19
The most notable exception to the easy tolerance of atrocities perpe- trated against South Vietnamese was the My Lai massacre, in March 1968, reported at once by the NLF among other massacres that are still not acknowledged or discussed.
The most notable exception to the easy tolerance of atrocities perpe- trated against South Vietnamese was the My Lai massacre, in March 1968, reported at once by the NLF among other massacres that are still not acknowledged or discussed.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
fighting alongside the United States to preserve liberty and justice in Asia," a cause carried on by the United States alone after Geneva.
State doctrine was "never challenged" by editors or colum- nists.
The liberal press showed particular enthusiasm for the cause, and "News stories also reinforced the preconceptions of the Administra- tion," because "the press relied almost completely on Administration sources for information which was reported.
" Although coverage of Indochina was limited, apart from a peak in 1954, and faded still further afterwards, "the terms of the future debate over U.
S.
policy were being hardened into usage by the press.
"53
188 M A N U F A C T U R IN G C O N S E N T
With peaceful settlement successfully deterred, the United States and its client regime turned to the task of internal repression, killing tens of thousands and imprisoning tens of thousands more. 54 Diem supporter and adviser Joseph Buttinger describes "massive expedi- tions" in 1956 that destroyed villages, with hundreds or thousands of peasants killed and tens of thousands arrested by soldiers in regions "controlled by the Communists without the slightest use offorce," facts that "were kept secret from the American people"-and still are. 55
The main target of the repression was the anti-French resistance, the Viet Minh, which was virtually decimated by the late 1950s. The rea- sons for the resort to violence were simple and have been amply docu- mented. 56 Recourse to violence was the only feasible response to the successes of the Viet Minh, reconstituted as the National Liberation Front (NLF), in organizing the peasantry, which left the United States only one option: to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena ofviolence, where it was strong. Despite the U. S. -organized terror, the Communist party continued to advocate political action. The outline of strategy for the coming year sent to the South in late 1958 still called for political struggle without the use of armsY As Jeffrey Race documents, when the Communist parry finally authorized the use of violence in self-defense in 1959 in response to pleas from the southern Viet Minh, the slaughter could no longer proceed unimpeded, and government authority quickly collapsed. Nevertheless, ". . . the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement-for example, by liquidations of former Viet- minh by artillery and ground attacks on 'communist villages,' and by roundups of 'communist sympathizers. ' "
The fundamental source of strength for the revolutionary move- ment, Race continues, was the appeal of its constructive programs-for example, the land-reform program, which "achieved a far broader distribution of land than did the government program, and without the killing and terror which is associated in the minds of Western readers with communist practices in land reform. " On the contrary, "the princi- pal violence was brought about not by the Party but by the government, in its attempts to reinstall the landlords"-the usual pattern, in fact, although not "in the minds of Western readers. " The lowest economic strata benefited the most from the redistributive policies implemented. Authority was decentralized and placed in the hands of local people, in contrast to the rule of the U. S. client regime, perceived as "outside forces" by major segments of the local population: "what attracted people to the revolutionary movement was that it represented a new society in which there would be an individu,al redistribution. of values,
THE lNDOCHINA WARS (I); VIETNAM 189
including power and status as well as material possessions. " In Long An province, near Saigon, which Race studied intensively, the NLF had become dominant in the early 1960s, while the government apparatus and its armed forces dissolved without violent conflict, undermined by NLF organizing and propaganda. By late 1964, parts of the province were declared a free-strike zone, and by early 1965, "revolutionary forces had gained victory in nearly all the rural areas of Long An. "58
The first units of the "North Vietnamese aggressors" entered the province at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive. In fact, up to summer 1969, when the post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign had suc- ceeded in decimating the indigenous resistance, U. S. sources reported about eight hundred North Vietnamese "against an estimated total of 49,000 Vietcong soldiers and support troops" in the entire Mekong Delta. 59
This picture and what it entails was essentially . invisible to the American public, and it is so remote from news coverage that sampling of the record is beside the point. The same remains true today outside of the specialist and dissident literature.
The context of McNamara's observation cited earlier on the crucial U. S. role in blocking the election and unification provisions after Ge- neva was the "growth of antiwar and neutralist sentiment in the Saigon- controlled areas" in 1964. This came at a time when virtually all Vietnamese factions, along with international opinion generally, were seeking a political solution among Vietnamese that would head off the impending war to which the United States was committed because of its recognition that it had no political base in South Vietnam. 60
The United States overturned the Diem regime in 1963 because of its ineptitude in conducting the war, as well as because of fears that it was moving toward a negotiated settlement with the NLF. There were few illusions about popular support for the U. S. efforts to maintain and extend the military struggle. As for the generals, who are "all we have got," as Ambassador Lodge recognized in January 1964, U. S. policy- makers knew little about them. William Bundy, soon to become assist- ant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, later commented that "Actually no one on our side knew what the new people were thinking at all. . . . Our requirements were really very simple-we wanted any government which would continue to fight. " The generals, however, did not want to continue to fight. Rather, along with the prime minister installed as a civilian cover for the military regime, they "wanted to move as rapidly as possible towards transferring the struggle for power in the South from the military to the political level," leading to "a negotiated agreement among the Vietnamese parties themselves, with-
190 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
out American intervention. " They saw the NLF "as preponderantly noncommunist in membership" and largely independent of Hanoi's control, and regarded a political settlement among South Vietnamese as feasible in essential agreement with the official NLF program. 61
But none of this was acceptable to the United States. President Johnson explained to Ambassador Lodge that his mission was "knock- ing down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head," because neutralism, as Ambassador Maxwell Taylor observed, "ap- peared to mean throwing the internal political situation open and thus inviting Communist participation" in a democratic process, here-as always-intolerable to the United States unless the right outcome is first determined by establishing a proper distribution offorce. 62 Ambas- sador Taylor feared as the worst outcome a government that would "continue to seek a broadened consensus" and would thus "become susceptible to an accommodation with the liberation front. " After the war ended, senior Pentagon legal adviser Paul Warnke observed criti- cally in retrospect that "For the United States to 'compromise' and permit the indigenous forces of Vietnam to work their own way would be to condone the demise of the anti-Communist regime we had sup- ported in Saigon for twenty years. "
UN Secretary-General U Thant initiated a negotiation effort in the fall of 1964, with the support of Moscow and Hanoi and in accord with the consensus of Vietnamese as well as others, but it was rebuffed by Washington. As for the media, "It was not until after the die had been cast-not until March 9, 1965, after the United States had mounted its sustained air war against the North and landed the first U. S. ground forces in Vietnam-that The New York Times reported U Thant's 1964 efforts. "63
The U. S. position throughout was that "after, but only after, we have established a clear pattern of pressure," could peaceful means be con- sidered (William Bundy, Aug. II, 1964; his emphasis). First violence, then-perhaps-recourse to the peaceful means required by interna- tionallaw and the supreme law of the land. The elections provision of the Geneva Accords had been officially described in a 1961 State De- partment white paper as "a well-laid trap" that the United States had skillfully evaded, and planners were in no mood to fall into such a "trap" in 1964, until the use of violence had secured their objectives. 64 Increasingly, U. S. planners turned to the policy of expanding the war to the North in the hope that this would compensate for their political weakness.
No such conception of the evolving events, and their meaning, was ever made accessible through the mainstream media, which kept to the
THE INI>OCHINA W ARS (I): VIE1:NAM 191
official line that the United States was pursuing limited measures "to strengthen South Vietnam against attack by the Communists," support- ing South Vietnam "against Communist aggression. "65
In the New York Times version, the United States was leading "the free world's fight to contain aggressive Communism" (Robert Trum- bull), defending South Vietnam "against the proxy armies of Soviet Russia-North and South Vietnamese guerrillas" (Hanson Baldwin), just as the French had fought "a seven-and-a-half-year struggle" against "foreign-inspired and supplied Communists. " In early 1965, President Johnson decided "to step up resistance to Vietcong infiltra- tion in South Vietnam" (Tom Wicker); the Vietcong "infiltrate" in their own country, while we "resist" this aggression. Since the South Viet- namese guerrillas were "trying to subvert this country" (David Halber- stam), it was natural that the Times supported the strategic-hamlet program as necessary despite the coercion and brutality; it was "con- ducted as humanely as possible" to offer the peasants "better protection against the Communists" (Halberstam, Homer Bigan). The peasant
support for the South Vietnamese "aggressors" and the reasons for it were ignored. Hallin comments that in the entire New York Times coverage from 1961 through September 1963, he found two "extremely brief" references to land tenure. f>6
While the print media did on occasion reflect the perceptions and opinions of American military officers in the field, arousing much irate condemnation thereby for their anti-Americanism and "negative re- poning," television was more obedient. Thus "the head of the Penta- gon's public-affairs office was able to assure Kennedy that the [NBC] network had been persuaded that it would be 'against the interest ofthe United States' to show its coverage of 'rough treatment by South Vietnamese soldiers to Viet-Cong prisoners, with a U. S. Army captain appearing in this sequence. ' NBC's news director undertook to with- hold this film's scheduled appearance on the Huntley-Brinkley show, and to keep it on the shelf so far as any other programs were con- cerned. "61
Until the expansion of the war in 1965 began to provoke some con- cern, the NLF and DRV were "treated almost exclusively as an arm of international Communism," Hallin found in his analysis of the Times's coverage. "The term civil war began to be used in 1965" and "the term aggression began to appear sometimes in quotation marks"- referring, of course, to Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam, the concept of American aggression being unimaginable, then or since. But concern over Vietnamese "aggression" never abated, as when James Reston discussed "the main point": "How, then, is this aggression by subver-
192 MANUFACTURll'G CONSENT
sion to be stopped? "-referring to aggression by Vietnamese against the American invaders and their clients. Similarly, on television, even more conformist than the print media, Peter Jennings, showing Pentagon films on U. S. air attacks, commented that "This is the shape of things to come for Communist aggression in Vietnam," while NBC's Jack Perkins, reporting an air-force attack that wiped out a "village una- bashedly advertising itself with signs and flags as a Vietcong village," justified the attack as necessary: "The whole village had turned on the Americans, so the whole village was being destroyed. " It is taken for granted that the Americans had every right to be marauding in a region of Vietnam where "Everything in this area for years was Vietcong. " A television report on Operation Attleboro described the fighting as rag- ing "once again to preserve democracy. "68
Summarizing, from the late 1940s, the United States supported the French war of conquest; overturned the political settlement arranged at Geneva in 1954; established a terrorist client regime in the southern section of the country divided by foreign (i. e. , U. S. ) force; moved on to open aggression against South Vietnam by 1962 and worked desper- ately to prevent the political settlement sought by Vietnamese on all sides; and then invaded outright in 1965, initiating an air and ground war that devastated Indochina. Throughout this period, the media presented the U. S. intervention entirely within the framework pre- dicted by a propaganda model.
There are, of course, those who demand still higher standards of loyalty to the state, and for them, the fact that critical perceptions of American military officers in the field sometimes reached public atten- tion is an intolerable "adversarial stance" reflecting the left-wing pro- clivities of "the culture. " Putting this interesting perspective to the side, as far as this period is concerned we may dismiss the conception that the media "lost the war," although it would be quite accurate to con- clude that they encouraged the United States to enter and pursue a war of aggression, which they later were to regard as "a tragedy," or "a blunder," while never acknowledging their fundamental contribution to rallying public support for the policies that they were ultimately to deplore. Given the conformism and obedience of the media during this crucial period, when the basis for U. S. aggression was firmly and irrevo- cably laid, it is small wonder that public concern was so slight, and that opposition was so negligible as to be entirely without significance. Only the most ardent researcher could have developed a moderately clear understanding of what was taking place in Indochina.
Public attitudes after the bombing of Norch Vietnam in February ?
"'-
THE I:-1DOCHINA W ARS (I): VIETNAM 193
1965, in "reprisal" for an attack on U. S. military installations by the "Viet Cong," are therefore hardly surprising. Asked "Who do you think is behind the attacks by the Viet Cong? " 53 percent blamed the Chinese Communists and 26 percent blamed North Vietnam, while 7 percent said, "Civil war. "69 In no identifiable sector of American opinion would it have been possible even to ask the obvious question that would receive an easy and accurate answer in the case of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: "Why do you think the southern resistance is attacking U. S. military installations in South Vietnam? " In fact, even at the peak of peace-movement activities-or today, many years later, when it should be possible to observe the plain facts with some detachment-it would be quite impossible to raise this simple and obvious question, or to answer it, within the mainstream media and most of "the culture. "
In this dismal record we see very clearly the consequences of mind- less media obedience in a state with enormous resources of violence.
5. 4. REPORTING ON THE WAR
As the U. S. invasion mounted in scale and intensity, Indochina was flooded with war correspondents, many of whom reported what they saw and heard with honesty and courage. With rare exceptions, how- ever, they gave an account of the war as perceived by the U. S. military on the ground or as offered in press briefings. In the home offices, Washington's version preva. iled until elite divisions within the United States expanded the range of tactical debate.
Reporters often did not conceal atrocities committed by the U. S. military forces, although they did not appear to perceive them as atroci- ties and surely did not express the horror and outrage that would have been manifest if others were the perpetrators, and the United States or its clients the victims. 70 Malcolm Browne quotes a U. S. official who describes B-52 strikes . in the South as "the most lucrative raids made at any time during the war";
Every single bomb crater is surrounded with bodies, wrecked equipment and dazed and bleeding people. At one such hole there were 40 or 50 men, all in green North Vietnamese uniforms but without their weapons, lying around in an obvious state of shock. We sent in helicopter gunships, which quickly put them out of their misery. 7I
I94 MA~UFACTURI~G CONSENT
The Geneva conventions require that "members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely"; and there are no limits to the horror expressed, until today, over Communist treatment of U. S. pilots captured during the air operations that leveled much of North Vietnam. But the victims that the New York Times is describing are Vietnamese carrying out aggression against Americans in Vietnam, so no such scruples are in order, and none were expressed.
Similarly, there was little reaction when B-52 raids in "the populous [Mekong] delta" were reported in 1965, with unknown numbers of civilian casualties and hordes of refugees fleeing to government-con- trolled areas "because they could no longer bear the continuous bomb- ings. "72 The victims fell under the category of "the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnam and its partisans," as explained by Sidney Hook while condemning Bertrand Russell because he "plays up" these meritorious actions "as deliberate
American atrocities. "73 No doubt one can find similar remarks today in Pravda in commentary on Afghanistan by other commissars who are much admired as leading humanitarians because they courageously condemn the crimes of the United States and its allies in Soviet journals.
Not only was there no reaction to these and subsequent atrocities, but there was also no attempt to place them in the context of what had immediately preceded-that is, to make them intelligible. Indeed, there was little awareness of the background, because the media were so closely wedded to U. S. government goals and perceptions that they never sought to learn the facts. As the war progressed, ample evidence became available from U. S. government sources to explain why the United States had been forced to resort to violence in "the populous delta," as elsewhere, as we described in the preceding section. But such materials, inconsistent with the preferred image of the United States defending South Vietnam from Communist terror and aggression, had little impact on news reporting or commentary, except for occasional illustration of the difficulties faced by the United States in pursuing its noble cause.
The reason for the U. S. resort to violence was overwhelmingly clear by the time of the outright U. S. invasion in 1965, and would have been no less clear before had any serious effort been made to determine the facts. As noted above, the United States was compelled by the political and social successes of the southern Viet Minh (NLF, "Viet Cong") to
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM I95
shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong, a typical response to a classic dilemma.
It is in this context that we can understand the resort to B-S2 raids in "the populous delta" and elsewhere to destroy the civilian base of the indigenous enemy, expanding the failed efforts of the strategic- hamlet program and earlier terror. The U. s. media continued to report the subsequent atrocities, but from the standpoint of the aggressors. One had to turn to the foreign press to find reports from zones held by the South Vietnamese enemy-for example, those of the pro-Western correspondent Katsuichi Honda, who reported in the Japanese press in the fall of 1967 from the Mekong Delta, describing attacks against undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong River and helicopter gunships "firing away at random at farmhouses," "using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood": "They are hunting Asians. . . . This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong delta were full of wounded. " His reports were available only to readers of antiwar literature, not the "objective" media, which had no interest in how the war might appear from the standpoint of the Vietnamese victims of the attack by the United States and the local forces it established. 74
The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue-in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies. The respected columnist Joseph Harsch describes the frustrations of an American pilot dropping bombs "into a leafy jungle" with "no visible result" and without "the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved":
A hit on a big hydroelectric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The water can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas offarm land, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydroelectric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment. Novels are written and films are made of such exploits. . . . The bombing which takes out the dam will flood villages, drown people, destroy crops, and knock out some electric power. . . . Bombing the dam would hurt people. 75
Nevertheless, it is better to bomb trucks, he concludes, although there would plainly be no moral barrier to the much more satisfying alterna- tive rejected on tactical grounds.
196 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: "We thank you for liberating US from Communist terror. " The Times reported that the refugees had lived "in caves and bunkers for many months" because "heavy Ameri- can bombing and artillery and naval shelling" had destroyed their homes, as well as a dike that was "blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese [sic] of a food supply. " It was left unrepaired,
so that two years later "the salt water of the South China Sea continues to submerge the fields where rice once grew. " The reason, according to an American official, is that the people "were written off as commu- nists," and for the same reason the region was left in ruins: "the hills that overlook the flooded paddies, once scattered with huts, are . . . filled with bomb fragments, mines and unexploded artillery shells," and "B-52 craters nearly 20 feet deep pock the hills. "76
Bombing of dikes in the North, occasionally reported,? 7 was contro- versial, as was the bombing of North Vietnam generally. The reason is that the cost to the United States might be high because of a potential Chinese or Soviet response, regarded as a serious and dangerous possi- bility, or because of the impact on international opinion. 78 But these questions did not arise in the case of U. S. terror against the South Vietnamese, which therefore proceeded without notable concern or, it seems, much in the way of planning. In the Penlagon Papers, we find extensive discussion and debate over the escalation of the bombing against the North, while there is virtually nothing about the far more destructive bombing, defoliation, destruction of vast areas by Rome plows, etc. , in South Vietnam, where we were "saving" the population
from "aggression. " With regard to South Vietnam, the planning record is limited to the question of deployment of U. S. troops, which again raised potential costs to the United States.
19
The most notable exception to the easy tolerance of atrocities perpe- trated against South Vietnamese was the My Lai massacre, in March 1968, reported at once by the NLF among other massacres that are still not acknowledged or discussed. Details were disclosed in Paris in June 1968, but neglected by the media until November 1969 despite extensive efforts by helicopter gunner Ronald Ridenhour to publicize the story, which finally broke through to the general public, thanks to the persist- ence of Seymour Hersh, at the time of a massive demonstration in- Washington, when media attention was focused cn antiwar protest. The
THE INDOCH1! '<A W ARS (I): VIETNAM 197
massacre was a footnote to the post-Tet accelerated pacification cam- paign, and minor in context. More revealing was the massacre at nearby My Khe, with ninety civilians reported dead, discovered by the Peers Panel inquiry into the My Lai massacre; proceedings against the officer in charge were dismissed on the grounds that this was merely a normal operation in which a village was destroyed and its population murdered or forcibly relocated, a decision that tells us all we need to know about the American war in South Vietnam, but that passed without com- ment. so
While the nation agonized about the sentencing of Lieutenant Wil- liam Calley for his part in the My Lai massacre, a new ground sweep in the same area drove some 16,000 peasants from their homes, and a year later the camp where the My Lai remnants were relocated in this operation was largely destroyed by air and artillery bombardment, the destruction attributed to the Viet Cong. 81 These events too passed with little notice, and no calls for an inquiry-reasonably enough, since these too were normal and routine operations.
Medical workers at the nearby Canadian-run hospital reported that they knew of the My Lai massacre at once but gave it little attention because it was not out of the ordinary in a province (Quang Ngai) that had been virtually destroyed by U. S. military operations. The highest- ranking officer to have faced court-martial charges for the massacre, Colonel Oran Henderson, stated that "every unit of brigade size has its Mylai hidden some place," although "every unit doesn't have a Riden- hour" to expose what had happened. 82 Knowledgeable elements of the peace movement also gave the My Lai massacre no special notice, for the same reasons.
The reasons why this particular massacre became a cause celebre were explained by Newsweek's Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley, referring to Operation Wheeler Wallawa, with 10,000 enemy reported killed, including the victims of My Lai, who were listed in the official body count:
An examination of that whole operation would have revealed the incident at My Lai to be a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times. Of course, the blame for that could not have been dumped on a stumblebum lieutenant. Calley was an aberration, but "Wheeler Wallawa" was not.
The real issue concerning this operation, Buckley cabled to the U. S. office of NewsweeJ; was not the "indiscriminate use of firepower," as
198 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
is often alleged. Rather, "it is charges of quite discriminating use-as a matter of policy, in populated areas," as in this operation or many others, among them Operation Speedy Express, with thousands of civilians murdered and many others driven to refugee and prison camps by such devices as B-52 raids targeted specifically on villages.
An experienced U. S. official, cited by Buckley, compared My Lai to the exploits of the U. S. Ninth Infantry Division in a range of similar operations:
The actions of the 9th Division in inflicting civilian casualties were worse. The sum total of what the 9th did was overwhelming. In sum, the horror was worse than My Lai. But with the 9th, the civilian casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command's insistence on high body counts. . . . The result was an inevitable outcome ofthe unit's command policy. 53
In short, the My Lai massacre was ignored when it occurred, and the substantial attention given to it later is a more subtle form of cover-up of atrocities. An honest accounting, inconceivable in the media or "the culture" generally, would have placed the responsibility far higher than Lieutenant Calley, but it was more convenient to focus attention on the actions of semi-crazed G I's in a gruesome combat situation with every Vietnamese civilian a threatening enemy. My Lai did not prompt the media generally-there were some individual exceptions-to take a deeper look at the nature of the war, or to display an interest in reports ofsimilar events in nearby areas that suggested its unexceptional char- acter. This particular massacre was made exceptional by an arbitrary cutoff of attention and refusal to investigate beyond narrowly circum- scribed limits. The limited but dramatized attention to My Lai was even used to demonstrate the conscience of America, in the face of enemy provocations. Thus a 1973 New York Times report from My Lai de- scribes the "battered Batangan peninsula," an area where the inhabi- tants were "generally supporters of the Vietcong," now demolished by U. S. bombardment and ground operations: "big guns fire into the pe- ninsula as they have again and again over the eight years that American, South Korean and South Vietnamese forces have been trying to make it safe. " The report quotes villagers who accuse the Americans of having killed many people here: "They are in no position to appreciate what the name My Lai means to Americans, J ) the reporter adds thought- fully. 84
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 199
The standard critique of the media for having "lost the war" identi- fies television as the major culprit. Television analyst Edward Jay Epstein formulates the standard view as follows:
Over the past 10 years, almost nightly, Americans have witnessed the war in Vietnam, on television. Never before in history has a nation allowed its citizens to view uncensored scenes of combat, destruction and atrocities in their living rooms, in living color. Since television has become the principal-and most believed- source of news for most Americans, it is generally assumed that the constant exposure of this war on television was instrumental in shaping public opinion. It has become almost a truism, and the standard rhetoric oftelevision executives, to say that television, by showing the terrible truth of the war, caused the disillusionment of Americans with the war. . . . This has also been the dominant view of those governing the Nation during the war years. . . . Depending on whether the appraisal has come from hawk or dove, television has thus been either blamed or applauded for the disil- lusionment of the American public with the war. 85
There have been several studies of the matter, suggesting a rather different picture. We will return to some of these issues in discussing the coverage of the Tet offensive, but we should observe that there are some rather serious questions about the standard formulations. Sup- pose that some Soviet investigators were to conduct an inquiry into coverage of the war in Afghanistan to determine whether Pravda should be blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the Soviet public with the war? Would we consider such an inquiry to be mean- ingful without consideration of both the costs and the justice of the venture?
Epstein notes an obvious "logical problem" with the standard view: for the first six years of television coverage, from 1962 and increasingly through 1967, "the American public did approve of the war in Vietnam" according to polls. Furthermore, in a 1967 Harris poll for Newsweek" "64 per cent of the nation wide sample said that television's coverage made them more supportive of the American effort, and only 26 per cent said that it had intensified their opposition," leading the journal to conclude that "TV has encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war. "
Epstein's review ofhis and other surveys oftelevision newscasts and commentary during this period explains why this should have been the case. "Up until 1965," he writes, "the network anchor men seemed
200 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
unanimous in support of American objectives in Vietnam," and most described themselves as "hawks" until the end, while the most notable "dove," Walter Cronkite, applauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia" in 1965 and later endorsed the initial U. S. commitment "to stop Communist aggression wherever it raises its head. " In fact, at no time during the war or since has there been any detectable departure from unqualified acceptance of the U. S. government propaganda framework; as in the print media, controversy was limited to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the United States.
The network anchormen not only accepted the framework of inter- pretation formulated by the state authorities, but also were optimistic about the successes achieved in the U. S. war of defense against Viet- namese aggression in Vietnam. Epstein cites work by George Baily, who concludes: "The results in this study demonstrate the combat reports and the government statements generally gave the impression that the Americans were in control, on the offense and holding the initiative, at least until T et of 1968," a picture accepted by the network anchormen. Television "focused on [the] progress" of the American ground forces, supporting this picture with "film, supplied by the Pentagon, that showed the bombing of the North" and "suggesting that the Americans were also rebuilding South Vietnam"-while they were systematically destroying it, as could be deduced inferentially from scattered evidence for which no context or interpretation was provided. NBC's "Huntley- Brinkley Report" described "the American forces in Vietnam as 'builders' rather than destroyers," a "central truth" that "needs under- scoring. "
What made this especially deceptive and hypocritical was the fact, noted earlier, that the most advanced and cruel forms of devastation and killing-such as the free use of napalm, defoliants, and Rome plows-were used with few constraints in the South, because its popu- lation was voiceless, in contrast with the North, where international publicity and political complications threatened, so that at least visible areas around the major urban centers were spared. 86
As for news coverage, "all three networks had definite policies about showing graphic film of wounded American soldiers or suffering Viet- namese civilians," Epstein observes. "Producers of the NBC and ABC evening-news programs said that they ordered editors to delete exces- sively grisly or detailed shots," and CBS had similar policies, which, according to former CBS News president Fred W. Friendly, "helped shield the audience from the true horror of the war. " "The relative bloodlessness of the war depicted on television helps to explain why
THE INDOCHI:-lA WARS (I): VIETI'AM 201
only a minority in the Lou Harris-Newsweek poll said that television increased their dissatisfaction with the war"; such coverage yielded an impression, Epstein adds, of "a clean, effective technological war," which was "rudely shaken at Tet in 1968. " As noted earlier, NBC withdrew television clips showing harsh treatment of Viet Cong prison- ers at the request of the Kennedy administration.
Throughout this period, furthermore, "television coverage focused almost exclusively on the American effort. " There were few interviews with GVN military or civilian leaders, "and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were almost nonexistent on American television news- casts. "
There was one famous exception to the sanitizing of the war, an August 5, 1965, CBS report by Morley Safer showing U. S. Marines burning huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters, which elicited "a semiofficial campaign" by the Pentagon "to discredit the television story and vilify the correspondent as 'unpatriotic. ''' But surveys of television newscasts by Epstein and Wisconsin Professor Lawrence Lichty show that "instances shown on TV of American brutality toward the South Vietnamese, such as Cam Ne, 'could be counted on one hand' [Lichty]," "even though hundreds of South Vietnamese villages were destroyed during this period. " "The Cam Ne story is famous for being the exception to the rule. "
Returning soldiers told a different story, and it became increasingly clear, although not through the medium of television, that the war was bloody and brutal, leading to "disillusionment"-and among a large sector of the general population, increasingly "out of control," a much stronger and more appropriate reaction.
But, Epstein continues, "the televised picture of gradual progress in the war was abruptly shattered by the Communist [Tet] offensive" in January-February 1968, when the military lost its "control over the movements of the press," who could step outside their hotels and find "themselves willy-nilly in the midst of bloody fighting. " For this brief moment, correspondents sent on-the-spot reports that were aired in place of "the usual carefully edited view of an orderly, controlled war," and the policy of "shield[ing] American viewers from the grisly close- ups of wounded Americans, body bags and death" briefly collapsed, though newscasts continued to be edited in home offices as "too strong," in the words of NBC producer Robert Northshield. This cov- erage convinced Walter Cronkite that the war had become "a bloody stalemate," in a controversial report to which we will return.
The Tet offensive convinced U. S. elites that the war was becoming too costly to the United States, and the government shifted toward the
202 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
policy of "Vietnamization," large-scale massacre operations to destroy the indigenous resistance and its civilian base, expansion of the war in Laos and Cambodia, and the commencement of negotiations with North Vietnam. "Accordingly, the networks again changed the focus of their coverage, this time from the battlefields in Vietnam to the negotia- tion tables in Paris. . . . The 'story' was now the negotiations, not the fighting," Northshield explained, adding that "combat stories seemed like a contradiction and would confuse the audience. " "Similar deci- sions were made at the other networks," Epstein adds, as all "altered their coverage in late 1969 from combat pieces to stories about the 'Vietnamization' of the war" and the negotiations in Paris. The post-
Tet accelerated pacification campaign~ one of the most crucial and murderous operations in the U. S. war against South Vietnam, received little attention.
Epstein believes that "there is a marked difference between the coverage of the formative years of the war (1962-1967) and the later years (when the antiwar movement was at its height). " "Up until 1968, television coverage was controlled to a large extent by the American military, and generally it reflected a controlled American initiative which seemed to be winning the countryside and decimating the Viet- cong. The searchlight rarely focused on related questions, such as the sufferings of Vietnamese civilians. " During the T et offensive, the focus changed to Americans "shown on the defensive, endangered and help- lessly frustrated," then to "the story of the American withdrawal" as "negotiations began at the end of 1968. " The differences, however, are misleading. Apart from the live coverage during the Tet offensive, there is very little departure from the principle that the war must be viewed from the standpoint determined by official Washington doctrine-a
standpoint that broadened in scope after Tet, as tactical disagreements arose within elite circles.
In his survey of network newscasts from 1965 through the January 1973 peace treaty, Daniel Hallin reaches similar conclusions. Until the Tet offensive, television coverage was "lopsidedly favorable to Ameri- can policy in Vietnam," well beyond even the "remarkably docile" print media. Like Epstein, he notes the "dramatic" change after Tet, "part of a larger change, a response to as well as a cause of the unhappiness with the war that was developing at many levels, from the halls of the Pentagon, to Main Street, U. S. A. and the fire bases of Quang Tri province"-and, much more crucially, the unhappiness that had be- come quite significant by 1968 among business elites, leading to the changes in U. S. government policy already discussed. "Before Tet, editorial comments by television journalists}. :an nearly four to one in
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 203
favor ofadministration policy; after Tet, two to one against," reflecting divisions in the "establishment itself. " He quotes New York Times editor Max Frankel, who said in an interview that "we're an establish- ment institution, and whenever your natural constituency changes, then naturally you will too. " The same was true of television, and it is hardly surprising-and quite in accord with the propaganda model-that its fervent loyalty to the administration changed when "the establishment bastards have bailed out," as Lyndon Johnson put it bitterly after the "Wise Men" advised him in March 1968 to abandon hope of military victory and to de-escalate the conflict, in the wake of the Tet offen- sive. 8 ?
Television typically presented events in terms of "a kind of morality play, . . . a dramatic contrast between good, represented by the Ameri- can peace offensive [in 1966], and evil, represented by Hanoi. " Report- ing was relatively bloodless, focusing on the successes of "the 'good guys': American boys in action," regularly depicted as "brave men," "the greatest men in the world," "heroes," exuding competence, hu- manity, and high morale as they fight against "Communist aggression" in the "battle for democracy," and "win hearts and minds" by caring for sick and injured civilians after a village "was burned and blasted to death"-properly, because ammunition had been found there, which "was enough proof of its being used by the Vietcong" (Greg Harris, NBC-TV, Oct. 27, 1967). The issue of racism "was apparently too sensitive to touch," Hallin adds, noting that he found no "comment on the hostility that many American soldiers felt towards all Vietnamese, . . . a prominent theme in veterans' recollections of the war. "
The focus of coverage was the Americans: soldiers bravely defending Vietnam, medics caring for the wounded, pacification officials rebuild- ing after the damage for which Communist terror bore responsibility. "Our South Vietnamese" were virtually ignored, with virtually nothing on political, economic, or social affairs, and "the peasant figured in the news mainly as a victim and prize of the conflict. " The political opposi- t. ion in Vietnam was portrayed with considerable hostility, "like the antiwar movement at home. " They were "forces of anarchy . . . on the march" (Walter Cronkite, CBS-TV, Mar. 31, 1966). The utterly fraudu- lent elections were portrayed as a triumph as democracy, courageously carried out in defiance of the disruptive attacks of "Vietcong terror- ists. "88
Civilian casualties were downplayed, or regarded as unavoidable side consequences of "a job that had to be done," raising no moral question. Observing an air strike on a village of "unabashed" Viet Cong support- ers after a column of American soldiers had drawn fire, NBC's Jack
204 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Perkins commented: "There was no discriminating one house from another. There couldn't be, and there did not need to be. The whole village had turned on the Americans, so the whole village was being destroyed," as is only right and just. In a follow-up on the Cam Ne incident, Dan Rather offers a comment that Hallin cites as an example of "a muckraking tone," the harshest he presents: the marines are holding Cam Ne
by force, not through the pacification program . . . [which] hasn't taken hold in Cam Ne. And until it does take hold here and a lot ofother places in South Vietnam, nobody can feel very good about this dirty little war.
In short, as long as there is still resistance to American violence, we cannot feel good about proceeding with our necessary chores; such comments as these presumably account for Rather's reputation among the "doves" as a courageous opponent of the war, and among the "hawks" as a dangerous leftist. Walter Cronkite reported "an urgent plea from the Vietcong for medical and surgical supplies" to the Inter- national Red Cross, "an indication that our bombing raids and infantry sweeps are taking a heavy roll of all kinds of Red equipment. "89
Reporting of civilian casualties rose from 1966 to a peak in early 1968, then declined sharply as the United States turned to the murderous accelerated pacification campaign, which Hallin does not discuss, pre- sumably because it was largely ignored by television, which had shifted attention to the negotiating tables in Paris in accordance with Washing- ton priorities. The coverage rose again in 1972, when casualties could be attributed to a North Vietnamese offensive and the U. S. "response. " In a 1971 CBS documentary entitled "The Changing War in Indo- china," Charles Collingwood reported the progress of the pacification campaign in Kien Hoa Province in the Mekong Delta-"once an NLF stronghold," Hallin observes. This province had been the target of Operation Speedy Express in early 1969, one of the most brutal Ameri- can operations of the war in an area that had been organized under NLF control with no known North Vietnamese presence, conquered through the "awesome firepower" ofthe Ninth Division. This included air strikes using napalm, high explosives, and anti-person~el bombs, B-52 bombing, and artillery shelling "around the clock" at a level that "it is impossible to reckon," with armed helicopters "scouring the landscape from the air night and day" and accounting for "many and perhaps most of the enemy kills"-about 11,000 according to the U. S. command, with 748 weapons captured, a fair indication of who was
THI! INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 205
killed. 9() Collingwood was pleased to observe progress in pacification, although there was still "Indian country" beyond. "This is almost like St. Louis on the move into the frontier," his companion, a U. S. govern- ment adviser replied, in a reference that is more accurate than he probably knew. 91
In contrast to the heroic and humane image ofthe American soldiers defending democracy, the NLF and North Vietnamese were portrayed in "an almost perfectly one-dimensional image . . . as cruel, ruthless and fanatica1. " Of twelve positive comments by journalists that he found throughout the war, Hallin remarks, "10 concerned the effectiveness of enemy forces: this was the only element of television's image of the enemy that changed substantially" in the course of the pOSt-Tet shift, mirroring establishment qualms about the prospects for the success of American arms. "What did not change was the dark picture of evil. " When U. S. forces burned villages, this was a necessity because they provided cover and support for the Viet Congo The results of B-52 saturation bombing were a "tragedy of war. " But when a North Viet- namese artillery shell hit an orphanage in An Hoa in October 1970, ABC's George Watson commented with horror: "No one was prepared for the massacre, the irrational murder that the North Vietnamese inflicted on An Hoa. " Although civilian casualties were overwhelmingly the result of U. S. firepower, attribution of responsibility by television was weighted by a 10 to 7 ratio to the account of the enemy; its "calculated policy of terror" contrasted with the unfortunate but legiti- mate side-effects of U. S. operations. Even military operations of the enemy were "terrorism. " Reporting on a Viet Cong ambush of an American patrol, ABC's Peter Jennings recounted "another of those small but {and here he paused a moment for dramatic effect] harrowing VC butcheries" (October, 1965). The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were portrayed as "savage," "brutal," "murderous," "fanatical," "sui- cidal," "halfcrazed," mere vermin in areas that were "Communist in- fested" or "Vietcong infested," and thus had to be cleansed by the American liberators. 92
The style and technique are familiar in state propaganda of all varieties.
Overall, Hallin concludes from his survey, television never veered from the official interpretation of the war as "a struggle to defend democracy against aggression. " In the early years, it was taken for granted that
we would surely win, not only because we were more powerful but because the right was clearly on our side. T e1evision held this view
206 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
strongly, perhaps more strongly than the public itself. It didn't work out that way, and eventually television brought the bad news. But it never explained why: it never reexamined the as- sumptions about the nature of the war it had helped to propagate in the early years. So to the public, the bad news must have seemed nearly as incomprehensible as an earlier "American de- feat" in Asia: the "loss" of China.
Attribution of the American failure by the public to "treason" or "lack of American will" caused by the failure of the media to support our just cause with sufficient fervor is, therefore, "hardly surprising. "93
This may well explain why the public has apparently been willing to accept the tales about media treachery. But among the educated elites, the explanation may lie elsewhere: in a totalitarian cast of mind that regards even the actual level of media subservience to the state as inadequate and a threat to order and privilege by the "forces of anarchy . . . on the march. "
5. 5.
188 M A N U F A C T U R IN G C O N S E N T
With peaceful settlement successfully deterred, the United States and its client regime turned to the task of internal repression, killing tens of thousands and imprisoning tens of thousands more. 54 Diem supporter and adviser Joseph Buttinger describes "massive expedi- tions" in 1956 that destroyed villages, with hundreds or thousands of peasants killed and tens of thousands arrested by soldiers in regions "controlled by the Communists without the slightest use offorce," facts that "were kept secret from the American people"-and still are. 55
The main target of the repression was the anti-French resistance, the Viet Minh, which was virtually decimated by the late 1950s. The rea- sons for the resort to violence were simple and have been amply docu- mented. 56 Recourse to violence was the only feasible response to the successes of the Viet Minh, reconstituted as the National Liberation Front (NLF), in organizing the peasantry, which left the United States only one option: to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena ofviolence, where it was strong. Despite the U. S. -organized terror, the Communist party continued to advocate political action. The outline of strategy for the coming year sent to the South in late 1958 still called for political struggle without the use of armsY As Jeffrey Race documents, when the Communist parry finally authorized the use of violence in self-defense in 1959 in response to pleas from the southern Viet Minh, the slaughter could no longer proceed unimpeded, and government authority quickly collapsed. Nevertheless, ". . . the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement-for example, by liquidations of former Viet- minh by artillery and ground attacks on 'communist villages,' and by roundups of 'communist sympathizers. ' "
The fundamental source of strength for the revolutionary move- ment, Race continues, was the appeal of its constructive programs-for example, the land-reform program, which "achieved a far broader distribution of land than did the government program, and without the killing and terror which is associated in the minds of Western readers with communist practices in land reform. " On the contrary, "the princi- pal violence was brought about not by the Party but by the government, in its attempts to reinstall the landlords"-the usual pattern, in fact, although not "in the minds of Western readers. " The lowest economic strata benefited the most from the redistributive policies implemented. Authority was decentralized and placed in the hands of local people, in contrast to the rule of the U. S. client regime, perceived as "outside forces" by major segments of the local population: "what attracted people to the revolutionary movement was that it represented a new society in which there would be an individu,al redistribution. of values,
THE lNDOCHINA WARS (I); VIETNAM 189
including power and status as well as material possessions. " In Long An province, near Saigon, which Race studied intensively, the NLF had become dominant in the early 1960s, while the government apparatus and its armed forces dissolved without violent conflict, undermined by NLF organizing and propaganda. By late 1964, parts of the province were declared a free-strike zone, and by early 1965, "revolutionary forces had gained victory in nearly all the rural areas of Long An. "58
The first units of the "North Vietnamese aggressors" entered the province at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive. In fact, up to summer 1969, when the post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign had suc- ceeded in decimating the indigenous resistance, U. S. sources reported about eight hundred North Vietnamese "against an estimated total of 49,000 Vietcong soldiers and support troops" in the entire Mekong Delta. 59
This picture and what it entails was essentially . invisible to the American public, and it is so remote from news coverage that sampling of the record is beside the point. The same remains true today outside of the specialist and dissident literature.
The context of McNamara's observation cited earlier on the crucial U. S. role in blocking the election and unification provisions after Ge- neva was the "growth of antiwar and neutralist sentiment in the Saigon- controlled areas" in 1964. This came at a time when virtually all Vietnamese factions, along with international opinion generally, were seeking a political solution among Vietnamese that would head off the impending war to which the United States was committed because of its recognition that it had no political base in South Vietnam. 60
The United States overturned the Diem regime in 1963 because of its ineptitude in conducting the war, as well as because of fears that it was moving toward a negotiated settlement with the NLF. There were few illusions about popular support for the U. S. efforts to maintain and extend the military struggle. As for the generals, who are "all we have got," as Ambassador Lodge recognized in January 1964, U. S. policy- makers knew little about them. William Bundy, soon to become assist- ant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, later commented that "Actually no one on our side knew what the new people were thinking at all. . . . Our requirements were really very simple-we wanted any government which would continue to fight. " The generals, however, did not want to continue to fight. Rather, along with the prime minister installed as a civilian cover for the military regime, they "wanted to move as rapidly as possible towards transferring the struggle for power in the South from the military to the political level," leading to "a negotiated agreement among the Vietnamese parties themselves, with-
190 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
out American intervention. " They saw the NLF "as preponderantly noncommunist in membership" and largely independent of Hanoi's control, and regarded a political settlement among South Vietnamese as feasible in essential agreement with the official NLF program. 61
But none of this was acceptable to the United States. President Johnson explained to Ambassador Lodge that his mission was "knock- ing down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head," because neutralism, as Ambassador Maxwell Taylor observed, "ap- peared to mean throwing the internal political situation open and thus inviting Communist participation" in a democratic process, here-as always-intolerable to the United States unless the right outcome is first determined by establishing a proper distribution offorce. 62 Ambas- sador Taylor feared as the worst outcome a government that would "continue to seek a broadened consensus" and would thus "become susceptible to an accommodation with the liberation front. " After the war ended, senior Pentagon legal adviser Paul Warnke observed criti- cally in retrospect that "For the United States to 'compromise' and permit the indigenous forces of Vietnam to work their own way would be to condone the demise of the anti-Communist regime we had sup- ported in Saigon for twenty years. "
UN Secretary-General U Thant initiated a negotiation effort in the fall of 1964, with the support of Moscow and Hanoi and in accord with the consensus of Vietnamese as well as others, but it was rebuffed by Washington. As for the media, "It was not until after the die had been cast-not until March 9, 1965, after the United States had mounted its sustained air war against the North and landed the first U. S. ground forces in Vietnam-that The New York Times reported U Thant's 1964 efforts. "63
The U. S. position throughout was that "after, but only after, we have established a clear pattern of pressure," could peaceful means be con- sidered (William Bundy, Aug. II, 1964; his emphasis). First violence, then-perhaps-recourse to the peaceful means required by interna- tionallaw and the supreme law of the land. The elections provision of the Geneva Accords had been officially described in a 1961 State De- partment white paper as "a well-laid trap" that the United States had skillfully evaded, and planners were in no mood to fall into such a "trap" in 1964, until the use of violence had secured their objectives. 64 Increasingly, U. S. planners turned to the policy of expanding the war to the North in the hope that this would compensate for their political weakness.
No such conception of the evolving events, and their meaning, was ever made accessible through the mainstream media, which kept to the
THE INI>OCHINA W ARS (I): VIE1:NAM 191
official line that the United States was pursuing limited measures "to strengthen South Vietnam against attack by the Communists," support- ing South Vietnam "against Communist aggression. "65
In the New York Times version, the United States was leading "the free world's fight to contain aggressive Communism" (Robert Trum- bull), defending South Vietnam "against the proxy armies of Soviet Russia-North and South Vietnamese guerrillas" (Hanson Baldwin), just as the French had fought "a seven-and-a-half-year struggle" against "foreign-inspired and supplied Communists. " In early 1965, President Johnson decided "to step up resistance to Vietcong infiltra- tion in South Vietnam" (Tom Wicker); the Vietcong "infiltrate" in their own country, while we "resist" this aggression. Since the South Viet- namese guerrillas were "trying to subvert this country" (David Halber- stam), it was natural that the Times supported the strategic-hamlet program as necessary despite the coercion and brutality; it was "con- ducted as humanely as possible" to offer the peasants "better protection against the Communists" (Halberstam, Homer Bigan). The peasant
support for the South Vietnamese "aggressors" and the reasons for it were ignored. Hallin comments that in the entire New York Times coverage from 1961 through September 1963, he found two "extremely brief" references to land tenure. f>6
While the print media did on occasion reflect the perceptions and opinions of American military officers in the field, arousing much irate condemnation thereby for their anti-Americanism and "negative re- poning," television was more obedient. Thus "the head of the Penta- gon's public-affairs office was able to assure Kennedy that the [NBC] network had been persuaded that it would be 'against the interest ofthe United States' to show its coverage of 'rough treatment by South Vietnamese soldiers to Viet-Cong prisoners, with a U. S. Army captain appearing in this sequence. ' NBC's news director undertook to with- hold this film's scheduled appearance on the Huntley-Brinkley show, and to keep it on the shelf so far as any other programs were con- cerned. "61
Until the expansion of the war in 1965 began to provoke some con- cern, the NLF and DRV were "treated almost exclusively as an arm of international Communism," Hallin found in his analysis of the Times's coverage. "The term civil war began to be used in 1965" and "the term aggression began to appear sometimes in quotation marks"- referring, of course, to Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam, the concept of American aggression being unimaginable, then or since. But concern over Vietnamese "aggression" never abated, as when James Reston discussed "the main point": "How, then, is this aggression by subver-
192 MANUFACTURll'G CONSENT
sion to be stopped? "-referring to aggression by Vietnamese against the American invaders and their clients. Similarly, on television, even more conformist than the print media, Peter Jennings, showing Pentagon films on U. S. air attacks, commented that "This is the shape of things to come for Communist aggression in Vietnam," while NBC's Jack Perkins, reporting an air-force attack that wiped out a "village una- bashedly advertising itself with signs and flags as a Vietcong village," justified the attack as necessary: "The whole village had turned on the Americans, so the whole village was being destroyed. " It is taken for granted that the Americans had every right to be marauding in a region of Vietnam where "Everything in this area for years was Vietcong. " A television report on Operation Attleboro described the fighting as rag- ing "once again to preserve democracy. "68
Summarizing, from the late 1940s, the United States supported the French war of conquest; overturned the political settlement arranged at Geneva in 1954; established a terrorist client regime in the southern section of the country divided by foreign (i. e. , U. S. ) force; moved on to open aggression against South Vietnam by 1962 and worked desper- ately to prevent the political settlement sought by Vietnamese on all sides; and then invaded outright in 1965, initiating an air and ground war that devastated Indochina. Throughout this period, the media presented the U. S. intervention entirely within the framework pre- dicted by a propaganda model.
There are, of course, those who demand still higher standards of loyalty to the state, and for them, the fact that critical perceptions of American military officers in the field sometimes reached public atten- tion is an intolerable "adversarial stance" reflecting the left-wing pro- clivities of "the culture. " Putting this interesting perspective to the side, as far as this period is concerned we may dismiss the conception that the media "lost the war," although it would be quite accurate to con- clude that they encouraged the United States to enter and pursue a war of aggression, which they later were to regard as "a tragedy," or "a blunder," while never acknowledging their fundamental contribution to rallying public support for the policies that they were ultimately to deplore. Given the conformism and obedience of the media during this crucial period, when the basis for U. S. aggression was firmly and irrevo- cably laid, it is small wonder that public concern was so slight, and that opposition was so negligible as to be entirely without significance. Only the most ardent researcher could have developed a moderately clear understanding of what was taking place in Indochina.
Public attitudes after the bombing of Norch Vietnam in February ?
"'-
THE I:-1DOCHINA W ARS (I): VIETNAM 193
1965, in "reprisal" for an attack on U. S. military installations by the "Viet Cong," are therefore hardly surprising. Asked "Who do you think is behind the attacks by the Viet Cong? " 53 percent blamed the Chinese Communists and 26 percent blamed North Vietnam, while 7 percent said, "Civil war. "69 In no identifiable sector of American opinion would it have been possible even to ask the obvious question that would receive an easy and accurate answer in the case of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: "Why do you think the southern resistance is attacking U. S. military installations in South Vietnam? " In fact, even at the peak of peace-movement activities-or today, many years later, when it should be possible to observe the plain facts with some detachment-it would be quite impossible to raise this simple and obvious question, or to answer it, within the mainstream media and most of "the culture. "
In this dismal record we see very clearly the consequences of mind- less media obedience in a state with enormous resources of violence.
5. 4. REPORTING ON THE WAR
As the U. S. invasion mounted in scale and intensity, Indochina was flooded with war correspondents, many of whom reported what they saw and heard with honesty and courage. With rare exceptions, how- ever, they gave an account of the war as perceived by the U. S. military on the ground or as offered in press briefings. In the home offices, Washington's version preva. iled until elite divisions within the United States expanded the range of tactical debate.
Reporters often did not conceal atrocities committed by the U. S. military forces, although they did not appear to perceive them as atroci- ties and surely did not express the horror and outrage that would have been manifest if others were the perpetrators, and the United States or its clients the victims. 70 Malcolm Browne quotes a U. S. official who describes B-52 strikes . in the South as "the most lucrative raids made at any time during the war";
Every single bomb crater is surrounded with bodies, wrecked equipment and dazed and bleeding people. At one such hole there were 40 or 50 men, all in green North Vietnamese uniforms but without their weapons, lying around in an obvious state of shock. We sent in helicopter gunships, which quickly put them out of their misery. 7I
I94 MA~UFACTURI~G CONSENT
The Geneva conventions require that "members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely"; and there are no limits to the horror expressed, until today, over Communist treatment of U. S. pilots captured during the air operations that leveled much of North Vietnam. But the victims that the New York Times is describing are Vietnamese carrying out aggression against Americans in Vietnam, so no such scruples are in order, and none were expressed.
Similarly, there was little reaction when B-52 raids in "the populous [Mekong] delta" were reported in 1965, with unknown numbers of civilian casualties and hordes of refugees fleeing to government-con- trolled areas "because they could no longer bear the continuous bomb- ings. "72 The victims fell under the category of "the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnam and its partisans," as explained by Sidney Hook while condemning Bertrand Russell because he "plays up" these meritorious actions "as deliberate
American atrocities. "73 No doubt one can find similar remarks today in Pravda in commentary on Afghanistan by other commissars who are much admired as leading humanitarians because they courageously condemn the crimes of the United States and its allies in Soviet journals.
Not only was there no reaction to these and subsequent atrocities, but there was also no attempt to place them in the context of what had immediately preceded-that is, to make them intelligible. Indeed, there was little awareness of the background, because the media were so closely wedded to U. S. government goals and perceptions that they never sought to learn the facts. As the war progressed, ample evidence became available from U. S. government sources to explain why the United States had been forced to resort to violence in "the populous delta," as elsewhere, as we described in the preceding section. But such materials, inconsistent with the preferred image of the United States defending South Vietnam from Communist terror and aggression, had little impact on news reporting or commentary, except for occasional illustration of the difficulties faced by the United States in pursuing its noble cause.
The reason for the U. S. resort to violence was overwhelmingly clear by the time of the outright U. S. invasion in 1965, and would have been no less clear before had any serious effort been made to determine the facts. As noted above, the United States was compelled by the political and social successes of the southern Viet Minh (NLF, "Viet Cong") to
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM I95
shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong, a typical response to a classic dilemma.
It is in this context that we can understand the resort to B-S2 raids in "the populous delta" and elsewhere to destroy the civilian base of the indigenous enemy, expanding the failed efforts of the strategic- hamlet program and earlier terror. The U. s. media continued to report the subsequent atrocities, but from the standpoint of the aggressors. One had to turn to the foreign press to find reports from zones held by the South Vietnamese enemy-for example, those of the pro-Western correspondent Katsuichi Honda, who reported in the Japanese press in the fall of 1967 from the Mekong Delta, describing attacks against undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong River and helicopter gunships "firing away at random at farmhouses," "using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood": "They are hunting Asians. . . . This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong delta were full of wounded. " His reports were available only to readers of antiwar literature, not the "objective" media, which had no interest in how the war might appear from the standpoint of the Vietnamese victims of the attack by the United States and the local forces it established. 74
The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue-in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies. The respected columnist Joseph Harsch describes the frustrations of an American pilot dropping bombs "into a leafy jungle" with "no visible result" and without "the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved":
A hit on a big hydroelectric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The water can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas offarm land, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydroelectric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment. Novels are written and films are made of such exploits. . . . The bombing which takes out the dam will flood villages, drown people, destroy crops, and knock out some electric power. . . . Bombing the dam would hurt people. 75
Nevertheless, it is better to bomb trucks, he concludes, although there would plainly be no moral barrier to the much more satisfying alterna- tive rejected on tactical grounds.
196 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: "We thank you for liberating US from Communist terror. " The Times reported that the refugees had lived "in caves and bunkers for many months" because "heavy Ameri- can bombing and artillery and naval shelling" had destroyed their homes, as well as a dike that was "blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese [sic] of a food supply. " It was left unrepaired,
so that two years later "the salt water of the South China Sea continues to submerge the fields where rice once grew. " The reason, according to an American official, is that the people "were written off as commu- nists," and for the same reason the region was left in ruins: "the hills that overlook the flooded paddies, once scattered with huts, are . . . filled with bomb fragments, mines and unexploded artillery shells," and "B-52 craters nearly 20 feet deep pock the hills. "76
Bombing of dikes in the North, occasionally reported,? 7 was contro- versial, as was the bombing of North Vietnam generally. The reason is that the cost to the United States might be high because of a potential Chinese or Soviet response, regarded as a serious and dangerous possi- bility, or because of the impact on international opinion. 78 But these questions did not arise in the case of U. S. terror against the South Vietnamese, which therefore proceeded without notable concern or, it seems, much in the way of planning. In the Penlagon Papers, we find extensive discussion and debate over the escalation of the bombing against the North, while there is virtually nothing about the far more destructive bombing, defoliation, destruction of vast areas by Rome plows, etc. , in South Vietnam, where we were "saving" the population
from "aggression. " With regard to South Vietnam, the planning record is limited to the question of deployment of U. S. troops, which again raised potential costs to the United States.
19
The most notable exception to the easy tolerance of atrocities perpe- trated against South Vietnamese was the My Lai massacre, in March 1968, reported at once by the NLF among other massacres that are still not acknowledged or discussed. Details were disclosed in Paris in June 1968, but neglected by the media until November 1969 despite extensive efforts by helicopter gunner Ronald Ridenhour to publicize the story, which finally broke through to the general public, thanks to the persist- ence of Seymour Hersh, at the time of a massive demonstration in- Washington, when media attention was focused cn antiwar protest. The
THE INDOCH1! '<A W ARS (I): VIETNAM 197
massacre was a footnote to the post-Tet accelerated pacification cam- paign, and minor in context. More revealing was the massacre at nearby My Khe, with ninety civilians reported dead, discovered by the Peers Panel inquiry into the My Lai massacre; proceedings against the officer in charge were dismissed on the grounds that this was merely a normal operation in which a village was destroyed and its population murdered or forcibly relocated, a decision that tells us all we need to know about the American war in South Vietnam, but that passed without com- ment. so
While the nation agonized about the sentencing of Lieutenant Wil- liam Calley for his part in the My Lai massacre, a new ground sweep in the same area drove some 16,000 peasants from their homes, and a year later the camp where the My Lai remnants were relocated in this operation was largely destroyed by air and artillery bombardment, the destruction attributed to the Viet Cong. 81 These events too passed with little notice, and no calls for an inquiry-reasonably enough, since these too were normal and routine operations.
Medical workers at the nearby Canadian-run hospital reported that they knew of the My Lai massacre at once but gave it little attention because it was not out of the ordinary in a province (Quang Ngai) that had been virtually destroyed by U. S. military operations. The highest- ranking officer to have faced court-martial charges for the massacre, Colonel Oran Henderson, stated that "every unit of brigade size has its Mylai hidden some place," although "every unit doesn't have a Riden- hour" to expose what had happened. 82 Knowledgeable elements of the peace movement also gave the My Lai massacre no special notice, for the same reasons.
The reasons why this particular massacre became a cause celebre were explained by Newsweek's Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley, referring to Operation Wheeler Wallawa, with 10,000 enemy reported killed, including the victims of My Lai, who were listed in the official body count:
An examination of that whole operation would have revealed the incident at My Lai to be a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times. Of course, the blame for that could not have been dumped on a stumblebum lieutenant. Calley was an aberration, but "Wheeler Wallawa" was not.
The real issue concerning this operation, Buckley cabled to the U. S. office of NewsweeJ; was not the "indiscriminate use of firepower," as
198 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
is often alleged. Rather, "it is charges of quite discriminating use-as a matter of policy, in populated areas," as in this operation or many others, among them Operation Speedy Express, with thousands of civilians murdered and many others driven to refugee and prison camps by such devices as B-52 raids targeted specifically on villages.
An experienced U. S. official, cited by Buckley, compared My Lai to the exploits of the U. S. Ninth Infantry Division in a range of similar operations:
The actions of the 9th Division in inflicting civilian casualties were worse. The sum total of what the 9th did was overwhelming. In sum, the horror was worse than My Lai. But with the 9th, the civilian casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command's insistence on high body counts. . . . The result was an inevitable outcome ofthe unit's command policy. 53
In short, the My Lai massacre was ignored when it occurred, and the substantial attention given to it later is a more subtle form of cover-up of atrocities. An honest accounting, inconceivable in the media or "the culture" generally, would have placed the responsibility far higher than Lieutenant Calley, but it was more convenient to focus attention on the actions of semi-crazed G I's in a gruesome combat situation with every Vietnamese civilian a threatening enemy. My Lai did not prompt the media generally-there were some individual exceptions-to take a deeper look at the nature of the war, or to display an interest in reports ofsimilar events in nearby areas that suggested its unexceptional char- acter. This particular massacre was made exceptional by an arbitrary cutoff of attention and refusal to investigate beyond narrowly circum- scribed limits. The limited but dramatized attention to My Lai was even used to demonstrate the conscience of America, in the face of enemy provocations. Thus a 1973 New York Times report from My Lai de- scribes the "battered Batangan peninsula," an area where the inhabi- tants were "generally supporters of the Vietcong," now demolished by U. S. bombardment and ground operations: "big guns fire into the pe- ninsula as they have again and again over the eight years that American, South Korean and South Vietnamese forces have been trying to make it safe. " The report quotes villagers who accuse the Americans of having killed many people here: "They are in no position to appreciate what the name My Lai means to Americans, J ) the reporter adds thought- fully. 84
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 199
The standard critique of the media for having "lost the war" identi- fies television as the major culprit. Television analyst Edward Jay Epstein formulates the standard view as follows:
Over the past 10 years, almost nightly, Americans have witnessed the war in Vietnam, on television. Never before in history has a nation allowed its citizens to view uncensored scenes of combat, destruction and atrocities in their living rooms, in living color. Since television has become the principal-and most believed- source of news for most Americans, it is generally assumed that the constant exposure of this war on television was instrumental in shaping public opinion. It has become almost a truism, and the standard rhetoric oftelevision executives, to say that television, by showing the terrible truth of the war, caused the disillusionment of Americans with the war. . . . This has also been the dominant view of those governing the Nation during the war years. . . . Depending on whether the appraisal has come from hawk or dove, television has thus been either blamed or applauded for the disil- lusionment of the American public with the war. 85
There have been several studies of the matter, suggesting a rather different picture. We will return to some of these issues in discussing the coverage of the Tet offensive, but we should observe that there are some rather serious questions about the standard formulations. Sup- pose that some Soviet investigators were to conduct an inquiry into coverage of the war in Afghanistan to determine whether Pravda should be blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the Soviet public with the war? Would we consider such an inquiry to be mean- ingful without consideration of both the costs and the justice of the venture?
Epstein notes an obvious "logical problem" with the standard view: for the first six years of television coverage, from 1962 and increasingly through 1967, "the American public did approve of the war in Vietnam" according to polls. Furthermore, in a 1967 Harris poll for Newsweek" "64 per cent of the nation wide sample said that television's coverage made them more supportive of the American effort, and only 26 per cent said that it had intensified their opposition," leading the journal to conclude that "TV has encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war. "
Epstein's review ofhis and other surveys oftelevision newscasts and commentary during this period explains why this should have been the case. "Up until 1965," he writes, "the network anchor men seemed
200 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
unanimous in support of American objectives in Vietnam," and most described themselves as "hawks" until the end, while the most notable "dove," Walter Cronkite, applauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia" in 1965 and later endorsed the initial U. S. commitment "to stop Communist aggression wherever it raises its head. " In fact, at no time during the war or since has there been any detectable departure from unqualified acceptance of the U. S. government propaganda framework; as in the print media, controversy was limited to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the United States.
The network anchormen not only accepted the framework of inter- pretation formulated by the state authorities, but also were optimistic about the successes achieved in the U. S. war of defense against Viet- namese aggression in Vietnam. Epstein cites work by George Baily, who concludes: "The results in this study demonstrate the combat reports and the government statements generally gave the impression that the Americans were in control, on the offense and holding the initiative, at least until T et of 1968," a picture accepted by the network anchormen. Television "focused on [the] progress" of the American ground forces, supporting this picture with "film, supplied by the Pentagon, that showed the bombing of the North" and "suggesting that the Americans were also rebuilding South Vietnam"-while they were systematically destroying it, as could be deduced inferentially from scattered evidence for which no context or interpretation was provided. NBC's "Huntley- Brinkley Report" described "the American forces in Vietnam as 'builders' rather than destroyers," a "central truth" that "needs under- scoring. "
What made this especially deceptive and hypocritical was the fact, noted earlier, that the most advanced and cruel forms of devastation and killing-such as the free use of napalm, defoliants, and Rome plows-were used with few constraints in the South, because its popu- lation was voiceless, in contrast with the North, where international publicity and political complications threatened, so that at least visible areas around the major urban centers were spared. 86
As for news coverage, "all three networks had definite policies about showing graphic film of wounded American soldiers or suffering Viet- namese civilians," Epstein observes. "Producers of the NBC and ABC evening-news programs said that they ordered editors to delete exces- sively grisly or detailed shots," and CBS had similar policies, which, according to former CBS News president Fred W. Friendly, "helped shield the audience from the true horror of the war. " "The relative bloodlessness of the war depicted on television helps to explain why
THE INDOCHI:-lA WARS (I): VIETI'AM 201
only a minority in the Lou Harris-Newsweek poll said that television increased their dissatisfaction with the war"; such coverage yielded an impression, Epstein adds, of "a clean, effective technological war," which was "rudely shaken at Tet in 1968. " As noted earlier, NBC withdrew television clips showing harsh treatment of Viet Cong prison- ers at the request of the Kennedy administration.
Throughout this period, furthermore, "television coverage focused almost exclusively on the American effort. " There were few interviews with GVN military or civilian leaders, "and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were almost nonexistent on American television news- casts. "
There was one famous exception to the sanitizing of the war, an August 5, 1965, CBS report by Morley Safer showing U. S. Marines burning huts in the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters, which elicited "a semiofficial campaign" by the Pentagon "to discredit the television story and vilify the correspondent as 'unpatriotic. ''' But surveys of television newscasts by Epstein and Wisconsin Professor Lawrence Lichty show that "instances shown on TV of American brutality toward the South Vietnamese, such as Cam Ne, 'could be counted on one hand' [Lichty]," "even though hundreds of South Vietnamese villages were destroyed during this period. " "The Cam Ne story is famous for being the exception to the rule. "
Returning soldiers told a different story, and it became increasingly clear, although not through the medium of television, that the war was bloody and brutal, leading to "disillusionment"-and among a large sector of the general population, increasingly "out of control," a much stronger and more appropriate reaction.
But, Epstein continues, "the televised picture of gradual progress in the war was abruptly shattered by the Communist [Tet] offensive" in January-February 1968, when the military lost its "control over the movements of the press," who could step outside their hotels and find "themselves willy-nilly in the midst of bloody fighting. " For this brief moment, correspondents sent on-the-spot reports that were aired in place of "the usual carefully edited view of an orderly, controlled war," and the policy of "shield[ing] American viewers from the grisly close- ups of wounded Americans, body bags and death" briefly collapsed, though newscasts continued to be edited in home offices as "too strong," in the words of NBC producer Robert Northshield. This cov- erage convinced Walter Cronkite that the war had become "a bloody stalemate," in a controversial report to which we will return.
The Tet offensive convinced U. S. elites that the war was becoming too costly to the United States, and the government shifted toward the
202 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
policy of "Vietnamization," large-scale massacre operations to destroy the indigenous resistance and its civilian base, expansion of the war in Laos and Cambodia, and the commencement of negotiations with North Vietnam. "Accordingly, the networks again changed the focus of their coverage, this time from the battlefields in Vietnam to the negotia- tion tables in Paris. . . . The 'story' was now the negotiations, not the fighting," Northshield explained, adding that "combat stories seemed like a contradiction and would confuse the audience. " "Similar deci- sions were made at the other networks," Epstein adds, as all "altered their coverage in late 1969 from combat pieces to stories about the 'Vietnamization' of the war" and the negotiations in Paris. The post-
Tet accelerated pacification campaign~ one of the most crucial and murderous operations in the U. S. war against South Vietnam, received little attention.
Epstein believes that "there is a marked difference between the coverage of the formative years of the war (1962-1967) and the later years (when the antiwar movement was at its height). " "Up until 1968, television coverage was controlled to a large extent by the American military, and generally it reflected a controlled American initiative which seemed to be winning the countryside and decimating the Viet- cong. The searchlight rarely focused on related questions, such as the sufferings of Vietnamese civilians. " During the T et offensive, the focus changed to Americans "shown on the defensive, endangered and help- lessly frustrated," then to "the story of the American withdrawal" as "negotiations began at the end of 1968. " The differences, however, are misleading. Apart from the live coverage during the Tet offensive, there is very little departure from the principle that the war must be viewed from the standpoint determined by official Washington doctrine-a
standpoint that broadened in scope after Tet, as tactical disagreements arose within elite circles.
In his survey of network newscasts from 1965 through the January 1973 peace treaty, Daniel Hallin reaches similar conclusions. Until the Tet offensive, television coverage was "lopsidedly favorable to Ameri- can policy in Vietnam," well beyond even the "remarkably docile" print media. Like Epstein, he notes the "dramatic" change after Tet, "part of a larger change, a response to as well as a cause of the unhappiness with the war that was developing at many levels, from the halls of the Pentagon, to Main Street, U. S. A. and the fire bases of Quang Tri province"-and, much more crucially, the unhappiness that had be- come quite significant by 1968 among business elites, leading to the changes in U. S. government policy already discussed. "Before Tet, editorial comments by television journalists}. :an nearly four to one in
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 203
favor ofadministration policy; after Tet, two to one against," reflecting divisions in the "establishment itself. " He quotes New York Times editor Max Frankel, who said in an interview that "we're an establish- ment institution, and whenever your natural constituency changes, then naturally you will too. " The same was true of television, and it is hardly surprising-and quite in accord with the propaganda model-that its fervent loyalty to the administration changed when "the establishment bastards have bailed out," as Lyndon Johnson put it bitterly after the "Wise Men" advised him in March 1968 to abandon hope of military victory and to de-escalate the conflict, in the wake of the Tet offen- sive. 8 ?
Television typically presented events in terms of "a kind of morality play, . . . a dramatic contrast between good, represented by the Ameri- can peace offensive [in 1966], and evil, represented by Hanoi. " Report- ing was relatively bloodless, focusing on the successes of "the 'good guys': American boys in action," regularly depicted as "brave men," "the greatest men in the world," "heroes," exuding competence, hu- manity, and high morale as they fight against "Communist aggression" in the "battle for democracy," and "win hearts and minds" by caring for sick and injured civilians after a village "was burned and blasted to death"-properly, because ammunition had been found there, which "was enough proof of its being used by the Vietcong" (Greg Harris, NBC-TV, Oct. 27, 1967). The issue of racism "was apparently too sensitive to touch," Hallin adds, noting that he found no "comment on the hostility that many American soldiers felt towards all Vietnamese, . . . a prominent theme in veterans' recollections of the war. "
The focus of coverage was the Americans: soldiers bravely defending Vietnam, medics caring for the wounded, pacification officials rebuild- ing after the damage for which Communist terror bore responsibility. "Our South Vietnamese" were virtually ignored, with virtually nothing on political, economic, or social affairs, and "the peasant figured in the news mainly as a victim and prize of the conflict. " The political opposi- t. ion in Vietnam was portrayed with considerable hostility, "like the antiwar movement at home. " They were "forces of anarchy . . . on the march" (Walter Cronkite, CBS-TV, Mar. 31, 1966). The utterly fraudu- lent elections were portrayed as a triumph as democracy, courageously carried out in defiance of the disruptive attacks of "Vietcong terror- ists. "88
Civilian casualties were downplayed, or regarded as unavoidable side consequences of "a job that had to be done," raising no moral question. Observing an air strike on a village of "unabashed" Viet Cong support- ers after a column of American soldiers had drawn fire, NBC's Jack
204 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Perkins commented: "There was no discriminating one house from another. There couldn't be, and there did not need to be. The whole village had turned on the Americans, so the whole village was being destroyed," as is only right and just. In a follow-up on the Cam Ne incident, Dan Rather offers a comment that Hallin cites as an example of "a muckraking tone," the harshest he presents: the marines are holding Cam Ne
by force, not through the pacification program . . . [which] hasn't taken hold in Cam Ne. And until it does take hold here and a lot ofother places in South Vietnam, nobody can feel very good about this dirty little war.
In short, as long as there is still resistance to American violence, we cannot feel good about proceeding with our necessary chores; such comments as these presumably account for Rather's reputation among the "doves" as a courageous opponent of the war, and among the "hawks" as a dangerous leftist. Walter Cronkite reported "an urgent plea from the Vietcong for medical and surgical supplies" to the Inter- national Red Cross, "an indication that our bombing raids and infantry sweeps are taking a heavy roll of all kinds of Red equipment. "89
Reporting of civilian casualties rose from 1966 to a peak in early 1968, then declined sharply as the United States turned to the murderous accelerated pacification campaign, which Hallin does not discuss, pre- sumably because it was largely ignored by television, which had shifted attention to the negotiating tables in Paris in accordance with Washing- ton priorities. The coverage rose again in 1972, when casualties could be attributed to a North Vietnamese offensive and the U. S. "response. " In a 1971 CBS documentary entitled "The Changing War in Indo- china," Charles Collingwood reported the progress of the pacification campaign in Kien Hoa Province in the Mekong Delta-"once an NLF stronghold," Hallin observes. This province had been the target of Operation Speedy Express in early 1969, one of the most brutal Ameri- can operations of the war in an area that had been organized under NLF control with no known North Vietnamese presence, conquered through the "awesome firepower" ofthe Ninth Division. This included air strikes using napalm, high explosives, and anti-person~el bombs, B-52 bombing, and artillery shelling "around the clock" at a level that "it is impossible to reckon," with armed helicopters "scouring the landscape from the air night and day" and accounting for "many and perhaps most of the enemy kills"-about 11,000 according to the U. S. command, with 748 weapons captured, a fair indication of who was
THI! INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 205
killed. 9() Collingwood was pleased to observe progress in pacification, although there was still "Indian country" beyond. "This is almost like St. Louis on the move into the frontier," his companion, a U. S. govern- ment adviser replied, in a reference that is more accurate than he probably knew. 91
In contrast to the heroic and humane image ofthe American soldiers defending democracy, the NLF and North Vietnamese were portrayed in "an almost perfectly one-dimensional image . . . as cruel, ruthless and fanatica1. " Of twelve positive comments by journalists that he found throughout the war, Hallin remarks, "10 concerned the effectiveness of enemy forces: this was the only element of television's image of the enemy that changed substantially" in the course of the pOSt-Tet shift, mirroring establishment qualms about the prospects for the success of American arms. "What did not change was the dark picture of evil. " When U. S. forces burned villages, this was a necessity because they provided cover and support for the Viet Congo The results of B-52 saturation bombing were a "tragedy of war. " But when a North Viet- namese artillery shell hit an orphanage in An Hoa in October 1970, ABC's George Watson commented with horror: "No one was prepared for the massacre, the irrational murder that the North Vietnamese inflicted on An Hoa. " Although civilian casualties were overwhelmingly the result of U. S. firepower, attribution of responsibility by television was weighted by a 10 to 7 ratio to the account of the enemy; its "calculated policy of terror" contrasted with the unfortunate but legiti- mate side-effects of U. S. operations. Even military operations of the enemy were "terrorism. " Reporting on a Viet Cong ambush of an American patrol, ABC's Peter Jennings recounted "another of those small but {and here he paused a moment for dramatic effect] harrowing VC butcheries" (October, 1965). The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were portrayed as "savage," "brutal," "murderous," "fanatical," "sui- cidal," "halfcrazed," mere vermin in areas that were "Communist in- fested" or "Vietcong infested," and thus had to be cleansed by the American liberators. 92
The style and technique are familiar in state propaganda of all varieties.
Overall, Hallin concludes from his survey, television never veered from the official interpretation of the war as "a struggle to defend democracy against aggression. " In the early years, it was taken for granted that
we would surely win, not only because we were more powerful but because the right was clearly on our side. T e1evision held this view
206 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
strongly, perhaps more strongly than the public itself. It didn't work out that way, and eventually television brought the bad news. But it never explained why: it never reexamined the as- sumptions about the nature of the war it had helped to propagate in the early years. So to the public, the bad news must have seemed nearly as incomprehensible as an earlier "American de- feat" in Asia: the "loss" of China.
Attribution of the American failure by the public to "treason" or "lack of American will" caused by the failure of the media to support our just cause with sufficient fervor is, therefore, "hardly surprising. "93
This may well explain why the public has apparently been willing to accept the tales about media treachery. But among the educated elites, the explanation may lie elsewhere: in a totalitarian cast of mind that regards even the actual level of media subservience to the state as inadequate and a threat to order and privilege by the "forces of anarchy . . . on the march. "
5. 5.
