No More Learning

. "H6
Faced with this thorough refutation of one essential component of their thesis, without which the thesis loses aU significance even if the residue were tenable, the Freedom House analysts retreat to the posi- tion that although the public was unaffected by the perverse behavior of the media, there was an effect "on the nation's 'leadership segment'" (Burns)-a safer claim, since, as they concede, no data are available. The director of the Freedom House study, Leonard Sussman, con- cludes that "the Tet offensive, as portrayed in the media, appeared to have had a far greater effect on political Washington and the Adminis- tration itself than on the U. S. population's sentiment on the war" (1, xxxiv). The media failures, in short, left the public unaffected or even more supportive of the war while they misled the government-along with presidential adviser Clark Clifford, the "Wise Men" from the corporate, political, and military elites including fotmer top-level mili- tary commanders, and such media addicts as Dean Acheson, Henry Cabot Lodge, McGeorge Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Robert Murphy, etc. We are asked to believe that their decision to move toward disengage- ment in a situation that they perceived as one of stalemate was based not on military briefings, intelligence reports, and all the information available at the highest level to official Washington, but on watching the evening news with Walter Cronkite. w
In short, we can dismiss out of hand the second component of the Freedom House thesis, the component that had dramatic impact and continuing influence within the post-Vietnam "right turn" among elites and that has set the agenda for subsequent discussion about (he "advet- sarial stance" of the media and its grim consequences. We are left with the conclusion that the media were either irrelevant, or that they con- tinued to operate within the general confines of the approved ideologi- cal system, thus refuting the first ~omponent of the thesis as well. All that remains of the Freedom House story is the possibility that the media were incompetent (even malevolent). but ineffectual. Notice that
THE l"'DOCHINA WARS (I): VIET"'AM 219
the Freedom House thesis here faces the same "logical problem" noted earlier with regard to the charges concerning television: if television is as influential as claimed) then the evidence shows that through 1967 it "encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war. "
To evaluate the remaining shreds of the Freedom House thesis) let us continue with the record of the T et offensive, now asking whether the media did in fact distort it in their zealous-although utterly inef- fectual---efforts to undermine authority.
With lavish use of firepower, U. S. forces succeeded in regaining control of the towns and cities. The city of Hue, which had been conquered from its own population by GVN troops with American assistance several months earlier in a desperate U. S. effort to prevent the growth of popular movements calling for democracy and a nego- tiated political settlement,liS was 80 percent destroyed by bombing and shelling, which left 2,000 civilians buried in the "smashed ruins," ac- cording to U. S. Air Force Undersecretary Townsend Hoopes; the ma- rines listed "Communist losses" at over 5,000, while Hoopes states that a "sizable part" of the Communist force of 1)000 men who captured the city escaped) allowing a determination of who constituted the "Com- munist losses. " U. S. AID in May estimated that some 4,000 civilians were left dead in the ruins of the city, most of them victims of U. S. firepower. 119
In the Mekong Delta, "Artillery and air strikes leveled half of My Tho) a city of 80,000, and the provincial capital of Ben Tre {Kien Hoa Province, later devastated in the post-Tet terror campaign; see p. 204], with 140,000 inhabitants, was decimated with the justification, as an American colonel put it in one of the most wideJy quoted statements of the war, 'We had to destroy the town to save it. ' "120 The U. S. command conceded that "the enemy" were overwhelmingly NLF, not North Vietnamese; killed and captured outnumbered captured weap- ons by a factor of five, an indication of who "the enemy" really were. Secretary of Defense MeNamara estimated NVA forces at 50,000 to
55,000 at the end 0? 1967, mostly in northern regions, with some 10,000 troops placed in Viet Cong combat units; the total roughly matches third-country forces, mostly Korean mercenaries, mobilized by the United States as part of its invasion of South Vietnam, and barely 10 percent of the U. S. forces of over half a million men, even excluding the massive forces engaged in the attack against Viefnam and Laos from the sea and from U. S. sanctuaries from Thailand to the Philippines and Guam, employing means of destruction that dwarfed all else in Indo-
china. 121
As noted earlier, the Tet offensive not only reduced Washington to
220 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
gloomy despair and convinced U. S. elites that there was no realistic hope of a military victory in Vietnam at a cost acceptable to the United States, but also changed the character of media reporting and commen- tary, which mirrored the changes in elite opinion. On the ground, American correspondents were able to witness the war at first hand, gaining a view rather different from the sanitized and edited version presented under the control of the American military command. Media commentary at home reflected elite opinion in recognizing that the optimistic forecasts that had been relayed from Washington with little skepticism were inaccurate, and that a long and bitter war lay ahead.
But on-the-scene reporting and domestic commentary never veered from the framework of the state propaganda system. In reporting the fighting in Ben Tre and My Tho in the Delta, for example, the press observed that American infantry participated while the towns were blasted by American bombers, helicopter gunships, navy patrol boats, and artillery to root out the Viet Cong-that is, the South Vietnamese guerrillas who "were probably living with the people," according to an American officer quoted by Bernard Weinraub. Nonetheless, the news reports speak of the perceived need to "blast the city" with jets and helicopter gunships, particularly the poorer and most crowded sections, <<to save other sections of the city and the lives of thousands of peo- pIe . . . " (Lee Lescaze)-people whose lives were threatened not by the southern NLF guerrillas living among them but by the U. S. forces "defending" them from the NLF. Because of Tet, Weinraub explains, "the protection of Ben Tre waS limited," and it was necessary to bring in troops from the U. S. Ninth Infantry Division by helicopter, and to carry out "bombing raids and fire by helicopter gunships and artillery" to "protect" Ben Tre, which "has long been a stronghold of the Viet- cong" and is "sometimes considered a Vietcong rest and recreation area," while surrounding hamlets "thought to be controlled by the Vietcong have been razed by allied bombing and artillery attacks and fire from armed helicopters. " In Ben Tre itself, "the market place is rubble and near the gutted homes nearby women in shawls sit in the noon heat and mourn with loud groans," while "My Tho still smells of death," with halfthe homes destroyed-thanks to the effective "protec- tion" the population received from their American defenders. lZ2
Throughout, it is taken for granted that the forces armed, trained, and supplied by the only foreign element in the delta are "the South Vietnamese," not the South Vietnamese guerrillas living among the population in their "Vietcong strongholds," from whom the United States is "protecting" the population by ferocious bombardment of civilian areas.
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I); VIETNAM 221
Recall that we are now evaluating the remaining component of the Freedom House thesis: that the media were suppressing the American victory in their antiestablishment zeal. In fact, they were reporting the story accurately in a narrow sense, but completely within the frame- work of the government propaganda system-never questioned, in a shameful display of media servility. We may imagine what the reaction would be to a comparable performance on the part of the Nazi or Soviet press. Braestrup's final comment that "a free society deserves better"
of its media (I, 728) is aCCurate enough, although not quite in the sense intended in the Freedom House study.
As throughout the war, the standpoint of the media continued to reflect the perceptions and attitudes of the American military; for ex- ample, an American official who observed: "What the Vietcong did was occupy the hamlets we pacified just for the purpose of having the allies move in and bomb them. By their presence, the hamlets were de- stroyed. "123 The same New York Times report from Binh Dinh Prov- ince-the "showcase" province for pacification-indicates this had been going on, unreported, well before the Tet offensive: "The enemy moves in December-which several military men called a 'softening up' for the offensive-resulted in a wave of allied air strikes on villages. Hundreds of homes were destroyed. "
The U. S. military "resistance"-to borrow the Freedom House ter- minology-took the same form elsewhere. Robert Shaplen reported from the scene that in Saigon,
A dozen separate areas, comprising perhaps sixty or seventy blocks, had been totally burned out. These were almost all resi- dential areas. . . . Most of the damage was the result of rocket attacks by American armed helicopters or other planes, though some of it had been caused by artillery or ground fighting. . . . A modern ten-million-dollar textile plant, containing forty thousand spindles, was entirely destroyed by bombs because it was sus- pected of being a Vietcong hideout. 124
Le Monde correspondent Jean-Claude Pomonti observed that
in the popular suburbs, the Front [NLF] has proven that the only way to eliminate its control is through systematic destruction. To dislodge it, the air force had to level many residential areas. Flee- ing the bombardments, tens of thousands of refugees have poured into the center of the city. us
222 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Charles Mohr, whom Freedom House singles out for "perhaps the consistently best reporting from Vietnam," reported that "in towns such as Hue, Vinhlong, Bentre and Mytho appalling destruction was wrought when encircled allied forces took the decision to destroy the attacking Vietcong forces by destroying the places they had occupied. " He quotes an American official in Saigon as stating: "The Government won the recent battles, but it is important to consider how they won. At first the Vietcong had won and held everything in some towns except the American military compound and a South Vietnamese position. "126 By "the Government," he means the reader to understand the GVN, who "won" thanks to U. S. firepower and troops.
As in this example, the U. S. government claim that the Tet offensive was a military defeat for the Communists was widely reported, although the U. S. government official's perception of an initial Viet Cong victory
goes well beyond the typical media accounts in the crime of "pessi- mism. " "Journalists generally accepted the official claim that Tet was a military defeat for the North Vietnamese and NLF," Daniel Hallin concludes in his review of the press and television; for example, Walter Cronkite, who said at once over CB8---0n February 14-that "first, and simplest, the Vietcong suffered a military defeat. "127 Clear and forth- right.
These facts do not comport well with what remains of the Freedom House thesis: the charge that until late February, the media portrayed the enemy's defeat as "a defeat for the allies" in "clamourous shouts," only conceding from late February in a "whisper" that this was not quite accmate, television being the worst offender, with Walter Cron- kite the arch-criminal. 128 It was this gross incompetence or malevolence that illustrates most dramatically the "mindless readiness . . . to believe the worst of the government or of authority in general. " In the real world, the facts were quite the opposite, and the last remnants of the Freedom House thesis thus disappear, apart from the charge, to be evaluated in the appendix, that the reporting was technically in-
competent.
Some would contend that the issue of "how they won," which con-
cerned the American official cited earlier, is as important as "who won" in evaluating the significance of the Tet offensive. This idea never penetrated the minds of Braestrup or his Freedom House as- sociates, however, at the time or in their study. Consider political scientist Milton Sacks, a specialist on Vietnam and a GVN adviser, thanked for "'Providing historical perspective" for the Freedom House Study (I, xxiii). In February 1968, he wrote, with no further comment: i
THE II'DOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 223
In conventional terms, it now seems clear that the Communists have suffered a military defeat in their Tet offensive. They have expended the lives of thousands of their soldiers without securing a single province or district town of significance. 129
U. S. officials, in contrast, were impressed with the fact that the NLF and NVA occupied vast areas previously thought to be "controlled," wreaked havoc with the pacification program, and were dislodged only by a further and still more violent U. S. attack on the civil society of South Vietnam. It was feared that it might not be an easy task to convince the populace that the Communists were to blame for the slaughter and destruction by U. S. forces. The problem, as reponed from Hue by Marc Riboud of Le Monde in April, was that the popula- tion appeared to compare ARVN behavior unfavorably with that of the NVA or NLF, while the deepest bitterness and resentment was directed against the Americans, whose "blind and systematic bombardment" had turned Hue into "an assassinated city"; this reaction may have also been in part a residue of the deep bitterness and resentment left by the U. S. -backed ARVN conquest of Hue a few months earlier. I3? An IVS worker quoted in Newsweek said: "As difficult as this may be to believe, not a single Vietnamese I have met in Saigon or in the Delta blames the Viet Cong for the events of the past two weeks," and in its last issue
of the Tet period, Newsweek reported from Hue, with the same surprise at this inexplicable reaction, that
Curiously, moreover, few of [the population] point an accusing finger at the North Vietnamese. "When the NVA were here," said one student, "they were polite and well-disciplined, totally dif- ferent from the government troops, the Americans, or even the Vie. tcong. "
"The hope is that the Vietnamese people will blame the communists rarher than the Americans for whatever damage is being done," Don Webster reported from Hue on February 12 in the midst of the recon- quest of the city by the U. S. Marines. Two days earlier, John Lengel of AP wrote rhat
It is still impossible to gauge the breadth of the damage. . . . But few seasoned observers see the devastation of Hue backfiring on the communists. They see as the greatest hope a massive and instant program of restoration underlined by a careful psychologi- cal warfare program pinning the blame on the communists. I31
224 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
Braestrup places the word "devastation" in italics as an illustration of the unfairness and anti-American bias of the media; comment seems superfluous.
While the U. S. media rarely strayed from the framework of the state propaganda system, others were unconstrained by these limits: for ex- ample, the Le Monde correspondents cited; or British photo-journalist Philip Jones Griffiths, who concluded from his observations on the scene that the thousands of civilian victims of the reconquest of Hue "were killed by the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen," and then designated "as the victims of a Communist massa- cre. "132
T o comprehend fully the nature of the Freedom House charges, we may imagine how the inquiry urged by John Roche might proceed. Who else is implicated in the terrible misdeeds that Freedom House per- ceives? General Westmoreland and the U. S. command in Saigon must surely be placed on the docket because of their estimates of early VC successes (see appendix 3 for further examples), along with William Bundy, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, given his extreme pessimism. He thought that the Tet offensive was "shattering to the South, especially in the area of pacification," concluding for a time that "the South Vietnamese were through," "they've had it"- where "South Vietnamese" excludes the South Vietnamese defending their country from a U. S. invasion, as usuaL These conclusions, which do conform to the Freedom House parody of the media, were based not on the press but on "reports from people in the field out in Vietnam,"
so presumably they too are implicated (I, 625)- Similarly, Lyndon John- son was guilty, since he seemed "to some degree 'psychologically de- feated' by the threat to Khe Sanh and the onslaught on the cities of Vietnam," so Braestrup concludes (I, 626, 630). The same is true of Johnson's civilian advisers, given the "air of gloom" among them and the "Battle of Bull Run" mood, and the author of the official U. S. government military-historical summary, cited earlier; and Dean Ache- son and other "Wise Men" who urged a shift of course because of the same "undue pessimism" for which the media are condemned by Free- dom House. Also Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who reported that the offensive had "disrupted the pacification effort for the time being," and the pacification adviser who reported that in his "showcase" area, "pacification does not exist" (II, 184-86).
Further candidates for investigation appear in the Pentagon Papers- for example, General Wheeler, who summarized the situation in the following terms to the president on February 27, just as Walter Cron- kite was speculating about "stalemate," arousing Freedom House ire:
tHE INDOCHINA WAilS (I): VIEtNAM 225
The enemy is operating with relative freedom in the countryside, probably recruiting heavily and no doubt infiltrating NVA units and personnel. His recovery is likely to be rapid; his supplies are adequate; and he is trying to maintain the momentum of his winter-spring offensive. . . . ARVN is now in a defensive posture around towns and cities and there is concern about how well they will bear up under sustained pressure. The initial attack nearly succeeded in a dozen places, and defeat in these places was only averted by the timely reaction of US forces. In shott, it was a very near thing. There is no doubt that the RD Program [pacification] has suffered a severe set back. . . . To a large extent the VC now control the countryside. . . . MACV estimates that US forces will be required in a number of places to assist and encourage the Vietnamese Army to leave the cities and towns and reenter the country. This is especially true in the Delta.
The media reports that Braestrup derides were rarely as "pessimistic" as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose summary of the situation led the president to order "the initiation of a complete and searching reassessment of the entire U. S. strategy and commitment in South Vietnam," the Pentagon Papers analyst reports. 03
The CIA must also be investigated for contributing to the decline of "free institutions" by its pessimism. A CIA paper of March I, presuma- bly uninfluenced by Walter Cronkite, expressed grave doubts about the GVN and ARVN and predicted that they might cease "effective func- tioning in parts of the country," so that "virtually the entire burden of the war would fall on US forces. " Like Cronkite a few days earlier, they expected "no better than a standoff" in the coming ten months. Penta- gon systems analysis concluded that the offensive "appears to have killed the [pacification} program once and for all," drawing the conclu- sion that Braestrup falsely attributes to the media (see appendix 3), and estimated that "our control of the countryside and the defense of the urban areas is now ar pre-August 1965 levels. " Ir was because of rhis serious situation-not perceived American successes, as Braestrup inti- mates-thar they recommended what was later to be called "Vietnami-
zation/'
The civilian analysrs in the Pentagon must be charged not only with
undue pessimism, but also wirh some of the other crimes of the press. For example, they referred to the famous statement that we are de- stroying Sourh Vietnam in order to save it; citation of this statement is the target of much Braestrup scorn. We must also include Colonel Herbert Schandler, on whom Braestrup relies for his account of the
226 MANUFACTURING COSSENT
Wheeler-Westmoreland request for additional troops. He was, Braest- rup says, the anonymous author of the Pentagon Papers section on this material, and here he described as "a startlingly accurate account" a New York Times article by Neil Sheehan and Hedrick Smith which, Braestrup claims, was a major example of "distorted and incomplete" reporting (1, 581, 613). The authors of the "Epilogue" to the Pentagon Papers must also be included in the indictment, given their pessimistic post-Tet assessment of "the price for military victory" and the "illu- sory" nature of claimed progress_
The category of people who were not threatening "free institutions" by the standards of Freedom House is small indeed, a fact that some may find suggestive.
It is significant that the major criticism of the media in the Freedom House study is that they were too "pessimistic. " Strikingly absent is the obvious standard of comparison: the internal reports from the field and analysis by intelligence and official Washington-which were, if any- thing, even more pessimistic. The logic of the Freedom House brief against the media is highly revealing. In their view. the media in a free society must not only accept without question the principles ofthe state doctrinal system, as the media did throughout {a fact that Freedom House never addresses, and apparently cannot perceive), but must do so with a degree of enthusiasm and optimism that exceeds that of U. S. intelligence, the military command. Johnson's "Wise Men," and other leading figures in the military, political, and corporate world who draw their information from a full range of government sources. It is an interesting conception of a "free society. "
We might ask how the Freedom House conception of a free press in a free society would be applied by Soviet commissars, let us say, to the case of the mass circulation weekly Ogonyo~ which published a series of long articles that presented a "bleak picture" of the war in Afghanis- tan, depicting it "in stark terms," speaking of "poor morale and deser- tion" among Afghan units and "tough fighting between elite Soviet troops and Afghan guerrillas," and implying that "large areas of Afg- hanistan are under guerrilla control. " The articles also give "a broad hint that drug use is common among Russian troops in Afghanistan," and they include extracts from a helicopter pilot's journal describing "the sight and smell of colleagues' chan-ed bodies" and implying that "helicopter losses are high" after the receipt of sophisticated Western weaponry by the guerrillas, terrorists who finance themselves by pro- ducing drugs for the international market (charges verified by Western observers, incidentally). But it would be inhumane for the USSR simply to withdraw without guarantees for the population, because "a Soviet
THE INDOCHI~A W ARS (I): VIETNAM 227
withdrawal would lead to nationwide internecine warfare," as Afghans who are quoted anticipate. The article does not simply mimic standard U. S. media fare, as these excerpts indicate. Thus it describes an attack on Soviet villages by Afghan guerrillas; one can imagine the U. S. reac- tion had there been a Viet Cong attack on villages in Texas. But by Freedom House standards, it is plain that the editors merit severe censure for their "adversarial stance," "pessimism," and "volatile styles," "always with the dark possibility that, if the managers do not themselves take action, then outsiders [in the government] will seek to apply remedies of their own. "U4 And, in fact, in]anuary 1988, General Dimitri T. Yakov, the Soviet defense minister, applied Freedom House and Braestrup principles to the "adversarial" Soviet press, sharply criticizing articles in Ogonyok and Literaturnaya Gazeta for reporting on the Afghan war in ways that undermined public confidence in the Soviet army and played into the hands of the West. 135
In the light of the evidence presented in the Freedom House study, and ofmuch that is ignored, the following conclusions seem reasonable. During the Tet offensive and its aftermath, media performance was creditable, sometimes very highly so, in a narrow sense. More broadly, this reporting was highly deceptive in that it was framed within the unchallenged and unrecognized doctrines of the state propaganda sys- tem, which impose a severe distortion. Media reports compare favora- bly in accuracy with those available to official Washington at the highest level from internal sources, although they were regularly less alarmist, perhaps because the media tended to give credence to official state- ments and were unaware of the internal assessments. The reports from the scene led media commentators to draw approximately the same conclusions as Johnson's high-level advisers. The manner in which the media covered the events had little effect on public opinion, except perhaps to enhance its aggressiveness and, of course, to instill ever more deeply the basic and unexamined tenets of the propaganda system.
As we shall see in appendix 3, a closer examination establishes these conclusions still more firmly, while demonstrating further the utter incompetence-to use the kindest term-of the Freedom House study that has been so influential in the subsequent period.
We have now addressed the argument presented by critics of the media for its alleged "adversarial stance" on their own chosen grounds, the grounds that they select as the strongest for their case. The propa-
ganda model is once again confirmed, thus meeting the most severe test that can be posed. The model is also vindicated by the manner in which Freedom House fulfills its function as a flak machine, attempting to bully the media into a still more thoroughgoing conformity with the
228 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
propaganda requirements of state policy by methods that are a travesty of honest journalism (let alone scholarship}-all, of course, in the interest of "freedom. "
5. 5. 3. The Paris Peace Agreements
The Tet offensive convinced large sectors ofelite opinion that the costs of the U. S. effort were too high. Lyndon Johnson stepped down. In what was termed by the government a "bombing halt," and reported as such, the bombers were shifted from North Vietnamese targets to Laos, where the defenseless rural society of scattered villages in the North was demolished, and later Cambodia, where the same was true on an even more horrendous scale. U. S. forces undertook the violent and destructive post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign in the South, and bombing was intensified to "step up refugee programs deliber- ately aimed at depriving the VC ofa recruiting base," in accordance with the advice ofpacifkation director Robert Komer in April 1967. u6 The Phoenix program was established to destroy the "infrastructure" of the NLF by terror. The burden of ground fighting was shifted to Viet- namese forces supplied and directed by the United States, and U. S. conscripts were withdrawn, a more typical pattern for colonial wars that essentially duplicated the earlier French effort to reconquer Indochina. And the United States finally agreed to pursue the path of a negotiated settlement, although still not relinquishing the aim of preventing the unification o[Vietnam and retaining Indochina, apart from North Viet- nam, within the U. S. global system.
This was not the maximal goal the United States had pursued; thus in the late 1950S the U. S. government still hoped for unification of Vietnam under anti-Communist leadership, and the U. S. client regime always regarded itself as the government of all of Vietnam (GVN = Government of Vietnam), and so declared in the first and unamendable article of its constitution. But by the late 1960s, if not before, control over all Indochina apart from North Vietnam was re- garded as the maximum goal attainable. As we have seen, opportunities for a peaceful diplomatic settlement had long existed, but they had never been pursued because they were regarded as inconsistent with the essential goal: preservation of an "independent" South Vietnam that would be a U. S. client state.
By October 1972, the negotiators in Paris had reached the essential tenns of an agreement: the 9-Point Plan. President Nixon, however, objected to the terms of the agreement, and the Thieu government in
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THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 229
Saigon was completely opposed to them. Nixon's hope was to delay further negotiations until after the November presidential elections, when he would have more leverage. 137 The delay would also permit a vast shipment of arms to the GVN) something that would surely be prohibited by the agreements.
In an effort to pressure Nixon to sign the agreements. the DRV made the terms public on October 26 in a radio broadcast. In a Washington press conference, Kissinger stated that the Radio Hanoi broadcast gave "on the whole a very fair account," then offering the following para- phrase: "As was pointed out by Radio Hanoi, the existing authorities with respect to both internal and external politics would remain in office" in the South. Thus Kissinger sought to insinuate that according to the accurate account on Radio Hanoi, the GVN ("the existing au- thorities") would remain "in office" as the government of the South, and would somehow deal with the other "party," whose status remained mysterious. But "what was pointed out by Radio Hanoi"--correctly, as Kissinger conceded-was something quite different, namely, that "the two present administrations in South Vietnam will remain in existence with their respective domestic and external functions," these being the
GVN and the PRG (based upon the NLF). Having reached agreement, these two parties were then to move toward reunification, to be "carried out step by step through peaceful means," with no external-meaning U. S. -interference.
The differences are crucial. From its earliest days, the war was fought over the question of whether "the South Vietnamese people shall decide themselves the political future of South Vietnam," as the October 9-Point Plan explicitly stipulated must be the case, or whether the United States would enforce the rule of its client regime, the GVN, as the sole legitimate government in the South, in accordance with Kissinger's version of the terms to which he had theoretically agreed, a version that plainly departed radically from the text. us
Kissinger's announcement that "peace is at hand. " designed with the upcoming U. S. presidential elections in mind, was also blatant decep- tion. As his distortion of the essential terms of the agreement clearly revealed, the United States was backing away from the settlement and refusing to implement it. Nixon later explained that "We had to use [Kissinger's press conference} to undercut the North Vietnamese prop- aganda maneuver [namely, making public the terms of the agreement] and to make sure that our version of the agreement was the one that had great public impact. "139 This result was substantially achieved; the media characteristically accepted Kissinger's version with no recogni- tion that it was diametrically opposed to the terms of the 9-Point Plan,
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though the facts were plain to anyone who troubled to look at the readily available public record.
The United States then proceeded with a vast shipment of arms to 1 the GVN while demanding substantial changes in the October agree-
ments. Hanoi, in contrast, pUblicly insisted that the October agreements
be signed. The media adopted the version of events relayed regularly
by Kissinger, depicting him as caught between two irrational adversar- ies, Hanoi and Saigon. The Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Hai- phong followed, causing great damage and also the loss ofseveral dozen B-52S (the exact numbers are contested, but the losses clearly shocked the Pentagon), as well as a highly adverse world reaction, although the media continued to relay the Washington interpretation of what had happened. Thus Stanley Karnow wrote that "evidently" the primary aim of "Nixon's bombings of Hanoi" was "to compel the Nonh Viet- namese to return to negotiations," a curious version of the readily available facts. l40 After the military and political failures of the Christ- mas bombings, the U. S. government then signed the January peace agreements, which were virtually identical to the terms it had rejected the preceding October-and, still more significant, were hardly differ- ent in essentials from the NLF proposals of the early 1960s, which caused such dismay in Washington and compelled the U. S. government to escalate the war so as to prevent a political settlement, thus virtually destroying Indochina, with millions of casualties and three countries utterly devastated-a fact considered of little moment in the West.
The charade that took place in October was reenacted in January. As the agreements were announced on January 24, the White House made an official statement, and Kissinger had a lengthy press confer- ence in which he explained clearly that the United States was planning to reject every essential provision of the accords the administration had been compelled to sign, presenting a version that explicitly violated them at every clUcial point. In yet another astonishing demonstration of servility, the media accepted the Kissinger-White House version unquestioningly, thus guaranteeing that the Vietnamese enemy would appear to be violating the agreements if it adhered to them.
Recall that all of this took place during the period when the media had allegedly reached their peak level of militant opposition to state authority. Let us now briefly inspect this remarkable record.
The Paris Agreements committed "the United States and all other countries [to] respect the independence, sovereignty, unity and territo- rial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam" (article I). Pending reunification of Vietnam, which is to "be carried out step by step through peaceful means . . . and without
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THI! INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 231
foreign interference," tae "military demarcation line" at the 17th paral- lel is to be regarded as "only provisional and not a political or territorial boundary" (article IS). In the South, there are two parallel and equiva- lent "South Vietnamese parties," the GVN and the PRG. This is the central element of the agreements, which proceed to specify in detail the responsibilities and commitments of the two "South Vietnamese parties. " These are to achieve national reconciliation through peaceful means, under conditions of full democratic freedoms, while "Foreign countries shall not impose any political tendency or personality on the South Vietnamese people" and "the United States will not continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Viet- nam" (articles 9C, 4). "The two South Vietnamese parties undertake to respect the cease-fire and maintain peace in South Vietnam, settle all matters of contention through negotiations, and avoid all armed con- flict" (article 10). Furthermore, "the two South Vietnamese parties"
will proceed to "Achieve national reconciliation and concord, end ha- tred and enmity, prohibit all acts of reprisal and discrimination against individuals or organizations that have collaborated with one side or the other," and, in general, "ensure the democratic liberties of the people," which are outlined, along with procedures to ensure the reconcilation undertaken by "the two South Vietnamese parties" (articles II, 12). The agreements committed "the two South Vietnamese parties" not to "ac- cept the introduction of troops, military advisers, and military person- neI including technical military personnel, armaments, munitions, and war material into South Vietnam" and called for a "total withdrawal" of all such personnel within sixty days, while "the two South Viet- namese parties" will settle "The question of Vietnamese armed forces in South Vietnam . . . without foreign interference" (articles 5, 7, 13).
In his January 24 press conference, Kissinger made it dear that the United States maintained the right to provide "civilian technicians serving in certain of the military branches," and as its forces were withdrawn after the signing of the agreements, the United States pro- ceeded to keep or introduce 7,200 "contract civilians" to "handle main- tenance, logistics, and training jobs formerly performed by the U. S. military," many of them "retired military men," under the supervision of a U. S. major-general. 141 The provisions concerning technical per-
sonnel were thus at once nullified, along with the U. S. pledge to refrain from any intervention "in the internal affairs of South Vietnam. "
In a speech of January 23, Nixon announced that the GVN would. be recognized as the "sole legitimate government in South Vietnam," nullifying articles 9c and 4 as well as the basic principle of the agree- ments: that the two parallel and equivalent "South Vietnamese parties"
232 MlI. ! 'ollJF/l. CTUF. J! 'olG CONSENT
are to proceed toward a settlement with no U. S. interference or effort to impose any "political tendency" on the people of South Vietnam. In its "summary of basic elements of the Vietnam agreements" on January 24, the White House announced that "the government of the Republic of (South) Vietnam continues in existence, recognized by the United States, its constitutional structure and leadership intact and un- changed"-the reason for the parentheses being that this "constitu~ tional structure" identifies the GVN as the government of all Vietnam. This "constitutional structure" also outlawed the second of the twO parallel and equivalent parties, along with "pro-communist neutralism" and any form of expression "aimed at spreading Communist policies, slogans and instructions"; and the GVN announced at once that such
"illegal" actions would be suppressed by force, while President Tilleu stated that "this is solely a ceasefire agreement, no more no less. "14z With these declarations, the United States and its client regime thus nullified the central principle of the Paris Agreements, and flatly re- jected the provisions for "the two South Vietnamese parties" to achieve "national reconciliation and concord" by peaceful means without forceful measures or repression.
In short, the United States announced at once, clearly and without equivocation, that it intended to disregard every essential provision of the scrap of paper it was compelled to sign in Paris_
Kissinger attempted to obfuscate the matter in his January 24 press conference, reprinted in full in the New York Times. l4 ) He claimed, falsely, that "we have achieved substantial changes" from the October 9-Point Plan, thus implicitly offering a justification for the Christmas bombings. He stated that "what the civil war has been all about" is "who is the legitimate ruler of South Vietnam" and "is there such a thing as a South Vietnam even temporarily until unification," claiming that the United States had achieved its objectives on these points by virtue of the "specific references to the sovereignty of South Vietnam" and "the right of the South Vietnamese people to self-determination"; and he claimed that the United States had also achieved its goal with regard to the status of the demarcation line.
All of this was blatant deception. The wording of the agreements reflected the DRV-PRG position in all the respects Kissinger men- tioned, while Kissinger's insinuation that the agreements permitted the United States to recognize the GVN as "the legitimate ruler of South Vietnam" is in explicit contradiction to the agreements he had just signed, as is his attempt to create the impression that the "civil war" is "between North and South Vietnam. " The core provision of the Paris Agreements establishes the GVN and the PRG as "the two South
THE I~DOCHINA W ARS (I): VIETNAM 233
Vietnamese parties," parallel and equivalent, to move toward unifica- tion with the North, abrogating the provisional demarcation line, which has no political status. Kissinger was attempting to confuse "sove- reignty of South Vietnam" with "sovereignty within South Vietnam"; the latter is what the war "was aU about" from the outset, and the agreements simply reiterated the position of "the enemy" that this was a matter to be settled by the two South Vietnamese parties without extemal interference, as in the October 9-Point Plan. l44
Just as in October, the purpose of this obfuscation was, in Nixon's words, "to make sure that our version of the agreement was the one that had great public impact. " And again it succeeded. The media-without exception, to our knowledge-accepted the Kissinger-White House version as expressing the contents of the agreements, enabling them to interpret the PRG-DRV insistence on the actual terms of the Paris Agreements as an effort to disrupt them. Thus Joseph Kraft, a liberal dove on these issues, wrote that "Much of the blame goes to the Communists" for the subsequent breakdown of the cease-fire, because "Hanoi has never abandoned the objective of unifying all of Vietnam"; that is, Hanoi has never abandoned its objective of living up to the terms of the Geneva Accords of 1954, now explicitly reiterated in the Paris Agreements ofJanuary 1973. 145 As a dove, he also added that "just as much of the blame goes to President Thieu"-but none, of course,
can be assigned to Washingron. He cites Communist military actions in the South and dispatch of equipment as the major reason for the breakdown of the cease-fire, citing no evidence; as we shall see, the facts reveal quite a different reason.
At the liberal extreme of U. S. opinion, Tom Wicker wrote that
American policy, which never accepted the Geneva agreement. came to insist, instead, that South Vietnam was a legally con- stituted nation being subverted and invaded by another power; and that view is implied even in the documents that finally pro- duced the cease_fire. l46
Wicker adopts Kissinger's version, which is in explicit contradiction to the actual documents; these simply reiterate the long-held position of the NLF and Hanoi with regard to the status of South Vietnam.
In the New Republic, Stanley Karnow wrote that "the Vietcong considers [the PRG] to be a parallel administration," failing to observe that it is not only "the Vietcong," but also the Paris Agreements just signed by the United States government that assign to the PRG a status exactly parallel to that of the GVN. 147 In Newsweek, Stewart Alsop
234 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
proclaimed that if the "marvelously elaborate" Nixon-Kissinger settle- ment "survives more or less intact, we will have won the war"-which would be true, under the Nixon-Kissinger interpretation, although under the evidently irrelevant terms of the Paris Agreements, the United States had abandoned its war aims and accepted the basic proposals of the Vietnamese enemy. Newsweek went on to explain in the same issue that Hanoi has now
accepted the provision that north and south are divided by a sacrosanct demarcation line, thus tacitly acknowledging the legiti- macy of the Saigon regime. . . . Equally vital to the Nixon Ad~ ministration was specific mention of the "sovereignty" of the Saigon government, and on this point, too, the U. s. had its way. Hanoi finally conceded that, in Kissinger's words, "there is an entity called South Vietnam. " In one important sense, the dispute over that question was what the war in Vietnam was all about. 148
Again, utterly and transparently false in every respect, as a comparison with the text just quoted immediately demonstrates, although in accord with Kissinger's deceptive version of the agreements, taken as sac? rosanct by the loyal media.
An honest and independent press would have announced the January agreements with headlines reading: "u. S. Announces Intention to Vio- late the Agreements Signed in Paris. " An informed press would have observed further that the Paris Agreements incorporate the principles rejected by the United States at Geneva twenty years earlier, as well as the essential principles of the NLF program of the early 1960s, which were similar to those advocated by Vietnamese quite generally and constituted the crucial fact that impelled the United States to escalate the war so as to block a political settlement among Vietnamese. The actual press simply adopted Washington's version of the agreements, never mentioning that this version contradicted them in every essential respect and thus guaranteed that the war would go on-as it did, Once again. the contribution of the media was to help implement further violence and suffering by adopting Washington's version of events-in this case, in the face of the fact that this version was, transparently, in flat contradiction to the documents readily at hand. One would have to search assiduously to discover a more blatant example of media subservience to state power.
The aftermath was predictable, predicted in the "alternative press," and similar to earlier occasions when the same factors were operative. As after Geneva 1954, the Communists, who had won a political victory
TH! ': INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 235
(on paper), attempted to pursue "political struggle," while the United States and its GVN client at once turned to military force to overturn the terms of the Paris Agreements. These facts were reported by the more serious journalists on the scene in Vietnam, notably Daniel South- erland, who observed from his extensive investigations that "the Saigon government has been guilty in by far the greatest number of cases of launching offensive operations into territory held by the other side," assuming "that it has the right, despite the cease-fire," to take back territory which it lost in t972," and giving many examples, as did others. I49 The U. S. government informed Congress cheerily that "the GVN has fared weB during the post-cease-fire maneuvering," adding "770 hamlets to the list of those over which it has dominant control" after the agreements-and in violation of them, a fact that passed without notice. The GVN thus added one milliOn people to the areas of its control, while expending sixteen times as much ammunition as the enemy and using the newly provided U. S. equipment, as intended, for massive military operations, including extensive bombardment of PRG areas to prevent refugees from returning to them as provided by the agreements. I50 The media either blamed the Communists, or some- times the GVN as well, but not the United States, which had an- nounced at once its intention to disrupt the agreements and now publicly expressed its pleasure in the military actions that successfully achieved this objective.
When the North Vietnamese finally responded to U. S. -GVN vio- lence, the GVN quickly collapsed, leading to outrage in the U. S. government and media-which still persists-over this dramatic dem- onstration of Communist iniquity, which proves that their intentions all along were to destroy the free and independent government of South Vietnam and to reduce its people to Communist tyranny, thus further entrenching the principle that "Communists cannot be trusted. "
This useful lesson, firmly established by media complicity in trans- parent government deceit, has, not surprisingly, been applied in subse- quent efforts by the U. S. government to gain its ends by violence. One dramatic example was featured in the media in August 1987, when the Central American presidents confounded Washington strategy by adopting a political settlement that undermined the familiar U. S. reli- ance on force to compensate for its political weakness. As part of its immediate efforts to sabotage this agreement, the State Department called the Latin American ambassadors to Washington, where they were presented with "a copy of the 1973 Paris peace agreement that was negotiated to end the U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War," the Wall
Street Journal reported, adding that "the agreement was subsequently
236 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
ignored by North Vietnam. " Thejourna/ explained that this unfortU- nate "Vietnam experience," which proved that agreements with Com- munists are not worth the paper they are printed on, is one factor in administration "skepticism" about the Central American agreement. Copies of the 1973 Paris Agreements were distributed to the envoys "as a case study of how an agreement with ambiguous provisions could be exploited and even ignored by a Communist government," Neil Lewis reported in the lead story in the New York Times, adding: "In violation of the 1973 accord, North Vietnam overran South Vietnam and united the two parts of Vietnam under its banner in 1975. "151 The utility of a carefully crafted historical record, designed by the loyal media to serve the needs of state power, is revealed here with much clarity.
Surveying these events, we reach essentially the same conclusions as before, although once again the performance of the media-at the peak period of their alleged "independence" and "adversarial stance"-goes well beyond the predictions of the propaganda model, exceeding the expected nann of obedience to the state authorities and reaching the level that one finds in totalitarian states. As before, the servility of the media made a significant contribution to ensuring that the slaughter in Indochina would continue and that the U. S. government would be able to exploit its "Vietnam experience," as filtered through the media, for later exercises in international terrorism. The remarkable performance of the media also laid the basis for the postwar interpretation of "what the war was aU about" and why the United States failed to attain its ends, a matter to which we turn in the next section.
5. 6. THE VIETNAM WAR IN RETROSPECT
In April 1975, the war came to an end, and the thirty-year conflict
entered a new phase. Indochina faced the near-insoluble problems of reconstruction in a land that had been reduced to ruin by foreign annies I after a century of colonial oppression. In the United States too, elite
groups faced a problem of reconstructio~but of a different kind. The
problem in the United States was the reconstruction of ideology, the
taming of the domestic population that had lost its faith in the nobility
of intent and the inspiring benevolence of the elites who determine U. S.
policy. It was necessary to overcome what Norman Podhoretz, echoing
Goebbels, calls "the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,"
THE INOOCHlNA WARS (r): VIETNAM 237
the dread "Vietnam syndrome," finally cured by the stirring triumph of U. S. arms in Grenada, so Podhoretz hoped. 1;2 This was part of a larger problem, the "crisis of democracy" perceived by Western elites as the normally passive general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power. 1 5 3 A further task was to prevent recovery in the societies ravaged by the American assault, so that the partial ~'ictory already achie,,'ed by their destruction could be sustained.
As we have seen, through the mid-sixties, the media loyally fulfilled their function of service to state violence, and there was no significant popular opposition to the U. S. attack on Indochina. True, in 1964, the population voted 2 to 1 in favor of the "peace candidate," who was assuring them that we want no wider war while laying the groundwork for the rapid escalation planned for the postelection period, a note- worthy illustration of the character of electoral politics in a society lacking genuine opposition parties and a critical and independent press. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of the ideological institutions for the rapid escalation of U. S. efforts to "defend South Vietnam" from "inter- nal aggression" helped keep the public in line as the U. S. invading army rose to over half-a-miUion men on the ground and appeared to be attaining some success in "grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass," although at "horrendous cost," in the words of pacification chief Robert ("Blowtorch") Komer, later to become a high-ranking official of the Human Rights Administration. 154
By 1967, the popular mood was shifting, and the public was begin- ning to defy the hawk-dove consensus of elites for whom the issues were limited to tactics and expedience, a matter of much government concern. Defense Secretary McNamara warned the president, in secret, in May 1967 that expansion of the American war might "polarize opin- ion to the extent that 'doves' in the US will get out of hand-massive refusals to serve, or to fight, or to cooperate, or worse? "155 At the time of the Tet offensive, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were concerned with "our
capacity to meet the possibility of widespread civil disorder in the months ahead"; in considering further troop deployments, they took care to ensure that "sufficient forces are stili available for civil disorder control," including "National Guard forces deployed under State or Federal control" and U. S. Army troops. The Pentagon warned further that a request for more troops might lead to "increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities," running the risk of "provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.