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questions hitherto excluded. Expressible opinion in the media broadened to accommodate these judgments, but the righteousness of the cause and nobility of intent were rarely subject to question. Rather, editorials explained that the “idealistic motives” of “the political and military commands” who “conceive[d] their role quite honestly as that of liberators and allies in the cause of freedom . . . had little chance to prevail against local leaders skilled in the art of manipulating their foreign protectors.”11 “Our Vietnamese” were too corrupt and we were too weak and too naive to resist their manipulations, while “their Vietnamese” were too wily and vicious. How could American idealism cope with such unfavorable conditions? At the war’s end, the liberal media could voice the lament that “the high hopes and wishful idealism with which the American nation had been born . . . had been chastened by the failure of America to work its will in Indochina.”12 But no conflict can be perceived between “wishful idealism” and the commitment to “work our will” in foreign lands, a comment that holds of “the culture” more broadly.

As for direct reporting, the major charge of the influential Freedom House study of the Tet offensive, echoed by others who condemn the media for their overly “adversarial” stance, is that reporting was too “pessimistic.” We return to the facts, but consideration of the logic of the charge shows that even if accurate, it would be quite consistent with a propaganda model. There was, no doubt, increased pessimism within the German general staff after Stalingrad. Similarly, Soviet elites openly expressed concern over the wisdom of “the defense of Afghanistan” and its costs, and some might have been “overly pessimistic” about the likelihood of success in this endeavor. But in neither case do we interpret these reactions as a departure from service to the national cause as defined by the state authorities. The Freedom House charge tacitly but clearly presupposes that the media must not only accept the framework of government propaganda, but must be upbeat and enthusiastic about the prospects for success in a cause that is assumed without discussion to be honorable and just.

This basic assumption endures throughout, and provides the basic framework for discussion and news reports. The harshest critics within the mainstream media, as well as what Corry calls “the culture,” held that the war began with “blundering efforts to do good,” although “by 1969” (that is, a year after corporate America had largely concluded that this enterprise should be liquidated) it had become “clear to most of the world—and most Americans—that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake,” and that it was a “delusion” to attempt to build “a nation on the American model in South Vietnam”; the argument against the war “was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina—that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself” (Anthony Lewis).13 Stanley Karnow’s highly praised companion volume to the PBS television series describes the American war as “a failed crusade” undertaken for aims that were “noble” although “illusory” and “motivated by the loftiest intentions”: specifically, the commitment “to defend South Vietnam’s independence.”14

Within “the culture,” it would be difficult to find harsher critics of U.S. Asia policy than John King Fairbank, the dean of American China scholarship, or Harvard government professor Stanley Hoffmann, or Dissent editor Irving Howe. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1968, Fairbank characterized the U.S. involvement, which he termed a “disaster,” as the result of “an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence,” an “error” based on misunderstanding. Howe explained that “we opposed the war because we believed, as Stanley Hoffman [sic] has written, that ‘Washington could “save” the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia from Communism only at a cost that made