No More Learning

A distinction between matters on and off the agenda, such as we used in the previous chapter, is once again applicable and illuminating. "On the agenda" are statements by Agca and Martella about Agca's latest
162 MANUFACTURll'iG CONSENT
claims and proofs of Bulgarian involvement, Brzezinski's opinion on whether the Bulgarians arc likely to have engaged in such an escapade (they were), or Judy Woodruff's question to Paul Henze as to whether the Soviets "would have any notion, any desire to try this again" (they do this kind of thing all the time-just got a little careless here because "they had got away with so much in ltaly"). 44 As in the Third World election cases described in chapter 3, the media prefer to focus on superficial detail about the participants and opinions within a narrow range of establishment views (plus bluffdenials by Bulgarian and Soviet officials), along with each development supporting the accepted case (a defector's accusations, a further Agca confession, an investigator's or prosecutor's report, and leaks of alleged claims or expected new devel- opments), whatever its credibility_
"Off the agenda" are arguments and facts that would call into ques- tion the validity of the basic SHK model, and those relating to the "alternative model" (which starts with the question of why Agca con- fessed so late and the likelihood that he was encouraged and pressed to talk). We will run through only a few of the important questions and points of evidence that the mass media put off the agenda.
The basic SHK model rested its case on the Soviet motive, Agca's stay in Sofia, and the high professionalism of the Soviet and Bulgarian secret police, which made it likely that they were manipulating Agca if he stopped off in Bulgaria. Only the ABC "20120" program of May 12, 1983, explored the Soviet motive in any depth, despite the constant mass-media reiteration of the SHK line. ABC went to the trouble of asking the Vatican about the validity of Marvin Kalb's claim that the pope had written a note threatening to resign and to return to Poland to lead the resistance to any Soviet invasion. Cardinal John Krol, speaking for the Vatican, said that "Not only was there not such a letter, but such a letter directly from the Pope to Brezhnev would have been a total departure from all normal procedures. In no way could you conceive of the Holy Father saying, 'I would resign. ''' ABC's informa- tion from the Vatican too was that the pope's spoken message to Brezh- nev was conciliatory. This spectacular repudiation of an important element in the SHK case was unreported in the rest of the media, and simply died with the ABC broadcast. And any balancing of supposed gains against the costs and risks to the Soviet Union in sponsoring Agca was simply not undertaken in the mass media.
None of them stopped to evaluate Agca's 1979 letter threatening to kill the pope on his earlier visit to Turkey. Sterling's ludicrous claim that the KGB hired a Turk to kill the pope in order to damage Turkey's
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO Kill THE POPE r63
relation to NA TO was never discussed. The question of the authentic- ity of Agca's letter to Turkes, which bears on Agca's political commit- ments (and thus another SHK premise), was never discussed in the U. S. mass media. During the trial, Abdullah Catli's statement that Bulgaria was a preferred Gray Wolves route to Europe because of the relative ease of hiding in the heavy Turkish traffic-which directly contradicts the SHK claim that the Bulgarian secret police know everything, and that Agca's stay in Sofia must therefore have been by Bulgarian official plan-was never picked up in the U. S. mass media's coverage of the Rome trial.
The most striking deficiencies of the mass media's handling of the basic SHK claims, however, was their remarkable naivete in the face of the pseudoscientific speculations of SHK and the accumulating vio- lations of elementary principles of plausible deniability. The preposter- ous SHK claims-without a vestige of evidence-that Agca had been recruited by the KGB in Turkey for future work, and that he took on the appearance of a right-winger as a "cover," were not ridiculed, and were not evaluated when presented as purported truth. 4S There was never any discussion in the mass media of the fact that the thesis of prior recruitment and careful cultivation of Agca's cover in Turkey was flatly inconsistent with the claim that he was brought to Sofia for a lengthy stay for instructions. With regard to Agca's alleged open deal- ings with Bulgarians in Rome, the mass media simply refused to discuss the fact that the alleged professionalism and use ofthe right-wing Turk as a "cover" had disappeared.
As regards the alternative model, and the likelihood that Agca had been encouraged and coached, here also the mass media refused to explore these dissonant possibilities. They simply would not examine and discuss the convenience of the newly discovered plot for so many Western incerests; the huge time lag in the naming ofBulgarians; Agca's prison conditions and prison contacts; reports of meetings, offers, and threats to Agca to induce him to talk; and the compromised character of the Italian police and intelligence agencies. This involved the media in the suppression of important documents.
As one importanc instance, the July 12, 1984, Italian Report of the Parliamentary Commission on the Masonic Lodge P-2 describes in great detail the penetration of this massive neo-Fascist conspiracy into the military establishment, secret services, press, and judiciary, among oth- ers. This report was newsworthy in its own right, but it also had a bearing on the Bulgarian ConnectiOn case, as it addressed characteris- tics of Italian institutions that were directly involved in making and
164 MANUFACTURING CONSENT I
prosecuting the case against the Bulgarians. The New York Times, Time, ~ Newsweek, and CBS Evening News never mentioned the publication of
this report.
As a second major illustration, one year later, in July 1985, the Crjmi- nal Court of Rome handed down aJudgmenf in the Maner of FTancesco Pazienza et al. , which described repeated corrupt behavior by officials of the Italian secret-service agency SISMI, including the forgery and planting of documents. These officials were also charged with involve- ment in a cover-up ofthe agents carrying out the 1980 Bologna railway- station massacre, the kind of terrorist connection that attracts frenetic mass-media attention when attributable to suitable villains. As we noted earlier, SISMI officials had visited Agca in prison and SI8MI had issued a forged document implicating the Soviet Union in the shooting of the pope on May 19, 1981, only six days after the assassination attempt. This forgery was never mentioned in the Times, Tim~ and Newsweek, or on CBS News, and the July 1985 court decision was barely mentioned in a back-page article of the Times.
These blackouts are of materials that suggest a corrupt Italian pro- cess and the possibility that Agca was persuaded and coached to pin the plot on the East. A propaganda system exploiting the alleged Bulgarian Connection will naturally avoid such documents.
Agca's extremely loose prison conditions and the numerous claims in the Italian and dissident U. S. press of visits by Italian intelligence personnel were also virtually unmentioned by the U. S. mass media throughout 1982 and 1983. In June 1983, Diana Johnstone, the foreign editor of the newspaper In These Times submitted on Op-Ed column to the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that summarized the evidence and claims of intelligence-agency visits, the reported threats to Agca that his open and pleasant prison conditions might be terminated if he remained uncooperative, and Martella's proposed deal with Agca. This Op-Ed offering was rejected, and no commentary or news along these lines was permitted to surface in the Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer-or elsewhere, to our knowledge. Several years later, in an article in the New York Times of June 17,1985, referring to Pandico's detailed description of how Agca was coached in prison, John Tagliabue describes Agca's prison as "notoriously porous. " But the Times had never mentioned this notorious fact before, or considered it in any way relevant to the case.
When Agca identified the Bulgarians in November 1982, the integrity of the Italian investigative-judicial process in pursuing the case was already badly compromised for a wide variety of reasons,46 but the U. S. mass media weren't interested. Nor were they interested in the strange
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE 165
circumstances of the famous Antonov photo, widely circulated in the Western press, which shows Antonov very clearly and in a remarkable likeness watching the scene at St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. This photo, Martella eventually claimed, was not of Antonov but an Ameri- can tourist. But this tourist, who apparently looked exactly like An- tonov, has never been located, and the film from which this shot was taken has unaccountably disappeared. 47 Agca's alterations in his claims about the Bulgarians, with Martella generously allowing him to change his recollections about the timing of events on May 13 whenever Bul- garian counter-evidence was too strong, failed to attract the media's attention. 48 Agca's June 28, 1983, retraction of his claim that he had visited Antonov's apartment and met his family was not mentioned in the mass media until a full year after the event, and even then suggested to the press no very serious problems with the case or with Martella's investigative work. 49 How could Agca know details about Antonov's apartment if he had never been there? An honest press would have pursued this relentlessly. The New York Times, with Sterling as its reporter, suppressed the issue. 5o The rest of the press simply wasn't
interested.
The media also weren't interested in Orsen Oymen's finding that the
Vatican had gone to some pains to try to implicate the Bulgarians, or the trial disclosure that the West German authorities had tried to bribe Gray Wolves member Oral Celik to come to West Germany and con- firm Agca's claims. Pandico's and Pazienza's insider claims of Mafia and 8I8MI involvement in getting Agca to talk were also given only the slightest attention, and this accumulating mass of materials on the Italian process was never brought together for a reassessment.
Perhaps the most blatant case of willful ignorance concerned the Italian fixer and former member of SI8MI, Francesco Pazienza. Wanted for several crimes, Pazienza had fled Italy, and in 1985 he resided in exile in New York City. Eventually he was seized and held there by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Pazienza had been a partner of Michael Ledeen in the "Billygate" affair in Italy, and retained his connection after Ledeen became General Haig's right- hand man in Italy in the early days of the Reagan presidency. Pazienza had also been a close associate of SISMI head Giuseppe 8antovito. From 1983 onward it was alleged in the Italian press that Pazienza had been involved in getting Agca to talk, and he himself eventually made detailed accusations of coaching by elements of 8ISMI. Although Pa- zienza was readily available for interviews in a New York City jail, the
New York Times ignored him. Our hypothesis is that they did this because if they had talked to him it would have been difficult to avoid
166 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
discussing his connections with Ledeen and Sterling (both Times sources and under Times protection). This would not have reflected well on the quality of the paper's sourcing. Pazienza's story would also have highlighted the Times's suppression of facts concerning the cor- ruption of SISMI and raised questions about coaching. This would have disturbed the propaganda line.
The trial in Rome was awkward for the Western media, as Agea quickly declared himself to be Jesus and, more important, failed to produce any supportive evidence backing up his claims of Bulgarian involvement. The diligent and extensive court investigation found nu- merous Gray Wolves links to Agea in the period just up to his assassina- tion attempt, but no witness to his (allegedly) numerous meetings with Bulgarians in Rome, no money, no car, and, in the end, no conviction. As we have pointed out, in addition to the already available evidence of atrocious prison practice in dealing with Agca, and the 1981 meetings with intelligence officials and Martella's offer, there was a steady ac- cumulation of claims and evidence of pressures on Agca to implicate the Bulgarians. But, despite this evidence and the failure to convict the Bulgarians after a lengthy investigation and trial, the mass media of the West never provided any serious reevaluations of the case. Almost uniformly they hid behind the fact that an Italian court dismissed the case for lack of evidence rather than demonstrated innocence. They never hinted at the possibility that an Italian court and jury might still be biased against the Eastern bloc and protective of the powerful Western interests that had supported the Bulgarian Connection so
energetically.
The mass media also never looked back at their own earlier claims
and those of the disinformationists to see how they had stood up to the test ofaccumulated evidence. On January 3, 1983, Newsweek had quoted an Italian official who said that "we have substantial evidence . . . [that} Agca operated in close contact with the Bulgarians," and the New York Times editorialized on October 20, 1984, that "Agea's accounts of meet- ings with Bulgarian officials are verifiable in important details. " I f there was "substantial evidence" and "verifiable" details long before the trial, why was this evidence not produced in the courtroom? Why, after an enormous further investigative effort was there still not enough evi- dence to sustain a conviction? The u. s. mass media didn't even try to answer these questions. This would mean asking serious questions about the validity of the SHK model and considering alternatives, which the media have never been prepared to do. For them, the alterna- tive model, plausible from the beginning and, by March 1986, based on a great deal of evidence, was still the "Bulgarian view. " The questions
THE KGB-BULGARIAN PLOT TO KILL THE POPE r67
raised by the "Bulgarian view," we believe. would have been applied by the U. S. mass media to analogous facts in a Moscow setting. This means that the view actually employed by the media from beginning to end was a "U. S. government view," as suggested by a propaganda model. That this was true even after the trial ended we show in a detailed analysis in appendix 3. "Tagliabue's Finale on the Bulgarian Connection: A Case Study in Bias. "
The Indochina Wars (I):
Vietnam
MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE U. s. WARS TN INDOCHINA HAS EN- gendered a good deal of bitter controversy, some close analysis of several specific incidents, and a few general studies. ' It is widely held that the media "lost the war" by exposing the general population to its horrors and by unfair, incompetent, and biased coverage reflecting the "adversary culture" of the sixties. The media's reporting of the Tet offensive has served as the prime example of this hostility to established power, which, it has been argued, undermines democratic instirutions and should be curbed, either by the media themselves or by the state.
A propaganda model leads to different expectations. On its assump- tions, we would expect media coverage and interpretation of the war to take for granted that the United States intervened in the service of generous ideals, with the goal ofdefending South Vietnam from aggres- sion and terrorism and in the interest ofdemocracy and self-determina- tion. With regard to the second-level debate on the performance of the media, a propaganda model leads us to expect that there would be no condemnation of the media for uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of
170 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
u. s. benevolence and for adherence to the official line on all central issues, or even awareness of these characteristics of media performance. Rather, given that the U. S. government did not attain all of its objec- tives in Indochina, the issue would be whether the media are to be faulted for undermining the noble cause by adopting too "adversarial" a stance and departing thereby from fairness and objectivity.
We shall see that all of these expectations are amply fulfilled.
5. 1. THE BOUNDS OF CONTROVERSY
"For the first time in history," Robert Elegant writes, "the outcome of a war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen," leading to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The beliefthat the media, particularly televi- sion, were responsible for U. S. government failures is widely expressed. It was endorsed by the right-wing media-monitoring organization Ac- curacy in Media in its hour-long "Vietnam Op/Ed" aired by public television in response to its own thirteen-part series on the war. 2 Ac- cording to a more "moderate" expression of this view, the media had become a "notable new source of national power" by 1970 as part of a general "excess of democracy," contributing to "the reduction of governmental authority" at home and a resulting "decline in the influ- ence of democracy abroad. " "Broader interests of society and govern- ment" require that if journalists do not impose "standards of
professionalism," "the alternative could well be regulation by the gov- ernment" to the end of "restoring a balance between government and media. "3 Freedom House Executive-Director Leonard Sussman, com- menting on Big Story, the study of media coverage of the Tet offensive sponsored by Freedom House, describes the "adversarial aspect" of the press-government relation as "normal," presupposing without argu- ment that it has been demonstrated, but asks: "Must free institutions be overthrown because of the very freedom they sustain? "4 John Roche proceeds further still, calling for congressional investigation of "the workings of these private governments" who distorted the record in pursuit of their "anti-Johnson mission," although he fears Congress is too "terrified of the media" and their awesome power to take on this necessary task. S
New York Times television critic John Corry defends the media as
THE ISDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 171
merely "unmindful," not "unpatriotic" as the harsher cntics claim. They are not "anti-American," despite their adversarial stance; rather, "they reflect a powerful element of the journalistic-literary-political culture," where "the left wins battles . . . by default" because "its ideas make up the moral and intellectual framework for a large part of the culture," and "television becomes an accomplice of the left when it allows the culture to influence its news judgments," as in his view it regularly does. 6
Media spokespersons, meanwhile, defend their commitment to inde- pendence while conceding that they may err through excessive zeal in calling the government to account in vigorous pursuit of their role as watchdog.
Within the mainstream, the debate is largely framed within the bounds illustrated by the PBS-AIM interchange broadcast on the pub- lic television network. AIM's "Vietnam Op/Ed" accused PBS of "de- liberate misrepresentation" and other sins, while the producers of the documentary defended its accuracy. A dozen commentators, ranging from extreme hawks to mild critics of the war such as General Douglas Kinnard, added their thoughts. 7 The program concluded with a studio wrap-up featuring three "intelligent citizens"; Colonel Harry Summers of the Army War College, a hawkish critic of the tactics of the war; Peter Braestrup, one of the harshest critics of media war coverage; and Huynh Sanh Thong, speaking for what the moderator called "the South Vietnamese community," meaning the exile community.
The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were indeed "unmindful," but highly "patriotic" in the special and misleading sense that they kept-and keep--dosely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corpo- rate elite, in conformity to the general "journalistic-literary-political culture" from which "the left" (meaning dissident opinion that ques- tions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense may adopt an "adversarial stance" with regard to those holding office, r. eflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from the elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during
172 M ASUF ACTURING CONSJiNT
the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative con- ception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and "the influence of democracy abroad," in the real sense of these words.
These conclusions concerning media conformism are accepted in part by mainstream critics of the media. Thus Leonard Sussman, of Freedom House, observes that "U. S. intervention in 1965 enjoyed near- total . . . editorial support. "s The "intervention" in 1965 included the deployment of U. S. combat forces in Vietnam, the regular bombing of North Vietnam, and the bombing of South Vietnam at triple the scale in a program of "unlimited aerial warfare inside the country at the price of literally pounding the place to bits. "9 It is a highly significant fact that neither then, nor before, was there any detectable questioning of the righteousness of the American cause in Vietnam, or of the necessity to proceed to full-scale "intervention. " By that time, of course, only questions of tactics and costs remained open, and further discussion in the mainstream media was largely limited to these narrow issues. While dissent and domestic controversy became a focus of media coverage from 1965, the actual views of dissidents and resisters were virtually excluded. These individuals were presented primarily as a threat to
order, and while their tactics might be discussed, their views were not: "The antiwar movement stood at the bottom of the media's hierarchy of legitimate political actors," Daniel Hallin concludes from his survey of television coverage (the print media were hardly different), "and its access to the news and influence over it were still more . i. imited. "Io All exactly as the propaganda model predicts.
As the war progressed, elite opinion gradually shifted to the belief that the U. S. intervention was a "tragic mistake" that was proving too costly, thus enlarging the domain ofdebate to include a range oftactical questions hitherto excluded. Expressible opinion in the media broad-
ened to accommodate these judgments, but the righteousness of the cause and nobility of intent were rarely subject to question. Rather, editorials explained that the "idealistic motives" of "the political and military commands" who "conceive[d] their role quite honestly as that of liberators and allies in the cause of freedom . . . had little chance to prevail against local leaders skilled in the art of manipulating their foreign protectors. "ll "Our Vietnamese" were too corrupt and we were too weak and too naive to resist their manipulations, while "their Viet- namese" were too wily and vicious. How could American idealism cope
THE ll"DOCHINA WARS (I): VIET~AM 173
with such unfavorable conditions? At the war's end, the liberal media could voice the lament that "the high hopes and wishful idealism with which the American nation had been born . . . had been chastened by the failure of America to work its will in Indochina. "12 But no conflict can be perceived between "wishful idealism" and the commitment to "work our will" in foreign lands, a comment that holds of "the culture" more broadly.
As for direct reporting, the major charge of the influential Freedom House study of the Tet offensive, echoed by others who condemn the media for their overly "adversarial" stance, is that reporting was too "pessimistic. " We return to the facts, but consideration of the logic of the charge shows that even if accurate, it would be quite consistent with a propaganda model. There was, no doubt, increased pessimism within the German general staff after Stalingrad. Similarly, Soviet elites openly expressed concern over the wisdom of "the defense of Afghanis- tan" and its costs, and some might have been "overly pessimistic" about the likelihood of success in this endeavor. But in neither case do we interpret these reactions as a departure from service to the national cause as defined by the state authorities. The Freedom House charge tacitly but clearly presupposes that the media must not only accept the framework of government propaganda, but must be upbeat and enthu- siastic about the prospects for success in a cause that is assumed with-
out discussion to be honorable and just.
This basic assumption endures throughout, and provides the basic
framework for discussion and news reports. The harshest critics within the mainstream media, as well as what Corry calls "the culture," held that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good," although "by 196<)" (that is, a year after corporate America had largely concluded that this enterprise should be liquidated) it had become "clear to most of the world-and most Americans-that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake," and that it was a "delusion" to attempt to build "a nation on the American model in South Vietnam"; the argument against the war "was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina-that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself' (Anthony Lewis). B Stanley Karnow's highly praised companion vol- ume to the PBS television series describes the American war as "a failed crusade" undertaken for aims that were "noble" although "illusory" and "motivated by the loftiest intentions": specifically, the commitment
"to defend South Vietnam's independence. "14
Within "the culture," it would be difficult to find harsher critics of
U. S. Asia policy than John King Fairbank, the dean of American China
174 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
scholarship. or Harvard government professor Stanley Hoffmann. or Dissent editor Irving Howe. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1968, Fairbank characterized the U. S. involvement, which he termed a "disaster," as the result of "an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence," an "error" based on misunderstanding. Howe explained that "we opposed the war because we believed, as Stanley Hoffman [sic] has written, that 'Wash- ington could "save" the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia from Communism only at a cost that made a mockery of the word "save. " , " Hoffmann explains later that our efforts in "supporting the South Viet- namese" were "undermined" by the way the war was fought, while the means adopted to "deter the North Vietnamese from further infiltra- tion" were "never sufficient"; and sufficient means, "had the United States been willing to commit them, would have created for the United States real external dangers with potential adversaries and in relations with allies. " Again, we find not the slightest recognition that the familiar pieties of state propaganda might be subject to some question. IS
In its 1985 tenth-anniversary retrospective on the Vietnam war, For- eign Affairs presents both the hawk and the dove positions. Represent- ing the more dovish view, David Fromkin and James Chace assert without argument that "the American decision to intervene in Indo- china was predicated on the view that the United States has a duty to look beyond its purely national interests. " and that, pursuant to its "global responsibilities," the United States must "serve the interests of mankind. " "As a moral matter we were right to choose the lesser of two evils" and to oppose "communist aggression" by the Vietnamese in Vietnam, but on the "practical side" it was "wrong" because "our side was likely to lose. " The moral imperatives of our service "to the inter- ests of mankind" do not. however. require that we intervene to over- throw governments that are slaughtering their own populations, such as the Indonesian government we supported in 1965, or our Guatemalan and Salvadoran clients of the 1980s.
On the contrary, they observe, the success of our Indonesian allies in destroying the domestic political opposition by violence in 1965 was a respectable achievement that should have led us to reconsider our Vietnam policy. They cite Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who feels in retrospect that "our effort" in Vietnam was "excessive" after 1965, when "a new anti-communist government took power in Indonesia and destroyed the communist party [the only mass-based political party] in that country . . . ? " incidentally slaughtering several hundred thousand people, mostly landless peasants, and thus "securing" Indonesia in
t
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 175
accord with our "global responsibilities" and "serving the interests of mankind. "16
Fromkin and Chace define "opponents of the war"-meaning. pre- sumably, critics whose views merit serious consideration-as those who "did not believe that 'whipping' the enemy [North Vietnam] was enough, so long as the enemy refused to submit or surrender. " The media, they say, "brought home to the American people how little effective control over the population had been purchased by all of General Westmoreland's victories," thus strengthening the "opponents of the war," dissatisfied by our inability to gain "effective control over the population. " "The media cannot be blamed for pointing out the problem. and if General Westmoreland knew the answer to it. perhaps he should have revealed it to the public. "
Outside of those committed to "the cause," although possibly skepti- cal about its feasibility or the means employed, there are only those whom McGeorge Bundy once described as "wild men in the wings," referring to people who dared to question the decisions of the "first team" that was determining U. S. policy in VietnamY
Quite generally, insofar as the debate over the war could reach the mainstream during the war or since. it was bounded on the one side by the "hawks," who felt that with sufficient dedication the United States could succeed in "defending South Vietnam," "controlling the popula- tion," and thus establishing "American-style democracy" there,18 and on the other side by the "doves," who doubted that success could be achieved in these noble aims at reasonable costI9-later, there arrived the "owls. " who observed the proceedings judiciously without suc- cumbing to the illusions of either extreme of this wrenching contro- versy. Reporting and interpretation of the facts were framed in accordance with these principles.
5. 2. "THE WILD MEN IN THE WINGS"
As the elite consensus eroded in the late I960s, criticism of the "noble cause" on grounds of its lack of success became more acceptable, and the category of "wild men in the wings" narrowed to those who opposed the war on grounds of principle-the same grounds on which they opposed the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, later, Afghanistan. Let us consider how superpower intervention would be
176 MA~UFACTURING CONSENT
presented from a point ofview that permits aggression to be understood as aggression.
In the case of Soviet intervention, there is no serious controversy.
True, the Soviet Union has security concerns in Eastern Europe, in-
cluding states that collaborated with the Nazis in an attack on the
Soviet Union that practically destroyed it a generation ago and now
serve as a buffer to a rearmed West Germany that is part of a hostile
and threatening military alliance. True, Afghanistan borders areas of
the Soviet Union where the population could be inflamed by a radical
Islamic fundamentalist revival, and the rebels, openly supported by
bitter enemies of the Soviet Union, are undoubtedly terrorists commit- 4 ted to harsh oppression <lnd religious fanaticism who carry out violent
acts inside the Soviet Union itself and have been attacking Afghanistan
from Pakistani bases since 1973, six years before the Soviet invasion. 20 :. But none of these complexities bear on the fact that the Soviet Union
invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan, holds Poland in a
firm grip, etc. True, the Russians were invited into Afghanistan in 1979,
but as the London Economist accurately observed, "an invader is an
invader unless invited in by a government with some claim to legiti- macy,"21 and the government that the Soviet Union installed to invite
it in plainly lacked any such claim.
None of these matters elicit serious controversy, nor should they. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, like earlier cases of Soviet inter- vention in the region occupied by the Red Army as it drove out the Nazis during World War II, are described as aggression, and the facts are reported in these terms. The United Nations has repeatedly con- demned the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and regularly investigates and denounces the crimes they have committed. Western reporters cover the war from the standpoint of (he rebels defending their country from foreign attack, entering Afghanistan with them from their Pakis- tani sanctuaries. Official Soviet pronouncements are treated not merely with skepticism but with disdain.
In the case ofthe U. S. intervention in Indochina, no such interpreta- tion has ever been conceivable, apart from "the wild men in the wings," although it is at least as well grounded as the standard, and obviously correct, interpretation of the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. Further- more, the reporting practice of journalists and commentators is also radically different in the two cases. We put off for a moment the more significant issue of how the war is understood, focusing first on the narrower question of journalistic practice.
In sharp contrast to the Soviet aggression, it was standard practice throughout the Indochina war for journalists to report Washington
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 177
pronouncements as fact, even in the extreme case when official state- ments were knOwn to be false. Furthermore, this practice persisted through the period when the media had allegedly had become "a nota- ble new source of national power" threatening government authority. To mention only one typical case from the year in which, we are to understand, this status had been definitively attained (see p. 170), in March 1970 the media reported a North Vietnamese invasion of Laos on the basis of a speech by President Nixon announcing that North Vietnamese forces in Laos had suddenly risen from 50,000 to 67,000. Nixon's comment came immediately after the U. S. military attache in Vientiane had presented his standard briefing citing the lower figure-a source of much private amusement among the press corps in Vientiane, as one of us witnessed at first hand-but the presidential fabrication was reported as fact. The lower figure was also fraudulent, although this fact was never reported. 22 Throughout the Indochina wars, when offi- cial statements were questioned, it was generally on the basis of U. S. military sources in the field, so that reporting and analysis remained well within the bounds set by U. S. power. 23
Only very rarely did U. S. reporters make any effort to see the war from the point of view of "the enemy"-the peasants of South Vietnam, Laos, or later Cambodia--or to accompany the military forces of "the enemy" resisting the U. S. assault. Such evidence as was available was ignored or dismissed. In reporting the war in Afghanistan, it is consid- ered essencial and proper to observe it from the standpoint of the victims. In the case of Indochina, it was the American invaders who were regarded as the victims of the "aggression" of the Vietnamese, and the war was reported from their point of view, just as subsequent commentary, including cinema, views the war from this perspective.
Refugee testimony, which could have provided much insight into the nature of the war, was also regularly ignored. The enemy of the U. S. government was the enemy of the press, which could not even refer to them by their own name: they were the "Viet Cong," a derogatory term of U. S. -Saigon propaganda, not the National Liberation Front, a phrase "never used without quotation marks" by American reporters,~4 who regularly referred to "Communist aggression" (E. W. Kenworthy) by the South Vietnamese in South Vietnam and Communist efforts "to subvert this country" (David Halberstam)2S-their country, then under the rule of a U. S. -imposed client regime.
To a substantial extent, the war was reported from Washington. In late 1970, when the process of elite defection was well under way, Los A ngeles Times Washington correspondent Jules Witcover described the Washington scene during the earlier years:
178 MANUFACTURING CONSEST
While the press corps in those years diligently reported what the government said about Vietnam, and questioned the inconsisten- cies as they arose, too few sought out opposing viewpoints and expertise until too late, when events and the prominence of the Vietnam dissent could no longer be ignored. In coverage of the war, the press corps' job narrowed down to three basic tasks- reporting what the government ~aid, finding out whether it was true, and assessing whether the policy enunciated worked. The group did a highly professional job on the first task. But it fell down on the second and third, and there is strong evidence the reason is too many reporters sought the answers in all three cate- gories from the same basic source-the government. 26
The search for "opposing viewpoints" as things went wrong was also extremely narrow, limited to the domain of tactics-that is, limited to the question of "whether the policy enunciated worked," viewed en- tirely from the standpoint of U. S. interests, and with official premises taken as given.
Furthermore, the U. S. war was openly supported by U. S. allies, some of whom sent combat forces (Australia, Thailand, South Korea), while others enriched themselves through their participation in the destruc- tion of Indochina. For Japan and South Korea, this participation con- tributed significantly to their "take-off" to the status of major economic powers, while Canada and Western Europe also profited from their support for the U. S. operations. In contrast to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United Nations never condemned the U. S. "interven- tion," nor did it investigate or denounce the crimes committed in the course of U. S. military operations, a reflection of U. S. world power and influence. These facts notwithstanding, it is common practice to de- nounce the UN and world opinion for its "double standard" in con- demning the U. S. "intervention" in defense of South Vietnam while ignoring the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, regularly described as
"genocidal," a term never used in the mainstream media with regard to the United States in Indochina.
At the time of the full~scale U. S. invasion of Vietnam, in 1965, when there was as yer no debate over the righteousness of the already massive "intervention," the United States had not yet succeeded in establishing a government able or willing to "invite it in. " It appears that the United States simply moved in without even the formalities of request or acquiescence by a supposedly sovereign government. Nevertheless, at the dovish extreme of U. S. journalism, Tom Wicker, explaining his view that "the United States has no historic or God-given mission to
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 179
bring democracy to other nations," observes that the matter is different in the case of the "maintenance of freedom" where it already exists:
u. s. support for a democratic regime that is being attacked or subverted by repressive forces of the left or right might well be justified if invited~although,as in Vietnam, the "freedom" being defended may be minimal and the cost may be astronomica1. 27
As a dissident commentator, Wicker recognizes that the "freedom" we were defending in Vietnam was minimal and that the cost proved too high. But the doctrine that we were "invited in" remains sacrosanct, and the idea that we were "defending" nothing beyond our right to impose our will by violence is completely beyond the range of the thinkable. We might ask how we would characterize the Soviet media if the harshest condemnation of the war in Afghanistan that could be expressed in the year 2000 is that Soviet support for the democratic regime in Afghanistan that invited the Russians in might be justified, although the "freedom" that the Soviets were defending was perhaps minimal and the cost was far too high.
Let us now turn to "the wild men in the wings" who adopt the principles universally accepted in the case of Soviet aggression when they approach the V. S. wars in Indochina. The basic facts are not in doubt. By the late 1940s, V. S. authorities took for granted that in backing France's effort to reconquer its Indochina colonies after World War II, they were opposing the forces of Vietnamese nationalism repre- sented by the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh. In 1947, the State Department noted that Ho had established himself as "the symbol of nationalism and the struggle for freedom to the overwhelming majority ofthe population. "2s By September 1948, the department deplored "our inability to suggest any practicable solution of the Indochina problem" in the light of "the unpleasant fact that Communist Ho Chi Minh is the strongest and perhaps the ablest figure in Indochina and that any
suggested solution which excludes him is an expedient of uncertain outcome," the Communists under Ho having "capture[d] control of the nationalist movement," while the U. S. "long-term objective" was "to eliminate so far as possible Communist influence in Indochina. "29 Nonetheless, the United States supported the cause of France against Vietnam, covering some 80 percent of the cost of the war at the end and contemplating a direct U. S. attack, had France agreed.
When the French withdrew, in 1954, the United States at once turned to the task of subverting the Geneva agreements that laid the ground- work for unification of Vietnam with countrywide elections by 1956,
ISO MA~UFACTURI/liG CONSENT
establishing a client state in South Vietnam (the GVN) that controlled its population with substantial violence and rejected the terms of the Geneva political settlement, with U. S. support. State terrorism evoked renewed resistance, and by 1959, Viet Minh cadres in the South, who were being decimated by U. S. -organized state terror, received authori- zation to use violence in self-defense, threatening the quick collapse of the U. S. -imposed regime, which by then had killed tens of thousands of people and alienated much of the peasantry as well as urban elites. The Vietnam correspondent for the London Times and the Economist, David Hotham, wrote in 1959 that the Diem regime imposed by the United States
has crushed all opposition of every kind) however anti-Commu- nist it might be. He has been able to do this, simply and solely because of the massive dollar aid he has had from across the Pacific, which kept in power a man who, by all the laws of human and political affairs, would long ago have fallen. Diem's main supporters are to be found in North America, not in Free Vietnam. . . . 30
The leading U. S. government specialist on Vietnamese Communism, Douglas Pike, whose denunciations of the "Viet Cong" often reached the level of hysteria, conceded that the NLF "maintained that its contest with the GVN and the United States should be fought out at the political level and that the use of massed military might was in itself illegitimate," until forced by the United States and its clients "to use counterforce to survive. "31
The Kennedy administration escalated the war in South Vietnam, engaging U. S. military forces directly in bombing, defoliation, and "advising" combat troops from 1961 to 1962 as part of an effort to drive several million people into concentration camps ("strategic hamlets") in which they could be "protected" behind barbed wire and armed guard from the guerrillas whom, the United States conceded, they were willingly supporting. Douglas Pike assessed indigenous support for the NLF at about 50 percent of the population at the time-which is more than George Washington could have claimed-while the United States could rally virtually no indigenous support. He explained that political options were hopeless) since the NLF was the only "truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam," and no one, "with the possible exception ofthe Buddhists, thought themselves equal in size and power to risk entering a coalition, fearing that if they did the whale [the NLF] would swallow the minnow. " As for the Buddhists, the United States
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 181
regarded them "as eq'Uivalent to card-carrying Communists" (Ambas- sador Henry Cabot Lodge), and later backed the use of force to destroy their pOlitical movement, to ensure that no independent political force would remain, since no such force could be controlled. 32 In a highly regarded military history and moral tract in justification of the Ameri- can war, Guenter Lewy describes the purpose ofthe U. S. air operations of the early 1960s, which involved "indiscriminate killing" and "took a heavy toll of essentially innocent men, women and children," in a manner that Orwell would have appreciated: villages in "open zones" were "subjected to random bombardment by artillery and aircraft so as to drive the inhabitants into the safety of the strategic hamlets. "33
It was conceded on all sides that the government imposed by the United States lacked any significant popular support. The experienced U. S. pacification chief John Paul Vann, widely regarded as the U. S.
official most knowledgeable about the situation in South Vietnam, wrote in 1965 that
A popular political base for the Government of South Vietnam does not now exist. . . . The existing government is oriented toward the exploitation of the rural and lower class urban popula- tions. It is, in fact, a continuation of the French colonial system of government with upper class Vietnamese replacing the French. . . . The dissatisfaction of the agrarian population . . . is expressed largely through alliance with the NLF. 34
Virtually all parties concerned, apart from the United States, were making serious efforts in the early 1960s to avoid an impending war by neutralizing South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia-the official stand of the National Liberation Front, the "Viet Cong" of U. S. propaganda, essentially the southern branch of the Viet Minh. But the United States was committed to preventing any political settlement.
Unable to develop any political base in the south, the U. S. govern- ment proceeded to expand the war. It was able to do this by continually manipulating the political scene in South Vietnam to assure the attain- ment of its objective: continued fighting until an anti-Communist re- gime, susceptible to American will, was established in the South. Amba~~ador Lodge observed in January 1964 that "It is obvious that the generals are all we have got. "3~ And we would keep replacing them until we got the right ones, "right" meaning that they were willing to follow orders and fight, not negotiate. One of Diem's early replacements told newsmen that he found out that he was going to be the next head of state only when his U. S. adviser "told me that a coup d'etat was planned
182 MAl<iUFACTURING CONSENT
in Saigon and that I was to become President. . . . " General Maxwell Taylor spoke quite frankly about the need of "establishing some rea- sonably satisfactory government," replacing it if we are not satisfied, either with civilians, or with "a military dictatorship. "36
It should be noted in this connection that after the long-standing U. S. manipulation of governments in its client state had finally suc- ceeded in its aim, and the United States had placed in power two former French collaborators, Ky and Thieu, whose sole qualification for rule was that they met the U. S. condition of willingness to fight and evade political settlement, the U. S. media continued to pretend that the gov- ernment of South Vietnam was a free choice of the South Vietnamese peopleY Thus the New York Times commented editorially on June 4, 1966, that "Washington cannot shape the political future in Saigon, but it can continue to urge a search for unity among all the South Viet- namese political factions pending the September elections. " In fact, the rulers at the moment had been imposed by the United States, the
election was a U. S. idea, and-needless to say-the South Vietnamese who constituted the only "truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam" (Pike, referring to the NLF) were not considered one of the "South Vietnamese political factions. " As for the "unity" sought by the United States, it was intended solely to provide a base for prosecution ofthe U. S. war. As that goal could be accomplished only by suppression of all popular movements, later in 1966 the military junta, with U. S. approval and direct assistance, crushed by force the largest non-Com- munist group, the organized Buddhists, thereby clearing the ground for durable rule by Thieu and Ky. Despite all of this, the U. S. media did not point out that any basis for a free election had been destroyed, and that the unelected government was maintained in power solely because its aims were identical to those of the U.