American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity
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the Phoenix of Hiroshima: Elizabeth Jelinek Boardman, The Phoenix Trip: Notes on a Quaker Mission to Haiphong, North Vietnam (Burnsville, NC: Celo Valley Books, 1985).
“the fracture of good order”: http://www.tomjoad.org/catonsville9.htm.
“life is cheap in the Orient”: Filmmaker Peter Davis allowed Westmoreland three takes to revise this statement. Davis used the third take. Desson Thomson, “Hearts and Minds Recaptured,” Washington Post, October 22, 2004.
“We want to know we’re still good”: Dana Sachs, The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), p. 90.
the judge threw out the case: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/daughter/peopleevents/e_babylift.html.
South Vietnamese were abandoned: Frank Snepp, Decent Interval, 25th anniversary ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).
CHAPTER TWO: AGGRESSION
“Would you believe”: Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1967.
“I would never have chosen”: Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), p. 224.
“the only work I want”: Gellhorn to Leonard Bernstein, December 7, 1965, published in Caroline Moorehead, ed., Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 324. On the Guardian offer, see Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 348.
stowed away on a hospital ship: Kate McLoughlin, Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 118–26. Hemingway’s piece on D-day in Collier’s gives the false impression that he landed at Normandy, e.g., “If you want to know how it was in an LCV[P] on D-Day when we took Fox Green beach and Easy Red beach . . . then this is as near as I can come to it,” Collier’s, July 22, 1944, p. 57.
Dachau: Gellhorn, The Face of War, p. 184.
“Red Fascism”: Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s–1950’s,” in Walter L. Hixson, The American Experience in World War II (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 14.
“We failed to halt Hirohito”: John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), p. 29. Historians are divided about Eisenhower’s view of intervention in support of the French. Many think he was reluctant or at least ambivalent (Robert Buzzanco, Gareth Porter, David L. Anderson), while Prados makes a strong case that Eisenhower favored intervention but would not do so without united support. For his full analysis, see The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954 (New York: Dial Press, 1983).
“We must not let it happen again”: Mark A. Kishlansky, ed., Sources of World History (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 298–302.
“You have a row of dominoes”: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10202&st=&st1=.
“The time has come”: The original text can be viewed at the JFK Library website: http://www.jfklibrary.org. Search for “Speech given on Indochina, Washington, DC, April 6, 1954.”
A Gallup poll: H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 51. For the Illinois American Legion resolution, see Ernest Gruening and Herbert W. Beaser, Vietnam Folly (Washington, DC: National Press, 1968), p. 105.
had made a mistake: http://www.gallup.com/poll/7741/gallup-brain-americans-korean-war.aspx.
“Never again should we fight”: The best analysis of military skepticism about intervention in Indochina from the 1950s through the Vietnam War is Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
many officers wanted assurances: David H. Petraeus, “Korea, the Never-Again Club, and Indochina,” Parameters, December 1987, pp. 59–70; Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 62.
Jacobo Arbenz: Christian G. Appy, “Eisenhower’s Guatemala Doodle,” in Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 183–213.
170 major covert actions: Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 76.
articles mentioning “Communist aggression”: The Boston Globe shows a similar pattern for “Communist aggression” (1872–1945: 2; 1946–1960: 759; 1961–1975: 382).
even in the months before his assassination: The war’s long, brutal history after Kennedy’s assassination has understandably produced lots of speculation about whether he would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived and been reelected. It is, of course, impossible to know. For an important analysis that debunks the idea that Kennedy would have pulled out, see Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 46–47. For a variety of views on the subject, see James Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, eds., Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
Project Beefup: George Herring, America’s Longest War, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), pp. 103–109.
“Look at that carrier!”: Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War, pp. 19–21.
MACV . . . shoulder patch: Barry Jason Stein, U.S. Army Patches, Flashes and Ovals: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cloth Unit Insignia (Insignia Ventures, 2007).
China’s support of North Vietnam: Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000), pp. 135, 179.
I. F. Stone’s Weekly: The complete archive is available online at ifstone.org. D. D. Guttenplan, American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. 396. Guttenplan believes “A Reply to the White Paper” “was probably the single most important issue of the Weekly ever published.”
Night of the Dragons: At least twenty-two times the film identifies the Viet Cong with the words “aggression,” “terror,” “invasion,” “murder,” “killer,” and “assassin.” At least thirty-six times the “South Vietnamese” are identified with the words “peace,” “secure,” “build,” “defend,” “protect,” “freedom,” “free world,” “courage,” and “future.” The poll is cited in Walter Gormly, “Americans Can’t Name Vietnam Enemy,” The Mennonite, July 5, 1966, p. 448.
necessary to defend ourselves: On August 4, LBJ told some congressional leaders that “some of our boys are floating around in the water.” It was one of his more flagrant lies. Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), p. 138.
They were lying: Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 198; George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 379; Edwin E. Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Every commando was either killed: Richard H. Shultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 28–29.
“grandma’s nightshirt”: Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 179.
“talked and talked and talked”: Goldwater quotations are taken from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, July 16, 1964, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm. Hanson Baldwin’s column is from the New York Times, May 26, 1964.
“We don’t want our boys”: Gardner, Pay Any Price, p. 144.
“to protect American lives”: His com
ments are most easily found online at “The American Presidency Project” maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara, by searching under the Public Papers of the Presidents by date: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26922&st=&st1.
“Find me some Communists”: Randall Bennett Woods, J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 96–105; Eric Thomas Chester, Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965–1966 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
“Men were running up and down”: The President’s News Conference, June 1, 1965, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=27013.
“We are sober and satisfied”: Congressional Record, Senate, September 15, 1965.
“Senator Halfbright”: Logevall, Choosing War, p. 393.
thirty million viewers: Estimated by Time magazine, February 25, 1966, p. 21, cited in Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture From the Second World War to the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 183.
famously recommended that “containment”: George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947. The article was originally signed with the pseudonym “X.”
“The spectacle of Americans inflicting grievous injury”: Committee on Foreign Relations, The Vietnam Hearings (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 112; for Senator Frank Lausche’s exchange with Kennan, pp. 129–131.
Fulbright asked Taylor: The Vietnam Hearings, p. 222.
“We see the Viet Cong”: J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 107–108; for book sales, see Woods, Fulbright, p. 144.
“We love our children”: Martha Gellhorn, “Suffer the Little Children,” Ladies’ Home Journal, January 1967, p. 109.
“I was told politely”: All of Gellhorn’s Vietnam War articles are included in The Face of War, pp. 221–281. Her efforts to secure another visa to go to South Vietnam are described on pp. 262–263.
“If we don’t stop the Communists”: Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1965.
“no right to leave her five children”: Ibid., July 1965.
Napalm is a highly flammable gel: Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, pp. 72–75.
“I wore my pearls and gloves”: From Napalm Ladies, a short documentary produced in 2010 by the San Jose Peace and Justice Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omkdv8gz_PM.
“not a single case of burns”: New York Times, March 12, 1967
“improper use of gasoline”: Ibid., October 1, 1967, and December 10, 1967.
“The Children of Vietnam”: Ramparts, January 1967.
“People have this thing”: New York Times, December 10, 1967.
crispy critters: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston: Mariner Books, 2009 reprint, 1990), p. 226.
five hundred protests: Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 107.
“Nothing will ever taste any good”: Adam Fairclough, “Martin Luther King Jr. and the War in Vietnam,” Phylon, vol. 45, no. 1, 1984, p. 22.
people packed into Riverside Church: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm.
“abject surrender”: Life, April 21, 1967, p. 4; Washington Post, April 6, 1967.
a nine-year-old boy: The boy was Hart Hooton. See his “Marching for Peace,” Huffington Post, January 18, 2010.
Norman Vincent Peale: Cited in Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 281.
“creeping permissiveness”: Cited in Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York: Vintage, 1976), p. 131.
“We consider it a crime”: The first sentence in the quotation comes from a GI newspaper, The Ally, issue no. 1, http://www.sirnosir.com/archives_and_resources/library/articles/ally_02.html. The second sentence was quoted in the New York Times, November 21, 1967.
“Our aggression”: Time, August 14, 1972.
“the enemy bore down”: Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 4–5.
CHAPTER THREE: PAPER TIGERS
“field marshal”: William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), p. 138.
Viet Cong commandos: Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 335–336; Mauldin quotation from Boston Globe, February 8, 1965, p. 3.
“We have kept our gun over the mantel”: Memorandum for the Record, February 6, 1965, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–68, vol. 2, January–June 1965, document 77; Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 124–125; William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part 3 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 61–64; Logevall, Choosing War, p. 326; Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 306–307.
slumped against a wall, and vomited: Prados, Vietnam, p. 113. Prados got this detail from Theodore C. Mataxis. Then a colonel and a chief U.S. adviser to II Corps, Mataxis was stationed at Pleiku and accompanied Bundy on his inspection.
“self-confident to the point of arrogance”: Time, June 25, 1965.
“Mac, I can’t hear you”: Richard Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 258–59.
“They made a believer out of you”: David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 517–18; for the sissy comment, see Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 341.
“What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?”: Ibid., p. 371.
“six months’ sensation”: The Vietnam Hearings, p. 124.
major purge within the State Department’s: John Paton Davies Jr., China Hand: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Mac Bundy did his best: Bird, The Color of Truth, p. 272.
“Bob and I believe”: Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983), p. 39.
“a policy of sustained reprisal”: The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Vol. 3 (Boston: Beacon Press,1975), pp. 687–91.
“Ol’ Ho isn’t gonna give in”: Gordon M. Goldstein, Lesson in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2008), p. 159.
the “cardinal” principle: Ibid., pp. 166–67.
letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson: The letter is dated April 20, 1965, and is cited in Gardner, Pay Any Price, pp. 204–5.
Bay of Pigs Invasion: Jim Rasenberger, The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs (New York: Scribner, 2011); Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
MAD magazine: The October 1963 cover featured Castro smoking an exploding cigar.
The CIA even brainstormed a sinister plan: Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–1965 (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006). Operation Northwoods was the name of the proposal to have U.S. agents hijack U.S. planes or bomb U.S. targets and blame the attacks on Cuba to build a pretext for invasion; http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/.
Cuban missiles represented a “domestic political problem”: Bird, The Color of Truth, pp. 226–29.
“making our power credible”: The journalist was James Reston. See James Carroll’s account: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/10/14/new-presidents-set-dangerous-precedents/3BkelmrNmJruLMDYzFTauJ/story.html.
Adlai “wanted a Munich”: David Munton and David A. Welch, The Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Oxford, 2007), p. 2007; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 434; Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences (New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 93–95.
“I cut his balls off”: Alterman, When Presidents Lie, p. 92.
deeper into the Vietnam quagmire: Still one of the best analyses of how the quagmire metaphor gets the history of U.S. intervention completely wrong is Daniel Ellsberg’s essay “The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine,” in his Papers on the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), pp. 47–135.
“I’ve just come back from Vietnam”: Ellsberg, Secrets, pp. 144–45.
had not requested the troops: Gardner, Pay Any Price, p. 184.
“To avoid a humiliating US defeat”: The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3, p. 695.
“the domino theory is much too pat”: Bird, The Color of Truth, p. 291. The first major written refutation of the domino theory by a U.S. official came from CIA analyst Sherman Kent in June 1964. Soon dubbed the “Death of the Domino Theory Memo,” it circulated throughout the intelligence community. It concluded, “We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far East. . . . With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam,” Bird, p. 285. There is no evidence that anyone briefed LBJ on this memo or William Bundy’s.
Bundy swallowed his opposition: Ibid., p. 295.
“We cannot win, Mr. President”: George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Anchor, 1987), pp. 371–72.