Democracy’s Debt to Our Fringe Press : On Vietnam, the mainstream media echoed the official lies--a ‘free press’ that trod the line.

The United States lost the war in Vietnam, but Bank of America, Unocal and Coca-Cola may win the peace. Communist Vietnam is an emerging tiger of capitalism rapidly embracing all aspects of free enterprise except the truly important one: Publishing is still under tight government control.

So there I was at UC Davis last weekend at a stormy conference on the legacy of Vietnam, hectoring Ha Minh Duc, the dean of the journalism school at Hanoi University, on the virtues of private ownership of the media: “You are in danger of embracing the worst of capitalism, not the best of capitalism, which is a free, independently owned press.”

An American veteran participating in the conference wanted to know what in the world was I talking about. Where was the “free press,” he asked, when the United States invaded Vietnam? He had been wounded in Vietnam after killing many Vietnamese in a U.S. invasion that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara now admits was based on official lies.

And, as McNamara notes in his recent memoirs, the U.S. mass media, from the beginning, were largely complicitous. In 1954, the established American press bought the lie that the U.S.-installed puppet, Ngo Dinh Diem, was an authentic nationalist leader of his country and that the future of the free world required that the totalitarian Diem not fall. And the media looked the other way nine years later when the United States orchestrated his assassination.

The U.S. media cheered the abrogation of the 1956 elections to unify the country, which were called for in the Geneva Accords, and accepted that the first combat soldiers sent in 1961 were doing “flood relief.” The media parroted the fraud of the Gulf of Tonkin attack in 1964 and endorsed the wicked distortion that the carpet bombing of the North rather than negotiation was the path to peace.

Take David Halberstam, as quoted in the McNamara book, arguing strenuously in 1965 against U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam because “withdrawal also means that the United States’ prestige will be lowered throughout the world and . . . enemies of the West will be encouraged to try insurgencies like the one in Vietnam.”

Of course, this best-and-brightest member of the established media had it exactly wrong. The ignominious defeat of the United States in Vietnam, even more dispiriting than the orderly negotiated withdrawal of Western forces that would have been possible 10 years earlier, led directly to war between communist Vietnam and communist China before both sets of Bolsheviks moved on down the capitalist road. The United States was defeated in Vietnam and won the Cold War.

Halberstam’s self-serving review of McNamara’s book in The Times does not even mention that his hawkish early bias is cited in the book. Perhaps it is just too uncomfortable to admit that, despite the freedom offered the media in this society, most of the press bleated like sheep right up to the point where half a million American troops were dispatched to dominate a tiny country irrelevant to our national-security interests.

But despite the deadening hold of Cold War ideology on the established media, a vital alternative free press did exist in this country and forced a debate early on in the war. The Nation magazine continued its century-old tradition of criticism from the left. There were also right-wing isolationist publications that raised troubling questions about the Vietnam intervention. As I recall, a John Birch Society pamphlet even carried a good early critique of the war.

Paul Krassner’s Realist magazine ran investigative pieces as early as 1963, as did the Village Voice. There was Ramparts magazine, with which I was associated. Ramparts was a once-quirky Catholic literary quarterly that publisher Ed Keating financed by selling off his shopping centers. Ramparts published Seymour Hersh before the established press would touch his work. The My Lai story was broken by Hersh on assignment in Vietnam for the tiny Dispatch News Service, set up to counter the cheerleading reporting of the main wire services.

That is why I extolled the virtues of private ownership of the media to the journalism dean from Hanoi. Not because I trust huge, profit-oriented conglomerates to be independent of government influence and conventional prejudice, but rather because it provides room for the dissenting voices that are often proved right. Going back to the pamphleteering of Tom Paine, it is alternative journalism, underfunded, often ignored, but ever skeptical, that keeps democracy going.