Star Trek and History

by Reagin, Nancy

  And if Star Trek was really about the exploration of space, why was its audience so meager during the days of space travel and so immense after that era ended? Ironically, the blastoff of Star Trek culture coincided with the end of the Vietnam War and the simultaneous end of human extraterrestrial travel. Thus the show with the slogan “to boldly go where no man has gone before” became a central feature of a culture that was abandoning all plans for sending people to other worlds. Star Trek culture went into orbit in the 1970s and early 1980s just as space exploration was being replaced by the militarization of space. By 1981, multibillion-dollar military space programs had gobbled up the budget for the peaceful exploration of space. As one NASA astronomer lamented, “The space science program has been almost destroyed.”2 A perfect symbol of this cultural juncture came in 1974 when an eleven-foot model of the Enterprise used for special effects on the TV show went on permanent exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, coequal with such actual spacecraft as the Apollo 11 Command Module.3

  The space program of the 1960s was not the dominant feature of that decade in America, a distinction that clearly belongs to the Vietnam War. We designed the entrance hall into our “Star Trek and the Sixties” exhibit to send people time traveling back into the decade. So as those endless queues of the million visitors entered the exhibit, they filed slowly past a series of huge, iconic black-and-white photographs that projected the upheavals of a society shaken to its foundation as the Vietnam War shifted the nation’s tectonic plates.

  Vietnam Genesis, Cosmic Exodus

  The exhibition was designed to show that the original Star Trek series was conceived and broadcast during one of the most profound crises in American history, a crisis from which we have yet to escape.4 At the center of the maelstrom swirled the Vietnam War, which was radically transfiguring America during the thirty-three months—September 1966 to June 1969—when the series was first aired. In the midst of this disastrous war and its domestic spin-offs—sporadic warfare in the streets of our own cities, rising inflation and crime, soaring debt, and deep challenges to hallowed cultural values and gender roles—Star Trek assumed a future when Earth had become a wonderfully prosperous, harmonious world without war and social conflict, a future in which the aptly named starship USS Enterprise embodied a unified and disciplined society capable of making traditional American ideals and roles triumphant throughout the galaxy.

  Looming over the mind of every thinking American, the Vietnam War was threatening to tear the nation asunder even as the series was being broadcast. The war was thus both a launch vehicle for Star Trek and a subtext for the entire series. Earth’s utopian twenty-third-century future assumed in Star Trek— although never shown—was presented as a happy sequel to the Vietnam epoch, and the starship Enterprise projected an alternative to the actual America of the 1960s.

  As one of television’s first dramatic series to face the Vietnam War, Star Trek was actually quite daring.5 Back then, TV networks rarely allowed disturbing or controversial issues into shows designed for entertainment. So following its usual gambit for dealing with contemporary issues, Star Trek projected its visions of the Vietnam War as parables set in a faraway time and space. But Star Trek itself was also being profoundly changed by the war, and its own rapid shifts on the war mirror similar shifts that were rapidly transforming American culture. Within those mere thirty-three months of its first life, Star Trek transformed from a reluctant supporter of the war to an ardent opponent of the war. In this brief life span, its creators, like tens of millions of other American citizens, were beginning to learn that the entire history of the war was radically different from what they were supposed to believe.

  They learned that the war did not begin as an invasion of “South Vietnam” by another nation called “North Vietnam” but as an attempt by France, financed by Washington, to recolonize the newly independent nation of Vietnam back in 1945. They discovered that after France was defeated and forced to recognize the independence and territorial unity of this nation in 1954, the United States had flown Ngo Dinh Diem from New Jersey to serve as the puppet ruler of the southern half of the nation, which Washington called “South Vietnam,” thus subverting the peace accord arranged at Geneva by all of the other involved nations. This was the beginning of the direct and ever-escalating U.S. military engagement in Vietnam, sliding from covert to overt and from “support” to direct command of huge air, sea, and ground forces, which consisted of an army of over a million fighters, including more than half a million U.S. combatants.

  In the early 1960s, as Star Trek was being conceived and born, Vietnam was becoming a swiftly changing and alarming part of American reality. On November 2, 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown and assassinated by a cabal of his generals, whose plot was coordinated by U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.6 Although President John F. Kennedy had authorized the coup, he reportedly was shocked by the assassination of Diem, for Kennedy’s own family had been instrumental in selecting Diem to serve as the U.S. proxy. At this time there were between sixteen thousand and twenty-one thousand U.S. troops in Vietnam, officially designated as “advisers.” Deprived of its figurehead Diem, the United States now had two possible courses of action: withdrawal, or a large-scale U.S. war with Vietnam. There is no evidence that Kennedy was leaning toward the latter course. But three weeks later, President Kennedy himself was assassinated. Within four days of being sworn in, President Lyndon Baines Johnson approved National Security Action Memorandum 273, the ambitious plan for covertly attacking North Vietnam in order to provoke retaliation and thus to legitimize an overt U.S. war, all to be cloaked under what was referred to in that top-secret document as “plausibility of denial.”7

  Four months later, in March 1964, Gene Roddenberry submitted the first printed outline for Star Trek, an “action-adventure science fiction” designed “to keep even the most imaginative stories within the general audience’s frame of reference.”8 That August, the Johnson administration, falsely claiming that U.S. ships had been repeatedly attacked by North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, ordered “retaliatory” bombing of North Vietnam and received from Congress the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” the blank-check authorization for full-scale U.S. war in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Johnson was in the process of winning a landslide victory over the war hawk Barry Goldwater on the basis of his promise that he would “never send American boys to Asia to do the job that Asian boys should do.”9 In February 1965, Roddenberry delivered the intended pilot episode for Star Trek, “The Cage,” which was rejected. The same month, Johnson, a few weeks after being inaugurated as the elected president, began full-scale bombing of North Vietnam, followed swiftly by the dispatch of the first openly acknowledged U.S. combat divisions to Vietnam.

  By the time the first Star Trek episode was broadcast, in September 1966, the United States was fully engaged in a war that was devastating Indochina and beginning to tear America apart. By the time the final Star Trek episode was aired, in June 1969, the war seemed hopeless and endless. Four episodes broadcast between the spring of 1967 and January 1969, the most crucial period in the war itself and in its effects on America, relate directly to the Vietnam War. Taken as a sequence, these four episodes reflect a traumatic metamorphosis in the war’s impact on both the series and the nation.

  Wars for Peace?

  The first of the four episodes was “The City on the Edge of Forever,” aired on April 6, 1967, one week before the end of Star Trek’s first season. During the period that this episode was being written and filmed, the most astonishing domestic manifestation of the war was the spectacular growth of the antiwar movement, whose size and fervor were without precedent in the history of America’s wars. In April 1965, just a few weeks after the first overt dispatch of U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, the first large antiwar demonstration took place in Washington. In the same period, an intense campaign began to educate the American people about the history of the war, a campaign featuring the teach-in movement on college campus
es and the publication of what became an avalanche of historical books, journals, and pamphlets.

  Millions of Americans were beginning to learn that the government had been deceiving them about how and when the United States had intervened in Vietnam, as well as about the nature and the current state of the war. They read and heard about how the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations had gradually escalated a covert war into what could already be considered America’s longest overseas military conflict. Two days before “The City on the Edge of Forever” aired, Martin Luther King Jr. threw himself into the burgeoning antiwar movement with his famous Riverside Church sermon, in which he outlined the history of our genocidal war in Vietnam, declared that “my own government” had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and prophesied, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”10

  “The City on the Edge of Forever” opens with the Enterprise being buffeted by strange ripples in time. Dr. Leonard McCoy accidentally injects himself with a potent drug, and, in a paranoid delirium, he hurtles through a time portal into the New York City of 1930. Evidently something he does there annihilates the future in which the Enterprise exists, so Captain James Kirk and First Officer Spock follow him though the portal to prevent his action and thus reestablish the proper course of history. While searching for McCoy, Kirk falls in love with social worker and “slum angel” Edith Keeler. But he and Spock discover that for their future to come into being, Edith Keeler must soon die in a traffic accident. If she is not killed then, she will become the founder of a peace movement that changes the outcome of World War II. At the crucial moment, Kirk prevents McCoy from saving Edith from an oncoming truck, thus restoring the history familiar to the audience and the crew of the Enterprise.

  The subtext of this episode and its significance are highlighted by the evolution of the script and key pieces of dialogue inserted into the version that was broadcast in April 1967. The original script of May 13, 1966, written by Harlan Ellison, was a poignant tragedy of doomed love. Although using the science fiction concept that any change in the past, no matter how slight, might radically alter the future, this script had no reference to Edith as a peace activist, much less to a peace movement that could change the course of history. In Ellison’s revised script of June 3, 1966, Spock imagines possible futures that might come to pass if Edith were to live, such as, “She might give birth to a child who would become a dictator.” “What if her philosophy spread,” he then speculates, thus delaying America’s entry into World War II so that “the outcome of the war would be reversed.”11

  In the episode as it aired in 1967, Spock’s speculation has been turned into a major plot element that viewers could hardly fail to relate to the growing movement against the Vietnam War. Asked in 1992 whether the makers of this episode consciously intended it to have the contemporaneous anti–Vietnam War movement as the subtext, producer Robert Justman replied, “Of course we did.”12

  Spock works feverishly with the materials available in this primitive period to build a rudimentary computer so that his tricorder can actually display the possible futures radiating from this temporal focal point in 1930 New York. He discovers an obituary for Edith Keeler, indicating that she was killed in a 1930 traffic accident. But he also discovers newspapers with later dates indicating that she has become the founder of a gigantic “peace movement” that will keep the United States out of World War II long enough for Nazi Germany to develop the atomic bomb, win the war, and rule the world, thus annihilating the future in which the starship Enterprise exists. So in order for the wonderful twenty-third-century of Star Trek to come into being, as Spock ruefully tells Kirk, “Jim, Edith Keeler must die.” And of course it is Kirk who must take the action to ensure her death.

  As an embodiment of a dangerously misguided peace movement, Edith Keeler is not portrayed as contemptible or ridiculous. She has only the most admirable and worthy motives. Indeed, she is a true visionary, who, in the midst of the miseries of the Depression, offers a prophecy of a magnificent future as inspiration to the homeless and unemployed. The future she describes is, in fact, the very one dramatized by the Star Trek series: “One day, soon, man is going to be able to harness incredible energies. Maybe even the atom, energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds, maybe in some sort of space ship. And the men who reach out into space will be able to find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world and to cure their diseases. . . . And those are the days worth living for.” But this apostle of peace, technological progress, prosperity, and space exploration has the misfortune to be living in the wrong time and place.

  As broadcast in the spring of 1967, “The City on the Edge of Forever” was clearly a parable suggesting that the peace movement directed against the U.S. war in Vietnam, no matter how noble, alluring, and idealistic in its motivation, might pose a danger to the progressive course of history. The episode presented the argument that sometimes it is necessary to engage in ugly, distasteful actions, such as waging remorseless warfare against evil expansionist forces like Nazi Germany or the Communist empire allegedly attempting to take over Indochina—and perhaps even doing away with well-intentioned, attractive people who stand in the way of such historical necessity.

  At this point in the Vietnam War, the peace movement, although growing rapidly, still represented only a minority of the American public, for it seemed to most people that victory in Southeast Asia was not only necessary but also feasible, and perhaps even imminent. This view would soon change.

  In the months that followed, the American people, despite the media’s general support of the war, began to get ever more appalling glimpses of its reality. Napalmed children, villages being torched by American GI’s, the corpses of young Americans being zipped into body bags—all started to become familiar images within the typical American home.

  As public opposition to the war kept growing, President Johnson summoned General William Westmoreland home in November 1967 to do public relations for the war. The commander of the U.S. forces informed the American people that “the enemy’s hopes are bankrupt,” his forces are “declining at a steady rate,” “he can fight only at the edges of his sanctuaries” in other countries, and we have entered the phase “when the end begins to come into view,” a time when the Saigon army will “take charge of the final mopping up of the Vietcong.”13 Prominent pundits in the establishment media dutifully echoed these claims, assuring the public that “the enemy is weaker than he appears to be” and is gripped by “desperation,” the morale of U.S. troops is “excellent,” whereas there is “irrefutable evidence of a decline in enemy morale,” “the allies are winning,” and “it is now merely a matter of time” before the enemy is forced “to fade away into the jungle.”14 So, according to the White House, the Pentagon, and the media, the Johnson administration’s strategy of gradual escalation was on the verge of success, and the American people needed to be patient, rejecting both those who called for withdrawal and those who demanded a speedy end to the war through massive escalation, including the possible use of nuclear weapons.

  It was during this period that Star Trek was producing “A Private Little War,” the episode designed explicitly as a policy statement about the Vietnam War. In a series of internal letters written from May through September 1967, Star Trek’s three main producers—Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon, and Robert Justman—defined the message about Vietnam they wanted this episode to bring to the TV audience.

  The first script, written by Don Ingalls, was criticized by Roddenberry for opposing U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Disregarding Star Trek’s Prime Directive—banning interference in the natural development of alien societies—Roddenberry wrote to Coon in May: “The things at stake in Vietnam are much more important and powerful than a charitable attitude toward simpler people in the world.”15 Coon, a major Star Trek writer as well as a producer, spelled out i
n August 1967 the politics of the episode:

  We have always played [the Klingons] very much like the Russians. . . . In the current situation in Vietnam, we are in an intolerable situation. We are doing what we are forced to do, and we can find no other way to do it. . . . If we are to honor our commitments, we must counter-balance the Klingons. If we do not play it this way, the Klingons will take over and threaten the Federation, even as the situation is in Vietnam, which is as I remember, if Vietnam falls all southeast Asia falls. . . . At this point, it should be evident to everyone that we have essentially been talking about Vietnam. . . . What we are trying to sell is the hopelessness of the situation. The fact that we are absolutely forced into taking steps we know are morally wrong, but for our own enlightened self-interest, there is nothing we can do about it.16

  These were the politics of the broadcast episode, with a final script written by Roddenberry himself.

  The Enterprise visits Neural, a planet Kirk remembers from an earlier visit as so primitive and peaceful that it seemed like Eden. However, an unequal war has begun on Neural, with one side—known as “the villagers”—mysteriously armed with firearms, devices far beyond the technological level of any society on the planet. The villagers, who represent the official U.S. view of the North Vietnamese, have been attacking and attempting to conquer the peaceful “hill people,” who represent the official U.S. view of the South Vietnamese. Like the National Liberation Front (the Vietcong), the villagers at first seem to be armed with primitive, hand-forged weapons, in this case flintlocks. But these weapons in fact have been mass-produced by some outside imperialist power, which has been smuggling them in and making them appear to be indigenous. Who could this evil empire be? It is the Klingons, of course, Star Trek’s analog to the Soviet Union. Their aim, needless to say, is to subvert and take over this primitive planet, itself an analog to Vietnam, Indochina, and the rest of the Third World menaced, according to the domino theory, by Communist expansion.