American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  The war that had once led so many to anguish over their nation’s devastating impact on other lands was increasingly leading citizens to worry about the need to rebuild American pride and power. Fanning that concern was a growing sense of national victimhood, a belief that the country had become the unjustified target of inexplicable foreign threats. Prior to 9/11, this belief was fueled most powerfully by the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981, when Americans watched with horror as TV news showed footage of angry Iranian crowds burning American flags and chanting anti-U.S. slogans. A new nationalism arose—defensive, inward-looking, and resentful. Along with it came renewed expressions of American exceptionalism, but it was a far more embittered and fragile faith than it had been in the decades before the Vietnam War.

  And for all the pumped-up patriotism of the post-Vietnam decades—all the chanting of “U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.” and all the chest-pounding TV ads (“The pride is back!”), there was never broad public support for protracted military interventions. Fear of “another Vietnam” permeated the culture, even the ranks of the military. Reagan and his followers argued against what they called the Vietnam syndrome—a dangerous reluctance to use military force. But even advocates of a more aggressive foreign policy were hesitant to pursue policies that might produce high American casualties. Despite many military interventions in the 1980s and 1990s, fewer than eight hundred American troops lost their lives in warfare during the quarter century after the Vietnam War.

  The attacks of 9/11 decisively destroyed the cautionary lessons of the Vietnam War, at least among the tiny group of people who formulated American foreign policy. George W. Bush launched a “Global War on Terror” premised on the idea that the United States was an exemplar of all that was good in the world fighting against all that was evil. He started two wars that led to protracted occupations and provoked bloody anti-American insurgencies. Both wars continued long after a majority of Americans had come to oppose them and were further prolonged by Barack Obama, a Democratic president who had been one of the first critics of the Iraq War.

  Indeed, through drone warfare and the secret deployment of Special Operations Forces to some 120 countries, Obama has extended U.S. military intervention as widely as ever. The size of our domestic and foreign spy network has grown so large no one even knows precisely how to measure it or how much it costs. Nor can anyone say for sure that our global commitment to “homeland security” has made us any safer, or that the animosity our policies engender in faraway places will not further endanger us decades into the future. Nor is there any serious plan at the highest levels of power to change course.

  If the legacy of the Vietnam War is to offer any guidance, we need to complete the moral and political reckoning it awakened. And if our nation’s future is to be less militarized, our empire of foreign military bases scaled back, and our pattern of endless military interventions ended, a necessary first step is to reject—fully and finally—the stubborn insistence that our nation has been a unique and unrivaled force for good in the world. Only an honest accounting of our history will allow us to chart a new path in the world. The past is always speaking to us, if we only listen.

  PART 1

  Why Are We in Vietnam?

  1

  Saving Vietnam

  I have never seen anything funnier—or more inspiring—than red-necked American sailors performing the duties of baby-sitters and maids-of-all-work. . . . I saw one notoriously loud, cursing boatswain’s mate on the forecastle, bouncing a brown bare-bottom baby on his knee while stuffing a Baby Ruth into its toothless mouth. . . . These little acts of spontaneous kindness were happening by the hundreds. . . . This was the force, heartfelt and uncontrived, that finally washed away the poisons of Communist hatred.

  —Thomas A. Dooley, Deliver Us From Evil (1956)

  THE FIRST POPULAR American book about Vietnam was a love story. Written by a young navy doctor named Tom Dooley, it showed how bighearted Americans could save a small, infant nation with Christian compassion. Lieutenant Dooley’s message carried the weight of personal experience—he participated in Operation Passage to Freedom, the navy mission that helped transport more than 800,000 northern Vietnamese to the South between August 1954 and May 1955. Dooley gave medical care to the “hordes of refugees from terror-ridden North Vietnam,” and vividly described their exodus to “Free Vietnam” in the South. Despite widespread illness and frailty, many refugees drew strength and solace from their Catholic faith. Long before most Americans could find Vietnam on a map, Dooley convinced millions that the U.S. role there was nothing less than a holy mission to rescue poor and tortured Christians from godless Communism.

  Dooley’s 1956 book, Deliver Us From Evil, casts the United States in an indisputably heroic role. It is a tale with clearly delineated villains and saviors. Vietnam has just emerged from a brutal eight-year war with France that put an end to decades of French colonial rule. But Vietnamese Communists led that fight and threaten to conquer the entire country. It is essential, Dooley argues, that America step in to prevent that disaster. It might be too late to save all of Vietnam, since the Communists are rapidly consolidating control in the North. But the United States can still help to create an independent new nation in the South, one that might stand as a beacon of freedom and hope to the entire world and a tribute to America’s exceptional generosity.

  The twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Dooley offers a simple and appealing solution to the threat of Communist aggression: not all-out war, but human kindness. “We had come late to Viet Nam, but we had come. And we brought not bombs and guns, but help and love.” Would that suffice? After all, this is Cold War America—the 1950s—when magazines use crimson arrows to show how the Communist menace shoots out from the Soviet Union and Red China, posing a constant threat of another global war.

  Dooley acknowledges that hard-line anti-Communists might be skeptical of his approach. In the opening pages of Deliver Us From Evil, he introduces Ensign Potts, a spit-and-polish officer fresh from Annapolis. Potts accuses Dooley of naive sentimentality: “You preach of love, understanding and helpfulness. That’s not the Navy’s job . . . I believe the only answer is preventive war.” Potts wants to bomb two hundred Red targets in the Soviet Union and China. “Sure, the toll of American lives would be heavy, but the sacrifice would be justified to rid mankind of the Communist peril.”

  Amazingly, Dooley quickly converts Ensign Potts to the power of love. It happens in Hawaii at Hickam Air Force Base. Dooley is just back from Vietnam, and he and Potts run into two dozen South Vietnamese air force cadets. The cadets rush to the doctor and smother him in hugs. He doesn’t recognize them at first (“Who could remember one face among those hundreds of thousands?”) but notices that many have “a scar where an ear should have been.”

  I remembered that in the Roman Catholic province of Bao Lac, near the frontier of China, the Communist Viet Minh often would tear an ear partially off with a pincer like a pair of pliers and leave the ear dangling. That was one penalty for the crime of listening to evil words. The evil words were the words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. . . . Give us this day our daily bread . . . and deliver us from evil.”

  When a crowd gathers around the Hickam reunion, Dooley offers an impromptu speech about Communist atrocities and how he had to amputate many of the cadets’ damaged ears. “I suspect I did not succeed in keeping the tears out of my voice.” Eventually many in the crowd began to cry. “Not in many a year had that number of tears hit the deck at Hickam. And among those who wept and did not bother to hide it was Ensign Potts. The same young officer who half an hour before had scoffed at my softness.”

  “Mr. Potts,” I said, “don’t you think these kids would do anything, even at the risk of their lives, because of the way they feel about one American?” In all the honesty of his enthusiastic heart, Ensign Potts replied: “Yes, Doctor, I think they would. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps there is
a special power in love.”

  This vignette, at once grisly and mawkish, exemplifies Dooley’s message—unspeakable Communist brutality can be overcome by compassion. America’s “touching and tender care” can “conquer” the hearts of Vietnamese. And then, like adoring children, they will proudly fight with, and for, America. But to win the hearts and minds of the world’s poor would require that Americans, especially men, overcome any fear of appearing “soft.” Even “red-necked sailors” might need to take on the “duties of baby-sitters and maids-of-all-work.” In doing so, they might save their own souls as well as others. “Let us stop being afraid to speak of compassion, and generosity,” Dooley writes. “Christ said it all in the three words of His great commandment: ‘Love one another.’”

  What a contrast to the policy of “massive retaliation”—the Eisenhower administration doctrine that threatened to respond to any foreign military provocation with an all-out nuclear attack. If the Soviet military so much as drove a truck into Western Europe, the United States claimed the right and will to unleash its full arsenal, which by 1954 included thermonuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Compared with the saber rattling of nuclear brinkmanship, Dooley’s call for Christian love seems like a stunningly benign and idealistic prescription for Cold War success.

  Yet Dooley did not actually propose a radical alternative to Cold War militarism. He supported the political, military, and corporate objectives of America’s most powerful institutions and lodged only minor criticism over tactics. Above all, he saw aid and service as the most effective means of “selling America.” And sell it he did. Although Jesus may have demanded that we not “sound a trumpet” to announce our charitable acts, Dooley was a consummate trumpet blower. With rival ideologies battling for every soul, he insisted that American aid should not only be “clearly marked” but verbally advertised. He had his staff memorize the Vietnamese phrase for “This is American aid” and ordered them to use it every time they offered any assistance, even if it was just to help a child pull up his pants. And he took every opportunity to put in a good word for capitalism:

  Rest assured, we continually explained to thousands of refugees . . . that only in a country which permits companies to grow large could such fabulous charity be found. With every one of those thousands of capsules of terramycin and with every dose of vitamins on a baby’s tongue, these words were said: “Dai La My-Quoc Vien-Tro [This is American Aid].”

  To most Americans in the 1950s, that seemed like good common sense. Of course the world should know about the size and generosity of our companies, and how much more the American way of life had to offer than Communism. And very few Americans in that era would have cringed at Dooley’s paternalism. At perhaps no other point in U.S. history did a greater portion of Americans share the powerful conviction that their nation was the greatest in the world, not only unmatched in its military and economic power but morally, politically, and culturally superior as well.

  The idea that America was chosen (and challenged) by God to stand above other nations had been developing for centuries. It was present even in 1630 when John Winthrop declared that the Puritan colony in Massachusetts Bay would be a “city upon a hill” that might inspire the world. That faith expanded along with the nation. By the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans believed it was their “manifest destiny” to seize the entire continent, even if it required a war against Mexico and further wars against Indians.

  In the years after World War II the faith in American exceptionalism reached its peak. In part, the exuberant nationalism reflected the triumph of World War II. No other nation emerged from that bloodbath in better shape. True, the United States had lost more than 400,000 people, a death toll surpassed only by the Civil War. But in the global context of sixty million dead, America had been spared the scale of suffering so common elsewhere, fueling the conviction that God or destiny had reserved a special role for the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. The Soviet Union, by contrast, had lost twenty-seven million, an unfathomable figure, and even many small nations had more war-related deaths than the United States. Vietnam, for example, lost at least a million and a half people in a 1944–45 famine caused by Japanese wartime exploitation.

  As the rest of the world struggled to rise from the rubble of war, the United States hardly missed a beat in transforming its humming factories and mills from the production of tanks and warplanes to cars and refrigerators. It had to be conceded that America was not perfect—racial discrimination and pockets of poverty were lingering problems—but the overriding view, at least among white people of reasonable means, was that these flaws were neither glaring nor permanent. The common chorus, sung in virtually every high school auditorium, at almost every Rotary Club luncheon, at barbecues and parades throughout the land, was that no other nation offered such abundant opportunity, such expansive freedom, such a bright and promising future. The fervent faith in American exceptionalism was the nation’s most agreed-upon religion of the 1950s. It was the central tenet of what was commonly called American national identity.

  The heart of American exceptionalism was the assumption that the United States was a unique force for good in the world. Although citizens might take pride in their nation’s armed might or the fact that it had never lost a war, there was also an unquestioned faith that America sought to share its blessings with the world. It was not an imperial aggressor seeking global conquest. It wanted for others only the great gifts enjoyed by Americans themselves—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and free enterprise. It would use its power to protect and advance those freedoms but never to assert its narrow national interests, and never without clear provocation or just cause.

  That was the conventional wisdom of Americans who read Deliver Us From Evil. The best seller might never have appeared without crucial assistance. Dooley was a gifted storyteller, but a clumsy and inexperienced writer. When Viking Press rejected his initial drafts, Dooley got essential support from William Lederer, a writer and former navy officer with close contacts to the CIA and Reader’s Digest. Lederer persuaded a group of Reader’s Digest editors to listen to Dooley’s stories. Captivated by his accounts, they proceeded to whip his manuscript into a publishable Cold War parable of good versus evil.

  Deliver Us From Evil first appeared as a condensation in Reader’s Digest, which was then the nation’s largest-circulation magazine, with five million American subscribers. The Digest also helped Dooley secure a contract for a longer edition of the book with Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. In multiple printings it sold more than a million copies. While now gathering dust in libraries and used-book stores, Deliver Us From Evil was one of the most widely read books about Vietnam ever written. And many who did not read the book nevertheless knew about Tom Dooley because he was a master of TV-age communication and self-promotion.

  There were, for starters, the hundreds of speeches. Describing a talk to high school students, Dooley writes: “I gave them the whole sordid story of the refugee camps, the Communist atrocities, the ‘Passage to Freedom,’ and the perilous future of southern Viet Nam. I talked for an hour—you can see I was getting to be quite a windbag—and you could have heard a pin drop.” That was only the beginning. By the end of 1956, Dooley had returned to Southeast Asia, this time as a civilian doctor, to offer medical care from small, modest clinics in the remote, rural countryside of Laos. From Laos, Dooley taped weekly radio broadcasts that reached tens of millions of listeners throughout the American Midwest. And by 1959 he had written two more best-selling books about his experiences. His fame soared. Americans began to think of him as a “jungle doctor” like the famous Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the Franco-German physician whose work in French Equatorial Africa earned him the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.

  As lofty as his reputation became, Dooley was not a remote figure. He often returned to the United States for promotional tours, giving speeches and appea
ring on TV shows like What’s My Line?, This Is Your Life, and Jack Paar’s Tonight Show. Charismatic, handsome, and articulate, Dooley knew how to blend irreverence and religiosity, pop culture and piety, self-deprecation and admonition. He could be charming and funny even when his subjects were troubling. While Deliver Us From Evil tells an exodus story of slavery to freedom in which Dooley is a kind of Moses, the doctor’s persona was more like that of a happy-go-lucky pied piper than the scary, serious Moses played by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, a hugely popular film that appeared in 1956, the same year Deliver Us From Evil was published.

  By the end of the 1950s, Dooley was, in effect, America’s poster boy for foreign service, just the kind of figure Senator John Kennedy had in mind when he proposed the Peace Corps during his 1960 presidential bid. The idea had been percolating for years (and even proposed in Congress), but Kennedy had not yet endorsed it. He and some of his aides worried that Republican candidate Richard Nixon might attack the plan as a naive and ineffectual approach to the Cold War.

  On October 13, 1960, JFK squared off with Nixon in their third of four televised debates. As usual, they argued about who would be a tougher and more effective opponent of Communism. Much of the debate focused on the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, a few miles off the coast of China. Would the United States defend the islands in the event of a Red Chinese attack? Nixon said yes. Kennedy said yes too (but only if the attack included a direct threat to Taiwan). In those early Cold War years, Americans were learning that any spot on the globe, no matter how obscure or previously unknown, might suddenly be proclaimed crucial to national security.