Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Extension essay - Arguments About Australia and the Vietnam War: selected documents, edited by Val Noone

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Importance of 1950s Influences

The saying, 'the first casualty when war comes is truth', overlooks the matter of timing: for indeed truth is often a casualty before war starts. In the years leading up to the first commitment of Australian soldiers to war in Vietnam in 1962, the press and the Australian Government tried to persuade the public that Ho Chi Minh was evil and Ngo Dinh Diem was good. The following quotation from Susan Welch's study of the press in USA in these years is relevant to Australia.

It was in the 1950s, not the 1960s, that this distant and undeclared war became established in the minds of both the public and public officials as a showdown between the forces of Communism and anti-Communism, vital to the 'Free World'; that Ho Chi Minh was identified as a tool of a larger Communist movement, and that victory in Indochina was seen as vital to the preservation of all Southeast Asia, indeed perhaps of all Asia and beyond. By 1965, when the United States [and Australia] dramatically escalated their involvement in Indochina, the rhetoric with which the struggle was discussed had long been fixed.

SOURCE: Susan Welch, 'Vietnam: How the Press Went Along', Nation (New York), 11 October 1971, p. 327-330.