Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [142]
The context of McNamara’s observation cited earlier on the crucial U.S. role in blocking the election and unification provisions after Geneva 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 assistant 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, without 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 “knocking down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head,” because neutralism, as Ambassador Maxwell Taylor observed, “appeared 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 of force.62 Ambassador 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 critically 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 supported 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 considered (William Bundy, Aug. 11, 1964; his emphasis). First violence, then—perhaps—recourse to the peaceful means required by international law and the supreme law of the land. The elections provision of the Geneva Accords had been officially described in a 1961 State Department white paper as “a well-laid trap” that the United States