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32 The attacks against Johnson did become personal. In his small book
Lyndon Johnson's Credibility Gap, James Deakin of the St. Louis Post-
DiFoatch linked the growing distrust of johnson to his personality.
Deakin Dlammed Johnson for his excessive secrecy and his attempts to
keep the media off guard, but even more stingingly he attributed the
gap to the "striking disparity" between Lyndon Johnson's public image
and his private character. Deakin argued that in his private character
Johnson was the archetypical "American Yankee" whose language was
"heavily animalistic and scatological.". He maintained that this in
itself
publicly
was
as
not
a sort
a problem,
of Mary
but
Poppins
Johnson
in
insisted
Lhe W:iite
in
House"
presenting
pp. 12,
"himself
13, 25.
33. "Television News and the Vietnam War," Panel Discussion at the Smithsonian.
op.cit. Tape 1, side 1.
34. Peter Braestrup, Big Story (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1977),
2 Volumes, Vol. 1, pp. 48, 49. Braestrup maintains that despite the
antiwar editorial stance of some of the senior editors, there was no
pressure on the Saigcn bureau to conform to a "llne." Whatever biases
crept intn the individual stories that appeared in the Times were
those of the reporter, not of the copy desk. Hcwever, when the Tet
of wen.ive story broke in 1968, the antiwar or anti-Johnson ethos in
New York was an important factor in the selection of Vietnam-related
stories for page one.
35. Kearns, p. 350.
4 36. Braestrup, p. 54.
J 37. Ibid., pp. 54, 55.
i 38. Ibid., p. 57.
39. Ibid., p. 62.
40. Ibid., p. 705.
41. Mr Danipl Henken, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public
Affairs recalled why a full official report of Tet was not issued to
the press immediately. The DOD Public Affairs office was swamped when
the Tet offensive began. Not only was the office collecting information
and releasing reports on the seizure of the Pueblo, but the
Thule, Greenland incident involving the loss of a nuclear weapon
occurred within the same general timeframe. This kind oi coafusion
at the top levels of DOD Public Affairs elevated the press reports
to a level of importance as officials in Washington lacking official
reports respondeL to Tet on the basis of early press reports. The
near-simultaneous crises coupled with the confusion and lack of
reliable official infermation or assessments of the Tet debacle caused
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