Free Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, John Schoeffel, Peter R. Mitchell Page A

what was happening at home at the time—very worried. See, here we have exposed secret documents, which are extremely enlightening. If you look at the very tail end of the Pentagon Papers , for example, the part that deals with the weeks after the Tet Offensive, the top American military brass said that they were concerned about sending more troops to Vietnam, because they were afraid they wouldn’t have enough troops left over for what they called “civil disorder control” at home—they were afraid of a revolution breaking out if they continued escalating the war. And they referred to the problems: youth, women, ethnic minorities, all these groups were starting to get involved in protest.   77
    And actually, there was also another factor here that I should mention: the American army was falling apart. Remember, this was a citizens’ army, and it was the first time in history that a citizens’ army was being used to fight a colonial war—and that doesn’t work. I mean, you cannot take kids off the street and turn them into professional killers in a couple months—for that you need Nazis like the French Foreign Legion [an army of foreigners used to fight in France’s colonies], or peasants that you mobilize and give guns to and turn into cold-blooded killers, like the contras, say. That’s the way every imperial power in history has run its empire. But the United States tried to do it with a citizens’ army, and by 1968 it was already collapsing: drugs, lack of discipline, shooting your officers. And all of that was also a reflection of the popular movement at home: this is a youth culture, after all, and the guys who were going into the army were not all that different from the ones at home who were getting involved in the various movements. So the American army was falling apart, and the top Pentagon brass didn’t like it: they in fact wanted the army out.   78
    Alright, let’s go back to the New York Times . All this time the New York Times had no criticism of the war: nothing. Anthony Lewis is a bellwether, because he was their most extreme critic. More than a year after the Tet Offensive, in mid-1969, Anthony Lewis was the Times ’s Bureau Chief in London, and at that point he was unwilling even to speak to people in the American peace movement. I remember this personally. I was in Oxford in the spring of 1969 as John Locke Lecturer, and I was all over the British media talking about the war. Some of the British anti-war groups tried to get Anthony Lewis just to have a private discussion with me—he wouldn’t do it, said he’s not going to talk to anyone connected with this peace movement. And this wasn’t even in the United States, it was in England , where the pressures and the political climate were different. Finally by late 1969, he did begin to write mildly critical stuff about the war. Then he went to North Vietnam and discovered that bombs actually hurt: you walk through Haiphong, you see a lot of buildings knocked down, people torn apart; big surprise. At that point Anthony Lewis started to write critical material about the war—but bear in mind that that’s about a year and a half after corporate America turned against the war.
    Or take the My Lai massacre [the March 1968 shooting of 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by an American Army unit], which became a big issue in the United States. When? My Lai became a big issue in November 1969—that’s a year and a half after the killings took place, and about a year and a half after corporate America had turned against the war. And of course, My Lai was a triviality—it was such a triviality that the peace movement knew about it right away and didn’t even talk about it. Like, the Quakers in Quang Ngai Province where it took place [working with the American Friends Service Committee] didn’t even bother reporting it—because the same sort of thing was happening all over the place.   79
    M AN : Life magazine made My Lai famous .