Kolko goes on to describe how these assessments
underestimated
the success of U.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
New York Times, September 15, 1969.
60. Kahin, Intervention, p. 208; chapters 8, 9.
61. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 183f. William Bundy, January 21, 1970, cited by Kahin, p. 183.
62. Lyndon Johnson, March 20, 1964; Maxwell Taylor, November 27, 1964. See FRS, pp. 127f. , for documentation and more extensive discussion based on the Pentagon Papers record.
63? Kahin, Intervention, pp. 238, 241, 245.
64? For references and further discussion, see FRS, pp. 11of. See also Wallace
J. Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964-68 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
65? E. W. Kenworthy, New York Times, November 17, 1961, reporting President Kennedy's decisions; Kenworthy, New York Times, May 10, 1961, reporting Lyndon Johnson's mission to Asia; Hallin, "Uncensored War'~ pp. 31, 53. 66. Robert Trumbull, February 18, 1962; Hanson Baldwin, September 16, 1962, May 13, 1961; Tom Wicker, February II, 1965; David Halberstam, January 20,
1963, March II, 1963; Homer Bigart, April I, 15, 1962. Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 51-56, 84.
67. Kahin, Intervention, p. 142.
68. James Reston, New York Times, April 25, 1965; Peter Jennings, ABC-TV, March 8, 1966; Jack Perkins, NBC-TV, January II, 1966; Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 89, 91, 229, 137, 140, 141.
69. Kahin, Intervention, p. 287.
70. For an extensive collection of press reports, see Seymour Melman, ed. , In the Name ofAmerica (Annandale, Va. : Turnpike Press, 1968). For analysis of the material available at the time, see Edward S. Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1970).
71. New York Times, May 6, 1972.
72. Takashi Oka, Christian Science Monitor, December 4,1965; Bernard Fall, "Vietnam Blitz," New Republic, October 9, 1965.
73. Sidney Hook, "Lord Russell and the War Crimes 'Trial,' " New Leader, October 24, 1966.
74. See AWWA, PP. 98f.
75? "Truck versus Dam," Christian Science Monitor, September 5, 1967.
76. Henry Kamm, New York Times, November 15, 1969; New York Times, April 6, 1971. See FRS, pp. 225f. , for more details.
77. E. g. , Amando Doronila, "Hanoi Food Output Held Target of U. S. Bomb- ers," AP, Christian Science Monitor, September 8, 1967, three days after Joseph Harsch's philosophical reflections just cited.
374 NOTES TO PAGES 196-209
NOTES TO PAGES 209-218 375
78. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 338f. , 384, 400, on these perceived risks. 79. See FRS, pp. 4f. , 70ff. , for documentation from the official record.
80. Seymour Hersh, My Lai Four (New York: Random House, 1970); Hersh, Cover-up (New York: Random House, 1972); and Hersh, New York Times, June 5, 1972, on My Khe. FRS, pp. 251, xx.
81. Henry Kamm, "New Drive Begins in Area of Mylai," New York Times, April I, 1971; Martin Teitel, "Again, the Suffering of Mylai," New York Times, June 7, 1972; see above, p. 196.
82. FRS, p. 222.
83. Cited in PEHR I, 316f. , from Buckley's unpublished notes provided to the authors. See pp. 313f. on Operation Speedy Express; and our review of Guenter Lewy, note 33, on his falsification and apologetics for this and other atrocities. 84. "Five years later, My Lai is a no man's town, silent and unsafe," AP, New
York Times, March 16, 1973; our emphasis.
85. Edward Jay Epstein, "The War in Vietnam: What Happened v~. Wh~tW,e Saw," TV Guide, September 29, October 6, October 13, 1973; repnnted In his Between Fact and Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1975)?
86. The character of the bombing of North Vietnam is denied by apologists- notoriously, the respected "scholar" Guenter Lewy, who proves that it was directed solely at military targets on the grounds that the U. S. government says so, discounting eyewitness reports from a wide range of sources; see our review, cited in note 33, for a few examples.
87. Hallin, "Uncensored War, " pp. IIO, 161-62; Johnson cited in Herring, A mer-
ica's Longest War, p. 204, from Roger Morris, An Uncertain Greatness.
88. Ibid. , pp. 201-3. On the elections, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U. S. -Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and EI Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), and chapter 3, above.
89. CBS-TV August 23, 1965; our emphasis. Hallin, pp. II8, 130-41.
90. Kevin Buckley; see PEHR, I, 313f. , for more details on this major war crime. Hallin points out that the delta looked like a wilderness because "it was
devastated by B-52 strikes in the late 1960s. " 91. Hallin, pp. 172, 143?
92. Ibid. , pp. 148-58.
93. Ibid. , pp. 209-10?
94. PP, II, 668-69, 653. See Pike, Viet Cong; PP, II, III; and for detailed discussion, Kahin, Intervention.
95. PP, III, 150; Kahin, Intervention, p. 205.
96. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f. ; Smith, International History, II, 280.
97. Smith, International History, II, 277, 280; Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f. 98. Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 19, 16, 20, 7of.
99. See Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 274ff. , and Circle of Deception, chapter 6, for detailed documentation and analysis.
100. Time, cover story, August 14; Newsweek, August 17, 24; U. S. News &
World Report, August 17; cited with discussion by Elterman.
101. Hallin, "Uncensored War," p. 21.
102. New Statesman, August 7, 14; National Guardian, August 8, 15 (three articles), 22; I. F. Stone's Week{y, August 10, 24, September 7; cited with discus- sion by Elterman, who notes also that the New Republic accepted the U. S.
government version with no question, although with some pessimism about the prospects, echoed in The Nation.
103. Pp, III, 107.
104. PP, 111,531, 207.
105. James Reston, New York Times, February 26, 1965.
106. Braestrup, Big Story,- see section I, note I; hereafter cited with volume and page number only. Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post Magazine, January 29, 1978; Oberdorfer is the author of Tet! (New York: Doubleday, 1971), praised as a "fine" study (I, xiii). Diamond, New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1977; a journalist, he headed the News Study Group in the MIT Political Science department. Roche, see note 5. Mohr, "Hawks and Doves Refight Tet Offensive at Symposium," New York Times, February 27, 1978; Smith, "Read- ing History: The Vietnam War," History Today (October 1984).
107. Hening, America's Longest War, pp. 200-201.
108. On the record of Freedom House in service to the state and in opposition to democracy, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appendix I, a small fragment of a record that merits more detailed exposure.
109. For additional evidence and discussion, see the review in Race & Class and More, from which we will draw extensively, particularly in appendix 3, and Porter's review, both cited in note I, above.
IIO. Thies, When Governments Collide, p. 201. This analysis, familiar in the scholarly literature, is quite different from Braestrup's conclusions, which, as Porter comments, he attributes to a consensus of historians without a single reference. Porter adds that "few independent historians" would endorse Braestrup's conclusions or his analysis of Communist objectives, quoting CIA analyst Patrick McGarvey and others. See his A Peace Denied, pp. 67f. , for further discussion of these issues.
III. New York Times, February 20, April 4, 1968. On internal U. S. government assessments, see below, and Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, p. 329.
Kolko goes on to describe how these assessments underestimated the success of U. S. terror in decimating the NLF infrastructure in rural areas, and were thus overly "pessimistic. " Note that oy virtue of these conclusions, Kolko counts as "opti- mistic" by Freedom House logic, that is, supportive of U. S. goals. In fact, quite the opposite is true, still another illustration of the absurdity of the Freedom House assumptions-or, more accurately, of their blind adherence to the doctrines of state propaganda, reaching to the way in which the issues are
initially framed.
II2. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 189. Hoopes quoted from his Limits of Intervention (New York: McKay, 1969), p. 145, by Herring and Thies.
II3. PP, IV, 548, 558. April USG study cited by Porter, review of Big Story. McNamara, Statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jan. 22, 1968 (II, 20).
II4. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 386f.
lI5. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 204.
II6. Braestrup, Big Story, I, 671fI. ; Burns W. Roper in Big Story, I, chapter 14. II7. For serious interpretations of the basis for the shift of government policy, putting Freedom House fantasies aside, see Herbert Schandler, The Unmaking of a President (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Thies, When Governments Col/ide,' Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, noting particularly the crucial
376 NOTES TO PAGES 218-224
NOTES TO PAGES 225-237 377
issue of the perceived economic crisis resulting from the costs of the war. 1I8. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 421ff. , for discussion of these important events.
1I9. Oberdorfer, Tet! ,' Porter, A Peace Denied, p. 66. On this forgotten massa- cre, and the various attempts to shift attention to the massacre carried out by the retreating NLF forces, see our PEHR, I, 345ff. , and sources cited, particu- larly Gareth Porter, "The 1968 'Hue Massacre,' "Congressional Record, Febru- ary 19, 1975, pp. S2189-94," and Porter's review of Big Story. Porter notes that Braestrup's estimate of destruction in Hue is far below that of US AID, which estimated in April that 77 percent of Hue's buildings wt:re "seriously dam- aged" or totally destroyed.
120. Kolko, Anatomy of a War, p. 309.
121. PP, IV, 539. On third-country forces, introduced well before the first sighting of a battalion of North Vietnamese regulars in the South, see Kahin, Intervention, pp. 333f. Korean mercenaries began to arrive in January 1965, while Taiwanese soldiers had reached "several hundred" by mid-1964, in addition to "a considerable number of soldiers seconded from Chiang Kai- shek's army on Taiwan," possibly as early as 1959 but certainly under the Kennedy administration, often disguised as members of the Nung Chinese ethnic minority in Vietnam and employed for sabotage missions in the North as well as fighting in the South. For MeNamara's estimate, see his statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, January 22, 1968; excerpts in Big Story, II, 14ff.
122. Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, February 8, 1968; Lee Lescaze, Washington Post, February 6, 1968; in Big Story, II, 1I6ff.
123. New York Times, April 4, 1968. See appendix 3 for similar comments from news reporting.
124. Robert Shaplen, "Letter from Saigon," The New Yorker, March 2, 1968. He estimates the NV A component of the forces engaged at 10 percent of some 50,000 to 60,000. .
125. Jean-Claude Pomonti, Le Monde hebdomadaire, February 4-8, 1968. Pomonti was expelled from the country soon after. The head of the Newsweek Saigon bureau had already been expelled.
126. Charles Mohr, New York Times, February 14, 1968. On Mohr, see Big Story, I, 718.
127. CBS-TV, February 14, 1968, Hallin, "Uncensored War," 171; Big Story, I, 158.
128. We return in appendix 3 to the evidence that Braestrup presents, compar- ing the facts with his rendition of them, including Cronkite's reports.
129. Boston Globe, February 24, 1968.
130. See note 1I8, above.
131. Marc Riboud, Le Monde, April 13, 1968; Newsweek, February 19 (banned from Saigon), March 30; "CBS-TV Morning News," February 12, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 274; John Lengel, AP, February 10, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 269. Such a psychological warfare program was indeed conducted, although not recognized as such by the media; see note 1I9 above and Appendix 3.
132. Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam Inc. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), with pictures of the ongoing fighting. We return to coverage of Hue in appendix 3. See also note 1I9 above, and sources cited.
133? PP, IV, 546f.
134? Paul Quinn-Judge, "Soviet Publication Paints Bleak Picture of War in
Afghanistan," Christian Science Monitor, Moscow, July 21, 1987. Quotes are Quinn-Judge's paraphrases.
135? Bill Keller, "Soviet Official Says Press Harms Army," New York Times, January 21, 1988.
136. PP, IV, 441; his emphasis. On Komer's role, as he sees it and as the record shows it, see FRS, pp. 84f.
137? See Seymour Hersh, The Pn'ce of Power (New York: Summit, 1983), pp. . 582,597, citing presidential aide Charles Colson and General Westmoreland. 138. For explicit references on these matters, here and below, see Noam Chomsky, "Indochina and the Fourth Estate," Social Policy (September- October 1973), reprinted in Towards a New Cold War, expanding an earlier article in Ramparts (April 1973). See also Porter, A Peace Denied,' Kolko, Anatomy of a Warj and Hersh, Price of Power. On the media during the
October-January period, see also Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, p. 347f. , documenting overwhelming media conformity to the U. S. government version o f the evolving events.
139? Cited by Hersh, Price of Power, p. 604.
140. New Republic, January 27, 1973. He notes that the Paris Agreements were "nearly the same" as the October agreements that "broke apart two months later," for reasons unexamined.
141. James N. Wallace, U. S. News & World Report, February 26,1973. 142. Boston Globe, January 25, 1973, cited by Porter, A Peace Denied, 181.
143? January 25, 1973; see State Department Bulletin, February 12, 1973, with slight modifications.
144? For a detailed examination, see Chomsky "Indochina and the Fourth Estate. "
145? Boston Globe, April 2, 1973.
146. New York Times, March I, 1973.
147? New Republic, February 17, 1973.
148. Newsweek, February 5, 1973.
149? Chn'stian Science Monitor, March 30, 1973.
150. For documentation, see our article in Ramparts (December 1974); May- nard Parker, Foreign Affairs (January 1975); Porter, A Peace Denied. See Porter on Pentagon assessments of North Vietnamese military activities and opera- tions, very limited in comparison to the U. S. -GVN offensive in violation of the
cease-fire and the agreements generally.
151. Robert Greenberger, Wall StreetJourna~ August 17; Neil Lewis, New York Times, August 18, 1987. For further details and the general background, see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), part 2, chapter 7.
152. "Proper Uses of Power," New York Times, October 3? ,1983. On the ways the task was addressed in the early postwar years, see our PEHR, vol. 2, largely devoted to the media and Indochina during the 1975-78 period.
153? See the Trilateral Commission study cited in note 3. 154? PP, IV, 420; Journal of International Affairs 25. 1 (1971).
155? Mark ~cCain,Boston Globe, December 9, 1984; memo of May 19, 1967, released dUring the Westmoreland-CBS libel trial.
378 NOTES TO P AGES 238-243
? ? . . -"TJ -"T-
156. Memorandum for the secretary of defense by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, February 12, 1968, in Gareth Porter, ed. , Vietnam: A History in Documents (New York: Meridian, 1981), pp. 354f. ; Pp, IV, 541, 564, 482, 478, 217, 197? 157. John E. Rielly, Foreign Policy (Spring 1983, Spring 1987). Rielly, ed. , American Public Opinion and U. S. Foreign Policy 1987> Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, p. 33. In the 1986 poll, the percentage of the public that regarded the Vietnam War as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" was 66 percent, as compared with 72 percent in 1978 and 198~. ~mong "leader~" (including representatives of churches, voluntary orgamzatlo~s, and ethnIc organizations), the percentage was 44 percent, as compared wIth 45 percent in 1982 and 50 percent in 1978. The editor takes this to indicate "some waning of the impact of the Vietnam experience with the passage of time"; and,
perhaps, some impact of the propaganda system, as memories fade and people are polled who lack direct experience.
158? New Republic, January 22, 1977; see Marilyn Young, "Critical Amnesia," The Nation, April 2, 1977, on this and similar reviews of Emerson's Winners
and Losers.
159. John Midgley, New York Times Book Review, June 30, 1985; Drew Middle-
ton, New York Times, July 6, 1985.
160. Review of Paul Johnson, Modern Times, in New York Times Book Review,
June 26, 1983, p. 15?
161. New York Times, May 28, 1984. A CIA analysis of April 1968 estimated that
"80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during
the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.
162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March II, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U. S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see
SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976). . '
163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); ChItra Subramaruam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.
164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977? 165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.
166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28,
1988; AP, April 7, 1988.
167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985.
168. Time, April 15, 1985.
60. Kahin, Intervention, p. 208; chapters 8, 9.
61. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 183f. William Bundy, January 21, 1970, cited by Kahin, p. 183.
62. Lyndon Johnson, March 20, 1964; Maxwell Taylor, November 27, 1964. See FRS, pp. 127f. , for documentation and more extensive discussion based on the Pentagon Papers record.
63? Kahin, Intervention, pp. 238, 241, 245.
64? For references and further discussion, see FRS, pp. 11of. See also Wallace
J. Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964-68 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
65? E. W. Kenworthy, New York Times, November 17, 1961, reporting President Kennedy's decisions; Kenworthy, New York Times, May 10, 1961, reporting Lyndon Johnson's mission to Asia; Hallin, "Uncensored War'~ pp. 31, 53. 66. Robert Trumbull, February 18, 1962; Hanson Baldwin, September 16, 1962, May 13, 1961; Tom Wicker, February II, 1965; David Halberstam, January 20,
1963, March II, 1963; Homer Bigart, April I, 15, 1962. Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 51-56, 84.
67. Kahin, Intervention, p. 142.
68. James Reston, New York Times, April 25, 1965; Peter Jennings, ABC-TV, March 8, 1966; Jack Perkins, NBC-TV, January II, 1966; Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 89, 91, 229, 137, 140, 141.
69. Kahin, Intervention, p. 287.
70. For an extensive collection of press reports, see Seymour Melman, ed. , In the Name ofAmerica (Annandale, Va. : Turnpike Press, 1968). For analysis of the material available at the time, see Edward S. Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1970).
71. New York Times, May 6, 1972.
72. Takashi Oka, Christian Science Monitor, December 4,1965; Bernard Fall, "Vietnam Blitz," New Republic, October 9, 1965.
73. Sidney Hook, "Lord Russell and the War Crimes 'Trial,' " New Leader, October 24, 1966.
74. See AWWA, PP. 98f.
75? "Truck versus Dam," Christian Science Monitor, September 5, 1967.
76. Henry Kamm, New York Times, November 15, 1969; New York Times, April 6, 1971. See FRS, pp. 225f. , for more details.
77. E. g. , Amando Doronila, "Hanoi Food Output Held Target of U. S. Bomb- ers," AP, Christian Science Monitor, September 8, 1967, three days after Joseph Harsch's philosophical reflections just cited.
374 NOTES TO PAGES 196-209
NOTES TO PAGES 209-218 375
78. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 338f. , 384, 400, on these perceived risks. 79. See FRS, pp. 4f. , 70ff. , for documentation from the official record.
80. Seymour Hersh, My Lai Four (New York: Random House, 1970); Hersh, Cover-up (New York: Random House, 1972); and Hersh, New York Times, June 5, 1972, on My Khe. FRS, pp. 251, xx.
81. Henry Kamm, "New Drive Begins in Area of Mylai," New York Times, April I, 1971; Martin Teitel, "Again, the Suffering of Mylai," New York Times, June 7, 1972; see above, p. 196.
82. FRS, p. 222.
83. Cited in PEHR I, 316f. , from Buckley's unpublished notes provided to the authors. See pp. 313f. on Operation Speedy Express; and our review of Guenter Lewy, note 33, on his falsification and apologetics for this and other atrocities. 84. "Five years later, My Lai is a no man's town, silent and unsafe," AP, New
York Times, March 16, 1973; our emphasis.
85. Edward Jay Epstein, "The War in Vietnam: What Happened v~. Wh~tW,e Saw," TV Guide, September 29, October 6, October 13, 1973; repnnted In his Between Fact and Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1975)?
86. The character of the bombing of North Vietnam is denied by apologists- notoriously, the respected "scholar" Guenter Lewy, who proves that it was directed solely at military targets on the grounds that the U. S. government says so, discounting eyewitness reports from a wide range of sources; see our review, cited in note 33, for a few examples.
87. Hallin, "Uncensored War, " pp. IIO, 161-62; Johnson cited in Herring, A mer-
ica's Longest War, p. 204, from Roger Morris, An Uncertain Greatness.
88. Ibid. , pp. 201-3. On the elections, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U. S. -Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and EI Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), and chapter 3, above.
89. CBS-TV August 23, 1965; our emphasis. Hallin, pp. II8, 130-41.
90. Kevin Buckley; see PEHR, I, 313f. , for more details on this major war crime. Hallin points out that the delta looked like a wilderness because "it was
devastated by B-52 strikes in the late 1960s. " 91. Hallin, pp. 172, 143?
92. Ibid. , pp. 148-58.
93. Ibid. , pp. 209-10?
94. PP, II, 668-69, 653. See Pike, Viet Cong; PP, II, III; and for detailed discussion, Kahin, Intervention.
95. PP, III, 150; Kahin, Intervention, p. 205.
96. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f. ; Smith, International History, II, 280.
97. Smith, International History, II, 277, 280; Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f. 98. Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 19, 16, 20, 7of.
99. See Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 274ff. , and Circle of Deception, chapter 6, for detailed documentation and analysis.
100. Time, cover story, August 14; Newsweek, August 17, 24; U. S. News &
World Report, August 17; cited with discussion by Elterman.
101. Hallin, "Uncensored War," p. 21.
102. New Statesman, August 7, 14; National Guardian, August 8, 15 (three articles), 22; I. F. Stone's Week{y, August 10, 24, September 7; cited with discus- sion by Elterman, who notes also that the New Republic accepted the U. S.
government version with no question, although with some pessimism about the prospects, echoed in The Nation.
103. Pp, III, 107.
104. PP, 111,531, 207.
105. James Reston, New York Times, February 26, 1965.
106. Braestrup, Big Story,- see section I, note I; hereafter cited with volume and page number only. Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post Magazine, January 29, 1978; Oberdorfer is the author of Tet! (New York: Doubleday, 1971), praised as a "fine" study (I, xiii). Diamond, New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1977; a journalist, he headed the News Study Group in the MIT Political Science department. Roche, see note 5. Mohr, "Hawks and Doves Refight Tet Offensive at Symposium," New York Times, February 27, 1978; Smith, "Read- ing History: The Vietnam War," History Today (October 1984).
107. Hening, America's Longest War, pp. 200-201.
108. On the record of Freedom House in service to the state and in opposition to democracy, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appendix I, a small fragment of a record that merits more detailed exposure.
109. For additional evidence and discussion, see the review in Race & Class and More, from which we will draw extensively, particularly in appendix 3, and Porter's review, both cited in note I, above.
IIO. Thies, When Governments Collide, p. 201. This analysis, familiar in the scholarly literature, is quite different from Braestrup's conclusions, which, as Porter comments, he attributes to a consensus of historians without a single reference. Porter adds that "few independent historians" would endorse Braestrup's conclusions or his analysis of Communist objectives, quoting CIA analyst Patrick McGarvey and others. See his A Peace Denied, pp. 67f. , for further discussion of these issues.
III. New York Times, February 20, April 4, 1968. On internal U. S. government assessments, see below, and Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, p. 329.
Kolko goes on to describe how these assessments underestimated the success of U. S. terror in decimating the NLF infrastructure in rural areas, and were thus overly "pessimistic. " Note that oy virtue of these conclusions, Kolko counts as "opti- mistic" by Freedom House logic, that is, supportive of U. S. goals. In fact, quite the opposite is true, still another illustration of the absurdity of the Freedom House assumptions-or, more accurately, of their blind adherence to the doctrines of state propaganda, reaching to the way in which the issues are
initially framed.
II2. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 189. Hoopes quoted from his Limits of Intervention (New York: McKay, 1969), p. 145, by Herring and Thies.
II3. PP, IV, 548, 558. April USG study cited by Porter, review of Big Story. McNamara, Statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jan. 22, 1968 (II, 20).
II4. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 386f.
lI5. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 204.
II6. Braestrup, Big Story, I, 671fI. ; Burns W. Roper in Big Story, I, chapter 14. II7. For serious interpretations of the basis for the shift of government policy, putting Freedom House fantasies aside, see Herbert Schandler, The Unmaking of a President (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Thies, When Governments Col/ide,' Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, noting particularly the crucial
376 NOTES TO PAGES 218-224
NOTES TO PAGES 225-237 377
issue of the perceived economic crisis resulting from the costs of the war. 1I8. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 421ff. , for discussion of these important events.
1I9. Oberdorfer, Tet! ,' Porter, A Peace Denied, p. 66. On this forgotten massa- cre, and the various attempts to shift attention to the massacre carried out by the retreating NLF forces, see our PEHR, I, 345ff. , and sources cited, particu- larly Gareth Porter, "The 1968 'Hue Massacre,' "Congressional Record, Febru- ary 19, 1975, pp. S2189-94," and Porter's review of Big Story. Porter notes that Braestrup's estimate of destruction in Hue is far below that of US AID, which estimated in April that 77 percent of Hue's buildings wt:re "seriously dam- aged" or totally destroyed.
120. Kolko, Anatomy of a War, p. 309.
121. PP, IV, 539. On third-country forces, introduced well before the first sighting of a battalion of North Vietnamese regulars in the South, see Kahin, Intervention, pp. 333f. Korean mercenaries began to arrive in January 1965, while Taiwanese soldiers had reached "several hundred" by mid-1964, in addition to "a considerable number of soldiers seconded from Chiang Kai- shek's army on Taiwan," possibly as early as 1959 but certainly under the Kennedy administration, often disguised as members of the Nung Chinese ethnic minority in Vietnam and employed for sabotage missions in the North as well as fighting in the South. For MeNamara's estimate, see his statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, January 22, 1968; excerpts in Big Story, II, 14ff.
122. Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, February 8, 1968; Lee Lescaze, Washington Post, February 6, 1968; in Big Story, II, 1I6ff.
123. New York Times, April 4, 1968. See appendix 3 for similar comments from news reporting.
124. Robert Shaplen, "Letter from Saigon," The New Yorker, March 2, 1968. He estimates the NV A component of the forces engaged at 10 percent of some 50,000 to 60,000. .
125. Jean-Claude Pomonti, Le Monde hebdomadaire, February 4-8, 1968. Pomonti was expelled from the country soon after. The head of the Newsweek Saigon bureau had already been expelled.
126. Charles Mohr, New York Times, February 14, 1968. On Mohr, see Big Story, I, 718.
127. CBS-TV, February 14, 1968, Hallin, "Uncensored War," 171; Big Story, I, 158.
128. We return in appendix 3 to the evidence that Braestrup presents, compar- ing the facts with his rendition of them, including Cronkite's reports.
129. Boston Globe, February 24, 1968.
130. See note 1I8, above.
131. Marc Riboud, Le Monde, April 13, 1968; Newsweek, February 19 (banned from Saigon), March 30; "CBS-TV Morning News," February 12, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 274; John Lengel, AP, February 10, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 269. Such a psychological warfare program was indeed conducted, although not recognized as such by the media; see note 1I9 above and Appendix 3.
132. Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam Inc. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), with pictures of the ongoing fighting. We return to coverage of Hue in appendix 3. See also note 1I9 above, and sources cited.
133? PP, IV, 546f.
134? Paul Quinn-Judge, "Soviet Publication Paints Bleak Picture of War in
Afghanistan," Christian Science Monitor, Moscow, July 21, 1987. Quotes are Quinn-Judge's paraphrases.
135? Bill Keller, "Soviet Official Says Press Harms Army," New York Times, January 21, 1988.
136. PP, IV, 441; his emphasis. On Komer's role, as he sees it and as the record shows it, see FRS, pp. 84f.
137? See Seymour Hersh, The Pn'ce of Power (New York: Summit, 1983), pp. . 582,597, citing presidential aide Charles Colson and General Westmoreland. 138. For explicit references on these matters, here and below, see Noam Chomsky, "Indochina and the Fourth Estate," Social Policy (September- October 1973), reprinted in Towards a New Cold War, expanding an earlier article in Ramparts (April 1973). See also Porter, A Peace Denied,' Kolko, Anatomy of a Warj and Hersh, Price of Power. On the media during the
October-January period, see also Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, p. 347f. , documenting overwhelming media conformity to the U. S. government version o f the evolving events.
139? Cited by Hersh, Price of Power, p. 604.
140. New Republic, January 27, 1973. He notes that the Paris Agreements were "nearly the same" as the October agreements that "broke apart two months later," for reasons unexamined.
141. James N. Wallace, U. S. News & World Report, February 26,1973. 142. Boston Globe, January 25, 1973, cited by Porter, A Peace Denied, 181.
143? January 25, 1973; see State Department Bulletin, February 12, 1973, with slight modifications.
144? For a detailed examination, see Chomsky "Indochina and the Fourth Estate. "
145? Boston Globe, April 2, 1973.
146. New York Times, March I, 1973.
147? New Republic, February 17, 1973.
148. Newsweek, February 5, 1973.
149? Chn'stian Science Monitor, March 30, 1973.
150. For documentation, see our article in Ramparts (December 1974); May- nard Parker, Foreign Affairs (January 1975); Porter, A Peace Denied. See Porter on Pentagon assessments of North Vietnamese military activities and opera- tions, very limited in comparison to the U. S. -GVN offensive in violation of the
cease-fire and the agreements generally.
151. Robert Greenberger, Wall StreetJourna~ August 17; Neil Lewis, New York Times, August 18, 1987. For further details and the general background, see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), part 2, chapter 7.
152. "Proper Uses of Power," New York Times, October 3? ,1983. On the ways the task was addressed in the early postwar years, see our PEHR, vol. 2, largely devoted to the media and Indochina during the 1975-78 period.
153? See the Trilateral Commission study cited in note 3. 154? PP, IV, 420; Journal of International Affairs 25. 1 (1971).
155? Mark ~cCain,Boston Globe, December 9, 1984; memo of May 19, 1967, released dUring the Westmoreland-CBS libel trial.
378 NOTES TO P AGES 238-243
? ? . . -"TJ -"T-
156. Memorandum for the secretary of defense by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, February 12, 1968, in Gareth Porter, ed. , Vietnam: A History in Documents (New York: Meridian, 1981), pp. 354f. ; Pp, IV, 541, 564, 482, 478, 217, 197? 157. John E. Rielly, Foreign Policy (Spring 1983, Spring 1987). Rielly, ed. , American Public Opinion and U. S. Foreign Policy 1987> Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, p. 33. In the 1986 poll, the percentage of the public that regarded the Vietnam War as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" was 66 percent, as compared with 72 percent in 1978 and 198~. ~mong "leader~" (including representatives of churches, voluntary orgamzatlo~s, and ethnIc organizations), the percentage was 44 percent, as compared wIth 45 percent in 1982 and 50 percent in 1978. The editor takes this to indicate "some waning of the impact of the Vietnam experience with the passage of time"; and,
perhaps, some impact of the propaganda system, as memories fade and people are polled who lack direct experience.
158? New Republic, January 22, 1977; see Marilyn Young, "Critical Amnesia," The Nation, April 2, 1977, on this and similar reviews of Emerson's Winners
and Losers.
159. John Midgley, New York Times Book Review, June 30, 1985; Drew Middle-
ton, New York Times, July 6, 1985.
160. Review of Paul Johnson, Modern Times, in New York Times Book Review,
June 26, 1983, p. 15?
161. New York Times, May 28, 1984. A CIA analysis of April 1968 estimated that
"80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during
the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.
162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March II, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U. S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see
SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976). . '
163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); ChItra Subramaruam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.
164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977? 165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.
166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28,
1988; AP, April 7, 1988.
167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985.
168. Time, April 15, 1985.
