ENABLERS OF A WAR: THE AMERICAN PRESS AND VIETNAM, 1954-1960 ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Chico ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History ____________ by Kevin Allen Luty Spring 2015 PUBLICATION RIGHTS No portion of this thesis may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Publication Rights ...................................................................................................... iii Abstract ...................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER I. Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 II. Collaborators in Colonialism, 1954-1955 ...................................................... 7 III. Encouragers of Optimism, 1955-1956 ........................................................... 31 IV. Purveyors of Pessimism, 1957-1960.............................................................. 49 V. Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 70 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 75 iv ABSTRACT ENABLERS OF A WAR: THE AMERICAN PRESS AND VIETNAM, 1954-1960 by Kevin Allen Luty Master of Arts in History California State University, Chico Spring 2015 Previous historical studies of the Vietnam War have examined thoroughly the American news media’s opposition to the conflict. This thesis, however, will reveal how at first the American press acted as a promoter of U.S. intervention in Vietnam from 1954 to 1960. Operating under the “can-do spirit” of the era, journalists believed that the United States could succeed in creating an anticommunist state in Vietnam where the French had failed. Convinced of South Vietnam’s centrality in the global struggle to contain Communism, the press applauded when American negotiators successfully placed the nation under the umbrella protection of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954 and raised no protests when the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) began training and equipping the South Vietnamese Army. Despite evidence that South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem lacked v widespread support, the American press backed him and cited his fraudulent presidential victory in October 1955 as proof of his popularity. Unwilling to promote any course of action that might threaten Diem, the U.S. media joined him in rejecting the 1956 unification elections called for by the 1954 Geneva Accords. In May 1957, Diem’s supporters in the United States welcomed him when he visited Washington with a highly orchestrated public relations campaign falsely depicting the president as a successful democratic leader—a “Miracle Man of Asia.” In response to Diem’s few critics, American commentators simply rationalized his police-state tactics as necessary reaction to the Communist threat. Following a near-fatal coup attempt in 1960, the press finally began to criticize Diem, but remained convinced about the ultimate necessity for American involvement. vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION For the American press no less than the U.S. government, the Cold War pitted communism against the “Free World” in an existential battle for the future of civilization. In the pages of popular newspapers, news magazines, and journals the basic assumptions that underlay Washington’s Cold War consensus went unchallenged. Thus when the United States intervened in foreign lands to prevent the spread of communism, as the Eisenhower administration did in Vietnam from 1954-1960, the American press naturally paid close attention. This thesis will analyze how the American press treated major policy decisions that the U.S. government made in Vietnam during these formative years of its engagement. It will examine in close detail press coverage of the Franco-American negotiations over Vietnam, the U.S. government’s rejection of the all-Vietnam elections stipulated in the 1954 Geneva Accords and the Eisenhower administration’s commitment to South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem. American press coverage of these issues and events, as the following pages will demonstrate, provided an important pretext for an expanding American intervention and ultimately the resort to war because it depicted the Republic of Vietnam as a vital security interest of the United States justifying providing significant quantities of military and economic aid to ensure its survival. In general, scholarship on the American press and Vietnam has focused on determining whether an adversarial relationship existed between journalists and the U.S. 1 2 government during the Vietnam War. Peter Braestrup’s groundbreaking two-volume study Big Story published in 1977 answers this question in the affirmative, claiming that the American press reported the 1968 Tet Offensive as a psychological and military victory for North Vietnam and the Viet Cong while officials correctly claimed the opposite.1 Right revisionist historians adopted the adversarial press thesis to argue that the media bears responsibility for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. According to these writers, who ironically challenged the initial orthodox position on the left that accepted news coverage of Tet as accurate, correspondents intentionally misled the American public about Tet to sour domestic attitudes toward the war and the U.S. military and civilian officials carrying it out.2 Other leftist critics of American foreign policy such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, on the other hand, reject the adversarial label altogether. They argue that the American press continued to defend U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a noble, if misguided, venture despite disagreeing with U.S. government tactics during the war.3 Prior scholars, by focusing on real or imagined conflict between the American press and U.S. government, have paid only cursory attention to Vietnam news coverage from the years 1954 to 1960. The studies that do exist mention this period if only to note the glaring lack of disparity between the opinions that American journalists and the U.S. officials charged with the task of nation-building in Vietnam expressed. According to 1 Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 1 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977), 156. 2 Charles Mohr, “Once Again-Did the Press Lose Vietnam?” Columbia Journalism Review 22, no. 4 (November/December 1983): 53. 3 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 299. 3 most writers, the press lacked both the manpower and expertise to report accurately about Vietnam in the 1950s and early 1960s, and thus relied on U.S. government sources who exaggerated the successes of Ngo Dinh Diem and his American supporters. Philip Knightley, in The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, states the case succinctly: “There were few experts on the area, and most articles, in the period from 1954-1960, concentrated on the Communist menace and the need for greater American involvement.”4 According to Susan Welch, the American press uncritically accepted President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s policies in Vietnam largely due to the absence of access to any contradictory information outside the U.S. government.5 Daniel Hallin, in The Uncensored War, claims that articles journalists who went to Vietnam in the early 1960s wrote tended to “reflect . the perspectives of American officialdom generally.”6 While certainly largely dependent on official sources during this period, journalists also granted legitimacy to U.S. nation-building techniques in Vietnam and the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem because they genuinely feared Communist expansion in Southeast Asia and accepted the “Domino Theory” as fact. Like the American press, many observers accuse the academic community of misrepresenting or underreporting Vietnam in the scholarly journals during the 1950s and early 1960s. In his study of intellectuals and the Vietnam War, Robert Tomes 4 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 409. 5 Susan Welch, “The American Press in Indochina, 1950-1956,” in Communication in International Politics, Richard L. Merritt, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 221. 6 Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 9. 4 characterizes coverage as suffering from “a basic state of confusion over the objective facts.”7 Similarly, Robert Scheer, in his 1965 study entitled How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam, claims that the social scientists who researched Vietnam during the 1950s created “propaganda for the cause” that glorified Ngo Dinh Diem’s anti- communism and the American commitment to create a democratic South Vietnam.8 Reinforcing this viewpoint, other studies claim that the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), an influential lobby group with government ties, exerted an inordinate influence on early Vietnam press coverage, specifically regarding coverage of Ngo Dinh Diem. In America’s