GOVERNMENT LIES FROM VIETNAM Essay, Research Paper

GOVERNMENT LIES FROM VIETNAM

For nearly a decade, the civil conflict in Vietnam was merely a footnote to the evening news in the United States. But with the first reports of an ?unprovoked attack? on the U.S. destroyer Maddox by the North Vietnamese in the summer of 1964, Americans were faced with a whole new vernacular of war. The United States government consistently lied to the American people through propaganda, censorship, and disinformation during the Vietnam War in order to gain support for the war effort. The governments deception of the American people can be separated into individual battles, CIA involvement, and involvement of the press.

In order to understand the government?s situation, one must understand the social conditions of America in the 1960?s. First and foremost, the Civil Rights Movement was preparing to go into full swing. Many government agencies were involved somehow with this. For the most part, African-Americans felt they had put up with enough discrimination. It was now the time to stand up for yourself. Many people who stood up for themselves became targets of FBI and CIA investigations. There was no way that African-Americans were going to support a war that not only needlessly harmed citizens, but also put a damper on there own fight for justice. Just a few years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the CIA had failed miserably with their attempted invasion of the Bay of Pigs. The government?s need to lie can be summed up by Victor Zorza in his Washington Post Article of November 1965:

?In psychological warfare? the intelligence agencies of the democratic countries suffer from the grave disadvantage that in attempting to damage the adversary they must also deceive their own public.?

Shortly before sending General Paul D. Harkins off to Vietnam, President Kennedy meet with him at the White House. In addition to being a general, Harkins was also the head of the United States Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). In this meeting, Kennedy gave explicit instructions that he wanted to be fully informed on every aspect of the war. This included both the good news and the bad news. As Commander-in-Chief, Kennedy had every right to this information, however he was consistently denied the bad news. Every time Kennedy received a report from General Harkins, Kennedy would hear about minor victories, new strategies, and flat out lies as well. Shortly after arriving in Vietnam, General Harkins had his first real taste of battle. The operation was code named Operation Sunrise. The point of this operation was to travel around Vietnam making a string of ?strategic hamlets.? Once these hamlets were built, small town farming families would be able to move in. In each hamlet, the U.S. army would have troops stationed to watch out for any possible attacks. At first, all of the reports that Harkins was sending back to Kennedy were exceptional. Almost a third of the target residents moved to hamlets.

?In reality, the experiments with the fortified hamlets were a failure. Nothing had changed except for the men at the top. They were waging war through public relations releases. Reports from the field were being rewritten by Harkins, with pessimism and unwelcome information deleted and outright fiction substituted.?1

Of course very few Americans knew how defective this program really was. It is hard to see why the United States government wanted every Vietnamese farmer in a protected area.

Perhaps the North Vietnamese?s most successful battle during the war was during the night of Tet, The Vietnamese New Year. The United States Army was expecting this attack, but they could not be sure of where exactly it would be. It turns out that the battle was in every place that had at least a decent size population. The Viet Cong had planned roughly one hundred hit points throughout the country. One hit point was the newly rebuilt U.S. Embassy. Two and a half million dollars had recently been spent to fix the embassy up after a previous hit. It turned out that the tax money used to rebuild the embassy should have been saved instead of spent. After all of the festivities and celebrations had been completed, nearly 60,000 Viet Cong spread out all over the Vietnam in preparation for an attack. After twenty-five days of battle, body counts could be made and various statistics could be collected. Although Vietnamese casualties were much larger than America?s, Vietnam seemed to be on the victorious side. Based solely on the body count, U.S. commanders differed with this opinion as they claimed domination. Fatalities, however, are not the only way to determine a battle?s victor. The U.S. did not attain their goal of the battle and therefore did not have a chance of winning it.

Another controversial battle was the Battle of Hamburger Hill. In this battle, the United Stated tried to take over Apbia Mountain. What was supposed to be a routine search and destroy mission, quickly became a poorly commanded and outright bloody battle. United States troops were sent up to storm the mountain and failed miserably on multiple occasions. Defoliate (Agent Orange) was sprayed on the mountaintop to make it easier for the American Army to attack. This strategy did not work and ended up hurting surviving vets of the war more than it helped them during the war. In all, forty-six people died in over ten attempted charges of the hill. How could these men go through such horror? One might think that their commander would have seen that it was impossible after the first three or even four tries. This was more like a suicide mission than a battle. It is amazing that only forty-six people died during the repeated onslaught uphill.

The government downplayed the three above-mentioned losses quite a bit so as not to wreak havoc throughout the nation. If the details of battles such as these had been released during the war, demonstrations would have been even more intense than they already were. Support of the war would have seen an even sharper decline than it eventually did.

In order for the government to convince the public that communism was a big problem, the CIA needed to step into play. Since 1947 the CIA had spent over one billion dollars for propaganda alone. These activities were both foreign and domestic.2 One example to where this money went was to a Communist newspaper. The CIA basically kept a Communist newspaper based in New York alive. This was accomplished without the publisher of the paper even knowing it. The CIA purchased a few thousand subscriptions to The Daily Worker in order to keep its circulation rate up. The idea was that when people saw that the circulation of the newspaper was rising, the same people would believe that the American Communist population is rising. This is an example of ?gray propaganda? because there is some truth in that there really are Communists living in America. Black propaganda is one of the most deceitful tactics used by the CIA. Black propaganda is disinformation in its purest form. There is absolutely no truth in any of it; even less truth than one would find in The National Inquirer. Because black propaganda is more easily detected in America, the CIA places false stories in foreign newspapers. From there, the CIA hopes that American journalists will read the foreign articles and print their own versions of them in American papers.

John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA agent to leave the agency and tell his story to the public. Stockwell worked thirteen years in all for the CIA; at the end he was on a subcommittee for the National Security Council. Stockwell says in a public speaking event that the United Stated led the way. Because of this the war would have never nearly ended up at the point that it did. Stockwell explains why books are the best source of information:

?In television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what they want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get what the editor selects to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for yourself. Read, and you find out for yourselves. As you?ll see, the issues are very, very important.?

While books are great for the most part, one must remember that they are still censored, sometimes in extreme ways. This occurs most often when the book is about a controversial subject. Almost half of the pages in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks have many missing lines.

The CIA worked intensively in Vietnam for twenty-five years. As each year went by, their propaganda became stronger and stronger. Americans were fooled by this propaganda brought about by the CIA. Eventually this brought about the Vietnam War. This means that the CIA is responsible for the more than two million deaths that occurred during that time. The reason why the CIA, and the United States in general, can get away with those kinds of death figures has to do with two words: nuclear bombs. Flat out, if Vietnam even had the ingredients to make a nuclear weapon the United States would have never initiated a full out war starting with the deception of the Gulf of Tonkin.

Newspapers have the power to create fantasy and turn it into reality. That is one reason why propaganda works so well in newspapers. The CIA figured this out a long time ago and for that reason has paid off journalists to write what the CIA wants to be written. These are not local journalists that they are paying off. The writers come from the top ranks of well-respected newspapers such as the New York Times.

Stockwell says: ?When you get people worked up to hate, they?ll let you spend huge amounts of money on arms.?3 This statement could not be more true. Vietnam is a case in point. When the Gulf of Tonkin story appeared in the news people became upset. Up until that point, Southeast Asia did not mean anything to many United States citizens. As soon as American ships were being ?bombed,? citizens were willing to hand over their life savings for this country.

When a newspaper reports claims as truths, atrocious things can occur. This includes war. Without American journalism, the Vietnam War as society knows it would have never happened. One year after the Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying: ?For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.? There are several reasons other than the CIA that explains why the news media coverage was poor. The media relied very heavily on government officials for facts. Also, not once did the media question official statements on issues that concerned the public. Americans are idiots when it comes to believing in what government officials say. If a journalist did enough research like they are supposed to, he or she would come up with real facts.

United States propaganda during the Vietnam War only worked part way. The government convinced the smart people of this country, those with a college degree, that the war was a worthy cause. However, the non-college educated were not as likely to support the war. The reasoning behind this was that most propaganda was distributed through readings and fliers. College-educated people tend to read more than the non-college educated therefore the college-educated see more propaganda on a daily basis.5 ?Vietnam Syndrome? was when a person was too educated. They saw right through the message and took it for nothing.6

Since the end of the war, many intriguing facts have been revealed to the public that were never meant to be. This includes the 6,000 page document called the Pentagon Papers. This document actually admits that the conflict in South Vietnam was purely the creation of the United States.

Without lying to American citizens, the Vietnam War would have been stopped by public protest much sooner than it was. The war was simply not planned out well enough and that is why the United States lost. The CIA had much more to do with the Vietnam War than most people realize. Although the false reports from Vietnam regarding won battles kept spirits high in the United States, everything came crashing down when people realized what the government was trying to do. Better planning would have lead to a better outcome of the war. If the CIA were not so busy trying to convince the American public that war was the right choice, soldiers would have learned how to defend guerillia warfare with a higher success rate.