The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Until early in 1965, I felt that our role in Vietnam was defensible. The rulers of the country seemed an untrustworthy lot, but that did not appear a good reason for turning the place over to the Vietcong. Knowing that a developing nation cannot possibly manage war and reform at the same time without assistance, I felt that our assistance in putting down an insurgency was helpful. The fact that the insurgents were natives did not bother me; so were their antagonists, and I have never believed that civil wars are somehow more virtuous and rational than wars of any other kind. From my point of view, the operations of the Vietcong were, and still are, every bit as irrational as I now believe ours are. They don’t seem to mind destroying their country any more than we do. I can understand why some Americans should be indifferent to the fate of Vietnam—to a certain degree, and to my own dismay, I am coming to feel that way myself—but I cannot understand why any Vietnamese should be indifferent to it. I wish Johnson would swallow his pride, whatever the consequences, but it seems to me it is positively idiotic for Ho Chi Minh not to take Johnson and Rusk at their word and, if what they are saying is all a bluff, call it. Why not set a place and a date, and see whether Rusk shows up? Everybody knows that unless American forces stay in Vietnam for the rest of history the Vietcong are going to have their triumphs anyway; if they negotiated us out of there tomorrow on any terms at all, the country would be theirs before long. (Tran Van Dinh, a former South Vietnamese diplomat, at odds with the Saigon regime, has speculated that this very knowledge may be a reason for Ho’s not negotiating. Our departure would create a vacuum that would for a time be filled by the Vietcong but would ultimately be vulnerable to Chinese pressure. Tran Van Dinh believes that one of the last things Ho really wants is a complete American pullout.) If the Vietcong can remain as strong as they seem to be with all the Americans chasing them around the country, they should have no trouble at all seizing power after they sat down and told us enough lies about the future to make it impossible for us not to agree to get out. The American people love to be lied to at peace conferences, and if that happened in this instance the guerrilla could put away his shooting irons, turn respectable, run for office, and run the country. General Ky could get a job with Pan American World Airways or just loll about on the Riviera, where he would be an authentic part of the scene and would find a lot of his old friends as well as many new ones.

  Nothing so agreeable is going to happen. It is up to us to make the first move. Until recently, I felt that the best first move would be a relatively small one—small but visible: not necessarily putting an end to the bombing but announcing a plan for scaling it down. I know Air Force officers who wouldn’t object to this. Why, it may be asked, should they, since the targets are mostly gone anyway? But many other Air Force people would not object to something of the sort being done for political reasons even if they had strategic reservations. I did not think such a move would be of the least help in “bringing Hanoi to the conference table,” but I thought that almost any deescalation would put an end to our scaring everyone else about our intentions, particularly toward the Chinese, and would help prepare us for the inevitable. In time, Johnson or some other President may begin a phased withdrawal in that way. But I now fear that it will soon be too late—by which I mean too late to undo the damage to us. And it is we ourselves in this moment of history that we must think of before we think of anyone or anything else. This is a terrible thing to feel compelled to say. Edwin Reischauer, in his Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia, argues that of the three options he thinks we have—escalation and a likely war with China, complete withdrawal as soon as possible, and plodding along on our present bloody and repugnant course—the last is the least disastrous and hence the most acceptable. Reischauer, who was until recently our Ambassador in Japan, is a fine scholar and humanist who has great respect and affection for the people of Asia, among whom he lived and studied for many years before John F. Kennedy persuaded him to leave scholarship for diplomacy. He is no hawk, no imperialist, no warrior of any kind. He thinks we were crazy ever to get into this and crazy to have let it reach this point. But what he fears most of all is that if we abandon this undertaking now, we will tell ourselves that Asia is impossible, that we should never again have anything to do with it, and will abandon not only Vietnam but all of Asia, with the likely exception of Japan. I share his fear. We might treat Asia as we treated Europe after 1918. We must ask ourselves right now whether that wouldn’t be a pretty good idea. From some points of view, it might be an excellent idea. If our foreign policy in Asia produces such a monstrosity as the Vietnam war, why not get out? But, as Reischauer sees it, and as I would like to see it, our foreign policy in Asia is more than just the war in Vietnam. Most of Asia needs our help desperately, and we can perhaps use a good deal of Asian help in growing up. I want to go on having an American presence in Asia, because I don’t want people to starve to death if we can prevent it, and I don’t want Asians to despise my children and grandchildren and plot to destroy them.

  Anyway, the thing wouldn’t work. In recent years, a good many people have urged the dismantling of NATO, on the ground that it is no longer needed and that what is sometimes called “the European system” can work on its own. Whenever such proposals were brought to the attention of George Ball, the former Under-Secretary of State and a dedicated Europeanist, he would ask their sponsors if they remembered what had happened to “the European system” in 1914 and in 1939. Things may have changed in Europe lately, but there has never been anything anyone could call “the Asian system,” capable of settling what diplomats call “regional” problems—usually meaning wars. Even if China managed to contain itself, which doesn’t seem very likely, there would still be a good deal of unpleasantness between India and Pakistan. Making their own nuclear weapons might seem more important to them than it does now. And there would be unpleasantness elsewhere in Southeast Asia. And who knows whether some of Japan’s long-range planners might not start casting a speculative eye on the “power vacuums” we would be creating?

  Until very recently, these considerations put me in substantial agreement with Reischauer that perhaps Johnson’s way offers fewer dangers than any of the others. But now I think we have reached—or are just about to reach—a point at which the argument no longer holds water. For one thing, if we continue much longer we may pull out of Asia whether we win, lose, or draw in Vietnam. It happens to be the view of our people that they don’t want their kids to be killed so that Asians can go on eating. Most of them would see no logic in saying there is a necessary connection between starvation in India and Americans getting shot in Vietnam, but even if the logic were self-evident they would reject it. Beyond all that, however, we seem as incapable as the South Vietnamese of running a war—or, at any rate, this war—and doing anything worthwhile at the same time. Congress insists on cutting our decent programs elsewhere in the world—to say nothing of those in this country—almost to the point of absurdity. In a literal sense, it is finding a way to make the wretched of the earth foot the bill for Vietnam. This isn’t its intention, and as a nation we are still more generous than most, yet not only are innocent people dying in Vietnam but, because of the dollars-and-cents cost of the war, they are dying in Africa.

  The war in Vietnam is heading too many of us for the loony bin. People who could once talk sensibly about politics are becoming unhinged and disoriented by it. Some are really thinking seriously of running Ronald Reagan for President. A young man who used to be a provocative analyst now screwily and oracularly proclaims that “morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun.” This is printed in a local high-brow journal, and it takes a professor from California to remind this well-educated ex-humanist, now evidently en route to some kind of New Left Fascism, that politics ends at the barrel of a gun. Not long ago, a highly intelligent and attractive young Negro spokesman for a radical organization said that he couldn’t see any reason anyone should write a book about poverty—he was talking of Michael Harr
ington’s The Other America—because anyone who was really poor and had lived in a ghetto knew all there was to know about it anyway. He said he himself could tell it like it is, but thought a book about it was a waste of anyone’s time. The land is filling up with cranks and zanies—some well intentioned, some vicious. It can be contended that Vietnam is not the only cause of goofing off, of alienation. Of course it isn’t. But it provides the occasion, and it heightens the degree. And so it seems to me that if we stay on in Vietnam we will render ourselves incapable of being of much help to Asians or anyone else. We will need all the help we can get ourselves. If Ronald Reagan became President, I’d say by all means let’s not have a foreign policy.

  · · ·

  I want us to get out, and then try to recover our sanity, so that we may face the consequences. Some of them cause me almost no concern. The spread of Communism bothers me very little. It may be bad in some places and not so bad in others, but we can live with it just about anywhere—even ninety miles from Key West. Once, it was, or seemed to be, a world movement, and it was surely a brutally expansionist one. But its adventures in expansionism blunted its threat as a world movement. By 1948, when Tito broke with Stalin, it should have been clear that ideology was no match for nationalism—at least in Europe. When China broke with Russia, it was obvious that the same thing went for Asia. Perhaps if we had borne in mind the history of earlier religious movements we could have seen all this fifty years ago. But we didn’t see it, and neither, of course, did they. At any rate, we now know that the mere circumstance that a piece of real estate falls under Communist control doesn’t constitute a threat to our existence, and doesn’t even mean there is no more hope for the people involved. Nor, with things as they are, can my first concern be with the indisputable fact that by pulling out we would be breaking our pledge not only to the Vietnamese but to the Thais and others to whom what would follow might be quite painful. We are going to get out sooner or later anyway, and when we do we will not go back in, so, no matter what happens in the near future, they are going to have to work out their relations with China without much support from us. But some of the consequences of withdrawal disturb me greatly. By and large, I think that most of American foreign policy for the last thirty years has been admirable. I want us to continue to be part of the world and to use our considerable talents for the benefit of all mankind. I suspect that if we get out of Vietnam we won’t have much left in the way of a foreign policy. And, most of all, I fear what will happen right here if we withdraw. Theodore C. Sorensen writes that since Khrushchev could admit a mistake in the missile crisis five years ago, and Kennedy could acknowledge one at the Bay of Pigs a year before that, Lyndon Johnson ought to be able to do the same thing now. Here are two analogies that do not work at all. The missile crisis was over in a few days, the Bay of Pigs in a few hours. No Russian soldiers died in the missile crisis, no American ones at the Bay of Pigs. It would take greater magnanimity and a greater dedication to the truth than we have any right to expect of any politician on earth for Lyndon Johnson to say that this whole bloody business is a mistake, and was from the start. He just cannot and will not do it. If he did, he would throw this country into worse turmoil than it has known at any time since the Civil War. Could he pull out and either say nothing or tell some lies? Could he possibly use Senator Aiken’s ploy and announce that we had achieved our ends in Vietnam and were withdrawing? Perhaps, but there would still be turmoil. There will be turmoil whether we stay or go, and I dread it. But, between the two, I have less fear of the consequences of withdrawal than of those of perseverance.

  This war is intolerable. What does it mean to say that? Not much—talk is cheap. I haven’t a clue as to how we can get out, and I have never much liked the idea of proposing without knowing of a means of disposing. I don’t think we can write our way out, and I doubt very much if we can demonstrate our way out. But out is where I want us to be, and I don’t know what a man can do except say what he thinks and feels.

  A NOTE BY KELEFA SANNEH

  DURING CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT’S time at the University of Georgia, plenty of reporters interviewed her, but Calvin Trillin is the only one who regularly offered to deliver her lunch. Those were exhausting years: in 1961, she and her classmate Hamilton (Hamp) Holmes became the first black students to attend the university; their presence on campus marked the end of a long battle over integration at U.G.A., which is not to say that the losing side stopped fighting. In those days, Trillin was working as a reporter for the Atlanta bureau of Time, filing long, discursive dispatches that were used (or, sometimes, ignored) by the people in New York who actually wrote the stories. Hunter-Gault recalls, “He would call me at night, in my dorm, and say, ‘Hi, Charlayne, it’s Bud—how would you like a hot pastrami sandwich right about now?’ And people would be shouting outside my window, doing all sorts of things.”

  When Trillin was ready to leave Time, he found a new home—a lifelong home, it turned out—at The New Yorker, which was eager to increase its coverage of race and the South. This, in any case, was Trillin’s impression; like many staff writers over the years, he has never been entirely sure why he was hired. “An Education in Georgia,” about the integration battle and its aftermath, was Trillin’s first article for the magazine and his longest, stretching over three issues, in July, 1963. (It remains his only multi-part article for The New Yorker.) He remembers sitting on a sofa in William Shawn’s office during the editing process, which was gentle but exacting. “He always seemed to put his finger on that limping cow that you thought would be lost in the herd,” Trillin says.

  Trillin chose as his protagonist his old acquaintance Charlayne Hunter (as she was then), a journalism major with an analytical sensibility—a participant who also happened to be a keen observer. Readers who devoured his story knew that Hunter was remarkably unflustered by the chaos and the violence that she faced. What they didn’t know was that, by the time the piece was published, Hunter was not only Trillin’s subject but also his colleague. That spring, she had been scouted by Shawn and his deputy, Leo Hofeller, who had offered her an entry-level position. Hunter was hired by The New Yorker, as an editorial assistant, in June, 1963, and one of her first tasks was to submit to an interrogation by a member of the fact-checking department, down the hall, in connection with Trillin’s piece, which was published the next month. A few years later, she was promoted to reporter, and spent a couple of years contributing to the Talk of the Town section; she established for herself an unofficial Harlem bureau, and became its chief correspondent. Hunter was, in fact, the first black writer ever hired by the magazine as a regular contributor, although of course others (including James Baldwin, in 1962) had been published on a freelance basis. This is the subtext of “An Education in Georgia”: in retrospect, it is actually, and covertly, a story about two integrations at once.

  Trillin spent much of the summer of 1963 writing about race and politics, a topic that took him to Washington, in August, for the March on Washington. His dispatch captures both the seriousness of the attendees—he noticed “surprisingly few knapsacks and sandals in the crowd”—and the sprawling nature of the event itself. The piece ends, rather tantalizingly, with a moment of expectant silence, as we await Martin Luther King, Jr., who goes unseen and unmentioned. Katharine T. Kinkead, observing the integration fight in Durham, North Carolina, in 1961, used small moments to create a portrait of the civil-rights movement in miniature. We hear the organizers debate how much to provoke the local police force and how to stay safe, or as safe as possible; as the group pickets a segregated cinema, we see “older white theatre patrons, who walked through the lines as though they were mist.” But perhaps the most memorable image comes near the end, as a New Yorker reporter, “dressed warmly, in boots and a fur coat,” but still shivering, is led to a radiator-warmed corridor indoors, alongside some protestors who are much younger, and much colder, than she is.

  A couple of years later, Trillin was planning to go to Stanford to
talk to a dream researcher when Shawn prevailed on him to stop by Berkeley—he was curious about the students who were causing such a fuss. Trillin’s “Letter from Berkeley,” from 1965, captures a scene that seems strikingly familiar: the students are deeply skeptical of so-called liberal values, but equally skeptical of any grand ideology that might offer itself as a replacement. He notes that “quite a few of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement are, in the words of one participant, ‘between movements.’ ” Later that year, in “The Price of Peace Is Confusion,” Renata Adler chronicled a chaotic antiwar demonstration in Washington, incisively arguing that by lionizing “individualism, privacy, personal initiative,” and “isolationism and a view of the federal government as oppressive,” the protesters were reviving a long-dormant strain of “right-wing consciousness.” Richard H. Rovere, writing from the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, and E. J. Kahn, writing from semi-occupied Harvard, in 1969, considered the possibilities and the limits of radical violence, a phrase that some people considered a contradiction in terms. Writing in 1967, Jacob Brackman considered a different kind of violence: rhetorical violence, as manifest in “the put-on,” an emerging form of conversational sabotage, well-suited to a generation seeking new ways to express its skepticism.