Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  The book rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists, not because Americans accepted McNamara’s confession or endorsed his ideas, but because its publication drew hostility from across the public spectrum: liberals as well as conservatives, antiwar protesters as well as veterans. Anger drew readers to the book, and its reading as like as not deepened the anger. Skeptics charged that the man who had sent millions of boys to Vietnam and brought hundreds of thousands home in body bags or on hospital gurneys, meanwhile devastating the Vietnamese land and people, was just as arrogant as ever, and greedy as well, poised to make millions off the book. Former critics of the war wondered about the length of his silence, if indeed ever since 1966 he had realized his mistakes. McNamara’s disclaimer about not speaking up earlier—“I didn’t know any way to do it. At that point my voice wouldn’t have made any difference”—went nowhere. “It’s the same McNamara as ever,” one former antiwar activist fumed. “He still thinks he’s one of the best and the brightest. Those are crocodile tears he sheds.” Veterans’ groups joined in the fury though not in the reasons for it. The Gulf War had resurrected the reputation of American soldiers, and the luster of Vietnam veterans was brighter than ever. Just when the country was finally taking note of their sacrifice, the architect of the war was disparaging the American effort there and, as far as many veterans were concerned, tarnishing the men who had fought. “That no good son-of-a-bitch,” remarked Wendell Johnson, a purple-hearted marine who had lost part of his foot near Chu Lai. “He’s making a couple of million now, going to the bank with his blood money. You would think he’d at least have the good sense to donate the profits to some handicapped veterans he sent off to war. Hell, I’d be satisfied if he gave the money to wounded Vietnamese. Anything but keep it himself. Has he no sense of decency?”

  The Clinton administration was forced to postpone temporarily its plans for diplomatic recognition. The president had to wait for the Vietnamese victory celebrations, tame as they were, to be off the news, and McNamara to be off the television screens. But opinion polls indicated that most Americans supported normalization. On July 11, 1995, at a brief White House ceremony, the president extended diplomatic recognition to Vietnam. “This moment,” Clinton said in a prepared statement, “offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds. They have resisted time for so long. We can now move on to common ground.”

  A generation after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the American people wondered how it had happened, how the Vietnam War had gone out of control, how the richest country in the world could sacrifice hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of young men and women in a military effort that seemed, in the end, to have so little significance. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia had fallen to communism, but the rest of Asia survived. Only three dominoes went down. During the 1970s and 1980s the victorious Socialist Republic of Vietnam slipped into stupefying poverty, while the United States recovered from its malaise and enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity. Communism had taken over Indochina in the end, and the United States was just fine anyway.

  Back in the late 1940s, when the American confrontation of communism began, it had all seemed so simple, so clear, the threat so real and the sacrifice so necessary. Communism was on the march—in Europe and in Asia—and it appeared to be enjoying great success. Much of Eastern Europe was under Soviet domination, and in 1949 China fell to Mao Zedong’s cadres. Communism threatened to do the same to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The United States adopted a policy of containment and looked to apply it all around the world. Because Southeast Asia seemed crucial to the economic recovery of Japan and Western Europe, American policymakers committed themselves to the survival of the French empire. Given a choice between colonialism and communism, they chose colonialism. And when outright colonialism under the French collapsed, the United States went to the support of its remnant in the form of South Vietnam.

  Standing up to Ho Chi Minh, then, meant upholding a tiny elite in South Vietnam—an urban, Roman Catholic minority that had nothing in common with the masses of rural Buddhist and Confucian peasants. The government of South Vietnam, distant and corrupt, was never able to win the loyalties of its own people, and great numbers of them gravitated instead to the Vietcong. The American attempt to win the war militarily by bludgeoning the Vietcong and North Vietnamese with massive firepower brought inordinately large numbers of civilian casualties, and the problem of winning political loyalty deepened.

  Throughout most of the war, however, the United States did not worry much about peasant loyalties. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations decided to fight a war of attrition, to kill so many enemy troops and inflict so much damage on North Vietnam that continuation of the war would be impossible. Long before the conversion of the peasantry to democracy, so Johnson’s advisers believed, the war would be over, the communists bandaging their wounds and retreating back across the seventeenth parallel. What the Americans did not know was the extent of the communists’ dedication to reunification and independence at whatever expense. The American resolve fell far short of that, for however passionately the American public and its government embraced freedom and democracy, neither could become entirely convinced that democracy and freedom were dependent on the continuation of a corrupt regime in a small country an ocean away, and achievable only by the military trashing of much of the country. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese were willing to wait until the American public reached its political and economic limit.

  So the United States found itself getting deeper and deeper into the war, not out of any forthright determination to achieve military victory in this year or that but by doses of military power carefully measured: frustrating, the liberal managers of the war thought, both to Neanderthals who wanted to bomb the enemy into rubble and to the weakkneed pacifists who wanted out at any cost. Each escalation of the conflict was undertaken as a compromise, and each step was taken with the conviction that just a little more firepower would win the day. But the sum of dozens of small escalations was the dreaded land war in Asia. And what Washington considered to be cautious and prudent increases in force the Vietnamese experienced as total, indiscriminate war against their society and their lives.

  Even when American policymakers began to see Vietnam for the quagmire it was, disengagement was excruciatingly difficult. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all expressed the fear of becoming the first American president to lose a war. Each of them remembered the political abuse Harry Truman had taken from the Republican right wing over the “loss” of China to the Reds, and none of them wanted to be the target of similar abuse for losing Vietnam. Domestic politics, as much as the perceived need to stop communism in Vietnam, kept the United States in the war against the better judgment of much of its political and intellectual leadership. Even in the early 1970s, when the war had become an albatross to the Nixon administration, blanket withdrawal was rejected for threatening American credibility around the world. What had begun as a genuinely idealistic venture to save the world from communism ended in the 1970s as a face-saving game to get out of an impossible mess without looking too bad.

  And the end of the Vietnam War is a black wall in Washington with 58,175 names, an epitaph to a loss that is every American’s.

  12

  Oliver Stone’s Vietnam

  In the years since first writing “Where the Domino Fell,” the authors have continued to think, read, and teach about the war in Vietnam, about how it started, why it continued, and, perhaps most of all, what it meant to the country at the time and continues to mean for Americans in the early twenty-first century. This process led directly to an examination of the films of Oliver Stone, all of which center in some way on the war in Vietnam. This epilogue, written by Randy Roberts and David Welky, belongs in the book as a sequel to the discussion of Vietnam in American popular culture. “Oliver Stone’s USA” is a look at the filmmaker who has had the most profound influence on Americans’ popular understanding of the war.


  In September 1967, Oliver Stone departed from the United States on a transport bound for Vietnam. Behind him he left his life—an unhappy childhood; frustrating, lonely years at Hill School and Yale; along with a rejected novel manuscript. He might have been Ernest Hemingway heading for Italy, or Joseph Conrad bound for the sea. Perhaps his mind was already tracking film images, imagining what might have been and what would be. Perhaps Vietnam was more of an escape than a mission. Whatever the case, the country would soon take hold of him, and it would occupy his thoughts and his creativity for much of the next thirty years. Few artists would delve so completely into the nature, texture, and causes of the Vietnam War. Fewer still would produce such a dazzling body of work. And at the heart of it all would be biography— Stone’s and America’s.

  For Oliver Stone, exploring Vietnam would become a sacred mission. His experiences changed him and set his artistic agenda. For the next twenty-five years he would return repeatedly to Vietnam for inspiration. The conflict became his touchstone; it provided him with both an avenue for personal exploration and a tool for understanding larger historical questions.

  In a series of brilliant films about America and Vietnam, Stone moved from autobiographical observations about the nature of war, to a sociological analysis of the American culture that led to the war, to historical investigation of the political causes and course of the conflict. In the process, Stone became the most influential historian of America’s role in Vietnam. But to understand Stone’s position, one has to come to terms with Stone himself.

  Considering his career as a writer and director of powerful films that deal with war, it is perhaps not surprising that, had it not been for World War II, Oliver Stone’s parents would never have met. Louis Stone, Oliver’s father, was a Wall Street stockbroker and the scion of a wealthy family. He met Jacqueline Goddet, a poor nineteen-year-old beauty, shortly after V-E Day while he was serving as a financial officer for General Eisenhower in Paris. After some initial hesitation, Jacqueline wed Louis in November 1945. By the time the couple returned to New York City, Jacqueline was pregnant with what would be their only child. William Oliver Stone was born on September 15, 1946.

  The future critic of the establishment grew up within its comfortable embrace. Despite being prone to making poor financial decisions, his father generally proved to be a good provider, enabling Oliver to lead, by his own admission, “a sheltered existence.” Oliver lived in a large town-house complete with a nanny and a butler, dressed stylishly, studied piano, and listened to classical music and Broadway show tunes. After finishing eighth grade at Manhattan’s Trinity School, his parents shipped him to the exclusive Hill School, an all-boys academy in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Oliver knew that Hill was the first step that would probably lead to Yale and Wall Street, the path his father had taken.

  Oliver’s childhood was pampered, but hardly happy. Both his parents were distant. His mother seemed more interested in New York’s party scene than in him, and his father was a “dark and pessimistic” man who had a hard time expressing his emotions. Oliver’s closest family may have been his grandparents in France. As a youth, he spent his summers in Europe, raptly listening to his grandfather tell stories about the Great War and happily playing army with his cousins on the battlefields where millions of men had lost their lives. He passed summer days writing plays, many about war, that willing locals performed.

  But the carefree summers ended, and he faced the unappealing prospect of returning to the States and school. Although he was intellectually curious and fascinated with American and European history, he was uncomfortable at Hill. A self-proclaimed outsider, he made few friends, chafed under the strict discipline of the boarding school, and resented its efforts to impose a rigid orthodoxy upon him. Like many adolescents, Oliver was extremely self-conscious, living in constant fear of being ridiculed by fellow students. Burdened with feelings of isolation, he pursued his interest in writing, primarily as a means of “retreat[ing] from reality.”

  His family life got even lonelier. In 1962, when he was fifteen, the headmaster of Hill called him to his office to inform him that his parents were separating. The news shocked him; he had failed or refused to see any signs of discord in his parents’ relationship. In fact, the split surprised few others. Louis had had a string of affairs, and Jacqueline, fully aware of her husband’s philandering, coped by partying, popping uppers, and, finally, taking lovers of her own. By the early 1960s, the Stones’ marriage existed solely on paper. Now, when Oliver most needed attention, his parents reinforced his sense of isolation by refusing to visit him. Oliver wanted to take a leave from school, but his father would not hear of it, claiming that he was too busy at work to attend to anyone else. Jacqueline was even more remote; she left for Europe, expressing no interest in seeing her son. Oliver received another shock when he learned that Jacqueline’s free-spending habits had driven the family into debt. Louis moved, with Oliver’s possessions, from their spacious town house to a cramped hotel room. Oliver was devastated. His parents’ actions taught him that “adults were dangerous” and “not to be trusted.”

  Abandoned by his parents, he accepted the grind at Hill. Unsure of his future, he struggled through his last tedious years of high school. World events seemed remote. Certainly, he did not see his destiny in the assassination of President Kennedy. Raised a staunch Republican by his conservative father (Oliver voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964), he has only vague memories of being “on a lunch break or something” when he heard of the president’s death. Although he was never a “Kennedy lover when he was alive,” Stone was shocked by the crime, but no more than others. He was not burdened with concerns for America’s future, only stunned that “a young, handsome president could be killed like that.” He fully accepted the Warren Commission’s finding that Kennedy had been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald alone.

  Personal concerns were more pressing. In accordance with his father’s wishes, in 1964 he enrolled at Yale. He quickly realized that college would be more of “the same crap” that Hill had been. Even more than before, he desperately searched for meaning in his life, longing to break out of the constricting East Coast conservative mold that his father had crammed him into. Books provided a means of escape. He devoured Joseph Conrad’s writings and was especially drawn to Lord Jim, with Conrad’s dark view of human nature and his lush depictions of the exotic Orient. The idea of living in a primitive land, unsullied by civilization, consumed him, and he began inquiring about possibilities for overseas employment. After several rejections, he was finally accepted by the Free Pacific Institute in Taiwan, a church-based organization that operated a number of schools. The Institute offered him a position as an English teacher at a school in Cholon, the Chinese suburb of Saigon. In 1965, he dropped out of Yale and headed for Vietnam.

  Saigon, with its gambling, drugs, and prostitution, was no Yale. It “was like Dodge City.” Hookers stalked busy street corners, drunks spilled out from numerous bars, and guns and violence were common. The hot sun and the nearby ocean lent a sense of romance to the chaotic scene. Stone felt alive. After the suffocating depths of Hill School and Yale, Saigon was like coming up for air. He plunged into his new job, working hard and living a Spartan life, but loving it all.

  But an immediate, itchy restlessness persisted. Travel had gotten into his blood, and he wanted to see more of the world. He quit his teaching position after two semesters and joined the merchant marine, where he passed his days cleaning toilets and engine rooms. After a long voyage from Vietnam to Oregon, the nineteen-year-old Stone drifted south to Mexico to write a novel. The manuscript, which he called “A Child’s Night Dream,” grew into a 1,400-page, stream-of-consciousness look at the psyche of a bright, troubled youth. The largely autobiographical story followed the protagonist through his experiences in Asia and the merchant marine. Stone worked furiously through much of 1966 at what he thought was a literary masterpiece, eventually feeling confident enough to return to New York City and the hars
h judgment of his father, who desperately wanted his son to return to Yale and a buttoned-down life. Stone finally gave in and reenrolled, but unenthusiastically. “Night Dream” continued to occupy his thoughts and his energy. He worked on his novel at a punishing pace, skipping classes and writing about ten hours every day. Not surprisingly, his return to Yale was brief and inglorious. He was expelled but, undaunted, returned to New York to finish his book. The incredible effort he poured into the novel only made it more painful when publishers panned the manuscript. Frustrated, he threw hundreds of pages into the East River and decided to take a drastic step. He would visit Vietnam again, this time as a soldier.