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phase. Indochina faced the near-insoluble problems of reconstruction in a land that had been reduced to ruin by foreign armies after a century of colonial oppression. In the United States too, elite groups faced a problem of reconstruction, but of a different kind. The problem in the United States was the reconstruction of ideology, the taming of the domestic population that had lost its faith in the nobility of intent and the inspiring benevolence of the elites who determine U.S. policy. It was necessary to overcome what Norman Podhoretz, echoing Goebbels, calls “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,” the dread “Vietnam syndrome,” finally cured by the stirring triumph of U.S. arms in Grenada, so Podhoretz hoped.152 This was part of a larger problem, the “crisis of democracy” perceived by Western elites as the normally passive general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power.153 A further task was to prevent recovery in the societies ravaged by the American assault, so that the partial victory already achieved by their destruction could be sustained.

As we have seen, through the mid-sixties, the media loyally fulfilled their function of service to state violence, and there was no significant popular opposition to the U.S. attack on Indochina. True, in 1964, the population voted 2 to 1 in favor of the “peace candidate,” who was assuring them that we want no wider war while laying the groundwork for the rapid escalation planned for the postelection period, a noteworthy illustration of the character of electoral politics in a society lacking genuine opposition parties and a critical and independent press. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of the ideological institutions for the rapid escalation of U.S. efforts to “defend South Vietnam” from “internal aggression” helped keep the public in line as the U.S. invading army rose to over half-a-million men on the ground and appeared to be attaining some success in “grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass,” although at “horrendous cost,” in the words of pacification chief Robert (“Blowtorch”) Komer, later to become a high-ranking official of the Human Rights Administration.154

By 1967, the popular mood was shifting, and the public was beginning to defy the hawk-dove consensus of elites for whom the issues were limited to tactics and expedience, a matter of much government concern. Defense Secretary McNamara warned the president, in secret, in May 1967 that expansion of the American war might “polarize opinion to the extent that ‘doves’ in the US will get out of hand—massive refusals to serve, or to fight, or to cooperate, or worse?”155 At the time of the Tet offensive, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were concerned with “our capacity to meet the possibility of widespread civil disorder in the months ahead”; in considering further troop deployments, they took care to ensure that “sufficient forces are still available for civil disorder control,” including “National Guard forces deployed under State or Federal control” and U.S. Army troops. The Pentagon warned further that a request for more troops might lead to “increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities,” running the risk of “provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.” Earlier, the Pentagon feared that escalation of the land war beyond South Vietnam might lead to massive civil disobedience, particularly in view of opposition to the war among young people, the underprivileged, women, and segments of the intelligentsia. “The sight of thousands of peaceful demonstrators being confronted by troops in battle gear” during “the massive anti-war demonstration” and “massive march on the Pentagon” in October 1967 was particularly disturbing, the Pentagon Papers analyst observed.156 The gradual withdrawal of the increasingly demoralized U.S. military forces led to a diminution of visible protest by the early 1970s, but the “Vietnam syndrome” was never cured. As late as 1982, 72 percent of the public (but far fewer “opinion