Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  King was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, by a Southern white, James Earl Ray, who was driven on by the racial tensions which had poisoned Southern life for so long; so it can be said that he was martyred in the cause to which he had brought such great gifts and victories. His death – the death of a devoted, wise and eloquent man, who had a sure grasp of the essentials of the tragedy of his times, and who still had much to give his people, white as well as black – was a fearful loss. When the news of the murder hit the nation, 125 cities rose in an unparalleled outbreak of rage, grief and protest. It took 70,000 troops to suppress the rebellion; once more the people of the ghettoes fought, looted and burned; in particular they erupted across Washington, doing immense damage both to the city and to race relations. It was not a commemoration which King would have appreciated, nor did it do anybody any good, although Lyndon Johnson, with characteristic adroitness, used Martin Luther King’s death to push the Open Housing Act through Congress, as he had used Jack Kennedy’s to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Riot, arson and looting are poor substitutes for a decent standard of living. This was soon so universally accepted that the poor black population began to sink back into apathy, even while the black middle class increased in numbers, prosperity and status.

  The next ten years brought no more dramatic gains. It began to seem as if the Second Reconstruction had ended, like the first, with no more than partial success; it began to be feared that yet another century might run before a Third Reconstruction would at last give African-Americans everything in the way of hope and happiness to which they were as much entitled as their more fortunate white fellow-citizens. It was not very surprising that at the Howard University commencement ceremonies in 1978 Thurgood Marshall, once the leading counsel for NAACP, who had led for the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education and then became the first black Justice of the Supreme Court, commented in the grimmest terms on African-American prospects:

  Be careful of the people who say, ‘You’ve got it made. Take it easy. You don’t need any more help.’ Today we have reached the point where people say, ‘You’ve come a long way.’ But so have other people come a long way. Has the gap been getting smaller? No. It’s getting bigger. People say we’re better off today. Better off than what?… Don’t listen to that myth that [inequality] can be solved… or that it has already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved.

  Poverty and racism: America’s most urgent business was still unfinished.

  26 The Crisis of the New Order 1963–74

  Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!

  for you will need it,

  for the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Anyone trying to make sense of the story of the American people must notice, I think, that two themes persist. One is continuity: this is a nation which, born in the seventeenth century, has developed along one line ever since. The other is challenge and response: changing times have periodically required radical alterations in the organization of American life. The alterations have seldom or never come in time to avert great troubles, but come they have, so that the great experiment of American freedom has been enabled to continue. The Revolution, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, the Second World War: these were the stages by which the American people had evolved; the changes of course by which they avoided shipwreck.

  By 1963 nearly two decades had passed since the last of these creative transformations had been completed, and it is far from surprising that then, and in the years since, the new order created during the Roosevelt administrations began to show its imperfections as well as its permanent value. Furthermore, the toils of the Cold War, though inevitable, and justified by results, as communism was eventually discredited and the Soviet Union disappeared, did to a large extent distort the natural evolution of American society, and exacted some monstrous sacrifices which will not be forgotten for a long time and may never be wholly made good. The tragedy of Lyndon Johnson was that while he clearly understood the need for new departures in American domestic policy, he did not accept the even more urgent need for a radical overhaul of foreign policy. Still less did he understand, as Martin Luther King did, that radical change at home – programmes to rescue the country’s poor from desperation, for instance – were dependent on adjustments right across the board. He allowed himself to be imprisoned by the traditions and institutions of the forties and fifties and plunged the United States deep into war, disgrace, economic crisis and political disaster. Things got no better under his immediate successors. Not until outsiders captured the presidency in 1976 and 1980 – outsiders who, from very different points of view, despised the Washington establishment – did the United States begin once more to adjust to new times. The process was still incomplete by the end of the twentieth century; it was a very choppy one at times, even if the eventual outcome was on the whole beneficial to America; and the years between 1963 and 1974, the matter of this chapter, were a time of continual crisis.

  It is not true that people learn nothing from history: they are marvellous at learning the wrong lessons. So it must seem, at any rate, to most students of America’s war in Vietnam. The story runs like a ghastly parody of the post-1918 tragedy. Once more the American people, mastered by illusion, went down the path to disaster behind leaders even more darkened than themselves. Once more disaster took the form of war; only this time the usual horror of international conflict was deepened by the fact that it was war in the name of an obsolete view of the world and of America’s duty in it against peoples who were of the most marginal concern to the real interests of the United States. Against these unoffending strangers America hurled her fullest might, with frightful consequences. The episode was the worst stain on the national honour since slavery.

  America’s participation in the Indo-Chinese wars was a mistake with many roots, yet the most important single cause can be stated in a sentence. It was the failure to understand the nature and consequences of the great movement which dismantled the European empires. Obsessed with the Cold War, and imagining that all the rest of the world shared their obsession, American policy-makers and their supporters simply did not notice that reality was in large part organized round different concerns, and they forced such facts as could not be denied into their preconceptions, instead of modifying the preconceptions to fit the facts. In 1961 Soviet Russia and Red China were perceived as a united threat to the peace of the world and the liberty of the United States, and were likened to the German danger of the first half of the century. The steady divergence of Russian and Chinese policies was ignored, and when the two great communist powers began openly to quarrel experienced men could be heard warning that it was all a pretence to lull the West into false security. When either Russia or China showed an interest in a particular country or region, that was sufficient proof that an anti-American plot was hatching; and when, as in Indo-China, both powers showed an interest, it was self-evident that the United States was seriously threatened and must go actively to work to defend itself. The idea that a nationalist movement, such as that led against the French Empire in Indo-China by Ho Chi Minh, was exceedingly unlikely to let itself become the simple tool of Soviet or Chinese expansionism was often put forward, but Washington paid no attention to such arguments (which were amply vindicated by events after 1975). Ho Chi Minh, said Washington, was a communist; he was therefore a tool of the Kremlin; he was therefore an enemy of the United States. The syllogism was as perfect in form as it was worthless in content. It served as a substitute for thought in exactly the same way that the Kellogg-Briand pact had so served in the twenties and thirties. Woodrow Wilson would have denounced it as a bad old balance-of-power calculation. Theodore Roosevelt, one would like to think, would have denounced it as a balance-of-power miscalculation. Like isolationism, it rested on a deep unwillingness to accept that the world was never going to dance at Uncle Sam’s every whim or share his every prejudice.

  The French Empire in
Indo-China had been founded in the nineteenth century chiefly to annoy the British and the Germans. It was destroyed beyond possibility of restoration by the Japanese conquest in the Second World War. This was so clear at the time to men on the spot, and was so much in accord with the repeatedly affirmed policy of Franklin Roosevelt, who disliked all European imperialisms, that the American representatives in Indo-China collaborated quite closely with Ho Chi Minh at the end of the war, in the expectation that he would soon be recognized as the ruler of an independent Vietnam. The French, however, deemed otherwise. National vanity and national obstinacy bred in them the illusion that they could repossess Indo-China, and General de Gaulle, the head of the French government at the time (1944-6), committed his country to the attempt, which was persisted in even after the General’s sudden abdication in January 1946. His successors immediately came up against the problem which should have made them abandon the policy: France, shattered by the Second World War and its aftermath, was simply not strong enough to subdue her former subjects; nor was it clear what the French people would gain even if the impossible undertaking succeeded. Not for nine years, however, was any French government brave enough to acknowledge the inevitable. Instead ministers looked about for ways of entangling the United States, with its apparently limitless resources, in their enterprise.

  The American anti-colonial tradition was so strong, and the war in Indo-China was so exactly the sort of thing that George Washington’s Farewell Address had warned against, that the French could never have succeeded in their scheme, but for the Cold War. The Cold War unfortunately made it possible for the United States government to believe the message, constantly in French mouths, that the nationalist movement in Indo-China was simply another manifestation of’the international communist conspiracy’. Furthermore, co-operation in Indo-China was a small price to pay for getting French co-operation in Europe against Russia. The Truman administration also believed that the USSR was constantly probing the West’s will, and would, wherever it detected weakness, mount an offensive. So it was as important to stand firm in Indo-China as in Korea. This explains why, after the 1950 invasion of South Korea, Truman increased aid to the French. For if Stalin was foiled in Korea, he might, with his right hand so to speak, launch an assault in South-East Asia, unless deterred.

  So America before long became the chief supplier and paymaster for the French war-effort; but that was still not enough to bring victory. In 1954 the French suffered a complete and humiliating defeat at the siege of Dienbienphu, and it became clear that the game was up. A new French Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes-France, negotiated a more or less graceful withdrawal at a conference of the powers in Geneva. It was a splendid opportunity for the Americans to cut their losses like the French. Unfortunately John Foster Dulles did not see the occasion in those terms. He was depressed and indignant at the French admission of defeat, and at one time hoped to send in American troops as a replacement, or just to stiffen morale. This idea got no support from anyone except the more brutal American admirals and generals, and Dulles was reduced to an attempt to wreck the Geneva conference by a spectacular sulk (he even refused to shake hands with the Chinese premier, Chou En-Lai). The composure of the other participants (Britain, Russia and China, as well as the belligerents) survived his tantrums, and agreement was reached after a month of hard bargaining. To this agreement (known as the Geneva Accords) Dulles refused to put his name. He accepted it as a fait accompli, but thereafter lost no opportunity of sabotaging it. For instance, the Accords divided Vietnam into two parts, north and south, pending countrywide elections which were supposed to take place in 1956. Anti-communist Vietnamese fled south, communists fled north. Dulles made this unpromising situation worse by inciting the provisional administration of South Vietnam to refuse to participate in the elections, which were therefore not held; for the Secretary of State believed, no doubt correctly, that such elections would be won by Ho Chi Minh, and thus the communists would take over the whole of Vietnam, which Dulles was determined to prevent. He was convinced that South-East Asia was the Western alliance’s weak point and the object of special attention by the fiends in the Kremlin (Stalin was dead, but that made no difference to Dulles). As well as snuffing out the last faint hope that Vietnam could be unified peacefully, he set up a South-East Asia Treaty Organization on the model of NATO. The members, besides the United States, were Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines: they pledged themselves to defend each other against any attack, which might have embarrassed them if SEATO had ever amounted to anything solid. But like so many of Dulles’s schemes, it was only a castle in the air. It was neither a deterrent nor a defence.

  America was now deeply committed to resisting communism in Indo-China, but the point of no return was still some way ahead. This was in part due to President Eisenhower’s willingness to rein in John Foster Dulles. A common canard of the time showed Ike viewing the Presidency simply as an agreeable place in which to pass the early years of his retirement, with wonderful opportunities for golf. It was a grotesque exaggeration, but it conveyed a truth, as good caricature always does. Eisenhower had no great sense of mission; prudent passivity was more his line. This attitude left a lot to be desired in domestic affairs, but it had great advantages internationally. Unfortunately Ike was not consistent. He took the struggle against communism very seriously; not only did he permit the CIA to begin the planning which was to end so catastrophically in the Bay of Pigs, he also identified Indo-China as a region where the United States must, if necessary, resist the communists with its own military forces. If any one country of South-East Asia – Laos, for example – fell to the communists, all the rest would tumble over like a row of dominoes. When he met his successor, just before Kennedy’s inauguration, he said that the US should send troops into Laos, if necessary. Kennedy was appalled.

  Laos was only one of the unpleasant problems which the Kennedy administration inherited. To be sure, the ‘missile gap’ of which the Democrats had made much during the election campaign of 1960 turned out to be a fiction: the United States was vastly stronger than the Soviet Union in rocketry as in all other forms of sophisticated weaponry. But relations between America and Cuba were abysmal, and the communists were plainly gaining ground in both Laos and Vietnam. The story of the Kennedy administration’s struggle with the Cuban difficulty has already been told; its handling of Indo-China displayed the same mixture of shrewdness, idealism and misplaced energy. Laos, the new President soon realized, was beyond all but diplomatic aid; as a result an agreement was negotiated, on the sort of unsatisfactory, compromised, provisional basis which has been known to last for ever, which more or less froze the Laotian civil war. Although the settlement was soon undermined by United States action, it lasted until the collapse of South Vietnam a decade later. It was easy to hope that Kennedy would finesse the Vietnamese problem in the same way. Unhappily he did not see the cases as similar. He believed that the Eisenhower administration had needlessly alienated the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, and devoted most of such time as he could spare for Vietnam between 1961 and 1963 to reassuring Diem, or trying to. Besides, his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, encouraged him to believe that the problem was essentially a military one, and that for every military problem there was a military answer if you looked for it hard enough. For instance, British success in suppressing the communist guerrilla movement in Malaya during the 1950s was put down to superior training in jungle warfare – superior, that is, to anything which the Americans practised; accordingly a new corps was set up, the so-called Green Berets, which followed the British model. Kennedy was infatuated with this invention, and his ghost must have been pleased to see a Green Beret among the sentinels round his coffin during his lying-in-state; but even if counter-insurgency forces were truly the means to victory in South Vietnam, which is anything but certain, the American armed services were far too conservative in doctrine to give them a fair chance. What the admira
ls and generals (of the army and air force) believed in was fire-power: they were always anxious to recommend the use of nuclear weapons. They continued in that belief to the end. So Kennedy’s hopes for the Green Berets were misplaced; and it was folly to think that hugely increasing the number of American ‘advisers’ in Vietnam would be very helpful either: ‘advisers’, led by General Stilwell, had never been able to achieve much with Chiang Kai-shek during the Second World War, or after it either. President Diem was very like Chiang, and eventually Kennedy recognized that the problem was essentially political. Diem was an unmanageable ally, an incompetent ruler, and a hopeless commander in war. In the summer of 1963, when Diem’s great unpopularity with his people at last became undeniable, Kennedy realized that he was groping in a minefield in the dark. He acquiesced in a coup against Diem, but was horrified when that resulted in Diem’s murder. His own murder came three weeks later. All he had achieved in Vietnam was to lose time and deepen the American commitment. Yet it is only fair to add that the point of no return had still not been passed at the time of his death.