The Cold War era after the Second World War and fear for the Red Menace: Communism. The US responded with Allen Dulles, CIA, covert ops, McCarthyism, Nixon, Reagan. Personal freedom was made inferior to the needs of the “common good,” the collective of power seated in Washington DC.
During a press conference on April 7, 1954, President Eisenhower laid out the first major defense of the domino theory. He was referencing the battle between French forces and the Vietminh (the communist forces of North Vietnam), and he began by explaining how economically important Vietnam was to the U.S. More importantly, however, was what Eisenhower called the ‘falling domino’ principle.
If South Vietnam fell, then Laos would be next, and after that, Thailand and Burma; and that would lead communists to the doorstep of India, a strong ally of the United States. Even Japan, Eisenhower warned, could be in danger of toppling, another domino in the row.
More below the fold …
Audience Costs in 1954?
By Marc Trachtenberg | Political Science Department - UCLA | May 24, 2013 |The publication of Frederik Logevall’s remarkable new book on the Indochina issue in the 1940s and 1950s allows us to revisit these issues, especially since some of Logevall’s arguments have a certain audience costs flavor. He refers in particular to a number of public statements made by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower as the crisis in Indochina was coming to a head in the spring of 1954. It seemed increasingly likely that the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu would be overrun by the Communist Viet Minh forces, and a defeat there, it was believed, could easily lead the French to end their involvement in Indochina on what to the Americans were considered unsatisfactory terms. The question then was what the U.S. government could do to prevent events from taking that course. Would the United States intervene in the war, and if so how would it get involved? Dulles gave a speech on March 29 called “The Threat of a Red Asia” which seemed to suggest that military action might be necessary:
Under the conditions of today, the imposition on Southeast Asia of the political system of Communist Russia and its Chinese Communist ally, by whatever means, would be a grave threat to the whole free community. The United States feels that that possibility should not be passively accepted but should be met by united action. This might involve risks. But these risks are far less than those that will face us a few years from now if we dare not be resolute today.
If the Communists won in Indochina, Dulles said, they would not stop there, but would try to “dominate all of Southeast Asia,” an area President Eisenhower had said a few days earlier was of “transcendant importance.” The Dulles speech, in fact, as one press account put it, “marked a climax to a series of Administration and Congressional statements designed to point up the tremendous stakes involved in the Indo-chinese war.” And the president himself went on to take a very tough line in his April 7 the press conference: he laid out his famous “domino theory,” referred to all the millions of people in Asia who had been lost to the Communists, and said pointedly: “we simply can’t afford greater losses.”
In taking that sort of line, Logevall argues, Eisenhower and Dulles “risked hemming themselves in.” After “describing the danger in such grandiose terms,” they might find it very hard to change course.
4 John Foster Dulles, "The Threat of a Red Asia," remarks made before the Overseas Press Club in New York, March 29, 1954, Department of State Bulletin, April 12, 1954 (link), p. 540.
5 Ibid., pp. 539-40 (link).
6 "The U.S. and Indo-China," New York Times, March 30, 1954, p. 26 (link). On this campaign, see also Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 459-61; John Burke and Fred Greenstein (with the collaboration of Larry Berman and Richard Immerman), How Presidents Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989), pp. 110-11; and Joint Chiefs of Staff Historical Division, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam: History of the Indochina Incident, 1945-1954 (originally completed in 1955; declassified in full in 1993, and now available on the JCS FOIA website; link), pp. 378, 380, 386 [henceforth cited as Indochina Incident ].
7 Eisenhower press conference, April 7, 1954, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower 1954, p. 383 (link). Henceforth cited in the form: PPP: Eisenhower 1954.
8 Logevall, Embers of War, p. 463.
○ Geneva Conference period April-July 1954: U.S. concern regarding the military ascendancy of the Viet Minh
○ CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968
○ The Pentagon Papers Vol. 1, Chapter 4, “U.S. and France in Indochina, 1950-56”
A Propaganda Model
By Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky | Excerpted from Manufacturing Consent, 1988 |These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news “objectively” and on the basis of professional news values. Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.
…
Freedom House, which dates back to the early I940s, has had interlocks with AIM, the World Anticommunist League, Resistance International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and international right wing.
○ Cold War paranoia: fear of the Reds and the Bomb
