US forces were said to be in South Vietnam at the “request” of Saigon. There was no such request. In May 1961, Lyndon Johnson, Vice President, went to Saigon to press the South Vietnamese to ask the US to send in troops. General Taylor too urged sending troops, though “the introduction of US forces may increase tensions and risk a major war in Asia”. Having signed a secret memorandum on sabotage in Vietnam, President Kennedy told the State Department to prepare a White Paper on Vietnamese responsibility for aggression in South Vietnam. The Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers confirm responsibility for the deadlock in the Paris talks on Vietnam rested with the US. While the State Department vowed loyalty to Ngo Dinh Diem, it prepared to overthrow him. The publication by US newspapers in 1971 of the secret Pentagon Papers on US policy in Vietnam showed the methods used to shape public opinion to suit the US ruling caste. They cite countless examples of lies, provocation and perfidy by the US.

• A Damning Indictment
• Continuity of Deception
• Post-the Pentagon Papers
• The Storm Stilled?

A Damning Indictment

An article, the effect of which the Paris Le Figaro likened to a “bombshell in the White House”, appeared on 13 June 1971. It appeared in the New York Times and was the first of a series on, and excerpts from, a top secret Pentagon document entitled, History of US Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy. Two items on the front page of the newspaper introduced the series. One described the Vietnam Archive, and summarized the conclusions of the study, from the initial involvement of the Truman administration, through the build-up of American involvement, to open warfare in 1965. The second gave the origin of the report.

On 18 June, the New York Times was joined by the Washington Post, syndicating its materials to over 300 local newspapers as well as Newsweek magazine and several TV stations. One after the other, theBoston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the St Louis Post-Dispatch joined the campaign to expose the secret machinery behind the Vietnamese war. These are not radical, or left publications but belong to the “respectable” press.

The New York Times described the Pentagon documents it first brought into the light of day, as:

An almost incredible record of subterfuge, deception, shortsightedness, mistakes, wrong assumptions and arrogant disregard of truth.

But this description falls far short of the ugly picture of official Washington standards of honesty revealed by its disclosures of goverment lying on the Vietnam war, 30 years ago. The lying then has startling parallels with today.

Fearing further exposure of its criminal deception of the American people as well as world opinion, US Attorney General, John Mitchell, on instructions from the White House, took extraordinary measures to gag the press and stop publication of the exposé. In an article, aptly called, in the light of today, The Endless Tragedy, journalist James Reston commented:

For the first time in the history of the republic the Attorney General of the United States has tried to suppress documents he hasn’t read about a war that hasn’t been declared.

Reston said that “the security argument was being used to cover up the blunders and deceptions of the past”. The published documents lifted the curtain on how US policy is made. The Washington Court of Appeals would not prohibit the Washington Post from publishing the papers.

There is no doubt Washington’s Indo-China policy had been throughout a policy of deliberate provocation, readiness to risk a big war, sabotage of a political settlement, and considered deception of the public. Abundant proof of this was provided by the published documents, though, as many American observers rightly noted, they revealed only the tip of the iceberg of US crimes in Vietnam.

The evidence is more than sufficient. The documents showed that US actions in Indo-China were not a pragmatic reaction to a fast-changing situation, but a considered step-by-step programme, the chief elements of which from the beginning were direct US intervention, escalation to the point of possible use of nuclear weapons, bombing of Vietnamese territory, extension of the hostilities to neighbouring Cambodia and Laos, and Vietnamization of the war.

When the forces of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) of South Vietnam marched into Saigon on 29 April, 1975, the most bitterly-fought war of national independence in human history ended. It had started in August 1945 with the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and was a connected struggle for the national independence of Indo-China, including Cambodia and Laos. A just war of incredible suffering, but noble courage, it was truly of world-shaking significance.

Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader, never saw the victory he inspired, but never faltered in his conviction of final victory. In August 1945, a party only 15 years old rose up against the Japanese and evicted them from Vietnam. Ho had led a revolution against the Japs, the enemy of the US in the S Pacific. You could have been excused for thinking the Vietnamese would have been seen as US allies. Nope! Though the challenge was not from the US, it was immediate. On 21 September, 1945, French troops were landed in Saigon from a British warship. Britain had been given allied responsibility for the whole of South-East Asia. In fact, they assisted the French colonists, as they assisted the Dutch in Indonesia.

Two days after the French forces landed, they opened fire in Saigon and occupied the premises of the government of the Republic in that city. Then a temporary agreement was signed between the DRV and the French, which lasted roughly a year. Ho Chi Minh had this year to build up the state apparatus in the Republic, consolidate its political forces and develop a rudimentary economy before the French struck. In January 1946, elections were held throughout the country, and Ho’s supporters, including the trade unions, women’s and youth organisations, and the Buddhist, Catholic and Cao Dai associations, won 80 per cent of the votes. This unity of the people for independence was to prove decisive. It was further consolidated by the land reform which gave the peasants the land.

But on 17 December, 1946, the French opened fire in Hanoi and went over to a general offensive on 19 December. Ho and the Vietnamese had to fight and negotiate to preserve the independence of the infant republic. The next day Ho issued his appeal for nationwide resistance. The French had started a war to destroy the Republic and re-colonise Vietnam.

By design and necessity, the war placed an enormously high premium on the individual and group initiative of the Vietnamese resistance, and their self-sufficiency. The economy had to be dispersed, and had to develop in the course of the war, to feed the people and develop a war economy. At this stage the main weapons were captured French supplies.

The Vietnamese General Giap expounded the approach of the resistance in 1969. The spirit of the sustained, resolute and all-out offensive against the enemy, the capability to strike a big force with a small force, always to hold the initiative. As he put it:

To wipe out the enemy so as to defend ourselves, to preserve our forces so as to wipe out the enemy.

Its heroic application shattered the French conventional war doctrine, the doctrine of an alien force in a hostile country, lacking any popular support. This broad strategy of people’s war, with variations, was eventually to be applied to the American war in the south, and with the same outcome.

Heavy fighting continued throughout 1948, and in March of the following year the “State” of Vietnam, headed by Emperor Bao Dai, who had abdicated under Ho, was set up by the French. Militarily and politically weak, French colonialism could only conduct its attempted reconquest with US aid and foreign help. In the later stages of the war 60 per cent of the French Expeditionary Corps were German and Austrian mercenaries, former memhers of Hitler’s armies.

Washington’s “direct involvement” in Vietnam, the Pentagon study revealed, began with Truman’s decision to support France in her efforts to suppress anti-colonial struggles in Indo-China, part of the Truman Doctrine. As early as 12 February 1950, the New York Times described Indo-China as “a prize worth a gamble”. It listed the area’s strategic military raw materials, tungsten, tin, manganese, and its military importance “an 800-mile long bridge between Communist China and British Malaya with a common frontier with both Burma and Thailand”.

America’s first military aid agreement with the French was signed in May 1950. In the same year the DRV won big victories in the south and cleared the French from the Chinese border. In the following year an agreement was reached between the national independence forces of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the common struggle against the French, underlining the related though separate national struggles of the three peoples and countries.

Robert Lovatt, US Secretary of Defence at that time, on 13 March 1952, highlighted the geographical and strategic importance of the area as the main reason for supporting the French. A year later, on 4 August, President Eisenhower explained:

Indo-China and the whole of South-East Asia are essential to the US, both for strategic and political reasons.

Now, a succession of administrations, under the pretext of “saving” Asia from a “communist takeover”, increasingly involved the US in the French colonial war there. One can judge of the scale of US participation if only from the fact that, in 1950-54, Washington covered more than four-fifths of the cost of the French war. It was this decision of Truman’s that set the course of American policy.

At the end of 1953, French General Navarre announced the “final offensive” to finish off the national independence forces. It was the end of the French. In devastating battles, the DRV forces took Kontum and the Central Highlands in the south in January 1954. On 13 March they opened up their assault on the encircled French troops in Dien Bien Phu. It fell on 7 May. Dien Bien Phu was the culmination of the resistance strategic, fought with a combination of all forces against a single target, with a huge concentration of artillery, a battle timed to the internal French political crisis which the war created when Vietnam had heen made a world issue and a centre of the diplomatic scene.

The French were defeated. Pierre Mendes-France returned to the premiership with a mandate to end the war. The first phase of the war of national independence had been won.

The Geneva Conference (June-July 1954) was attended by representatives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the “State of Vietnam”, Laos, Cambodia, the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain and the United States of America.

The agreements (HMSO White Paper Cmd 9239, August 1954) which resulted from the conference were vital for the entire future of Vietnam. In the Final Declaration, the members of the Geneva Conference undertook to “respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity and territorial integrity of Vietnam”, and “to refrain from any interference in its internal affairs”—Ho Chi Minh’s main aim of a single, united Vietnam. This won international recognition. The independence of Laos and Cambodia was also recognised.

In the Agreement on the Cessations of Hostilities the signatories and “their successors” were responsible for enforcing the agreement.

• Article 27 obliged the Saigon regime to carry it out.
• Article 1 established a provisional demarcation line at the 17th Parallel for the withdrawal of foreign forces and the regrouping of the Vietnamese forces.
• Article 16 prohibited any troop reinforcements and additional military personnel.
• Article 17 prohibited war material.
• Article 18 prohibited the establishment of new military bases.
• Article 19 prohibited military alliances.

The demarcation of the 17th Parallel was temporary pending a general election to elect a single government for the whole of Vietnam. The Declaration, in paragraph 7, provided for “general elections in July 1956, under the supervision of an international Commission”, on which Poland, India and Canada were asked to serve. It added that consultations for this should be held “between the competent representative authorities of the two zones from 20 July, 1955, onwards”.

The US refused to sign the Geneva Agreements. It would have meant its plans for Indo-China would have been illegal in international law. At the same time its representative declared that the US would not use force to upset them. It was a cynical, hollow pledge.

Truman’s successor in the presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, was a highly successful general in World War II, and doubtless thought he could scotch liberation movements in Asia, particularly that in Vietnam, which was looking more and more likely to succeed. On 4 January 1954, the year of the Geneva Agreements, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, spelled out the matter in detail:

US interests in the Far East, from the strategic point of view, are closely connected with what is called “the chain of littoral islands”. This chain comprises two continental bases, Korea in the north and if possible Indo-China in the south. Between these two bases lie the following islands: Japan, Ryukyu, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.

Eisenhower’s adminisration decided to prevent the implementation of the 1954 Geneva accords on Indo-China, for, as the Pentagon study said, these accords interfered with Washington’s plans. Sounds familiar even though it was half a century ago. The reason for the refusal to sign the Geneva Agreements was that the US was prepared for massive intervention to prevent the defeat of the French. Before Dien Bien Phu, US General, James M Gavin, recalled:

The Chief of Staff, General Mathew B Ridgway, directed that we should go into the situation quite thoroughly in case a decision should be made to send US forces into the Hanoi delta. As I recall, we were talking about the possibility of sending eight divisions plus 35 engineer battalions and other auxiliary units.

US News and World Report, 7 February, 1966

This confession showed the deception of the US ruling caste, who sought all along to persuade the world that the American forces were in Indo-China because of an alleged “communist invasion”, of South Vietnam from the North in violation of the Geneva agreements. They sought to replicate the cause of the Korean War in Vietnam.

The use of the atom bomb was also considered. World outrage prevented both moves. So, the Americans had to systematically violate the Geneva Agreements, and render them null and void in the south. The stipulated general elections had to be avoided at all costs. South Vietnam would be transformed into a separate US puppet state, violating the Geneva agreement.

Even during the Geneva Conference the Americans took their first step. On 15 June 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem was hurriedly brought from cold storage in the US and installed as head of South Vietnam. Bao Dai, France’s puppet emperor, was unceremoniously cast aside.

From the start the new “state” was an American puppet. John F Kennedy, while still a Senator, in a speech to the American Friends of Vietnam Association, said on 1 June 1956, said:

If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the god-parents. We presided at its birth, we have given assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future.

Diem, Catholic son of a Minister at the Vietnamese Imperial Court, was Bao Dai’s Minister of the Interior in 1933. He retired in 1940. With the arrival of the Japanese he worked in secret with the Japanese Intelligence and in public ran a pro-Japanese party. Arrested in the August Revolution, he was released by Ho after six months in jail. In 1951, he went to the US and became private secretary to the crooked Cardinal Spellman.

His first job back in Vietnam was to torpedo the elections Geneva had guaranteed. On 6 June 1955, the north proposed opening the consultative talks on elections. On 16 July, Saigon radio turned this down, and broadcast an official statement repudiating the Geneva Agreements. On 19 July 1955, the North Vietnamese authorities again proposed consultations, only to have them rejected on 9 August.

The Soviet Union and the United Kingdom were joint co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference. In an official note on 30 March 1956, the Soviet Union raised the matter with Britain. In reply, the British government admitted the justice of North Vietnam’s complaint that “Saigon was avoiding elections” and stated it was desirable that the elections be held. (White Paper Cmd 9763, May 1956.)

In May 1956, the Soviet Union and Britain requested both north and south to meet to discuss preparations for the elections. The north was willing, Saigon refused. The elections were never held. Why? Simply because Ho would win, and Diem would lose, in which case American dreams in Indo-China would again he over. As Time Magazine put it (4 April 1955), South Vietnam was “neither mathematically nor politically remotely ready for the contest”.

Eisenhower himself wrote:

I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indo-China affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh.

(Mandate For Change: The White House Years 1953-56, 1963)

With the US forces thin on the ground the US used Diem to suppress all national independence figures and supporters of Geneva in the south. The CIA was extensively used. Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale was assigned to boost Diem and organise sabotage and guerrilla groups in the north. In the south, Marchetti and Marks ( The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence ) say “he initiated various psychological warfare programmes and helped Diem in eliminating his political rivals”. Marchetti was 14 years in the CIA. Lansdale armed and controlled tens of thousands of Diem troops in interrogation and intelligence units.

Diem attacked practically everyone. As early as 1955, he launched a military attack against the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen politico-religious sects. He repressed the Buddhists. But his special ferocity was reserved for those who had fought the French and remained in the south and supported the Geneva Agreements. Clashes increased. He decreed it a crime to advocate a neutral Vietnam. In his January 1956 Decree, he set up concentration camps. He set up his secret police run by his brother with the aid and direction of the CIA. A reign of terror was complete. In nine years, 160,000 were executed, 700,000 tortured and 370,000 imprisoned.

Phillipe Devillers, a French historian and a Roman Catholic who spent much of his life in Indo-China, originally supported Diem. His observation of Diem’s totalitarianism, corruption and repression changed his mind. In an article in P J Honey’s book North Vietnam Today, he wrote:

This repression was in theory aimed at the communists. In fact, it affected all those—and they were many—democrats, socialists, liberals, adherents of the sects, who were bold enough to express their disagreement [with Diem].

Those oppressed took to the countryside and started to fight back. Devillers added:

In December (1958) and the following January, armed bands sprang into being almost everywhere.

New York Times correspondent Robert Trumbull described the guerrilla uprising on 28 May, 1961:

The Vietcong movement… is thought to be capable of developing into the same kind of broadly based popular uprising that the French were unable to defeat in nine years of bitter fighting. In many distressing aspects the Vietcong rebellion appears to be really a continuation of the colonial war against the French.

In April 1959, Diem declared a state of war in the South. On 6 May, special military tribunals for summary executions were introduced. By 1960, the war was beyond Diem’s control. It became America’s “special war”. In November 1961, the first US regular troops were landed.

During this period, too, the US, through the CIA, were conducting the “secret war” in Laos, the largest and most expensive in the agency’s history. Marchetti and Marks tell us:

More than 35,000 opium growing Meo and other Laos mountain tribesmen were recruited into the CIA’s private army, “l’armée clandestine”. CIA-hired pilots flew bombing and supply missions in the agency’s own planes.

The CIA army was directed by General Vang Pao, who was only removed by the Pathet Lao in May 1975. After ceaseless violation of Cambodian neutrality and bombing of its territory, a CIA-instigated coup overthrew Prince Sihanouk in 1970, who was replaced by General Lon Nol.

On 20 December, 1960, the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formed of the progressive political, social and religious forces of the south. Its ten-point programme became the battle programme for the resistance.

Throughout 1961, as the struggle reached nation-wide proportions, all Diem’s reserves were called up. On 13 May, Lyndon Johnson, then Vice-President to Kennedy, and Diem signed an eight-point declaration on the US special war. On 2 August, President Kennedy pledged all assistance, and the British Permanent Military Mission under Brigadier-General Thompson was established in Saigon.

In his brief period in office, John F Kennedy transformed a policy of “limited-risk gamble” into a “broad commitment” that left President Lyndon B Johnson with a “choice between more war and withdrawal”, as New York Times writer, Neil Sheehan put it. Johnson’s choice was never a secret, but the details of the conspiracy against the American people, the Vietnamese and world peace hatched in the Washington corridors of power had been kept quiet. Now they are forgotten again.

The Boston Globe, showed from the documents that the use of US troops in Indo-China was urged as early as 1961 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Taylor. The general recommended to President Kennedy that these troops “act as an advance party of such additional forces as may be introduced” in South Vietnam if Washington’s “contingency plans are invoked”.

A State of Emergency was declared in 1962. That year there were 27,000 actions by the US and Diem troops. The US Air Force flew 50,000 sorties. Although President Kennedy took no formal decision on the matter then, by the time Lyndon Johnson took over the reins, in the autumn of 1963, there already were in South Vietnam 16,000 American “advisers” whose presence paved the way to the gradual build-up of strength until there was a half-million strong US army in Indo-China. Whoever was in the White House did not alter the policy—the Democrats’ Truman and Johnson, or the Republicans’ Eisenhower and Nixon.

The year 1963 was a decisive one, with huge Buddhist demonstrations against Diem in Hue, and 700,000 demonstrated in the streets of Saigon in June. On 1 November, there was a US-instigated coup against Diem, who was assassinated. After a swift succession of further coups—15 in all—Ngyuen Van Thieu seized power on 20 February, 1965.

With Thieu, America merely exchanged one puppet dictator for another. His, too, was a regime of terror ably assisted by the CIA. By that time, William Colby directed the CIA Counter Terror Programme. Later the name of Colby’s units was changed to Provisional Reconnaisance Units. This was a unilateral American programme, according to Marchetti and Marks, of “assassination, abuses, kidnappings and intimidation”. Colby had interrogation units which used torture in each of South Vietnam’s 42 provinces. In 1967, Colby’s office organised the notorious programme Phoenix. He testified in 1971, before a Congressional Committee, that 20,587 suspected Vietcong were killed under Phoenix in the first two and a half years. The Saigon government put the figure at 40,994. In 1968, Colby became the head of the “pacification” programme in Saigon.

The terror was matched by large scale corruption, prostitution and drug peddling, with a debased American sub-culture killing the centuries old indigenous Vietnam culture, literature and art. From then on, the war reached all out proportions, the number of troops increasing from 200,000 in that year to over 400,000 in 1967, and ultimately to half a million.

After nine years of fierce, intermittent fighting, two-thirds of the south had been liberated by the NLF forces, and the way was opened up for the formation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. It was founded at a Congress of the Liberation Front in June 1969. Its programme spelled out in much greater detail that advanced by the NLF. By then the Paris peace talks had begun. The PRG programme specified that the war had to end on the basis of the recognition of the fundamental national rights of the Vietnamese people as laid out in the Geneva Agreements.

It advanced its conception of a Provisional Coalition Government of all the forces that stand for peace, independence and neutrality. That provisional government would then organise general elections for a Constituent Assembly based on national concord. The various democratic freedoms were stipulated. Living conditions were to be raised. How to heal the wounds of war received great attention. Finally, it said that the reunification of the country would proceed “step by step, by peaceful means, through discussion and agreement between the two zones, without coercion by either side”.

Essentially the NLF strategy of people’s war was the same as that in the struggle against the French in the north. Again there was no single continuous front, the whole of the south was the front. Offensive war was waged with the three military wings of the NLF—regular, self-defence and guerrilla. The Commander was General Tran Nam Trung, a veteran of the anti-colonial struggle against the French.

Of the guerrilla forces, a US correspondent, Neil Sheehan, then Saigon Correspondent of the UPI Press Agency, wrote in reluctant admiration, in April 1964:

The Vietnamese Communist guerrilla is a legendary, phantom-like figure in 20th-century warfare. He has proven that his own human resources can defeat the best technology and massive fire power of modern Western-style armies.

Hilda Vernon, in her book, Vietnam quotes Colonel G M Jones, Commander of the US Army Special Warfare Centre, Fort Bragg, as saying:

The record shows, that one guerrilla has effectively tied down or dissipated the usefulness of ten conventional soldiers. He has killed 15 conventional soldiers for every guerrilla fatality… How has the guerrilla managed to do this? The answer in great part lies in motivation, training and courage.

As against this, the US forces had no real motivation, even if the White House and the Pentagon had. They and America’s allies were suffering demoralisation and were in a stage of near revolt and collapse. As Colonel R D Heinl Jr, admitted, the US troops in Vietnam around this time were in a state of imminent collapse, with individual units trying to avoid battle and refusing to fight, “fragging” COs and NCOs, addicted to drugs, and with sagging morale. (Vietnam 1970, a Staff Report, Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, Washington.)

What it led to is now ancient history, but US leaders always want to be heroes as long as there is no chance of them dying themselves. America’s war in the south, and ultimately in the north, was one of the most brutal in human history. It was a massive military intervention, including dropping a greater tonnage of bombs than that dropped in the Second World War, employing napalm, food crop and foliage poisons on an enormous scale. It resulted in 72,000 US dead and 140,000 wounded, cost 120 billion dollars, and undermined the whole of US society.

The Vietnamese dead and maimed must number millions. It was virtual genocide. Most of the dead resulting from the numberless US air strikes were civilian, mainly women and children. Many villages, including all their inhabitants, were wiped out by US ground forces. The most notorious example was the My Lai massacre.

Yet the US was defeated.

It was a just struggle. It gained ultimately the support of the whole progressive world, including many Americans.

For the US administrators, it was a colonial war, not even its own, devoid of justice. At first the Americans relied on their Vietnamese puppets, but when that failed it became a large-scale war with over 500,000 US troops. It was a war which resulted in the alienation of the US in the world, and rent the country with the greatest political crisis it had seen. It made Vietnam a world issue, and its outcome had world repercussions.

All of those killed, wounded and mentally shattered was the price the American people paid for the gambles of their irresponsible leadership. One can well understand the eruption of indignation when the public learned that it had been the victim of a colossal political swindle. Senator Mansfield demanded an investigation of what he has called the most shameful period in US history. Senator George S McGovern said the documents told a story of “almost incredible deception” of Congress and the American people by the highest officials in government, including the President.

Continuity of Deception

Note the continuity of US Indo-China deception, especially since the Republican leaders tried to dissociate themselves from the crimes committed in Vietnam by the American military over two and a half decades, taking advantage of the fact that the study was commissioned by President Johnson’s Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, and to lay the responsibility at the doorstep of the Democrats. Secretary of State Rogers, for instance, said that they did not propose to engage in a controversy on this issue but were mostly concerned with how to get out of the war.

The documents nullify the Republicans’ efforts to whitewash themselves. It is common knowledge that the Republicans, Eisenhower and Nixon, sought to torpedo the 1954 Geneva Conference on Vietnam. It is also known that as far back as 1954, when the French colonialists were on the brink of collapse in Vietnam, Nixon, then Vice-President, joined with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in urging the use of nuclear weapons in Indo-China and the sending of American troops there. And, as the well-known US commentator Jack Anderson observed, the Nixon Administration, while promising to bring the American operations in Indo-China to an early end, was actually working on a plan for massive bombing of North Vietnam. The literally million of tons of explosives dropped by the US Air Force in Indo-China, were shared by governments of both governmental parties in the US, though the Republicans held the record. It highlights the continuity of policy, and the escalation by the Republican Nixon of the war he inherited from the Democrat Johnson.

Take the official thesis that the US forces were in South Vietnam at the “request” of the Saigon authorities. There never was any such request. In May 1961, Lyndon Johnson, then Vice-President, personally went to Saigon to press on the South Vietnamese authorities to ask the US government to send ground troops to Vietnam. General Taylor too urged sending troops to Indo-China, even though he felt that “the introduction of US forces may increase tensions and risk escalation into a major war in Asia”. Having signed a secret memorandum on sabotage in Vietnam, President Kennedy directed the Department of State to prepare to publish its White Paper on Vietnamese responsibility for aggression in South Vietnam. The Washington Post pointed out that the Pentagon Papers confirm that the responsibility for the deadlock in the Paris talks on Vietnam rested with the US government. And while the State Department vowed loyalty to its ally Ngo Dinh Diem, it was getting ready to overthrow him because of his “neutralist” tendencies. Countless other examples of lies, provocation and perfidy could be cited.

The documents the New York Times managed to publish revealed that the policy of American leaders on this issue had been built on deception, backstage manoeuvring and provocation. Inventing a pretext for bombing North Vietnam can hardly be categorized otherwise. The Gulf of Tonkin “incident” makes the point. As early as 31 May, 1964, Melvin Laird, Republican Member of the House Appropriations Sub-Committee, declared:

The Administration’s position is to move north, and we are now preparing to move north.

This was immediately followed by the Tonkin Gulf incident. The US version was that North Vietnamese naval vessels shelled US destroyers. The North Vietnamese authorities claimed it was the other way round. What was clear was that the US was organising commando sea raids on the north, using heavily-armed, high-speed PT type boats. Marchetti and Marks wrote:

At least one such CIA raiding party was operating in that part of the Tonkin Gulf in 1964 where two US destroyers allegedly came under attack by North Vietnamese ships.

The Pentagon had planned a sham attack on American warships as a pretext for the bombing, and meanwhile the politicians and diplomats were already drafting a Congressional resolution giving the President a free hand in Southeast Asia in anticipation of it. The draft was finalized on 25 May 1964, two months before the Tonkin Gulf incident fabricated in the Pentagon, and was adopted on 7 August 1964, just after it.

As an excuse it was enough. The world political situation and balance of power diplomacy made it difficult for the US to send ground troops into the north. They therefore launched large-scale ferocious bombing from South Vietnamese, Thailand and Pacific bases and the 7th Fleet, to bomb North Vietnam back to the stone age. This caused widespread suffering and wholesale destruction, but was a gigantic military and political miscalculation. Not only did the US underestimate the tenacity of the north, it stoked up afresh the world wide revulsion against the US.

The north defeated the aerial offensive. They not only shot down thousands of US planes, but maintained communications, central and regional production, underground and in caves. They dug millions of shelters and tens of thousands of communication trenches. As Giap puts it:

Civilisation triumphed over violence.

By bombing the north, he said, the US enemy “looked upon Vietnam as one single battlefield, thus tacitly and unwittingly admitting that Vietnam is one”. In another essay he wrote:

Our entire people from the north to south rose up in close unity, determined to save their country and homes…

These principles were well illustrated in the Tet offensive in 1968 when the national independence forces struck simultaneously in Hue, Danang, the Saigon Airport and even the US Embassy, or the 1972 offensives in Quang Tri and the Kontum Pleiku Highlands.

Both at the time of this US-provoked clash in August 1964 and in the subsequent six and a half years the New York Times had ample information to tell the truth about what really bad happened, but it did not do it even when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee challenged the official version hy summoning the then Defence Secretary Robert McNamara to testify before it in early 1968. One has to wonder, not only at the ignorance of the US public on these things, but also at the US Senators and Congressmen who continue to give absolute dictatorial power to plainly questionable people, on dubious bases.

An idea of how far the warmongers would let escalation go can be had from official plans to use nuclear weapons in South Vietnam. As the Pentagon Papers show, Robert McNamara, then Defence Secretary, speaking at the secret conference in Honolulu in early June 1964, envisaged the “use of nuclear weapons at some point”. He was supported by the commander of the US forces in the Pacific, Admiral Felt, who asked to be given the option to use tactical nuclear weapons.

That these dangerous plans were not carried out is in no way evidence of Washington’s common sense, but merely the result of a sharp turn in the course of the war which compelled the US command to change its plans. In early 1966, Assistant Defence Secretary McNaughton said that the patriotic forces of Vietnam were effectively “matching our deployments”, while the Saigon forces were “tired, passive and accommodation prone”. The US, he said further, was “in an escalating military stalemate”. Nor did the hopes that the Saigon regime could be consolidated materialize. McNaughton admitted that Saigon’s “political infrastructure was moribund and weaker than the Vietcong’s”. To this was added growing discontent among the American people which reached such dimensions that the Pentagon already conceded “the possibility of widespread civil disorder in the US”. All of which undermined Washington’s confidence in the final outcome of the war, as the Boston Globe pointed out.

Washington’s duplicity is plain also in the US pressing for the convocation of a new Geneva conference, ostensibly to “bring peace to Indo-China”. The Pentagon Papers show that, really, the US government regarded its proposal not as a potential opening for negotiations but as a convenient means to lay down a tough line. Notice anything familiar there?

Washington not only deceived the American people, it also caused its allies to deceive their own people. Australian Premier Menzies said Australia sent its armed forces to Vietnam “at the request of the South Vietnam government”. The Australian government had to conduct an investigation of its own. Suspicions were aroused in Canada too, in respect of the dubious behaviour, according to the Canadian Globe and Mail, of the former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson.

The reports on the Pentagon Papers were not only a blow, at the policies of one or another president, they also showed up the perfidy of Washington diplomats, government leaders and politicians. It revealed serious shortcomings in US democracy long before Bush worked his miracle of the chads. Who can now recall without disgust how Lyndon Johnson, touring the country during the 1964 election campaign to build up his image as a champion of peace, proclaimed that American boys would never be sent to die in Vietnam? The published documents show that the Johnson Administration “began planning in the spring of 1964 to wage overt war”, at the very time the President was parading his peaceful intentions. We also know now that Johnson embarked on the last stage of planning the massive bombings of Vietnam on 3 November 1964, the very day he won the elections.

Post-the Pentagon Papers

The US had now reached an impasse. Talks in Paris commenced. Long, tortuous and difficult, they were to last four years, during which ceaseless fighting took place and the bombing of the north was renewed before agreement was reached on 27 January, 1973.

With the big American losses, the US after 1968 sought a policy of Vietnamisation, as US Ambassador Bunker in Saigon said, “to change the colour of the corpses”.

So the Americans cooked up the policy of Vietnamisation to preserve the US neo-colonial grip on the south. In this they encountered the opposition of Saigon. But Thieu was inefficient and corrupt, and it was an illusion to think the Americans could carry through these new plans. So the US were delaying the negotiations while trying to strengthen Thieu.

As the long negotiations in Paris went on, the war reached an even more ferocious critical stage. Before the Paris talks in 1968, Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election and Nixon had defeated Senator Humphreys in the subsequent presidential election.

Nixon was re-elected for a second term on a withdrawal ticket, but went on to extend the war. He built up the puppet forces to a million and carried the war into Cambodia and Laos. At the same time the world relation of forces was changing with the growth of detente in Europe and Nixon’s discussions with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon tried to pressurise the Soviet Union and China on Vietnam. While fully supporting the process of detente, the Vietnamese insisted that the war would be discussed and settled in Paris by the Vietnamese.

Nixon’s impotent answer was the huge B52 raids with the strategic bombing fleet and the mining of Haiphong in 1972. It was his last fling. The US had miscalculated in two ways—the heavy toll the bombing took of the Strategic Air Command and the sense of outrage of world opinion. There was little purpose in carrying on. Defeated politically, strategically and militarily, the US signed the Paris Agreement.

The Paris Agreement, a victory for the Vietnamese, was signed on 27 January, 1973. As on the military front, the four-year struggle on the diplomatic front was fierce. Signed by the DRV, the PRG, the US and the Saigon administration, the agreement went back to the Geneva accords of 1954, that the US had determined to sabotage. The first article confirmed the Vietnamese people’s fundamental national rights:

The United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognised by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam.

The agreement also confirmed, as at Geneva (Article 15), that:

The military demarcation line between the two zones is only provisional and not a political or territorial boundary.

It stipulated the end of US military involvement or intervention in Vietnamese affairs, the withdrawal of US forces and dismantling of US bases. It recognised two authorities in the south, the PRG and the Saigon administration, each with its territory and forces.

Article 12 required that these two authorities…

…hall hold consultations in a spirit of national reconciliation and concord, mutual respect and mutual non-elimination, to set up a National Council of National Recon ciliation and Concord of three equal segments [PRG, Saigon, and the so—called neutral forces].

This National Council was to organise free and democratic elections. Article 15 stipulated.

The reunification of Vietnam shall be carried out step by step through peaceful means on the basis of discussions and agreements between North and South Vietnam, without coercion or annexation by either party and without foreign interference.

There were many other provisions, including international supervision. These vital points were to be carried out quickly. The National Council of Concord was, for example, to be set up in 90 days. Article 20 re-emphasised the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Cambodia and Laos.

The ink on the agreement was hardly dry before the US and Thieu started to violate it. Thieu never accepted it, and was led to understand the US would support him in his defiance. In a speech on 24 January, 1973, just before the agreement was signed, Nixon said:

The US will continue to recognise the government of the Republic of Vietnam (Thieu) as the sole legitimate government of South Vietnam.

Even as the main US forces were pulled out, military aid were poured in to Thieu. All the US governmental apparatus, military advisers, and the CIA remained.

The Americans had learnt nothing. They continued the same discredited and fatal tactics as after the Geneva Agreements with Diem. The Council of Concord was never established. The dream was still to hold the south with Thieu and his million troops and with terror. They had to be taught yet another lesson.

Le Duan summed up the position—the Vietnamese had been strong enough to compel the US to pull out, the agreement was a big victory, it had recognised two governments and two armies in the south, called for general peace, release of detainees, freedom and national concord. To the extent it was realised, it placed the Thieu regime in jeopardy.

Thieu took the gambler’s course, with the tacit agreement of the US. Throughout 1973 and 1974 he launched ceaseless attacks, only to meet the strongest possible resistance and counter-offensive. As a result his power was eroded and that of the resistance grew. At the same time, Thieu’s regime internally was disintegrating, with soaring inflation, mounting unemployment, corruption and ever extending political revolt.

With dramatic suddenness the climax was reached in 1975. Thieu, faced with disaster, withdrew from the Central Highlands region, which throughout the whole 30 years’ war had been the strategic key to the south. In 55 days his regime collapsed. In rapid succession, Hue, Da Nang and other cities were abandoned, and the people rose in rebellion. Even then, the Americans were desperately urging their puppet to fight and make a last stand.

President Ford was demanding another 400 million dollars of arms for Saigon. But Congress and the American people had had enough. Support for the US war had evaporated in its heartland. Thieu resigned. His army was completely demoralised. On 29 April, the independence forces were in Saigon.

At long last, after 30 long and bloody but nevertheless heroic years, the war was over. Once again from the China border to the Mekong Delta, Vietnam was free. The longest war in American history had proved to be America’s first outright defeat. Its plans collapsed in an orgy of looting, anarchy and complete demoralisation.

There was the tragedy and farce of American evacuation, the grandiose plan, political in intent, to pull out 150,000 refugees along with the last remaining American forces—ahove all, the US henchmen, torturers and criminals. But who to take? One American cynically put it to the correspondent Martin Woolacott:

Who do you take out? The killers from the provincial reconnaisance squads, or Catholic nuns?

Guardian, 17 April 1975

They took the killers, Thieu, Marshal Ky and their like. Ky went to the United States, Thieu to Taiwan. The Americans took the top brass of their corrupt creation…

…including many who played an unsavoury role in the political system in South Vietnam.

The Times, 6 May 1975

It was a mean and sordid end to a meaner and more sordid war of the world’s greatest military power against a small but proud and courageous people. The inquest was already taking place. Many could not understand how the collapse happened, Peter Hazelhurst wrote:

The explanation is perhaps summed up succinctly by an experienced military adviser: “It was like a wooden house being eaten away by termites for two years. On the outside it looked fine, but inside the structure was rotting”.

The Times of 7 April 1975

T D Allman, who covered the war for the last seven years, wrote that the US deliberately created refugees for military and political reasons:

It was this “refugee policy” that created what Senator I W Fulbright called “a society of prostitutes and mercenaries”, and the caricature of civilisation produced in South Vietnam by the American Way of War, which now accounts for the collapse of a state that never had any economic, political or social basis except that provided by the Americans.

Guardian, 8 April, 1975.

The callous, blinkered verdict of The Times was that the US failed because “in spite of all the brutality which it did employ, it rightly accepted some restraints on the use of military force”. The Times can only mean that it did not use nuclear bombs! The US used every weapon in its arsenal, without restraint, except the nuclear bomb. The restraint regarding the bomb was the restraint of diplomacy, and particularly world outrage.

From start to finish, whether with Labour or Tory governments, Britain shamefully backed the US with only occasional weasel words of admonition. In August 1961 the Foreign Ministers of the US, France and Britain jointly pledged “full political, military and economic support” to Diem.

Fortunately, in those days, the UK did not have quite such hapless poodles of the White House in Parliament, and the British public never let them send British troops, though the US continually and despairingly pressed for them.

As the war mounted, with its toll of US dead, and the magnitude of the crimes emerged, a sense of revulsion swept the country. The huge anti-war movement which resulted split the country from top to bottom. The embittered returning servicemen swelled the revolt.

The US global crusade against national indeoendence in its pursuit of greed, its worldwide bases and alliances were buttressed by CIA coups and ruthless internal interference in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They supported the most corrupt and puerile regimes, and this in turn stoked the forces of freedom and democracy everywhere.

The more the military-industrial complex thrived, with its massive arms orders and three million conscripts, the greater were the attacks on American civil liberties, the conventions of the US Constitution, and in turn the greater the protest and counter action.

Even rich America, with its tremendous resources, felt the strain of huge arms budgets to sustain America’s self-imposed military role. Vietnam alone cost 120 billion dollars, helped to devalue the currency and contributed to the undermining of the world monetary system.

Congressional power diminished, particularly the convention that only Congress could authorise war, and that of the Presidency epitomising the military-industrial complex grew, the Nixon Presidency most of all. His manifestly illegal acts abroad were matched by equally illegal acts at home with burglary, private espionage, and the White House “plumbers”. First used against Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Vietnam Pentagon Papers, they were ultimately turned against the Democratic Party at Watergate. It led to Nixon’s downfall under the threat of impeachment and the jailing of the lesser criminals. What has changed?

Pulitzer prize-winning historian Arthur Schlessinger, Junior, wrote:

The weight of Messianic globalism was indeed proving too much for the American Constitution… In fact, the policy of indiscriminate intervention, far from strengthening American security, seemed rather to weaken it by involving the US in remote, costly and mysterious wars, fought in a way that shamed the nation, and, even when thus fought, demonstrating only the inability of the most powerful nation on earth to subdue bands of guerrillas in black pyjamas.

The Imperial Presidency, 1974

As the war progressed, so the US global role, of which Vietnam was the heart, faced mounting difficulties. The world balance of forces was changing to benefit democracy, freedom, national independence and peace. National independence won in Portugal, and its colonies from an evil dictator. Another, Franco was overthrown in Spain. The Greek junta collapsed. Apartheid in S Africa was beaten.

But, these setbacks and particularly that for the US in Vietnam did not mean the power elite responsible in Washington had gone. This was no revolution, and it stands to reason that the callous hatred of these men would continue to burn low until it burst out again. Sure enough, it has.

The Storm Stilled?

The storm raised by the publication of the Pentagon documents has now utterly been stilled. The US propaganda agencies muted the vociferous chorus that first attended the exposure of some of Washington’s secrets. Even those who stood behind the publication of the “confidential” and “top secret” Pentagon documents came to feel that the revelations went a bit too far, becoming too flagrant an indictment of the US leadership over decades. The exposure of deliberate and systematic deception of the public and uncontrolled behind-the-scenes intrigues by the architects of brinkmanship policies was too scandalous. It was played down or ignored as old history.

Nor did the US press, radio and TV go significantly into the mechanics of deception or the continuation and motivation of the caste of professional politicians in Washington that operate in secret, and plainly operate outside of the scope of democracy. Who are these people and why should they remain as a law unto themselves?

The response of the Washington propaganda machine was that the publication of the Pentagon Papers proved the freedom of the US press. In fact, the US press zealously supported the US leadership until the government itself began to talk about pulling out. American newspapers, magazines and other media of mass information had for years been telling deliberate lies and deceiving public opinion at home and abroad by painting a distorted picture of the war in Vietnam. They did it not because they did not know the truth. More than enough material belying the Washington version of Vietnam existed. If it had wanted to, the US press could have checked official reports, but it did not, and accepted the propaganda put out by the US political and military leaders.

Although American media of different kinds and trends—newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations, publishing houses and film companies—claim to be independent, there is constant and close control over their activities. The bulk of daily information is selected, sorted out and slanted by the bosses of the news agencies, newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations.

Press agency reports on international, national and even local affairs fill the air and the newspapers and magazines, presenting the news in the way the ruling element want it. These press agencies are immensely powerful, supplying almost the whole world with easy news at a time when most correspondents are too self-indulgent to want to do anything hard, like getting an original story. The top few agencies feed thousands of media outlets and have branches in hundreds of countries.

Some newspapers, like the New York Times itself, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and Baltimore Sun and broadcasting companies are influential because they are close to the leading government departments and are well informed of their policies. The leading newspapers and radio and television companies assign their best correspondents and columnists to Washington. Political scientist, Bernard Cohen, wrote:

The correspondents follow a path of news that is narrowed at the start because it proceeds within the framework of what they understand editors and publishers to want by way of variety and amount of foreign affairs news… Many are disturbed by the potential influence and great responsibility that in these circumstances rest in just a few hands.

The presentation of news about major current events, especially in the foreign policy sphere, is co-ordinated directly by the US government. Nowadays it is called “spin”—for which read propaganda—and is done by the White House, the State Department, the US Information Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defence Department. The government departments have special boards and agencies-policy and planning, public relations, which give guidance to newspapers and the radio. The spin or propaganda machine hides its sources with confidential directives and instructions, and briefings, on or off the record, are given by the White House, the State Department and the other government offices and agencies.

The activity undertaken to shape public opinion often involves campaigns. The President has several meetings with the leaders of the House and the Senate and the chairmen uf their main committees, invites sympathetic Congressmen to lunch, and takes part in regional briefings for newspaper publishers and editors and radio and television executives. Some members of the Cabinet visit the editorial offices of newspapers, magazines and radio networks in Washington, New York, Chicago, los Angeles, Dallas and other cities. Prominent government officials tour different states. Everything is done to present things to the public in the best possible light.

The administration attaches particular importance to the co-ordination of the activity of spin when important speeches are made that have to gather public support. Many Presidential advisers and assistants are former newspapermen. John Scalli of ABC joined Nixon’s brigade of specialist advisers, the Washington Evening Star said, to “make the President and his policies more popular”. Blair’s battery of spindoctors, copied from the US, seemed to be working excellently at first, but the trouble with spin, with any lying propaganda, is that people begin to realise the falseness of it when it does not tie in with their experience. Blair has had to join the US war party to try to win back lost credibility.

The Pentagon Papers saw the light of day not because someone suddenly had qualms of conscience and awakened to the inhumanity and criminality of the war. It was not humane considerations but the realization that continuation of the war was not only futile but was fraught with danger to the US system. The Vietnam gamble eventually divided American society and the rift eventually even cut through the administration. The Washington elite ended up itself divided between the political hawks, wanting to carry the war to its victorious finish, or at least prolong it whilst it was profitable, and those with a more pragmatic outlook who saw dissension building up at home and abroad and saw potential danger to long term profitability in it.

The US Establishment split and one faction leaked information to the press, knowing that some press barons were on their side. The latter got sufficiently influential for a time to stop the war. The war party is back stronger and bolder than ever—now that there is only one world superpower. The story of the Pentagon Papers for a while exposed the mechanism of deceit. But this mechanism continues to function, to shape public opinion so that it will accept the leadership’s aggressive policy.

The, prominent US political figure, William Averell Harriman, concluded that the war could not be won.Fortune predicted that “the Vietnam war would bring on economic strains beyond what most economists appear to foresee”. Brigadier General William Wallace Ford declared the war in Southeast Asia to be a mistake, and the best way out was immediate withdrawal of US forces.

These statements reflected the awakening that came to those who counted on aggression but who found serious difficulties and problems in it. If the editors of the newspapers had not had strong voices behind them, it is doubtful that the secret Pentagon Papers would have been brought out into the open. It was, in short, a political move of a pressure group that had been sidelined for too long by the Washington professionals.

Now US Presidents have started again their mad adventures. Speaking of the Washington policy makers, a New York Post commentator described them as men without moral compunctions concerned solely with US might and the prestige they assumed it engendered. The same men are in charge in Washington with the same crude and ineffective policies, ineffective that is in gaining any prestige in world terms, although they doubtless get prestige and riches out of it themselves. It is time the US electorate called their ruling caste to order and demanded that they concentrate on home policy instead of adventuring abroad.

When the nazi criminals were committing their vile deeds, they did not think that they would have to answer for them before courts of justice in Nuremberg, Krasnodar, Paris, Belgrade, Warsaw and Prague. Whether Americans commit atrocities or Nazis, the crime is the same. Americans get away with it because they are the only superpower in the world. It does not make it right. This tale ought to be a warning, but who in the US cares? They don’t seem to.