The documentary history of American policy in Vietnam
compiled by researchers for the Department of Defense, known now as the
Pentagon Papers, became public property in 1971 against the wishes of the
United States government. This seems only proper when we consider that for
seven years this government has been carrying on a war of annihilation in
Indochina against the wishes of the people there, and now against the wishes of
the American people, too. Those who made the Pentagon Papers public have laid
out for general scrutiny the story of American war policy and have exposed the
coldness of mind, the meanness of spirit, behind that policy.
As a sign that this country, born with thrilling
phrases about freedom, has not been truly free, there was peril for those who
informed the American people of the decisions that sent their sons to war. The
New York Times was brought into court by the government, and while a Supreme
Court decision saved it from an injunction to prevent publication, the
possibility of later prosecution was left open. Such prosecution has indeed
begun of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo. It was they who defied the doctrine
of secrecy, showing that true patriotism which asks dedication not to one's
government, but to one's country and countrymen. Beacon Press, not nearly so
wealthy or huge an enterprise as the New York Times, had the audacity to print
the bulk of the Pentagon Papers, those which Senator Mike Gravel had in his
possession and which he began to read into the record one dramatic night in
Washington in the summer of 1971. Four massive volumes were required for this:
a mountain of information for scholars and citizens. The volumes contain a
thousand pages of documents, three thousand pages of narrative, and two hundred
pages of public statements by government officials trying to explain American
involvement in Vietnam.
Those of us who began to explore these pages soon
realized that something more was needed. An index, of course, as a guide
through the mass of material; and it has been provided here in this volume. But
even more important, we could not leave the readers of the four volumes with
the commentary of the Pentagon analysts as the last word. These analysts were
all people who were working for the military bureaucracy—hardly independent
researchers. Furthermore, they were operating under the constraints of a
government harassed by the antiwar movement, watching the growing peace
sentiments of the American population, and sensitive to any possible hint of
criticism. And these researchers were writing their report for one of the
engineers of the war—Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Under these circumstances, it is not surprising to
find that with all the weight of thousands of pages, there are serious
omissions in the story, and also gross distortions. "Lies and
lacunae" is how the two of us and Arnold Tovell of Beacon Press summarized
the insufficiency of the Pentagon Papers, as we discussed them one evening.
This volume of essays is the result of that assessment.
We decided to ask men and women who have devoted much
of their lives to the Indochina war during these past years to read through the
four volumes, and to comment on them. All the people we asked were critics of
the war, and we feel no apologies are needed for this deliberate bias: four
thousand pages from the Department of Defense are enough from the side of the
government. As the volumes of the Gravel edition came off the press, we flew
them to our authors, in New Hampshire, in California, in Paris, in Washington, D.C.,
and many other places—and then the essays began coming in.
A number of the commentators have spent years in
Vietnam or Laos, as journalists, as scholars, or as field workers in the
countryside. Others have written extensively about the war in Vietnam in books
and articles. Most of the writers are Americans, but one is a Vietnamese and
several are French, because we wanted to include the viewpoint of these people
who have felt and suffered most from the policies of the United States, as well
as to draw upon the prior French experience with the anticolonial revolution in
Indochina. And, as we anticipated, some of those invited to contribute essays,
including a number of Southeast Asians, devoted their time in this spring of
1972 to acting against the war, not writing.
We hope the essays will illuminate for the reader
what is obscure in the Pentagon Papers, will suggest what is missing in the
official story, will bring forward what is important and might be overlooked.
Most of all, we hope they supply what the government documents lack, some sense
of the human consequences of this war, so that now Americans will devote time
and energy to stopping the unforgivable American assault on the land and people
of Southeast Asia.
Noam Chomsky
Howard Zinn
May 5, 1972
1.
Nina S. Adams and
her family have been living in Paris doing research this year and expect to
move to Hong Kong in the near future. She edited, with Alfred McCoy, Laos: War
and Revolution, which was published in 1970.
2.
James Aronson was
a founder and for many years editor of the radical newsweekly National
Guardian, which he left in 1967 for a career in writing and teaching. He is the
author of The Press and the Cold War and Deadline for the Media.
3.
Fredric Branfman is
the director of Project Air War in Washington, D.C. He was in Laos from 1967 to
1971 with International Voluntary Services and as a freelance journalist. Mr.
Branfman studied at the University of Chicago and at Harvard.
4.
Wilfred Burchett,
born in Australia, has traveled throughout the world as a journalist for the
Daily Express, the London Times, Le Soir, L'Humanite, the London Daily Worker,
the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, and other newspapers. He was
in Indochina at the beginning of the battle of Dien Bien Phu and has been a close
observer of the war in Indochina for many years.
5.
Gerard Chaliand is
a French writer specializing in national liberation movements in the third
world. His book Peasants of North Vietnam was written as the result of research
in that country.
6.
Noam Chomsky is
Ward Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
the author of American Power and the New Mandarins, At War with Asia, and
Problems of Freedom and Knowledge.
7.
Philippe Devillers is
the director of South East Asia Studies of Centre d'Étude des Relations
Internationales in Paris. He was attached to General Leclerc's headquarters in
Saigon during 1945-1946 and was for some time a senior correspondent for Le
Monde. He is the author of What Mao Really Said and coauthor of End of a War:
Indochina Nineteen Fifty-Four.
8.
John W. Dower is
an assistant professor of Japanese history at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison. A member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, he has lived in
Japan and is the author of The Elements of Japanese Design. He is currently
working on a book about postwar U.S.-China-Japan relations.
9.
Richard B. Du Boff is
an associate professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College, where he is a
specialist in economic history and development. He coauthored with Edward S.
Herman America's Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception.
10.
Walt Haney is a
graduate student at the Center for Studies in Education and Development at
Harvard. He spent two years in Laos with International Voluntary Services and
one year with the Ministry of Education of the Royal Lao government. Mr. Haney
prepared the Survey of Civilian Casualties Among Refugees from the Plain of
Jars for the U.S. Senate subcommittee on refugees and escapees.
11.
Gabriel Kolko is
currently professor of history at York University in Toronto. Among his books
are The Roots of American Foreign Policy, The Politics of War, and with Joyce
Kolko, The Limits of Power.
12.
Truong Buu Lam is
now a visiting professor of history at the University of Hawaii. The author of
Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign Interventions: 1858-1900, he was for
several years the director of the Institute of Historical Research in Saigon
and concurrently taught at the University of Saigon.
13.
Don Luce is now
director of the Indochina Mobile Education Project. He was in Vietnam from 1958
to 1971 as an agriculturist, as director of International Voluntary Services,
and as a research associate and journalist for the World Council of Churches.
He is the author of Vietnam: The Unheard Voices and has translated and edited a
volume of Vietnamese poetry We Promise One Another: Poems from an Asian War.
14.
David G. Marr served
as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1959 to 1964. Now an
assistant professor of Vietnamese studies at Cornell University and director of
the Indochina Resource Center in Washington, D.C., he is the author of
Vietnamese Anticolonialism.
15.
Peter Dale Scott,
a former Canadian diplomat, has taught political science. Now an associate
professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, he is a
co-author of The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam and author of The War
Conspiracy.
16.
Howard Zinn is a
historian and professor of political science at Boston University. Among his
books are Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal and The Politics of History.
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