A Photo That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War
Meredith H. Lair, a Vietnam War expert at George Mason University, said the offensive “caused people to question whether they’d been fed lies by the administration,
and to question whether the war was going as well as they’d been led to believe, and to question whether the war could be won if the enemy was supposed to be cowed and appeared so strong and invigorated.”
If the broader Tet offensive revealed chaos where the government was trying to project control,
Adams’s photo made people question whether the United States was fighting for a just cause.
“It really introduced a set of moral questions that would increasingly shape debate about the Vietnam War: Is our presence in Vietnam legitimate or just,
and are we conducting the war in a way that is moral?”
In the months after the Tet offensive, public opinion shifted more rapidly than at any other point in the war, Dr. McMahon said.
The photo “fed into a developing narrative in the wake of the Tet offensive
that the Vietnam War was looking more and more like an unwinnable war,” said Robert J. McMahon, a historian at the Ohio State University.
“It hit people in the gut in a way that only a visual text can do,” said Michelle Nickerson, an associate professor
of history at Loyola University Chicago who has studied the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era.
