American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  “The reasons why we went into Vietnam: George C. Herring, ed., The Pentagon Papers: Abridged Edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), pp. 138–39.

  “unzipped his fly”: Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson and His Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 491. The story was told to Dallek in a letter from Daniel M. Giat. Giat, in turn, was told the story by Arthur Goldberg. Giat wrote the screenplay for Path to War, a TV movie about LBJ’s Vietnam War decision making.

  “Johnson would knock on my door”: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 252–53.

  Ideas about gender: Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000); for an early analysis of how some Vietnam veterans rejected older models of masculinity, see Robert J. Lifton, Home from the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).

  “On the Rainy River”: O’Brien, The Things They Carried, pp. 37–58.

  “I’m not going to waste the rest of my life feeling guilty”: Bird, The Color of Truth, p. 401.

  “Credibility Gap”: Stephen L. Vaughn, ed., Encyclopedia of American Journalism (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 123.

  “I call it the Madman Theory”: H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 122.

  Operation Duck Hook: Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 158–70.

  turned the White House into an armed fortress: Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), pp. 352–95.

  “Let us also be united against defeat”: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2303&st=&st1=.

  greatest outpouring of protest: Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, pp. 247–50.

  “we live in an age of anarchy”: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2490&st=&st1=.

  repeatedly watched Patton: Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 199–200, 210–11.

  CHAPTER FOUR: VIETNAM, INC.

  Governors’ Conference in Seattle: This text comes from the New York Times, August 5, 1953. In Eisenhower’s presidential papers, the text has been edited with an eye to greater clarity: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9663&st=&st1=.

  “The [Malayan] peninsula”: In the filmed version of this passage, most readily seen in the documentary Hearts and Minds, Eisenhower does not say “Malayan peninsula.” Instead he says something that sounds like “Incrop” or “Encraw” Peninsula. The official papers of the president have made it the Malayan Peninsula. That makes sense given the reference to tin and tungsten. Malaya was a far more important source of those products than Indochina.

  Vietnam’s “primitive economy”: America’s Stake in Vietnam, pp. 22–23.

  triangular trade that bolstered global capitalism: Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 49–69, 141–64.

  “two halves of the same walnut”: Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), p. 52.

  It required trading partners: Rotter, The Path to Vietnam, pp. 127–140. For the importance of economic planning and regulation in Japan, see Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982).

  “the keystone of United States policy in the Far East”: The Pentagon Papers, vol. 1, p. 450.

  “Economic expansion is the driving force”: Cited in James Peck, Washington’s China: The National Security World, the Cold War, and the Origins of Globalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), p. 42.

  “We want nothing for ourselves”: Lyndon Johnson, “Peace Without Conquest,” April 7, 1965, http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650407.asp.

  “empire for liberty”: Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). As Immerman points out, Jefferson eventually changed his original formulation from “empire of liberty” to “empire for liberty.”

  It predated the Berlin Blockade: See, for example, Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006).

  Commercial Import Program: The Commercial Import Program is sometimes referred to as the Commodity Import Program.

  Here’s how it worked: Kahin, Intervention, pp. 85–88; David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–61 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 156–57; James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 75–79.

  Ky getting $15,000 a week: See William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962–1968 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1989), p. 265.

  A typical story in this genre: Life, February 25, 1966, pp. 49–52.

  confidence in the effectiveness of aerial warfare: Significantly, Rostow did not take part in the post–World War II study that evaluated the effectiveness of Allied bombing (the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey). That study raised many doubts about the ability of strategic bombing to dampen the political morale and commitment of opponents. On Rostow’s early life, see David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), pp. 15–40.

  Rostow’s book received admiring reviews: Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Many modernization theorists, like Rostow, were also great believers in American exceptionalism. That posed a tricky philosophical problem. If the U.S. is exceptional, how can its ideas and institutions be exported? People like David Potter (People of Plenty, 1954) and Rostow resolved the conundrum by identifying abundance as the factor that most explained America’s exceptional history and created the conditions for unparalleled democracy, opportunity, and political stability. Thus, if abundance, through economic growth, could be reproduced elsewhere, “exceptionalism” might be exportable. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 66–68.

  “crude act of international vandalism”: Cited in ibid., p. 197.

  “Walt writes faster than I can read”: Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 158. Also Mark H. Haefele, “Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth: Ideas and Action,” in David C. Engerman et al., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), pp. 88–97.

  Toward the Good Life: Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000), pp. 180–81.

  “useless—worse than useless”: The Hilsman quotation comes from an interview that was done for episode 11 of The Cold War, produced by CNN in 1998. Hilsman believed the program had failed but only because it had not been executed as he recommended. He believed the Ngo family had corrupted the program by building the strategic hamlets in a scattered fashion as opposed to an “ink blot” growing outward. Hilsman does not address the inherent problems caused by forced relocation; http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/hilsman1.html.

  “ruthless projection to the peasantry”: Latham, Modernization as Ideology, p. 176.

  “a wholesome and not unexpected phase”: The satire is reprinted in Robert Manning and Michael Janeway, eds., Who We Are: An Atlantic Chronicle of the United States and Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown Books, 1969), pp. 41–46.

 
“We and the Southeast Asians used those ten years”: Kim Willenson, The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (New York: New American Library, 1987), p. 390.

  Huntington had quibbles: On Huntington’s critique of modernization theory, see Nils Gilman, “Modernization Theory, The Highest Stage of American Intellectual Growth,” in Engerman et al., Staging Growth, pp. 62–66.

  “forced-draft urbanization”: Samuel Huntington, “The Bases of Accommodation,” Foreign Affairs, July 1968. Available online at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/23988/samuel-p-huntington/the-bases-of-accommodation.

  bomb Vietnam into the future: Latham, Modernization as Ideology, p. 151.

  “There were all these wonderful jobs”: Appy, Patriots, pp. 319–21.

  “students at Saigon’s teacher training college”: Don Luce and John Sommer, Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 286.

  had to import its major crop: FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, p. 466.

  “I want to leave the footprints of America”: Gardner, Pay Any Price, p. 197.

  pushing to get “cheap TV sets” into Vietnam: See U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 4, Vietnam, document 79, February 19, 1966, and document 86, February 26, 1966; Gardner, Pay Any Price, p. 299. FRUS documents are available online at: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v06/ch4.

  “Ports a-Go-Go”: Richard Tregaskis, Southeast Asia: Building the Bases (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 224–28.

  nine million cans of beer and soft drinks: Time, December 24, 1965.

  Theft and corruption: New York Times, August 21, 1966; Dan Briody, The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money (New York: Wiley, 2004), pp. 165–66.

  base . . . at Dong Tam: Tregaskis, Southeast Asia: Building the Bases, pp. 292–94; Meredith H. Lair, Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 73.

  eleven million tons of asphalt: Lair, Armed with Abundance, p. 71; Tregaskis, Southeast Asia, p. 2; Reagan quotation cited in Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), p. 163.

  “Riddle the son-of-a-bitch!”: Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), p. 58.

  died while swimming: Tregaskis died on August 15, 1973, at age fifity-six. Initial reports said he had drowned, but an autopsy showed that the cause of death was a heart attack. His papers are at Boston University; http://www.bu.edu/dbin/archives/index.php.

  “Never before in history”: Tregaskis, Southeast Asia, p. 1.

  “Whatever the outcome of the war”: Time, January 7, 1966.

  an astounding quantity of American goods: Lair, Armed with Abundance; on the Camp Enari PX, see p. 151.

  “massage parlors” and “steam baths”: Heather Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 58–59, 91–92, 162–77.

  “25-acre sprawl of ‘boom-boom parlors’”: Time, May 6, 1966.

  a consortium of large American construction firms: Robert Bryce, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 106.

  RMK-BRJ employed: New York Times, May 26, 1966. See also Victor Perlo, The Vietnam Profiteers (New York: New Outlook, 1966), p. 20.

  Brown & Root rose to preeminence: Robert A. Caro, Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 461–64; Joseph A. Pratt and Christopher J. Castaneda, Builders: Herman and George R. Brown (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1999), p. 52. The Mansfield Dam was originally called the Marshall Ford Dam.

  “Landslide Lyndon”: Robert Caro, Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 2 (New York: Knopf, 1990).

  Vietnam contracts caused Brown & Root to double in size: Carter, Inventing Vietnam, pp. 157–59, 173, 239; Bryce, Cronies, p. 109.

  Brown & Root won a contract: Holmes Brown and Don Luce, Hostages of War (Indochina Mobile Education Project, 1973), Appendix B, p. 43. Pratt and Castaneda, Builders, pp. 240–41, These authors accept the claim that the new prisons were more humane. The evidence hints that the new cells were intended for one person—“isolation cells”—but in practice, as Brown and Luce argue, they were used for multiple prisoners and were therefore even worse than the original cells.

  more jobs available: Dean Baker, Robert Pollin, and Elizabeth Zahart, “The Vietnam War and the Political Economy of Full Employment,” Challenge, May–June 1996.

  “the Vietnam War is bad business”: New York Times, June 21, 1969, p. 54. Marriner Eccles, “Vietnam—Its Effect on the Nation,” Vital Speeches, September 15, 1967. For Eccles on aggression, see http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/utah_today/utahandthevietnamconflict.html.

  “The thrust of my testimony”: “Impact of the War in Southeast Asia on the U.S. Economy,” Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, 91st Congress, 2nd Sess., April 15, 1970, p. 3.

  “Cowardly little bums”: New York Times, February 27, 1970; Time, March 9, 1970.

  forty more attempts to damage: Steven V. Roberts, “For Bombers and Critics, It’s a Favorite Enemy Now,” New York Times, May 16, 1971.

  The war, he argued, hurt profits: “Impact of the War . . . on the U.S. Economy,” p. 12.

  a new “Asian tiger”: “Rising from the Ashes: Can Free Markets Turn Vietnam into a Tiger?” Business Week, November 29, 1993, pp. 100–108; “Vietnam: Business Rushes to Get In,” Fortune, April 5, 1993, p. 98.

  Trade with the United States: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5520.html.

  Nike’s sweatshop labor: For an example of some of this criticism, see Bob Herbert, “In America,” New York Times, March 28, 1997.

  Air Jordan, the sneakers: http://sneakernews.com/air-jordan-brand-jordan/air-jordan-13/.

  “The purpose . . . is to attract companies”: Saigon Times Weekly, January 27, 2011.

  CHAPTER FIVE: OUR BOYS

  They also turned to their televisions: Vaughn, ed., Encyclopedia of American Journalism, p. 242.

  Robert Kennedy made the call: New York Times, November 26, 1963; http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Green-Berets.aspx.

  The media relished the . . . training: See, for example, “The American Guerrillas,” Time, March 10, 1961.

  “Harvard Ph.D.’s of warfare”: Joseph Kraft, “Hot Weapon in the Cold War,” Saturday Evening Post, April 28, 1962, pp. 87–91. John Hellmann has an insightful analysis of popular responses to the Green Berets in American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 41–50, as does Alasdair Spark, “The Soldier at the Heart of the War: The Myth of the Green Beret in the Popular Culture of the Vietnam Era,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 18, no. 1 (April 1984), pp. 29–48.

  As Time effused: Time, March 10, 1961.

  denied permission to wear . . . berets: Ibid., August 22, 1969.

  “a badge of courage”: Ibid., June 25, 1965.

  “a new generation of Americans”: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8032.

  seventy-three million Americans: Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers, 1995), p. 114; James Maguire, Impresario: The Life and Times of Ed Sullivan (New York: Billboard Books, 2006).

  On January 30, 1966, . . . The Ed Sullivan Show: http://www.tv.com/shows/the-ed-sullivan-show/january-30-1966-the-four-tops-dinah-shore-jos-feliciano-ssgt-barry-sadler-107866/; for Sadler’s performance on the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5WJJVSE_BE.

  “The Ballad of the Green Berets” . . . number one pop song: James E. Perone, Songs of the Vietnam Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), pp. 82–85.

 
Many peace activists considered: See R. Serge Denisoff, “Protest Movements: Class Consciousness and the Propaganda Song,” Sociological Quarterly, vol. 9, 1968, pp. 228–47; R. Serge Denisoff, “Fighting Prophecy With Napalm: ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets,’” Journal of American Culture, Spring 1990, pp. 81–93.

  resisted such clear-cut labels: James Perone reports that “it was not unheard of [among folk revival performers] for a musician to sing ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’ at the same performance as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ or ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’” Perone, Songs of the Vietnam Conflict, p. 83.

  Jim Morrison . . . defied Ed Sullivan: Stephen Davis, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend (New York: Gotham, 2005), pp. 203–5.

  Within the military . . . countercultural music: Brian Mattmiller, “‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’: Music, Memory and the Vietnam War,” University of Wisconsin-Madison News, February 16, 2006. Based on an interview with Craig Werner and Doug Bradley about their manuscript “We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Music, Survival, Healing and the Soundtrack of Vietnam.” Manuscript in author’s possession.

  The two works reinforced each other: John Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, p. 54.

  “was credited with several kills”: Time, June 25, 1965.

  “Fiction Stranger Than Fact!”: Hanson W. Baldwin, “Book on U.S. Forces in Vietnam Stirs Army Ire,” New York Times, May 29, 1965.

  “hands tied behind their backs”: Robin Moore, The Green Berets (New York: Crown, 1965), pp. 29, 49–50, 184–85; Reagan quotation: http://www.presidency .ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43454.

  “serving the cause of freedom”: Moore, The Green Berets, p. 339; Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 230–31.

  lousy little dirty bug-outs: Moore, The Green Berets, p. 69, “brown bandit,” p. 36, “assorted thieves,” p. 104.

  “pinned him, squirming”: Ibid., pp. 61, 119.

  Bernie Arklin: Moore calls this story “Home to Nanette,” ibid., pp. 164–222.