Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [140]
The Geneva settlement was quickly undermined by the United States and its client regime because it was taken for granted on all sides that elections would lead to a unified Vietnam under Viet Minh rule. “American intelligence sources were unanimous that Diem [the U.S.-imposed client] would lose any national election,” George Kahin concludes from a close inspection of the available record. The Viet Minh had agreed to the Geneva decision for regroupment of its forces well to the north of territories it controlled on the basis of “the assurance that the struggle for the control of Vietnam would be transferred from the military to the political level, a realm in which the Vietminh leaders knew their superiority over the French and their Vietnamese collaborators was even greater than it was militarily . . . For the Vietminh, this was the heart of the Geneva Agreements.”49
The secret U.S. response to the perceived disaster of Geneva was a plan to resort to military action (including attacks on China if deemed necessary) in the event of “local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack,” in explicit violation of the UN Charter, which limits the use of force to self-defense in the event of “armed attack” until the UN Security Council is able to respond. This crucial decision, misrepresented beyond recognition in the Pentagon Papers history and generally ignored, also recommended operations against China, “covert operations on a large and effective scale” throughout Indochina (including North Vietnam), remilitarization of Japan, development of Thailand “as the focal point for U.S. covert and psychological operations in Southeast Asia,” etc.50 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara observed in a memorandum for President Johnson that “Only the U.S. presence after 1954 held the south together . . . and enabled Diem to refuse to go through with the 1954 provision calling for nationwide free elections in 1956.”51
Surveying the media during this period, Howard Elterman observes that “during a six-month period in 1955 and 1956, there was virtually no news coverage” about the U.S. policy of undermining the Geneva Accords in the New York Times and the three newsweeklies. Communist charges to this effect were occasionally mentioned on back pages but dismissed as propaganda—accurate propaganda, in fact. When the evasion of elections was conceded, it was justified on the basis of Communist terror and regimentation. The Times (June 2, 1956) described Vietnam as a country “divided into the Communist regime in the north and a democratic government in the south”—namely, the murderous and corrupt Diem dictatorship. Newsweek denounced the “wide infiltration in South Vietnam” in support of the “implacable purpose” of the Viet Minh, while U.S. News & World Report condemned Ho Chi Minh for “plotting new Red aggression in Southeast Asia.”52
More generally, through 1956 “the press insured that the reading public would view the war as a struggle between Communism and the Free World,” Susan Welch observes on the basis of her survey of several leading journals. Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were presented as “merely agents of Moscow and Peking whose primary means of gaining support was through terror and force (although occasional mention was made of their nationalist appeal),” while France was “a gallant ally . . . 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 columnists. The liberal press showed particular enthusiasm for the cause, and “News stories also reinforced the preconceptions of the Administration,” because “the press relied almost completely on Administration sources