As the Vietnam War shuddered to an end, dominant images of a nation underpinned by universal aspirations were undergoing a crisis of containment. Fault lines had become visible through issues such as the war, demands for civil rights and legal protections for marginalized peoples. Voices displaced or ignored by aggressively marketed versions of ‘average’ and ‘typical’ American values were asserting presence and influence. The US was always already irreducibly diverse, multicultural and multi-ethnic, but the idea of America was, as this book has stressed, also subject to complex negotiations among different social strata and competing ideological influences. During the 1960s and 1970s, hegemonic concepts of US cultural and national identity came under renewed pressures, particularly in the media. If, for much of the 1960s, media outlets had suppressed controversial political content, by the decade's end they were reflecting widespread public disillusion. Americans could hardly avoid the barrage of photographic and moving images revealing the brutalities of military actions overseas and unrest at home.

As US troops were withdrawing from Vietnam, Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds (1974), which concludes with Vietnam veteran Randy Floyd declaiming the ‘criminality’ of US policymakers, won an Academy Award. Emile de Antonio criticized the film's ‘political emptiness’, lack of historical rigor and ‘japing, middle class superiority’ (de Antonio 2000 [1974]: 359); still Davis's film and its reception seemed to underline a period of collective national contrition known as the ‘Vietnam syndrome’.