Gellhorn went to one publisher after another, pleading in vain to be sent to Vietnam. It is “the only work I want to do,” she wrote a friend. “But nobody wants it; I am plainly too old.” Whether it was her age, her gender, her public criticism of the war, or all three, no American publisher would hire her. Finally, the Manchester Guardian in Britain agreed to publish her articles if she would pay for the trip to Vietnam. She went.
To the resistant publishers, it did not matter that Martha Gellhorn had reported on war from eight countries, starting with the Spanish Civil War in 1937. It did not matter that she had made an amphibious landing on Omaha Beach at Normandy two days after D-day in 1944 amid a still dangerous and chaotic scene in which she helped carry wounded soldiers to a beached LST. To do so, she had stowed away on a hospital ship, locked herself in a toilet stall, and jumped into a landing craft. These daring moves were necessary not only because women reporters were officially denied access to the front lines, but also because her magazine, Collier’s, had given her press credential to a famous male writer—her husband, Ernest Hemingway. Almost a year later, in May 1945, Gellhorn reported from Dachau, Nazi Germany’s oldest concentration camp.
Few Americans had Gellhorn’s firsthand exposure to the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, but most shared her conviction that World War II had taught a clear lesson: Never again should a regime like Hitler’s be allowed to expand its power and exercise its aggression.
This lesson was easy to proclaim—Never again!—but much harder to enact. It raised more questions than it answered. How do you identify “another Hitler”? What policy can reliably prevent such a monstrous force from gaining ground? How do you know when an initial act of aggression signals the rise of a state as bent on conquest as Nazi Germany? Is diplomacy always an inadequate response to powerful enemies? And isn’t the specter of “another Hitler” a convenient means for U.S. leaders to justify unprovoked attacks against proclaimed “enemies” who do not actually threaten our security? These questions divided Americans throughout the Cold War. They divide us still.
The once unifying legacy of World War II eventually became bitterly divisive in large part because many cold warriors equated Hitler’s genocidal Fascism to every imaginable manifestation of “Communism.” In the early days of the Cold War, that linkage was made explicit when the term “Red Fascism” was used to describe Communism. It was also commonplace for American leaders to claim that Communism was an interconnected, monolithic threat, masterminded from the Soviet Union and devoted to global conquest. Every form it took was therefore regarded as dangerous—whether it cropped up in Western European electoral politics, in revolutionary movements in Greece and Indochina, or among a group of accused “Reds” in Hollywood.
And just as Fascism had advanced “while England slept,” as Winston Churchill put it, Cold War Americans heard countless warnings that Communism was rapidly metastasizing without sufficient alarm or opposition. The World War II lesson included a sharp self-rebuke for ignoring Hitler’s rise. The West had not only “slept,” but actually stimulated Hitler’s rapacious appetite by “appeasing” him; by passively accepting his blatant acts of aggression, first in 1936 when he moved troops into the Rhineland (in violation of the Versailles Treaty), then in 1937 when he bombed Republican Spain in support of General Francisco Franco, and again in 1938 when he annexed Austria. In September 1938, Hitler met with French and British leaders at a conference in Munich and demanded Germany’s right to claim yet more territory—the Sudetenland (a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia).
In Munich, Hitler promised that he only wanted this one more piece of territory. If he had the Sudetenland, his goals would be achieved, he would go no farther. The French and British accepted his word. A settlement was reached. Hitler would take the Sudetenland and a second world war would be avoided. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned home and bragged that the Munich Agreement had achieved “peace for our time.” Within months the “peace” collapsed. Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Then on September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland. The carnage of World War II began. For decades to come American foreign policy makers believed they had learned a profound lesson—the lesson of Munich. Because Hitler betrayed the agreement, “Munich” became a one-word curse, a synonym for surrender, a symbol of appeasement. Munich, they believed, proved that diplomacy cannot be trusted to placate aggressors. Force is the only “language” they understand.
In April 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower invoked this lesson with one of its major popularizers—British prime minister Winston Churchill. Eisenhower wanted Britain to join the United States in a last-ditch effort to save the French in Indochina. At the time, French forces were desperately under siege at Dien Bien Phu. America was already paying 78 percent of the cost of France’s failing war, but the Communist-led Viet Minh were winning their anticolonial struggle nonetheless. Eisenhower was thinking of ordering air strikes against the Viet Minh—but he wanted Churchill’s support. In a letter to the prime minister, he suggested that standing by while France lost Indochina would be akin to sleeping while Fascism advanced: “We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?”
One might have expected Churchill to buy the Hitler–Viet Minh connection. After all, in 1946, at a Missouri college, Churchill had famously denounced the Soviet Union for expanding its control into Eastern Europe and sealing it off with an “iron curtain.” Communism, he warned, presented the same threat of conquest posed by Hitler: “We must not let it happen again.” But to Churchill in 1954, the peace talks in Geneva were not like the 1938 talks in Munich. Global security did not require saving a French colony, even to the Communists. The Viet Minh were not a Hitler-like threat.
A few days after Eisenhower’s failed attempt to persuade Churchill, the president explained the domino theory to journalists. A loss of Indochina to Communist rebels, he claimed, would inevitably lead to the loss of all of Southeast Asia: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” The domino theory grew directly out of the “Munich analogy.” Aggressors like Hitler want to conquer the world and unless that aggression is opposed, one country after another will fall under their sway.
Congress wasn’t buying it any more than Churchill, at least not as a convincing justification to escalate U.S. support for France in a war many believed was doomed. On April 6, 1954, for example, Senator John Kennedy spoke against U.S. military intervention:
The time has come for the American people to be told the blunt truth about Indochina. . . . [T]o pour money, materiel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. . . . I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere . . . [and] which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.
And the American people weren’t buying it. A Gallup poll in April 1954 found that 68 percent opposed direct U.S. military intervention to support the French. In Illinois, an American Legion division with 78,000 members passed a resolution demanding that the government “refrain from dispatching any of its Armed Forces to participate as combatants in the fighting in Indochina.”
American resistance stemmed in large part from the recent experience of the Korean War. That stalemated and costly war had just ended the previous fall, leaving 33,000 Americans dead. There was little public protest against the Korean War, but opinion polls indicated widespread disillusionment. Throughout most of the war, 40–50 percent of Americans said their country had made a mistake “going into war in Korea.” That level of opposition is especially remarkable since it coincided with the hey
day of McCarthyism—an era in which all forms of dissent were routinely branded “un-American.”
The Korean War was disillusioning even to the military brass. Although the initial goal of containing North Korea at the 38th parallel was achieved, the United States soon embarked on a much more ambitious mission. A few months into the war Truman endorsed the effort to drive the Communists all the way back to the Chinese border. The rapid achievement of that objective led to premature gloating. As soon as U.S. troops approached the border, in October 1950, 300,000 Chinese troops poured across in support of North Korea. Chinese intervention drove the forces under General Douglas MacArthur all the way back to the 38th parallel. The war stalemated there for two and a half more years until an armistice was finally agreed upon.
General MacArthur claimed that Truman’s timidity prevented complete victory. Had the United States been willing to drop atomic bombs on North Korea and China, Communism might have been defeated throughout Korea and perhaps even in China. Not all officers shared MacArthur’s eagerness to go nuclear, but a large number did share his angry faith that victory had been denied them by their civilian bosses, that there was something fundamentally flawed about the very idea of limited warfare. Although the U.S. air attacks against North Korea were among the most ruthless and indiscriminate in military history, they had been “limited” to nonnuclear bombs and napalm, and did not target China. For many career officers, Korea left a profound resentment of how “politics” could inhibit their ability to do their job, a grievance that would deepen and fester during the Vietnam War and remain alive in institutional memory to the very present.
However, the Korean experience, like the Vietnam War that followed, produced conflicting impulses within the military—a resentment of political “restraints” and a reluctance to go to war. Over drinks at the officers’ club there might be a lot of hostile invective aimed at spineless politicians, but when it came down to whether or not American troops should be sent to fight in Indochina, all but a few were opposed. In fact, the Pentagon was soon said to house an unofficial organization called the Never Again Club. This “never again” lesson was remarkably different from the World War II lesson (never again another Munich or another Hitler). The Korean War lesson was “Never again should we fight a land war in Asia.”
The Never Again Club easily checked off the numerous reasons why war in Asia might fail, particularly if the United States was not committed to an all-out nuclear attack: hostile and unfamiliar terrain, radically different languages and cultures, long transoceanic supply lines, and enemies with reservoirs of dedicated, even “fanatical,” troops willing to fight to the last man, en masse, wave after wave. Given those obstacles, many officers wanted assurances that they could use nuclear weapons in any future Asian war.
Eisenhower understood the broad reluctance to fight another war after Korea. That’s one of the reasons he was so attracted to the use of secret operations to assert U.S. power. There would be few, if any, American casualties and no public knowledge or debate. In the summer of 1954, after the French defeat in Indochina, American agents under the CIA’s Edward Lansdale were already in Saigon plotting to build and bolster a permanent, non-Communist South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem. Few could have predicted that these were the first steps in the creation of an unpopular police state and a major war. When Americans did begin to hear more about American involvement in Vietnam, the news was generally upbeat. The stories told by Dr. Tom Dooley and the American Friends of Vietnam made it sound as if the United States was involved in nothing more than an idealistic, humanitarian campaign to help a struggling young nation.
Nor did Americans know about that summer’s other covert operation—the one in Guatemala. In June 1954, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to launch its secret plan to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. The Eisenhower administration considered Arbenz a Communist sympathizer, if not a full-fledged Red, because in addition to the liberal, New Deal–style reforms he had implemented (e.g., universal suffrage, social security, the right to organize unions), he introduced an agrarian reform program that seized about one-seventh of the property owned by the United Fruit Company, a U.S. firm that owned 42 percent of Guatemala’s land. This modest nationalization of fallow land (for which the company was compensated), along with a small shipment of old “Communist weapons” from Czechoslovakia, led Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to declare that Arbenz had begun a “reign of terror.”
The next thing the American public heard about Guatemala was the wholly fictitious story of a successful “popular uprising” against Arbenz by Guatemalan “patriots.” It was the CIA alone that was responsible for ousting Arbenz and installing Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a brutal dictator who immediately revoked the land reforms, disenfranchised most Guatemalans, banned labor unions, and initiated fifty years of repressive government and civil war that ultimately killed more than 200,000 people. Under Eisenhower, the CIA launched 170 major covert actions in forty-eight nations.
Eisenhower’s foreign policies thus bear a striking resemblance to those of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Both presidents led war-weary nations reluctant to fight again, especially where there was no compelling goal or clear end point. Yet both men were devout cold warriors. Confronted by the Never Again Club that emerged from Korea and the Vietnam syndrome of the 1970s and 1980s, Eisenhower and Reagan used military force primarily in secret and by proxy.
A major difference between the two eras, however, is that in the 1950s most Americans trusted their government to carry out foreign policy in ways that were necessary for national security and to advance freedom and democracy. By the 1980s, largely because of the experience of the Vietnam War, many Americans questioned the fundamental premises and execution of U.S. policy. They were far more skeptical when their president claimed to be supporting “freedom fighters” in a righteous struggle against “Communist-controlled revolutionaries.” There was much broader public awareness that Cold War America had supported many dictatorial and repressive regimes to gain their political, strategic, and economic compliance. By the 1980s, many Americans opposed not only major U.S. military interventions, but even the U.S.-backed proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
The rise of dissent toward Cold War foreign policy can be traced in the history of a phrase. In the 1950s, “Communist aggression” was one of the most common expressions in American political discourse. It tripped off so many tongues and pens it seemed like an unquestioned law of nature, solid and permanent, beyond doubt. It was easy to assume that Communists and Communist nations were, by definition, always the aggressors, always the ones to initiate hostilities, always the ones to favor violence over peaceful negotiation, always the ones to sabotage democratic elections.
Oddly, if you search the New York Times from its first issue in 1851 (three years after Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto) until 1946, “Communist aggression” appears in only eight articles. From 1946 to 1960, by contrast, as the Cold War and Third World anticolonialism elevated the specter of Communism to the level of national fixation, the expression appeared in 2,714 articles. “Red aggression” adds another 90 results and was especially common in headlines. Communist aggression was the primary ideological justification of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, yet during the key years of combat in Vietnam (1961–1975), its use declined substantially, dropping in the Times to 833 articles. Then, from 1976 to 1990, despite the rise of the New Right and its effort to renew Cold War concerns about Soviet power, the number of articles mentioning “Communist aggression” fell to 75.
In 1961, when John Kennedy replaced two-term president Dwight Eisenhower, it was hard to say which one took a harder line against Communist aggression. Although JFK had eloquently opposed direct military intervention in French Indochina back in 1954, he embraced U.S. support for the creation of a permanent, non-Communist South Vietnam after France was defeated. He believed aid and training alone wo
uld be enough to preserve “our offspring,” the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Like most American public officials of the 1950s, Kennedy believed the United States could shape affairs in South Vietnam without the taint of colonialism that had made the French so reviled. He did not anticipate the rise of a broadly popular insurgency to overthrow the American-backed government in Saigon.
But by the end of JFK’s first year as president, reports from South Vietnam were ominous. Diem’s government and military were riddled with corruption, paralyzed by incompetence, and ever more unpopular. Worst of all, from Washington’s perspective, Diem had failed to suppress the Viet Cong insurgency. In fact, it was growing by leaps and bounds. The Viet Cong had a guerrilla fighting force of more than thirty battalions and deep support in many provinces throughout the South.
Unless U.S. military support increased substantially, advisers told Kennedy, the insurgency would triumph. JFK believed a Communist victory in Vietnam would be an intolerable blow to his political fortunes. He was also a steadfast believer in the domino theory. Losing South Vietnam might lead to Communist gains throughout the Pacific. So for all his private skepticism about the effectiveness of U.S. policy in Vietnam, and his genuine wariness of deeper military commitments, he was willing to do whatever was necessary, at least to avert defeat. And he often said, even in the months before his assassination in 1963, that American forces could only come home if victory over the Viet Cong was achieved.
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 6
