Media, Propaganda and Vietnam

The Vietnam War

The context in which Vietnam appeared to fall under Soviet influence is critical. Vietnam had actually approached the U.S. for assistance in building a nation in the wake of the Second world war and particularly from French imperialism both of which had taken their toll on this region. (President Roosevelt for example, had "already vilified France which, he said, had 'milked' Vietnam for a hundred years. 'The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better, ' the President had said, and the United States supported their 'independence and self-determination.'" (p.181).) The communist leader, Ho Chi Minh liked Americans, and enjoyed 'the openness of Americans' (p.181).

Yet, having been turned down a number of times by the U.S., they turned to the other superpower at that time, the Soviet Union, even though they had shown a preference to the U.S. model of democracy:

Ho Chi Minh was the antithesis of other emerging communist leaders in one respect: he wanted his people to open themselves out to other societies, communist, capitalist and non-aligned. Like Tito in Yugoslavia, he knew that this was the only way his people could survive as a national entity. Indeed, so anxious was Ho for American support for his fledgling republic that he addressed twelve separate appeals to President Roosevelt, to his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Major Patti [a U.S. government liaison officer, working for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA] later wrote that Ho 'pleaded not for military or economic aid', ...but for understanding, for moral support, for a voice in the forum of western democracies. But the United States would not read his mail because, as I was informed, the DRV Government was not recognised by the United States and it would be 'improper' for the President or anyone in authority to acknowledge such correspondence. [DRV stood for Democratic Republic of Vietnam, later known colloquially by the Americans as 'North Vietnam'.] ...As for relations with the Soviet Union, Ho had spent fifteen years in Moscow and expressed himself well aware of the tenuous and highly conditional nature of Soviet 'friendship'. He told Patti, 'I place more reliance on the United States to support Vietnam's independence, before I could expecet help from USSR.' -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.180 - 181 (Emphasis Added)

(Side Note: J.W. Smith (cited below) suggests it was 6 times, that Ho Chi Minh sent letters to the U.S. government. I don't know if what Pilger calls 'appeals' is the same as the letters J.W. Smith refers to, but the point is, there were many appeals to the U.S.)

As the U.S. clumped Northern Vietnam into the same bracket as Communist China and Soviet Union, Minh felt no choice but to turn to them.

The immediate post World War II era for Vietnam was crucial:

• As with other parts of the world, previous imperial rulers had carved up Vietnam as well.
  • The French had divided Vietnam into three, all sub-divisions of its colony in Indo-China.
  • The Allies divided it between two military commands headquartered in China and South-East Asia.
• British colonial officer, Major-General Douglas Gracey, took surrender of the Japanese in September 1945, in Saigon, but "immediately rearmed them and ordered them to put down the Vietminh, who had already formed an administration in the South. Like the Vietminh of the North, they were a popular movement of Catholics, Buddhists, small businessmen, communists and farmers who looked to Ho Chi Minh as the 'father of the nation'." (p.181)
• By 1947, thanks to the British and Gracey, the French were back in power in Saigon.

Needing to get the French out of their country, Ho Chi Minh was still hoping for a U.S. alliance and he

...appealed again to President Truman while insisting to Patti that he was 'not a communist in the American sense'. Although he had lived and worked in Moscow, Ho considered himself a free agent; but he warned that he 'would have to find allies if any were to be found; otherwise the Vietnamese would have to go it alone.' And alone they went until 1950 when Ho Chi Minh believed he could no longer delay accepting the formal ties and material assistance under offer from the Soviet Union and especially from China. It was the success of the Chinese revolution in 1949 that was to give the Vietminh the means to defeat the French: military training, arms and sanctuary across an open frontier. -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.181 - 182 (Emphasis Added)

As J.W. Smith summarizes:

During World War II, while working directly with American agents to rescue downed U.S. pilots, Ho Chi Minh sent six letters to the U.S. government asking for support and stating that the Vietnamese wished to pattern their constitution after America's. Only after America refused to recognize and support their freedom, and instead supported the French suppression of their freedom, were the Vietnamese forced to turn to China and the Soviet Union. It is said that America lost in Vietnam but three million people were slaughtered (four million if one included the previous twenty years of French suppression), millions of acres of forest poisoned with herbicides were destroyed, rice fields were pockmarked with bomb craters and, after winning its freedom, Vietnam was further decimated by embargoes. Vietnamese resources are now available to intact imperial-centers-of-capital. That makes that war a success. After all, control of resources to feed the industries of imperial centers is what these wars are all about. -- J.W. Smith,Suppressing the Former Colonial World's Break for Economic Freedom,, pp.159 - 160 (Emphasis is original)

As Pilger adds, the root of American concern was imperial in nature, which, citing Noam Chomsky,

...was over strategic resources of Southeast Asia and their significance for the global system that the US was then constructing, incorporating western Europe and Japan. It was feared that successful independent development under a radical nationalist leadership might 'cause the rot to spread', gradually eroding US dominance in the region and ultimately causing Japan, the largest domino, to join in a closed system from which the US would be excluded... The idea that US global planners had national imperialist motives is intolerable to the doctrinal system, so this topic must be avoided in any history directed to a popular audience. -- Noam Chomsky,The Vietnam War in an Age of Orwell,Race and Class, Spring 1984, p.44. Quoted by John Pilger, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001). p.182.

Summarizing mostly from Pilger again, the political background to the buildup of the Vietnam war is worth highlighting here:

• "Having declared a policy of 'containing communism' in Asia, the American government in 1950 gave $10 million to assist the French in winning back their colony in the North. Within four years the Americans were paying 78 percent of a colonial war directed by the same French whom President Roosevelt had castigated" (p.182)
• While this was going on, an international conference in Geneva (July 1954) was held on Indo-China.
  • The final declaration divided Vietnam temporarily into two 'national regrouping areas.'
  • The North and South were to be reunited after free national elections in July 1956.
  • There seemed no doubt that Ho Chi Minh was most likely to win and form Vietnam's first democratically elected government.
• But China also had geopolitical interests here. "It was a role of exquisite duplicity which owed nothing to the solidarity of 'world communism', the current Western bogey." (p.183)
  • China wanted to end its diplomatic isolation, so took part in Geneva.
  • But it also wanted control in its 'backyard'.
  • Hence, the later support for Pol Pot in Cambodia, for example. (p.183) (See below for more on this as well.)
• Knowing that Minh was most likely to win those elections, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, refused to sign the Geneva accords and the U.S. moved to not only support France, but take command:

  According to the Pentagon Papers, the United States moved in secret to 'disassociate' France from the levels of command', in southern Vietnam and to assume direct American control. This task was assigned to the newly formed CIA which, during the summer of 1954, invented a 'republic of Vietnam' with Saigon as its capital. This was known by those assigned to the task as 'creating the master illusion.' -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.183 - 184

• The level to which the U.S. were willing to go to support France before this was quite extreme. Journalist Robert Weiner, who was CNN's executive producer in Baghdad, Iraq, during the 1991 Gulf War, describes in the Los Angeles Times an aspect of this when watching Peter Davis' 1974 Academy Award-winning documentary, "Hearts and Minds.":

  The [Hearts and Minds] film makes a powerful case for how successive [U.S.] administrations, from Eisenhower to Ford, lied to the American public about U.S. policy in Vietnam and the threat of communism to world stability. It also revealed, for the first time, that the U.S. offered France two atomic bombs prior to its 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Mercifully, Paris declined. -- Robert Weiner,Truth May Sink in Desert Sand,LA Times, January 20, 2003

• A democratically electable leader was opposed.
  • Instead, through the CIA, a fascistic one was put into power in the South, Ngo Dinh Diem.
  • At the same time the CIA provided mass propaganda of the horrors that Ho Chi Minh would supposedly impose on the people of the North, urging them to flee to the South.
  • This would provide enough justification to raise the good conscious of the American people to demand something be done.
  
  
  John Pilger provides important details of this 'master illusion':

  It is worth highlighting in full the following, at considerable length, to give an idea of the lengths taken to achieve the end-goals. Continuing from the above: Ralph W. McGehee was for twenty-five years a career officer in the CIA and one of the creators of such illusions. He was an expert in 'black propaganda', which is known today as 'disinformation'. In an interview with me in 1983 he described the war in Vietnam as 'the Agency's longest and most successful disinformation operation'. In 1977 McGehee retired, not as renegade, but with the CIA's highest honour, its Medal of Commendation. He was disillusioned, he said, because the CIA had become not an 'intelligence gathering organisation but a covert operations arms of the Presidency'. In 1983 his book Deadly Deceits was published. In the following passage he describes how the CIA not only installed a regime of its choice in Saigon, its 'master illusion', but changed the demographic map of South-East Asia: To make the illusion a reality, the CIA undertook a series of operations that helped turn South Vietnam into a vast police state. The purpose of these operations was to force the native South Vietnamese to accept the Catholic mandarin [Ngo Dinh] Diem, who had been selected by US policymakers to provide an alternative to communism in Vietnam. It was a strange choice. From 1950 to 1953, while Ho's forces were earning the loyalty of their people by fighting the French, Diem, a short, fussy bachelor, was living in the U.S. in Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York. Diem arrived in Saigon in mid-1954 and was greeted by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA's man in South Vietnam and the head of the Agency's Saigon Military Mission (SMM). Diem was opposed by virtually all elements of South Vietnamese society - Bao Dai's followers, the pro-French religious sects, the Buddhists, the remnant nationalist organisations, and, of course, the followers of Ho Chi Minh. He had no troops, no police, no government, and no means of enforcing his rule. What he did have was the complete support of Colonel Lansdale and all the money, manpower, weapons, training, propaganda, and political savvy in the CIA's covert-action war chest. To create Diem's government, Lansdale's men, operating in teams in North Vietnam, stimulated North Vietnamese Catholics and the Catholic armies deserted by the French to flee south. SMM teams promised Catholic Vietnamese assistance and new opportunities if they would emigrate. To help them make up their minds, the teams circulated leaflets falsely attributed to the Viet Minh telling was expected of citizens under the new government [of Ho Chi Minh]. The day following distribution of the leaflets, refugee registration tripled. The teams spread horror stories of Chinese Communist regiments raping Vietnamese girls and taking reprisals against villages. This confirmed fears of Chinese occupation under the Viet Minh. The teams distributed other pamphlets showing the circumference of destruction around Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities should the United States decide to use atomic weapons. To those it induced to flee over the 300-day period the CIA provided free transportation on its airline, Civil Air Transport, and on ships of the U.S. Navy. Nearly a million North Vietnamese were scared and lured into moving to the South. Lieutenant Tom Dooley, who operated with the U.S. Navy out of Haiphong, also helped to stimulate the flow of refugees to the South. At one point he organised a gathering of 35,000 Catholics to demand evacuation. A medical doctor, Dooley was a supreme propagandist whose message seemed aimed largely at the U.S. audience. He wrote three bestselling books, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles were written about him. Dr. Dooley's concocted tales of the Viet Minh disembowelling 1,000 pregnant women, beating a naked priest on the testicles with a bamboo club, and jamming chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing the word of God, aroused American citizens to anger and action. Dr. Dooley's reputation remained unsullied until 1979, when his ties to the CIA were uncovered during a Roman Catholic sainthood investigation. The Agency's operation worked. It not only convinced the North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South, thereby providing Diem with a source of reliable political and military cadres, but it also duped the American people into believing that the flight of the refugees was a condemnation of Viet Minh by the majority of Vietnamese. Now the scene had been set and the forces defined. The picture drawn to justify U.S. involvement was that the Communist North was invading the Free World South. The CIA was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda and, through covert operations, to make the illusion a reality. Its intelligence, with an occasional minor exception, was only a convenient vehicle to sell the lie to the U.S. bureaucracy and people. Unfortunately, nearly everyone, including later policy-makers, was deceived by this big lie. While the plan was never detailed in a single available document, an examination of the Pentagon Papers, plus other related information, demands this conclusion. The terror which the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem inflicted on people living south of the seventeenth parallel [that formed the North/South divide] is conclusively documented. The main instrument of terror was a 50,000-strong civil guard, or secret police, which had been set up and trained by teams from the CIA and Michigan University. In 1959 the Diem regime passed a law requiring the death sentence for those found guilty or speaking out or 'spreading rumours' against the government. This was the model of the 'free world democracy' which the United States was committed to defend against the 'communist threat' and on whose behalf President Kennedy, by clear implication in his inaugural address, had called on his countrymen to lay down their lives. Colonel Lansdale, on the other hand, was more candid; in a secret memorandum to the Secretary of Defence in 1961 he wrote: 'I cannot truly symphathise with the Americans who help promote a fascistic state and then get angry when it doesn't act like a democracy.' -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.184 - 186 (Bold Emphasis added) So, in the apparent fight against democracy, the U.S. had engineered public support for a 'fascistic' leader, rather than a democratically elected one, who therefore reluctantly turned to the Soviets and Chinese for assistance in fending off the French.

  
  
• Diem's excesses proved too much, and in November 1963, "Diem was overthrown by a triumvirate of his generals, organised by the CIA." (p. 186)
• Some of these generals approached the NLF (the national liberation front, also known as Vietcong, Vietnamese Communists) seeking a "ceasefire and negotiation towards a 'neutralist' non-communist coalition government in Saigon. According to a study by George Kahin, based on extensive interviews, the generals, who were 'seeking a negotiated agreement among the Vietnamese parties themselves without American intervention', regarded the NLF as 'overwhelmingly non-communist' and sufficiently free of Hanoi's control to have made [a political settlement in South Vietnam] quite possible." (pp. 186 - 187)
• However,

  The Vietnamese were never allowed to choose. The historian David G. Marr wrote that the generals' mere countenance of peace negotiations ...was one of the main reasons why the US government, or at least the US military commander in Saigon encouraged their overthrow in turn only three months later. From then on, every Saigon military officer knew that contacts with the NFLSV, or even internal discussion of negotiation options, risked vigorous American counteraction. Some were still prepared to take that risk, but with the arrival of US combat troops in 1965 the historical opportunity vanished. Henceforth the US government had the means ... to ensure that no 'neutralist'-included RVN officer came close to Power. [RVN stood for Republic of Vietnam - Saigon regime.] -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.186 - 187

• "The creation of more 'illusions' and a legal justification for an expanded war now became an urgent necessity", as Pilger continues. While there was secret bombing by American planes of Vietnam on its border with Laos, domestic politics and civil rights upheavals preoccupied the news.
  • The 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident provided the justification for use of military force.
    • An alleged attack on US spyship USS Maddox was engineered that became the pretext for war in Vietnam.
    • This was later known as the 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident' and "as a direct result, a resolution was sent by the White House to Congress seeking authority for the United States to invade Vietnam. Seven years were to pass before the Pentagon Papers, the official 'secret history' of the war would reveal that administration officials had drafted the 'Gulf of Tonkin Resolution' two months before the alleged attack on the Maddox" (p. 188, Emphasis is original.)
      Side Note:

      For more information about the Pentagon Papers you could look at the following on-line material: The Pentagon Papers Case from the National Security Archive, which reposts declassified U.S. documents, based on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Pentagon Papers Home Page by one of the principle players in the Pentagon Papers action, Anthony Joseph (Tony) Russo.

  • And a U.S. State Department-published "White Paper" was to provide the legal justification for war.
    • In early 1965,

      the State Department published a White Paper whose centrepiece was the 'provocation' of the 'Gulf of Tonkin Incident', together with seven pages of 'conclusive proof' of Hanoi's preparations to invade the South. This 'proof' stemmed from the discovery of a cache of weapons found floating in a junk off the coast of central Vietnam. The White Paper, which would provide legal justification for the American invasion, was, in the words of Ralph McGehee [former CIA agent], a 'master illusion'. McGehee told me: Black propaganda was when the US Government spoke in the voice of the enemy, and there is a very famous example. In 1965 the CIA loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons -- the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of Central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place. Then they brought in the American press and the international press and said, 'Here's the evidence that the North Vietnamese are invading South Vietnam.' Based on this evidence two Marine battalion landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam. ... The scale of American bombing in the mid-1960s, both in the North and South, together with the American-directed terror of the South, eventually persuaded Ho Chi Minh to send regular army units south in support of those South Vietnamese opposing the American invasion. -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.188 - 189

The scale of propaganda needed to pull all this off was immense. The official version which most are familiar with, is quite different to the above. Pilger comments on this difference:

This was not how propaganda in the United States explained the origins of the war. Neither is it how many people remember the war today. In the opinion poll quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in which more than a third of those questioned expressed confusion as to who were 'our allies', almost two-thirds said they were aware that the United States had 'sided with South Vietnam'. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, this is the equivalent of being aware that Nazi Germany sided with France in 1940 and the Soviet Union now sides with Afghanistan. The accredited version of events has not changed. It is that non-communist South Vietnam was invaded by communist North Vietnam and that the United States came to the aid of the 'democratic' regime in the South. This of course is untrue, as documentation I have touched upon makes clear. That Ho Chi Minh waited so long before sending a regular force to assist the American attacks seems, in retrospect, extraordinary; or perhaps it was a testament to the strength and morale of those South Vietnamese who had taken up arms in defence of their villages and their homeland. In 1965 the American counter-insurgency adviser, John Paul Vann, wrote in a memorandum addressed to his superiors in Washington that a 'popular political base for Government of South Vietnam does not now exist' and the majority of the people in South Vietnam 'primarily identified' with the National Liberation Front. -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.189

That the end result was costly is an understatement:

During those years the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army to Vietnam, and dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, and pursued a military strategy deliberately designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes, and used chemicals in a manner which profoundly changed the environmental and genetic order, leaving a once bountiful land petrified. At least 1,300,000 people were killed and many more were maimed and otherwise ruined; 58,022 of these were Americans and the rest were Vietnamese. President Reagan has called this a 'noble cause'. -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.190

And as Noam Chomsky adds, with slightly updated numbers:

As the 20th anniversary approached, the government of Vietnam released new figures on casualties, generally accepted here and conforming to earlier estimates. Hanoi reported that 2 million civilians had been killed, the overwhelming majority in the south, along with 1.1 million North Vietnamese and southern resistance fighters ("Viet Cong," in the terminology of U.S. propaganda). It listed an additional 300,000 missing in action. Washington reports 225,000 killed in the army of its client regime ("South Vietnam"). The CIA estimates 600,000 Cambodians killed during the U.S. phase of what the one independent governmental inquiry (Finland) calls the "Decade of Genocide" in Cambodia: 1969 through 1978. Tens if not hundreds of thousands more were killed in Laos, mainly by U.S. attacks that were in large part unrelated to the war in Vietnam, Washington conceded. -- Noam Chomsky,Memories,ZMagazine, July/August 1995

As J.W. Smith and Noam Chomsky, cited above, described, one of the core aspects of this war and the cold war ideology in general was to try and contain the breaks for freedom of various nations and to ensure successful independent development was minimized, for fear of what Eisenhower had called the 'domino' effect. William Blum, who worked at the State Department in the 1960s, and is now an investigative journalist summarizes the effect of the Vietnam war:

Most people believe that the US lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water and the gene pool for generations, Washington had in fact achieved its primary purpose: preventing what might have been the rise of a good development option for Asia. -- William Blum,Rogue State,(Common Courage Press, 2000) pp.87 - 88

To further demonstrate that Vietnam did not wish to pursue a communist ideology for its country, consider what happened after the war: it tried to look to the west, and to open up for foreign investment:

As soon as the war was over the Hanoi leadership began to extricate Vietnam from the embrace of the Soviet Union and to look to the West. They rejected both the Soviet view that ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations) was an 'imperialist creation' and Moscow's offer of a 'treaty of collective security'. Much to the Soviet's chagrin the Vietnamese also resisted joining COMECON, the Eastern bloc economic alliance, and instead Hanoi took the Saigon regime's seat in two pre-eminent capitalist institutions, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. To underline its independence the Vietnamese barred Soviet ships from using port facilities at the former American base at Cam Ranh Bay. To those who see the world in 'blocs' and small countries as 'dominoes' Vietnam's stance must have seemed puzzling; the Soviet Union, after all, had been Hanoi's principal weapons supplier. But communism was no more than a tool of Vietnamese nationalism and the rejection of one communist ally in favour of overtures to the West was entirely consistent with Vietnam's past. Once again they were unravelling themselves from somebody else's quarrel which, in the 1970s, was the war of attrition between China and the Soviet Union. -- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.190

As part of the agreement to end war and rebuild, the Nixon administration offered $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years for U.S. contribution to postwar reconstruction, though Vietnam wanted "reparation" money not "reconstruction" money. It was never paid, because Vietnam apparently did not reveal all the prisoners of war that was part of the deal for the aid. This itself is a tragic and thorny issue for those Americans who for long periods have been unaware of the fate of their loved ones. Yet, for Vietnam, it was though they had to pay in turn for a war largely created by the U.S. as William Blum describes, almost cynically:

However -- deep breadth here -- Vietnam has been compensating the United States. In 1997 it began to pay off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it. How can this be? The proper legal term is "extortion". The enforcers employed by Washington include the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Export-Import Bank, the Paris Club and the rest of the international financial mafia.[sic] ... At the Vietnamese embassy in Washington ... the First Secretary for Press Affairs, Mr. Le Dzung, told the author in 1997 that this matter, as well as Nixon's unpaid billions, are rather emotional issues in Vietnam, but the government is powerless to change the way the world works. -- William Blum,Rogue State,(Common Courage Press, 2000) pp.87 - 88

Media and the War

Media reporting and the general attitudes about the media on the whole, as well as how segments of society interpreted the events of Vietnam is interesting and important.

The Vietnam experience highlights a multitude of factors that contributed to what can only be termed as propaganda for Cold War ideological battles.

• A mixture of ideological goals, geopolitical and military goals, and issues to do with the nature of reporting and the structure of the media and how it worked, combined with cultural norms, all impacted the way that things were reported, not reported, portrayed, or misrepresented.
• This ultimately provided legitimacy for a war that saw millions killed.
• That the war need not have happened in the first place is almost never discussed now, and it is more of a 'tragedy' or 'bad mistake' for the sole superpower to come to terms with; good intentions carried out poorly.
• The 'good intentions' are rarely questioned.

More Information

The above may be considered long for a web page, but it really isn't much detail at all. In addition, many other important aspects have not been touched upon here such as the huge anti-war protest movements in the 1960s; the issue of those missing in action; the details of the devastation of Indo-China; Vietnam's attempts at development after the wars, amidst trade and aid embargoes; the various sociopolitical, environmental and economic consequences up to today; the 'Vietnam syndrome'; the impact Vietnam has had on American culture, on the attitude to sending military troops abroad, etc etc.

For more details on various aspects, discussed here, and not discussed, consider the following, which is by no means anywhere near a comprehensive list, but will be added to over time:

• Covering Vietnam from the Media Channel provides various articles about the media on Vietnam.
• Asia articles from media watch-dog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
• The books cited above are listed here (they themselves list many more sources):
  • John Pilger, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), especially part IV, chapters 14 to 23. (John Pilger's web site also includes a lot of articles on Vietnam.)
  • Phillip Knightly, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Kosovo, (Prion Books, 2000), especially chapters 16 and 17
  • Works by J.W. Smith from the Institute for Economic Democracy. At his web site you can find on line books, in full, for free. These detail in far more breadth and depth, the context in which Vietnam occurred.
  • Works from Noam Chomsky. His web site contains numerous articles, interviews, speeches, and books on all sorts of aspects of U.S. foreign policy, and like Smith, details the wider context as well.
  • William Blum, Rogue State, (Common Courage Press, 2000)