The Vietnam War appears in these excerpts not as a subject in itself but as a cause whose domestic consequences the guests trace: the criminalization of drugs, the erosion of social trust, the weaponization of broadcast regulation, and a temporary turn toward skeptical foreign-policy reporting.
The War on Drugs as a Reaction to the War
Dr. Rick Doblin places the political origins of drug prohibition in the Nixon administration, in the context of protests against the Vietnam War and the emerging counterculture. Marijuana had been criminalized in 1937 through the Tax Act and taken out of the pharmacopoeia in 1942, in part through the efforts of Harry Anslinger and prohibition agents who, a few years after the end of alcohol prohibition, were looking for something else to criminalize; the targets were mostly Mexicans using marijuana and black jazz musicians Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016). Doblin notes that the American Medical Association argued against criminalization in Congress, citing medical uses and exaggerated risks, and that its testimony was ignored.
Doblin recounts that marijuana remained a war against minorities that drew little notice until the youth generation of the 1960s adopted marijuana and LSD and became involved in challenging the status quo, particularly on civil rights and the Vietnam War, which attracted the attention of Nixon and others. He relays the Ehrlichman account: Nixon was upset about black civil rights people and hippies, and since he could not criminalize their ideas — their opposition to the war and to civil rights abuses — he could selectively criminalize the drugs they used, meaning opiates, cocaine and marijuana, exaggerate the risks, and develop criminal penalties to break up these groups, arrest their leaders and harass people Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016).
Bob Zadek states that Nixon hated the hippies and was not fond of inner-city blacks, and devised a strategy to target both groups at once by declaring a War on Drugs, driven by no health concerns. Zadek adds that Reagan furthered the War on Drugs, famously with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No,” and that Carter was kind of opposed to it but was denied the political movement to slow it down after a cocaine scandal. Doblin adds that Nixon commissioned the Shafer Commission, which found marijuana not nearly as dangerous as claimed and recommended that penalties against drugs not be worse than the drugs themselves; Nixon ignored it Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016).
Zadek draws the distinction between malum per se and malum prohibitum, placing marijuana possession in the latter category, and Doblin describes felony disenfranchisement as a use of the drug war to selectively suppress voters, citing Florida’s notices to about 80,000 people before the Bush–Gore election and the book The New Jim Crow. Zadek also cites early-twentieth-century racism in drug regulation, including a Journal of the American Medical Association editorial on cocaine and Negroes, a blue-ribbon panel’s line about the Chinaman and his dope, and a New York Times article on Negro cocaine fiends Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016).
The War and the Decline of Social Trust
Kevin Vallier, discussing the decline in social trust, says the problem is that social trust has only been measured carefully across the world for about 40 years, and that he would want to see levels around the Second World War. His suspicion is that war against an enemy universally regarded as terrible made people think they could trust their government and each other, because everyone was working together to beat the Nazis. Then, he says, another war comes along, Vietnam, and there is no agreement that it is just, no agreement on whether the enemy is bad, and there are huge protests; the younger generation’s slogan was “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” and that created social distrust Mandatory PPE (2020). He contrasts banding together under a common threat with divisive episodes in which people call each other not a patriot or a baby killer, or harass soldiers coming home, which can make people think others are rotten.
Vallier also names Watergate as a very big deal for political trust, and says that Watergate and the Vietnam War were real periods of increasing distrust. He adds that when people disagree more about values it is harder for them to trust each other, describing a non-Christian religious conversion on the left in the ’60s and ’70s — a culture of equality and sexual revolution — and comparing it to half the country converting to Islam 50 years earlier Mandatory PPE (2020).
The Fairness Doctrine Turned on Vietnam Coverage
Paul Matzko describes how the original wielders of the weaponized Fairness Doctrine — Democrats in the early 60s — realized that if they could exercise the power in control, the other side could when in control. Once Richard Nixon took office, he used the threat of Fairness Doctrine control against media outlets critical of his administration and policies, including to intimidate big television networks into changing their coverage of the Vietnam War. Nixon sent Chuck Colson, one of his CREEP operatives, and Colson reported back that the networks were “cordial, accommodating, and almost apologetic” as soon as he brought out the implicit threat of Fairness Doctrine enforcement; it worked The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021).
Matzko says that once Nixon began using the doctrine as a weapon, those who had used it earlier began to back away, but the rule stayed on the books through the Nixon and Ford administrations. Jimmy Carter, whom Matzko calls the true great deregulator, deregulated airline tickets and flight routes, craft beer and the airwaves, and the Carter FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine as rigorously, so it waned in the late 70s. Ronald Reagan in 1987 decided to repeal it and vetoed a bipartisan congressional attempt to codify it. Matzko notes that Reagan had hosted a daily radio show he mostly wrote himself five days a week between 1976 and 1980, turning down an ambassadorship to the United Kingdom, the chair of the Republican National Committee and a prime-time television slot, and that this experience explains why he repealed the doctrine The Radio Right and The Fairness Doctrine (2021).
The War and the Press
Ted Galen Carpenter, asked whether there was ever a golden age of press objectivity, says he does not subscribe to an idealistic notion of a totally objective press and that it has never existed. What has happened, coincidentally as America began to emerge as a global empire, is that the press has become ever more subservient to government agencies and leaders who push that agenda Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023). He points to the 1970s and 1980s as an interlude, when journalists were disillusioned by having been flat-out lied to by government officials regarding the Vietnam War; when the war turned out to be a total failure, that skepticism carried over onto other issues. He describes the period as partisan in aspect — Democrats and liberals more likely to criticize the Reagan administration in places like Central America, Republicans more inclined to defend him — but with hard questions asked and matters debated. With the advent of the Persian Gulf War, he says, that process came to an end and journalists reverted to regarding themselves as part of the government apparatus Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Bob Zadek, in the same exchange, notes that going back to the founding era the press was understood to have taken sides — Jefferson had his guys and Adams had his guys — and that neither the founders nor the public held the expectations of objectivity under discussion. He asks where the beginnings of that duty lie, and says that looking across the Civil War, World War I, Vietnam War and Spanish-American War, he could not find any good old days Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Across episodes: no development
The Vietnam War surfaces in four episodes — the Doblin interview on drug prohibition, the Vallier interview on social trust, the Matzko interview on the Fairness Doctrine, and the Carpenter interview on the press — but each treats it as background to a different subject, and the excerpts show no shared argument developing across them.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no account of the war’s conduct, battles, casualties, dates of American involvement, or its conclusion. They do not name statutes, treaties or court cases deciding the war’s legal status, and they do not describe the draft, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the Paris negotiations. The war’s own legality and the constitutional questions it raised are not addressed by any speaker.