History Professor Receives National Endowment
for the Humanities Summer Stipend
Contact: Janice Roche, (740) 597-1833
ATHENS, Ohio (May 8, 2000) -- Chester Pach, associate professor in Ohio University's Department
of History, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer stipend to
support the writing of a book entitled The First Television War: TV News, the White House, and
Vietnam. The NEH summer stipends provide funds for two consecutive months of full-time work on
a research project.
Pach was nominated for the highly competitive stipend by the university, which is permitted
two such nominations per year. Applications for summer stipends are evaluated on the quality and
significance of the proposed project by scholars in the humanities outside NEH.
TV news coverage of the Vietnam War has long been a controversial subject. The First
Television War will be the most comprehensive study yet of how the network evening news
programs reported the war. Pach will examine how the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon
administrations devised increasingly elaborate strategies to counteract critical television
reporting and build public support for their policies in Vietnam. In a war whose "main front"
was "here in the United States," as Johnson believed, and in which "our worst enemy seems to
be the press," as Nixon asserted, the television screen became an important battlefield, according
to Pach. "I am delighted to have gotten this award, which will help me make significant progress
this summer toward finishing my book, " Pach said.
Pach received grants from the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation and a Baker Research Award to
support the research and writing of The First Television War. He has also been on faculty
fellowship leave from the College of Arts and Sciences during the 1999-00 academic year. Pach
conducted extensive research for his book in the National Archives, the Lyndon B. Johnson
Library, and the Vanderbilt Television News Archives as well as several other repositories.
He has interviewed prominent journalists including David Brinkley and Sander Vanocur as well
as policy makers form the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
Pach is also the author of Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States
Military Assistance Program, 1945-1950 and The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He served as director of the Contemporary History Institute from 1993-98 and as director of the
Baker Peace Studies Program from 1996-98.
