“Lying about the war, or at least giving the public misleading information, became routine. Johnson repeatedly hid or gave deceptive accounts of planned increases in troop strength. To justify the American intervention by portraying the Vietnamese conflict as an attack by North Vietnam against South Vietnam rather than as a civil war, his administration went as far as having the CIA create elaborate fake evidence of large-scale shipments of arms from the north to the south. Meanwhile, in Vietnam itself, military officials gave reporters misleading information, withholding anything that might bring into question official optimism.”

While Freeman mentions a couple of reasons for America’s participation in the Vietnam war, he manages to continuously come back to pride. The lies by Johnson to Americans, and by military officials show the desperation in upholding the image of undefeated power. It goes so far as to require official optimism, a placebo. The lengths that Johnson went through to fester false security was denial of the country’s political leaders’ mistakes. Deceptions of the war was to justify the loss of soldiers and the horrendous violence taking place; communism, the enemy, was a deception in itself to justify American perseverance in political pride and power.