The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  At three-forty-five, the male captives between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were marched to the edge of the helicopter pad, where they squatted in two rows, with a guard at each end. They hid their faces in their arms as a Chinook double-rotor helicopter set down, blasting them with dust. The back end of the helicopter was lowered to form a gangplank, leading to a dark, square opening. Their captive cards flapping around their necks, the prisoners ran, crouching low under the whirling blades, into the dim interior. Immediately, the gangplank drew up and the fat bent-banana shape of the Chinook rose slowly from the field. The women and children braved the gale to watch its rise, but appeared to lose interest in its flight long before it disappeared over the trees. It was as though their fathers, brothers, and sons had ceased to exist when they ran into the roaring helicopter.

  Inside the Chinook, the prisoners were sitting on two long benches in a dim tubular compartment, unable to hear anything over the barely tolerable roaring of the engines, which, paradoxically, created a sensation of silence, for people moved and occasionally talked but made no sound. Many of the prisoners held their ears. Up front, on each side, a gunner wearing large earphones under a helmet scanned the countryside. The gunners’ weapons pointed out, and there was no guard inside the helicopter. A few of the prisoners—some bold and some just young—stood up and looked out of small portholes in back of their seats. For the first time in their lives, they saw their land spread below them like a map, as the American pilots always see it: the tiny houses in the villages, the green fields along the river pockmarked with blue water-filled bomb craters (some blackened by napalm), and the dark-green jungles splotched with long lines of yellow craters from B-52 raids, the trees around each crater splayed out in a star, like the orb of cracks around a bullet hole in glass.

  Richard H. Rovere

  OCTOBER 28, 1967

  WHETHER OR NOT they mean it, the leaders of the Administration miss no opportunity to wring their hands and insist that it is peace, and not victory, they seek, and that they are ready at any time to sit down with anyone anywhere, and so on. (“I would depart today for any mutually convenient spot,” Rusk said, “if I could meet a representative of North Vietnam with whom I could discuss peace in Southeast Asia.”) Do they mean it? Who knows? If they don’t mean it, why are they saying it? If they didn’t talk so much, the credibility gap might narrow. But they go on. Week after week, the Secretary of Defense, the master of the greatest war machine in history, seems to be trying to signal to us, his countrymen, that the damned thing isn’t working, that the bombing is pointless, that it should be stopped. Does he speak for the President? Evidently not, but he still has the job. As for the President, speaking of mankind’s behavior in this century, he said earlier this month, in Williamsburg, Virginia, “We can take no pride in the fact that we have fought each other like animals.” He added that it “is really an insult to the animals, who live together in more harmony than human beings seem to be able to do.” After some generalizations on other failures of statesmanship, he said, “Shame on the world and shame on its leaders.” Those who support the war, like those who oppose it, appeal not to the patriotic heart but to the bleeding one. This is without precedent.

  Consider, also, the attitudes toward civilian deaths, and casualties, and the general human suffering brought by the war to the Vietnamese, North and South. These, too, are without known precedent. Whether this war is like or unlike any earlier one, it resembles all modern wars in that noncombatants are killed, the innocent suffer greatly, and there is much cruel and needless destruction. In Korea, we bombed and shelled villages, killed countless women and children. No Senate committees pestered the generals to learn how many civilians had been killed or what steps were being taken to avoid the slaughter of the innocents. C’est la guerre. We killed a great many civilians in the Second World War. If they were Germans or Japanese, it served them right. (Hiroshima produced some immediate revulsion, but it was the newness and hideousness of the weapon employed that affected us, who had been little moved by wider killing with mere TNT.) If they were Italians or Frenchmen, we thought of their deaths as gallant sacrifices they made happily for the liberation of their soil. To be sure, civilized people have always felt that noncombatants should be spared to the greatest extent consistent with military needs, but until now there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the military needs—provided, of course, they were our own—should be the first consideration. Any sense of outrage over atrocities and dead civilians was directed at the enemy. Now, for the first time, the conscience of a large part of the nation has been aroused by agonies for which our own forces are responsible.

  All wars are brutalizing, and perhaps in the random violence of the past few years (not merely the riots—not even so much the riots as the murders and assassinations) we are paying part of the price for sanctioned murder in the name of anti-Communism, self-determination, and democracy. But what seems already clear—from the size of the anti-war movements, from the muting of the eagles, from the outrage over atrocities and civilian losses—is that there is building up in this country a powerful sentiment not simply against the war in Vietnam but against war itself, not simply against bombing in Vietnam but against bombing anywhere at any time for any reason, not simply against the slaughter of innocents in an unjust conflict but also against the slaughter of those who may be far from innocent in a just conflict. The youthful protesters would probably acknowledge this without hesitation, only asking themselves why anyone should labor the point so heavily. (Some would no doubt go further, and say that they oppose not only the wars this government runs but everything else it does.) Their elders, thinking of a past they find it necessary to be true to, cannot turn pacifist overnight. They must distinguish between this war and the wars they have supported in the past—up to and including the war in the Middle East a few months ago. But in fact our present war is different mainly in that it seems endless and hopeless.

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  Is it possible for us to come through this experience, if we come through at all, as a pacifist nation? I suppose not. “Pacifist nation” seems a contradiction in terms. If all of us, or most of us, were pacifists, we would have little reason to be a nation. Defense is the fundamental raison d’être for the modern state. And if a pacifist nation didn’t come apart at the seams, some non-pacifist nation would tear it apart. It seems to me, though, that if the war goes on and if opposition to it continues to increase at the present rate, there will in time be a testing of this whole proposition. No government that is not totalitarian can go on indefinitely fighting a hard war that its people hate. Something has to give. Either the government yields to the popular will or it becomes oppressive and stifles the protest by terror. Thus far, there is no sign that our government has faced the question. With very few exceptions, as far as the anti-war movement is concerned, police power has been used sparingly and in the interests of domestic tranquillity. Few other governments, even when they were not at war, would be as restrained as this one has been in dealing with protest movements, including violent ones. It seems to me that this is in part because we are waging the Vietnam war with an essentially professional military force. Its morale is said to be high and not to be much affected by what is going on here. This state of affairs cannot last indefinitely. Morale will be affected, and then the test will be made. I cannot figure the odds on the outcome. On the one hand, repression is the safest, surest, cheapest course for any government to take. I can imagine the coming to power of an American de Gaulle, or even of someone a lot more authoritarian than de Gaulle. Much of the troublemaking in the months and years ahead will be the work of Negroes, and I can even imagine the imposition of a kind of American apartheid—at least in the North, where Negroes live in ghettos that are easily sealed off. If there should be the will to do it, it could be done quite “legally” and “Constitutionally.” There are enough smart lawyers around to figure out how. On the other hand, there is unprecedented opposition to the war ins
ide the odious “power structure” itself. There is much opposition in Congress and in every department of the federal government. The governors of large states and the mayors of great cities—among them the Mayor of New York—are opposed to the war. The Supreme Court, which was such a bastion of liberty in the McCarthy years, would make things as hard as possible for all the smart lawyers. The government could, of course, ignore, or even abolish, the Supreme Court. But the Court is not the only American institution that has proved quite resilient in periods of stress. The churches, the press, the universities—all are centers of dissent. It could prove to be crucial that the American middle class—as despicable as the Establishment in the minds of the young and alienated—is also a center of dissent. The proletariat may not be willing to call off strikes or accept pay cuts because of the war, but it offers little support to the protest movements. If we are now undertaking, or are about to undertake, a radical alteration in values, support for it will come not from the workers but from an unproclaimed, and even unwanted, alliance between relatively affluent whites, of whom I happen to be one, and what Daniel P. Moynihan calls the “underclass,” consisting mainly of unemployed Negroes, many of whom want to kill me.

  I want American democracy to survive. It is in many ways a fraud. It is not keeping its promises to the American Negroes. It has abused them and many other people. It has very little aesthetic or intellectual appeal. But under it there is at least a hope of redemption. Things do get done here that don’t get done under other systems. But it now seems clear to me that if American democracy does survive it will be something quite different from what we have known. I find it hard at this stage to see how a victory for democracy will not also be a victory for pacifism. Those who will lead the struggle are, whether they acknowledge it or not, renouncing war as an instrument of policy. They may insist that of course they would fight the enemy at the gates, or perhaps take arms against a new Hitler if one should arise. But the wars of the future—at least, those that would have any ideological content—are not going to be like the wars of the past. India and Pakistan or India and China may fight over bits and pieces of territory, but the Soviet Union and the United States are agreed on the need for common efforts to cool it when such disputes get hot. Most future wars are apt to be like the war in Vietnam—wars that will be called by their instigators “wars of national liberation.” The Soviet Union, as Nikita Khrushchev long ago informed us, will support them. From its point of view, they are irresistible. They cost next to nothing and drive us Americans out of our minds. But if we survive as anything like a free society, we will not be entering them. I simply cannot imagine this country, under any President chosen in a free election, taking on another Vietnam. If this is so, it may he good news. But it means that we won’t have much in the way of a foreign policy. We will draw back from all difficult situations. We will leave the field to those who have not renounced war.

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  I hold a kind of Tolstoyan view of history, and believe that it is hardly ever possible to determine the real truth about how and why we got from here to there. Since I find it extremely difficult to uncover my own motives, I hesitate to deal with those of other people, and I positively despair at the thought of ever being really sure about what has moved whole nations and whole generations of mankind. No explanation of the causes and origins of any war—of any large happening in history—can ever be for me much more than a plausible one, a reasonable hypothesis. But if we cannot answer the “how” and “why” questions with anything like certitude, we can answer a good many of the “what” ones, and this sometimes enables us to eliminate at least some of the suggested “how”s and “why”s. In regard to Vietnam, I feel confident in isolating certain non-causes and non-origins. We did not go into Vietnam spoiling for a war. It was not the American attitude at the Geneva Conference in 1954 that made what everyone now speaks of as the “Geneva agreements” unworkable. A far more likely thesis is that they proved unworkable because the Russians gave the French (and the South Vietnamese) better terms than they needed to, in the expectation that the French would on this account decide not to enter the proposed European Defense Community. However that may be, those so-called agreements were not a diplomatic settlement of any kind but simply a document setting forth the terms of a cease-fire. To quote John McAlister again:

  There were only three documents signed at Geneva, and only four signatories were involved: France, the royal governments of Laos and Cambodia, and the Vietminh. [The Vietminh was an army, not a government. What we think of as the South Vietnamese, or anti-Communist Vietnamese, were never consulted.] These agreements were not treaties and they were not formally ratified by any government by any process. They were simply agreements between the opposing military commands to stop the fighting in Indo-China and to take measures to prevent the fighting from being resumed. Some confusion has resulted because the “Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference,” which “noted” the key provisions of the various cease-fire agreements, seemed to emanate from all nine conference participants. However, this “Final Declaration” was not signed by any of the participants. It was yet another cold-war device to mask the lack of consensus among the major powers—an “unsigned treaty.”

  We have sinned greatly and frequently since 1954, but not always in the ways that we think we have. We did not go into Vietnam hoping for a war; after all, we had just passed up a splendid opportunity to join the fighting with our then friends the French at our side. But we were not taken altogether by surprise at discovering that nothing really had been settled by Geneva. Two-fifths of our aid in the early days was military, but something beyond this figure persuades me that we were after something a bit more decent than the opening of a new firing range. The non-Communist state that came into being as a consequence of the Geneva Conference looked to our foreign-aid people as if it might actually work, as if it might turn out to be a nice, prosperous, well-behaved little democracy. In the bright light of hindsight, this seems a ridiculous dream. And what may have been ridiculous about it was not that people like the Emperor Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem would never let it happen but, rather, that Ho Chi Minh would never let it happen. We are always being told what awful people we have supported in Saigon while all along there has existed the alternative of supporting the Vietnamese Thomas Jefferson, Ho Chi Minh, and having him on our side. Ho sounds a lot more attractive than most of the types we have lately been dealing with, and it might have been very smart of us back before 1950, say, to try to strike up some sort of deal with him. And Ho could not have been much interested in us in the early fifties (and anyway think of what McCarthy would have said), and Diem then did not have, or was concealing, his cloven hoof. Diem never seemed a Thomas Jefferson, or even a Lyndon Johnson, but he looked no worse than our man in Korea, Syngman Rhee. And one can at least advance the hypothesis that our troubles have grown not out of Diem’s “failure” and ours to create a good society in South Vietnam but out of a certain amount of early success, or, if not that, out of Ho’s fear that we might somehow succeed someday. It could also be that he was not unmindful of the possibilities for looting. The Americans had put a good many desirable things—including a lot of expensive and well-made weaponry—in South Vietnam, and if he could knock over the government without too much difficulty they would all be his.

  Senator Fulbright has been saying for years that foreign aid is dangerous, because it can lead to war. I think he is right. We invest money and, more important, hope in a country, and when some thugs threaten to wreck the country and dash its hopes and ours we are tempted to police the place. Some of the most promising governments in Africa are likely to go to pieces because the leaders of less hopeful neighboring states either can’t stand the thought that the people across the way are going to make it or feel that neighbors ought to share and share alike. In the late fifties and early sixties, many Americans who had no appetite for war and no thought that there would be one urged that we give Saigon enough military assis
tance to put down the Vietcong and enable the government at least to stand on its feet and have enough time and energy to make something of itself. They should have known better. But there was no reason then to think of the difficulties with the Vietcong as having much to do with the balance of power in Asia. Indeed—and here, perhaps, is another important difference between this war and Korea—it seems to have been our intervention on a large scale that gave the war a real balance-of-power meaning. In the early sixties, when Laos was a more troublesome place than Vietnam, the Russians were looking the other way. In that period, too, the “domino theory” was generally discredited. There may then have been a chance for a President to reappraise—agonizingly, of course—the whole affair and order a phase-out. Vietnam was still an obscure place, and with us no longer involved it would have been still more obscure. I speak of a time when Kennedy was alive. He could probably have de-escalated, but instead he escalated. If he had lived, and if he had beaten Goldwater or some other Republican in 1964, he might have altered his strategy at some later point. But he died, and Johnson pursued his policy with a vengeance, thereby, in my view, giving the domino theory a strange validity it had earlier lacked: The dominoes might fall in a certain way because we set them up that way. If we had got out of Vietnam five years ago, the balance of power in Asia might have been affected only insignificantly and imperceptibly. If we got out tomorrow, the consequences might be very serious indeed. We have painted ourselves in.