Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [280]
26. “Where Washington Reporting Failed,” Columbia Journalism Review (Winter 1970–71), cited by James Aronson, “The Media and the Message,” in Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, eds., Critical Essays and Index, vol. 5 of PP.
27. New York Times, September 28, 1987; our emphasis.
28. State Department, “Policy and Information Statement on Indochina” (July 1947), cited by George C. Herring, America’s Longest War (New York: Wiley, 1979), p. 8.
29. Department of Defense, United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–67 (the U.S. government version of the Pentagon Papers), bk. 8, pp. 144–45; Chomsky, FRS, pp. 7, 32 (see this book for documentation when not specifically cited below). For general discussion of the war see, inter alia, Herring, America’s Longest War; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War (New York: Pantheon, 1985), with particular focus on Vietnamese Communist planning; R. B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War (New York: St Martin’s, 1983, 1985), the first two volumes of a projected four-volume history, a somewhat mistitled study focusing on “international Communist strategy.” For the pre-1965 period, see particularly George M. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986). A useful documentary record and commentary appears in Williams et al., America in Vietnam.
30. In R. Lindholm, ed., Vietnam: The First Five Years (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1959), p. 346.
31. Douglas Pike, Viet Cong (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 91–92, 101. For some samples of Pike’s rhetoric in this study, see Appendix 3, note 3, below.
32. Douglas Pike, War, Peace and the Vietcong (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), p. 6; the estimate was common in the U.S. government and by outside specialists. Pike, Viet Cong, pp. 110, 362. Henry Cabot Lodge, in PP, II, 376.
33. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). For detailed discussion of this vulgar propaganda exercise disguised as “scholarship,” see our review, reprinted in Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, chapter 5. Lewy tacitly concedes the accuracy of this critique by evasion; compare the review with his response to critics, Washington Quarterly (Autumn 1979). For further insight into the commitments and intellectual level of a man taken seriously as a scholar, see his discussion of the need for the state to take stern action to protect the public from “lies” by subversives, and to ensure that the public is not deceived by the “hidden agenda” of such groups as Clergy and Laity Concerned, the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, NACLA, and others who seek to conceal “their espousal of Cuban-style Communism” and who are engaged in “deception” and “subversion.” As he correctly notes, and inadvertently reveals in his discussion, “to totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive” (Lewy, “Does America Need a Verfassungsschutzbericht?” Orbis [Fall 1987]—a respected journal with a distinguished editorial board).
34. Unpublished memorandum on pacification problems circulated within the military in 1965, a copy of which was given by Vann to Professor Alex Carey, University of New South Wales, Australia.
35. PP, II, 304.
36. Interview in Stern, reprinted in New Advocate (Los Angeles), April 1–15, 1972; Maxwell Taylor, in PP, III, 669.
37. U.S. involvement dates back to the export of Diem from the United States to Vietnam in 1954, and his forcible imposition as a “leader” of the southern part of the country, in a context where U.S. officials readily admitted that the great majority of South Vietnamese supported Ho Chi Minh and that Diem lacked an indigenous base of support.
38. We saw in chapter 3 that in El Salvador, too, while it was admitted by the media that the population wanted peace above all else, the elections under U.S. auspices—again, held only after the ground had been cleared by mass killing for reasons