Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume II, Vietnam, 1962

197. Memorandum From the Public Affairs Officer at the Embassy in Vietnam (Mecklin) to the Deputy Public Affairs Officer (Baumgartner)¹

Saigon, May 17, 1962.

SUBJECT

• PsyOps Committee Meeting of May 18

As you know, I had planned to propose to the Committee at tomorrowʼs meeting that we react to the coming on stream of the GVNʼs new radio transmitters with a hard look at the content of counter-insurgency information activities. Since I cannot attend the meeting, perhaps you could propose the idea and see what happens? If there is adequate encouragement, my thought is that perhaps each agency could put together a report within, say, a week which you and I would undertake to wrap up in a sort of working paper for discussion at the next meeting. I realize, of course, that this is something less than a new idea, and that a good many people have already sweated at length over this problem. But Iʼm told that there has not been an effort to look at it collectively in this fashion.

In any case, it seems to me we should try to sort out four questions:

1) How effective, vis-à-vis the insurgency problem, is the propaganda now being directed at the VC and the Vietnamese people?

Replies to my superficial enquiries have been unanimous that the content of GVN propaganda is poor. The most common complaint was that it is too negative, with heavy-handed emphasis on what the regime is against, instead of what itʼs for. At yesterdayʼs ceremonies opening the new Saigon transmitter, for example, Minister Hieu talked first about the sins of the VC and then about “the three enemies”: Communism, disunity, and backwardness. The sense of his remarks was that the new radio facilities would be devoted more or less exclusively to the battle against those things. Just about the only positive thought in his speech was a relatively secondary reference to personalism, which he elaborated in only one or two sentences.

One of the most helpful errors of Communist propaganda worldwide is that it is monumentally long-winded and boring. Is the GVN pitch committing the same mistake? Minister Hieu remarked to me the other night that GVN propaganda at the boondocks level was now avoiding all mention of President Diem and talking instead about specific boondocks problems. Apart from the controversy about the Diem regime, can you reach the Vietnamese peasant without offering him a leader? Is the suppression of Diemʼs name a surrender to VC propaganda, or to stateside press criticism, or perhaps inescapable in the present circumstances? Is it true that GVN propaganda (as well as our own supporting efforts) uniformly depicts the VC as baby-murdering, arsonist monsters? Is this a true picture of the VC as it is known to the majority of the peasants in the red and pink areas whom we are trying to reach? In short is the present pitch credible?

Does anyone have a really hard reading on how well GVN propaganda is working in the rural areas? Among town dwellers who probably have not had first-hand contact with the VC? Is adequate consideration being given to the probability that the pitch to town dwellers should be different from the pitch to peasants?

(Of course there is also the equally basic question of whether existing propaganda programs are really arriving in the target areas, regardless of the quality of the content. Should the heavy emphasis be on radio, or village newspapers, or airdropped leaflets, or what? But this perhaps should be the subject of a separate study.)

2) Is it possible to establish broad guidelines on ways to improve GVN propaganda?

Is it possible, for example, to laugh at the VC, to make them look ridiculous and thus lose face? For village level consumption, can a more subtle approach be used, with less emphasis on terror and more on Communist techniques for capturing and destroying a manʼs mind? How should the American presence be treated? Ignored on the theory that the villagers dislike foreigners? Or perhaps brought out in carefully controlled ways to show the presence of American power to help defend the people against the VC? How about more emphasis on economic improvements bestowed by the Saigon Government, along lines of Ben Woodʼs paper on USOMʼs achievements?² In any case, can policy lines be established to put more emphasis on the positive, in the sense perhaps of a sort of frame of reference for testing new projects?

3) To what extent do the various U.S. agencies now influence the content of GVN propaganda and in what specific ways is this done?

In the case of USIS, there is close to total U.S. control (except for a GVN veto) in such operations as the weekly newsreel, some 50 hours of weekly radio programming, the Operation Sunrise newspaper, plus various other areas which you can elaborate. My idea is that it would be useful for the Committee to collect specifics on what all the U.S. agencies in Vietnam are doing along these lines, and then to try to assess effectiveness and target areas that are not being adequately covered.

4) Finally, where and how can the U.S. increase its influence over the content of GVN propaganda, assuming this is desirable?

As I see it, this would be a study primarily concerned with specific situations and personalities within the GVN and with specific U.S. GVN relationships where there are possibilities for negotiating a greater U.S. voice, e.g. the proposed USOM effort to get the GVN to accept a stateside task force to advise on a program of rural education (the Winfield fetter),³ or your suggestion for a VOA advisor. My thought is that this kind of a go-round should ultimately produce agreement on which agency should try to promote what specific objectives vis-à-vis improvement of the GVN propaganda effort.

1. Source: Washington National Records Center, RG 84, Saigon Embassy Files: FRC 67 A 677. USIS 1962. Secret.
2. Not found.
3. Not further identified.