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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 constituted nation being subverted and invaded by another power; and that view is implied even in the documents that finally produced the cease-fire.146

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 proclaimed that if the “marvelously elaborate” Nixon-Kissinger settlement “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 legitimacy of the Saigon regime . . . Equally vital to the Nixon Administration 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 sacrosanct by the loyal media.

An honest and independent press would have announced the January agreements with headlines reading: “U.S. Announces Intention to Violate 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 (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 Southerland, 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