No More Learning

32. Douglas Pike, War, Peace and the Vietcong (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1969), p. 6; the estimate was common in the U. S. government and by outside specialists. Pike, Viet Cong, pp. 110, 362. Henry Cabot Lodge, in PP, II, 376. 33. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). For detailed discussion of this vulgar propaganda exercise disguised as "scholarship," see our review, reprinted in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, chapter 5. Lewy tacitly concedes the accuracy of this critique by evasion; compare the review with his response to critics, Washington Quarterly (Au- tumn 1979). For further insight into the commitments and intellectual level of a man taken seriously as a scholar, see his discussion of the need for the state to take stern action to protect the public from "lies" by subversives, and to ensure that the public is not deceived by the "hidden agenda" of such groups as Clergy and Laity Concerned, the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, NACLA, and others who seek to conceal "their espousal of Cuban- style Communism" and who are engaged in "deception" and "subversion. " As he correctly notes, and inadvertently reveals in his discussion, "to totalitarian- ism, an opponent is by definition subversive" (Lewy, "Does America Need a Verfassungsschutzbericht? " Orbis [Fall 1987]-a respected journal with a dis- tinguished editorial board).
34. Unpublished memorandum on pacification problems circulated within the military in 1965, a copy of which was given by Vann to Professor Alex Carey, University of New South Wales, Australia.
35? Pp, II, 304?
36. Interview in Stern, reprinted in New Advocate (Los Angeles), April 1-15, 1972; Maxwell Taylor, in PP, III, 669.
37. U. S. involvement dates back to the export of Diem from the United States to Vietnam in 1954, and his forcible imposition as a "leader" of the southern part of the country, in a context where U. S. officials readily admitted that the great majority of South Vietnamese supported Ho Chi Minh and that Diem lacked an indigenous base of support.
38. We saw in chapter 3 that in EI Salvador, too, while it was admitted by the media that the population wanted peace above all else, the elections under U. S. auspices-again, held only after the ground had been cleared by mass killing for reasons that the media never confronted or tried to explain-produced governments dedicated to military victory.
39. Walter LaFeber, in Williams et al. , America in Vietnam, p. 236, with the text of the resolution.
372 NOTES TO PAGES 11$3-11$1$
N UT I! ~ TU ('Au I! S lilli-19? 373
40. PP, 715-16, Stevenson's speech before the UN Security Council, May 21, 1964. See FRS, II4f. , for documentation on the U. S. concept of "aggression. " 41. Bernard Fall, "Vietcong-The Unseen Enemy in Vietnam," New Society (London), April 22, 1965, reprinted in Bernard B. Fall and Marcus G. Raskin, eds. , The Viet-Nam Reader (New York: Vintage, 1965). See note 9.
42. Bernard Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York: Doubleday, 1967). 43. Samuel Huntington, Foreign Affairs (July 1968).
44. Paul Quinn-Judge reports that deaths from 1965 on in Vietnam alone may have passed three million (Far Eastern Economic Review, Oct. II, 1984). A standard Western estimate is about 500,000 killed in the U. S. -backed French war. Hundreds of thousands more were killed in South Vietnam before 1965, in Laos, and in Cambodia.
45. According to congressional sources that cite unpublished studies of the Congressional Research Service, which are alleged to give the figure $84. 5 million, in fiscal-year 1987 dollars, from FY 1980 through FY 1986. We return to this matter in the next chapter.
46. See Charles Kadushin, The American Intellectual Elite (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). This study was based on lengthy interviews taken in May 1970, after the Cambodia invasion, when public opposition to the war reached its highest peak. Virtually all of those interviewed were "doves," some active in opposition to the war. Virtually none opposed the war on the principled grounds of opposition to aggression (called "ideological grounds" by the au- thor) that all would have adopted had they been asked about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
47. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 30, 1987.
48. Charles Mohr, quoting a "South Vietnamese official" (New York Times, Oct. 24, 1966). One of the authors (Herman) published in 1971 a compilation of quotations, many from Saigon generals and other officials, on the need for time because of their lack of indigenous support, which made political compe- tition intolerable. See "Free Choice or Subjugation," American Report, May 7, 1971.
49. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 89, 60-61; on the secret record revealed in the Pentagon Papers, see FRS, pp. 104-5.
50. See FRS, pp. 10of.
51. March 13, 1964; Kahin, Intervention, pp. 91, 208.
52. Elterman, Circle of Deception, reviewing stories from May 1955 through July 1956; Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 182f. .
53. Susan Welch, "The American Press and Indochina," in Richard L. Merritt, ed. , Communications in International Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). Only the isolationist Chicago Tribune was opposed to U. S. inter- vention and challenged administration assumptions, in her sample.
54. Fall, "Vietcong-The Unseen Enemy," cites as credible the figure 66,000 killed between 1957 and 1961. Gabriel Kolko gives the figure of 12,000 killed as a "conservative" estimate for 1955-57, with 40,000 political prisoners, reach- ing 150,000 by 1961-5? ,000, according to the government (Anatomy ofa War, p. 89)?
55. "Losung fUr Vietnam," Neues Forum (August/September 1969); see our Political Economy ofHuman Rights (Boston: South End Press, 1979; hereafter PEHR), 1,3? 2,422.
56. See, among others, U. S. government specialist Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, and particularly Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), the major study of the period preceding the outright U. S. invasion, by a U. S. military adviser with extensive access to U. S. and Saigon intelligence as well as direct evidence.
57? "The Situation and Tasks for 1959," from the Race document collection cited by Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam, and th; Paris Agreement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 281.
58. Race, War Comes to Long An. Essentially the same picture is presented- despairingly-in Pike's 1966 study.
59. New York Times, September 15, 1969.
60. Kahin, Intervention, p. 208; chapters 8, 9.
61. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 183f. William Bundy, January 21, 1970, cited by Kahin, p. 183.
62. Lyndon Johnson, March 20, 1964; Maxwell Taylor, November 27, 1964. See FRS, pp. 127f. , for documentation and more extensive discussion based on the Pentagon Papers record.
63? Kahin, Intervention, pp. 238, 241, 245.
64? For references and further discussion, see FRS, pp. 11of. See also Wallace
J. Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964-68 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
65? E. W. Kenworthy, New York Times, November 17, 1961, reporting President Kennedy's decisions; Kenworthy, New York Times, May 10, 1961, reporting Lyndon Johnson's mission to Asia; Hallin, "Uncensored War'~ pp. 31, 53. 66. Robert Trumbull, February 18, 1962; Hanson Baldwin, September 16, 1962, May 13, 1961; Tom Wicker, February II, 1965; David Halberstam, January 20,
1963, March II, 1963; Homer Bigart, April I, 15, 1962. Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 51-56, 84.
67. Kahin, Intervention, p. 142.
68. James Reston, New York Times, April 25, 1965; Peter Jennings, ABC-TV, March 8, 1966; Jack Perkins, NBC-TV, January II, 1966; Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 89, 91, 229, 137, 140, 141.
69. Kahin, Intervention, p. 287.
70. For an extensive collection of press reports, see Seymour Melman, ed. , In the Name ofAmerica (Annandale, Va. : Turnpike Press, 1968). For analysis of the material available at the time, see Edward S. Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1970).
71. New York Times, May 6, 1972.
72. Takashi Oka, Christian Science Monitor, December 4,1965; Bernard Fall, "Vietnam Blitz," New Republic, October 9, 1965.
73. Sidney Hook, "Lord Russell and the War Crimes 'Trial,' " New Leader, October 24, 1966.
74. See AWWA, PP. 98f.
75? "Truck versus Dam," Christian Science Monitor, September 5, 1967.
76. Henry Kamm, New York Times, November 15, 1969; New York Times, April 6, 1971. See FRS, pp. 225f. , for more details.
77. E. g. , Amando Doronila, "Hanoi Food Output Held Target of U. S. Bomb- ers," AP, Christian Science Monitor, September 8, 1967, three days after Joseph Harsch's philosophical reflections just cited.
374 NOTES TO PAGES 196-209
NOTES TO PAGES 209-218 375
78. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 338f. , 384, 400, on these perceived risks. 79. See FRS, pp. 4f. , 70ff.
, for documentation from the official record.
80. Seymour Hersh, My Lai Four (New York: Random House, 1970); Hersh, Cover-up (New York: Random House, 1972); and Hersh, New York Times, June 5, 1972, on My Khe. FRS, pp. 251, xx.
81. Henry Kamm, "New Drive Begins in Area of Mylai," New York Times, April I, 1971; Martin Teitel, "Again, the Suffering of Mylai," New York Times, June 7, 1972; see above, p. 196.
82. FRS, p. 222.
83. Cited in PEHR I, 316f. , from Buckley's unpublished notes provided to the authors. See pp. 313f. on Operation Speedy Express; and our review of Guenter Lewy, note 33, on his falsification and apologetics for this and other atrocities. 84. "Five years later, My Lai is a no man's town, silent and unsafe," AP, New
York Times, March 16, 1973; our emphasis.
85. Edward Jay Epstein, "The War in Vietnam: What Happened v~. Wh~tW,e Saw," TV Guide, September 29, October 6, October 13, 1973; repnnted In his Between Fact and Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1975)?
86. The character of the bombing of North Vietnam is denied by apologists- notoriously, the respected "scholar" Guenter Lewy, who proves that it was directed solely at military targets on the grounds that the U. S. government says so, discounting eyewitness reports from a wide range of sources; see our review, cited in note 33, for a few examples.
87. Hallin, "Uncensored War, " pp. IIO, 161-62; Johnson cited in Herring, A mer-
ica's Longest War, p. 204, from Roger Morris, An Uncertain Greatness.
88. Ibid. , pp. 201-3. On the elections, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U. S. -Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and EI Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984), and chapter 3, above.
89. CBS-TV August 23, 1965; our emphasis. Hallin, pp. II8, 130-41.
90. Kevin Buckley; see PEHR, I, 313f. , for more details on this major war crime. Hallin points out that the delta looked like a wilderness because "it was
devastated by B-52 strikes in the late 1960s. " 91. Hallin, pp. 172, 143?
92. Ibid. , pp. 148-58.
93. Ibid. , pp. 209-10?
94. PP, II, 668-69, 653. See Pike, Viet Cong; PP, II, III; and for detailed discussion, Kahin, Intervention.
95. PP, III, 150; Kahin, Intervention, p. 205.
96. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f. ; Smith, International History, II, 280.
97. Smith, International History, II, 277, 280; Kahin, Intervention, pp. 219f. 98. Hallin, "Uncensored War," pp. 19, 16, 20, 7of.
99. See Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 274ff. , and Circle of Deception, chapter 6, for detailed documentation and analysis.
100. Time, cover story, August 14; Newsweek, August 17, 24; U. S. News &
World Report, August 17; cited with discussion by Elterman.
101. Hallin, "Uncensored War," p. 21.
102. New Statesman, August 7, 14; National Guardian, August 8, 15 (three articles), 22; I. F. Stone's Week{y, August 10, 24, September 7; cited with discus- sion by Elterman, who notes also that the New Republic accepted the U. S.
government version with no question, although with some pessimism about the prospects, echoed in The Nation.
103. Pp, III, 107.
104. PP, 111,531, 207.
105. James Reston, New York Times, February 26, 1965.
106. Braestrup, Big Story,- see section I, note I; hereafter cited with volume and page number only. Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post Magazine, January 29, 1978; Oberdorfer is the author of Tet! (New York: Doubleday, 1971), praised as a "fine" study (I, xiii). Diamond, New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1977; a journalist, he headed the News Study Group in the MIT Political Science department. Roche, see note 5. Mohr, "Hawks and Doves Refight Tet Offensive at Symposium," New York Times, February 27, 1978; Smith, "Read- ing History: The Vietnam War," History Today (October 1984).
107. Hening, America's Longest War, pp. 200-201.
108. On the record of Freedom House in service to the state and in opposition to democracy, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appendix I, a small fragment of a record that merits more detailed exposure.
109. For additional evidence and discussion, see the review in Race & Class and More, from which we will draw extensively, particularly in appendix 3, and Porter's review, both cited in note I, above.
IIO. Thies, When Governments Collide, p. 201. This analysis, familiar in the scholarly literature, is quite different from Braestrup's conclusions, which, as Porter comments, he attributes to a consensus of historians without a single reference. Porter adds that "few independent historians" would endorse Braestrup's conclusions or his analysis of Communist objectives, quoting CIA analyst Patrick McGarvey and others. See his A Peace Denied, pp. 67f. , for further discussion of these issues.
III. New York Times, February 20, April 4, 1968. On internal U. S. government assessments, see below, and Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, p. 329. Kolko goes on to describe how these assessments underestimated the success of U. S. terror in decimating the NLF infrastructure in rural areas, and were thus overly "pessimistic. " Note that oy virtue of these conclusions, Kolko counts as "opti- mistic" by Freedom House logic, that is, supportive of U. S. goals. In fact, quite the opposite is true, still another illustration of the absurdity of the Freedom House assumptions-or, more accurately, of their blind adherence to the doctrines of state propaganda, reaching to the way in which the issues are
initially framed.
II2. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 189. Hoopes quoted from his Limits of Intervention (New York: McKay, 1969), p. 145, by Herring and Thies.
II3. PP, IV, 548, 558. April USG study cited by Porter, review of Big Story. McNamara, Statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jan. 22, 1968 (II, 20).
II4. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 386f.
lI5. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 204.
II6. Braestrup, Big Story, I, 671fI. ; Burns W. Roper in Big Story, I, chapter 14. II7. For serious interpretations of the basis for the shift of government policy, putting Freedom House fantasies aside, see Herbert Schandler, The Unmaking of a President (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Thies, When Governments Col/ide,' Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, noting particularly the crucial
376 NOTES TO PAGES 218-224
NOTES TO PAGES 225-237 377
issue of the perceived economic crisis resulting from the costs of the war. 1I8. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 421ff. , for discussion of these important events.
1I9. Oberdorfer, Tet! ,' Porter, A Peace Denied, p. 66. On this forgotten massa- cre, and the various attempts to shift attention to the massacre carried out by the retreating NLF forces, see our PEHR, I, 345ff. , and sources cited, particu- larly Gareth Porter, "The 1968 'Hue Massacre,' "Congressional Record, Febru- ary 19, 1975, pp. S2189-94," and Porter's review of Big Story. Porter notes that Braestrup's estimate of destruction in Hue is far below that of US AID, which estimated in April that 77 percent of Hue's buildings wt:re "seriously dam- aged" or totally destroyed.
120. Kolko, Anatomy of a War, p. 309.
121. PP, IV, 539. On third-country forces, introduced well before the first sighting of a battalion of North Vietnamese regulars in the South, see Kahin, Intervention, pp. 333f. Korean mercenaries began to arrive in January 1965, while Taiwanese soldiers had reached "several hundred" by mid-1964, in addition to "a considerable number of soldiers seconded from Chiang Kai- shek's army on Taiwan," possibly as early as 1959 but certainly under the Kennedy administration, often disguised as members of the Nung Chinese ethnic minority in Vietnam and employed for sabotage missions in the North as well as fighting in the South. For MeNamara's estimate, see his statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, January 22, 1968; excerpts in Big Story, II, 14ff.
122. Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, February 8, 1968; Lee Lescaze, Washington Post, February 6, 1968; in Big Story, II, 1I6ff.
123. New York Times, April 4, 1968. See appendix 3 for similar comments from news reporting.
124. Robert Shaplen, "Letter from Saigon," The New Yorker, March 2, 1968. He estimates the NV A component of the forces engaged at 10 percent of some 50,000 to 60,000. .
125. Jean-Claude Pomonti, Le Monde hebdomadaire, February 4-8, 1968. Pomonti was expelled from the country soon after. The head of the Newsweek Saigon bureau had already been expelled.
126. Charles Mohr, New York Times, February 14, 1968. On Mohr, see Big Story, I, 718.
127. CBS-TV, February 14, 1968, Hallin, "Uncensored War," 171; Big Story, I, 158.
128. We return in appendix 3 to the evidence that Braestrup presents, compar- ing the facts with his rendition of them, including Cronkite's reports.
129. Boston Globe, February 24, 1968.
130. See note 1I8, above.
131. Marc Riboud, Le Monde, April 13, 1968; Newsweek, February 19 (banned from Saigon), March 30; "CBS-TV Morning News," February 12, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 274; John Lengel, AP, February 10, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 269. Such a psychological warfare program was indeed conducted, although not recognized as such by the media; see note 1I9 above and Appendix 3.