Edward S. Herman’s first political effort that I know of was his book with Richard B. Du Boff, published in 1966. It was about the USA in Vietnam. There were a few interesting aspects of that first effort. One is how it was a joint effort. Ed was the consummate collaborator. He published several works with Du Boff, who also wrote an article for Lies our Times, which Ed edited. People who worked with Ed usually loved him. Ed was a sweet man.
Another interesting aspect of that first effort is that nowhere in it was anything that hinted at a media critique. In that book, Ed and Du Boff criticized the American government, not the media. They clearly laid out the USA’s duplicity in Vietnam, as well as the imperial and genocidal nature of the American invasion. Ed began protesting the Vietnam War in those days.
In 1968, Ed published his The Great Society Dictionary, which I was never able to obtain, as it has long been out of print. But I know that it was the satirical predecessor of Ed’s “Doublespeak Dictionary,” which was produced in his Beyond Hypocrisy, in 1992. I produced quotes from it on the Wikiquotes page that I made for Ed. Readers might notice that one entry was for “Magic Bullet,” which referred to the JFK assassination. Ed was onboard with the idea that JFK was killed in a conspiracy that was covered up, and he was intrigued by Gary’s tale. When Ed edited Lies of Our Times, a backyard photo of Oswald was on the cover of an issue, and a story in it was about how the media attacked Oliver Stone’s JFK before the movie was even made. Ed was not like Noam Chomsky on that score, as Noam wrote a book to debunk the idea that the CIA would have had any motivation to kill JFK. Noam’s effort was badly misguided, in my opinion.
Ed was one of the few among the radical left who did not align with the Warren Commission on the JFK hit. Michael Parenti (who also wrote an article for Lies of Our Times), wrote that the “left” had a “conspiracy phobia.” Ed did not have that phobia, but he didn’t really promote conspiracy theories, either. Ed always thought that structural factors explained more about how our societies operated than conspiracy theories did. I agree, as I learned that the hard way before I ever heard of Ed.
Ed’s next book was a solo effort, titled Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities, published in 1970. Once again, there was no hint of a media critique in that book, as it took the American government to task. Ed used media accounts, but Ed focused on the government’s lies in Atrocities in Vietnam, he showed that the USA outperformed the Nazis at times, and he argued that the American effort was as racist as the Nazi effort. Once again, Ed made the case that the USA was committing genocide in Vietnam, which was quite a charge for a Jew to make.
Although it was a slim book, Atrocities in Vietnam was filled with the meticulous scholarship and astute observations that made me a fan of Ed’s work. I did not read it until I began working on Ed’s bio in the spring of 2017. It became one of my favorite works of his.
Ed’s experience in publishing Atrocities in Vietnam was a gentle prelude to what happened when he and Noam published their first book together, or at least attempted to. Ed’s enthusiastic editor for Atrocities in Vietnam lost his job over the book. The publishing company never promoted the book and soon remaindered it. In my studies over the years, I have seen Ed’s Atrocities in Vietnam considered one of the classics of dissident American literature on the Vietnam War.