American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  In that intimate, quasi-therapeutic setting, Goodwin took notes while LBJ talked:

  Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam . . . I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II [at Munich]. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression. And I knew that . . . Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China. . . .

  If we lost Vietnam . . . there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine.

  Oh, I could see it coming all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up.

  Johnson habitually embellished stories or made them up. LBJ’s recurring nightmare—“every night”—may have been pure invention, but it does offer a vivid sense of how he viewed his Vietnam decisions (or at least how he wanted others to view them). Most obvious is his profound anxiety about manliness and courage and how inextricably linked they are to his worries about the political cost of appearing weak.

  But he does not cast himself as a stalwart, heroic commander. Instead of dismissing his critics as cowards or appeasers, he makes himself the pitiable, helpless victim. It’s as if he were literally driven into war by a mad mob—stalked, staked, and stoned into escalating the war in Vietnam. You might expect that the lynch mob would be led by right-wing Republican hawks like Curtis LeMay or Barry Goldwater. But it’s Democrat Robert Kennedy leading the charge.

  LBJ stacks the deck to suggest that all the forces of history and politics were aligned against him. He had to make the decisions he did in Vietnam. However much he may have wanted to avoid an ill-fated war, he had no choice. To back down would ruin his presidency and put the nation through an “endless” and “destructive” debate. Even near death, LBJ could not acknowledge that the war had done precisely that.

  Lying there in bed, with the covers pulled up, the former president might just as easily have told Doris Kearns Goodwin about another, more plausible nightmare. In this one a raging and howling mob ties him to the ground and screams: “Murderer! Baby-Killer! War Criminal!” Then the chanting dies out and he sees Robert Kennedy speaking to a large, enraptured crowd: And if we care so little about South Vietnam that we are willing to see the land destroyed and its people dead, then why are we there in the first place? The crowd begins to chant again: “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” And then he wakes up and realizes that his nightmare comes directly from the daily news, the terrifying reality that engulfed the final years of his presidency.

  LBJ and most of the other key Vietnam policymakers never imagined that withdrawal from Vietnam would be an act of courage. In one sense this moral blindness is baffling because these same men prided themselves on their pragmatic, hardheaded realism, their ability to cut through sentiment and softhearted idealism to face the most difficult realities of foreign affairs. They could see that the war was failing. But they could not pull out. A deeper set of values trumped their most coherent understandings of the war. They simply could not accept being viewed as losers. A “manly man” must always keep fighting.

  By the late 1960s, however, all the foundational lessons of LBJ’s foreign policy were crumbling, even the idea of what it meant to be a man. Ideas about gender were beginning to undergo just as much scrutiny as national identity. Suddenly large numbers of young men were saying no to the idea that male identity required them to take up arms against foreign “enemies.” And many young women were forcefully arguing that American masculinity was an ever more intolerable form of patriarchy that was oppressing women at home and abroad.

  For Tim O’Brien, the novelist and Vietnam veteran, the war represented a “moral emergency,” a wrenching test of conscience. In one of his best-known stories, “On the Rainy River,” O’Brien explores the anguishing dilemma facing a college graduate who has just received his draft notice. His character (a fictional “Tim O’Brien”) is tormented. Should he submit to the draft or escape to Canada? He heads to a fishing camp on the Canadian border, where he stays for six days, sometimes fishing with the camp’s elderly owner or doing small chores for him, but mostly wrestling with his quandary. Should he enter the military and possibly kill and even die in a war he hates, or escape to Canada and face the “ridicule and censure” from his hometown friends and family?

  On one side is his conscience and intellect. He knows he does not have all the answers, does not know exactly how the war began or why, but even his doubts tell him that the war is wrong (“You don’t make war without knowing why”) and he concludes that the “right” and “brave” thing to do is to choose exile. On the other side, he feels the deep pressure of his “whole history”: “My hometown was a conservative little spot on the prairie. . . . It was easy to imagine people sitting around a table down at the old Gobbler Café on Main Street, coffee cups poised, the conversation slowly zeroing in on the young O’Brien kid, how the damned sissy had taken off for Canada.”

  One day at the fishing camp, he sits in a boat with the old man. The Canadian shore is just a few feet away and now O’Brien imagines a crowd of people gathered on the American side. He sees his parents and siblings, “all the townsfolk, the mayor and the entire Chamber of Commerce and all my old teachers and girlfriends and high school buddies.”

  Finally, “in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule . . . .

  “And right then I submitted.

  “I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”

  The twenty-two-year-old draftee in “On the Rainy River” had a nightmarish vision very similar to LBJ’s (“Coward! Traitor! Weakling!”). But unlike the former president, he does not try to justify and excuse his decision. In the unforgettable last lines of his story, O’Brien writes, “I was a coward. I went to the war.”

  No principal policymakers expressed that degree of moral self-criticism. Some admitted making errors of judgment, but they all too easily dismissed the burdens of conscience visited upon young men like O’Brien. When a journalist pressed McGeorge Bundy in 1976 to admit that he failed in Vietnam, Bundy met the question with glacial silence before saying: “Yes, I did. But I’m not going to waste the rest of my life feeling guilty about it.”

  One reason many policymakers continued for so long to defend a failing policy was their adherence to a particular definition of credibility. For them, it was not synonymous with honesty or integrity; it was about staying the course, having the spine to stand by established policies out of fear that any fundamental change would signify weakness and error.

  For most people, however, Washington’s credibility did depend on whether its policies were founded on truth and devoted to worthy and achievable goals. In 1965, journalist David Wise wrote an article about the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic that highlighted the “gap” between LBJ’s explanation of the event and the mounting evidence that contradicted the president’s claims. The headline writer called the article “Dilemma in ‘Credibility Gap,’” thus coining what became one of the era’s signature expressions.

  Within months the term was used to describe the gulf between LBJ’s claim that U.S. escalation in Vietnam was limited and defensive and the growing evidence that it was massive, open-ended, and aggressive. But public distrust did not explode overnight; it took years to develop and widen. In Nixon’s presiden
cy, the credibility gap took on Grand Canyon–like proportions.

  Nixon was elected in 1968 with a vague pledge to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. Instead the nation got four more years of war. But Nixon understood that the American public would no longer tolerate the presence of 540,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam and weekly death tolls in the hundreds. Early in his first term he therefore announced that he would gradually withdraw U.S. combat troops and turn over more and more of the fighting to the South Vietnamese—a program he called Vietnamization. He knew he would have to reduce the most glaring domestic costs of the war in order to prolong and expand it.

  But Nixon faced a huge dilemma. How could he convince the American public he was winding down the war while also convincing the Communist leaders in Vietnam that he had every intention of preventing a Communist takeover in South Vietnam? How could he appear to be both a peacemaker and a warmonger? How could he prove to the Vietnamese that he might do anything to achieve his objectives while publicly announcing that he was going to withdraw troops?

  He explained his solution to that conundrum to his aide Bob Haldeman while walking on the beach during the 1968 campaign.

  I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “For God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

  Did Nixon really think it could be that easy? Just make a few wild threats and, presto, the United States would secure a permanent non-Communist South Vietnam? He may have indulged this magical thinking on occasion, but he knew it would take something more provocative than idle threats.

  Therefore, just two months into office Nixon initiated the secret bombing of Cambodia. By actually expanding and intensifying the war, he hoped to demonstrate to Hanoi that he was willing to take extreme measures to “stop the war” on his terms. Communist leaders may well have considered Nixon a madman, but his bombing of Cambodia, like every U.S. military escalation, only intensified their resolve.

  Later in 1969 Nixon made a secret threat through Kissinger to diplomat Xuan Thuy—that the United States would unleash a “go for broke” bombing attack against North Vietnam if negotiations did not make “major progress” by November 1, 1969. The ultimatum was called Operation Duck Hook. When Hanoi failed to respond, Nixon backed away from his threat. He admitted in his memoirs that he had been dissuaded by the massive antiwar demonstrations in the fall of 1969. On November 15, 1969, a half-million protesters poured into the nation’s capital to demand an immediate end to the Vietnam War. It was the largest demonstration to that point in American history.

  Nixon claimed at the time that the protests had no impact on his policies whatsoever; that the only college students he was watching were the ones playing football on the tube, not those protesting outside. It was just a pose. Nixon turned the White House into an armed fortress and demanded a steady stream of detailed reports about the demonstrations. He worried that even greater protests would erupt if he went forward with his Duck Hook ultimatum. He almost immediately berated himself for backing down, and that regret shaped further escalations of the war in the months and years to follow.

  Though Nixon was determined to keep South Vietnam non-Communist, he talked more of peace than victory. And he seemed most preoccupied by the specter of shameful loss. In his famous 1969 speech calling upon “the great silent majority” to support his Vietnam policies he included these lines: “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”

  If Americans pulled together behind the war, they could avoid defeat. Nixon was right about that. The United States had enough military power to occupy South Vietnam indefinitely. But Americans never had the ability to establish a government in Saigon that could survive on its own. Only the Vietnamese could do that.

  On April 30, 1970, when Nixon announced that the United States would invade Cambodia, it produced the war’s greatest outpouring of protest. It came from all quarters—students, college presidents, church people, homemakers, lawyers, unions—every imaginable group. Two hundred and fifty members of the U.S. State Department signed a petition condemning the invasion. Even much of the foreign policy establishment concluded that Nixon’s expansion of the war was weakening American power and credibility.

  Explaining his decision on TV, Nixon pointed to a map of Cambodia where red blobs along the border with South Vietnam indicated the presence of North Vietnamese “military sanctuaries.” For five years, Nixon claimed, the United States had not attacked those sanctuaries “because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation”—a blatant lie given Nixon’s heavy secret bombing of Cambodia and the many secret cross-border operations since the early 1960s. In order to protect U.S. forces, Nixon claimed, and to “guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization programs,” it was necessary to “clean out” the sanctuaries.

  But there was something much greater at stake, Nixon continued, putting away the pointer. “It is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight.” If the U.S. did nothing about the Communist sanctuaries but to offer “plaintive diplomatic protests,” then “the credibility of the United States would be destroyed.” That sounded like familiar Cold War rhetoric. But it came without a vision of triumph. Nixon sounded like a desperate coach at halftime, beseeching his badly losing team to fight harder, if only for dignity. “We will not be humiliated. We will not be defeated.” Just a few lines later, Nixon suggests that the United States had already suffered many humiliating defeats: “If the enemy’s response to our most conciliatory offers for peaceful negotiation continues to be to increase its attacks and humiliate and defeat us, we shall react accordingly.”

  In his most hyperbolic passage, Nixon claimed that the war in Cambodia was a test of civilization itself and necessary to prevent a final descent into chaos or dictatorship:

  My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. . . . If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.

  “Pitiful, helpless giant.” The fear of impotence and loss was as primal with Nixon as it was with LBJ. The speech includes five references to American “defeat.”

  To bolster his confidence in the days just before and after the invasion of Cambodia, Nixon repeatedly watched Patton, the 1970 blockbuster in which George C. Scott plays the famous World War II commander. According to one source, Nixon sat through the three-hour film at least five times during those weeks. It begins with the swaggering Patton exhorting his troops in front of a gigantic, screen-filling American flag.

  Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle . . . Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

  Never lose a war, never lose a war—that injunction hounded LBJ and Nixon like a relentless, recurring nightmare. It had come down to that.

  4

  Vietnam, Inc.

  MANY YEARS BEFORE Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon h
ad nightmares about losing the war in Vietnam, President Dwight Eisenhower was making crucial decisions that started it. And, in 1953, Eisenhower did something amazing and rare—he spoke openly about the economic motives behind U.S. foreign policy. In Southeast Asia, he said, “our power and ability to get certain things we need” was at stake. If Indochina fell to Communism, he warned, the entire region would fall to our enemies and the United States would lose access to materials “we so greatly value”—“tin and tungsten” and “the riches of the Indonesian territory.” All these vital resources would “cease coming.”

  The occasion for these remarks was a Governors’ Conference in Seattle. Press reports described Eisenhower’s speech as “off the cuff,” a polite way of saying that he was winging it. In some places he seemed not just off the cuff but off the rails. For example, while trying to describe the relationship between state and federal authority, his mind began to roam: “What we have got is a great hinterland in between those two roads and through them we have some kind of a path for all of us to walk together to decency and to progress; not to immediate salvation and the rainbow’s end, not at all, but progress.” By the end, even Eisenhower seemed embarrassed, conceding that his “rather wandering thoughts” had “gone a long way around the cabbage patch.”

  Perhaps the most lucid part of the speech came when he turned to “one simple problem in the foreign field”—the war in Indochina. He sought to explain “why we are so concerned with the far-off southeast corner of Asia” and why, more specifically, we were paying France vast amounts of money to continue its long war against the anticolonial revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap.

  Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The [Malayan] peninsula, the last little bit of land hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible. The tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming. . . . All of that position around there is very ominous to the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line this must be blocked. It must be blocked now. That is what the French are doing.