Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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and sound of the taped event. The camera became cheaper, smaller, even more portable.

With digital technology nonlinear editing becomes more accessible as well.

On the industrial side, digital technology has helped made

Titanic

a success, as well as

creating other works from

Toy Story

to the

Matrix

. More and more films are now edited

first in video rather than film.

With the development of the

Internet,

video technology has found a new channel for

distribution and exhibition. It can be both broadcast, reaching whoever hits the site, or

narrowcast, where only the target audience will be reached. Technology is developing

quickly so that the quality of cyber-video constantly improves both in resolution and the

time needed to transmit images.

We cannot fully understand the implication of these new technologies for the

roduction and transmission of moving images and sound without placing them in the

asic cultural and economic landscape of the US. When new, better quality cheaper, more

accessible technologies arrive, different people in society will find diverse uses for them,

e it portable video or digital nonlinear editing systems. Lay people shoot home videos,

activists make community/advocacy works, artists create avant-garde works and George

Lucas

makes Hollywood

blockbusters

. In the US, while all these possibilities coexist,

the commercial broadcasting and entertainment systems inevitably devise ways to make

the most profitable use of the medium.

Hence, home video stays at home, while consumer camera sales go up. Activists can

use video to create community and have their messages heard, but are confined to limited

constituents. Artists will find small grants and museums open to their new pursuits.

Hollywood

will have the best machine to produce the most expensive images,

mesmerizing the audience with the mystique of technologies. The Internet sites that get

the most hits mean bigger companies and the richest Internet companies will have the

largest capacities for the transmission of video data in cyberspace. The marketplace is not

only an economic phenomenon, but also a cultural one. Technologies are intertwined

with the market, channeling money, talent and other resources, and benefiting the owners

of the means of such production and distribution.

CINDY WONG

video cassette recorder (VCR)

After the VCR was introduced to the American mass market in the mid-1970s, the home

entertainment options for many Americans were greatly expanded. In combination with

the emergence of

cable

television and satellite, the VCR initially seemed to pose a

substantial threat to the dominance of

network

television and movie theaters. The VCR

not only enables viewers to rent movies that they can watch comfortably in their own

homes, it also allows them to record programs from television, allowing greater

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flexibility in terms of viewing schedules. Renting videos is less expensive than the cost o

a ticket (or multiple tickets) at a movie theater. Hence, the VCR has also transformed the

film industry—film producers now make the most of their profits from

video

rentals

(even in cases when films are quite successful at the box office). By the mid-1990s, over

86 percent of American households owned a VCR.

The VCR is not the last word on home entertainment, however. Films are also

available on laser-discs and DVDs (digital video discs or digital versatile discs). These

technologies promise to transform once again the home viewing experience. Laser-discs

have been available in the United States since the late 1970s, but they never became

opular. They are cumbersome and can only contain approximately 1 hour of material per

side. Laserdiscs also have analog video components (like videotapes) so they suffer from

some generational degradation. DVDs, on the other hand (available since 1996), hold

more promise. They are digital, and therefore suffer very little generational degradation,

and are comparable in quality to studio masters. They are also much smaller than laser-

discs, and can contain up to 4 hours of material (8 hours if both sides are used). Both

laserdiscs and DVDs have features that videotapes do not have (such as scan and search

functions), but only DVD is capable of interactivity. While all these new technologies

allow consumers to have control over the time and space of the consumption of media

goods, the goods are still primarily produced by

Hollywood,

allowing the New

Hollywood to demand ever-increasing market share in the US and abroad.

Further reading

Kibria, N. (1993)

Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans,

Princeton: Princeton University.

Rutledge, P. (1992)

The Vietnamese Experience in America,

Bloomington: Indiana

University.

CINDY WONG

Vietnam memorials

After the fall of Saigon in May 1975, most Americans wanted to forget the

Vietnam

War

and the servicemen who had fought there for sixteen years. Inspired by the film

The

eerhunter

(1978), Jan Scruggs formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which

sponsored a design search for a memorial for this difficult war. Maya Lin, an

architecture

student at Yale, submitted the winning design: a black granite V-shaped

wall nestled in the ground below the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, which both

ears the names of over 58,000 American dead and reflects the faces of those who look at

“the Wall.” Although some

veterans

and administration officials considered the

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memorial insufficiently heroic, after its 1982 consecration “the Wall” quickly became a

lace of remembrance and catharsis for civilians and veterans, with people leaving gifts

and letters for lost comrades and family members.

MELINDA SCHWENK

Vietnam Syndrome

The US catastrophe in Vietnam gave rise to the popular belief in the 1970s that presidents

would hesitate to commit American troops abroad again, fearing the indignation o

electorates if they became embroiled in wars and once body bags returned with American

GIs. This syndrome, if it ever contributed to military inaction, was certainly short-lived.

Within five years of the end of the Vietnam War, American troops were being sent into

action in

Grenada,

and all presidents after Carter would commit troops abroad.

A more realistic syndrome reflects an inducement to throw caution to the wind in

international affairs. George

Bush

endeavored to counter the “wimp factor”

y using

force on several occasions, while Bill

Clinton

, who had the charge of being a draft

dodger made against him during the 1992 election, proved more willing to commit

American forces than any other president. After trouncing Saddam Hussein in 1991, Bush

announced that Americans had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” But the

syndrome (as with much of the war itself) concerns credibility something that cannot be

kicked.

ROBERT GREGG

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a pivotal turning point in American history. If the Second World

War marked the apogee of American power in “America’s Century,” Vietnam

emphasized the limits of that power. America had long believed itself an exceptional

nation, the world’s exemplar of democracy, freedom, individualism, Christianity and all-

round moral superiority. More than any other event, the Vietnam War presented a

monumental challenge to those beliefs and provoked a marked erosion of America’s

sense of innocence and infallibility.

Background

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Vietnam has fought for survival through much of its existence. For several millennia the

main danger came from

China

. In the nineteenth century a weak and divided Vietnam

faced a new threat, European imperialism, and was easily conquered by France.

Vietnam’s history of resistance to China made it an intractable colony, however. A young

exile who would become known as Ho Chi Minh became the acknowledged leader of an

active Vietnamese independence movement after pleading that cause at the Versailles

Conference in 1919.

When diplomatic efforts to gain support for Vietnamese independence failed, Ho Chi

Minh turned to the Soviet Union, became a communist and started developing an

organization, known as the Vietminh, to overthrow the French by force. When

Japan

seized Vietnam during the Second World War the Vietminh had a new enemy and

cooperated with the OSS (predecessor to the

CIA

) in fighting the Japanese. When the

war ended, Ho Chi Minh issued a declaration of independence and hoped for American

support in preserving Vietnam’s independence under his control.

Those hopes were dashed. The US was preoccupied with other matters. France

reoccupied Vietnam, and the Vietminh launched a bloody ten-year war to drive the

French from their country. That effort seemed successful when, after increasing

opposition at home to

“le guerre sale”

(“the dirty war”) and a disastrous defeat at

Dienbienphu in 1954, France withdrew from Vietnam.

Once again, Ho Chi Minh’s dream proved elusive. As the

Cold War

heated up, the US

increasingly viewed Ho as an agent of global

communism

. After the outbreak of the

Korean War,

Harry

Truman

and Dwight D.

Eisenhower

heavily subsidized the French

war. When France withdrew, the US took up the mantle. The Geneva Agreement

negotiating France’s withdrawal provided for a temporary division of Vietnam as a

relude to nationwide elections and unification. The Vietminh controlled the northern

half of the country The remnant French government in the southern half was led by Ngo

Dinh Diem. With US support, Diem cancelled the elections and began the creation of a

separate South Vietnam.

Diem’s government was unpopular, repressive and dictatorial. An internal opposition

movement, the National Liberation Front (NLF, informally known as the Vietcong),

developed with covert support from North Vietnam. Eisenhower and John F.

Kennedy

sent more than 16,000 military “advisors,” some of whom regularly acted in combat

capacities. But despite economic and military aid, Diem continued to lose control of the

country. By the early 1960s Vietnam was in crisis. Kennedy made a series of statements

that indicated both his reluctance to get more deeply involved in Vietnam and an even

greater unwillingness to see South Vietnam fall to communism. Hoping that Diem was

the crux of the problem, the US promoted a military coup in November 1963 that

overthrew and murdered Diem and his widely despised brother Nhu. (They committed

“accidental suicide” in one report.) Three weeks later Kennedy himself was assassinated.

The problem of Vietnam fell into the unfortunate lap of Lyndon

Johnson

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1170

America’s war

Johnson was forced to make decisions that Kennedy had put off. A series of military

governments were even less competent and popular than Diem had been. Johnson could

abandon South Vietnam and let the communists win, or dramatically increase American

involvement. With private

angst

and public bravado, following the advice of former

Kennedy advisors, including Robert MacNamara, Dean Rusk and Maxwell Taylor,

Johnson chose the latter course.

American action took two primary forms: bombing of opposition forces in the South

and of North Vietnam itself; and the introduction of combat troops. A minor naval

confrontation in the Tonkin Gulf in August 1964 was exaggerated and fabricated into an

international incident, allowing Johnson to obtain, with almost no opposition,

congressional authority for military action in lieu of a declaration of war. (When the

extent of the deception later became known, the

Gulf of Tonkin

incident became the

most famous example of the “credibility gap”—government lying over Vietnam.)

Johnson initiated bombing raids against North Vietnam. Combat troops were introduced

in March 1965 to protect US air bases and personnel. But, when bombing proved

ineffective, William Westmoreland, the new military commander in Vietnam, persuaded

Johnson that South Vietnam could only survive with a larger commitment of American

soldiers.

Over the next three years Vietnam became increasingly America’s war. The bombing

campaign turned into the largest in world history surpassing by several times Allied

ombing of Germany and Japan in the Second World War. By 1967 Westmoreland was

directing more than 500,000 American troops. Using “search-and-destroy” tactics, the US

measured success in terms of “body count,” fighting a war of attrition whose object was

to kill more enemy than could be infiltrated from the North or recruited in the South. The

result was a steady escalation of death and destruction. Perhaps half-a-million enemy

troops were killed, along with another half-million civilians. Four to five million South

Vietnamese became homeless

refugees

. But the ultimate goals of defeating the enemy

and leaving a strong, independent South Vietnam were never reached. The Vietcong and

VA (North Vietnamese army) developed guerrilla warfare tactics to counter US

firepower. In the first large-scale confrontation between US and NVA troops, in the Ia

Drang Valley in 1965, the NVA killed 240 men of the elite First Air cavalry. Infiltration

of troops and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail continued unabated, while peasants

lamed the destruction of their society on the US and South Vietnamese government,

making Vietcong recruitment easier and weakening the government the US was supposed

to be supporting.

Tet Offensive and 1968

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By 1968 the war was a stalemate. The US had prevented the collapse of South Vietnam,

ut at a cost of nearly fifty US soldiers killed each day The price for North Vietnam and

the Vietcong was much higher, with no end in sight. The

Tet Offensive

of 1968 was a

dramatic effort to break the stalemate. After a diversionary attack on the mountain base

of Khe Sanh, the Vietcong broke an informal ceasefire during Vietnam’s New Year

celebrations with a widespread series of assaults. Despite catching the US unprepared, by

almost all accounts the Tet Offensive was a military failure. The departure from hit-and-

run guerrilla tactics led to the exposure and destruction of much of the carefully built up

Vietcong infrastructure.

Ironically, while the Tet Offensive may have been a military victory for the US, it was

a political and public-relations disaster. For three years American officials had

confidently foreseen a “light at the end of the tunnel,” that the war would soon be over.

The Tet Offensive shattered that illusion. During Tet the Vietcong overran the US

embassy, a large section of Saigon and all of Hue, the second-largest city of South

Vietnam. Tet also provided dramatic, graphic media symbols of the war’s futility and

rutality: the summary execution in front of television cameras of a Vietcong suspect by

a high-ranking South Vietnamese official and a statement by an anonymous American

military official that “it was necessary to destroy the town—Ben Tre—in order to save

it.” During the edgy aftermath of Tet, Charlie Company under Lieutenant William

Calley

murdered almost 400 innocent, unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai, probably the

most gruesome atrocity incident in American military history After Tet, Walter Cronkite

went to Vietnam and came back believing the war was unwinnable. Johnson’s most

respected advisors, the Wise Men, defected. In the face of a growing antiwar movement

and challenges from within his own party a dejected Johnson announced on March 31

that he was withdrawing from the presidential race.

Nixon and Vietnam

In the wake of Tet, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and widely publicized rioting at the

Democratic National Convention in

Chicago, IL,

Richard

Nixon

was elected to the

presidency Vietnam became Nixon’s war. He and his chief foreign-

olicy advisor Henry

Kissinger

had few pretensions to “winning” in Vietnam. Public opposition was growing

rapidly expanding from a small contingent of college students associated with

Students

for a Democratic Society (SDS)

. More powerful were congressional opponents, led by

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairperson William

Fulbright

. A damaging secret

history of the war, the

“Pentagon Papers”,

was leaked to the

New York Times

. Military

morale was tenuous: drug use was rampant, as were reports of fragging, the killing o

unpopular officers by their own men.

Nixon needed peace, but “peace with honor,” which meant not obviously losing the

war. His solution was “Vietnamization,” turning the fighting and dying back to the South

Vietnamese, while supporting them with ever-increasing bombing. The war went on for

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1172

four more years. Almost 30,000 more Americans died, and perhaps another million

Vietnamese. But Nixon’s plan was politically astute. American troops came home,

casualties declined, the draft was ended. The antiwar movement reached a crescendo after

Nixon’s April 1970 invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard’s killing of four

students at

Kent State,

then fizzled out.

Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972. Secret negotiations to end the war

progressed slowly but inexorably. After mining and blockading North Vietnam’s ports,

and a final, brutal Christmas bombing campaign, the US and North Vietnam reached an

agreement for US withdrawal in early 1973. But the peace agreement turned out to be

only a temporary ceasefire. Both sides violated the agreement almost before the ink was

dry Judging that the US would have no stomach for resuming the war in the aftermath o

Watergate

and Nixon’s resignation, the NVA/Vietcong renewed the war. In the spring o

1975 South Vietnamese resistance collapsed. Saigon fell in April. Vietnam was reunited,

though Ho Chi Minh was no longer alive to see his dream come true. He had died in

1969. But peace had come to Vietnam.

Legacies

The Vietnam War is slowly fading from prominence. But it created deep, long-lasting

scars that still plague the country. The war was refought in numerous movies and several

television series. The US maintained a diplomatic and economic blockade of Vietnam for

more than thirty years after the war ended. The issue of POW/MIAs possibly left behind

in Vietnam was wrenchingly emotional, as was the legacy of

Agent Orange

and post-

traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). In Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, his past as

an antiwar “draft dodger” was an issue. Government secrecy and illegal surveillance o

antiwar activists by the CIA and

FBI

contributed to the Watergate scandal and

Iran-

Contra affair,

and helped promote a pervasive cynicism and distrust of America’s

government.

Even the legacy of representation of the war reveals these conflicts. Apart from some

clichéd patriotic efforts like John

Wayne’s

Green Berets

(1968),

Hollywood

did not

generally depict what

television news

carried live into the home everyday. A series o

powerful later movies, however, including

The Deer Hunter

(1978),

Coming Home

(1978) and

Apocalypse Now

(1979) opened up a critical discussion of the war and its

ain, followed in the late 1980s by a plethora of compelling films, including Oliver

Stone’s

Platoon

(1986) and Stanley Kubrick’s

Full Metal Jacket

(1987),

Born on the

ourth of July

(1989) and even a more tender comic perspective in

Good Morning,

Vietnam

(1987). This filmic heritage and other representations, including the television

series

China Beach

(ABC, 1988–91), have become part of memory interpretation and

healing. Later explorations have even found positions combining experiences o

Vietnamese and Americans, like Trinh T.Min-Ha’s

Surname Viet, Given Name Nam

(1989) or the 1999 documentary

We Regret to Inform

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Americans still disagree on the basic meaning of the war. Was it a tragic but

unintentional blunder, the result of corrupt and evil politicians and policies, or a “noble

cause,” a just war that could and should have been won if the politicians and protestors

had not lacked the will to win? The black granite “Wall,” the

Vietnam memorial

Washington, DC,

with the names of more than 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam,

has been a source of healing and unity but Vietnam still deeply divides Americans. It was

surely one of the most important, complex and controversial events in shaping

contemporary American culture.