Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  Neither Nixon’s vague peace plans nor Humphrey’s equally vague promises satisfied the nation’s young peace activists. For three years their calls for an end to the war had increased in stridency. Government officials and agents ignored their demands, infiltrated their organizations, and expressed contempt for their political and cultural style. For a brief time some saw a glimmer of hope in Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. But McCarthy seemed almost determined to distance himself from the public he was soliciting, and Kennedy was dead. At his funeral Tom Hayden, a leader of SDS, wept. Across the country other students shared his grief. “As I look back on the 60s,” mused Michael Harrington, whose writings a few years earlier had brought poverty back to the attention of Americans basking in the prosperity following World War II, Robert Kennedy “was the man who actually could have changed the course of American history.”

  The passing of Kennedy deprived young protesters of their only powerful political voice. He might have been elected president. He might have made a difference. The remaining politicians were establishment figures who cared little for the dreams of the young. To register their protests—to voice their disenchantment with the political process that was excluding them—members of various student organizations decided to go to the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. Some represented factions of the New Left. Many were committed Marxists, wedded to revolutionary change. Others were apostles of the counterculture whose politics were as nebulous as their religious beliefs. The only conviction they shared was the notion that liberal politics were moribund.

  The establishment Democrats should have known what was in store. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April 1968, racial rebellion broke out in the nation’s cities. Late in April, when Columbia University’s president Grayson Kirk held a memorial service for King, the local SDS disrupted the gathering, accusing Columbia of being insensitive to the needs of black people and of supporting the Vietnam War through its membership in the Institute for Defense Analysis. As anger swept the university, students occupied several buildings on campus, including Kirk’s office, and pictures of them smoking his cigars and drinking his sherry made all the wire services. The dispute went on for three weeks before New York City police forcibly cleared the campus.

  The protest movement then shifted to Chicago. Orthodox urban politicians there as throughout the country cared little for the creeds of the New Left and the politically outrageous. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley mobilized 12,000 police and prepared to call out national guardsmen. He denied demonstrators the right to protest or march. Short, barrel-chested, with the jowls of a big city boss, Daley promised that he would not allow any “long-haired punks” to dirty the city where he attended mass every day and decent people lived. The novelist Norman Mailer caught Daley’s disdain for the eastern press and the counterculture: “No interlopers for any network of Jew-Wasp media men were going to dominate the streets of his parochial city, nor none of their crypto-accomplices with long hair, sexual liberty, drug license and unbridled mouths.”

  August 28, 1968—Police squirt mace into a tightly packed crowd at an antiwar demonstration outside the Conrad Hilton hotel in Chicago. Hundreds were injured in the bloody clash. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  Given Daley’s attitude and the determination of the protesters, violence was certain. The Youth International party, or Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, urged people to “vote Pig in’68.” They nominated their own candidate—“Pigasus,” a fat pig they paraded through the streets. They demanded legalization of marijuana and “all other psychedelic drugs,” an “end to all censorship,” total disarmament of all people “beginning with the police,” and abolition of money and work. “We believe,” Point 15 of their manifesto stated, “that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish.” Such appeals were not part of the establishment’s vision of a better nation, and it was emphatically not Mayor Daley’s. Police repeatedly clashed with the demonstrators. They fired tear gas into groups of protesters. “We walked along,” as Sol Lerner of the Village Voice would remember it, “hands outstretched, bumping into people and trees, tears dripping from our eyes and mucus smeared across our faces.” The police, armed with clubs, waded into the demonstrators, one of whom “saw a cop hit a guy over the head and the club break. I turned to the left and saw another cop jab the guy right in the kidneys.” Demonstrators fought back, threw rocks, overturned cars, set trash cans on fire. Reporters and photographers became victims of what was later termed a “police riot.” Nicholas von Hoffman of the Washington Post reported police attacks on news photographers: “Pictures are unanswerable evidence in court. [The police had] taken off their badges, their name plates, even the unit patches on their shoulders to become a mob of identical, unidentifiable club swingers.” But the television cameras did not blink, and the violence became entertainment in millions of homes. Disgusted by the police, Walter Cronkite told his prime-time viewers, “I want to pack my bags and get out of this city.”

  The violence in the streets spilled into the convention center. Several delegates were assaulted outside the convention hall. When Mike Wallace of CBS questioned the suppression of dissent, a cop slugged him on the jaw. Speaking from the podium, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut condemned the “Gestapo tactics” of the Chicago police. His remarks brought Daley to his feet, shaking his fist and calling Ribicoff a “motherfucker.” Amid all this, Hubert Humphrey—whose theme was “The Politics of Joy”—received the nomination for president.

  The debacle in Chicago doomed Humphrey’s chances for the election. A further complication was the candidacy of George Wallace, capable of drawing both blue-collar Democratic votes and the ballots of hard-right Republicans. Born to poor sharecroppers, Wallace was a populist who opposed civil rights legislation and called for a military victory in Vietnam. When he received no support from the regular Democratic party, Wallace created the American party. He drew substantial sympathy in the Deep South and among some white ethnic workers in the North, two constituencies Humphrey needed for victory. For his vice presidential running mate, Wallace selected Curtis LeMay, a retired air force general whose formula for the Vietnam War was quite simple. In 1967 he had argued that the United States “must be willing to continue our bombing until we have destroyed every work of man in North Vietnam if this is what it takes to win the war.” At the press conference when he accepted the nomination, he was equally blunt. In response to a question about how to end the war, LeMay instantly said that he “would bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.”

  Throughout most of the fall, Humphrey tried to rid himself of the Vietnam millstone without alienating Johnson. Richard Nixon kept promising an honorable end to the Vietnam War. Not until late October did Humphrey openly call for a negotiated settlement. On October 31 President Johnson, hoping to breathe some life into the peace negotiations and the Democratic candidacy, ended all Rolling Thunder bombing raids. He had little choice. Nguyen Van Thieu, suspecting that he might get better treatment from Richard Nixon as president than from Hubert Humphrey, refused to engage in serious talks in Paris. The bombing halt was too little and too late. Nixon won by a narrow margin. He received 43.4 percent of the popular vote and 302 electoral votes to 42.7 percent and 191 electoral votes for Humphrey, while Wallace gathered 13.5 percent and 45 electoral votes.

  By the 1966-1967 season, as the malaise infecting politics invaded popular culture as well, television programs favoring the military lost their appeal. Americans could watch a real war every night on the six o’clock news. During 1964-1965, the Nielsen ratings had put Combat! in tenth place among popular television shows. Although its ratings slipped modestly in the next two seasons, the show still garnered a profitable share of the television audience. But Combat! was canceled at the end of the 1966 season. Several of the series’ stars, including Vic Morrow, attributed its demise to the growing criticism of the war in Vietnam. By 1966, Mona McCluskey, Convoy, McHale’s Navy, and Wa
ckiest Ship in the Army were gone. Twelve O’ Clock High disappeared the next season. When the 1968 fall season opened, only Gomer Pyle and Hogan’s Heroes survived.

  In the early years of the war, references to Johnson’s policies occasionally appeared on the controversial That Was the Week That Was, which aired from January 1964 until May 1965. Other shows offered antiwar sentiments in more subtle forms, including one concerning a real-life frontier American. Daniel Boone aired from September 1964 through the spring of 1970. Barry Rosenzweig, supervising its writers, instructed them to portray the Revolutionary War by “making it Vietnam, with the colonials as the Vietcong and the English as the Americans.” Star Trek consistently aired story lines condemning war and stressing the Federation command that star fleet captains avoid interfering with the internal affairs of new civilizations they encounter. Even the characters in Mission Impossible stopped overthrowing foreign governments and switched to more domestic missions, such as fighting organized crime.

  One program, at least, was not so subtle. The Smothers Brothers were a singing-comedy team who gained national fame during the popularity explosion of folk music in the early 1960s. In a midseason attempt to steal viewers from NBC’s Bonanza, CBS gave them their own weekly variety program on Sunday nights. Tommy and Dick Smothers soon became heroes to antiwar activists. In September 1967, they invited Pete Seeger to appear on the show. The famed activist and folk artist was scheduled to perform his antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but the network cut the segment when Seeger, backed by the Smothers Brothers, refused to cut the most controversial verse. In February 1968, after a long battle with CBS, Tommy Smothers once again introduced Seeger on the show, and this time Seeger was allowed to perform the song in its entirety. The Smothers Brothers continued to battle the network and its censors, but CBS finally canceled them in 1969, even though their ratings were excellent, after they featured an interview with Joan Baez in which she made a reference to her husband’s prison term for draft evasion.

  Opposition to the war also found expression in a number of popular novels published in the mid-1960s. Most of the fiction portrayed Indochina as a place alien to American culture, interests, and knowledge.

  John Sack’s M, published in 1967, was one of the first of the antiwar novels. It follows M Company, an army unit as it goes from basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, through several months of combat in Vietnam. Against the warrior idealism of Specialist 4 Demirgian, Sack sets the corruption of ARVN troops, the inability to distinguish between Vietcong and civilians, and the unbelievably poor morale among United States soldiers. The novel climaxes in a killing of a Vietnamese girl by an American grenade lobbed into a shelter to kill Vietcong.

  One Very Hot Day, published by David Halberstam the same year as M, is a tale of several American advisers who are trying to train the South Vietnamese army. Captain Beaupre, the central character, is a veteran of World War II and Korea who has no illusions about the Vietnam War. His only objective is to stay alive in the hot, sticky, despair-ridden madness. Beaupre’s second-in-command—the young, idealistic Lieutenant Anderson—has high expectations of successfully training the South Vietnamese soldiers and winning the war against communism. In the end, the South Vietnamese troops fail to fight, Beaupre manages to survive, but Anderson dies in a firefight. Beaupre is unable to find any reason for his death, any meaning for an American to be dead in a nowhere-place called Ap Than Thoi.

  Incident at Muc Wa is the title of Daniel Ford’s novel about the Vietnam War, which also appeared in 1967. The book centers on Corporal Stephen Courcey, a demolitions expert who has just arrived in Vietnam. Along with several other American soldiers, he establishes an outpost at Muc Wa. The novel proceeds to expose the absurdities of the war through tragicomedy. Courcey’s girlfriend from the States shows up at Muc Wa as a war correspondent, but she is unable to meet him because he is off in the jungles with a visiting general and army captain who are trying to earn their Combat Infantry Badges. The novel provides a caricature of stupid officers fighting a war for the wrong reasons. In the end, the troops at Muc Wa fight off a Vietcong attack, and the Vietcong, in Ford’s words, “exfiltrate” the area. In the course of this absurd episode, Courcey is killed in action.

  Yet another work published in 1967, Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? is actually set not in Indochina but in Texas, New York City, and the Brooks Range of Alaska. A cast of characters—D. J. Jellicoe, Rusty Jellicoe, Alice Lee Jellicoe, Medium Asshole Pete, Medium Asshole Bill, and Tex Hude—end up in the wilderness on a hunting trip. There, in a pristine and naturally savage environment, they use all the hunting technology they can muster and slaughter wolves, caribou, bighorn sheep, and bears. The carnage is extraordinary and, for Norman Mailer, symbolic of what American military technology was doing to the life and habitat of Southeast Asia.

  James Crumley’s novel One Count to Cadence and William Eastlake’s The Bamboo Red both appeared in 1969, in the wake of the Tet offensive. One Count to Cadence tells of a ten-man communications detachment stationed first at Clark Air Base in the Philippines and then in Vietnam during the early stages of the war. Sergeant “Slag” Krummel is the narrator, and his foil is Joe Morning, a self-destructive loser. The novel exposes the gratuitous violence of military life—bars, brothels, fights, and profanity—as well as the futility of the war in Vietnam. The sergeant eventually betrays a best friend and buddy, and the team is decimated. The novel ends with the unit returning to the Philippines, where Joe Morning joins the communist Huk Rebellion. In The Bamboo Red, a surrealistic condemnation of the war, Eastlake draws on incongruous fantasies: peace-loving hippie flower children wandering aimlessly through the Indochinese jungles; helicopter pilots having sex with medevac nurses while airborne; American Rangers topped with Roman helmets and accompanied by drummer boys airlifted into French-Vietnamese villas. Like the images in The Bamboo Red, the Vietnam war cannot accord with any rational world.

  Even comic books reflected the increasing depth of antiwar sentiment in American popular culture. Comic book readers had become too sophisticated about the Vietnam War to accept the stereotypes. Dell Comics’ Jungle War Stories, which featured Vietnam War themes, had failed commercially in 1966, proving that the war was going to be difficult to sell to the American people. Tales of the Green Berets was dropped by most newspapers in 1967. In 1968 Marvel Comics abandoned cold war and Vietnam themes altogether, shifting the focus of Iron Man’s exploits to such domestic issues as race relations, environmental problems, and crime.

  How times had changed from the confident naivete of 1965! The treatment of the Green Berets in American popular culture captures the shift in the public mood.

  During the Kennedy years, the Green Berets had been perceived as missionaries with muscle and brain. They received training that conformed to the prescription in The Ugly American. In theory, to be considered for the Green Berets Special Forces a volunteer had to be qualified as both Ranger and airborne, physically fit, and able to speak at least one foreign language. Once accepted into the outfit, he was trained to proficiency in “skills such as demolition, communications and field medicine . . . unarmed combat, SCUBA diving and mountaineering, and . . . all kinds of weapons.” And he had to know his enemy. At their training center at Fort Bragg, Green Berets read the works of Mao Zedong and Vo Nguyen Giap while preparing their bodies to meet the enemy in battle. In Robin Moore’s The Green Berets the “ugly American”—that is, the plain common sense technician as Lederer and Burdick had favorably presented him—is transformed into a bright and shining knight, a warrior for democracy. The novel was a huge financial success. Published in 1965, it rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. Although Moore upset government officials by portraying Green Berets taking part in forays into North Vietnam, his attitude toward the war was that of American officialdom. When asked why he is in Vietnam, a Green Beret replies, “First, I am a professional soldier and I take orders and do what I am told. Second, I don’t want
my children fighting the Communists at home.” Once again the vision of toppling dominoes is conjured. And between Indochina and California, Moore posits the Green Berets, “a potent new weapon against the Communists.” Describing the Green Berets in The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam wrote reflectively of what these striking figures out of the Kennedy era were supposed to be: “They were all uncommon men, extraordinary physical specimens and intellectual Ph.D.s, swinging through trees, speaking Russian and Chinese, eating snake meat and other fauna, springing counter-ambushes at night on unwary Asian ambushers who had read Mao and Giap, but not Hilsman and Rostow.”

  Three years after the publication of Moore’s work, John Wayne translated the novel onto the screen as an unabashedly direct propaganda movie for which he had bought the film rights in 1965. It is “extremely important, “Wayne wrote to President Johnson, that “not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there.” Recalling the role of the film industry during World War II, he proposed that he “tell the story of our fighting men in Vietnam with reason, emotion, characterization and action. We want to do it in a manner that will inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of fellow-Americans—a feeling which we have always had in this country in the past during stress and trouble.” Johnson’s aide Jack Valenti advised the president that Wayne would be “saying the things we want said,” and with this assurance Wayne received administration support for his project. Much of the film was shot at Fort Benning, and the army contributed Huey helicopters and technical advisers.