No More Learning

Finally, in January 1973, the United States formally accepted a peace treaty that was virtually identical with the Vietnamese consensus it overturned by violence in 1964, except that by that time, the indige- nous NLF had been effectively demolished and little remained in In- dochina outside of North Vietnam, laying the basis for North Vietnamese domination of Indochina, exactly as had been pr~dicted, long before, by "the wild men in the wings. " The media bear a major responsibility for these tragic events, coverage of the Tonkin Gulf incident with its congressional "blank check" for further aggression serving as a notable example. io.
THE INDOCHiNA WARS (i): ViETNAM 2II
5. 5. 2. The Tet offensive
Media coverage of the Tet offensive has been the centerpiece of the critique of the media for "losing the war" by their incompetent report- ing and their anti-government bias reflecting their passion for confront- ing authority. The authoritative "proof' of this contention was provided in the two-volume Freedom House study by Peter Braestrup. Conducted over a six-year period with a wide range of distinguished participants and consultants, and support acknowledged from some two dozen corporations and labor unions, this study was hailed as a "monu- mental" work by Don Oberdorfer in a WashinglOn Post magazine cover story on the tenth anniversary of the offensive, with the title: "Tet: The Turning Point: How a 'Big Event' on Television Can Change Our Minds. " Professor John P. Roche, of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, "intellectual-in-residence" for the Johnson administration, described the Freedom House study as "one of the major pieces of investigative reporting and first-rate scholarship
of the past quarter century," a "meticulous case-study of media incom- petence, if not malevolence. " In a relatively critical discussion in the Times's Sunday book review, Edwin Diamond praises this "painstak- ingly thorough study of how the Vietnam war was presented to the American public by its leading image makers," a "highfalutin' epis- temological quest" by a "conscientious . . . reporter-analyst" that raises profound questions about "how do we know what we know," revealing "the biases introduced by standard journalistic assumptions and organi- zational practices" that contributed to undermining the U. S. position in Vietnam among the general public and Congress. Similarly, Charles Mohr reports that in a conference of "aging hawks and doves" on the tenth anniversary of the Tet offensive at the University of North Caro- lina, "Journalism came in for some strong criticism and only a rather muted defense. " The criticism was by Braestrup, who "expounded gently the theme of his recent book," Big Story, and the hawks in attendance, "while some of the reporters there demurred only softly. "
The study is regularly cited by historians, without qualification, as the standard work on media reporting of the Tet offensive, "in some re- spects as important as the battle itself," here "analysed in depth" (R. B. Smith). 106
Oberdorfer too accepts the conclusions of the study as proven: it was the" 'Big Event' on television" that changed our minds about the war. The only commentary he cites, even obliquely, accepts this judgment (Roche and others unnamed). Within the mainstream more generally, it is assumed with little question that this remarkable scholarly contri-
2J2 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
bution made its case, though one may debate whether it revealed "ma- levolence" or deeper problems of "standard journalistic assumptions and organizational practices," reflecting perhaps the "adversarial stance" of the media with regard to established power.
Braestrup claims to have shown that the reporting of the Tet offen- sive is "an extreme case" cf the "unsatisfactory" performance of the media: "Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retro- spect, to have veered so widely from reality" by presenting <<a portrait of defeat for the allies"-"allies" being the term regularly used to refer to the U. S. invaders, the local forces they organized, and the largely mercenary forces they introduced to support U. S. military operations in Indochina, and a term chosen to exploit the favorable connotations provided by World War II, when "the allies" fought "the Axis. " "To have portrayed such a setback for one side [them] as a defeat for the other {us]-in a major crisis abroad--cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism," which "shouted that the patient was dying, then weeks later began to whisper that he somehow seemed to be recovering-whispers apparently not heard amid the clamorous domes- tic reaction to the initial shouts," with television the worst offender. The whispers began "about late February," he asserts. These joumalis~ tic failures, Braestrup concludes, reflect "the more volatile journalistic style-spurred by managerial exhortation or complaisance-that has become so popular since the late 196050," accompanied with "an often mindless readiness to seek out conRict, to believe the worst of the government or of authority in general, and on that basis to divide up the actors on any issue into the 'good' and the 'bad. ' "The "bad actors" include the U. S. forces in Vietnam, the "military-industrial complex," and the CIA, among others, while "the good" in the eyes of the media are presumably the Communists, who, Braestrup argues sardonically throughout, were consistently overpraised and protected. The prospect, he foresees, "is for a continuation of the current volatile styles, always with the dark possibility that, if the managers do not themselves take action, then outsiders-the courts, the Federal Communications Com- mission, or Congress-will seek to apply remedies of their own," a proposal taken up in Roche's call fOT a congressional inquiry and the subsequent warnings of the Trilateral Commission, cited earlier (Big
Story, I, 705ft". )
The Braestrup-Freedom House thesis has two essential components:
(I) coverage of the Tet offensive illustrates media incompetence and their "adversarial stance"j (2) by their portrayal of an American victory as a defeat, the media bear responsibility for the loss of American resolve and the subsequent American defeat in Vietnam. It is the sec-
THE 11<ODOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 213
ond component of the thesis that carries the dramatic impact, and that has permitted it to set much of the agenda for subsequent discussion of the fourth estate and the dangers that its new-found power and "sixties' style" of "mindless" hatred of authority pose for the very survival of free institutions and democracy.
The first component of the thesis is commonly accepted even by those who deny the second. Thus, rejecting "the stab-in-the-back the- sis," George Herring nevertheless observes: "That the media was hos- tile to the war and to Johnson seems clear, and much of the reporting of Tet was misleading"; these "distortions of the media" may have contributed to "growing popular discontent" with the war and "public anxiety," Herring adds, but these were not the operative factors in Johnson's decision to de-escalate and seek negotiations after Tet. tO?
An analysis of the facts and the argument demonstrates that neither component of the Freedom House thesis is tenable. The second, as we shall see, is conceded in the Freedom House study to be false with regard to public opinion, and the straw at which they then grasp will plainly not bear the weight. As for the first component, on the narrow question of professional competence in reporting the facts available under trying and confused circumstances, the performance of the media was acceptable if not outstanding, and compares quite favorably to the internal reporting of the American military authorities and U. S. intelligence, insofar as these are available. But when we turn to broader questions of the sort discussed earlier-that is, if we evaluate the media
by the standards that we would properly apply to reporting, say, on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan-we see that indeed they can be faulted in precisely the terms anticipated by the propaganda model. The very example selected as providing the strongest grounds for their accusa- tions by Freedom House and other critics from the jingoist right wing of the political spectrum actually happens to demonstrate the precise opposite of what is alleged-namely, it provides yet another striking illustration of the subservience of the media to the state propaganda system. lOS
The Freedom House study itself provides ample documentation to establish these conclusions, and to refute its own specific allegations point by point. Given the major role that this study and the thesis it allegedly established has played in recent ideology, we will give some attention to the chasm that lies between its interpretation and summar- ies, on the one hand, and the documentary record that it (in part) presents, on the other. 109 The comments and summaries often seriously misrepresent the contents of the documents described or are outright falsifications. The analysis, laced with bitter sarcasm throughout, is
2I4 MANUf'ACT\lI. lN<; CONSENT
thoroughly undermined when compared with the actual documents. When the countless errors and careless and inaccurate comments are corrected, nothing remains of the Freedom House case. The sardonic reference to "straw man journalism," "CBS exclusives" and the like, referring to alleged misdeeds of the media, is misplaced; case by case, we find, instead, "Freedom House exclusives. "
Before proceeding to details, we should take careful note of the background assumptions that guide this inquiry. As we noted, for Bra- estrup and Freedom House, the "allies" are the United States, the South Vietnamese client government, and the various South Korean, Thai, Australian, Chinese Nationalist, and other forces (largely merce- nary) mobilized by the United States. The "South Vietnamese" include our client government and the armed forces organized, supplied, trained, and directed by the United States, but exclude the indigenous NLF and its supporters, although the U. S. government never had the slightest doubt, and its specialists do not hesitate to concede, that the client regime had little support while its opponents in South Vietnam constituted so powerful a political force that any peaceful settlement was unthinkable. That the United States has a right to conduct military operations in South Vietnam to uproot the NLF and destroy the peas- ant society in which it was based, that its goals are democracy and self-determination, and that its forces "protect" and "bring security" to South Vietnamese peasants are principles taken for granted in the
Brliestrup-Freedom House version, where no patriotic assumption or cliche is ever challenged--or even noticed, so deeply rooted are these doctrines. Correspondingly, the fact that the media coverage surveyed is framed entirely within these patriotic premises passes unnoticed. The Freedom House inquiry cannot perceive fundamental bias favorable to the state because all ofthe premises ofstate doctrine are taken as given. There is "mindlessness" here, as Braestrup observes, although it is not quite what he perceives; rather, we find that Braestrup "mindlessly" adopts what we referred to in chapter 3 as a patriotic agenda, even more so than the media he condemns. And as we described in chapter I, the function of such "flak machines" as Freedom House is to ensure that the press stays within the bounds of this patriotic agenda,
The Tet offensive of January 1968 began on January 21 with a siege by North Vietnamese (NVA) regulars of a U. S. military base at Khe Sanh. near the 17th parallel. It was soon apparent that the purpose was to draw U. S. forces away from populated centers, and the siege suc- ceeded in this aim, as General Westmoreland rushed combat forces to the northern areas. On January 31, all major cities and thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals, along with numerous other towns, came
THE INDOCHINA WAllS (I): VIETNAM 215
under simultaneous attack by southern NLF resistance forces ("Viet Cong"), along with some NVA elements. The effects are succinctly summarized by Wallace Thies in his scholarly study ofthe U. S. strategy of "coercing Hanoi":
" . although U. S. military commanders would later claim that the offensive had been anticipated and that the heavy casualties suf- fered by the attackers had resulted in a great victory for the Allies, the offensive was in fact a military setback for the American side. To meet the threat in the northern provinces and forestall a Dien Bien Phu-type defeat at Khe Sanh, half of all U. S. maneuver battalions in South Vietnam were deployed in I Corps (in the north]; the rest, along with the bulk of the combat-ready ARVN [GVN, Government of (South) Vietnam] units, were tied down defending the cities against the possibility of a second wave of attacks. As a result, the countryside went by default to the NLF, the pacification program was left in a shambles, and whatever losses the DRV / VC (North Vietnamese / Viet Cong] forces did suffer in the initial assaults were largely offset by the unimpeded recruiting that they conducted in the rural areas in the weeks that followed. 110
International Voluntary Services (IVS), which had a close familiarity with the situation in rural areas, withdrew most of its field workets in early 1968 because of "security conditions. " A volunteer reported in February: "The number of locations at which we can safely place a volunteer have significantly decreased in recent months"; another added that "we all knew that security in the countryside was getting worse and worse," contrary to the optimistic evaluations of the U. S. high command and Washington, which were relayed with little skepti- cism by the media in the pre-T et period. A South Vietnamese senator estimated that after Tet, the government controlled "only one third of the country," the remaining two-thirds being in the hands of the NLF, an estimate consistent with U. S. intelligence reports. I I I
The Tet offensive left Washington in a state of "troubled confusion and uncertainty," Undersecretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes observed, and "performed the curious service of fully revealing the doubters and dissenters to each other, in a lightning flash," within the Pentagon. While General Westmoreland persisted with the optimistic assessments that had been undermined by this dramatic demonstration that the NLF remained firmly rooted in the South despite the devastat- ing American attack on the rural society, the reaction in official Wash-
216 MAKUFACTURING CONSENT
ington circles was quite different. Summarizing the impact in Washing~ ton, George Herring observes that in private,
Johnson and his advisers were shocked by the suddenness and magnitude of the offensive . . . and intelligence estimates were much more pessimistic than Westmoreland. . . . An "air of gloom" hung over White House discussions, [General Maxwell] Taylor later observed, and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen- eral [Earle] Wheeler likened the mood to that following the first Battle of Bull Run. l12
General Wheeler reported that "to a large extent the VC now control
the countryside," the situation being particularly bad in the Mekong
Delta, and the Pentagon systems-analysis group concluded that "our
control of the countryside and the defense of the urban areas is now
essentially at pre-August 1965 levels," when the U. S. war was being lost,
according to General Westmoreland. A U. S. government military-his-
torical summary of the offensive in the Mekong Delta, completed in
April 1968, concluded that "The Tet offensive in IV Corps had a devastating effect on the Revolutionary Development [pacification] I Program. " As we shall see, these internal assessments are considerably
more "pessimistic" than those of the media that are denounced for the crime of excessive pessimism by Freedom House standards.
We might incidentally note that in IV Corps (including the Mekong
Delta), there were "no regular North Vietnam units" according to 1 Defense Secretary McNamara; the Freedom House study states that , "In the southernmost Delta, it was an ARVN-Vietcong [actually, U. S. -
Vietcong] guerrilla struggle," and more generally, Hanoi "had yet to
commit sizable (multi-division) forces in sustained, concerted attacks" , anywhere in South Vietnam (I, 24). 113 These assessments are what
motivated the mass-slaughter campaign carried out in the rural areas
of the delta and elsewhere in the post-Tet accelerated pacification
campaign, discussed earlier.
Even before the Tet offensive, Defense Secretary McNamara had privately concluded that military victory was an unreasonable objective and that the course of the war should be changed. Clark Clifford, who wa'3 brought in to replace him after Tet, had long '3hared such doubts, and they were reinforced by the evidence available to him and by the conclusions of the "Wise Men" whom Johnson called in to assess the situation. 114 Dean Acheson, who headed this group of longtime hawks drawn from business and political elites, agreed with Clifford's pessi- mism and "advised Johnson to scale down ground operations, reduce
J j
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 217
the bombing, and seek every means of terminating hostilities without abandoning South Vietnam. " The "Wise Men," "after full briefings from diplomatic and military officials, confirmed Acheson's findings . . . the consensus, as summed up by one of the participants) was that 'rhere are no military concJusjons in this war--or any military end in the future,' " so that "Johnson should therefore de-escalate the con- flict. "115
Notice that at this point some rather serious problems arise concern- ing the second component of the Freedom House thesis: that the mis- deeds of the media caused the public to oppose the war, undermining government resolve and leading to U. S. failure in its (by definition, benevolent) aims. To establish the "stab-in-the-back" component of the Freedom House thesis, it is necessary to show that public opinion was swayed toward opposition to the war by media coverage, and that the media and public opinion were a significant factor in the shift of government policy. Neither claim can be sustained.
With regard to the course of public opinion, the Freedom House study decisively refutes its own thesis. It includes a chapter on public opinion polls by Burns Roper, which demonstrates, as Braestrup con- cedes, that "there is no available evidence of a direct relationship between the dominant media themes in early 1968 and changes in American mass public opinion vis-a-vis the Vietnam war itself)" but rather a continuing "slow drift toward the dove side" after an initial wave of support for the president and "frustration and anger at the foe" during the T et offensive. A closer examination of their own data under- mines the Freedom House thesis even more thoroughly. The early response to the Tet offensive, during the period when media incompe- tence and unwarranted pessimism were allegedly at their height, was "an increase in the belligerency of the American public"; "the immedi- ate reaction of the U. S. public was to favor stiffened resistance [that is, U. S. resistance to an attack by South Vietnamese in South Vietnam] and intensified U. S. effort. " The major sentiment aroused was "Bomb the hell out of them. " In later February and March) when the media, in the Freedom House version, were beginning to "whisper" the true story of American victory) "there developed a decided negative reaction to the President's handling of the war and the war itself) and a distinct opposition to more aggressive U. S. military action. " In early February
1968, when the impact of the alleged media "distortions" and "pessi- mism" reached its peak, public opinion shifted toward the "hawks. " Public opinion returned to the pre-Tet figures by late February, when the media were allegedly correcting their earlier errors. By April, after the offensive had ended and the "errors" had been overcome (albeit in
zr8 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
a "whisper"), there was a sharp shift toward the "doves. " By April- May-June, measurements had returned to pre-Tet levels. "When looked at on this broader time scale, the T et offensive appears merely to have caused a minor ripple in a steadily changing attitude toward our involvement in the war," a shift toward the position of the doves after an initial shift toward the hawks during the period of media "pessi- mism. " Tet was just "one more incident" that "reminded the public that the war was not going well-that the confident predictions out of Washington had to be taken with a grain of salt-and that helped move public opinion in the antiwar direction in which it had been moving for nearly three years. . . . "H6
Faced with this thorough refutation of one essential component of their thesis, without which the thesis loses aU significance even if the residue were tenable, the Freedom House analysts retreat to the posi- tion that although the public was unaffected by the perverse behavior of the media, there was an effect "on the nation's 'leadership segment'" (Burns)-a safer claim, since, as they concede, no data are available. The director of the Freedom House study, Leonard Sussman, con- cludes that "the Tet offensive, as portrayed in the media, appeared to have had a far greater effect on political Washington and the Adminis- tration itself than on the U. S. population's sentiment on the war" (1, xxxiv). The media failures, in short, left the public unaffected or even more supportive of the war while they misled the government-along with presidential adviser Clark Clifford, the "Wise Men" from the corporate, political, and military elites including fotmer top-level mili- tary commanders, and such media addicts as Dean Acheson, Henry Cabot Lodge, McGeorge Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Robert Murphy, etc. We are asked to believe that their decision to move toward disengage- ment in a situation that they perceived as one of stalemate was based not on military briefings, intelligence reports, and all the information available at the highest level to official Washington, but on watching the evening news with Walter Cronkite. w
In short, we can dismiss out of hand the second component of the Freedom House thesis, the component that had dramatic impact and continuing influence within the post-Vietnam "right turn" among elites and that has set the agenda for subsequent discussion about (he "advet- sarial stance" of the media and its grim consequences. We are left with the conclusion that the media were either irrelevant, or that they con- tinued to operate within the general confines of the approved ideologi- cal system, thus refuting the first ~omponent of the thesis as well. All that remains of the Freedom House story is the possibility that the media were incompetent (even malevolent). but ineffectual. Notice that
THE l"'DOCHINA WARS (I): VIET"'AM 219
the Freedom House thesis here faces the same "logical problem" noted earlier with regard to the charges concerning television: if television is as influential as claimed) then the evidence shows that through 1967 it "encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war. "
To evaluate the remaining shreds of the Freedom House thesis) let us continue with the record of the T et offensive, now asking whether the media did in fact distort it in their zealous-although utterly inef- fectual---efforts to undermine authority.
With lavish use of firepower, U. S. forces succeeded in regaining control of the towns and cities. The city of Hue, which had been conquered from its own population by GVN troops with American assistance several months earlier in a desperate U. S. effort to prevent the growth of popular movements calling for democracy and a nego- tiated political settlement,liS was 80 percent destroyed by bombing and shelling, which left 2,000 civilians buried in the "smashed ruins," ac- cording to U. S. Air Force Undersecretary Townsend Hoopes; the ma- rines listed "Communist losses" at over 5,000, while Hoopes states that a "sizable part" of the Communist force of 1)000 men who captured the city escaped) allowing a determination of who constituted the "Com- munist losses. " U. S. AID in May estimated that some 4,000 civilians were left dead in the ruins of the city, most of them victims of U. S. firepower. 119
In the Mekong Delta, "Artillery and air strikes leveled half of My Tho) a city of 80,000, and the provincial capital of Ben Tre {Kien Hoa Province, later devastated in the post-Tet terror campaign; see p. 204], with 140,000 inhabitants, was decimated with the justification, as an American colonel put it in one of the most wideJy quoted statements of the war, 'We had to destroy the town to save it. ' "120 The U. S. command conceded that "the enemy" were overwhelmingly NLF, not North Vietnamese; killed and captured outnumbered captured weap- ons by a factor of five, an indication of who "the enemy" really were. Secretary of Defense MeNamara estimated NVA forces at 50,000 to
55,000 at the end 0? 1967, mostly in northern regions, with some 10,000 troops placed in Viet Cong combat units; the total roughly matches third-country forces, mostly Korean mercenaries, mobilized by the United States as part of its invasion of South Vietnam, and barely 10 percent of the U. S. forces of over half a million men, even excluding the massive forces engaged in the attack against Viefnam and Laos from the sea and from U. S. sanctuaries from Thailand to the Philippines and Guam, employing means of destruction that dwarfed all else in Indo-
china. 121
As noted earlier, the Tet offensive not only reduced Washington to
220 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
gloomy despair and convinced U. S. elites that there was no realistic hope of a military victory in Vietnam at a cost acceptable to the United States, but also changed the character of media reporting and commen- tary, which mirrored the changes in elite opinion. On the ground, American correspondents were able to witness the war at first hand, gaining a view rather different from the sanitized and edited version presented under the control of the American military command. Media commentary at home reflected elite opinion in recognizing that the optimistic forecasts that had been relayed from Washington with little skepticism were inaccurate, and that a long and bitter war lay ahead.
But on-the-scene reporting and domestic commentary never veered from the framework of the state propaganda system. In reporting the fighting in Ben Tre and My Tho in the Delta, for example, the press observed that American infantry participated while the towns were blasted by American bombers, helicopter gunships, navy patrol boats, and artillery to root out the Viet Cong-that is, the South Vietnamese guerrillas who "were probably living with the people," according to an American officer quoted by Bernard Weinraub. Nonetheless, the news reports speak of the perceived need to "blast the city" with jets and helicopter gunships, particularly the poorer and most crowded sections, <<to save other sections of the city and the lives of thousands of peo- pIe . . . " (Lee Lescaze)-people whose lives were threatened not by the southern NLF guerrillas living among them but by the U. S. forces "defending" them from the NLF. Because of Tet, Weinraub explains, "the protection of Ben Tre waS limited," and it was necessary to bring in troops from the U. S. Ninth Infantry Division by helicopter, and to carry out "bombing raids and fire by helicopter gunships and artillery" to "protect" Ben Tre, which "has long been a stronghold of the Viet- cong" and is "sometimes considered a Vietcong rest and recreation area," while surrounding hamlets "thought to be controlled by the Vietcong have been razed by allied bombing and artillery attacks and fire from armed helicopters. " In Ben Tre itself, "the market place is rubble and near the gutted homes nearby women in shawls sit in the noon heat and mourn with loud groans," while "My Tho still smells of death," with halfthe homes destroyed-thanks to the effective "protec- tion" the population received from their American defenders. lZ2
Throughout, it is taken for granted that the forces armed, trained, and supplied by the only foreign element in the delta are "the South Vietnamese," not the South Vietnamese guerrillas living among the population in their "Vietcong strongholds," from whom the United States is "protecting" the population by ferocious bombardment of civilian areas.
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I); VIETNAM 221
Recall that we are now evaluating the remaining component of the Freedom House thesis: that the media were suppressing the American victory in their antiestablishment zeal. In fact, they were reporting the story accurately in a narrow sense, but completely within the frame- work of the government propaganda system-never questioned, in a shameful display of media servility. We may imagine what the reaction would be to a comparable performance on the part of the Nazi or Soviet press. Braestrup's final comment that "a free society deserves better"
of its media (I, 728) is aCCurate enough, although not quite in the sense intended in the Freedom House study.
As throughout the war, the standpoint of the media continued to reflect the perceptions and attitudes of the American military; for ex- ample, an American official who observed: "What the Vietcong did was occupy the hamlets we pacified just for the purpose of having the allies move in and bomb them. By their presence, the hamlets were de- stroyed. "123 The same New York Times report from Binh Dinh Prov- ince-the "showcase" province for pacification-indicates this had been going on, unreported, well before the Tet offensive: "The enemy moves in December-which several military men called a 'softening up' for the offensive-resulted in a wave of allied air strikes on villages. Hundreds of homes were destroyed. "
The U. S. military "resistance"-to borrow the Freedom House ter- minology-took the same form elsewhere. Robert Shaplen reported from the scene that in Saigon,
A dozen separate areas, comprising perhaps sixty or seventy blocks, had been totally burned out. These were almost all resi- dential areas. . . . Most of the damage was the result of rocket attacks by American armed helicopters or other planes, though some of it had been caused by artillery or ground fighting. . . . A modern ten-million-dollar textile plant, containing forty thousand spindles, was entirely destroyed by bombs because it was sus- pected of being a Vietcong hideout. 124
Le Monde correspondent Jean-Claude Pomonti observed that
in the popular suburbs, the Front [NLF] has proven that the only way to eliminate its control is through systematic destruction. To dislodge it, the air force had to level many residential areas. Flee- ing the bombardments, tens of thousands of refugees have poured into the center of the city. us
222 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Charles Mohr, whom Freedom House singles out for "perhaps the consistently best reporting from Vietnam," reported that "in towns such as Hue, Vinhlong, Bentre and Mytho appalling destruction was wrought when encircled allied forces took the decision to destroy the attacking Vietcong forces by destroying the places they had occupied. " He quotes an American official in Saigon as stating: "The Government won the recent battles, but it is important to consider how they won. At first the Vietcong had won and held everything in some towns except the American military compound and a South Vietnamese position. "126 By "the Government," he means the reader to understand the GVN, who "won" thanks to U. S. firepower and troops.
As in this example, the U. S. government claim that the Tet offensive was a military defeat for the Communists was widely reported, although the U. S. government official's perception of an initial Viet Cong victory
goes well beyond the typical media accounts in the crime of "pessi- mism. " "Journalists generally accepted the official claim that Tet was a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and NLF," Daniel Hallin concludes in his review of the press and television; for example, Walter Cronkite, who said at once over CB8---0n February 14-that "first, and simplest, the Vietcong suffered a military defeat. "127 Clear and forth- right.
These facts do not comport well with what remains of the Freedom House thesis: the charge that until late February, the media portrayed the enemy's defeat as "a defeat for the allies" in "clamourous shouts," only conceding from late February in a "whisper" that this was not quite accmate, television being the worst offender, with Walter Cron- kite the arch-criminal. 128 It was this gross incompetence or malevolence that illustrates most dramatically the "mindless readiness . . . to believe the worst of the government or of authority in general. " In the real world, the facts were quite the opposite, and the last remnants of the Freedom House thesis thus disappear, apart from the charge, to be evaluated in the appendix, that the reporting was technically in-
competent.
Some would contend that the issue of "how they won," which con-
cerned the American official cited earlier, is as important as "who won" in evaluating the significance of the Tet offensive. This idea never penetrated the minds of Braestrup or his Freedom House as- sociates, however, at the time or in their study. Consider political scientist Milton Sacks, a specialist on Vietnam and a GVN adviser, thanked for "'Providing historical perspective" for the Freedom House Study (I, xxiii). In February 1968, he wrote, with no further comment: i
THE II'DOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 223
In conventional terms, it now seems clear that the Communists have suffered a military defeat in their Tet offensive. They have expended the lives of thousands of their soldiers without securing a single province or district town of significance. 129
U. S. officials, in contrast, were impressed with the fact that the NLF and NVA occupied vast areas previously thought to be "controlled," wreaked havoc with the pacification program, and were dislodged only by a further and still more violent U. S. attack on the civil society of South Vietnam. It was feared that it might not be an easy task to convince the populace that the Communists were to blame for the slaughter and destruction by U. S. forces. The problem, as reponed from Hue by Marc Riboud of Le Monde in April, was that the popula- tion appeared to compare ARVN behavior unfavorably with that of the NVA or NLF, while the deepest bitterness and resentment was directed against the Americans, whose "blind and systematic bombardment" had turned Hue into "an assassinated city"; this reaction may have also been in part a residue of the deep bitterness and resentment left by the U. S. -backed ARVN conquest of Hue a few months earlier. I3? An IVS worker quoted in Newsweek said: "As difficult as this may be to believe, not a single Vietnamese I have met in Saigon or in the Delta blames the Viet Cong for the events of the past two weeks," and in its last issue
of the Tet period, Newsweek reported from Hue, with the same surprise at this inexplicable reaction, that
Curiously, moreover, few of [the population] point an accusing finger at the North Vietnamese. "When the NVA were here," said one student, "they were polite and well-disciplined, totally dif- ferent from the government troops, the Americans, or even the Vie. tcong. "
"The hope is that the Vietnamese people will blame the communists rarher than the Americans for whatever damage is being done," Don Webster reported from Hue on February 12 in the midst of the recon- quest of the city by the U. S. Marines. Two days earlier, John Lengel of AP wrote rhat
It is still impossible to gauge the breadth of the damage. . . . But few seasoned observers see the devastation of Hue backfiring on the communists. They see as the greatest hope a massive and instant program of restoration underlined by a careful psychologi- cal warfare program pinning the blame on the communists. I31
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Braestrup places the word "devastation" in italics as an illustration of the unfairness and anti-American bias of the media; comment seems superfluous.
While the U. S. media rarely strayed from the framework of the state propaganda system, others were unconstrained by these limits: for ex- ample, the Le Monde correspondents cited; or British photo-journalist Philip Jones Griffiths, who concluded from his observations on the scene that the thousands of civilian victims of the reconquest of Hue "were killed by the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen," and then designated "as the victims of a Communist massa- cre. "132
T o comprehend fully the nature of the Freedom House charges, we may imagine how the inquiry urged by John Roche might proceed. Who else is implicated in the terrible misdeeds that Freedom House per- ceives? General Westmoreland and the U. S. command in Saigon must surely be placed on the docket because of their estimates of early VC successes (see appendix 3 for further examples), along with William Bundy, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, given his extreme pessimism. He thought that the Tet offensive was "shattering to the South, especially in the area of pacification," concluding for a time that "the South Vietnamese were through," "they've had it"- where "South Vietnamese" excludes the South Vietnamese defending their country from a U. S. invasion, as usuaL These conclusions, which do conform to the Freedom House parody of the media, were based not on the press but on "reports from people in the field out in Vietnam,"
so presumably they too are implicated (I, 625)- Similarly, Lyndon John- son was guilty, since he seemed "to some degree 'psychologically de- feated' by the threat to Khe Sanh and the onslaught on the cities of Vietnam," so Braestrup concludes (I, 626, 630). The same is true of Johnson's civilian advisers, given the "air of gloom" among them and the "Battle of Bull Run" mood, and the author of the official U. S. government military-historical summary, cited earlier; and Dean Ache- son and other "Wise Men" who urged a shift of course because of the same "undue pessimism" for which the media are condemned by Free- dom House. Also Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who reported that the offensive had "disrupted the pacification effort for the time being," and the pacification adviser who reported that in his "showcase" area, "pacification does not exist" (II, 184-86).
Further candidates for investigation appear in the Pentagon Papers- for example, General Wheeler, who summarized the situation in the following terms to the president on February 27, just as Walter Cron- kite was speculating about "stalemate," arousing Freedom House ire:
tHE INDOCHINA WAilS (I): VIEtNAM 225
The enemy is operating with relative freedom in the countryside, probably recruiting heavily and no doubt infiltrating NVA units and personnel. His recovery is likely to be rapid; his supplies are adequate; and he is trying to maintain the momentum of his winter-spring offensive. . . . ARVN is now in a defensive posture around towns and cities and there is concern about how well they will bear up under sustained pressure. The initial attack nearly succeeded in a dozen places, and defeat in these places was only averted by the timely reaction of US forces. In shott, it was a very near thing. There is no doubt that the RD Program [pacification] has suffered a severe set back. . . . To a large extent the VC now control the countryside. . . . MACV estimates that US forces will be required in a number of places to assist and encourage the Vietnamese Army to leave the cities and towns and reenter the country. This is especially true in the Delta.
The media reports that Braestrup derides were rarely as "pessimistic" as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose summary of the situation led the president to order "the initiation of a complete and searching reassessment of the entire U. S. strategy and commitment in South Vietnam," the Pentagon Papers analyst reports. 03
The CIA must also be investigated for contributing to the decline of "free institutions" by its pessimism. A CIA paper of March I, presuma- bly uninfluenced by Walter Cronkite, expressed grave doubts about the GVN and ARVN and predicted that they might cease "effective func- tioning in parts of the country," so that "virtually the entire burden of the war would fall on US forces. " Like Cronkite a few days earlier, they expected "no better than a standoff" in the coming ten months. Penta- gon systems analysis concluded that the offensive "appears to have killed the [pacification} program once and for all," drawing the conclu- sion that Braestrup falsely attributes to the media (see appendix 3), and estimated that "our control of the countryside and the defense of the urban areas is now ar pre-August 1965 levels. " Ir was because of rhis serious situation-not perceived American successes, as Braestrup inti- mates-thar they recommended what was later to be called "Vietnami-
zation/'
The civilian analysrs in the Pentagon must be charged not only with
undue pessimism, but also wirh some of the other crimes of the press. For example, they referred to the famous statement that we are de- stroying Sourh Vietnam in order to save it; citation of this statement is the target of much Braestrup scorn. We must also include Colonel Herbert Schandler, on whom Braestrup relies for his account of the
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Wheeler-Westmoreland request for additional troops. He was, Braest- rup says, the anonymous author of the Pentagon Papers section on this material, and here he described as "a startlingly accurate account" a New York Times article by Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith which, Braestrup claims, was a major example of "distorted and incomplete" reporting (1, 581, 613). The authors of the "Epilogue" to the Pentagon Papers must also be included in the indictment, given their pessimistic post-Tet assessment of "the price for military victory" and the "illu- sory" nature of claimed progress_
The category of people who were not threatening "free institutions" by the standards of Freedom House is small indeed, a fact that some may find suggestive.
It is significant that the major criticism of the media in the Freedom House study is that they were too "pessimistic. " Strikingly absent is the obvious standard of comparison: the internal reports from the field and analysis by intelligence and official Washington-which were, if any- thing, even more pessimistic. The logic of the Freedom House brief against the media is highly revealing. In their view. the media in a free society must not only accept without question the principles ofthe state doctrinal system, as the media did throughout {a fact that Freedom House never addresses, and apparently cannot perceive), but must do so with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism that exceeds that of U. S. intelligence, the military command. Johnson's "Wise Men," and other leading figures in the military, political, and corporate world who draw their information from a full range of government sources. It is an interesting conception of a "free society. "
We might ask how the Freedom House conception of a free press in a free society would be applied by Soviet commissars, let us say, to the case of the mass circulation weekly Ogonyo~ which published a series of long articles that presented a "bleak picture" of the war in Afghanis- tan, depicting it "in stark terms," speaking of "poor morale and deser- tion" among Afghan units and "tough fighting between elite Soviet troops and Afghan guerrillas," and implying that "large areas of Afg- hanistan are under guerrilla control. " The articles also give "a broad hint that drug use is common among Russian troops in Afghanistan," and they include extracts from a helicopter pilot's journal describing "the sight and smell of colleagues' chan-ed bodies" and implying that "helicopter losses are high" after the receipt of sophisticated Western weaponry by the guerrillas, terrorists who finance themselves by pro- ducing drugs for the international market (charges verified by Western observers, incidentally). But it would be inhumane for the USSR simply to withdraw without guarantees for the population, because "a Soviet
THE INDOCHI~A W ARS (I): VIETNAM 227
withdrawal would lead to nationwide internecine warfare," as Afghans who are quoted anticipate. The article does not simply mimic standard U. S. media fare, as these excerpts indicate. Thus it describes an attack on Soviet villages by Afghan guerrillas; one can imagine the U. S. reac- tion had there been a Viet Cong attack on villages in Texas. But by Freedom House standards, it is plain that the editors merit severe censure for their "adversarial stance," "pessimism," and "volatile styles," "always with the dark possibility that, if the managers do not themselves take action, then outsiders [in the government] will seek to apply remedies of their own. "U4 And, in fact, in]anuary 1988, General Dimitri T. Yakov, the Soviet defense minister, applied Freedom House and Braestrup principles to the "adversarial" Soviet press, sharply criticizing articles in Ogonyok and Literaturnaya Gazeta for reporting on the Afghan war in ways that undermined public confidence in the Soviet army and played into the hands of the West. 135
In the light of the evidence presented in the Freedom House study, and ofmuch that is ignored, the following conclusions seem reasonable. During the Tet offensive and its aftermath, media performance was creditable, sometimes very highly so, in a narrow sense. More broadly, this reporting was highly deceptive in that it was framed within the unchallenged and unrecognized doctrines of the state propaganda sys- tem, which impose a severe distortion. Media reports compare favora- bly in accuracy with those available to official Washington at the highest level from internal sources, although they were regularly less alarmist, perhaps because the media tended to give credence to official state- ments and were unaware of the internal assessments. The reports from the scene led media commentators to draw approximately the same conclusions as Johnson's high-level advisers. The manner in which the media covered the events had little effect on public opinion, except perhaps to enhance its aggressiveness and, of course, to instill ever more deeply the basic and unexamined tenets of the propaganda system.
As we shall see in appendix 3, a closer examination establishes these conclusions still more firmly, while demonstrating further the utter incompetence-to use the kindest term-of the Freedom House study that has been so influential in the subsequent period.
We have now addressed the argument presented by critics of the media for its alleged "adversarial stance" on their own chosen grounds, the grounds that they select as the strongest for their case. The propa-
ganda model is once again confirmed, thus meeting the most severe test that can be posed. The model is also vindicated by the manner in which Freedom House fulfills its function as a flak machine, attempting to bully the media into a still more thoroughgoing conformity with the
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propaganda requirements of state policy by methods that are a travesty of honest journalism (let alone scholarship}-all, of course, in the interest of "freedom. "
5. 5. 3. The Paris Peace Agreements
The Tet offensive convinced large sectors ofelite opinion that the costs of the U. S. effort were too high. Lyndon Johnson stepped down. In what was termed by the government a "bombing halt," and reported as such, the bombers were shifted from North Vietnamese targets to Laos, where the defenseless rural society of scattered villages in the North was demolished, and later Cambodia, where the same was true on an even more horrendous scale. U. S. forces undertook the violent and destructive post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign in the South, and bombing was intensified to "step up refugee programs deliber- ately aimed at depriving the VC ofa recruiting base," in accordance with the advice ofpacifkation director Robert Komer in April 1967. u6 The Phoenix program was established to destroy the "infrastructure" of the NLF by terror. The burden of ground fighting was shifted to Viet- namese forces supplied and directed by the United States, and U. S. conscripts were withdrawn, a more typical pattern for colonial wars that essentially duplicated the earlier French effort to reconquer Indochina. And the United States finally agreed to pursue the path of a negotiated settlement, although still not relinquishing the aim of preventing the unification o[Vietnam and retaining Indochina, apart from North Viet- nam, within the U. S. global system.
This was not the maximal goal the United States had pursued; thus in the late 1950S the U. S. government still hoped for unification of Vietnam under anti-Communist leadership, and the U. S. client regime always regarded itself as the government of all of Vietnam (GVN = Government of Vietnam), and so declared in the first and unamendable article of its constitution. But by the late 1960s, if not before, control over all Indochina apart from North Vietnam was re- garded as the maximum goal attainable. As we have seen, opportunities for a peaceful diplomatic settlement had long existed, but they had never been pursued because they were regarded as inconsistent with the essential goal: preservation of an "independent" South Vietnam that would be a U. S. client state.
By October 1972, the negotiators in Paris had reached the essential tenns of an agreement: the 9-Point Plan. President Nixon, however, objected to the terms of the agreement, and the Thieu government in
j
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Saigon was completely opposed to them. Nixon's hope was to delay further negotiations until after the November presidential elections, when he would have more leverage. 137 The delay would also permit a vast shipment of arms to the GVN) something that would surely be prohibited by the agreements.
In an effort to pressure Nixon to sign the agreements. the DRV made the terms public on October 26 in a radio broadcast. In a Washington press conference, Kissinger stated that the Radio Hanoi broadcast gave "on the whole a very fair account," then offering the following para- phrase: "As was pointed out by Radio Hanoi, the existing authorities with respect to both internal and external politics would remain in office" in the South. Thus Kissinger sought to insinuate that according to the accurate account on Radio Hanoi, the GVN ("the existing au- thorities") would remain "in office" as the government of the South, and would somehow deal with the other "party," whose status remained mysterious. But "what was pointed out by Radio Hanoi"--correctly, as Kissinger conceded-was something quite different, namely, that "the two present administrations in South Vietnam will remain in existence with their respective domestic and external functions," these being the
GVN and the PRG (based upon the NLF). Having reached agreement, these two parties were then to move toward reunification, to be "carried out step by step through peaceful means," with no external-meaning U. S. -interference.
The differences are crucial. From its earliest days, the war was fought over the question of whether "the South Vietnamese people shall decide themselves the political future of South Vietnam," as the October 9-Point Plan explicitly stipulated must be the case, or whether the United States would enforce the rule of its client regime, the GVN, as the sole legitimate government in the South, in accordance with Kissinger's version of the terms to which he had theoretically agreed, a version that plainly departed radically from the text. us
Kissinger's announcement that "peace is at hand. " designed with the upcoming U. S. presidential elections in mind, was also blatant decep- tion. As his distortion of the essential terms of the agreement clearly revealed, the United States was backing away from the settlement and refusing to implement it. Nixon later explained that "We had to use [Kissinger's press conference} to undercut the North Vietnamese prop- aganda maneuver [namely, making public the terms of the agreement] and to make sure that our version of the agreement was the one that had great public impact. "139 This result was substantially achieved; the media characteristically accepted Kissinger's version with no recogni- tion that it was diametrically opposed to the terms of the 9-Point Plan,
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though the facts were plain to anyone who troubled to look at the readily available public record.
The United States then proceeded with a vast shipment of arms to 1 the GVN while demanding substantial changes in the October agree-
ments. Hanoi, in contrast, pUblicly insisted that the October agreements
be signed. The media adopted the version of events relayed regularly
by Kissinger, depicting him as caught between two irrational adversar- ies, Hanoi and Saigon. The Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Hai- phong followed, causing great damage and also the loss ofseveral dozen B-52S (the exact numbers are contested, but the losses clearly shocked the Pentagon), as well as a highly adverse world reaction, although the media continued to relay the Washington interpretation of what had happened.