American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [“We must combine”]: quoted in Oates, p. 431.

  Rolling Thunder

  [“If I left the woman”]: quoted in Keams, pp. 251-53; see also F. M. Kail, What Washington Said: Administration Rhetoric and the. Vietnam War, 1949-1969 (Harper, 1973), pp. 97-103 and passim; Goldman. chs.14-15, 18 and passim; Philip Geyelin, Lyndon B. Johnson and the World (Praeger, 1966), chs. 1, 5-6; Halberstam, esp. ch. 20; James Deakin, “The Dark Side of L.B.J.,” in Hayes, pp. 506-22; Joseph Kraft, Profiles in Power: A Washington Insight (New American Library, 1966), ch. 2.

  402 [Morgenthau’s warning]: see McPherson, pp. 389-90; see also Hans J. Morgenthau, “We Are Deluding Ourselves in Viet-Nam,” in Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, eds., The Viet-Nam Reader (Random House, 1965), pp. 37-45.

  403 [Tonkin]: George G. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2nd. ed. (Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 118-23; George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (Knopf, 1986), pp. 219-26; Joseph G. Goulden, Truth Is the First Casualty: The Gulf of Tonkin Affair—Illusion and Reality (Rand McNally, 1969); Kathleen J. Turner, Lyndon Johnson’s Dual War: Vietnam and the Press (University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 81-85; Anthony Austin, The President’s War (Lippincott, 1971); Sandy Vogelgesang, The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War (Harper, 1974), pp. 53-55; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam (Viking, 1983), pp. 365-76.

  [Pleiku]: Herring, pp. 128-29; Halberstam, pp. 520-26; Karnow, pp. 411-15.

  [Johnson’s men]: Halberstam; Kraft; Richard J. Barnet, “The Men Who Made the War,” in Ralph Stavins et al., Washington Plans an Aggressive War (Random House, 1971), pp. 199-252; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (Doubleday, 1967), ch. 4; Henry L. Trewhitt, McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon (Harper, 1971); Warren I. Cohen, Dean Rusk (Cooper Square Publishers, 1980); John B. Henry II and William Espinosa, “The Tragedy of Dean Rusk,” Foreign Policy, no. 8 (Fall 1972), pp. 166-89.

  404 [Dominican intervention]: Theodore Draper, The Dominican Revolt: A Case Study in American Policy (Commentary, 1968); Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Harvard University Press, 1972); Evans and Novak, ch. 23; Turner, pp. 135-37; Geyelin, ch. 10.

  405 [Mao’s advice]: see Karnow, p. 329.

  [Lin Piao’s article]: see John J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Westview Press, 1981), p. 245; Karnow, p. 453.

  [Vietnam, China, Soviet Union]: Duiker, passim: Donald S. Zagoria, Vietnam Triangle: Moscow, Peking, Hanoi (Pegasus, 1967); Daniel S. Papp, Vietnam: The View from Moscow, Peking, Washington (McFarland & Co., 1981); Jon M. Van Dyke, North Vietnam’s Strategy for Survival (Pacific Books, 1972), pp. 217-28; King C. Chen, Vietnam and China, 1938-1954 (Princeton University Press, 1969); Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh, Peter Wiles, trans. (Random House, 1968), ch. 13; Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1972), ch. 2 passim: Adam B. Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II (Viking, 1971), ch. 11 passim; Victor G. Funnell, “Vietnam and the Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1965-1976” and “Documents: Vietnam and the Sino-Soviet Conflict,” Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. 11, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Summer, 1978), pp. 142-99.

  [Rolling Thunder]: Herring, pp. 129-30, 146-47, 149-50; see also Kahin, chs. 10-11; James C. Thompson, Rolling Thunder: Understanding Policy and Program Failure (University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Turner, pp. 114-18.

  [McNamara on civilian casualties]: Herring, p. 147.

  405-6 [Divisions within Administration]: see Herring, pp. 137-43; Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (Norton, 1982); Halberstam, Best and Brightest, chs. 24-26 passim; Henry F. Graff, The Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on War and Peace under Lyndon B. Johnson (Prentice-Hall, 1970), ch. 1; George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (Norton, 1982), pp. 380-403; Geyelin, pp. 213-35, 291-302; Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Belts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Brookings Institution, 1979), pp. 116-43 passim; Harvey A. DeWeerd, “Strategic Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1965-1968,” Yale Review, vol.67, no. 4 (June 1978), pp. 481-92.

  406 [North Vietnam’s defense and mobilization against U.S. bombing and escalation]: see Herring, pp. 147-49, “ant labor” quoted at p. 148; Karnow, pp. 454-59; see also Van Dyke, passim; Duiker, pp. 240-46; Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam North (International Publishers, 1966).

  [“Most sophisticated war”]: quoted in Herring, p. 151.

  [“To locate an ever elusive enemy”]: ibid.; see also William A. Buckingham, Jr., Operation Ranch Hand: The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia: 1961-1971 (Office of Air Force History, 1982); William Heseltine, “The Automated Air War,” New Republic, vol. 165, no. 16 (October 16, 1971), pp. 15-17; Paul F. Cecil, Herbicidal Warfare: The RANCH HAND Project in Vietnam (Praeger, 1986).

  406 [“I have no army”]: quoted in FitzGerald, p. 169; see also ibid., esp. ch. 4; Duiker; Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (MIT Press, 1966); Van Dyke; Paul Berman, Revolutionary Organization: Institution-Building Within the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (Lexington Books, 1974); Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army (Praeger, 1962); Susan Sheehan, “The Enemy,” New Yorker, vol. 42, no. 29 (September 10, 1966), pp. 62-100; George A. Carver, Jr., “The Faceless Viet Cong,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 44, no. 3 (April 1966), pp. 347-72; David Hunt, “Villagers at War; The National Liberation Front in My Tho Province, 1965-1967,” Radical America, vol. 8, nos. 1-2 (January-April 1974), pp. 3-181; Cincinnatus, Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era (Norton, 1981), Appendix D.

  [“Key to the vast, secret torrents”]: FitzGerald, p. 169.

  407 [Washington protest, April 1965]: New York Times, April 18, 1965, pp. 1, 3; Sale, ch. 11; Miller, pp. 226-34; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left (University of California Press, 1980), pp. 46-60; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 177-87; Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Doubleday, 1984), pp. 38-42.

  [Potter’s speech]: quoted in Sale, p. 189.

  [King’s break with Johnson]: Oates, pp. 373-76.

  [Lippmann’s break with Johnson]: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 571-72, quoted at p. 572. [Teach-ins]: Louis Menashe and Ronald Radoshe, eds., Teach-ins, U.S.A. (Praeger, 1967); Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 37-38, 43; Vogelgesang, pp. 70-74.

  [March on New York induction center]: Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 51, 53-54, sign quoted at p. 51; New York Times, July 30, 1965, p. 2; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 21-22; on the draft and resistance, see also Michael Useem, Conscription, Protest, and Social Conflict: The Life and Death of a Resistance Movement (Wiley, 1973); Alice Lynd, ed., We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors (Beacon Press, 1968); Wallerstein and Starr, vol. 1, ch. 6; Handbook for Conscientious Objectors, Arlo Tatum, ed., 8th ed. (Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, 1966); Jessica Mitford, The Trial of Dr. Spock (Knopf, 1969); Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (Knopf, 1978); Ferber and Lynd.

  408 [“Assembly of Unrepresented People”]: New York Times, August 9, 1965, p. 4; ibid., August 10, 1965, p. 3; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 51-53.

  [Antiwar self-immolations]: see Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 1-5, “Burn yourselves” quoted at p. 4.

  [Miller’s burning of draft card]: ibid., pp. 56-57; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 22-27.

  [Fall 1965 international days of protest]: New York Times, October 16, 1965, pp. 1-2; ibid., October 17, 1965, pp. 1, 42-44; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 56-57. [Strategic and organizational debate within the movement]: see Sale, chs. 12-16 passim; Miller, pp. 234-59; Breines, ch. 5; Gitlin, Whole World, esp. ch. 4
; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 188-92, 225-30.

  408-9 [Old Left and New]: Milton Cantor, The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900-1971 (Hill and Wang, 1978), ch. 10 passim; Mills, “Letter to the New Left”; Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties, chs. 5-6 passim; Breines, pp. 13-17; James Weinstein, “The Left, Old and New,” Socialist Revolution, vol. 2, no. 4 (July-August 1972), pp. 7-60; Newfield, ch. 8; David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968 (Harper, 1988), pp. 33-38, 40-43; see also Bogdan Denitch, “The New Left and the New Working Class,” in J. David Colfax and Jack L. Roach, eds., Radical Sociology (Basic Books, 1971), pp. 341-52.

  409 [“Criminal, sinister country”]: quoted in Vogelgesang, p. 73.

  [“Alienated intellectuals”]: ibid., p. 91.

  [April 1961 New York demonstration]: New York Times, April 16, 1967, pp. 1-3; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 110-14; Ferber and Lynd, ch. 5; Lynd, We Won’t Go, pp. 220-25; Paul Goodman, “We Won’t Go,” New York Review of Books, vol. 8, no. 9 (May 18, 1967), pp. 17-20.

  [From protest to resistance]: Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 86, 94-96, 104-7; Gitlin, Sixties, ch. 10 passim; Durward Long, “Wisconsin: Changing Styles of Administrative Response,” in Foster and Long, pp. 246-70; see also Sale, part 3; Ferber and Lynd, ch. 4 and passim; Wallerstein and Starr, vol. 2, ch. 6.

  409 [Pentagon march]: New York Times, October 21, 1967, pp. 1, 8; ibid., October 22, 1967, pp. 1, 58-59; ibid., October 23, 1967, pp. 1, 32-33; Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New American Library, 1968); Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 135-42; David Dellinger, “Gandhi and Guerrilla—The Protest at the Pentagon,” in Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 285-92; Vogelgesang, pp. 130-33; “The Pentagon Demonstration,” in Hare and Blumberg, pp. 241-70; Sale, pp. 383-86; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 135-40.

  [“Creative synthesis”]: Dellinger, “Gandhi and Guerrilla,” p. 287.

  [“Witches, warlocks”]: quoted in Sale, p. 384.

  [“Anarchists of the deed”]: Gitlin, Sixties, p. 223.

  410 [“Join us”]: quoted in David Dellinger, More Power Than We Know: The People’s Movement Toward Democracy (Anchor Books, 1975), p. 126.

  [“Burn a draft card ”]: quoted in Zaroulis and Sullivan, p. 139.

  [U.S. troops in Vietnam, 1967]: see Karnow, p. 512.

  [Divisions within Administration and LBJ]: Reams, ch. 11; Karnow, ch. 13 passim; Turner, ch. 7 passim; Johnson, pp. 366-78; Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention (David McKay, 1969), chs. 3-6; Gelb and Betts, pp. 156-70; Graff, ch. 3; Herring, pp. 175-83; DeWeerd.

  [“Bomb, bomb, bomb”]: quoted in Herring, p. 178.

  [“Spit in China’s face”]: quoted in Karnow, p. 504.

  [“Can’t hunker down”]: quoted in Herring, p. 179.

  [Ebbing of revolutionary zeal]: quoted in Duiker, p. 262.

  410-11 [Preparations for Tet]: Don Oberdorfer, Tet! (Doubleday, 1971), ch. 2; Duiker, pp. 263-65; Herring, pp. 187-88.

  411 [Tet and its effects upon American opinion]: Oberdorfer; Karnow, pp. 523-44; FitzGerald, ch. 15; Herring, pp. 186-92, 200-3; Turner, pp. 217-23; Duiker, pp. 265-71, 273-76; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 298-301; Robert Pisor, The End of the Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh (Norton, 1982); Peter Braestrup, Big Story, 2 vols. (Westview Press, 1977); John B. Henry II, “February, 1968,” Foreign Policy, no. 4 (Fall 1974), pp. 3-33; Herbert Y. Schandler, The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 1977), ch. 4; see also Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy (Presidio Press, 1982), ch. 1.

  [“What the hell is going on?”]: quoted in Herring, p. 191; see also Oberdorfer, pp. 246-50.

  [“It seems now more certain”]: quoted in Oberdorfer, p. 251.

  [“American people know the facts”]: quoted in Turner, pp. 221-22.

  [Debate over post-Tet strategy]: Herring, pp. 192-206 passim; Oberdorfer, pp. 257-77 and ch. 8; Hoopes, chs. 8-10; Karnow, pp. 549-57; Johnson, pp. 383-415 passim, DeWeerd; Schandler, chs. 5-13 passim.

  412 [Conclusion of the Wise Men]: Oberdorfer, pp. 308-15; Hoopes, pp. 214-18; Ball, pp. 407-9; Schandler, ch. 14; Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (Simon and Schuster, 1986), ch. 23.

  [“Growing with such acuteness”]: quoted in Hoopes, p. 216.

  [“Establishment bastards”]: quoted in Herring, p. 206.

  [“President is confronted”]: Lippmann, “This Draft Is Difficult to justify,” Washington Post, March 24, 1968, p. B3. [LBJ in polls, post-Tet]: Herring, pp. 201-2.

  [McCarthy campaign and New Hampshire primary]: David S. Broder, “Election of 1968,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 3716-18; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (Atheneum, 1969), ch. 3 passim; Lewis Chester et al., An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (Viking, 1969), ch. 3; Vogelgesang, pp. 142-46; Sidney Hyman, Youth in Politics: Expectations and Realities (Basic Books, 1972), pp. 97-133; David Halberstam, “McCarthy and the Divided Left,” Harper’s, vol. 236, no. 1414 (March 1968), pp. 32-44; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 294-97.

  [Kennedy’s dilemma and entry into race]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), chs. 37-38; David Halbersham, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (Random House, 1968), ch. 1; Broder, pp. 3718-19; Kearns, pp. 338-39; Chester et al., pp. 105-26.

  412 [Poll on public support for bombing]: John Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (Wiley, 1973), p. 72 (Table 4, 3).

  413 [LBJ’s withdrawal]: in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965-70), vol. 5, part 1, pp. 469-76, quoted at p. 476; see also “The President’s News Conference of March 31, 1968,” in ibid., pp. 476-82; Johnson, ch. 18; Turner, pp. 233-48; Herring, pp. 207-9; Kearns, ch. 12 passim; Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 868-69; McPherson, pp. 430-35; Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 642-47; Schandler, ch. 15; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 304.

  [“Rioting blacks, demonstrating students”]: quoted in Kearns, p. 343.

  [King’s assassination and rioting]: Manchester, pp. 1128-29; Oates, pp. 483-98; Lewis, pp. 383-92; Newsweek, vol. 71, no. 16 (April 15, 1968), pp. 31-34; ibid., vol. 71, no. 17 (April 22, 1968), pp. 24-26; Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 874-75; Garry Wills, “Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case, ”] in Hayes, pp. 731-50.

  [Columbia rising]: Jerry L. Avorn et al., Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (Atheneum, 1969); Fact-Finding Commission on Columbia Disturbances, Crisis at Columbia (Vintage, 1968); Joanne Grant, Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest (Signet, 1969); Daniel Bell, “Columbia and the New Left,” in Bell and Irving Kristol, eds„ Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities (Basic Books, 1969), pp. 67-107; Michael A. Baker et al., Police on Campus: The Mass Police Action at Columbia University, Spring, 1968 (New York Civil Liberties Union, 1969).

  [“Go all the way”]: Avorn et al., p. 61.

  414 [“Violence going to stop?”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Kennedy, p. 874.

  [“Year of the barricades”]: Caute, “free art, free theatre,” quoted at p. 71.

  [Kennedy campaign]: Schlesinger, Kennedy, chs. 39-41; Halberstam, Odyssey, chs. 2, 4-6; White, pp. 166-79; Chester et al., pp. 127-79 passim and 297-349 passim; Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey (Norton, 1984), chs. 28-30.

  [“Sad rather than cold”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Kennedy, p. 756.

  [The poor “are hidden”]: quoted in Halberstam, Odyssey, p. 9.

  [Liberal McCarthyites’ anger at Kennedy]: see Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 859-61, 896-99.

  [“Personalization of the presidency”]: quoted in ibid., p. 893.

  [Kennedy’s assassination]: Chester et al., pp. 349-62; Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 907-16; see also Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 310-11; Miller, pp. 287-88, 292-94.

  [Broder on shock of assassination]: Broder, p. 3725.

  [Chicago convent
ion]: ibid., pp. 3731-39; White, ch. 9; Chester et al., ch. 10; Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict (E. P. Dutton, 1968); Donald Myrus, ed., Law of Disorder: The Chicago Convention and Its Aftermath (Donald Myrus and Burton Joseph, 1968); David Farber, Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press, 1988); Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 175-201; Gitlin, Sixties, ch. 14; Miller, pp. 295-306; Sale, pp. 472-77; Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (World Publishing, 1968), part 2; Caute, chs. 15-16; Solberg, ch. 31; Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence, part 5.

  415 [Ribicoff on “Gestapo tactics”]: quoted in Broder, p. 3739.

  [Nixon’s nomination]: ibid., pp. 3709-15, 3725-31; White, chs. 2, 5, 8; Chester et al., chs. 5, 9; Richard Nixon, Memoirs (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 297-316; Mailer, Miami, part 1.

  [Presidential campaign, fall 1968]: Broder, pp. 3739-50; White, part 3; Chester el al., chs. 11-12; Marshall Frady, “The American Independent Party,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), vol. 4, pp. 3429-44; Jody Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness (Transaction Books, 1981), chs. 1-2, 7-9; Solberg, chs. 32-34; Nixon, pp. 316-35; George Christian, The President Steps Down (Macmillan, 1970); Philip E. Converse et al., “Continuity and Change in American Politics; Parties and Issues in the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (December 1969), pp. 1083-1105; Benjamin I. Page and Richard A. Brody, “Policy Voting and the Electoral Process: The Vietnam War Issue,” ibid., vol. 66, no. 3 (September 1972), pp. 979-95. [“Irate buffalo”]: Fady, p. 3441.

  416 [“Master of ambiguity”]: Page and Brody, p. 987.

  [“Alternated between protestations”]: ibid., p. 989.

  [“Dime’s worth of difference”]: quoted in Carlson, p. 131.

  [“Ask my Attorney General”]: quoted in Page and Brody, p. 992.

  [Election results]: Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, p. 3865; and Broder, pp. 3707, 3750-52; see also Page and Brody; Richard W. Boyd, “Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, vol. 66, no. 2 (June 1972), pp. 429-49.