We rebuilt these societies, we got them back going in the right direction, and we were containing these societies from the spread of Communism. We rebuilt Europe after we destroyed Europe. Americans defined their self-image as a society that beat the bad guys and rebuilt the societies that produced the bad guys. Americans were defined by the experience of going to war. For most Americans who had lived through World War II, even if they were too young to have served, it structured their imagination of what America did in the world. Where we need to start, though, is actually before the 1960s at the end of World War II. The first war really covered by photograph is the Civil War, but it is a small number of still photographs that have to be either studio posed or that take a long time to produce, whereas in the Vietnam War you get a proliferation of photographs from the field in a way you never have before. There is no doubt that, in the 1960s, the nature of media coverage of war and society changed, in large part because of the prevalence of television and the easier access to photo imagery. It is also important that anyone who talks about the Vietnam War talks about the modern media. I want to argue today that the '60s defined the Vietnam War as much as the Vietnam War defined the '60s, and that, if you want to understand the war in Vietnam, you need to understand the Great Society, the civil rights movement, the monumental personalities in the United States, as well as many of the major international transformations going on. Too often, when people are asked to talk about the Vietnam War, it is decontextualized from the 1960s, or, conversely, the 1960s are defined by the war.
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