Mendacious History: The New York Times, the Imperial Jewel of Smooth Lies

The New York Times is a strongly logical paper, whose biases and frequent propaganda service give its logo phrase “all the news that’s fit to print” an ironical twist.

James Reston acknowledged that “we left [out] a great deal of what we knew about U.S. intervention in Guatemala and in a variety of other cases” at government request or for political reasons satisfactory to the editors. The government lied, but the Times published their claims even though the “Times knew the statements were not true”(Salisbury). Strategic silences, the transmitting of false or misleading information, the failure to provide relevant context, the acceptance and dissemination of myths, the application of double standards as virtual standard operating procedure, and participation in ideological bandwagons and campaigns, have been extremely important in Times coverage of foreign affairs.

Obviously the Times is not merely a biased instrument of propaganda. It does many things well and its reporters often produce high quality journalism. This is especially true where the paper’s editorial slant on issues (“policy”) and ideological biases are not at stake and where major advertisers are not threatened.

In those sensitive areas (some described below), critical and probing articles are hardly more common than dogs walking on their hind legs. Furthermore, the paper’s reporters are frequently “generalists” moving from field to field, country to country, who must make up for being out of their depth by glibness, a reliance on familiar (and English-speaking) sources, and an ideological conformity that will meet “New York” standards. This helps explain James LeMoyne’s reporting on Central America in the 1980s, and Roger Cohen’s on France, Serge Schmemann’s on Israel, and David Sanger’s on Asia today.

In his “Without Fear Or Favor”, Harrison Salisbury refers to the pride of Times editors in the 1960s at the paper’s tradition of the “total separation of news and editorial functions,” which he implied was still operative in 1980. There is no doubt an organizational separation between these departments, even with the greater centralization of the Rosenthal era and after, and undoubtedly neither department gives instructions to the other. But there is a line of authority from the top affecting the hiring, firing, and advance of personnel, and the evidence is overwhelming that on issue after issue a common policy affects editorials, news, and book reviews as well.

Alan Wolfe’s recent “One Nation, After All”, fitting well the ideological stance of Times leaders, is reviewed favorably in both the daily paper and Sunday Book Review, and Wolfe immediately gets Op Ed column space to expound his congenial message.

Anticommunism and the Cold War.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Times’s commitment to anticommunist ideology, and its acceptance of the Cold War as a death struggle between the forces of good and evil, ran deep and severely limited its objectivity as a source of information (putting it charitably.—Eds)

Rosenthal, as noted in Part I, evoked the admiration of William Buckley for his anticommunist fervor. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was equally passionate, regularly admonishing his editors to focus on the Soviets as “colonialists,” to use the phrase “iron curtain,” and generally exhibiting the Manichean world view of anticommunist ideologues.
This corrupting influence dates back at least to the Russian Revolution. In a famous, and devastating, critique of Times reporting on the revolution, entitled “A Test of the News,” published in the New Republic on August 4, 1920, Walter Lippman and Charles Merz found that the paper had reported the imminent or actual fall of the revolutionary government 91 times, and had Lenin and Trotsky in flight, imprisoned, or killed on numerous occasions. Times news about Russia was “a case of seeing, not what was there, but what men wanted to see.”

When the Cold War began in earnest in 1947, the Truman administration found it difficult to get congressional and public support for massive aid to a far-right collaborationist government that the British had installed in Greece. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson therefore resorted to scare tactics, claiming that this was a case of Soviet expansionism and that we were in a death struggle with the forces of evil. This was disinformation, as Stalin honored the postwar settlement with the West, leaving it free to dominate Greece, and he sought to restrain the Greek guerrillas. But the lie was taken up by the media with enthusiasm, and on February 28 and March 1, 1947, James Reston had front-page articles in the Times that echoed State Department press releases, asserting that the “issues” were containment of an expanding Soviet Union and our willingness to aid a government “violently opposed by the Soviet Union” (a lie). Acheson’s formulations -Soviet aggression, and “our safety and world peace” at stake in Greece [eds., March 3, 11, 12] – along with a virtual suppression of the facts on Greece and the quality of our Greek client- became standard Times fare in news and editorials.

An important episode in the history of media coverage of the U.S. effort to “save” Greece by imposing a minority government of the Right was the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk in May 1948. Polk had been a harsh critic of the Greek government, and his murder by the right wing was “understandable,” but presented a PR problem.

Polk: much too honest, or too naive, for the standards of “professional journalism” upheld by the NNYTimes and the rest of the establishment worthies.

The Greek government, with complete cooperation from the U. S. government and mainstream U. S. media, pinned the killing on Communists, and got several to “confess” -after weeks of incarceration-that it had been done to “discredit” the Greek government. Although the case was extremely implausible, and the use of torture to extract suitable confessions was obvious at the time (and conclusively proved in later years), the U. S. media accepted as legitimate a staged trial that was a Western equivalent of the Moscow trials of the 1930s. Walter Lippman even organized a “monitoring” group, which included James Reston, that put its seal of approval on this show trial. The Times reporter in Greece at that time, A. C. Sedgwick (a Harvard grad and lifetime anglophile), was married into the Greek royal family, and had been accurately described by George Polk as a pawn of the Right. Even within the Times there had been a steady stream of criticism of Sedgwick as biased and incompetent. But Cyrus and Arthur Sulzberger supported him -Cyrus had married Sedgwick’s niece and was therefore linked to the royal family- and Sedgwick served as a Times reporter for 33 years. His coverage of the Polk trial, discussed in detail in Vlanton and Mettger’s “Who Killed George Polk?”, was continuously biased, incompetent, and unreliable on the facts. But his line was compatible with the Times support of the Cold War and uncritical acceptance of the party line on the Polk trial, which the editors found to be “honestly and fairly conducted” (April 22, 1949).

A towering figure in the American liberal establishment fro many years, Walter Lippman embodied the inherent dishonesty and corruption at the core of that political persuasion.

Interestingly, the Times and its reporter James LeMoyne displayed a very similar patriotic (meaning of course only loyal to the interests of the American upper class) gullibility in treating the murder of Herbert Anaya in El Salvador in 1984.

Here also a U.S.-supported right-wing government killed one of its enemies, but produced a tortured student who confessed to having killed Anaya in order to “make the government look bad.” LeMoyne and the Times took this confession and explanation seriously once again, failed to look at analogous cases of Salvadoran torture (or the Polk case), and failed to follow the case up after the tortured student later recanted.

The Soviet Threat and the Arms Race.

The Times accepted the official view of the Soviet Threat throughout the Cold War. A huge news, as well as editorial, bias flowed from this, serving well the propaganda ends of the state. This was notable in 1975-1986, when U.S. “peddlers of crisis” re-escalated the Cold War and military outlays that greatly helped corporate capital.

Significant events in this escalation process were the CIA’s claims in 1975-1976 that the Soviet Union had doubled its rate of military spending, supposedly to 45 percent a year, and the CIA’s “Team B” report of December 1976, which claimed that the Soviets were achieving military superiority and getting ready to fight a nuclear war. There had been a Team A report by CIA professionals, which found the Soviets aiming only toward nuclear parity, but CIA boss George Bush found this unsatisfactory, appointed a group of ten noted hardliners (including Richard Pipes and Paul Nitze), who came up with the desired frightening conclusions. This highly politicized report displaced that of Team A, and became official doctrine.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] front-page article in the Times of December 26, 1976, by David Binder, took the Team B report at face value, failed to analyze its political bias and purpose, and made no attempt by independent investigation or by tapping experts with different views to get at the truth. With Richard Burt and Drew Middleton as their regular correspondents on military affairs in this period, Times news and commentary steadily featured the Soviets as on the rise and the U.S. in military decline. There was no investigative effort to check out the CIA’s estimates, which the CIA admitted in 1983 to have been fabrications. Times editorials complemented this know-nothing reporting, supporting “prudent” defense expansion, which involved the funding of the Trident submarine, Cruise Missile, and MX mobile land missile, and the creation of rapid deployment force as an ‘ investment in diplomacy” (February 24, 1978; February 1, 1980).

During the Reagan years, the Times supported the enormous increase in the military budget, first, by refusing to investigate outlandish claims by the administration. Tom Gervasi, exploding many of these lies in his “Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy” (1986), noted that in one important case where there was a conflict between the claims of Reagan officials and available Pentagon data, the Times stated that precise figures were “difficult to pin down,” but its reporters made no effort to pin them down even though billions of dollars of excess military spending were at stake.

They could have interviewed those giving the figures, “But the Times did not do this. It dismissed the issue in six column inches and did not bring it up again.” Gervasi put up a four-page compilation of Times estimates of U.S. and Soviet warheads, 1979-82, compared them with Pentagon data, and showed that the Times’s figures were inconsistent, distorted, incompetently assembled, and persistently biased toward overstating Soviet capabilities.
Gervasi was given Op Ed space in the Times in December 1981, after which he was closed out. His book was never reviewed in the paper, although of high quality and on a subject to which the Times devoted much space for official claims. By contrast, passionate supporters of the Reagan military buildup, Edward Luttwak and Richard Perle, had nine and six Op Eds, respectively, during the Reagan years.

Reagan Era Propaganda Campaigns.

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]xtremely important in maintaining the vision of an acute Soviet Threat and need for a huge arms buildup were the various propaganda campaigns of the 1980s, used to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.”

The Times participated in each of these campaigns with a high degree of (willful) gullibility.

– International terrorism.
One campaign was the attempt to portray the Soviets as the sponsor of “international terrorism.” A landmark was the publication of Claire Sterling’s “The Terror Network” in 1980.

This right-wing fairy tale relied heavily on disinformation sources such as the intelligence agencies of Argentina, Chile, and South Africa, and Soviet bloc defectors such as Jan Sejna, which she took at face value. Sterling also got much of her data from Robert Moss, co-author with Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Soviet-subversion-of-the-West novel “The Spike”, and of a warm apologia for Pinochet, 10,000 copies of which were purchased by the Pinochet government. Sterling’s fanaticism can be inferred from her statement (in Human Events, April 21, 1984), at the height of the Reagan era anti-Soviet frenzy, that the Reagan administration was “covering up” Soviet guilt in the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1981 because of the Reaganite devotion to détente.

The Times reviewed Sterling’s book favorably (compliments of Daniel Schorr), but more importantly, gave her magazine space to expound her views (“Terrorism: Tracing the International Network,” May 1, 1981).

Previously, and just before the 1980 election, the paper also gave space to Robert Moss, peddling the same line (“Terrorism: A Soviet Export, ” November 2, 1980). These highly misleading flights of propaganda served well the plans of the Reagan administration, featuring the Soviet connection and entirely ignoring the terrorism of “constructively engaged” states like South Africa and Argentina.

Times “news” performed the same service, continuously identifying “terrorism” with retail and left-wing violence, and that of states declared outlaws by the State Department.
Little attention was given to the U.S.-sponsored retail terrorists of the Cuban refugee network or the wholesale terrorists of Argentina and Guatemala.

For example, of 22 victims of state terror given intense coverage in the Times between 1976 and 1981, 21 lived in the Soviet Union, although these were years of extraordinary violence in Latin America.

Sterling: Who needs journalistic inquiry when the facts can be fabricated?

-The plot to murder the Pope.

A second propaganda salvo followed the assassination attempt against the Pope in May 1981. As the criminal had stayed in Bulgaria for a period, the western propaganda machine, with Claire Sterling in the lead, soon pinned this shooting on the Bulgarians and KGB, and a case was brought in Italy against several Bulgarians (which was eventually lost).

This case rested on what was almost surely an induced and/or coerced confession, and as in the trial for the murder of George Polk in Greece, the Times (and most of the mainstream media) handled it with shameful gullibility. (Editor’s Noyte: IN this aspect we disagree with Herman. We cannot accept “gullibility” on the part of the conscious liars for the empire at the Times or elsewhere in the US media, since gullibility implies naivete and innocence, none of which apply to these deliberate criminals.—PG)

The will to believe overpowered any critical sense, and investigative responsibility was suspended; official handouts and the speculation of ideologues like former CIA propaganda specialist Paul Henze and Sterling dominated the coverage. The Times actually used Sterling as a news reporter in 1984 and 1985, with a front-page article on June 10, 1984 (“Bulgarians Hired Agca To Kill Pope”), that was not only biased but suppressed critically important information. From beginning to end, the Times never departed from the Sterling-Henze line. This was not altered by the loss of the case in Rome in 1986.

When CIA officer Melvin Goodman testified during the Gates confirmation hearing in 1990 that the CIA professionals knew the Bulgarian Connection was a fraud because they had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services, the Times failed to reprint this part of Goodman’s testimony.

When Allen Weinstein was given permission to examine Bulgarian files on the case in 1991, the Times repeatedly found this newsworthy, but when he returned, apparently without “success,” the Times failed to seek him out and report his results.

Following Claire Sterling’s death, the obituary notice by Eric Pace (June 18, 1995) stated that while her theory of a Bulgarian Connection was “disputed,” in 1988 she asserted that Italian courts had “expressed their moral certainty that Bulgaria’s secret service was behind the papal shooting.” Sterling’s unverified hearsay was given the last word.
In sum, having participated in a fraudulent propaganda campaign, the Times not only has never cleared matters up for its readers, it continues to supply disinformation and refuses to publish facts that would correct the record.

-Shooting Down 007.

The Times also got on the propaganda bandwagon when the Soviets shot down Korean Airliner 007 on September 1, 1983. The paper had 147 articles on the shootdown in September alone, and for 10 days it had a special section of the paper on the case.
As usual, the paper took at face value administration claims, in this case that the Soviets knew they were shooting down a civilian plane. (Five years later the editors acknowledged this to have been “The Lie That Wasn’t Shot Down,” ed, January 18, 1988).

The columnists and editors were frenzied with indignation, using words like “savage,” “brutal,” and “uncivilized, and the editors stated that “There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner” (September 2, 1983). But when the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988 killing 290, no invidious language was employed, and the editors found that there was a good excuse for the act -a “tragic error” and irresponsible behavior by the victims (August 4, 1988). Subsequently, when David Carlson, commander of a nearby ship, wrote in the September 1989 issue of the U. S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings that the actions of the commander of the Vincennes had been consistently aggressive, and that Iranian behavior had been entirely proper and unthreatening, the Times failed to report this information, which contradicted its editorial position.

The Times also failed to report that in 1990 President Bush had awarded the commander of the Vincennes a Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” for his deadly efforts. On the other hand, the Times did find newsworthy an interview in 1996 with the Soviet pilot who shot down KAL 007, showing his picture on the front page, with a brief lead entitled “Pilot Describes Downing of KAL 007,” the text including the statement that “he recognized [007] as a civilian plane” (December 9, 1996). But the fuller text on page 12 quotes him saying “It is easy to turn a civilian plane into one for military use.” The Times distorted his message on page 1, in an almost reflexive effort to portray the Soviet Union as barbaric, while continuing to suppress evidence putting the shooting down of the Iranian airliner in a bad light.

Fresh and Stale History.

On the other hand, the Times treated differently the story that broke in Italy in 1990 about Operation Gladio, the code name for a secret army in Europe sponsored by the CIA immediately after World War II, closely tied to the far right, which was using weapons secreted under this program for terrorist activities in the 1980s. In this case, the three back-page Times articles all featured the story’s old age, although the use of Gladio-related weapons in terrorist activities of the 1980s gave it a currency absent in the Katyn Forest massacre story. But its political implications made the Gladio story stale.

A footnoted version of this article is available from the author for $2:
2300 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is part of conservative mythology that the mainstream media, especially the New York Times, opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and, effectively “lost the war.”

Liberals, on the other hand, while often agreeing that the press opposed the war, regard this as a display of the media at its best, pursuing its proper critical role.

But they are both wrong: conservatives, because they identify any reporting of unhelpful facts as “adversarial” and want the media to serve as crude propaganda agencies of the state; liberals, because they fail to see how massively the mainstream media serve the state by accepting the assumptions and frameworks of state policy, transmitting vast amounts of state propaganda, and confining criticism to matters of tactics while excluding criticism of premises and intentions.

Vietnam War Context

After the Vietnamese defeated the French, the U.S. refused to accept the 1954 Geneva settlement, which provided for a temporary North-South division to be ended by a unifying election in 1956. Instead, it imported its own leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, from the U.S., imposed him on the South, and supported his refusal to participate in the 1956 election. Eisenhower conceded that Ho Chi Minh would have swept a free election, and from 1954-1965 a stream of U.S. experts conceded that our side had no indigenous base, whereas the Vietnamese enemy had the only “truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam” (Douglas Pike).

Pacification officer John Vann stated in 1965 that “A popular political base for the Government of South Vietnam does not now exist,” that our puppet regime is “a continuation of the French colonial system…with upper class Vietnamese replacing the French,” and that rural dissatisfaction “is expressed largely through alliance with the NLF [National Liberation Front].”

When our puppet could no longer maintain control by the early 1960s, even with massive U.S. aid, the U.S. engaged increasingly in direct military action from 1962, including the chemical destruction of crops and mass relocation of the population. In 1963 it collaborated in the assassination of Diem, replacing him with a series of military men who would do our bidding, which meant, first and foremost, refusing a negotiated settlement and fighting to the bitter end.

As U.S. official William Bundy put it, “Our requirements were really very simple: we wanted any government that would continue to fight.”

The U.S. was determined to maintain a controlled entity in the South, and a negotiated settlement with the dominant political force there -which opposed our rule- was consequently dismissed. The strategy was to escalate the violence until the dominant indigenous opposition surrendered and agreed to allow our choice to prevail. We made sure that only force would determine the outcome by manipulating the governments of “South Vietnam” so that only hard-line military men would be in charge.

General Maxwell Taylor was frank about the need for “establishing some reasonably satisfactory government,” replacing it if it proved recalcitrant, possibly with a “military dictatorship.” Having imposed a puppet, refused to allow the unifying election, evaded a local settlement that would give the majority representation, and resorted to extreme violence to compel the Vietnamese to accept our preferred rulers, a reasonable use of words tells us that the U.S. was engaging in aggression in Vietnam.

Thoroughly indoctrinated with racist hatred, many GIs committed dreadful crimes in Vietnam. As usual, most of them didn’t have a clue about the true war aims or their mission.

The official U.S. position, however, was that the North Vietnamese were aggressing by supporting the southern resistance, and, in April 1965, actually sending organized North Vietnamese troops across the border. In one remarkable version, the southerners who were members of the only mass-based political party in the south, but opposed to our choice of ruler, were engaged in “internal aggression.” We were allegedly “invited in” by the government to defend “South Vietnam.”

The mainstream U. S. media never accepted the view that the Soviets were justifiably in Afghanistan because they were “invited in”-they questioned the legitimacy of the government doing the inviting. If the Soviet-sponsored government was a minority government, the media were prepared to label the Soviet intrusion aggression. Their willingness to apply the same principles to the Vietnam war was a test of their integrity and they -and the New York Times- failed that test decisively.

In his “Without Fear Or Favor”, Harrison Salisbury acknowledged that in 1962 the Times was “deeply and consistently” supportive of the war policy. He also admitted that the paper was taken in by the Johnson administration’s lies on the 1964 Bay of Tonkin incident that impelled Congress to give Johnson a blank check to make war. Salisbury claims, however, that in 1965 the Times began to question the war and moved into an increasingly oppositional stance, culminating in the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

While there is some truth in Salisbury’s portrayal, it is misleading in important respects. For one thing, from 1954 to the present, the Times never abandoned the framework and language of apologetics, according to which the U.S. was resisting somebody else’s aggression and protecting “South Vietnam.” The paper never used the word “aggression” to describe the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, but applied it freely with respect to North Vietnam.
Its supposedly liberal and “adversarial” reporters like David Halberstam and Homer Bigart referred to NLF actions as “subversion” and the forced relocation of peasants as “humane” and “better protection against the Communists.”

The liberal columnist Tom Wicker referred to President Johnson’s decision to “step up resistance to Vietcong infiltration in South Vietnam.” The Vietcong “infiltrate” in their own country while the U.S. “resists.”

Wicker also accepted without question that we were “invited in” by a presumably legitimate government, and James Reston, in the very period when the U.S. was refusing all negotiation in favor of military escalation to compel enemy surrender, declared that we were in Vietnam in accord with “the guiding principle of American foreign policy…that no state shall use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its political objectives.” [Yea, this is laughable indeed, but in a nation so thoroughly ignorant and lacking in focus, anything can be said and it will fly through the radars undetected.—Eds.)

In short, for all these Times writers the patriotic double standard was internalized, and any oppositional tendency was fatally compromised by acceptance of the legitimacy of U.S. intervention, which limited their questioning to matters of tactics and costs.
Furthermore, although from 1965 onward the Times was willing to publish more information that put the war in a less favorable light, it never broke from its heavy dependence on official sources or its reluctance to check out official lies or explore the damage being wrought by the U.S. war machine. In contrast with its eager pursuit of refugees from the Khmer Rouge after April 1975, the paper rarely sought out testimony from the millions of Vietnamese refugees from U.S. bombing and chemical warfare.
In its opinion columns as well, the new openness was towards those commentators who accepted the premises of the war and would limit their criticisms to its tactical problems and costs to us. From beginning to end, those who criticized the war as aggression and immoral at its root were excluded from the debate.

Propaganda Service

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Times also remained to the end a gullible transmitter of each propaganda campaign mobilized to keep the war going, as the following examples illustrate:

– Demonstration elections.

The Johnson administration sponsored “demonstration elections” in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 to show that we were respecting the will of the Vietnamese people. Although that country was occupied by a foreign army (U.S.) and otherwise thoroughly militarized, free speech and freedom of the press were non-existent, and not only the “mass-based political party” (NLF) but all “neutralists” were barred from participation, the New York Times took these elections seriously. Their news reports stressed the heavy turnouts, and the editorials noted the “popular support” shown by the peasants willingness “to risk participation in the election held by the Saigon regime” (ed., September 4, 1967).

In both news and editorials the paper suggested that the elections might lead to peace, because by legitimizing the generals it “provides a viable basis for a peace settlement.” As the whole point of the exercise was to keep in place leaders who would fight, this was promotional deception of the worst sort.

-Phony peace moves.

Every six months or so, the Johnson administration would make a “peace move,” with a brief bombing halt, described by the analysts of the Pentagon Papers as “efforts to quiet critics and obtain public support for the air war by striking a position of compromise,” which “masked publicly unstated conditions…that from the communists’ point of view was tantamount to a demand for their surrender.”

Although from early 1965 onward the Times editorially favored some kind of negotiated settlement, it was institutionally incapable of piercing the veil of deception in the peace move ploy, to present evidence of their fraudulence and PR design, and to call Johnson and his associates liars. Reston greeted each of them at face value, asserting that “the problem of peace lies now not in Washington but in Hanoi” (October 18, 1965) and that “the enduring mystery of the war in Vietnam is why the Communists have not accepted the American offers of unconditional peace negotiations” (December 31, 1965).

The Times gave back-page coverage to the disclosures late in 1966 that the U.S. had sabotaged a string of negotiating efforts in 1964, and the peace talks in late 1966 involving Poland, which ended with a series of bombings of Hanoi, were given minimal publicity (“Pessimism in Warsaw,” December 15, 1966).

Altogether, from beginning to end, the Times, in editorials and news articles, failed to portray the true role of the “peace moves,” even while allowing some modest criticism of their flaws.

-Paris Peace Agreement.

In October 1972 an agreement was reached between the Nixon administration and Hanoi that would have ended the war on terms similar to those the U.S. had rejected in 1964, with the NLF and Saigon government both recognized in the South and an electoral contest to follow. The U.S., however, following the heaviest bombing attacks in history on Hanoi in December 1972, proceeded to reinterpret the agreement as leaving the South to the exclusive control of its client, in contradiction of the clear language of the document.

The Times, along with the rest of the mainstream media, accepted the Nixon administration’s reinterpretion without question, and continued thereafter to repeat this false version and to cite the incident as “a case study of how an agreement with ambiguous provisions could be exploited and even ignored by a Communist government” (Neil Lewis, August 18, 1987).

-The POW/MIA gambit.

Hollywood quickly joined in and exploited the revenge bandwagon against Vietnam with cheap jingoist vehicles like Rambo, starring Sylvester Stallone, a mediocre but opportunistic actor who sat out the war in Switzerland.

Nixon used U.S. prisoners of war and men missing in action “mainly as an indispensable device for continuing the war,” allowing him to prevent or sabotage peace talks (H. Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Myth-making in America).

The New York Times editors jumped quickly onto this bandwagon, denouncing the Communists as “inhuman,” accepting the disinformation that 750 U.S. POWs were still alive, and claiming that the POW question “is a humanitarian, not a political issue” (ed., May 29, 1969). Reston argued that Americans “care more about the human problems than the political problems…The guess here is that they will be more likely to get out of the war if the prisoners are released…than if Hanoi holds them as hostages and demands that Mr. Nixon knuckle under to them” (April 21, 1972).

The ready transformation of the POWs into hostages, and the failure to see the cynicism and managed quality of this concern over POWs, shows the Times at its most gullible as it again joined a deceptive propaganda exercise that contributed to large-scale violence and death.

Postwar Imperial Apologetics.
After the Vietnam War ended, and during the ensuing 18 years of U.S. economic warfare against the newly independent Vietnam, the Times’ adherence to the traditional and official viewpoints never wavered. That the U.S. was guilty of aggression has never been hinted at; the U.S. fought to protect “South Vietnam.”
In 1985 the editors chided public ignorance of history, evidenced by the fact that only 60 percent knew that this country had “sided with South Vietnam” -a creation of the U.S. with no legal basis or indigenous support, but legitimized for the Times because it was official doctrine.
In reconstructing imperial ideology it was also important that-the enormous damage inflicted on the land and people of Vietnam by this country be downplayed and that the Vietnamese now in command be put in an unfavorable light. The Times accommodated by giving the damage minimal attention and by consistently attributing the difficulties of the smashed (and then boycotted) country to communist mismanagement.

While featuring selected refugees who presented the most gruesome stories and blamed the communists, the Times repeatedly sneered at the “bitter and inescapable ironies…for those who opposed the war” and who had “looked to the communists as saviors of the unhappy land” (ed, March 21, 1977). This not only implicitly denied U.S. responsibility for the unhappiness, but misrepresented the position of most antiwar activists, who did not look on the Communists as saviors, but objected to the murderous aggression designed to deny their rule, which the Times supported.

For the Times, our only debt was to those fleeing “communism.” On the other hand, with the POW/MIA gambit institutionalized in the U.S., throughout the boycott years the Times agreed to the view that the Vietnamese were never sufficiently forthcoming about U.S. service-people missing in action (the vast numbers of missing Vietnamese have never been a concern of the U.S. establishment or the Times).

In 1992 the editors were even retrospectively criticizing Nixon for having failed to pursue the issue sufficiently aggressively with Hanoi. (“What’s Still Missing on M.I.A,” August 18, 1992). Their gullibility quotient in this area also continued at a high level, so that when, with normalization of relations threatening in 1993, the right-wing anti-Vietnam activist, Stephen Morris, allegedly found a document in Soviet archives showing that Hanoi had deceived on POWs, the Times featured this on the front page, without the slightest critical scrutiny.

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, despite the serious provocations that led it to invade and the frenzied Western outcries over Pol Pot’s murderous behavior, Vietnam immediately became the “Prussia of Southeast Asia” for the Times, and it received no credit for ousting the Khmer Rouge (nor did the ensuing U.S. support of the Khmer Rouge elicit any criticism). Vietnam’s failure to withdraw over the next decade was given as a reason justifying their ostracization (ed., Oct. 28, 1992).
The contrast with the Times treatment of the regular Israeli assaults on Lebanon and refusal to withdraw from occupied neighboring territories is striking.
In one of the most revealing displays of the Times’ arrogance and double standard, in 1993 Leslie Gelb classed Vietnam as one of the “outlaw” states, for its behavior in Cambodia, foot-dragging on the MIAs that count, and because “These guys harmed Americans” (April 15, 1993). As in the case of Nicaragua in the 1980s, nobody has a right of self defense against any U.S. exercise of force, which is by definition just and right.

The Times was not only not “adversarial” during the Vietnam War, it was for a long time a war promoter. As antiwar feeling grew and encompassed an increasing proportion of the elite, the Times provided more information and allowed more criticism within prescribed limits (a tragic error, despite the best of intentions, because of unwinnability and excessive costs -to us). But even then it continued to provide support for the war by accepting the official ideological framework, by frequent uncritical transmissions of official propaganda, by providing very limited and often misleading information on government intentions and the damage being inflicted on Vietnam, and by excluding fundamental criticism. It is one of the major fallacies about the war that antiwar critics were given media access -those that opposed the war on principle were excluded from the Times, and the antiwar movement and the “sixties” have always been treated with hostility by the paper.

A footnoted version of this article is available from the author for $2:
2300 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Published in Z Magazine