American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  My friend and colleague Clark Dougan focused his great editorial talent on this project from the beginning. In some ways, I think we have been talking our way toward this book since we met in 1993. Clark’s invaluable help is based on his own extensive writing about the Vietnam War and twenty-five years as a senior editor at the University of Massachusetts Press.

  At Viking, I have been the beneficiary of a supremely talented group of professionals. I am most indebted to Wendy Wolf, one of our country’s most gifted editors. She has led me through two books and I completely trust her sage and savvy judgment. I am also grateful to the meticulous copy editor Jeanette Gingold and the ever attentive assistant editor Georgia Bodnar. Thanks as well to production manager Matthew Boezi, production editor Sharon Gonzalez, and designer Katy Riegel.

  Age has given me an ever greater appreciation for the superb teachers I had as an undergraduate and without whom I might never have dared to try this work. I’m especially grateful to Barry O’Connell, but also to George Kateb, Gordon Levin, and Leo Marx.

  Special thanks to the many students at the University of Massachusetts who have taken my course on the American War in Vietnam and the graduate students who have helped me teach it. Their curiosity and engagement always challenge and deepen my knowledge. My wonderful colleagues in the history department are a constant source of inspiration and encouragement. I especially want to thank Joye Bowman, our chair, for her steadfast support.

  Many friends sustained me throughout this long process and helped me get through, and beyond, the daily stresses of an unfinished manuscript. The support of Sarah and Scott Auerbach and Christine and Jon Frieze has been especially unflagging. I also want to acknowledge Maria and Yaser Abunnasr, Carleen Basler and Henry Chang, Alex Bloom, Chris Brashear and Betsy Krause, Kathy and Jim Brennan, Nick Bromell, Chris and Todd Felton, John Foran and Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Richard Joffe, Chris and Julie Keller, Mary and Chris Kiely, Ray and Taryn La Raja, Linda Levine, Cindy and Rolf Nelson, Barry and Kristin O’Connell, Pam and Bart Rietkerk, Kim Stender, Sue Thrasher, and Eric and Jessica Wilkinson.

  Karen and Steve Baumann, my sister and brother-in-law, are among my closest friends and I have always drawn strength from their love. My brother-in-law Alex Green has been a best friend since high school and the extended Green family is now a part of my own. Many thanks to all of them for including me so fully: Julia Penrose, Peter and Mary Green, Andrew and Bettyanne Green, Doug Green and Trish Dunn, Bill Green, John and Michelle Green, Eleanor Craig and my father-in-law Paul Green. Thanks also to virtual family members Tamar and Greg Kaye.

  My mother, Shirley Appy, now living just down the road, has always been there for me—a model of support, love, generosity, and renewal.

  To my sons Nathan and Henry—thank you for being your wonderful selves. I love you both so much. Daughter-in-law Shannon and granddaughter Maelyn compound my joy and pride every day. And no one could be blessed with more accepting and loving stepsons—Spencer, Dylan, and Ian Kaye. I treasure you all.

  My wife, Katherine, enriches my life beyond measure or words. Among her many beautiful gifts I will mention only one: she is the keenest and most empathic listener I have ever met. It is the foundation of her great insight and generosity. The dedication of this book is a limited token of my unlimited love.

  NOTES

  To view photographs and images discussed in American Reckoning, or relevant to it, please go to the author’s website. You will also find a time line of significant dates. Go to: ChristianAppy.com.

  INTRODUCTION: WHO ARE WE?

  “I didn’t know there was a bad war”: Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 449–52. After the Vietnamese boys were killed, George Evans engaged in antiwar activism while still in Vietnam. After the war he became a poet and writer. He is the author, among other works, of Sudden Dreams and The New World.

  “One of the most important casualties”: Washington Post, May 1, 2000.

  “We didn’t know who we were”: Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (New York: Ballantine, 1975), p. 57.

  roughly three-quarters of Americans . . . trusted the government: http://www.people-press.org/2013/10/18/trust-in-government-interactive/.

  By 1971, 58 percent: George C. Herring, America’s Longest War, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), p. 300.

  “they were called and they went”: Harry Haines, “‘They Were Called and They Went’: The Political Rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran,” in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 81.

  Special Operations Forces: See Nick Turse, “Special Ops Goes Global,” http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175790/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_special_ops_goes_global.

  CHAPTER ONE: SAVING VIETNAM

  “I have never seen anything funnier”: Thomas A. Dooley, MD, Deliver Us From Evil: A Story of Viet-Nam’s Flight to Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), pp. 38–39. On Dooley, see the excellent biography by James T. Fisher, Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).

  Operation Passage to Freedom: Ronald B. Frankum Jr., Operation Passage to Freedom: The United States Navy in Vietnam, 1954–1955 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007); Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 637–38.

  “You preach of love”: Dooley, Deliver Us From Evil, pp. 11–12. In the Reader’s Digest condensed version of Deliver Us From Evil, the Potts story is moved to the end. Reader’s Digest, April 1955, p. 172.

  “Love one another”: Dooley, Deliver Us From Evil, p. 19. On American representations of Vietnamese as childlike and submissive, see Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  “massive retaliation”: Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon (New York: Random House, 2009), pp. 146–50.

  “selling America”: Dooley, Deliver Us From Evil, p. 124.

  “Rest assured”: Ibid., pp. 71, 124. Graham Greene, the British novelist, offered a critical view of U.S. aid, “permanently stamped with the name of the donor,” compared with that of private Catholic agencies. The Sunday Times (London), May 1, 1955. Private Catholic agencies gave more than $35 million to support refugees from the North; see Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 131.

  “manifest destiny”: Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).

  American exceptionalism: Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Walter L. Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

  Reader’s Digest: Fisher, Dr. America, pp. 72–74; John Heidenry, Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

  “the whole sordid story”: Dooley, Deliver Us From Evil, p. 17. Dooley began making speeches at the request of navy commanders as early as October 1954, honing his skills with a standard speech he called “Treatment for Terror”; Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, p. 151.

  What’s My Line?: Dooley’s appearance can be viewed on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rurr0xhQmQA.

  Peace Corps: Gerard T. Rice, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1985), pp. 18–22.

  “we haven’t been trigger-happy”: http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-13-1960-debate-transcript.

  “How many of you”: James Tobin, “JFK at the Union: The Unknown Story of the Peace Corps Speech,�
� http://peacecorps.umich.edu/Tobin.html.

  “All of us have admired”: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25928.

  “haven for draft dodgers”: Tobin, “JFK at the Union.”

  magazine polls: Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, p. 138.

  “an astonishing 99 percent”: Ibid., pp. 60–66.

  “the rights of God”: Ibid., pp. 66, 80, 82; Steve Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).

  “This is a book of Christ”: Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, p. 159.

  reader might wrongly conclude: At the June 1, 1956, meeting of American Friends of Vietnam, Monsignor Joseph Harnett, head of the National Catholic Relief Service in Vietnam, felt obliged to correct that misimpression and inform the gathering that no more than 5–10 percent of Vietnamese were Catholic. American Friends of Vietnam, America’s Stake in Vietnam (New York: Carnegie Press, 1956), pp. 42–43.

  “civic religion”: For the classic interpretation of the “civic religion of the American way of life,” see Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 72–91. Others often refer to it as a “civil” religion, including supporters of it such as Robert Bellah and Samuel Huntington. “God” was read primarily in Christian terms, though the idea of a “Judeo-Christian” tradition as central to American identity emerged in the 1950s. In 1952, Eisenhower said, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.”

  “Without God, there could be”: For Eisenhower’s 1955 speech, see http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10414&st=&st1=.

  “exert upon the world”: Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941.

  free and fair election: Indeed, a major goal of the June 1, 1956, conference was to justify the decision to deny the elections called for by the Geneva Accords. Senator John Kennedy said, “Neither the United States nor Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance.” America’s Stake in Vietnam, p. 13. Hans Morgenthau, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, was the one panelist to argue that the elections should go forward; see p. 69.

  two of the featured speakers: Dooley and Kennedy met each other earlier that year, on February 17, 1956, at a lunch that included Cardinal Francis Spellman. Fisher, Dr. America, p. 84.

  “rammed into each child’s ear”: America’s Stake in Vietnam, p. 37. In Deliver Us From Evil, Dooley places this story four months later, in December 1954. The New York Times reported no Viet Minh violence against Catholics in this period (not itself evidence that it didn’t occur but an indication of the absence of evidence to corroborate Dooley’s claims). According to the Times on December 31, 1954, North Vietnam had initiated twice-daily political education meetings, especially designed to win over Catholics, but claimed that “this control of the people is being instituted without violence. . . . The Viet Minh . . . is making a great propaganda effort to win over the Roman Catholics. On Christmas Eve masses were celebrated in the churches, decorated with pontifical banners.”

  “This is our offspring”: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Vietnam-Conference-Washington-DC_19560601.aspx.

  “Did the American government send you”: James Michener, Return to Paradise (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 434–35. Also cited in Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, p. 117.

  like adoptive parents: Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 143–90.

  ongoing racial violence and injustice: On Emmett Till, see Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). What Till actually said to the storekeeper Carolyn Bryant remains in dispute. On the “kissing case,” see Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chaps. 4–5. On Malick Sow, the Chad ambassador, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 152.

  In many corners: Klein’s Cold War Orientalism is the indispensable source here.

  historical obscurity: Dooley’s name does not appear in many important histories of the war, including David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (1972), Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake (1974), Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam (1983), Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie (1988), and A. J. Langguth’s Our Vietnam (2000).

  For critical analysis: There were, of course, other sources for early critical opinion on the war. For example, Leo Huberman published a number of articles in the Monthly Review from 1954 to 1965 attacking U.S. policy. A leading African American journal, Freedomways, founded in 1961, was a source of important articles on decolonization movements and opposition to U.S. foreign policy. Carol Brightman began a monthly newsletter in 1965 called Viet-Report. Key antiwar analyses from Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn came somewhat later. On Ramparts, see Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: New Press, 2009).

  “if elections were held today”: Scheer cited the Cherne quotation later in 1965 in a pamphlet called How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam, published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1965, p. 29. Most of that pamphlet is reprinted in Marvin E. Gettleman et al., Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War (New York: Grove, 1995), pp. 115–34.

  the Vietnam Lobby: Joseph G. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Fisher, Dr. America, pp. 90–115; Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, pp. 217–62.

  five media moguls: Henry Luce (Time/Life), William Randolph Hearst Jr. (New York Journal-American, etc.), Malcolm Muir (Newsweek), Walter Annenberg (Philadelphia Inquirer), Whitelaw Reid (New York Herald Tribune).

  “Behind a façade of photographs”: John Osborne, “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,” Life, May 13, 1957.

  heads chopped off with a guillotine: A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 100; Appy, Patriots, p. 58.

  “Winston Churchill of Asia”: Langguth, Our Vietnam, pp. 131–32.

  “The peoples of Southeast Asia”: Wesley Fishel, “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule,” New Leader, November 2, 1959. For another classic pro-Diem article that both acknowledges and justifies his use of “many of the time-tested techniques of modern totalitarianism,” see William Henderson, “South Vietnam Finds Itself,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 35, no. 2 (January 1957), pp. 283–94.

  “Jesus Christ!”: Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 517.

  denied any responsibility: New York Times, November 2, 1963, p. 1.

  The Communist-led insurgency: See David Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

  despite Kennedy’s escalation: Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 89–104.

  a new form of criticism: William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New York: Crown, 1995).

  71 percent of Americans: Poll cited in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 300.

  The CIA’s Edward Lansdale: Cecil B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1998), pp. 156–61; Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 60–64.

  U.S. Inf
ormation Agency: Fisher, Dr. America, pp. 78–79; on Baker, see Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, p. 149. Daniel Redmond, a navy officer who knew Dooley and participated in Operation Passage to Freedom, also disputes Dooley’s atrocity stories. See Appy, Patriots, pp. 47–50. Another skeptical insider is Howard R. Simpson, Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952–1991 (New York: Brassey’s, 1992), p. 127.

  may not have realized: Fisher, Dr. America, pp. 48–49, 122, 196–97.

  a navy sting operation: Ibid., pp. 82–89.

  His Laotian project was supported: Ibid., pp. 95–102; Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (New York: Ballantine, 1994).

  “sob sisters”: David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), p. 151.

  American officials said: LBJ asked Leo Cherne, head of the International Rescue Committee, to go to Vietnam to support official claims that the refugees were escaping Communist aggression. New York Times, June 10, 1965, p. 5. For evidence that the U.S. policy was intended to generate refugees, see, for example, William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part 4 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 544–46.

  military operation called Cedar Falls: Jonathan Schell, The Real War: Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War (New York: Da Capo, 2000), p. 94.

  more than five million South Vietnamese: Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 569–70.

  “It became necessary”: The statement first appeared in an AP article by Peter Arnett on February 8, 1968.

  “destroy all of South Vietnam”: Jan Landon, “Kansas Was Bobby’s First Campaign Stop,” Topeka Capital-Journal, December 10, 2006.