Mind-Munitions

Propaganda, Cold War and the Television Age 267
impossible for contemporaneous readers to identify which story
was real and which was a propaganda plant.
Psychological operations were, then, no longer being confined
to the traditional battlefield, for the battlefield had become the
global information environment. They were still used in low
intensity conflicts – in the colonial and guerilla wars, for example –
which required high-intensity propaganda, and they were to be
tried in the escalating conflict in Vietnam. The time-honoured
techniques of leaflet dropping and clandestine radio broadcasting
were now accompanied by more sophisticated experiments such as
the placing of messages in bars of soap and on ping-pong balls
dropped over enemy lines. Blocks of ice containing animal blood
were even dropped by parachute over the Vietnamese jungle,
where they would melt leaving all the indications that a pilot was
injured but missing somewhere – a ploy designed to divert North
Vietnamese forces on a wild goose chase. In the Vietnam war,
however, the major propaganda battle was to be fought not in
theatre itself but on the domestic front.
President Kennedy had proved himself a master of the new medium
of television. Indeed, such was his skill as a media politician – the
most effective since Roosevelt – that many myths about his
administration still belie the actual historical record (resurfacing in
Oliver Stone’s 1989 film J.F.K.). Kennedy’s youthful and dynamic
image, combined with his ability to find the appropriate snappy
phrase before the cameras (which we now call ‘sound-bites’) made
for an attractive leader of the western world as it attempted to stem
the advance of communism. He was quick to see that the space
race would be perceived world-wide more in terms of prestige
through technological achievement, and he launched an American
space programme designed to steal the thunder of the Soviets
following their successful launch of the first extra-terrestrial vehicle,
Sputnik I, in 1957. He was not to see that race won with the
American moon landing in 1969. Nor, following his assassination
in Dallas in 1963, was he to see the disastrous outcome of the war
he had done so much to escalate in South-East Asia. Even in death,
Kennedy’s love affair with the camera was captured on film, the
famous Zapruder footage. Little could he have known that the war
he helped to escalate when it was captured on television was, for
many people, to lie at the root of what would be America’s first
significant military defeat.