No Repeat of Kennebunkport

“Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?”

“Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

This quote is evidence that President Bush knows a little something about how a different game is played in Washington: media management. Images are created and controlled, because images have power. The government is actively involved in controlling what we see, as they know it affects how we think about what they are doing.

Let’s backtrack. It is often said that the media played a role in the U.S. defeat in Vietnam by doing negative reporting. Indeed, there was a cadre of brave young reporters, like Neil Sheehan, who reported what they saw, often ugly. But most reporters were loyal, some slavishly so. What happened in Vietnam was probably inadvertent, caused by the inexperience of people in understanding the nature and power of their own medium, television. It was still young back then.

Television is comprised of two signals running side-by-side – audio and video. The audio is often filtered or ignored by the viewer, but the video leaves a lasting impression. Reporting in Vietnam often contained ghastly images of death and destruction, and though the words may have been in support of the government and the military, the images penetrated consciousness and made us aware of what was going on.

That’s not the whole story, of course. There was disagreement among elites about the cost of the war to us, leading to some negative reporting. Unlike Iraq, that war did not have uniform backing in power centers. And returning soldiers were telling horror stories, which made the rounds. But from a pure propaganda standpoint, the media blew it in Vietnam.

Post-Vietnam, the Pentagon has involved us in an ongoing experiment in media management. Perhaps the first try, a kind of dry run, was in 1983 in Grenada, an insignificant island that President Reagan invaded shortly after 241 U.S. military personnel were killed in Lebanon. The Pentagon was ham-handed about it, confining reporters to a military vessel and spoon feeding them. Reporters didn’t like it. It was a different era.

The 1989 attack on Panama was handled in much the same manner – this time the spoon feeding was done by none other than Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. As I watched him during that invasion, I remember getting cold chills. Pure evil. But in terms of media management, Panama was a success. To this day, we don’t know how many people the U.S. killed, and absent images, few have been curious.

The first Gulf War showed us a military well advanced in news and image management. That war was shown to us as a video arcade, sanitized and bloodless. As with other wars, we have no idea how many people we killed in the massive aerial bombardment. To this day people think of Gulf I as a clean war where they used precision bombing to pinpoint targets and spare civilians. But estimates of civilian casualties run as high as 158,000, including 32,000 children, but imagery of the grisly deaths never penetrated American consciousness. The media managers at the Pentagon had done their jobs.

Mostly. One slight problem cropped up during that war. George H.W. Bush was roundly criticized for playing golf at Kennebunkport in 1990 while deploying troops to the Middle East. It looked really bad, and showed his indifference to the problems of ordinary people. George W. Bush learned the lesson – casualties may mount, but images must be managed. No golf, dammit!

So we’ve come the full circle – the lessons of Vietnam have been absorbed, and modern warfare is carried on in a sanitized environment with managed images as part of the ongoing propaganda. In 2008 we’re not even allowed to see flag-draped coffins, so tight is the control.

The object is to keep the public actively behind the war. But in Iraq in 2008, as in Vietnam in 1968, reality interferes, just as it did with Bush’s golf game. Even without the grisly images, the public has soured on Iraq. Damned reality.