Enablers of a war: the American press and Vietnam, 1954-1960

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 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.