policy - The Black Vault

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communist leadership faded. At the same time, American fighting men were
taking on ever-expanding roles in the land war on the Asian mainland.
Public support for the war itself ebbed, but the presidents were able
to evoke strong showings of public support in opinion polls for specific
action whether it was escalating or de-escalating. Thus though support
for the war as a policy was weak during the Nixon Administration, the
President was
able to elicit majority support for his strong military
actions like the invasion of Cambodia or his negotiation efforts.
Examination of public opinion shows that the decline of support for
the war, especially after the initial slump of late 1965-early 1966, was
strikingly gradual; arid, over the long-term, was not related to turns of
events either on the battlefield or in the United States.
Another significant feature of the available public opinion data
cuncerning the war is the similarity of opinion patterns among various
subgroups of the American population. Thus, youth, intellectual, and
laboring people all seem to have shared similar patterns of declining
support for the war after late 1965. Blacks apparently consistently
expressed lower levels of support for the war than the general population.
This is
significant because these three groups were depicted as being
heavily polarized in their attitudes toward the war. Spokesmen on the left
claimed to represent the youth and educated; spokesmen on the right claimed
to represent the opinions of the laboring class. The observation that the
attitudes of these three groups were similar indicates that the presumed
polarization was not as deep as was depicted.
Indeed, the bitterness of
the public feeling of the time may be laid- at the feet of the leaders of
both extremes who tried to use the perceived polarization for their own
political erds.
This demonstrates the importance of moderate rhetoric in
the discussion of political differences.
While they shared similar patterns (i.e., support began to ebb after
1965 and declined steadily thereafter), the more educated members of
society were more volatile in their fluctuations of opinion than the less
educated.
This would seem to be contrary to the opinion that the "masses"
in modern society are easily swayed by the news media and are susceptible
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