It soon became clear to Fulbright that all of these claims were wildly inflated or completely fabricated. There was no convincing evidence that American lives were in peril or that pro-Castro Communists were seizing power in the Dominican Republic. The turmoil was caused by a popular movement to restore Juan Bosch to power. A liberal intellectual and writer, Bosch had become the nation’s first democratically elected president in 1963 but was soon overthrown by a military coup—with U.S. approval. LBJ claimed that Communists were orchestrating the movement to reinstate him. Lacking evidence, the president browbeat the CIA and FBI to provide some. “Find me some Communists in the Dominican Republic,” Johnson ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover came back with fifty-three names, but even this short list was later discredited.
In response to skeptical questions, LBJ told wild stories of Americans under attack. “Men were running up and down the corridors of the Ambassador Hotel with tommy-guns,” he told journalists at a press conference in June 1965. “Our citizens were under the beds and in the closets and trying to dodge this gunfire. Our Ambassador, as he was talking to us, was under the desk.”
Senator Fulbright suspected the president of lying. He had his Foreign Relations Committee call witnesses. His hearings showed that the administration had concocted phony evidence. The State Department had urged the American ambassador in Santo Domingo to say that American lives were in peril to give LBJ a legal justification for intervening.
Fulbright was an Arkansan gentleman with cosmopolitan tastes, a Rhodes scholar more at ease with intellectuals than poor country farmers. Unlike President Johnson, Fulbright was not given to political arm-twisting. He didn’t like it and he wasn’t good at it. Though he would become one of the most prominent Senate critics of the Vietnam War, he did not pressure his colleagues to take up the cause. He believed logic and reason should carry the day. He studied the issues and devoted hours to patient, methodical questioning of witnesses.
But underneath the calm demeanor, a fire was building. On September 15, 1965, he entered the Senate Chamber and gave a two-hour speech. He not only attacked the Dominican intervention but launched a broadside critique of U.S. Cold War policy. The United States, he claimed, fails “to understand social revolution and the injustices that give it rise.” Instead of supporting the “great majority of people” who were poor and oppressed, America sides with “corrupt and reactionary military oligarchies.” Despite the “Fourth of July speeches” about America’s revolutionary tradition, we are “much closer to being the most unrevolutionary nation on earth. We are sober and satisfied and comfortable and rich.”
It was a brave speech, but it effectively ended Fulbright’s relationship with the president of the United States. LBJ thought Fulbright’s criticism was an intolerable betrayal. The senator would no longer be invited to state dinners and no longer called in for serious consultations. Behind Fulbright’s back, the president called him “a frustrated old woman,” a “crybaby,” and “Senator Halfbright.”
Fulbright’s Dominican dissent illustrates that protest against the Vietnam War had many roots. Critical questions raised about Vietnam built upon concerns over many other issues: military interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere, the nuclear arms race and nuclear testing, civil rights, women’s rights, poverty, pollution, conformity, education, and much more. This variety of critical thinking produced a peace movement of great diversity and energy, fed by many streams.
Fulbright’s dissent had a second major significance—it showed that even some members of the establishment were beginning to question the intellectual and moral underpinnings of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. As early as 1965, years before Republican Richard Nixon became president and took responsibility for the war, a Democratic president was being attacked by a high-ranking member of his own party. Others soon joined in.
That was a huge change. After World War II, there had been two decades of broad agreement about the aims and conduct of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. There were some heated debates about how and where to intervene overseas (Should we defend Quemoy and Matsu?), but those seem like minor squabbles compared with the shouting matches of the 1960s.
The widening fissures in Congress came to national attention in early 1966 when Fulbright held televised hearings on the Vietnam War. They attracted thirty million viewers every day. One witness, George F. Kennan, was the career diplomat who first and most famously recommended that “containment” define U.S. Cold War relations with the Soviet Union. Kennan’s views had great weight in postwar Washington, coming as they did from an expert on Russia who had spent many years in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union,” Kennan wrote in an influential 1947 article, “must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Many policymakers regarded him as a principal architect of U.S. Cold War policy.
How mind-blowing it was, therefore, to hear his testimony before the Fulbright committee in 1966. The great Cold War advocate of U.S. power and resolve sat before the cameras and described the Vietnam War as an “unfortunate” and “unpromising involvement in a remote and secondary theater.” Even worse, it had done profound damage to our foreign relations and national identity: “The spectacle of Americans inflicting grievous injury on the lives of a poor and helpless people . . . people of a different race and color . . . [is] profoundly detrimental to the image we would like [the world] to hold of this country.” The hawkish Democratic senator Frank Lausche from Ohio was not happy with the testimony: Mr. Kennan, aren’t you “the designer and architect” of the containment policy? Don’t you support that policy?
“Senator Lausche,” Kennan responded, “I bear a certain amount of guilt for the currency of this word containment. I wrote an article . . . in 1947 [that] got much more publicity than I thought it would get. . . . I did not mean . . . that we could necessarily stop [Communism] at every point on the world’s surface. . . . I failed to say, I must admit, in that article . . . that certain areas of the world are more important than others; that one had to concentrate on the areas that were vital to us.” The great architect of containment now regretted his role in promoting a broad-brush policy that was endlessly invoked to justify warfare in Vietnam.
Viewers also saw Senator Fulbright grill recently retired general Maxwell Taylor. Unlike Kennan, Taylor expressed no guilt. He had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1962 to 1964 and then ambassador to South Vietnam. Fulbright asked Taylor if he saw any moral distinction between the American napalming of Vietnamese villages and Viet Cong murders of civilians by “disemboweling [them] with a knife.”
Taylor: “We are not deliberately attacking civilian populations in South Vietnam. On the contrary, we are making every effort to avoid their loss.”
Fulbright: “We drop napalm bombs on villages just deliberately . . . it is not by accident we are doing this.”
Less than a year after his televised hearings, Fulbright published a book called The Arrogance of Power. No chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has ever written such a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy. While Fulbright insisted that U.S. foreign policy was based on “the best intentions in the world,” he was deeply disturbed by many specific policies and the sanctimony, hypocrisy, and arrogance with which they were carried out. We could see evil in others, but not in ourselves: “We see the Viet Cong who cut the throats of village chiefs as savage murderers but American flyers who incinerate unseen women and children with napalm as valiant fighters for freedom . . . we see the Viet Cong as Hanoi’s puppet and Hanoi as China’s puppet but we see the Saigon government as America’s stalwart ally . . . we see China, with no troops in South Vietnam, as the real aggressor while we, with hundreds of thousands of men, are resisting foreign intervention.” In early 1967, The Arrogance of Power made the New York Times best-seller list and sold 400,000 copies.
Vietnam War debates were going mainstream, but the harshest criticism of U.S. policy rarely appeared in major news outlets. When writer Martha Gellhorn returned from Vietnam in September 1966, her articles were rejected by almost every U.S. publisher, which is why one of her most penetrating exposés appeared in the most unlikely source imaginable—the Ladies’ Home Journal. There, in the January 1967 issue with Audrey Hepburn on the cover, was Martha Gellhorn’s article “Suffer the Little Children.” The subhead read “It’s Time to Talk of the Vietnam Casualties Nobody Dares Talk About: The Wounded Boys and Girls.” Gellhorn had convinced the Ladies’ Home Journal that her article about the Vietnamese victims of U.S. military policy was “purely humanitarian,” not “political,” and they agreed to run it.
“We love our children,” it begins. “We are famous for loving our children, and many foreigners believe that we love them unwisely and too well.” In fact, we might be “too busy, loving our own children, to think of children 10,000 miles away,” or to understand that the parents there, “who do not look or live like us, love their children just as deeply, but with anguish now and heartbreak and fear.”
Gellhorn takes us inside the “desperately crowded” civilian hospitals. “The wounded lie on bare board beds, frequently two to a bed, on stretchers, in the corridors, anywhere.” Often there is only one meal a day. The floors are littered with garbage because the hospitals cannot afford to have them cleaned. Even so, these patients are fortunate; most wounded civilians cannot get to hospitals or die on the way.
In the children’s ward at the Qui Nhon hospital, Gellhorn met the victims of a U.S. napalm attack. A badly burned seven-year-old boy “moaned like a mourning dove. . . . His mother stood over his cot, fanning the little body, in a helpless effort to cool that wet, red skin . . . her eyes and her voice revealed how gladly she would have taken for herself the child’s suffering.”
Through an interpreter, Gellhorn interviewed the grandfather of another burned child from the same village. He told her that “Vietcong guerrillas had passed through their hamlet in April, but were long gone. Late in August, napalm bombs fell from the sky.” An American surgeon explained that the napalm rarely struck young men; most of them were away from the villages fighting for the Viet Cong or the South Vietnamese army. When U.S. bombs hit villages, he reported, they often “hit women and children almost exclusively, and a few old men.”
Then there was the awful testimony of a “housewife from New Jersey, the mother of six” who had adopted three Vietnamese children. She was visiting South Vietnam “to learn how Vietnamese children were living.”
Before I went to Saigon, I had heard and read that napalm melts the flesh, and I thought that’s nonsense, because I can put a roast in the oven and the fat will melt but the meat stays there. Well, I went and saw these children burned by napalm, and it is absolutely true. The chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh, and the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chests and it sits there and it grows there. . . . These children can’t turn their heads, they were so thick with flesh. . . . And when gangrene sets in, they cut off their hands or fingers or their feet; the only thing they cannot cut off is their head.
Gellhorn’s reporting so enraged South Vietnamese authorities they never issued her another visa. She was effectively banned from the war zone. Her many appeals to U.S. authorities fell on deaf ears. “I was told politely that after all the South Vietnamese ran their own affairs.”
The appearance of such a damning article in Ladies’ Home Journal exemplifies the dramatic transformations brought by the war and the political ferment of the 1960s. With a circulation of seven million, LHJ was one of the so-called Seven Sisters—the leading women’s magazines of the era, primarily aimed at married, middle-class homemakers with children. These magazines had rarely run any articles about the Vietnam War. Only one other appeared in LHJ during the two years before Gellhorn’s “Suffer the Little Children”—a brief piece about the supportive wife of an army helicopter pilot. “If we don’t stop the Communists from taking over by force in Vietnam,” she said, “we’ll eventually have to stop them somewhere else and it could be worse. That’s the way Doug feels, and he’s over there.” The article closed with a letter from Doug about Vietnamese children: “These little babies are really cute, but they don’t have much of a chance in life.”
The Seven Sisters had typically ignored or criticized women activists. In 1965, for example, LHJ ran a piece about Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit mother of five who was murdered in Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan for marching in support of black civil rights. The article focused on a group of mothers who overwhelmingly believed Liuzzo had “no right to leave her five children to risk her life for a social cause.” As one of them said, “It was a shame, but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.”
Many women began to reject that idea. Outraged by the war, they joined groups like Women’s Strike for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Another Mother for Peace, and the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. In the spring of 1966, well before Gellhorn’s article appeared, women were at the center of an emerging movement against the manufacture and use of napalm.
Napalm is a highly flammable gel invented during World War II and first used for strategic bombing—the destruction of entire cities and their populations from the air. Napalm bombs explode on contact, producing giant fireballs that spray gobs of burning, sticky gel in every direction. If the gel gets on your skin it burns ten times hotter than boiling water and cannot be wiped away. Those nearby who are untouched by fire or gel can nonetheless die from suffocation, heatstroke, or carbon monoxide poisoning.
Aerial bombing of civilians began before World War II, but on a much smaller scale, and the practice was widely condemned. On the very day World War II began, President Franklin Roosevelt urged every nation to refrain from “the ruthless bombing from the air of civilians” that has “profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.” It was, he insisted, a “form of inhuman barbarism.”
In the final year of World War II, however, the United States carried out the most devastating air attacks in history—the firebombing of a handful of cities in Germany and sixty-seven in Japan, all of it followed by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Robert McNamara, an aide to General Curtis LeMay, helped plan and analyze the firebombing. In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, McNamara recalled the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945: “In that single night, we burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women, and children.” After the war, General LeMay said to McNamara: “If we’d lost the war we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”
“I think he’s right,” McNamara continued. “He—and I’d say I—were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
In 2003 McNamara expressed guilt for the firebombing of Japan, but could still not admit moral failings as secretary of defense in the 1960s—only errors of judgment. Yet he had authorized massive napalm bombing in Vietnam, fully understanding that it was an indiscriminate weapon of terror. By war’s end, the U.S. had dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, far exceeding the 16,500 tons dropped on Japanese cities during World War II.
The anti-napalm campaign of 1966 was part of a rising, global outcry against American aggression in Vietnam, though some activists argued against this single-issue focus. The major injustice, they argued, was not the use of a single weapon but the war itself—the very presence of the United States in Vietnam and its denial of Vietnamese self-determination. Why single out napalm? Wouldn’t any and all weapons used in such a war be unjust? But the campaign gathered support because napalm was such an egregious example of the indiscriminate violence the United States was unleashing on the very people it claimed to be protecting from “Communist aggression.”
Drawing attention to its horrifying effects would highlight the routine suffering inflicted by the U.S. on Vietnamese civilians.
In the 1966 anti-napalm campaign, four activists from California were dubbed the Napalm Ladies. In addition to leafleting and collecting signatures, the Napalm Ladies decided to commit an act of civil disobedience by blocking truck deliveries of napalm to a loading terminal on San Francisco Bay. Aware of the media stereotype of antiwar activists as young, scruffy radicals, the four women consciously played up their status as middle-class housewives. As Joyce McLean recalled, “We wanted to present a very different image. . . . We would dress as ladies. We wore heels. I wore my pearls and gloves.”
Stories like these were multiplying by the thousands in the late 1960s, but they got cursory attention (if any) from a national media that dominated news coverage in the pre-Internet era. In fact, just as the anti-napalm campaign was taking off, the New York Times ran a series of articles denying that napalm was causing substantial civilian casualties. In a March 1967 piece, Dr. Howard Rusk said he had visited twenty hospitals in South Vietnam and found “not a single case of burns due to napalm and but two from phosphorus shells.” He further claimed, without providing evidence, that the Viet Cong were killing and wounding more civilians than American and Allied forces. The Times editorialized that napalm burns in Vietnam were “negligible” and not as common as burns “caused by the improper use of gasoline as a cooking and lighting fuel.”
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 8