why was the vietnam war called the living room war

(No “Vietnam Review” that week.) Not a bad game, either. There was a baseball game in progress on N.B.C. I went back home at ten to five, got out a beer, turned on the TV set.

Somewhere up toward Ninety-sixth Street a band was playing “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Children all around me clutched American flags and looked the way children usually do, with or without flags. A flatbed truck went by full of teamsters, many of them holding aloft placards reading, “It’s Your Country! Love It Or Leave It!” The Putnam County John Birch Society went by singing “America the Beautiful.” An American Legionnaire went by in a wheelchair, carrying a placard reading, “Victory over Atheistic Communism.” The crowd applauded. Lots of those Catholic high-school bands. program called “Vietnam Weekly Review” for whatever it might have to offer, and went outside (it was a nice day-warm, sunny, full of the first hints of summer’s dust and laziness, of all those hammocks one will never swing in), toward Fifth Avenue and the Park, past which close to one hundred thousand men, women, and children were marching as part of a “Support Our Boys in Vietnam” parade. (Not much doing on television in the good old, mythic old American summertime.) The other Saturday, just back from a trip, and for some reason conscious more pointlessly than ever of that miserable war, I made a mental note to watch, at five o’clock that afternoon, an N.B.C.

Women walking down East Eighty-sixth Street in those jouncy cotton dresses. Kids already gabbling about the last day of school.

Why was the vietnam war called the living room war