America’s Vietnam Policy — Edward S. Herman & Richard B. Du Boff

Full Title:America’s Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception
Edward S. Herman & Richard B. Du Boff
Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1966
First Edition · First Printing

The Book:
The true first edition, first printing of Edward S. Herman and Richard B. Du Boff’s America’s Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception, published by Public Affairs Press in 1966 while the Vietnam War was still actively escalating. The title page carries the original Washington, D.C. imprint and 1966 date; the copyright page bears only the original 1966 copyright, with no later printing statement or revised-edition notice. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-29854 is present, and the original publisher’s printed wrappers match known first-issue examples. No evidence of rebinding, facsimile production, ex-library provenance, or restoration is observed.

Condition:
Very Good. The original printed wrappers remain intact with moderate rubbing, handling wear, light edge wear, and expected age toning. The binding is sound and the interior clean. No notable provenance is documented.

Story Of The Book

Wars are fought with weapons. They are also sustained with stories.

Published in 1966, America’s Vietnam Policy appeared at a moment when the Johnson administration was rapidly expanding the American war in Vietnam while continuing to defend that expansion through claims about limited objectives, necessity, progress, and reluctant intervention.

Herman and Du Boff challenged that narrative in real time.

They argued that deception was not incidental to American policy but had become one of its instruments—that selective disclosure, information management, and official framing helped manufacture public consent for a war whose underlying assumptions deserved far greater scrutiny.

That timing is what gives this book its force.

It was not written after the Pentagon Papers, after Watergate, or after the war had become a settled symbol of governmental failure.

It was written while the argument was still live.

Before the dominant public narrative had fully collapsed, Herman and Du Boff were already asking readers to distrust the official version.

That makes the book less a retrospective indictment than a contemporaneous act of dissent.

The authors were not explaining how the government had misled the public. They were accusing it of doing so while the war was still expanding.

Why It’s In The Collection

America’s Vietnam Policy belongs in Consigned to Darkness because power often depends on controlling not only events, but the public interpretation of those events.

This book confronts that process directly.

Rather than criticizing a single policy decision, Herman and Du Boff challenged the information environment through which American policy was justified. The object therefore sits at the intersection of war, propaganda, democratic accountability, and free expression.

Its first-edition status matters because it preserves that challenge at the moment of confrontation.

A later history of Vietnam can explain what happened.

This copy preserves people arguing, in 1966, that the official story itself had become part of the problem.

The inventory accordingly treats it as a publication-event object documenting organized intellectual opposition to the war while the conflict was still unfolding, rather than as a later historical synthesis.

That gives it a particularly useful role beside the collection’s other Vietnam holdings. Where firsthand works such as Dispatches preserve the lived experience of the war, America’s Vietnam Policy preserves the contemporaneous struggle over what the American public was being told about it.

The battlefield was in Vietnam. One of the other battles was over whether Americans could trust the story their government was telling them.

Collection Categories: Free Expression · Anti-Authoritarianism · Political Dissent · War & Conflict · Investigative Journalism · U.S. Foreign Policy · Vietnam War

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Authentication Evidence

• Title page identifies America's Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception by Edward S. Herman and Richard B. Du Boff, published by Public Affairs Press, Washington, D.C.

• First Edition Evidence: Title page bears the original Public Affairs Press, Washington, D.C. imprint dated 1966, consistent with the first edition.

• First Printing Evidence: Copyright page carries only the original 1966 copyright with no later printing statements or indications of subsequent impressions, consistent with Public Affairs Press first-printing practice.

• Copyright page includes Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-29854, consistent with the original issue.

• Original publisher's printed wrappers match known first-issue examples.

• No evidence of rebinding, facsimile production, ex-library provenance, or restoration observed.

• The observed bibliographic evidence is fully consistent with an authentic First Edition, First Printing.