Though a growing number of whites agreed that there was a “Negro problem,” few perceived that racism was deeply entrenched in white-controlled institutions and culture. There was even less acknowledgment that all people of color, including Asians, were the targets of racial hostility. Anti-Asian racism had been stoked by decades of “yellow peril” imagery in which hordes of nameless, indistinguishable Asians—often depicted as rodents, apes, or reptiles—threatened white America. The knife was sharpened by three American wars in Asia—against Filipinos at the turn of the century, Japanese in World War II, and North Koreans and Chinese in the Korean War.
In light of those realities, many Americans must have been relieved by Michener’s claim that Asians would love to be “adopted” by Americans. Also reassuring were press reports from Japan during America’s postwar occupation (1945–1952) promoting the idea that wartime hostilities had evolved into a warm teacher-student alliance. And South Pacific suggested that racial prejudice was unnatural and easily overcome. As one of the musical’s best-known songs put it, you had to be “carefully taught” to hate and fear people “whose eyes are oddly made” or have skin of a “different shade.” Nellie showed how easy it was to dispense with all that piffle.
In many corners of post–World War II culture, Americans were encouraged to care about Asia and the Pacific. Books like Deliver Us From Evil (1956), The Ugly American (1958), and Hawaii (1959), long-running musicals like South Pacific and The King and I, and numerous films, articles, and travel accounts all told compelling stories that raised public awareness of these distant lands. More than that, they suggested that Americans should be concerned about Asia not just because it harbored the threat of Communism, but because humanitarian commitments overseas exemplified the nation’s highest ideals; they were a fulfillment of our national destiny.
What happened to that vision? It didn’t die in 1961 with Tom Dooley, but it was soon eviscerated by the escalating war in Vietnam. By 1965, Dooley himself was well on his way toward historical obscurity, and by the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, about the only thing most Americans could remember about “Tom Dooley” was an old Kingston Trio song of the same name, which began, “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley.” Worse still, the song wasn’t even about Dr. Dooley; it was about a nineteenth-century murderer. But before Dooley could be forgotten he had to be discredited.
In the early 1960s, when the number of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam was still below fifteen thousand and fewer than a hundred of them had died, a small but committed opposition to American policy began to develop. Its first significant actions focused less on petitions and protests and more on something less dramatic: research. All social movements require information and analysis, but it was especially crucial to the early anti–Vietnam War movement because the mass media generally supported official claims about the distant war and its necessity. From today’s vantage point, with critical evidence readily available on the Internet, it is hard to recall a time when finding and distributing information that fundamentally challenged the government required so much effort. The three TV networks offered only fifteen minutes of nightly news (CBS was the first to move to thirty minutes in September 1963). Dissenting views rarely made it into those broadcasts, and the major newspapers and magazines also tended to reinforce the stated objectives of U.S. foreign policy. For critical analysis, you had to read small-circulation magazines or newsletters that most Americans had never heard about, such as The Nation, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and, in the mid-1960s, Ramparts.
Ramparts magazine was founded in 1962 as a liberal Catholic quarterly, but by 1965 it had become an important organ of New Left opinion. The young radicals of the New Left believed postwar liberals were essentially indistinguishable from conservatives—too slow to support civil rights and other domestic reforms at home and too eager to embrace militant Cold War policies overseas. They also rejected (at least until the late 1960s) the doctrinaire, undemocratic traditions of the Communist “Old Left” and called for an expansion of “participatory democracy” to give citizens a greater voice in everything, including the shaping of foreign policy in the nuclear age.
Ramparts ran its first major article on Vietnam in January 1965. Written by Robert Scheer, it was called “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley.” The main point was to demonstrate that Dooley’s vision of idealistic Americans saving South Vietnam was fraudulent. Though Scheer did not question Dooley’s “well-meaning” motives, he argued that the doctor was nonetheless a “master publicist” of government lies and distortions about Vietnam. Dooley had given Americans the false impression that Vietnam was mostly a Catholic country. Equally deceitful was his suggestion that most Vietnamese were hostile toward the Viet Minh—the revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh who defeated France. In fact, most Vietnamese viewed the Viet Minh as patriotic heroes.
But Scheer had much bigger fish to fry than Dooley. In his telling, America moved into Vietnam not to rescue a suffering majority of that country’s poor, but to prop up a tiny elite against the wishes of the masses. He found much of his evidence hidden in plain sight, information that had been ignored or explained away by most of the media. For example, he quoted Dwight Eisenhower’s 1963 memoir in which the former president wrote: “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that, had elections been held at the time of the fighting [against France], possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.” This view was published even earlier in a 1955 Look magazine article by Leo Cherne, a founder of American Friends of Vietnam, who expressed concern that “if elections were held today, the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese would vote Communist.”
These statements stood in flat contradiction to the dominant public claim that Communists could only seize all of Vietnam through subversion, terror, and military support from China and Russia. Here were the former president (Eisenhower) and one of the strongest public supporters of the American-backed government in South Vietnam (Leo Cherne) admitting that the Communists could have won at the ballot box; that Ho Chi Minh was supported in the South as well as the North. It was not the Reds who had made elections impossible, but the United States and Diem. It was the Diem government, with U.S. encouragement, that refused to hold the nationwide elections promised by the Geneva Accords. The nation that had proclaimed itself the leader of the Free World, a supporter of self-determination and democracy everywhere, had forced the Vietnamese majority who supported Ho Chi Minh to find other means besides the democratic process to achieve their political goals.
Just as shocking, Scheer (and his sometime coauthor Warren Hinckle) argued that Ngo Dinh Diem was essentially handpicked by the United States to be the leader of South Vietnam. Diem was a devout Catholic bachelor, and his popular support in Vietnam was “minuscule,” but he gained the crucial support of a small group of prominent Americans even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu. From 1950 to 1954, while his nation was mired in a bloody war, Diem was mostly overseas, much of the time in the United States, where he often stayed at the Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York. From there the “absentee aristocrat” met and impressed Cardinal Francis Spellman, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Senators John Kennedy and Mike Mansfield. These men, along with dozens of lesser known but influential people such as Edward Lansdale, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., General William Donovan, Henry Luce, Leo Cherne, Joseph Buttinger, Harold Oram, Wesley Fishel, Angier Biddle Duke, Congresswoman Edna Kelly, and Congressman Walter Judd, formed what Ramparts dubbed the Vietnam Lobby, a politically diverse and loose-knit group, most of whom became members of the American Friends of Vietnam when it formed in 1955.
They believed Diem could establish a popular, anti-Communist government because he had only served the French briefly, and never in the military. But that meant little in a land that gave the greatest patriotic credentials to those who had actively opposed
foreign invaders. Diem did not fight for the French, but he had not fought against them.
That key distinction did not deter the Vietnam Lobby. It launched an impressive public relations campaign to promote Diem as a nationalist reformer who would stand up to Communism without the stigma of colonial masters calling his shots. By the time the French were defeated in 1954, Diem’s name was on the lips of everyone shaping U.S. policy in the region. The U.S. government successfully pushed to have him appointed prime minister of South Vietnam. A year later he became president in a referendum guaranteed to produce an all but unanimous “election.”
The Vietnam Lobby was not primarily responsible for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. That distinction belongs to Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who were already committed to building a non-Communist state in South Vietnam. But the lobby did play a key role in sustaining U.S. support for Ngo Dinh Diem, especially during his rocky first year when some U.S. officials were scouting around for a possible replacement.
Once Diem consolidated his power over a variety of rival non-Communist sects in the spring of 1955, the Vietnam Lobby and the U.S. government practically competed over who could offer the most over-the-top praise. The pinnacle of official adulation for Diem came in May 1957, when he made a state visit to the United States. He was given a red carpet airport greeting by Eisenhower, a twenty-one-gun salute, a standing ovation by a joint session of Congress, a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and a banquet presided over by publishing magnate Henry Luce and attended by John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst Jr., and Senators Mansfield and Kennedy.
The press did little more than echo the kudos. “Brave,” “courageous,” “devout,” “incorruptible,” “freedom-loving,” “miracle worker”—the praise for Diem was so lavish his American publicist, Harold Oram, should have raised his $3,000 monthly fee. Oram’s job was pretty easy, since five media moguls were members of American Friends of Vietnam.
Beneath the stirring headlines, however, some of the brutal realities of Diem’s rule occasionally leaked through. For example, a Life magazine article (“The Tough Miracle Man of South Vietnam”) began with what had become a standard account of “the miracles he has wrought”—establishing “order from chaos,” initiating “reform,” saving Vietnam from “national suicide.” Yet the article goes on to offer a stunning revelation: “Behind a façade of photographs, flags and slogans there is a grim structure of decrees, ‘re-education centers,’ secret police. . . . Ordinance No. 6, signed and issued by Diem in January 1956, provides that ‘individuals considered dangerous to national defense and common security may be confined on executive order’ in a ‘concentration camp.’”
This level of candor about U.S. support for an authoritarian regime was rare in mass-circulation publications. Few Americans were aware of Diem’s harsh rule, or that it became even more draconian in 1959 with the creation of roving tribunals that traveled the countryside and summarily executed anyone regarded as a threat to national security. South Vietnamese papers had photographs of the executions showing people getting their heads chopped off with a guillotine. Diem wanted people to know what was in store for them if they rebelled. In the United States, no such photographs appeared. Even as evidence against Diem mounted—his dictatorial rule, his repression of dissent, his discrimination against non-Catholics, his unpopularity—most of it stayed out of the headlines. As late as 1961, Vice President Lyndon Johnson called Diem “the Winston Churchill of Asia.” When a journalist asked Johnson if he really believed in that comparison, LBJ replied, “Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there.”
Those who championed Diem as pro-democracy had to twist logic and language beyond the breaking point. “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule” was the Orwellian title of a 1959 New Leader article written by Wesley Fishel, a Michigan State political scientist who helped train Diem’s secret police. Fishel claimed that Diem had a democratic “vision,” but it would take time to implement. Diem’s dictatorial powers would provide the stability necessary for democracy to evolve. At bottom, the argument rested on the claim that the Vietnamese were not “ready” for democracy. They were too “immature.” As Fishel put it, “The peoples of Southeast Asia are not, generally speaking, sufficiently sophisticated to understand what we mean by democracy.”
The blanket of propaganda that hid Diem’s failure to gain popular support ripped open in June 1963 when a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, burned himself to death on a Saigon street. Journalist Malcolm Browne’s photograph of the immolation circled the globe. It showed the robed monk, with shaved head, sitting perfectly upright, legs crossed in the lotus position, engulfed in flames. “Jesus Christ!” President Kennedy exclaimed as he viewed the photograph on the front page of the New York Times.
Thich Quang Duc’s self-sacrifice was an indelible protest against Ngo Dinh Diem. It symbolized the much larger Buddhist uprising against a regime that reserved high office for Diem’s own family and other Catholics, and discriminated against the Buddhist majority. Americans may already have known that Diem’s rule was threatened in the countryside by a Communist-led insurgency. But now a mass audience was learning that Diem was also opposed by nonviolent Buddhists. Obvious questions arose. Why is the United States supporting a ruler hated by monks? What had Diem done to inspire such extreme protest? How could this happen after eight years of American aid and military support?
Five more monks immolated themselves that summer and fall, keeping media attention on the Buddhist uprising and Diem’s effort to repress it by storming hundreds of temples, killing dozens, and imprisoning thousands.
On November 1, 1963, Diem was overthrown by a junta of his own military officers. Diem and his brother were thrown in the back of an armored personnel carrier with their hands tied behind their backs. Then they were murdered. South Vietnam’s “miracle man” was shot in the back of the head. The Kennedy administration denied any responsibility for the coup. In fact, the president had authorized it. He directed the Central Intelligence Agency and American ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, to assure the plotting generals that the United States would approve their seizure of power and would give them the support that had once belonged to Diem. Kennedy did not order Diem’s murder, but he should not have been shocked when it happened. The history of military coups is not noted for its nonviolence.
Kennedy soured on Diem partly because he was dictatorial and unpopular. But he was mostly concerned that Diem had failed to crush the Communist-led insurgency. In fact, the White House was worried that Diem’s brother Nhu might be negotiating some kind of accommodation with the Communists. Near the end, Washington found Diem not too tyrannical, but too weak. Perhaps a military junta would do a better job. And so the generals were given the green light to move against the man America had supported for eight years.
The Communist-led insurgency would continue to attack each new American “puppet” government in Saigon. The insurgency first emerged in the South and had roots in the anticolonial war against France. From 1954 to 1959 its supporters focused on political organizing, building ideological commitment to the cause of reuniting Vietnam under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. But by 1959, these southern revolutionaries began to take up arms against the American-backed government. They viewed the United States as a neocolonial power—not an old-school colonial power like France that ruled directly but a new (“neo”) kind of imperialist that dominated small countries indirectly through proxy governments like Diem’s.
The southern guerrillas called themselves the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (under the political authority of the National Liberation Front), but were soon dubbed the Viet Cong by an American public relations officer eager to find a name that branded all the insurgents as Communists (Viet Cong means Vietnamese Communist). While the Viet Cong was Communist-led, it did include non-Communist elements. Over time the southern guerrillas began to receive increasi
ng support from Communist North Vietnam. Beginning in 1959, small numbers of North Vietnamese Army troops moved south to support the insurgency. As the United States escalated the war, hundreds of thousands of these uniformed regular army troops poured into the South. However, in the early 1960s, with little northern support, the southern insurgency came very close to victory.
Indeed, despite Kennedy’s escalation of U.S. military personnel (from 800 in 1961 to 16,700 in 1963), economic aid (from $250 million to $400 million per year), and arms (helicopters, fighter jets, napalm, chemical defoliants), by 1963 many U.S. policymakers privately concluded that Saigon was losing the war to the Viet Cong. That was the reality that moved Washington to abandon Diem.
With the decline and fall of Diem, a new form of criticism appeared in the mainstream U.S. media. Journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan began to document the many failures of American policy. It wasn’t working nearly as well as senior officials publicly claimed. For all the U.S. support and training, the South Vietnamese military was poorly motivated and incompetent. The government was corrupt and widely despised. The Viet Cong, by contrast, were tenacious and skillful. Yet even the most critical mainstream journalists did not challenge the underlying legitimacy of American intervention. Virtually everyone agreed that it was right for the United States to try to “save” South Vietnam. The only debate was over which tactics might achieve that goal.
What made the mid-1960s articles in Ramparts, Viet-Report, and I. F. Stone’s Weekly so path-breaking were their fundamental challenges to U.S. intervention in Vietnam. U.S. policy was not merely failing, they argued, but fraudulent and unjust. The United States was not supporting democracy and self-determination. In fact, it had opposed the popular will of the Vietnamese, first by giving massive support to France’s bloody war to preserve imperial control (1946–1954) and then with the cancellation of nationwide elections in 1956 and its intervention to build a permanent, non-Communist South Vietnam.
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 4
