Example research essay topic: President John F Kennedy American Popular Culture - 1,670 words

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Coming Home from Vietnam American involvement in Vietnam began in the mid- 1950 s, as the French, defeated on the battlefield by the communist Viet Minh, began to withdraw all military forces out of their former colony. Fearing a vacuum that the communists might soon fill, the United States helped establish the Republic of Vietnam in the southern half of the country. In the face of North Vietnam's determination to unite all of Vietnam under its control, a series of U. S. administrations provided support to the South Vietnamese government -- first with economic and military aid under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, then military advisors under President John F.

Kennedy, then combat troops under President Lyndon Johnson, and finally by invading Cambodia under President Richard Nixon. Vietnam first entered American popular culture through articulation of what became known as the "domino theory. " At a press conference in April 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower was asked by a reporter to assess the importance of French Indochina for American national security. Eisenhower replied, "You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences. " The image of falling dominos as a metaphor for the consequences of a communist victory in Vietnam was a compelling one, and many leaders who followed Eisenhower made use of it in policy discussions. It was endorsed by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as their surrogates and spokesmen. Scholars and pundits debated the domino theory's merits in print and in person, and it even showed up in an episode of the popular late- 1960 s television show, The Monkees: the boys have an arrangement of dominos set up on a table.

One of them says, "Look, Southeast Asia, " and pushes the first domino over, with predictable results for the others. One of the earliest literary discussions of Vietnam also appeared during Eisenhower's time with William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's 1959 book The Ugly American. Less a novel than a collection of loosely-related stories, it is a stinging indictment of U. S. diplomacy throughout Asia -- -especially in the fictional country of Sarkhan, a thinly-disguised Vietnam. The book depicts U.

S. diplomats throughout the region as ignorant, incompetent political hacks, who spend their time at embassy cocktail parties while the communist agents move among the people, speaking their language, respecting their culture, and gaining their allegiance. Several scholars claim that The Ugly American inspired President John F. Kennedy (who had read and endorsed the book when it first appeared) to create the Peace Corps; others contend that reading it led Kennedy to transform a small, neglected U. S. Army unit called the Special Forces into those fabled champions of counterinsurgency, the Green Berets.

That elite commando force is also the subject of one of the few fictional works about Vietnam written while the U. S. was militarily engaged there: Robin Moore's The Green Berets (1965). Although the book was published during the Johnson Administration, it was Kennedy who gave Moore permission to accompany a Special Forces "A" team to Vietnam -- provided the author first went through Special Forces training himself. The resulting book was hugely popular, inspiring both a song and a motion picture. The film, John Wayne's 1968 production The Green Berets, was blatant propaganda on behalf of the war and against its critics.

Wayne, whose right-wing sympathies were well known, starred, directed, and installed his own son as producer. The Pentagon, on President Johnson's orders, loaned Wayne immense amounts of military equipment and charged him cut rates for its use. In return, the Defense Department had approval rights on the script, and it was not displeased with the result. The film glorifies the Special Forces, vilifies the Viet Cong, and portrays the war's American opponents as uninformed and misguided. The music that accompanies the film's opening credits is a choral version of Barry Sadler's "The Ballad of the Green Berets. " Sadler, a Special Forces NCO, wrote the song while serving in Vietnam and later saw his recording of it reach number one on the singles chart. In addition to using Wayne's film to influence public opinion on the war, the Johnson Administration also produced a film of its own.

Why Vietnam? was released in 1965 by the Defense Department and a copy was made available for loan to any school, club, or civic organization that was interested in screening it. The 40 -minute documentary was done in the melodramatic, end-of-the-world style of Frank Capra's Why We Fight films that was effective in the 1940 s. But 1960 s audiences often found the approach hokey.

In addition, the historical perspective that the film gave of the reasons for U. S. involvement in Vietnam was not only one-sided but at times simply untrue -- -as when the film's narrator claimed that the planned 1954 national plebiscite that would have united Vietnam was sabotaged by the communists in the North (South Vietnam was actually responsible, with U. S. concurrence). A very different documentary was released in 1974, just as the war was nearing its end.

Hearts and Minds, directed by Peter Davis, was an uncompromising indictment of American involvement in Vietnam. The winner of an Academy Award for Best Feature-length Documentary, the film uses juxtaposition -- for example, Nixon justifying his "Christmas bombing" of 1972 followed by footage of a Hanoi hospital destroyed in that bombing -- and interviews with Vietnamese peasants to show the devastating damage that the United States inflicted on Vietnam. News coverage, especially on television, was of vital concern to the several U. S.

administrations that waged war in Vietnam. It was believed, not without reason, that the focus and tone of the news might well have an effect on public support for the war. Consequently, both civilian and military officials tried to influence the coverage -- they emphasized some aspects of the war, downplayed others, withheld some and lied about more than a few. These efforts at news management were fairly successful for several years; many journalists, both print and electronic, produced stories that were generally favorable to both the American goals in Vietnam and the ways those goals were pursued.

Although the war's end in 1975 also brought a halt to the musical battle being waged over the airwaves, most other aspects of American popular culture continued to find the Vietnam conflict a worthy subject. One of these manifestations involved memoirs: a number of veterans published personal accounts of their experiences in the war, including Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973), Ron Kevin's Born on the Fourth of July (1976), Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977), and William Broyles' Brothers in Arms (1986). A number of "oral histories" from veterans were also collected and published, such as Al Santoli's Everything We Had (1981) and To Bear Any Burden (1986), Wallace Terry's Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1984), and Kathryn Marshall's In the Combat Zone: An Oral History of American Women in Vietnam (1984). The postwar period also saw no shortage of novels about the conflict in Vietnam. Some of the most important are Tim O'Brien's books Going after Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990), James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978), Winston Groom's Better Times than These (1978), John Del Vecchio's The Thirteenth Valley (1982), and Philip Caputo's Indian Country (1987). The dearth of war-related motion pictures made while the conflict was in progress was more than made up afterwards.

Ted Post directed 1978 's Go Tell the Spartans, a bleak look at the early days of American "advisors" in Vietnam that suggests the seeds of American defeat were planted early in the struggle. The same year, Michael Casino's The Deer Hunter won the Best Picture Oscar for its story of three friends whose service in Vietnam changes them in markedly different ways. A year later, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now premiered, a near-epic film injected with a heavy dose of surrealism. Surrealism also permeates the second half of Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, which follows a group of young men from the brutality of Marine Corps boot camp to the terrors of their deployment in Vietnam. Two other important films, Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986) and John Irvin's Hamburger Hill (1987) take a more realistic approach, emphasizing the individual tragedies of young men's lives wasted in a war they do not understand. In addition to the differing film depictions of the actual fighting in the Vietnam War, two sub-genres of Vietnam War films emerged.

One focuses on the figure of the Vietnam veteran, made crazy by the war, who brings his deadly skills home and directs them against his countrymen. Though many cheap exploitation films were based on this premise, using it as an excuse to revel in blood and explosions, two more complex treatments appeared. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), in which Robert De Niro offers a compelling portrait of the psychologically disintegrating Travis Bible, and Ted Kotcheff's First Blood (1982), in which a former Green Beret is pushed beyond endurance by a brutal police chief who pays a high price for his callousness, offer interesting insights into the lasting wounds war inflicts on soldiers. Words Count: 1, 534. Bibliography: Caroline Page, U. S.

Official Propaganda during the Vietnam War, 1965 - 1973: The Limits of Persuasion. London: Leicester University Press, 1996. Gentleman, Marvin, ed. et al.

Vietnam and America: A Documented History. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. , 1995. Nguyen To Thi, "A Content Analysis of Voice of America News Broadcasts to Vietnam. " Ph. D. dissertation, Mass Communications, Ohio State, 1977. Robert W.

Chandler, War of Ideas: The U. S. Propaganda Campaign in Vietnam. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981. Robert W. Chandler, "United States Psychological Operations in Vietnam, 1965 - 72. " Ph.

D. dissertation, George Washington University, Political Science, 1974.

Research essay sample on President John F Kennedy American Popular Culture