American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The former President had lost none of his bombast, sarcasm, Texas high coloring, his capacity to oversimplify history. But wholly authentic in this discourse was the self-portrait of a leader who had been deeply divided about his choices as he had perceived them. As usual, he had dealt with his options by personalizing them. He remembered just what he had felt and whom he had feared in those years: Bobby Kennedy would be out front telling everyone that Lyndon Johnson had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. LBJ would be called a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine. He had nightmares, he said, about people running toward him shouting “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” But he feared World War III even more.

  Always the image of Roosevelt loomed before him as exemplar and guide—FDR, who had led the nation so skillfully against Hitlerism despite the doubters and the defeatists. World War II had shown that the defense of little nations like Czechoslovakia was necessary to the security of big nations; that the democracies must unite in the face of aggression; that nations must live up to their promises and commitments. LBJ knew of Hans Morgenthau’s warning against treating Vietnam in European terms—but had not Roosevelt’s and Truman’s way of standing up to aggression worked against Japan? Against North Korea?

  So Johnson had reasoned. It seemed historically fitting, in retrospect, that he had dealt with his first Vietnam “crisis” much as Roosevelt had exploited Nazi “aggression” in the North Atlantic. Just as FDR had converted provocative acts on both sides into a simple act of Nazi hostility, just as he had grossly oversimplified murky actions in the misty waters south of Greenland, so Johnson seized on equally minor, two-sided, and confused encounters between an American destroyer and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to step up the war. After ordering reprisal air strikes against North Vietnam, LBJ asked congressional approval for a resolution—drafted in the White House several months before the Tonkin Gulf incident—that would empower the President as Commander-in-Chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States. After brief hearings at which the Administration failed to provide Congress with vital information about the Gulf of Tonkin encounters, disingenuously suggesting that the attack on the destroyer had been unprovoked, the House gave Johnson his mandate by a vote of 414-0, the Senate by 88-2. Only the outspoken former Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon and Democrat Ernest Gruening of Alaska voted against the White House.

  The escalation continued. National Liberation Front forces attacked a U.S. base at Pleiku in February 1965, killing eight Americans. Johnson ordered air strikes and sent in the first official American troops—no longer “advisers.” The sequence became tedious: land battles, more troops mobilized on both sides, lulls in the struggle marked by calls for negotiation, more battles.

  Later, when Johnson talked to Kearns and others about his nightmares, about awaking and prowling the White House and visiting the situation room to scrutinize the latest battle reports, some said that the President had become unhinged. But if this was the case, the whole White House had been a little mad, for the President had acted not alone but on the advice of such presumably sober and experienced advisers as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and many others who were largely holdovers from the JFK White House. Some said that LBJ had become a fanatical anticommunist in the face of Hanoi’s resistance. But the President was no fanatic. He often spoke loudly while wielding a relatively small stick, limiting attacks in both intensity and duration, holding back the military all-outers, spending hours selecting bombing targets that would not provoke Chinese or Soviet retaliation. He constantly pleaded that he was seeking not to crush communism in Russia or China or North Vietnam—merely to preserve South Vietnam as a bastion of present, or future, freedom. Indeed he staked his most eager hopes on his numerous economic aid and social reform programs in Vietnam—a kind of Indochinese Great Society. He would bring to the Vietnamese democracy American style, honest elections, Bill of Rights liberties. Like his predecessor, he failed to see that the Vietnamese wanted freedom as they defined it—and the first freedom was liberation from imperial or neocolonial control.

  His motivation was far less psychological or ideological than political and conceptual. The Gulf of Tonkin brush occurred hardly two weeks after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and the Republicans were already making clear that they would campaign against the party that had lost Poland and China and was now about to lose Indochina. Even after his November triumph, Johnson feared that other rivals lay in wait for him, not only in the GOP but in both the hawk and dove wings of the Democratic party. Yet the conceptual factor was perhaps more influential, certainly more insidious. Every small escalation seemed so sensible, so practical, so moderate. Each little step was based on careful analysis, ample intelligence, elaborate quantification. Like good pragmatists, like eminently reasonable men, the leaders experimented with a variety of strategies and tactics. When none worked—and none ever did—they tried something else.

  Moreover, they were not wholly distracted by Southeast Asia—not at first anyway. They were guarding Atlantic ramparts against communism as well. Early in 1963, Kennedy had dispatched Vice President Johnson to the Dominican Republic for the inauguration of Juan Bosch, a litterateur and leftist, noncommunist politician, as President. Photographs depicted LBJ and Bosch in a warm Latin abrazo. After the generals overthrew Bosch six months later, civilian and army supporters of the deposed President struck back in April 1965. Johnson promptly dispatched the Marines, ostensibly to save lives but mainly because of some scattered indications that communists were among the pro-Bosch forces. Within three weeks 22,000 American troops were patrolling the small nation—the first major overt military intervention in a Latin nation in forty years. The Administration never produced convincing evidence of significant communist involvement, but once again Washington was captive to the phantom threat of unified global communism. God forbid that there be another Cuba in the Caribbean!

  The Americans used the latest, most sophisticated intelligence technology in Indochina, but their analysis of political information was faulty. Otherwise they might have grasped that the communists too lacked global unity; that the communist world too was torn by geopolitical differences, national rivalries, factional quarrels, leadership rivalries; that Hanoi faced many of the same types of problems with friends and foes that Washington did—faithless allies, coalition weaknesses, great powers ultimately devoted to their own national interests and perhaps willing in a pinch to “lose” Vietnam or some other small communist ally.

  As usual, big powers had plenty of advice for small allies. Mao Tse-tung urged the Vietnamese communists to follow the strategy of protracted conflict he had developed and tested against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Lin Piao wrote an important article humbly analyzing mistakes made during the Chinese Revolution but obviously reproaching Hanoi for being intent on escalating and not knowing when to pull back. The Vietnamese hardly took this advice with fraternal grace. They had long memories of Chinese aggression over the centuries, of Chinese arrogance toward lesser peoples, of the Chinese “sellout” of their Vietnamese comrades at Geneva in 1954, when Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel. Did Peking wish to keep Vietnam divided and impotent so that the Chinese could dominate Indochina?

  Nor did the Hanoi regime have any more comradely love for the Russians. Moscow too had been a party to the Geneva Accords; at a critical moment Molotov, surrounded by Mendès-France, Chou En-lai, and Eden, had hammered down with the finality of a blacksmith’s blows the agreement that provided for partition. Hanoi rightly suspected that the Russians saw Vietnam as a pawn in great power rivalry, were far more concerned about their relationship with China, and above all feared that escalation in Southeast Asia would lead to World War III. Hanoi no doubt suspected all this—what it did not fully grasp was the extent to which Lyndon Johnson too feared that escalation might trigger a nu
clear war.

  What Hanoi did know by 1965 was that Hanoi must go it alone. The North Vietnamese could extract help from Moscow and Peking by expertly playing one off against the other, but the extent of military and logistical aid finally turned on shifting great power relationships as well as Hanoi’s needs. The North Vietnamese people had to survive under merciless American bombing while Hanoi mounted its own land infiltration and attacks to the south. During 1966 the Pentagon’s Rolling Thunder saturated North Vietnamese military centers, supply depots, and infiltration tracks with 136,000 tons of bombs. Mammoth B-52S, each carrying almost thirty tons of explosives, left the countryside scarred and towns and villages destroyed. McNamara privately admitted that North Vietnamese civilian casualties were running up to one thousand a month.

  Rolling Thunder was ill named, for it implied an Administration steadfastness that did not exist. The Joint Chiefs were urging a stepped-up, unrestricted air war; others contended that bombing could not succeed against a government and people like the North Vietnamese. Here too Johnson took the “practical” middle path, adopting a stop-and-go escalation. This not only hardened popular anger and resistance in North Vietnam without shocking it into defeatism but enabled Hanoi, with its small and widely dispersed factories, to establish alternative transportation routes and place workers underground. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children worked and even lived in an estimated 30,000 miles of tunnels.

  Under the holocaust of bombs Hanoi was still able to dispatch troops and supplies to the south. Even the official United States estimates acknowledged that perhaps 90,000 men infiltrated south in 1967, almost three times the number that had done so two years earlier. As usual the airmen boasted of bombing with surgical precision and as usual they exaggerated—it was hard to identify the infiltration routes and even harder to hit them. North Vietnamese engineers and laborers quickly filled in craters and improvised pontoon bridges, while drivers camouflaged their trucks with palm fronds and traveled at night, their headlights turned off, by following white markers along the roads. Americans marveled at the “ant labor” that could put back into operation in several days a key pass leading to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  In the south the Americans massed military technology on the ground as awesome as the B-52S in the air. In what their general, William Westmoreland, called the “most sophisticated war in history,” they tried to apply the latest weapons to old-fashioned guerrilla warfare. “To locate an ever elusive enemy,” in George Herring’s summary, “the military used small, portable radar units and ‘people sniffers’ which picked up the odor of human urine. IBM 1430 computers were programmed to predict likely times and places of enemy attacks. Herbicides were used on a wide scale and with devastating ecological consequences to deprive the Vietcong of natural cover. C-123 ‘RANCHHAND’ crews, with the sardonic motto ‘Only You Can Prevent Forests,’ sprayed more than 100 million pounds of chemicals such as Agent Orange over millions of acres of forests, destroying an estimated one-half of South Vietnam’s timberlands and leaving human costs yet to be determined. C-47 transports were converted into awesome gunships (called ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’) that could fire 18,000 rounds a minute.”

  But it was still the human factor that made the difference. “I have no army, I have no finances, I have no education system,” Ho Chi Minh had said. “I have only my hatred”—a hatred, Frances FitzGerald wrote later, that was the “key to the vast, secret torrents of energy that lay buried within the Vietnamese people.” But it was more than hatred. It was the determination of a rigorously propagandized and disciplined people led by ideologues. It was pride in their defeat of the French and now their standing up against the Americans. It was hope in their future of national independence—a hope that had stirred Americans two centuries before. It was faith in their kind of freedom.

  Washington, D.C., Holy Saturday, April 17, 1965.A warm cloudless day in the nation’s capital, one of those dreamlike spring days that made the city of cherry blossoms appear like a fairy-tale picture book of democracy. While military officials in the big government buildings toiled during the weekend over escalation plans for Vietnam, tens of thousands of war protesters were flocking into town on buses and trains and on foot. After picketing the White House the petitioners moved on to the Washington Monument, where they heard peace songs by Joan Baez and Judy Collins and speeches by Bob Moses, Staughton Lynd, I. F. Stone, and Senator Gruening. Paul Potter, head of SDS, which had organized the march, closed it with a passionate and prophetic call to his listeners to build a broad social movement that “will, if necessary, respond to the Administration war effort with massive civil disobedience all over the country,” and beyond that, to try to change the whole “system” that had produced the war.

  One by one Lyndon Johnson was also losing the support of men who had backed him. Martin Luther King, wondering when America would learn to understand the nationalistic spirit awakened within the colored people of the world, including the Vietnamese, broke with the Administration during the summer of 1965 on the issue. Walter Lippmann, discovering that the President had been planning to escalate the war even while telling the columnist that the war “had to be won on the non-military side,” and feeling the Administration’s cool breath to boot, never set foot in Johnson’s White House after the spring of 1965. Other notables also broke with the White House and the response was the same—excommunication.

  But it was the protesters in the streets—especially the young—who were still leading the way. In the wake of the April march, SDS campus chapters, coffers, and protests burgeoned, with excited coverage by the media. Others had not waited for SDS to lead the swelling movement. In an earlier striking display of the 1960s phenomenon of leadership welling up from below, University of Michigan students and faculty in March had organized an all-night teach-in that drew thousands—an idea quickly copied at scores of other campuses, where antiwar professors debated State Department “truth teams” before large audiences. In late July 1965, just after LBJ announced a doubling of draft calls, CNVA troops marched on the New York induction center, carrying signs reading: “The President has declared war—we haven’t.” On the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki an “Assembly of Unrepresented People” gathered in Washington for workshops and direct action that would connect black voting rights with Vietnam, creating a “peace and freedom” movement; a few hundred were arrested as they tried to invade the Capitol nonviolently with a “Declaration for Peace.” The Assembly gave birth to the first national antiwar coalition, the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, composed of thirty-three organizations.

  It was across the country that the thunder rolled. In Oakland, protesters sat down in front of army trains carrying soldiers bound for Vietnam. An eighty-two-year-old woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, followed the example of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns and set herself afire on a Detroit street. In New York, pacifist David Miller lighted a flame to his draft card before cameras at the induction center, the first public defiance of a new law which had made draft card destruction punishable by five years in prison. In the fall of 1965 the National Coordinating Committee sponsored international days of protest, with thousands taking to the streets in cities across the country and as far-flung as Tokyo. A thirty-two-year-old Quaker from Baltimore also sat down—within view of McNamara’s window at the Pentagon—poured kerosene over his body, and died in a small inferno. A young Catholic Worker activist immolated himself in front of the United Nations, after having witnessed a draft-card burning during which hecklers yelled, “Burn yourselves, not your cards!”

  As protests erupted across the country, attracting ever-greater numbers of people and intense television coverage, antiwar activists hotly debated age-old questions of strategy and organization: Should they maintain their bias against centralization or recognize the frequent need for leadership? Should they concentrate on the single issue of the Vietnam War or reach out to the varied concerns of other groups, espe
cially blacks and students? Should they admit, or at least work with, communists, or steer clear of them as dangerous allies? The last issue was especially complex not only because liberal groups like the ADA and old-line labor unions in general opposed inclusion of “Stalinists” but because the communists were as usual divided into orthodox CPers, Maoists, Trotskyites, young communists, and other factions, who fought among themselves.

  Cutting across these questions and groups was a conflict that pervaded the whole antiwar movement, a conflict, partly of generations, of classes, of tactics, a conflict of the Old Left, of the industrial trade unions, the nonrevolutionary socialists, the League for Industrial Democracy, of ADA “liberal reformism,” of political writers like Max Lerner and John P. Roche and novelists like Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, arrayed against the New Left, with its own dogmas, against SDS and other militant organizations, against numerous academic Marxists, writer Norman Mailer and poet Robert Lowell, The Nation and the New York Review of Books, radical chic, “resistance and reconstruction.” Intellectuals pitched ferociously into the fray— some critics said because of guilt over their having legitimated confrontation by the young. Susan Sontag described America as a “criminal, sinister country—swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world, of life itself, in terms of its own interests and jargon.”