In 1978, the government tried unsuccessfully to rescind his green card. Then there was the fallout for the person for whom viewers had the least sympathy: General Loan, the executioner, who would eventually move to the United States. To South Vietnamese, it conveyed the opposite: Those forces “no longer had the kind of aura of omnipotence that they had had before,” said Mark Philip Bradley, a historian at the University of Chicago. To Americans in 1968, it conveyed that North Vietnam and the Vietcong were far stronger than they had been led to believe. In South Vietnam, the execution image resonated in a different way. “It was immediately understood to be an icon.” Moeller, the author of “Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat,” and a professor of media and international affairs at the University of Maryland. “You can talk about ‘the execution photograph from the Vietnam War,’ and not just the generation who lived through it but multiple generations can call that image to mind,” said Susan D. Adams’s photo won a Pulitzer Prize, and Time magazine called it one of the 100 most influential ever taken. In the months after the Tet offensive, public opinion shifted more rapidly than at any other point in the war, Dr. ![]() “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?” Appy, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “It raised a different kind of question to Americans than whether or not the war was winnable,” said Christian G. And the official was not a Communist, but a member of South Vietnam’s government, the ally of the United States. “And I think more people began to question whether we were, in fact, the good guys in the war or not.”Ī police chief had fired a bullet, point-blank, into the head of a handcuffed man, in likely violation of the Geneva Conventions. McMahon, a historian at the Ohio State University. 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. Together, they undermined the argument for the war on two fronts, leading many Americans to conclude not only that it could not be won, but also that, perhaps, it shouldn’t be. 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. 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.” Westmoreland, that the enemy was on its last legs. ![]() ![]() Johnson and his top general in Vietnam, William C. It was a shocking sight for Americans, who had been assured by President Lyndon B. They were even inside the heavily guarded compound of the United States Embassy. They were in the streets of Saigon, the capital. Suddenly, insurgents were in dozens of cities, in almost every province of South Vietnam. 1, 1968, two days after Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces launched the coordinated attacks of the Tet offensive. “The photo translated the news of Tet in a way that you can’t quantify in terms of how many people were, at that moment, turned against the war.” “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.
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