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First, the campaign by the United States military in Vietnam to do as President Lyndon Baines Johnson had urged them, when he said that, "The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there." The military then set out to "win the hearts and minds of the people" beginning in the early 1970s. Johnson's use of the phrase is a quote John Adams, the American Revolutionary War patriot, who said that the revolution was won not on the battlefield, but in the "hearts and minds" of the American people.
Second, the phrase was used as the title of Hearts and Minds, a 1974 Academy Award winning documentary directed by Peter Davis. The documentary premiered at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and later went on to win the Academy Award for best documentary of the year, both before its release in the United States itself. Release had been held up by threatened lawsuits, public controversy, and threats. By changing distributors, the film makers were able to get the movie released to audiences in March of 1975. During his acceptance of the Oscar award, co-producer Bert Schneider read out a "Greetings of friendship to all American People" from the North Vietnamese government. Frank Sinatra retaliated later by reading a letter from Bob Hope, another presenter on the show, disavowing any political comments in the broadcast.
Davis had earlier directed and written The Selling of the Pentagon and Hunger in America. Hearts and Minds concentrates less on the people of Vietnam than the American soldiers. In a sense, he revert's Johnson's quote back onto the people of America. Over the years, "Hearts and Minds" has become a shorthand reference for a disasterous and misguided attempt to use a military to make a subjugated population like its conquerors, and the 1974 film has become an accepted masterpiece of political documentary film.