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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 reported from Hué by Marc Riboud of Le Monde in April, was that the population 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 Hué 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 Hué a few months earlier.130 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 Hué, 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 different from the government troops, the Americans, or even the Vietcong.”

“The hope is that the Vietnamese people will blame the communists rather than the Americans for whatever damage is being done,” Don Webster reported from Hué on February 12 in the midst of the reconquest of the city by the U.S. Marines. Two days earlier, John Lengel of AP wrote that

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 psychological warfare program pinning the blame on the communists.131

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 example, 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 Hué “were killed by the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen,” and then designated “as the victims of a Communist massacre.”132

To 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 perceives? 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 Johnson was guilty, since he seemed “to some degree ‘psychologically defeated’ 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 Acheson and other “Wise Men” who