that were then turned into a book called, fire in the lake, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

For the other people, the war would come one day out of a clear blue sky. In a few minutes, it would be over. The bombs, released by an invisible pilot with incomprehensible intentions, would leave only the debris and the dead behind. It was the first major book by an American profiling Vietnam, its history, its people, the impact of the war on them. At the time, Frankie described the book as a, quote, first draft of history. Frankie's book was part of a chorus of reporting that had been fueling a growing anti-war movement for years.

So many Americans are not only opposed to the war, but vehemently out on the streets. Public opinion had dramatically begun to shift going into 1968. U.S. troop numbers were at an all-time high. And then came the Tet Offensive. Communist forces swept through more than 100 South Vietnamese cities, towns, and villages. American and South Vietnamese troops fought them back, and the North suffered huge losses. It was militarily a win for the U.S. But optically, it was a resounding defeat.

Reporters sent back photos that shook the American public. In one, a South Vietnamese soldier stands over a North Vietnamese soldier. Vietnamese prisoner, pistol in hand, carrying out an execution. Another shows bloodstains, bullet holes, and dead bodies at the U.S. Embassy. Susan Carruthers says, for much of the war in Vietnam, the news media... ...was absolutely beholden to this Cold War template that the United States was there to try to prop up Beliege at South Vietnam. And that changes only really after the consensus on Capitol Hill itself.

has started to break down. Editors are more willing to sort of push the boundaries of the say-a-ball, the showable. It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. About a month after the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman for CBS Evening News, known then as the most trusted man in America, recorded this broadcast after a trip to Vietnam. It is increasingly clear to this report that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could. After hearing this broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America. and within weeks he decided to not run for re-election.

The war continued for another seven years until 1975 when the U.S. withdrew the last of its combat troops. Journalists were credited with and blamed for ending the war. They had risked life and limb, often without the safety of a military escort, to report the truth. More than 60 journalists paid the ultimate price for it. The Vietnam War came to be known as the unsexuals,

censored war, forever changing the way Americans see, understand, and engage with the story of war. That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear the full episode featuring the experiences of war reporters, check out from the front lines. And be sure to join us next week when we meet the ultimate superhero. He's not someone who has always known power. So here's someone who knows what it is like to be the one, getting sand kicked in their face. He's on the side of the little guy.

Time for Captain America to go to work. Captain America. And what his story tells us about being American today. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Ada Blewee and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna.

I'm Randadad Fattah. Thanks for listening.