American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  So in late 1961 Kennedy ordered a tripling of U.S. military “advisers” in South Vietnam, from 3,000 to 9,000. By 1963 that number had risen to 16,700. JFK also deployed fighter-bombers, helicopter squadrons, and armored personnel carriers, and authorized the use of napalm and chemical defoliants. He also approved a program to force rural peasants into armed camps called strategic hamlets.

  Kennedy’s escalation of the war was called Project Beefup. The White House tried to keep it as secret as possible, not wanting to raise fears of a larger land war in Asia or draw attention to its blatant breach of the Geneva Accords (which restricted military advisers to under seven hundred). The effort to downplay and deny such an obvious militarization was so ludicrous it produced a “credibility gap” several years before the term was invented. For example, on December 11, 1961, journalist Stanley Karnow was having a beer with an American information officer at the Hotel Majestic, overlooking the Saigon River. Karnow glanced at a bend in the river and saw a U.S. aircraft carrier, the Core, looming into view, dwarfing the junks and sampans skirting around its giant hull. On the carrier’s deck were dozens of helicopters. “My God,” he said. “Look at that carrier!” The officer said, “I don’t see nothing.”

  The officer was joking, but the Pentagon was dead serious when it cabled Saigon demanding an investigation: Who leaked information about the helicopters? Radio Hanoi knew about every chopper, right down to the serial numbers. Nor was Secretary of State Dean Rusk joking when he cabled the U.S. embassy, “No admission should be made that [Geneva] Accords are not being observed.” It was like trying to deny that forty circus elephants had just walked down Main Street.

  At press conferences in 1962, President Kennedy denied that Americans were directly engaged in combat, a tough lie to sustain as the number of U.S. casualties increased. And even as late as 1964, some officials still denied that napalm bombing had been authorized in South Vietnam, long after dramatic evidence to the contrary had surfaced. On January 25, 1963, for example, Life magazine ran a cover story on the war that included a two-page color photograph by Larry Burrows taken from the backseat of an American aircraft. An enormous orange-and-black napalm fireball rises from the Vietnamese lowlands. The caption reads “WEAPONRY OF FLAME. Sweeping low across enemy-infested scrubland, a U.S. pilot-instructor watches a Vietnamese napalm strike. Object of the bombing is to sear the foliage and flush the enemy into the open. U.S. airmen train Vietnamese to handle T-28 fighter-bombers. . . . But as advisers they may not drop bombs.” The caption was written by editors still willing to parrot the official fiction that American pilots only “watch” while the Vietnamese bomb, that napalm is used merely to “sear” and “flush,” not to incinerate, and that it is used on “scrubland,” never on villages.

  Despite denials, by 1962 the United States had already initiated the aggressive tactics it would eventually unleash on a vast scale—search-and-destroy missions aimed at amassing high body counts; the bombing, napalming, and burning of South Vietnamese villages; the spraying of chemical defoliants; the indiscriminate shelling of free-fire zones; and the forced relocation of peasants. Still to come were hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, more advanced weapons and aircraft (e.g., Phantom jets and Cobra helicopter gunships), B-52 carpet bombing of South Vietnam, and the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. Yet much of the American war, in microcosm, was already in place.

  Also put in place by 1962 was Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV, pronounced “Mac-Vee”). First under the command of General Paul Harkins (1962–1964), then William Westmoreland (1964–1968) and Creighton Abrams (1968–1972), MACV oversaw virtually the entire American military operation in Vietnam. Like the war itself, the command headquarters grew to enormous proportions. By 1966 it earned the nickname “Pentagon East.”

  Military personnel assigned to MACV wore a distinctive shoulder patch that graphically represents the vision of the war American officials wanted to project. The shield-shaped patch has a field of red with a white sword thrust upward through a gap in a yellow, crenellated wall. According to the army’s Institute of Heraldry, “The red ground alludes to the infiltration and aggression from beyond the embattled ‘wall’ (i.e., the Great Wall of China). The opening in the ‘wall’ through which this infiltration and aggression flow is blocked by the sword representing United States military aid and support.”

  Taken literally, the MACV patch is absurd. The Great Wall of China does not border Vietnam, but is far to the north in interior China. Nor did Communist China invade South Vietnam or cause the war there. China’s support of North Vietnam was substantial, especially between 1965 and 1970, when it sent up to 175,000 troops to operate antiaircraft guns, repair roads, build bridges, and construct factories. But none of the Chinese troops fought in South Vietnam.

  Nor did North Vietnamese troops start the war. The war’s real origins were in South Vietnam and effectively began when Ngo Dinh Diem began arresting, torturing, and executing southerners who were organizing political opposition against him and his U.S. backers. By 1958, the rebels began to take up arms, increasingly staging executions of their own against Diem-appointed village chiefs. Starting in 1959, the North began to send some soldiers through the Truong Son mountain range into South Vietnam—a network of footpaths and (eventually) roads that Western media soon dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the large-scale deployment of North Vietnamese troops in the South did not begin until the mid-1960s, and U.S. troops outnumbered them until the early 1970s.

  More important, most South Vietnamese did not consider the North a foreign country. Supporters of the Viet Cong looked to the North as an ally in a common nationwide struggle for independence and reunification. Even many anti-Communist southerners longed for national unification under non-Communist leadership. To the majority of Vietnamese, the only foreign aggressors in South Vietnam were the Americans and the allies they had hired or recruited from South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.

  The MACV patch reflected the government’s intense effort to define the Vietnam War as a war of “outside aggression” in which a “foreign” enemy from the North attacked an independent and sovereign neighbor in the South. Countless government speeches, pamphlets, briefings, and films hammered home that claim.

  The narrative of North-South conquest did not go unchallenged. On March 8, 1965, the very day that the first combat brigade of U.S. Marines hit the beaches of Da Nang, Izzy Stone did what he had done every week since 1953—he published his one-man, four-page newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly. A small but growing readership relied on Stone for his surgical analysis of current events. He pored over government documents no one else even skimmed. He especially liked to study the details tucked away in appendices, always telling friends that the best way to read official reports is backward, since the most telling information is always buried near the end. Stone devoted the March 8 issue to debunking a government white paper called “Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.” By using the government’s own statistics (Appendix D) he demonstrated that North Vietnam’s support for the southern insurgency was actually quite minimal. For example, despite the government’s claim that the war in the South was “inspired, directed, supplied, and controlled” by Hanoi, from 1962 to 1964 only 179 of the 15,100 weapons captured from the Viet Cong guerrillas of South Vietnam had come from Communist countries. Virtually all the weapons had southern origins and the southern Viet Cong were still doing most of the fighting. The government in Saigon was facing a revolution, not a foreign conquest.

  But I. F. Stone’s analysis reached only a few thousand. The government’s narrative of external Communist aggression reached the entire country. And it was full of deceptions and flat-out lies. In a 1966 government film called Night of the Dragons narrator Charlton Heston gravely announces: “Nearly 40,000 trained guerrilla soldiers from the Communist North have infiltrated into South Vietnam. Know
n as the Viet Cong, they have organized a war of terror against the people. After six years of war South Vietnamese soldiers are still trying to defend their border against North Vietnam.” The story could not be more black and white, and distorted. The people of South Vietnam are presented as uniformly committed to peace, defense, security, freedom, hard work, and progress. The Communists of the North are identified entirely with aggression, terror, invasion, and murder. From this and other government sources no one could possibly understand that the Viet Cong were southern insurgents with substantial southern support. The propaganda campaign was largely effective. A 1966 poll found that 75 percent of Americans wrongly believed the Viet Cong were North Vietnamese.

  Congress was equally gullible. It not only accepted the claim that North Vietnam was the major threat to South Vietnamese self-determination, but fully supported LBJ’s request for a resolution giving him the power to escalate U.S. intervention without a declaration of war. The resolution sailed through Congress in 1964 after a shadowy “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin involving U.S. destroyers and a few tiny North Vietnamese patrol boats.

  On August 4, 1964, just before midnight, LBJ went on national television with an ominous announcement: “Aggression by terror against peaceful villages of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” On August 2 and again on August 4, Johnson claimed, North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at two U.S. destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, in the Gulf of Tonkin. “It is my duty,” the president said, “to take action in reply.” Sixty-four American fighter-bombers were already beginning their “retaliatory” mission against North Vietnam.

  Suddenly the official stakes had shifted. From the days of Tom Dooley through the JFK presidency, the United States claimed to be in South Vietnam on an idealistic mission to save the infant nation of South Vietnam and prevent Communism from spreading through the region. Now, in 1964, President Johnson was saying military strikes were necessary to defend ourselves. The next day LBJ sent Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify in support of a resolution authorizing the president to use military force at his discretion. The administration had drafted the resolution months before; it only needed the right moment to send it forward. Now was the time. Rusk and McNamara assured the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright, and his colleagues that they had unequivocal evidence that the Vietnamese had twice committed unprovoked acts of aggression against U.S. destroyers.

  They were lying. They did not know for sure that there was a second attack. The Maddox commander, John Herrick, sent an urgent “flash message” warning that “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen” may have caused a false alarm. He suggested “a complete evaluation before any further action [is] taken.” The administration was not willing to wait. LBJ and his aides may have initially believed the second attack had occurred, but just a few days later the president told Undersecretary of State George Ball, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”

  There was a more serious lie. The one North Vietnamese attack was far from unprovoked. U.S. destroyers were not sailing innocently through the gulf. In fact, they were engaged in an intelligence-gathering mission that was part of a secret war the United States had been waging against North Vietnam since 1961. For years the U.S. had been sending South Vietnamese commandos on Swift boats to attack the coast of North Vietnam. Sometimes targets were shelled and machine-gunned from the ocean, other times the commandos came ashore to blow up targets. Larger U.S. ships often tracked these raids from farther out at sea. One purpose of the raids was to provoke the North Vietnamese military to turn on its radar systems so they could be identified and mapped for possible future bombing attacks. That is precisely what the Maddox was doing in the Gulf of Tonkin. On July 31, 1964, four South Vietnamese gunboats had attacked some coastal islands off North Vietnam. The Maddox went along to collect electronic data. On August 2, North Vietnamese patrol boats sped toward the Maddox. The Maddox opened fire first and then the PT boats launched several torpedoes, all of them missing. There was not a single American casualty. Then the United States ordered another destroyer into the gulf with instructions for both ships to zigzag provocatively near the site of the first incident.

  Since 1961, the CIA had also been sending teams of South Vietnamese commandos into North Vietnam to gather intelligence and sow rebellion against the Communist government. These missions were a complete failure. Every commando was either killed, or imprisoned, or began working for the North. By the time the program was finally shut down, some seven hundred South Vietnamese commandos had been lost.

  Though the details of the secret war against North Vietnam would not emerge for decades, enough evidence had leaked out to warrant the suspicion that the United States was in fact the aggressor and had provoked the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. On July 23, 1964, for example, the New York Times ran a front-page story under the headline “Sabotage Raids on North Confirmed by Saigon Aide.” Air Commodore Nguyen Cao Ky “confirmed today that ‘combat teams’ had been sent on sabotage missions inside Communist North Vietnam.” Ky “indicated that clandestine missions had been dispatched at intervals for at least three years.” An American general at the news conference “tried to suggest that Commodore Ky did not have a complete command of English and might be misinterpreting questions.” The media and Congress did virtually nothing to follow up on Ky’s stunning revelation, and it effectively disappeared.

  Only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson got exactly what he wanted: a boost in his popularity and a blank check to do whatever he wanted in Vietnam without a prolonged congressional debate. His approval ratings jumped from 42 to 72 percent overnight, and the resolution gave him the power “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The authorization was so broad Johnson quipped to aides, “It’s like grandma’s nightshirt—it covers everything.”

  The resolution also helped LBJ fend off right-wing critics who branded him soft on Communism. His foremost critic was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Johnson’s 1964 Republican opponent for president. The hawkish Goldwater, a general in the Air Force Reserve, believed the Democrats were losing the Cold War. Just before the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, at the Republican National Convention, Goldwater attacked both Johnson and recently assassinated President John Kennedy. Both had “talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom,” but each one had failed to deliver the reality. “Failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam.” And now, “the Commander-in-Chief of our forces . . . refuses to say—refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory.”

  By contrast, Goldwater had pledged to do whatever it took to win, even suggesting the use of “low-yield atomic weapons” to block the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops and supplies into South Vietnam. It did not strike everyone as a nutty idea. Hanson Baldwin, the military editor of the New York Times, offered a supportive column claiming that a single “nominal-yield” atomic bomb could “clear” as much forest as twenty-five million pounds of napalm.

  In the face of Goldwater’s attacks, LBJ shored up his tough-guy credentials by launching a major air strike against North Vietnam in response to a tiny attack (provoked by the United States) that did not produce a single American casualty. After that demonstration of force, LBJ finished off his presidential campaign sounding like a peace candidate. He promised that his decisions regarding Vietnam would be “cautious and careful,” not provocative and rash. He did not seek a “wider war.” Reckless hawks like Barry Goldwater, Johnson warned, might incite China to ent
er the war in Vietnam as it had in Korea. “We don’t want our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people [China] and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”

  LBJ was elected in a landslide. Few voters could have predicted that he would go on to escalate the war almost as fully as Goldwater recommended. LBJ’s great fear was that failure in Vietnam might destroy his political opportunity to become the greatest liberal reformer in U.S. history. He wanted his Great Society programs to surpass the New Deal reforms of his hero Franklin Roosevelt. For a while it worked. From 1964 to 1966, Johnson drove Congress to pass the most ambitious set of domestic legislative reforms in U.S. history—landmark bills on civil rights, health care, education, poverty, transportation, the environment, consumer protection, immigration reform, federal support for the arts and sciences, freedom of information, public broadcasting, and dozens more.

  Johnson believed ongoing success hinged on his ability to curb debate about the war in Vietnam. That proved impossible, even in Congress, where he had a supermajority of Democrats. Senator William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, soon regretted his support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. At first, he tried privately to dissuade LBJ from escalating the war. But he went public with his opposition after witnessing LBJ’s handling of another, nearly forgotten, military intervention—the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic.

  At the end of April 1965, Johnson rushed four hundred marines to Santo Domingo. Within weeks, thirty thousand more American troops were added. On April 28, LBJ announced that he had acted “to protect American lives.” That was it—no details. Two days later he added a second motive: “There are signs that people trained outside the Dominican Republic are seeking to gain control.” Two days later he elaborated, sounding a bit defensive: “There was no longer any choice.” If he had not acted, Americans “would die in the streets.” If that wasn’t convincing, he had an ace in the hole: Communism. “Communist leaders, many of them trained in Cuba,” were taking “increasing control” and “the American nations cannot, must not, and will not permit the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.”