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39. Walter LaFeber, in Williams et al., America in Vietnam, p. 236, with the text of the resolution.

40. PP, 715–16, Stevenson’s speech before the UN Security Council, May 21, 1964. See FRS, 114f., for documentation on the U.S. concept of “aggression.”

41. Bernard Fall, “Vietcong—The Unseen Enemy in Vietnam,” New Society (London), April 22, 1965, reprinted in Bernard B. Fall and Marcus G. Raskin, eds., The Viet-Nam Reader (New York: Vintage, 1965). See note 9.

42. Bernard Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

43. Samuel Huntington, Foreign Affairs (July 1968).

44. Paul Quinn-Judge reports that deaths from 1965 on in Vietnam alone may have passed three million (Far Eastern Economic Review, Oct. 11, 1984). A standard Western estimate is about 500,000 killed in the U.S.-backed French war. Hundreds of thousands more were killed in South Vietnam before 1965, in Laos, and in Cambodia.

45. According to congressional sources that cite unpublished studies of the Congressional Research Service, which are alleged to give the figure $84.5 million, in fiscal-year 1987 dollars, from FY 1980 through FY 1986. We return to this matter in the next chapter.

46. See Charles Kadushin, The American Intellectual Elite (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). This study was based on lengthy interviews taken in May 1970, after the Cambodia invasion, when public opposition to the war reached its highest peak. Virtually all of those interviewed were “doves,” some active in opposition to the war. Virtually none opposed the war on the principled grounds of opposition to aggression (called “ideological grounds” by the author) that all would have adopted had they been asked about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

47. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 30, 1987.

48. Charles Mohr, quoting a “South Vietnamese official” (New York Times, Oct. 24, 1966). One of the authors (Herman) published in 1971 a compilation of quotations, many from Saigon generals and other officials, on the need for time because of their lack of indigenous support, which made political competition intolerable. See “Free Choice or Subjugation,” American Report, May 7, 1971.

49. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 89, 60–61; on the secret record revealed in the Pentagon Papers, see FRS, pp. 104–5.

50. See FRS, pp. 100f.

51. March 13, 1964; Kahin, Intervention, pp. 91, 208.

52. Elterman, Circle of Deception, reviewing stories from May 1955 through July 1956; Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 182f.

53. Susan Welch, “The American Press and Indochina,” in Richard L. Merritt, ed., Communications in International Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972). Only the isolationist Chicago Tribune was opposed to U.S. intervention and challenged administration assumptions, in her sample.

54. Fall, “Vietcong—The Unseen Enemy,” cites as credible the figure 66,000 killed between 1957 and 1961. Gabriel Kolko gives the figure of 12,000 killed as a “conservative” estimate for 1955–57, with 40,000 political prisoners, reaching 150,000 by 1961—50,000, according to the government (Anatomy of a War, p. 89).

55. “Lösung für Vietnam,” Neues Forum (August/September 1969); see our Political Economy of Human Rights (Boston: South End Press, 1979; hereafter PEHR), I, 302, 422.

56. See, among others, U.S. government specialist Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, and particularly Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), the major study of the period preceding the outright U.S. invasion, by a U.S. military adviser with extensive access to U.S. and Saigon intelligence as well as direct evidence.

57. “The Situation and Tasks for 1959,” from the Race document collection, cited by Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 281.

58. Race, War Comes to Long An. Essentially the same picture is presented—despairingly—in Pike’s 1966 study.

59. New York Times,