Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Readers of the prestige press received a different view. Harrison Salisbury’s Behind the Lines: Hanoi, December 23, 1966–January 7, 1967 described a North Vietnam indifferent to submitting the United States to “Communist influence and control”—the country was just interested in defending their civilians from slaughter by American F-111s. The Village of Ben Suc, by a twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate named Jonathan Schell, described what it looked like when American personnel “pacified” a once-prosperous South Vietnamese hamlet: first it was bombed and shelled; then a joint U.S.–South Vietnamese army assault killed forty-one people on its first day; then, the traces were bulldozed, then bombed, its farmers transferred to a barren “strategic hamlet” behind barbed wire. (Time, in its negative review, savaged him for not pointing this out as an act of charity.) Schell quoted the reassurance of an American commander: “What does it matter? They’re all Vietnamese.”