“On July 14, [1965,] Johnson walked into a staff meeting, took a seat, listened for a while, and then told us, ‘Don’t let me interrupt. But there’s one thing you ought to know. Vietnam is like being in a plane without a parachute, when all the engines go out. If you jump, you’ll probably be killed, and if you stay in you’ll crash and probably burn. That’s what it is.’ Then, without waiting for a response, the tall slumped figure rose and left the room.

“If that’s how he feels, I thought as I watched the door close behind him, then why are we escalating the war; what’s the point if he thinks it’s hopeless? Maybe he’s going to end it. There was truth – rational truth – in what Johnson had said, a moment of illumination. Yet reflecting on the President’s startling statement, I realized that the seeming objectivity of his description also revealed the inward struggle: No matter what course he took, the result would be disaster, total and irrevocable. He was trapped; he was helpless – conclusions that were closer to his own fears than to external reality. Admittedly there was, by now, no easy way out. We had raised the stakes and increased our commitment; American boys were dead and American resources wasted. But still there were choices – to continue the unwinnable war, to withdraw, or to seek some kind of jerry-built compromise. These choices were all unpleasant, but they were not, equally, disasters of fatal magnitude.”

So writes Richard Goodwin, a White House aide and speechwriter under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, in his memoir Remembering America, which appeared three decades ago, made a modest splash, and then was quickly forgotten.Footnote ¹ Goodwin’s anecdote serves as a useful way to begin this reexamination of the US military intervention in Vietnam, which was by far the largest and most consequential intervention in the Johnson years (the other being the Dominican Republic). For one thing, the account underscores a key point amply supported by the archival record and the tapes now available: that Johnson and his aides were not optimistic when they Americanized the war in 1965; they were gloomy realists who knew what they were getting into. The hubris so often ascribed to them – thanks in part to the influence of David Halberstam’s monumental, sprawling, brilliant work, The Best and the BrightestFootnote ² – is seldom seen in that record, at least with respect to the long-term prospects in the fighting. Johnson, the evidence shows, experienced deep doubts not only about whether the war was winnable but whether the outcome really mattered to American national security. The anecdote also goes to the crucial question of presidential maneuverability and the related matter of periodization. Was Johnson really as trapped in mid-July as he told Goodwin and the other staffers? If the answer is yes, does this mean he was also trapped earlier in the year, in February–March, when the most important decisions for escalation were made? What is more, Goodwin usefully reminds us that the administration’s choices on Vietnam, though each of them lousy, were not of the same “fatal magnitude.”

Publicly, of course, Johnson offered a different Vietnam message that spring and summer. He depicted the intervention (the scope of which he sought to downplay) as necessary in national security terms, and as fulfilling a commitment made by three administrations to defend an allied government combating outside aggression. The struggle, he and his principal Vietnam advisors insisted, was part of the larger Cold War, necessary to halt the spread of Moscow- and Beijing-directed communism.

Birth of an Image

This was not a new message. American officials had always seen the Vietnam struggle through a Cold War lens, long before Lyndon Johnson entered the White House. Already in the late 1940s and early 1950s, during the French war against the Hồ Chí Minh-led Việt Minh, civilian as well as military analysts articulated an early version of the domino theory, linking the outcome in Indochina to a chain reaction of regional and global effects. Defeat in Vietnam, they warned, would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond.

In early August 1953, for example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told a Seattle audience: “If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula, with its valuable tin and tungsten, would become indefensible, and India would be outflanked. Indonesia, with all its riches, would likely be lost too.” “So you see,” he continued, “somewhere along the line, this must be blocked. It must be blocked now. That is what the French are doing.” Consequently, continued American backing of the war effort mattered greatly; by assisting its close ally, Washington was acting “to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of the most terrible significance for the United States of America – our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesian territory, and from southeast Asia.”Footnote ³

When in early 1954 it began to appear that the French might soon lose the war, Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), urged the commitment of US ground forces, and used the domino theory in support of his argument. He warned that if Indochina was lost, and the Western powers did nothing to prevent it, the loss of the rest of Southeast Asia would inevitably follow. Japan, the key to the United States’ defense posture in the region, could be expected to make an accommodation with the communist powers.Footnote ⁴ President Eisenhower, in a National Security Council (NSC) meeting on April 6, 1954, endorsed this view. According to the meeting’s note taker, the president said that “Indochina was the first in a row of dominoes. If it fell its neighbors would shortly thereafter fall with it, and where did the process end? If he was correct, said the president, it would end with the United States directly behind the 8-ball.”Footnote ⁵ The next day, Eisenhower gave his now-famous press conference where he publicly articulated this “domino theory”:

After the French defeat later that year, the domino theory slid out of view for several years, as the communist insurgencies in various parts of Southeast Asia lost steam, and as Ngô Đình Diệm’s South Vietnam attained a measure of economic growth and (for a time) political stability. But the theory stood ready to be reasserted whenever some country in Asia seemed in danger of falling to communism. On January 19, 1961, on the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration, Eisenhower warned the new president that if Laos were lost it would only be “a question of time” before South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma were lost as well.Footnote ⁷ Later that fall, as the Kennedy team debated increasing the US commitment to South Vietnam’s defense, many top officials expressed the view that the fall of South Vietnam to communism would lead to the fairly swift extension of communist control, or at least accommodation to communism, in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia as well as in Indonesia. Or consider the breathtakingly sweeping prediction by General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the JCS, in early 1962:

Figure 14.1 President John F. Kennedy (right) speaks with advisors, General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (left), and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (center) (August 23, 1963).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Kennedy himself never articulated the stakes in such grandiose terms, but he did on occasion endorse the domino theory, notably in September 1963 in an interview on NBC’s Huntley–Brinkley Report: “I believe it, I believe it.”Footnote ⁹ Other officials, too, in the critical years 1963–5, notably the Joint Chiefs of Staff, still articulated the theory in much the same way as before. So did Dean Rusk, now secretary of state but inclined to see things much as he had done a decade before. Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, on occasion used domino imagery in talking about the choices in Vietnam. “We could pull out of there,” he declared in February 1964. “The dominoes would fall and that part of the world would go to the Communists. We could send our marines in there, and we could get tied down in a Third World War or another Korea action. The other alternative is to advise them and hope that they stand and fight.”Footnote ¹⁰

The Credibility Maxim

National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 288, approved by Johnson in March 1964, following a visit to South Vietnam by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, referred to dominoes in all but name in expanding US objectives in South Vietnam. No more would Washington merely seek to secure “an independent non-Communist South Vietnam”; henceforth, the whole of Southeast Asia must be defended. “Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam,” the memorandum argued, “almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance (all of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), accommodate to Communism so as to remove effective US and anti-Communist influence (Burma), or fall under the domination of forces not now explicitly Communist but likely then to become so (Indonesia taking over Malaysia). Thailand might hold for a period without help, but would be under grave pressure. Even the Philippines would become shaky, and the threat to India on the West, Australia and New Zealand to the South, and Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to the North and East would be greatly increased.”Footnote ¹¹

If NSAM 288 represented a kind of textbook articulation of the domino theory, it is nevertheless true that American thinking about the Cold War strategic stakes in Vietnam underwent an important shift in the Kennedy–Johnson era. In the documentary record, one sees less concern about the fall of Vietnam immediately leading to the fall of the rest of the region – the CIA, the Intelligence and Research desk (INR) at the State Department, and even numerous senior administration officials now concede that, as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs William Bundy put it in October 1964, the original domino theory “is much too pat.” Or, as his brother McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor under both Kennedy and Johnson, asserted in a later interview: “[W]hat happens in one country affects what happens in another, yes, but that you could push one down and knock the rest over, its extreme form … I never believed that.”Footnote ¹² A CIA report in June 1964 expressed doubts about the theory’s applicability to particular situations. True, the report said, the collapse of South Vietnam could cause neighboring Laos and Cambodia to fall as well. But it was only conjecture. And a “continuation of the spread of communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread which did take place would take time – time in which the total situation might change in any number of ways unfavorable to the communist cause.”Footnote ¹³

Instead, the worry now was less tangible, more amorphous, as US officials began to expound what Jonathan Schell has aptly called the “psychological domino theory.”Footnote ¹⁴ To be sure, from the start the domino theory had contained an important psychological component; now, however, that component became supreme. Credibility was the new watchword, as policymakers declared it essential to stand firm in Vietnam in order to demonstrate the United States’ determination to defend its vital interests not just in the region but around the world. Should the United States waver in Vietnam, friends both in Southeast Asia and elsewhere would doubt Washington’s commitment to their defense, and might succumb to enemy pressure even without a massive invasion by foreign communist forces – what political scientists refer to as a “bandwagon” effect. Adversaries, meanwhile, would be emboldened to challenge US interests worldwide.

Vietnam, in this way of thinking, was a “test case” of Washington’s willingness and ability to exert its power on the international stage. It was, in a sense, a global public relations exercise, in which a defeat anywhere in the world, even in comparatively small and remote (from an American perspective) places such as Indochina, could bring serious, even irreparable harm, to the United States’ geopolitical position. Even the incontrovertible evidence of a schism between the USSR and China, which affected the strategic balance in the Cold War in the mid-1960s in serious ways, seemingly did not lessen the importance of the credibility imperative. Beijing appeared to be the more hostile and aggressive of the two communist powers, the more deeply committed to global revolution, but the Soviets, too, supported Hanoi; any slackening in the American commitment to South Vietnam’s defense could cause an increase in Soviet adventurism. Conversely, if Washington stood firm and worked to ensure the survival of a noncommunist Saigon government, it could send a powerful message to Moscow and Beijing that indirect aggression could not succeed.

Again and again in the internal record, and in public pronouncements, one sees references to this psychological domino theory. In 1965 Johnson warned that “around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of America’s commitment, the value of America’s word.”Footnote ¹⁵ Early the following year, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John McNaughton put it this way: “The present US objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation. The reasons why we went into Vietnam to the present depth are varied; but they are now largely academic. Why we have not withdrawn is by all odds, one reason: to preserve our reputation as a guarantor, and thus to preserve our effectiveness in the rest of the world. We have not hung on (2) to save a friend, or (3) to deny the Communists the added acres and heads (because the dominoes don’t fall for that reason in this case), or even (4) to prove that ‘wars of national liberation’ won’t work (except as our reputation is involved).”Footnote ¹⁶ In short, according to McNaughton, maintaining American credibility was now the sole reason for the United States being in Vietnam.

Surely there was more to it than that, if not for McNaughton, then for other officials. Surely the desire to “save a friend” still belonged somewhere in the causal hierarchy, if not perhaps near the top. Dean Rusk certainly spoke in such terms on occasion, as did the president. Surely, too, some officials, notably members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, still adhered to the notion of falling dominoes in the original sense.

What is more, as I have argued elsewhere, a great many well-informed people, in Washington and elsewhere, rejected the notion that American credibility was on the line in Vietnam and that a setback there would inevitably cause similar losses elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁷ The skeptics were both numerous and influential, and included many top lawmakers on Capitol Hill (about which more below), mainstream newspapers around the country – including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal – and prominent columnists. In the intelligence community, meanwhile, analysts at the CIA and INR in 1965 remained disinclined to put much stock on any kind of domino imagery.

The same was true abroad. Many Western governments, while not unsympathetic to what Washington sought to achieve in South Vietnam, emphasized the importance of nationalism and doubted that communism in one country meant communism in neighboring countries.Footnote ¹⁸ Some key allies, including the United Kingdom, did offer tepid rhetorical support for the Americanization of the war in 1965 (by which the United States took over from South Vietnam much of the conduct of the struggle), but Washington proved almost totally unsuccessful in gaining meaningful material support from friendly governments for the war effort. The Chinese and Soviet governments, meanwhile, backed the North Vietnamese, but both were anxious to avoid a direct military confrontation with the United States. Both were careful in this period to avoid making direct pledges of support to Hanoi in the event of large-scale American intervention. More important, it now seems quite clear, neither Moscow nor Beijing, nor most American allies, at the start of 1965 believed Washington’s global credibility would be crippled if it failed to stand firm in South Vietnam, particularly given the lack of broad popular support among Vietnamese for the Saigon regime.

None of this prevented top American policymakers from invoking, both publicly and privately, the credibility of American commitments in deciding for, and then justifying, the resort to large-scale war. They did so in the Johnson years, and they did so after the advent of the Nixon administration in 1969. Richard Nixon and his leading foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger, privately complained that their predecessors had chosen to make a major stand in Vietnam (disingenuously, in that both had been hawks in the key months of decision in 1964–5), but they too articulated the psychological domino theory in explaining their policy decisions. Said Kissinger in early 1969, with respect to Vietnam: “For what is involved now is the confidence in American promises … [O]ther nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness.”Footnote ¹⁹

Second Thoughts

Yet these perceived Cold War imperatives cannot really explain the decision for major war in Vietnam, or the perpetuation of that war for eight long years. For one thing, the “other nations” to which Kissinger referred were not clamoring for Americanization in 1964–5; in the years thereafter, as the fighting intensified, most of them questioned not Washington’s credibility but its judgment. (Or, in the minds of some of them, US officials had forgotten that the two went together: credibility was not just about resolve, but also about judgment.) In domestic opinion, too, the thinking about the Cold War had begun to change by 1964, and the vaunted Cold War consensus to fracture – not following the Vietnam escalation, as is so often claimed, but before it. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis leaders in both Washington and Moscow reached the general decision that the Cold War must now be fought in a manner that would not bring about direct Soviet–American confrontation. Indeed, in 1963 much of the hostility drained out of the bilateral relationship. In June, Kennedy spoke at American University in conciliatory terms, urging cautious Soviet–American steps toward disarmament. More than that, he called on Americans to redefine some of their attitudes toward the USSR and toward communism, to “not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”Footnote ²⁰ Then, in August, the adversaries defied the opposition of their respective bureaucracies to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty, banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, the oceans, and outer space. Individually these steps were small, but together they reversed the trend of the previous years and began to build much-needed mutual trust. Both superpowers began, after the missile crisis, to reconceptualize the Cold War, to think carefully about how they might wage it now that the option of general war was off the table.

This arguably meant, of course, waging the Cold War more aggressively in the Third World. Yet there is little evidence that senior US officials (who are the main concern here) thought in such terms, or that elite domestic opinion clamored for a more bellicose posture in the developing world.Footnote ²¹ On the right, the National Review condemned the American University speech and its call for reduced superpower tensions. Communism, the editors declared, was an “alien and inimical force bearing down upon the West,” something the president evidently did not understand. Some hawks in Congress, such as Senators Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), thundered that Moscow would never keep its word and rejected JFK’s claim that the United States and the Soviet Union shared equally in creating Cold War suspicions. Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois) wondered if the United States was “retreating from weakness rather than leading from strength,” both in Europe and in the rest of the world.Footnote ²²

What is striking, however, is how few such condemnations were. Most leading newspapers and most news magazines welcomed the new initiatives, as did most legislators on Capitol Hill. A shift was under way. “It had become plain by the Summer of 1963,” influential columnist Walter Lippmann would write in November of the following year, “that the post-war period had ended.” It ended “with an uneasy and suspicious truce between the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance,” a truce that accepted the balance of power and reduced the tensions in the superpower relationship. Historian Jennifer W. See’s examination of elite and popular opinion in the months following the missile crisis finds a broad willingness to depart from the shibboleths of Cold War imperatives and “embrace a new perspective.”Footnote ²³

Did this change have a significant potential bearing on the US commitment in Vietnam? The evidence suggests that it did. One can see it in the shift in the editorial position of many regional and national newspapers during 1963 and 1964 with respect to the Indochina struggle – not least the New York Times, which moved in fits and starts to a more dovish position, one that implicitly questioned Vietnam’s importance to American security. One can see it in Congress, where in late summer and early fall of 1963, as relations with the Ngô Đình Diệm government deteriorated, Kennedy administration representatives were subjected to tough questions not merely about the conduct of the war, but also about its viability and importance. Several centrist and left-of-center Senate Democrats – Albert Gore of Tennessee, Ernest Gruening of Alaska, Wayne Morse of Oregon, Frank Church of Idaho, and George McGovern of South Dakota, for example – cast considerable doubt on the long-term prospects of the war, and wondered whether the United States should not use the Diệm regime’s repressive policies as an excuse to get out of Vietnam. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) worried about the prospect of an open-ended commitment, as did Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), whose doubts had increased dramatically following a trip to Vietnam the previous year. When the administration that fall made public a plan to withdraw 1,000 advisors from Vietnam by the end of the year, an important rationale was the growing cognizance on the part of JFK and his aides that they would have to make a strong case to Congress for continuing US involvement. A partial withdrawal, so the argument went, would suggest to lawmakers that the current course was the correct one and that the administration did not plan for Americans to take over the main burden of fighting the war.

The misgivings among senators increased during 1964. More and more of them reached the conclusion that Vietnam was not worth the loss of American lives, that the outlook in the war effort was bleak, and that avenues of withdrawal should be actively sought. The group included the powerful trio of Mansfield, Fulbright, and Armed Services Committee chairman Richard Russell (D-Georgia) – the foreign policy leadership in the Senate – as well as several other Democrats and moderate Republicans. Publicly, to be sure, these and other skeptics kept largely silent. In August the vast majority of them voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave LBJ broad authority to use military force in Southeast Asia. But this does not change the fact that a great many senior legislators were skeptical of the desirability of stepping up the US presence in the conflict (as even a cursory examination of the Congressional Record for August makes clear). John Sherman Cooper (R-Kentucky) spoke for many when during the debate over the resolution he cautioned on the Senate floor against a deepened US involvement in the war.

That fall, the Republican Party warned voters that, if they did not elect Barry Goldwater to the presidency, Vietnam would be “lost.” Americans in huge numbers took that chance. Goldwater was clobbered on Election Day, his belligerence on Vietnam as thoroughly repudiated as it could have been – Lyndon Johnson won forty-four states and 61 percent of the popular vote. True, Johnson did not campaign on the need for withdrawal from the conflict, nor did the electorate push for such a solution. But he got big cheers on the electoral trail when he vowed not to send American boys to fight Asian boys’ wars, and gave every indication that he was the candidate who would keep the nation out of large-scale war in Indochina. “We seek no wider war” was his steady refrain. This brings to mind comedian Mort Sahl’s joke, a staple of his club routine the following year: “My friends told me that if I didn’t vote for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, we would be bombing the North by the spring. And they were right. I didn’t vote for Johnson, and we were bombing the North by the spring.”

As Daniel Ellsberg notes in his extraordinary memoir Secrets, most Americans that autumn took Johnson at his word when he proclaimed that he sought “no wider war.” “It was what an overwhelming majority of them believed they were voting for on election day, November 3. No one I knew within the administration voted under that particular illusion. I don’t remember having time to vote that day myself, and I doubt [Assistant Secretary of Defense John] McNaughton did. We were both attending the first meeting at the State Department of an interagency working group addressing the best way to widen the war.”Footnote ²⁴

Suppose Johnson had been up front with voters, and told them during the campaign what he and his advisors were privately coming to realize: that almost certainly the only real alternative to direct American combat involvement was either to negotiate a political settlement that would allow the United States to withdraw, or to await the imminent defeat or collapse of the Saigon government and the reunification of Vietnam under communist control. Suppose he then said that, on the basis of the cable traffic and intelligence data the government was receiving, he would seek a negotiated settlement leading to an eventual US withdrawal. It is not easy to believe that he would have lost against Goldwater in such a circumstance, given especially the drumbeat of pessimistic reporting in the press about the military situation and the incompetence and infighting of the South Vietnamese regime. Indeed, it is not easy to believe that he would have scored anything less than a decisive win.

Johnson did not go that route, of course, and it makes sense that he did not – in narrow political terms the savvy move was to keep Vietnam on the backburner during the campaign, which meant avoiding dramatic moves in either direction, toward escalation or withdrawal. Maintaining the present course was prudent. The point, however, is that there existed no all-powerful “Cold War Consensus” in American elite or popular opinion mandating an aggressive US posture in Vietnam. This was true before the election, and it was true afterward. Thus in December 1964 and January 1965, as South Vietnam seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse, many liberal and moderate lawmakers, including the entire Senate Democratic leadership, privately warned against any Americanization of the conflict and publicly predicted that a full-fledged congressional debate on Vietnam was imminent. White House opposition to such a debate and the unwillingness of lawmakers to force the issue kept one from taking place, but the private grumbling continued through March – by which point the pivotal decisions to commence sustained bombing and to dispatch the first ground forces had been made – and into the spring. Virtually all congressional skeptics were unwilling to say what they really believed: that Vietnam was not worth the price of a major war, that even the “loss” of South Vietnam would not have serious implications for American security; that a face-saving negotiated settlement was the best that could be hoped for. White House officials, all too aware of the widespread concerns on Capitol Hill, were relieved when no genuine debate on the war ever occurred in the first half of 1965. They had been particularly worried about the Senate, generally the more independent-minded of the two houses on foreign policy matters and in this case possessing leaders dubious about the commitment.Footnote ²⁵

Clearly, then, severe trepidation about an American war in Vietnam on the part of senior members of Congress was fully formed well in advance of the key decisions of early 1965. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but it seems clear that in the Senate a majority were either downright opposed to Americanization or ambivalent about it; perhaps more important, the number of committed hawks that spring was remarkably small. (Congressional support would rise markedly in the summer, after Americanization had commenced in earnest, in a textbook example of the rally-round-the-flag effect.) It is misleading to suggest, as many authors do, that the war enjoyed broad support on Capitol Hill in the early years of large-scale war; in the key months of decision, the support was lukewarm at best. The dynamic changed only with the arrival in significant numbers of US combat troops in the spring and summer. At that point, Richard Russell believed, supporting the troops meant supporting the policy.

Nor were these misgivings expressed only about Vietnam. Top Democrats also grumbled about the rationale for another military intervention ordered by Johnson at this very time, this one closer to home, in the Dominican Republic. Here, military officers in 1963 had ousted leftwing but noncommunist Juan Bosch, the nation’s first elected leader since 1924. In April 1965 another group of military leaders tried to restore Bosch to power but were thwarted by the ruling junta. Announcing that “people trained outside the Dominican Republic” were seeking to gain control and that he would not allow “another Cuba,” Johnson sent nearly 23,000 troops to the country. Unfortunately for him, the CIA determined that no communists were involved. He ordered the FBI to “find me some Communists in the Dominican Republic,” and the US Embassy duly produced a weakly sourced list of fifty-eight (or fifty-three) “Communist and Castroite leaders” among the rebels.Footnote ²⁶ The intervention put an end to the rebellion, but it outraged many Latin Americans. Fulbright, disturbed by what he saw as an evolving pattern of interventionism backed up by dubious “the-communists-are-taking-over” justifications, and perhaps feeling guilty for having failed to make his Vietnam misgivings public in a timely fashion, in the fall of 1965 charged the White House with following a policy of deception. Other critics concurred that Johnson was playing less than straight with the American people, and the term “credibility gap” entered the political lexicon.

The Costs of Getting Out

None of this is to suggest that disengagement would have been risk-free for Lyndon Johnson in domestic political terms. Such a course would have brought a cost, even if disguised through some kind of agreement leading to a coalition government in Saigon and a “decent interval” before any Hanoi takeover. The question is how big a cost. How many dominoes at home would have fallen? Cold Warriors would have branded him an “appeaser,” but in response he could have called on his own team of heavy-hitters to defend the decision. A distinction must be made, moreover, between being called names by your opponents and actually losing significant political power as a result. In view of the constellation of forces in Congress and in the press, especially after Johnson’s landslide election victory in 1964, there is little reason to believe that a decision against war would have exacted an exorbitant political price.

Nor do I find persuasive the claims by some authors that LBJ justifiably feared that his cherished Great Society program would have been scuttled by congressional hawks if he had opted against escalation. Dixiecrats and many Republicans, according to this view, would have banded together to filibuster the civil rights and social legislation if Johnson could have been made to appear soft on communism in Southeast Asia.Footnote ²⁷ But who were these supposed hawks? How much clout did they have? And what exactly did they say, either publicly or behind closed doors, to support this line of argument? The proponents of this interpretation do not tell us. The evidence suggests strongly that Vietnam hawks in Congress were a small and timid lot in the spring of 1965 and, although their number and volubility might have grown later in the year had Johnson chosen to begin disengagement, it is hard to see how this would have changed the overall dynamic.

Moreover, if we are to speak of the price to be paid for getting out of Vietnam in 1965, we must also consider what cost Johnson could expect to incur if he opted for what by the early part of that year was the only genuine alternative: large-scale escalation. Numerous Johnson allies examined this cost in the winter and spring of 1965, and what they saw made them shudder. Many of them, it should be stressed, were seasoned political operators, shrewd tacticians with decades of electoral campaigning under their belt. They did not give recommendations that they believed would be, on balance and relative to the alternatives, bad for the Democratic Party.

Take Hubert Humphrey, vice president-elect and then vice president during the key period of decision-making. Writing privately to Johnson as one who saw his value to the president as “my ability to relate politics and policies,” Humphrey summarized his views of “the politics of Vietnam”:

Even if such a settlement did not result, Humphrey concluded, disengagement would still be far preferable to a risky escalation. “If, on the other hand, we find ourselves leading from frustration to escalation and end up short of a war with China but embroiled deeper in fighting in Vietnam over the next few months,” he wrote, “political opposition will steadily mount. It will underwrite all the negativism and disillusionment which we already have about foreign involvement generally – with direct spill-over effects politically for all the Democratic internationalist programs to which we are committed – AID [Agency for International Development], UN, disarmament, and activist world policies generally.”Footnote ²⁸

A prescient analysis, time would show, but more than that it was one that would have won nods of approval at the time from the Senate Democratic leadership, from Democratic Party elder statesman Clark Clifford, and from leading voices in the American press. Furthermore, in considering Humphrey’s analysis, it is vitally important to bear in mind that no senior military analyst in the first half of 1965 offered the White House even a chance of swift military victory in Vietnam. Five years, 500,000 troops, was the general estimate Johnson heard. The war would be long and difficult, most everyone in a position of authority agreed, and would still be going as the campaigning began in 1968. Yet Johnson took the plunge, even though he shared many of Humphrey’s fears and even though there is no indication he received contrary advice from any equally authoritative political source.

Why he did so is something of a mystery. It is not, though, inexplicable. Part of the explanation, surely, is that escalation, if done quietly and without putting the nation on a full war footing, offered the path of least immediate resistance for the president. Given his and his advisors’ repeated public affirmations of South Vietnam’s importance to American security it made sense that they would be tempted to stand firm, in the hope – and hope is all it was – that the new military measures would succeed. Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk – all of them would have felt strong temptation to preach patience, to counsel staying the course. Their word, their reputations, their careers were on the line. Johnson’s was too. And he feared the personal humiliation he imagined would inevitably accompany a defeat (and in his eyes a negotiated disengagement constituted defeat).

On this point it is useful to return to the classic study by Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. The book describes the president as being – notwithstanding his commanding and intimidating physical presence – deeply sensitive to fears and imagined accusations of being insufficiently manly. It is not impossible that this concern grew so large as to overwhelm calculations regarding electoral advantage.Footnote ²⁹ Thus LBJ relayed to Kearns his fears about what Robert F. Kennedy would say about him if he got out of Vietnam, but he gives no sense that he ever faced the question of what RFK would do – including in terms of the nomination in 1968 – if he did not get out of Vietnam. In the same way, he appears to have thought little about whether the charges by hawkish critics would actually do lasting political damage to him; it mattered only that they might attack him.

Richard Goodwin, in Remembering America, goes down this line, describing his boss’s “increasingly irrational behavior” in the spring of 1965. In response, Goodwin writes, he consulted medical textbooks, talked to professional psychiatrists, and huddled with fellow White House aide Bill Moyers, who (according to Goodwin) fully shared his concerns. Based on their private and frequent interactions with Johnson, and their imperfect understanding as laymen, they each came to the belief that they were working for someone in the grip of clinical paranoia, a man who believed “the communists” (among them establishment journalists Walter Lippmann and Theodore White) and the Kennedys were out to get him. “As his defenses weakened,” Goodwin writes, “long-suppressed instincts broke through to assault the carefully developed skills and judgment of a lifetime. The attack was not completely successful. The man was too strong for that. Most of Johnson – the outer man, the spheres of rationally controlled thought and action – remained intact, most of the time. But in some ways and on increasingly frequent occasions, he began to exhibit behavior which manifested some internal dislocation.”Footnote ³⁰

The tendency of historians to discount psychological interpretations of this kind is understandable, and defensible. Few of us, for one thing, have any training in such analysis. But on Vietnam 1964–5 these interpretations deserve more attention than they have received, because the leading alternative explanations do not stand up. This includes explanations pointing to threats to US security in the international system, which, though not absent in 1964–5, cannot account for Americanization. And it includes assessments emphasizing domestic political imperatives and the Cold War consensus. The keys to the major US military intervention in Vietnam are to be found not in the international arena nor in Vietnam, but at home in the United States. It was not, however, about meeting the demands of this supposed consensus, the power of which has been exaggerated. It was not even about domestic political advantage per se, at least not in the main. Lyndon Johnson, it seems, preferred to risk a revolt within his party, preferred to risk a contentious battle for the nomination in 1968, than to go into that campaign having been “weak” on Vietnam and having “allowed” defeat to occur there. And, in this respect, he succeeded. He withdrew from the presidential race on the last day of March 1968, the warnings of Hubert Humphrey having come true to an unerring degree. Some observers puzzled at the move, wondered if he was acting hastily and would come to regret dropping out (as indeed some part of him later did). But none of them called Johnson a quitter on Vietnam, and none questioned his manliness.

The politics of Vietnam was born in the early Cold War when Republicans made a concerted effort to undercut the national security advantage that Democrats had enjoyed since a decisive US victory in World War II. The years after the war are often remembered as a period when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there were a number of factors that moved the United States military deep into the jungles of Vietnam, including a “domino theory” positing that if one country fell to communism everything around it would follow, partisan politics was a driving force behind this disastrous strategy. The same political logic and prowess that led President Lyndon Johnson to strengthen the legislative coalition behind his Great Society simultaneously pushed him into a hawkish posture in Southeast Asia.

Politics at the Water’s Edge in the Early Cold War, 1946–1952

The contentious partisan debates that unfolded between 1946 and 1952 profoundly shaped the way that Representative and then Senator Lyndon Johnson and an entire generation of Democrats came to think about national security, a way that constricted the political space they felt to challenge a hawkish agenda overseas. Coming out of the victory against Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Democrats and Republicans grew deeply divided in the public arena about their relative strength in handling the issue of war and peace. During the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans were increasingly comfortable criticizing the direction of foreign policy under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman. Senator Robert Taft, Sr. (R-Ohio), who harbored great doubts about the expansion of the national security state, sounded pretty comfortable as a hawk when he said that Democrats had “pursued a policy of appeasing Russia, a policy which has sacrificed throughout Eastern Europe and Asia the freedom of many nations and millions of people.”Footnote ¹ When Republicans won control of the House and the Senate for the first time since 1932, the attacks on national security were seen as part of the winning mix.

The new Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg, emerged as a model for bipartisanship despite the bitter feelings from the elections. In 1947 and 1948, when Republicans controlled Congress, Vandenberg worked closely with Harry Truman’s Democratic administration to create the infrastructure of the Cold War state. Indeed, the notion that politics should stop at the water’s edge grew out of the historic relationship between these two men. But the relationship between Vandenberg and Truman was more of an exception than the norm.Footnote ²

The other side of national security politics in the early Cold War revolved around fierce partisan conflict. Most Republicans realized that they were in a difficult position politically. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats had built a robust political coalition around domestic programs such as Social Security and the Wagner Act. Many Republicans had been on the wrong side of history during World War II, with FDR championing the US need to intervene overseas to prevent the spread of fascism. The outcome of the war had been decisive, at least with regard to fascism. Then Republicans faced the problem that there remained many colleagues, including Senator Taft, who, outside the midterm elections, were still critics of excessive intervention overseas and who warned of creating a “Garrison State.”Footnote ³ For more and more Republicans the answer was to give greater weight to the hawkish elements in their party and to take on the Democrats by focusing on the expansion of communism. The template of the 1946 elections seemed appealing.

Though Democrats retook control of Congress in the 1948 elections, the year Johnson won a seat in the upper chamber, a pivotal moment in the partisan battles took place one year later when the Chinese Communist Party took power. Republicans in Congress blasted the Truman administration for having “lost China” to the communists. They argued that Secretary of State Dean Acheson and President Truman had failed to provide sufficient support to the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. As a result, there were now two major communist powers. Democrats were shaken by the outcome, unclear about how they should respond. In 1950, California Republican senator William Knowland pounded away at the theme. He delivered 115 floor speeches about China. Knowland said that Truman’s policies had “accelerated the spread of communism in Asia” and the “gains for communism there have far more than offset the losses suffered by communism in Europe.” The senator argued that the “debacle solely and exclusively rests upon the administration which initiated and tolerated it.” Charging Truman and Secretary Acheson with “appeasement,” he told the public that the two of them were guilty of “aiding, abetting and giving support to the spread of communism in Asia.”Footnote ⁴

Republicans coupled the criticism about “who lost China?” with incessant attacks on Democrats for failing to take seriously the threat of communist spies within the United States. Nobody had been better at these attacks than Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, a fiery Republican who unleashed blistering attacks on Democrats, jumbling and making up facts, which the media repeated in their effort to remain objective. While most Senate Republicans distanced themselves from McCarthy in public, they were more than willing to let him continue with his attacks on Democrats, and they echoed his broader arguments albeit in a somewhat more restrained fashion.

As Republicans ramped up their attacks on the Democrats, the Truman administration sent the nation’s military forces in 1950, without a declaration of war, into Korea. Truman dispatched troops to provide support to the South Koreans in their effort to push back against the North Korean troops who had crossed the 38th parallel. The war, though drawing initial enthusiastic public support for a hawkish Truman, quickly turned into a political problem for his party. But the midterm elections fostered division over the issue. In July, Senator Taft wrote to a friend that “the only way we can beat the Democrats is to go after their mistakes … There is no alternative except to support the war, but certainly we can point out that it has resulted from a bungling of the Democratic administration.” During the campaign, congressional Republicans followed through on Taft’s advice and became critical of how the president was handling the war. One Republican said: “We’ll man the pumps and unroll the hose, but damned if we’ll sing, ‘Hail to the Fire Chief.’”Footnote ⁵ The criticism merged with the McCarthyite arguments about the number of communist spies that existed within the US government. While the Democrats retained control of Congress, Republicans gained twenty-eight seats in the House and five Senate seats. The conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans increased significantly in size. Johnson initially hesitated when asked about running to become the Senate Democratic Whip. “You’ll destroy me, because I can’t afford to be identified with the Democratic Party right now.”Footnote ⁶ He ran anyway and won.

The war in Korea dragged on. Truman kept expanding the size of the military commitment, yet the war between the South and North seemed to become more bogged down every month. By early 1952, there appeared no hope for a decisive victory in the region. US troops remained tied down, with thousands of troops dead or injured, while it did not look as if communists would be falling any time soon. Thousands of Americans waited for their family members to come home. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the Việt Minh were holding their ground against the French.

These politically charged years culminated with the presidential and congressional elections of 1952. “It is true that in Europe we have never reversed the appeasement policy of Yalta and Potsdam that was approved by Mr. Truman,” said Senator Taft. “No, Mr. Truman has not stopped the advance of Communism all over the globe.”Footnote ⁷ Sensing that he had little chance to win reelection, Truman, whose approval ratings had fallen to a stunning 23 percent, decided that he would not run.

Republicans took a different approach in 1952, one that highlighted their national security theme. The party nominated the World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower, who identified as a Republican for the first time and ran a campaign that revolved around the Democratic failures on national security. His running mate, California senator Richard Nixon, served as an attack dog and reiterated these themes in the kind of rhetoric that was not fit for the major nominee. Nixon accused the Democrats of having “lost 600,000,000 people to the Communists” and allowing them to “honeycomb our secret agencies with treachery.”Footnote ⁸ Nixon had cut his teeth in the new conservative national security politics of the post–World War II period and played his role to perfection. Eisenhower did not get quite so ugly in his attacks, though he did make clear his agreement. During his most famous speech on the subject on October 25, 1952, he said, “It has been a sign – a warning sign – of the way the Administration has conducted our world affairs. It has been a measure – a damning measure – of the quality of leadership we have given.” The reason for the Korean War was simple, he said, dismissing claims it was “inevitable.” “We failed to read and to outwit the totalitarian mind.” Eisenhower famously promised that “I shall go to Korea,” with the implicit meaning that as a soldier he would be able to end the war.Footnote ⁹

Republicans enjoyed a major electoral success, one that a young Lyndon Johnson would never forget. Eisenhower won with 442 electoral votes and 55.1 percent of the popular vote while Republicans once again retook control of the House and Senate, proving that the outcome in 1946 had not been a total fluke. New York governor Thomas Dewey, who in 1948 had run mimicking Harry Truman’s hardline anticommunist stance, now said, “Whenever anybody mentions the words Truman and Democrat to you, for the rest of your lives remember that those words are synonymous with Americans dying, thousands of miles from home, because they did not have the ammunition to defend themselves … Remember that the words Truman and Democrat mean diplomatic failure, military failure, death and tragedy.”Footnote ¹⁰

For Democrats like Johnson, the election of 1952 had been devastating. He and his colleagues were taken aback by how strong the forces of conservatism had proven to be in the electorate and how the Republicans, who had been marginalized as isolationists in the early 1940s, now found a way to use national security as a partisan cudgel. The political battles that culminated with Eisenhower’s election and a Republican Congress proved to him just how far national security could be used to undercut Democrats and open the door for Republican success at the ballot box. Johnson, who like others in the South had a naturally hawkish disposition and was inclined to support the use of force to contain communism, came to believe that his party needed to maintain a hawkish stance or Republicans would tear them apart in elections.

Fearing Looking “Weak” on Defense, 1961–1964

The political dynamics of the early Cold War period continued to shape Johnson’s outlook for decades to come, as well as that of other Democrats he worked with. As president, John F. Kennedy constantly considered the threat that he faced from the Republican right on these sorts of issues. As he tried to navigate through difficult military problems like the US presence in Vietnam he often came back to the kinds of domestic political pressures he faced to avoid, especially as a Northern Democrat, seeming to be too liberal on Vietnam. Though Kennedy did demonstrate more predilections to push back against some of these rightwing forces with his emphasis on diplomacy and military restraint, it remains unclear what he would have done with Vietnam. The forces of conservatism remained strong, as did the domino theory, in the highest levels of international policymaking. The problem was not just Republicans but Southern Democrats, still the base of the party, who tended to be extremely hawkish on foreign policy. Democratic senators such as Richard Russell of Georgia could be counted to be some of the most rightward-leaning voices when it came to questions of war.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson became president as a result of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, in the city of Dallas, Texas, where conservative activists had lined the streets with signs railing against the president’s weak national security positions. LBJ was immediately cognizant of the risks that national security posed to his domestic agenda in the coming years. From his very first day in office, Johnson displayed massive ambitions about what he would do on the domestic front. He intended to extend the New Deal into new areas such as race relations and urban poverty, while solidifying an electoral coalition composed of labor, farmers, African Americans, poor Americans, liberal intellectuals, and urban Democratic machines who all retained a deep commitment to the federal government.Footnote ¹¹ But to do so, Johnson believed, he needed to protect his flank on national security. He remembered what had happened to his party in 1952 and was determined not to let it happen again. This line of thinking guided how he approached the politics of Vietnam.

Early in Johnson’s presidency, Vietnam was not a very prominent issue outside the White House. Polls showed that only a small number of Americans knew about the war taking place in the region and even that Kennedy had increased the number of military advisors helping the South Vietnamese.Footnote ¹² Two-thirds of the population reported that they were not paying attention to the situation there.Footnote ¹³ Florida Democrat George Smathers, one of Johnson’s closest friends and advisors, reported that he was having trouble finding any legislators who believed that “we ought to fight a war in that area of the world.”Footnote ¹⁴

Understanding that support or interest for military intervention remained shaky within his own party, Johnson nonetheless realized that Vietnam had the potential to become a major operation that would consume his presidency. He had seen this at first hand with Truman and Korea. What caused him even greater concern was that many of his colleagues, including the hawks, warned that this could, and probably would, be a losing war. Senator Russell, a Southern hawk, outlined the many reasons why the war would likely be disastrous and unwinnable. Referring to the conflict as the “Vietnam thing,” Russell called the situation the “damn worst mess I ever saw.” He warned the president that the more the United States tried to do, the “less they are willing to do for themselves,” speaking of the South Vietnamese government. Russell said that if it was up to him, and he had the option of getting out or fighting, “I’d get out.” Russell said that the territory was not worth a “damn bit,” and he feared that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not understand the “history or background” of the people in the region. Russell felt that Senator Wayne Morse (D-Oregon), a top opponent of the war, reflected public opinion.Footnote ¹⁵

Johnson understood all of these concerns but did not really know how he could get out. Military risks were one factor behind his concerns, but so too were political considerations. In a subsequent telephone conversation, Johnson said to Russell that voters in places like Georgia would “forgive you for everything except being weak,” especially as Republicans raised hell about this issue. He needed to stand firm. He believed that, as soon as the public did start paying attention to the war, “The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it, every one of them.” “I’m not going to lose Vietnam,” Johnson told Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., his Republican ambassador to Vietnam, “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.”Footnote ¹⁶

During the 1964 reelection campaign, Johnson faced off against Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater, a rightwing conservative who had entered the Senate in 1952 and had picked up on the national security themes that had loomed large since then. Goldwater attacked Johnson for being both too weak and too strong. When he was on the campaign trail, Goldwater spent much of the summer months warning that Johnson was weak when fighting against communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. At the same time, he warned that the president would involve US forces in the wrong kinds of wars without the willingness to do whatever it took to achieve victory. Goldwater claimed that Johnson was planning to vastly escalate the ground war in Vietnam if he was reelected, despite all his claims to be the peace candidate. At the same time, Goldwater argued, the president was scared to use the air power and bombing arsenal that the United States had available in the brutal way that would actually be necessary to defeat the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Goldwater’s speeches in July 1964 centered on these themes. He warned that Johnson would go to war “recklessly” and called Vietnam “Johnson’s War.” In his acceptance speech in July at the Republican convention in San Francisco, Goldwater said that “failures infest the jungle of Vietnam.” Other Republicans agreed. Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Charles Halleck of Indiana had said earlier in the month that “Johnson’s indecision” on the war had made it a campaign issue. Halleck said that Johnson’s “lack of definite, vigorous policy” left the nation in limbo, while Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) warned that “It is not time for equivocation and vacillation.”Footnote ¹⁷

Johnson took the threat from Goldwater seriously even if many Democrats and political pundits dismissed the notion that the far-right Arizonian could ever pose a credible threat. Johnson was the kind of politician who never took anything lightly. He believed in assuming the worst possible outcome and conducting the kind of campaign that devastated his opponent. Johnson, who feared that many Americans did not believe his presidency was legitimate given how he had come into office, wanted a convincing landslide victory that would create the perception of a mandate.

Johnson went after Goldwater on national security in two different and contradictory directions. The first was to demonstrate to voters that he was tough on defense. Just a few weeks before the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, NJ, Johnson had sent US Navy ships into the Gulf of Tonkin to ramp up their operations and try to intimidate the North Vietnamese. When there were reports of an attack on US ships on August 2, Johnson decided to downplay the incident and rejected any kind of military response. Although he backed away from military action, Johnson told McNamara that they needed to be “firm as hell” without making any dangerous statements that could provoke a war. Johnson explained that he had spoken with a friend, a banker on Wall Street as well as a friend of Texas, who warned that he needed to be “damned sure I don’t pull ’em out and run, and they want to be damned sure that we’re firm. That’s what all the country wants because Goldwater’s raising so much hell about how he’s gonna blow ’em off the moon, and they say that we oughtn’t to do anything that the national interest doesn’t require. But we sure oughta always leave the impression that if you shoot at us, you’re going to get hit.”Footnote ¹⁸

When McNamara reported that there might have been another attack in the early hours of August 4, though the evidence remained shaky at best, Johnson decided to be tough. During a discussion with advisor Kenneth O’Donnell, a Kennedy holdover, he and Johnson concurred that the administration was being “tested” and that they had to show they were willing to use force. Although there was almost no evidence that the attacks had been real, Johnson used them to approach Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted him authority to use force in the region. Politics was front and center in why he wanted to obtain this power. Senator William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) made it clear to Senate Democrats, who were asking why they should grant this authority, that they needed to understand the political importance. If Johnson appeared weak, Goldwater and the Republicans would use this against the Democrats. If anyone feared that Johnson was going too far in using military force, they should just imagine what Goldwater would do. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Johnson claimed was as broad as “grandma’s nightshirt” since it gave him so much authority, passed both houses by decisive margins.Footnote ¹⁹ There were only two opposing votes in the Senate, including Senator Morse. On August 10, just three days after Congress passed the resolution, Johnson’s spirits were lifted when pollster Lou Harris found that the number of Americans supporting him over Goldwater to handle Vietnam had gone up from 59 to 71 percent.

At the same time, Johnson simultaneously wanted to argue that handing Senator Goldwater the keys to the White House would greatly increase the chances of a nuclear war. Goldwater had made a number of controversial statements, including his openness to use low-level tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam as a way to end the war quickly without ground troops. Johnson pounced on these kinds of statements, and the fears they stimulated, to tell Americans that Goldwater would escalate the dangers that all Americans faced.

The centerpiece of the strategy came when the campaign broadcast the “Daisy” ad on September 7, a blistering television commercial where viewers saw a girl counting the petals as she pulled them off a flower. As she got closer to ten, she stopped counting. The camera zoomed in on her eyes and viewers listened to a countdown from ten to one in an ominous official voice, which was followed by the image of a nuclear explosion that could be seen in her pupils. The spot ended with Johnson explaining to voters that “These are the stakes – to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die. Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” The Republican National Committee asked for the commercial to be removed, calling it one of the lowest moments in political campaigns as well as a violation of the Fair Campaign Practices Code, which prohibited vilifying opponents through unfair accusations. Republican Dean Burch filed a complaint, calling on the campaign to “halt this smear attack” on the US senator.Footnote ²⁰ The Johnson team was fine with that. They pulled the ad. But the intense media scrutiny that the spot received was better than any paid advertisement could ever deliver. Everyone in the media and politics was talking about the ad, to the dismay of Goldwater and his supporters.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, Johnson would continue to talk about this theme, albeit in a toned-down fashion, as he tried to foster what he called a “Republican Frontlash” of voters who would leave their party given that the person at the top of the ticket was too reckless and extreme.

Johnson won the election by huge margins, 61.1 percent of the popular vote and 486 Electoral College votes. Democrats came out with sizable margins in Congress, 295 in the House and 68 in the Senate.

Ignoring Humphrey, 1965–1967

It seemed that Johnson had decisively put down any electoral threat that he faced and could now shape the political agenda around the issues that mattered to him. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, sent him a memo making this point. He warned the president that the war in Vietnam needed to come to an end. “In Vietnam, as in Korea,” he wrote, “the Republicans have attacked the Democrats either for failure to use our military power to ‘win’ a total victory, or alternatively for losing the country to the Communists.” Continued involvement in this battle would put his domestic agenda in peril. Most importantly, the election gave Johnson a clear playing field since the Republican right had been neutralized. Humphrey wrote that 1965 was “the first year when we can face the Vietnam problem without being preoccupied with the political repercussions from the Republican right.” Humphrey warned that if “we find ourselves leading from frustration to escalation, and end up short of a war with China but embroiled deeper in fighting with Vietnam over the next few months, political opposition will steadily mount. It will underwrite all the negativism and disillusionment which we already have about foreign policy generally.”Footnote ²²

Rather than taking Humphrey’s advice, Johnson isolated him from the inner circle of advisors on foreign policy. “We don’t need all these memos!” Johnson wrote the vice president.Footnote ²³ Johnson still believed that communism had to be contained and that a hawkish approach to North Vietnam was in the best interests of the nation. Politically, standing firm also made the most sense so that weakness on national security would not become a problem for his administration. A liberal Democrat could survive only by being tough on defense. Johnson formed a bipartisan coalition with Senator Everett Dirksen who ensured that the Republicans would support his policy of escalation.

Johnson was savvy enough to understand the limits of presidential power. He assumed that he only had a short window for legislating. He recalled that Congress got the best out of most presidents, and they would do the same with him. The 1966 midterms would certainly see a resurgence of power for the conservative coalition that ruled Capitol Hill, and they would clearly include national security issues in their campaign. The party of the president almost always lost seats in midterm elections. Given the landslide victory he had enjoyed, the losses would probably be more severe than usual, as FDR had experienced in 1938 and Eisenhower in 1958. With this political calculation in mind, as the pressure to escalate in Vietnam increased in the mid-1960s, Johnson did not resist calls for more militarism.

Johnson pushed back against critics in his administration such as Humphrey and ignored the growing antiwar movement that was taking form on college campuses. Instead, in the spring of 1965, he accelerated the war by launching a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam and deploying ground troops to South Vietnam. None of these decisions meant that his doubts about the war had gone away. “If we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam,” he later reflected, “there would follow in this country an endless national debate – a mean and destructive debate – that would shatter my presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy. I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson [Truman’s secretary of state] had lost their effectiveness the day that the Communists took over China.”Footnote ²⁴ Though in public he stood firm as a resolute hawk, in private he continued to share his reservations and fears with friends like Richard Russell.

The opposition to the war kept growing. Liberals started to move into open rebellion against the Democratic administration. In 1965, there were peace rallies in New York and Washington that drew an impressive 25,000 people each. In March, student members of the Students for a Democratic Society started to conduct “teach-ins” that mobilized opposition to Vietnam. An antiwar movement also took strong hold at the grass roots. Protests started to break out all over the country as younger liberals turned decisively against the Johnson administration. All of his accomplishments on the domestic front started to be overshadowed by the controversies over the war.

Some of the opposition took form in the halls of Congress. Senator William Fulbright conducted blistering hearings into the war, dragging members of the administration in front of the television cameras to ask tough questions about the justification for this war. Fred Friendly, who headed CBS News, convinced his fellow executives to cover some of the hearings on television, which would require preempting popular shows such as Captain Kangaroo. The hearings gave Americans a look at administration officials including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, former diplomat George Kennan, and former ambassador to South Vietnam General Maxwell Taylor being asked tough and hard-hitting questions about the war. When Rusk said that the “prospect for peace disappears” if the United States did not confront the communist threat, Fulbright tore apart everything that he said, arguing that Vietnam did not involve any vital US interests and could be a “trigger for world war.” Johnson came to hate Fulbright, whom he mocked privately as “Senator Halfbright.” But the hearings were damaging. As the historian Randall Woods has argued, the hearings “opened a psychological door for the great American middle class … If the administration intended to wage the war in Vietnam from the political center in America, the 1966 hearings were indeed a blow to that effort.” Advisor Joseph Califano told the president that speechwriter “Dick Goodwin called yesterday to say that everywhere he speaks, he runs into deep concern about the situation in Vietnam. He said he is personally and firmly convinced that you are pursuing the correct course, but that the Fulbright hearings particularly are doing a tremendous amount to confuse the American people.”Footnote ²⁵ The network executives allowed Friendly to broadcast only some of the hearings and ultimately turned back to more lucrative shows.

Others on Capitol Hill, such as Idaho’s Democratic senator Frank Church, started to speak out openly against the war. He called for an immediate bombing halt. The administration’s “worst problem,” Johnson told Dirksen, was not military but the “speeches that are made about negotiation … and about pulling out … They use those, the communists take them and print them up in pamphlets and circularize them in newspapers … They keep all the government fearful.”Footnote ²⁶ The liberal opposition was not all partisan. There were more voices in the Republican Party, such as the New York congressman Jacob Javits, who started to express similar concerns.

Yet Johnson’s fears of the right greatly overshadowed any concerns about liberals or the left who were criticizing the war. “Don’t pay any attention to what those little shits on the campuses do,” Johnson told Undersecretary of State George Ball. “The great beast is the reactionary element in the country.”Footnote ²⁷ National Security Advisor William Bundy recalled that everyone in the administration feared that to make a “‘soft’ move” would be politically devastating. And Johnson was not making things up.Footnote ²⁸ Even as Dirksen and the Senate Republicans backed his policies, House Republicans were extremely critical of the administration for being too timid.

As Johnson predicted, Republicans stressed national security as a major issue in the midterm campaigns. None other than Richard Nixon, seeking to revive his political image after losing the presidential election in 1960 and the California gubernatorial election two years later, stumped for Republican congressional candidates across the country. He made national security and Vietnam central themes. He criticized the administration for a policy of “retreat and defeat” in Vietnam. With college students protesting the war from the left, Nixon and other Republicans claimed that Johnson was unwilling to use enough force to bring the conflict to an end. Sounding like Goldwater in 1964, Nixon insisted that the president had to use more air power and unleash more bombs to end this ground war. This, combined with attacks on rising deficits and disorder in the cities, allowed the conservative coalition to vastly increase its numbers. Republicans gained forty-seven seats in the House.

When Johnson analyzed the results, he was worried about the direction his party seemed to be moving, one that was in contrast to public opinion and Congress. Polls showed that the war had been important to the Republican victories. Many of the new Republicans were more hawkish than the people they replaced. Polls consistently showed that, even though Americans were unhappy with the situation in Vietnam, they opposed withdrawal by sizable majorities and wanted more military intervention, not less. This was why conservatives like the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, were demanding that Johnson authorize a full escalation of the war. Nixon, who could not have been more pleased with the election, called it a rejection of Johnson’s policies. The election was the “sharpest rebuff of a president in a generation,” and Vietnam was the main issue. He warned “our friends and enemies abroad” that the election meant “more support, rather than less, for the principle of no reward for aggression.”Footnote ²⁹

With the conservative coalition back in control of Congress, they started to put pressure on Johnson in 1967 to restrain domestic spending. Johnson understood from all of his economists that, to continue financing the war in Vietnam while maintaining funding for his social programs, he would have to request a tax surcharge from Congress to pay for everything. The surcharge was also essential to restraining the growing inflationary pressures that the economy was facing as a result of so much government spending. When the president sent his request to Congress in August 1967, the conservatives said no. Wilbur Mills (D-Arkansas), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, insisted that if the president wanted his tax he would have to agree to steep cuts in social spending: he would have to choose between guns and butter.

Johnson’s advisors urged him to stand firm. They warned that the kinds of cuts that the conservatives were calling for would be disastrous to his domestic agenda. The spending reductions would cripple the programs that he already passed and prevent him from doing anything more. The possibility of achieving a Great Society would disappear.

As the White House and Congress faced off in this budgetary battle, the antiwar movement exploded all over the country, and “Johnson’s War” became the new term through which activists discussed what was going on in Vietnam. In April 1967 the civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., rocked the White House when he publicly came out against the war. He had expressed criticism of the war in earlier settings, but always with caution and at lower-level events. This marked his formal embrace of an antiwar movement that still had lukewarm support in much of the country, including among many prominent civil rights leaders. Speaking at the historic Riverside Church in New York City, King told the 3,000 people in attendance that “my conscience leaves me no other choice” but to speak out against the war.Footnote ³⁰ The president’s daughter, Luci Johnson, remembers that the last words she would hear before going to bed every night were: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The student protestors on Pennsylvania Avenue, standing near the walls of her bedroom, made their message loud and clear. She and her sister woke up to the same chants.Footnote ³¹

One of the reasons that the war took on such urgency was that the nation had a peacetime draft in place, which meant that millions of Americans had friends or family members who felt the impact of the war. Even in middle-class families where college education protected many younger members from going to war because of exemptions and deferments, the threat remained very real and they knew others who were not so fortunate. The movement took to the streets and commanded immense attention within the media, bringing daily coverage to the problems of Vietnam. In late October 1967, the antiwar movement staged one of the most important weeks up to then with “Stop the Draft Week.” Thousands of demonstrators all over the country turned in their draft cards or burned them. At the University of Wisconsin, demonstrators confronted Dow Chemical Company that was there to recruit students. The company notoriously made napalm, the gasoline-based gel used to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam. Tens of thousands of younger Americans flooded into Washington, DC, and marched on the Pentagon.

Administration officials were struggling to maintain their confidence as they watched the protests on their television screens and read about them on the front pages of newspapers. Many had children who were directly or indirectly involved in the protests, bringing the criticism right to their home. They went to work in the White House or Pentagon, only to come home and find antiwar material plastered all over their children’s walls and pacifist music of the counterculture blaring from their stereos.

Figure 15.1 President Lyndon B. Johnson inspects a marine at Cam Ranh Bay Air Force Base (October 26, 1966).

Source: PhotoQuest / Contributor / Archive Photos / Getty Images.

The news media had also become more critical of the administration’s Vietnam policies. It took the press a long time to start broadcasting and publishing negative coverage of the war. During the first few years, most reporters relied on military officials for their information. Their accounts were still generally supportive of the policy. Starting in late 1966, that slowly started to change. Writing for the New York Times (starting with a story in late December), Harrison Salisbury was the first reporter to actually go to North Vietnam and start producing reports of what he was seeing, unfiltered by the military officials. His emphasis was on the civilian damage being caused by American force. Others followed him in 1967. Reporters in print and television were bringing Americans stories from what they were seeing on the frontlines, sharing a narrative that looked very different from what Johnson was saying. The stories ranged from the failures of US military efforts to atrocities committed against civilians.Footnote ³²

1968

On January 31, 1968, any remaining faith that Americans had about the war soon coming to an end disappeared. The National Liberation Front launched a surprise attack, the Tet Offensive, on the US Embassy in Saigon and other key South Vietnamese military installations. While the United States eventually did repulse the attacks, the severity of the incident left many people in the country doubting all claims coming from Johnson and General William Westmoreland that the war would soon come to an end. When Westmoreland requested 206,000 more troops for the war, the domestic conflict intensified.

CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, one of the most respected sources of news in that generation, broke with the veneer of objectivity when he closed his show by saying: “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds … For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate … To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past … To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.” Looking at the camera with a somber face, he said: “But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”Footnote ³³

With the next presidential election looming, Johnson watched as his political coalition unraveled while his opponents gained momentum. The fears that he had developed about conservatives early in his career seemed to be coming true. He had underestimated just how deep the opposition to the war would become among liberals, and he seemed to have little response to the antiwar movement. A president who had been determined upon taking office not to let the politics of national security swamp his domestic agenda watched as this happened as a result of his own actions.

Going into the election the situation seemed increasingly dire. The Republican nominee would be Richard Nixon, marking how politics had come full circle since 1952. Vietnam was at the very top of Nixon’s agenda as the Republican nominee asserted that this war marked the complete failure of the Johnson administration to handle the communist threat. Nixon argued that he would bring the war to an end, though he remained vague about how he intended to do this. He alluded to his willingness to use force but also hinted that diplomacy would be on the table again. At the same time, Nixon appealed to his supporters – those he called the “Silent Majority” – as the Americans who were not causing disruptions on the street by protesting, but who still believed in the values of their country. He hoped to separate core working- and middle-class Democratic voters from their party by tying Johnson to the antiwar movement which, ironically, did not like Johnson either.

During the Democratic primaries, Johnson faced a challenge from Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran as the antiwar candidate, framing his campaign around a rejection of involvement in Vietnam. McCarthy appealed directly to the antiwar movement and hoped that the arguments about what had gone wrong in anticommunist policy would appeal to a wide spectrum of voters. He attracted huge numbers of younger Democrats who found him to be the only reasonable voice in a party they saw as having become corrupt. McCarthy enjoyed a very strong and unexpected second-place finish in New Hampshire.

Tired and broken down, fearing that he might lose, the president decided to withdraw from the campaign. Johnson made a dramatic announcement on March 31 before a national televised audience who had been expecting to hear another standard address about the war. “With America’s sons in the fields far away,” he told a stunned audience on television, “with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office – the presidency of your country.”Footnote ³⁴ He concluded by saying that he would not run for the nomination. Following the announcement, he turned his attention to diplomacy and the budget. In April, Johnson reached a deal with Congress, one his liberal advisors did not like, that included a 10 percent tax surcharge in exchange for $6 billion in cuts in discretionary domestic spending. In the parlance of the times, he cut butter to finance the guns.

But the politics of Vietnam continued to bog down the Democrats. The Democrats splintered in many directions. With McCarthy doing well, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, who had an extraordinarily tense relationship with Johnson, neither trusting the other, entered the contest. Like McCarthy, whose supporters resented the senator for coming into the campaign only after the Minnesotan had proved how vulnerable the president was, Kennedy likewise came down hard against the war after entering the race, including the inequitable way that the draft worked by falling hardest on the most disadvantaged, though his campaign came to an abrupt end when he was assassinated in June following his victory in the California primary.

The candidate who paid the highest political price for Vietnam was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who gained the Democratic nomination and had to run as the heir to Johnson. Once a maverick young Democrat who had shaken the party in 1948 by calling on his colleagues to embrace civil rights, Humphrey was now the face of a broken establishment. The antiwar movement refused to get on board with Humphrey’s candidacy, as became evident with protests that took place outside the convention in Chicago. Antiwar activists inside and outside the convention hall demanded a strong antiwar plank in the party platform, but they were denied. When police clashed with the protestors in front of the convention, the chaos that unfolded over the war made the Democrats look divided and weak. McCarthy was deeply disillusioned with Humphrey and would refuse to endorse him until late in October. Humphrey left Chicago with the nomination, but without robust support.

Richard Nixon, though vague on what he would actually do, kept promising that it would be very different from what the nation was seeing and hearing from Johnson. “When the strongest nation in the world can be tied up for four years in a war in Vietnam,” he said upon accepting the nomination, “with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can’t manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness … it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America.”Footnote ³⁵

Humphrey struggled over how to handle the war. Fearing Johnson’s wrath and appearing to be disloyal, he resisted coming out too strongly against his own leader. In late September, with his polls suffering, Humphrey finally made a speech in which he promised to move forward with a bombing halt should he be elected to the presidency. The speech, though timid, was sufficient to convince antiwar activists that he had finally seen the light. His polls improved as more liberals finally started to come out in favor of the campaign. On October 31, just days before the election, Johnson himself went on television to announce a temporary bombing halt. The announcement boosted Humphrey’s standing in the poll once again, but it was too late.

The negotiations themselves were subject to the political battles. Johnson got word that people connected to the Nixon campaign were secretly talking to the South Vietnamese government, urging them to reject any deals that emerged on the grounds that a Nixon administration would give them much better terms for agreement. Fearing that the bombing halt would greatly boost the chances of Humphrey’s victory, the Republican activist Anna Chennault, who worked for Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger and had deep ties to the government in Saigon, had passed the message to the South Vietnamese. Kissinger had informed Nixon that Johnson was working on a deal. In exchange for the bombing halt, the Soviets were pressuring Hanoi into ending the war. According to notes that were taken by Nixon’s top aide H. R. Haldeman, the Republican candidate understood what was happening as he told his future chief of staff that their friends should keep “working on” efforts to sway the South Vietnamese and stifle the peace talks that could swing the election toward Humphrey. “Keep Anna Chennault working on” South Vietnam, his notation about Nixon’s order said; “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.”Footnote ³⁶ Johnson learned of the operation through wiretaps that he was conducting on the Republicans.

Johnson called Senator Dirksen on the telephone to complain about what Nixon was doing. “I think that we’re skirting on dangerous ground,” Johnson said to his old friend. “This is treason.” Johnson said he did not know exactly who was behind the operation, but “I know this: that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.” When Dirksen agreed “That’s a mistake!” Johnson said, “And it’s a damn bad mistake.”Footnote ³⁷ The president also complained to Senator Russell that the South Vietnamese did not understand how the American system worked. If Nixon was elected, liberal Democrats who were against the war would have even more influence. “They don’t realize they’ll have you and Fulbright and all the Congress that I’ve had. And they think that [if] they get Nixon they get all of Nixon’s policies. Now, they’re not going to, Nixon’s not going to be able to be much harder than I have been.”Footnote ³⁸ In the end he decided that he would not reveal this plan since it would disclose that he had authorized surveillance on the South Vietnamese ambassador and other communications with Saigon. Johnson also feared that if Nixon won it would undermine his legacy.Footnote ³⁹

None of this was sufficient to save Humphrey’s election, Johnson’s coalition, or liberalism in the short term. By a narrow margin, lowered in part by the third-party candidacy of the racist Alabama governor George Wallace, Nixon won the presidency. Nixon won 43.42 percent of the popular vote and 301 Electoral College votes. Humphrey gained 191 Electoral College votes and 42.72 percent of the popular vote. The Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress, with 58 seats in the Senate and 243 seats in the House. Within the new Congress, liberals were much more powerful and much more vociferous in threatening to cut funding for the war.

The politics of the war in Vietnam played out exactly in the way that Johnson had feared most. The pressure from the right remained unyielding throughout his presidency, creating a powerful force that helped keep Johnson on a hawkish track. Political fears converged with his understanding of foreign policy to lead the president, and the nation, deeper and deeper into Vietnam.

Johnson famously pitted Vietnam against the Great Society. He told his biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, “That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved – the Great Society.” The war, however, was of his own making. And the same political calculations that he used on domestic issues shaped his decision to ignore critics, including his own vice president, and double down on the battle.

But the way that the war unfolded did not give Johnson much political benefit for standing firm. The Democratic Party ended his term deeply divided, while Republicans were able to rally around a candidate who set the terms for national security debate for decades to come. Nixon, who had believed since the late 1940s that attacking Democrats as weak on defense offered a winning formula for the Republicans, entered into the White House determined to bring an end to the Vietnam War while continuing to disparage the incompetence of his opposition on questions of war and peace. Though sidetracked by Watergate, the coalition that Nixon put into place would prove to be robust in the coming decades, particularly when Ronald Reagan won election to the White House in 1980. Republicans prevented major expansions of Johnson’s domestic agenda, pushed for sharp reversals in the direction of other policies – such as taxation – and gained great support for a hawkish military agenda that left Democrats constantly playing defense – that is, until Republicans in 2003 started a Vietnam War of their own in Iraq.

Between 1963 and 1968 the central feature of politics in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was the monopolization of political power by a divided military. The generals were determined to maintain political control but were consumed by infighting, leading to a succession of coups and attempted coups. In the absence of legal political institutions through which to challenge the successive juntas and as a means of protecting communal, religious, and regional interests, politics frequently took the form of street protests, riots, and rebellions. Many noncommunist civilian politicians and groups believed that the establishment of a legitimate, constitutional, and democratic system with a representative legislature and checks on executive power was the solution to the RVN’s political ills and would stand a stronger chance of resisting the revolution than the military regime. Alongside battles over the RVN’s political institutions, successive regimes and nongovernmental actors attempted to govern, reform, and mobilize. The juntas launched pacification programs and economic reforms and attempted to craft a coalition of support, while civil society groups and nascent political parties attempted grassroots organizing in response to what they perceived as failed government efforts to mobilize the population against the insurgency. Each of these groups had a vision, however limited, for the future of Vietnam that was at odds with that offered by the National Liberation Front (NLF) and Hanoi.

It was only after domestic political turmoil and a noncommunist rebellion against the government, along with pressure from the United States, that the generals acceded to the creation of representative institutions in 1966 and 1967. But the military’s manipulation of the constitution-drafting and electoral processes ensured that such institutions would only graft a thin veneer of legitimacy onto continued military rule and would provide only limited opportunities for competitive politics. General Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu won the 1967 presidential election, consolidated his control of the military, and built a fragile base of support within the new National Assembly. Some political and civil society leaders believed that the RVN’s new institutions provided the best avenue for challenging the military’s continued dominance or for seeking a negotiated settlement with the National Liberation Front. Other noncommunist groups denounced these new institutions as illegitimate and remained outside legislative politics.

In addition to these issues of immediate concern, RVN politics in the mid-1960s was a product of historic faultlines in Vietnamese nationalism. Political identity was sometimes strongly though not exclusively influenced by regional or religious background as well as by differing experiences of colonialism, communism, and the French Indochina War. Many groups were motivated by self-preservation and self-interest and acted in response to their perceived marginalization from power. Confessional and regional identity and historical memory did not wholly determine political action, and political alliances did not fall neatly along these lines, but these divisions contributed to the failure of the RVN’s noncommunists to find a common program and leadership around which to unify, perhaps one means by which the RVN could develop popular legitimacy.

The story of Saigon’s political scene in these years cannot be told without the United States and the RVN’s highly circumscribed sovereignty. Acutely aware of the RVN’s military and economic dependence on the United States, even while extremely sensitive to it, South Vietnamese officials frequently looked to the US Embassy for advice and approval. Through its various agencies in South Vietnam, the United States instigated programs and cajoled, coerced, or bribed RVN officials into action. Deciding that the RVN military was the strongest institution in the country and fearful that a civilian government might be too weak or too independent, the United States backed the generals.

And, yet, US officials repeatedly expressed their frustration at their inability to direct and manipulate South Vietnamese politics to achieve desired outcomes. Many noncommunist Vietnamese believed foreign intervention was necessary to secure an independent, noncommunist Vietnam, if only the foreign supporters would stay in the background. Some objected to and resented American domination of South Vietnam’s political affairs, even as they sought to harness it to their own ends. For others, the costs of American intervention became too great, and they began to support a solution which would include the NLF in the political process and secure an American exit from Vietnam. But opposition to the government did not necessarily mean sympathy for the revolution or opposition to the American presence. All the while, the United States created a screen, in the form of economic and military aid and then conventional military forces, behind which noncommunists fought with one another. As a result, the RVN’s fight against the NLF and North Vietnam frequently took a back seat to the struggle among noncommunists for political control and about the nature of the state and the society they hoped would survive the communist onslaught. Focusing exclusively on the relationship between the United States and the RVN government therefore overlooks an energetic, although highly dysfunctional, noncommunist politics in South Vietnam. The RVN was both an outpost of the American empire and a site of febrile postcolonial politics.

Recent scholarship has cast light on aspects of this topic, including how the legacies of Ngô Đình Diệm’s rule continued to shape the politics of the era and how an authoritarian South Vietnamese state suppressed a vibrant civil society.Footnote ¹ But the period between the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 and the establishment of the Second Republic of Vietnam in 1967 demands further archive-based studies. For decades, orthodox historians complacently argued that the US mission in Vietnam was doomed to fail because of the absence of a legitimate, functioning noncommunist state in the South. Yet those scholars rarely examined South Vietnamese politics in any sustained manner and failed to reveal the dynamics that made the RVN illegitimate and unviable. Just as American policymakers hoped they could win the war while sidelining South Vietnamese, the historiography has sometimes reproduced the imperialist marginalization of South Vietnamese actors from the American war at the time. An exploration of the Phủ Thủ Tướng (Office of the Prime Minister Collection) in National Archives II in Hồ Chí Minh City and the memoirs of RVN personalities would no doubt reveal many new insights to the researcher with the tenacity to examine the most unstable and chaotic period in the RVN’s twenty-year history.

The Military Revolutionary Council: November 1963–January 1964

On November 1, 1963, after months of political unrest, RVN president Ngô Đình Diệm was overthrown by several of his generals in a US-backed coup. The generals appointed a predominantly civilian cabinet but power rested with the newly established Military Revolutionary Council (MRC), composed of twelve generals with Dương Vӑn “Big” Minh as chair. Although the generals won political power, Buddhists and students had led the protests against Diệm, and the president’s downfall had unleashed or reenergized numerous other political forces. Student and Buddhist groups called for a social revolution that would attack poverty and alienation, which they believed had instigated the insurgency. Several of Diệm’s most prominent political opponents emerged from jail or returned from exile, while nationalist political parties that had long clashed with the communists but remained underground during Diệm’s reign began to operate more openly. The MRC and subsequent juntas were compelled to respond to these forces and would struggle variously to court, contain, or suppress them, while crafting a coalition of support.

The most contentious question of the MRC period is whether its leaders planned a “neutral solution” for the RVN. In a series of post facto interviews with the historian George Kahin, former MRC leaders insisted that their plan had been to build a base of support that would allow them to negotiate with the NLF from a position of strength. They believed they could detach noncommunist elements from the NLF, form a government of reconciliation, and allow the NLF to participate in elections. The result would be a neutral country which would secure peace with North Vietnam and reject foreign troops and bases, even while maintaining a military and leaning toward the capitalist bloc. Just as Diệm and his brother Nhu may have been exploring contacts with the North in 1963, Big Minh was in contact with his brother, a colonel in the North Vietnamese army, but there is no evidence that he began negotiations with the NLF.Footnote ²

The MRC made several moves to maintain the support of groups which welcomed Diệm’s downfall. The generals abrogated the Strategic Hamlet Program, the cornerstone of the Diệm regime’s counterinsurgency efforts and the source of much popular resentment in the countryside. To woo civilian politicians, the MRC promised a transition to civilian and constitutional rule and appointed a “Council of Notables” to draw up a new constitution.Footnote ³ This was the first of several bodies which, over the next few years, would act as constitutional conventions or pro tem legislatures. The members of these bodies insisted on a return to civilian and constitutional rule even as they failed to build mass-based political movements and instead attached or reconciled themselves to the military regimes. The generals also released imprisoned Buddhists and students and sanctioned the establishment of a new, independent Student Association and the Unified Buddhist Church.

But these groups placed demands on the new regime. Student organizations supported the establishment of civilian rule and opposed communism, neutralism, and foreign intervention, but were divided along religious and institutional lines.Footnote ⁴ For the RVN’s politicized monks, the November revolution remained incomplete. Drawing on the ideas of the Buddhist revival dating to the 1920s, these monks and lay leaders were committed to social activism and subscribed to a vision of Vietnamese nationalism based on Buddhist principles that they believed was threatened by foreign ideologies and religions, including communism and Catholicism.Footnote ⁵ The protests against Diệm showed they were capable of mobilizing thousands of followers in and around South Vietnam’s major cities, though they had less success linking up with Buddhist groups in the Mekong Delta, and the movement itself was factionalized.

By the early 1960s, two monks, Trí Quang and Tâm Châu, led the largest groups. With power bases in Huế and Saigon respectively, the two men briefly united forces against Diệm in the latter half of 1963, but their differences reemerged and widened thereafter. Tâm Châu, whose support rested largely on anticommunist Northern Buddhist émigrés, had a history of cooperation with Catholic organizations against the communists and tended to adopt a more conciliatory stance toward the Southern government. Trí Quang, with a stronger following among younger radical monks and students, has proven harder for scholars to pigeonhole. Some view him as an antiwar activist, committed to ending the conflict by securing the withdrawal of US forces and the establishment of a popularly elected civilian government, followed by negotiations with the National Liberation Front.Footnote ⁶ Others argue that Trí Quang hoped to channel Buddhist dissatisfaction with Diệm and subsequent military regimes into a mass movement for an anticommunist government based on Buddhist principles.Footnote ⁷ In the weeks after the coup, Buddhist and student groups demonstrated little opposition to American intervention and insisted instead that the junta purge the government and educational institutions of members of the Cần Lao, Ngô Đình Nhu’s secret political party which had shored up Diệm’s rule and which many viewed as a tool of Catholic repression.

Responding to Buddhist demands, the MRC replaced many officials with ties to the party and, although the depth of the Cần Lao’s influence and its secrecy made a true purge difficult, these moves alarmed some Catholic leaders. While many leftwing Catholics joined calls for a noncommunist social revolution and, eventually, for a coalition government with the NLF, the RVN was also home to more than 600,000 Catholic refugees who had migrated south following the partition in 1954. Many came from Catholic communities that had resisted Việt Minh incursions during the French Indochina War and blamed the communists for their exile. Suspicious of the state and Catholic political parties, including the Cần Lao, these communities often took political guidance from their priests and focused broadly on representing Catholic interests by resisting both communism and the Buddhist domination of RVN politics.Footnote ⁸

Still, in the weeks following the coup, these groups revealed far more patience with the MRC than they would for subsequent regimes, and the threat to the MRC emerged instead from within the military. American officials had little idea what to expect from the generals once they had removed Diệm, but were alarmed by the junta’s desire to reduce American influence in directing the war. Disgruntled officers, feeling insufficiently rewarded by the MRC, sought to capitalize on this American dissatisfaction and began lining up support for another coup. After I Corps Commander Nguyễn Khánh told his American advisor that he had acquired documentary evidence of MRC generals’ neutralist inclinations, he received word that the United States would not oppose a preemptive coup. The plotters pulled off their plans on January 30, 1964, placing four senior MRC generals under house arrest and retaining the popular Big Minh as a figurehead chief of state. Khánh assumed the role of prime minister and chair of the MRC.Footnote ⁹ US officials did not instigate the coup, but it is unlikely that Khánh and his associates would have acted without American sanction for fear of losing aid. When presented with the opportunity to remove the suspect generals, American officials chose to stand aside rather than stall Khánh’s plot.

Figure 16.1 A Buddhist monk speaks to the crowd gathered at Saigon’s Xá Lợi Pagoda during memorial services for those who self-immolated to protest policies of President Ngô Đình Diệm (August 18, 1963).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

The Rise and Fall of Nguyễn Khánh: January 1964–February 1965

Nguyễn Khánh’s rule marked perhaps the most chaotic period in the RVN’s twenty-year history. He welcomed greater American intervention, and American officials expressed confidence that he would prosecute the war more vigorously than his predecessors. As it turned out, Khánh demonstrated both dependence on and defiance of the United States, and his war leadership revealed itself in bellicose rhetoric about “marching north” rather than in battlefield results. He was highly unpredictable, making and breaking alliances and brutally suppressing some dissent while fleeing from other confrontations. In short, Khánh was an unprincipled opportunist, interested primarily in his own political survival.

Khánh proved incapable of building a base of support among the RVN’s diverse political constituencies. He attempted to win Buddhist favor by repealing a colonial-era decree which denied Buddhism the status of an official religion and by pressing ahead with the trials of several officials of the Diệm regime. These moves did not satisfy Buddhist leaders who wanted a more thoroughgoing purge, but they outraged some Catholic leaders and, throughout 1964, Buddhist and Catholic students took to the streets protesting Khánh’s policies. Meanwhile, Khánh awarded cabinet posts to Đại Việt politicians, the successors of a group of anticommunist, anticolonial parties formed in the late 1930s and with significant support among the officer class. Frustrated with their lack of power, these ministers soon began conspiring to overthrow him.Footnote ¹⁰

Khánh believed he could use the escalating war as a pretext for centralizing power and clamping down on his opponents, but his efforts backfired. He seized on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in early August to impose a state of emergency. He then drew up a new constitution, the so-called Vũng Tàu charter, which granted him practically unlimited powers. This unleashed political turmoil and violence perhaps exceeding that seen during the final months of Diệm’s regime. Students in Saigon, backed by Buddhist leaders, protested the new charter and clashed with counterprotestors, some of whom student leaders believed were bused in from Northern Catholic refugee settlements on the outskirts of Saigon. In the final days of August, sectarian clashes led to several deaths. NLF operatives, having increased their penetration of urban organizations in the spring of 1964, further stoked the flames.Footnote ¹¹ Buddhist and Catholic leaders appealed for calm, but the violence continued for days, indicating the difficulty religious leaders had imposing their will on their followers.Footnote ¹²

Faced with mounting chaos in the streets and fearful that students and monks could bring him down, Khánh revoked his charter and promised a framework for a new government. He would share leadership of the MRC with two senior generals, while a civilian-led High National Council (HNC) would draft a provisional constitution and ensure the return of civilian rule. But the HNC-appointed prime minister, Trần Vӑn Hương, also proved unacceptable to the Buddhist movement, and protestors again descended on the streets calling for his resignation. The new prime minister’s opponents resented his demand that student and religious groups refrain from political activity, objected to the composition of his cabinet, and condemned his failure to aid the victims of a devastating flood in central Vietnam. Hương imposed martial law in Saigon in mid-November, and dozens of protestors were killed and arrested in clashes that followed.Footnote ¹³

The balance of political power now shifted to a group of younger military officers or Young Turks, as the American and Vietnamese press would label them. Chief among them was Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, the 35-year-old Northern-born commander of the air force. Khánh had promoted these officers in 1964 to build a power base within the military that would rival senior generals. But the Young Turks gained leverage over Khánh when they rescued him from a Đại Việt–orchestrated coup in September. They demanded that the HNC forcibly retire dozens of senior officers and, when the members refused, the Young Turks dissolved the council. US ambassador Maxwell Taylor denounced the action and continued to back Prime Minister Hương. In response, Khánh publicly condemned Taylor’s interference and, in a volte-face, sought support among Hương’s Buddhist opponents, generating a rupture between the general and his erstwhile American backers. The MRC, now reconstituted as the Armed Forces Council (AFC), resolved the impasse by deposing Hương and exiling Khánh in late January and early February respectively. The AFC appointed the civilian politician Phan Huy Quát as prime minister, and he proved acceptable to the protestors, but the Young Turks were now the principal center of power within the military.

Throughout Khánh’s tenure, officials from the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the US Embassy looked on in frustration at the absence of a stable political base from which to escalate the war against the North. Fearful that the Buddhist movement’s success might lead to a neutralist government, US officials supported Khánh and then Hương in their confrontations with the movement, only serving to destabilize RVN politics. With the RVN military effort collapsing, the United States put aside the question of political stability and launched a bombing campaign against the North regardless. Evidently, the Buddhist movement could make or break governments and undermine the foundation upon which the US military effort rested.

American Intervention and the Young Turks, 1965–1966

One area that requires further study is the RVN’s role in the American expansion of the war in the spring and summer of 1965, perhaps the single most significant American violation of RVN sovereignty. Bùi Diệm, Prime Minister Quát’s close advisor and later ambassador to Washington, reported that the American decisions to begin a sustained bombing campaign against the North and dispatch combat troops to the South in February and March were made without consulting Quát’s government. As the number of American deployments grew and their mission expanded in spring 1965, Bùi Diệm said he and Quát felt powerless to oppose these moves. They felt sufficiently ill informed to judge whether South Vietnam was truly on the brink of military collapse and feared that opposition to the Americanization of the war might further threaten government stability during an ongoing cabinet crisis.Footnote ¹⁴

The crisis would spell the end of experiments with civilian rule. When Quát attempted to dismiss two ministers for their failure to deal with rice shortages, Chief of State Phan Khắc Sửu refused to sign the decree. He was backed by Southerners and Catholics who had borne the brunt of the arrests in the wake of another failed coup attempt in February and felt Quát’s cabinet was the product of Buddhist and Northern protest and scheming. The crisis dragged on until June and, when Quát requested the generals to mediate, they dispensed with the pretence of civilian rule entirely. The Young Turks established a National Leadership Council, otherwise known as the Directorate, under Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu as de facto chief of state, and a Central Executive Committee, a predominantly civilian cabinet, under Nguyễn Cao Kỳ as de facto prime minister. Thiệu and Kỳ would rule South Vietnam together until 1971, but would fuel their rivalry by building independent power bases within the military and bureaucracy. US officials were taken by surprise by this development but accepted the return to military rule.

Exhibiting a preference for authoritarian governance and military-led development, Kỳ’s “war cabinet” curbed civil liberties and promised to execute speculators and corrupt government officials, instituted austerity measures, and launched rural pacification programs. Opportunities for graft increased as American resources poured in. Supply shortages, inflation, and an artificially low exchange rate created opportunities for speculation, currency manipulation, and capital flight.Footnote ¹⁵ Senior officers were frequently implicated in corruption but usually suffered consequences only if their rivals chose to highlight it. Anticorruption efforts were arbitrary. The most egregious example came in March 1966 when Kỳ ordered the execution of the Chinese rice merchant and alleged speculator Tạ Vinh in central Saigon. As former commander of the air force, Kỳ himself reportedly profited from the lucrative heroin trade between Laos and Saigon.Footnote ¹⁶

Kỳ’s regime was the first since Diệm’s to pay serious attention to rural pacification. By 1965, the government controlled the cities, towns, and major transport arteries but had lost large areas of the countryside to the NLF. Kỳ established a Ministry for Rural Construction, which charged armed teams with the arduous task of reestablishing local government and carrying out development schemes to win the favor of peasants in newly pacified areas.Footnote ¹⁷ Youth groups, Buddhist social welfare organizations, and opposition political parties, already conducting their own pacification programs in the countryside and cities, captured some of these government programs at the local level and used the resources to build grassroots support for future elections.

In the second half of 1965, noncommunist challengers to the regime remained relatively muted. The US government was focused primarily on the military effort and was pleased enough to avoid further turnovers in leadership that it applied little pressure on Kỳ’s government in the field of democratic reform. Nonetheless, the Buddhist movement and even rightwing political parties continued to demand elections.Footnote ¹⁸ In late 1965, a rebellion also broke out among US-trained ethnic minority militias in the Central Highlands. Although the government violently suppressed the rebellion, the regime had to make concessions for greater Highlander representation in RVN institutions, foreshadowing a strategy of coercion and concession which the regime would deploy in its next standoff with the Buddhist movement.

The 1966 Buddhist Uprising

The Honolulu Conference in February 1966 set the stage for the RVN’s next political crisis. Recognizing the need for a stable and legitimate RVN government to underpin the American military effort, President Johnson and his advisors used the conference to press the generals into action on economic and political reform. But the summit only reproduced Kỳ’s formula for political development, which Buddhist leaders had already rejected – namely the appointment, rather than election, of a committee to draft a new constitution.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, Johnson’s endorsement of Kỳ at Honolulu emboldened the latter to move against his principal rival within the junta, General Nguyễn Chánh Thi.

As commander of I Corps in the RVN’s northern provinces, Thi had built up an independent power base, earning goodwill from local Buddhist and student groups through his participation in an aborted 1960 coup against Diệm and by tolerating Buddhist grassroots organizing in his corps area. He criticized Kỳ’s government, spoke out against the overbearing American presence, and refused to attend the Honolulu Conference.Footnote ²⁰ Frustrated and likely threatened by Thi’s independence, and urged on by US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Kỳ fired Thi in early March. This sparked massive protests throughout the cities in I Corps. The protests revealed a broad range of grievances, from support for Thi to demands for local autonomy, and from anger at the economic turmoil unleashed by the war to calls for Kỳ and Thiệu to resign. NLF activists participated in the protests, though there is little evidence to suggest they directed them.

Trí Quang, the Buddhist monk who had played such a prominent role in the movement against Diệm and enjoyed significant popular support in I Corps, sought to channel this anger into demands for a provisional civilian government, a new constitution, and elections. During the first weeks of the uprising, Trí Quang stressed that he did not oppose the United States’ role in Vietnam, only its manipulation of RVN politics, and even appealed to the Johnson administration to support the Buddhist movement against the generals. Yet the protests took on a growing anti-American tone as they proceeded, as the United States failed to express support for the rebels’ cause and sided openly with the generals.

In his efforts to suppress the movement, Kỳ oscillated between concessions and coercion. The generals sent Thi back to Đà Nẵng to negotiate a settlement, but he claimed he was persuaded by the rebels’ arguments and abandoned his role as mediator. By the end of the month, the central government had lost control of both Đà Nẵng and Huế, as protestors seized the radio stations and weapons depots, and entire army units as well as many local government officials openly sided with what was now called the “Struggle Movement.” The armed supporters of the Vietnamese National Party and Catholic militias now clashed with the struggle forces, even though they also wanted a transition to civilian rule. Kỳ made further proposals for political reform, but none satisfied the protestors. He then announced his determination to retake Đà Nẵng by force, denouncing the rebellious city authorities as communists and suggesting in a press conference that “either the government will fall or the mayor of Đà Nẵng will be shot.” Kỳ flew troops to Đà Nẵng, but backed down in the face of rebel strength and turned his attention instead to splitting the Buddhists by promising the moderate Tâm Châu that he would hold a National Political Congress to discuss elections for a Constituent Assembly. When protestors learned the United States had supplied Kỳ with planes for his Đà Nẵng operation, slogans and graffiti declaring “Down with the CIA” and “Yankees go home!” appeared in towns and cities across central Vietnam.Footnote ²¹

The regime managed to temporarily subdue the protests in the latter half of April. On April 12, the Directorate withdrew its troops from Đà Nẵng and convened the National Congress in Saigon. Although boycotted by the Buddhist movement, after two days of discussion the representatives made several proposals matching Buddhist demands. Chief of State Thiệu signed a decree that called for the election of a Constituent Assembly within three to five months and the generals’ resignation once it was elected. The demonstrations continued for several days in central Vietnam, but Trí Quang soon concluded that he could achieve his goals through an electoral process if Kỳ kept his word. He called for a temporary pause in the demonstrations and traveled around I Corps requesting Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers to return to their posts.Footnote ²²

Kỳ shattered this fragile peace in early May when he said the regime would try to hold elections by October but that he expected to remain in office for another year, until a new government was elected. Huế and Đà Nẵng were soon back under the rebels’ control. Kỳ now resolved to destroy the movement by force, but not before two corps commanders defected rather than carry out the task. Over the course of late May and June, however, government forces retook Đà Nẵng, and Kỳ appointed the ruthless director of National Police, Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, to lead the operation in Huế. After scores of Buddhist movement supporters were killed in these operations and hundreds arrested, the junta announced that elections to the Constituent Assembly would be held in September.Footnote ²³

The Buddhist uprising had won concessions at a great cost. The movement was irrevocably divided, and the repression would continue. Throughout the uprising, moderate and radical monks had struggled for control of key Buddhist institutions, with the radicals briefly gaining ascendancy and the moderates eventually attaining the upper hand. Tâm Châu had maintained good relations with the government and at several points urged Buddhists to cease the demonstrations.Footnote ²⁴ In 1967, the government would issue a new charter recognizing Tâm Châu’s faction as an official group. Trí Quang, having once believed it necessary to gain American backing for a Buddhist-led government, was now implacably opposed to both the military regime and the United States. His Ấn Quang movement, itself factionalized, would boycott the Constituent Assembly elections and increasingly call for negotiations with the NLF for a coalition government.

Toward a New Constitution, 1966–1967

The Constituent Assembly produced limited opportunities for political participation by tolerated groups and promised to improve the RVN’s image at home and abroad. But while some hoped it might temper the military’s arbitrary exercise of power, it would in practice serve to legalize and reinforce the status quo of military rule. From the beginning of the electoral process, it was clear that the military would use its power to protect its privileges. The generals insisted that the electoral commission set strict rules for candidacy and, with CIA assistance, General Loan funded the campaigns of Kỳ’s allies. Despite these abuses, the election returned a mixture of religious and regional representatives, including lawyers, academics, businesspeople, and veteran politicians, and even some of the military-funded lists proved more independent than expected, but the generals worked to ensure the production of a constitution favorable to military interests.

Among the most significant political currents within the assembly was Southern opposition to Kỳ and his fellow Northern emigré military officers’ domination of the government. The leader of this tendency was Trần Vӑn Vӑn, a wealthy Southern landowner and veteran anticommunist, who referred to Kỳ as a “neocolonialist.”Footnote ²⁵ Vӑn believed that Southern resistance to Northern domination was a driving force in Vietnamese history and argued that a Southern civilian government could draw on this to resist the communists and split Southern NLF members from Hanoi. Conscious of these charges, Kỳ had expanded his cabinet following the Honolulu Conference to include more Southern civilians and had depended on their support in his battle against the largely central Vietnamese Buddhist movement. They had used these positions to launch local development projects, upon which they built support for their allies’ election to the Constituent Assembly and later to the lower house of the legislature. Evidently ambivalent about General Loan’s use of extreme violence against the Buddhist movement, six Southern cabinet members threatened their resignation when Loan arrested a Southern minister in October 1966 for “North–South discrimination.”Footnote ²⁶ The earliest meetings of the Constituent Assembly occurred against this backdrop. The loosely organized Southern bloc did not represent all of Southern Vietnam, but these Southerners would offer some of the strongest opposition to the regime in the future.

The Constituent Assembly met for the first time on September 27 in the Saigon Opera House. In the words of one deputy, the proceedings often resembled “cheap and ridiculous comedy” more than an opera befitting the setting.Footnote ²⁷ The assembly operated under the watchful eye of the military, with General Thiệu ominously suggesting in his opening address that the Directorate would “lay before [the representatives] all views which we deem useful and constructive.” Assembly debates focused on local autonomy, freedom of religion and the press, private property, and land reform, but above all on the powers of each branch of government. Some delegates expressed support for a parliamentary model. Among those who favored a presidential system, promilitary deputies insisted on a strong executive, while others wanted to embed legislative checks on executive power. Southern deputies tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the 36-year-old Kỳ from the presidential race by proposing a minimum age of 40 for candidacy. The military rejected a draft because it granted too much power to the legislature, and the final version created a presidency with strong powers. But the legislature would not be entirely impotent. With a two-thirds majority vote, the National Assembly could remove from office a president or cabinet member who had served at least a year in office, while an independent inspectorate would investigate cases of corruption at the request of the legislature.Footnote ²⁸

With the constitution promulgated on April 1, the assembly moved on to the contentious issue of an electoral law which would govern the presidential and National Assembly elections in the fall. Southern deputies wanted provisions for a runoff in any presidential election, making it more difficult for a united military to split civilian tickets. But the deputies faced intimidation and threats of physical violence by the military and its supporters. During debates, Loan strutted around the balcony above the deputies, guzzling beer and wielding a pistol. These threats were underscored by speculation that the junta was responsible for the assassination of Trần Vӑn Vӑn and for Deputy Phan Quang Đán’s narrow escape from a car bomb the previous December. The final version of the election law did not include a provision for a runoff and barred candidates who had advocated neutralism or worked directly or indirectly “in the interests of the communism.”Footnote ²⁹

The 1967 Elections, the Tet Offensive, and Thiệu’s Consolidation of Power

American officials were divided about the degree to which the United States should try to shape the outcome of the presidential election. Recognizing that civilian candidates were at a distinct disadvantage against the military, some senior officials in Washington wanted to intervene in the election on the civilians’ behalf. They believed that a civilian victory, although achieved through American intervention, would showcase the legitimacy of the American and RVN war effort. But the US Embassy, at first under Henry Cabot Lodge and then under his successor Ellsworth Bunker, favored stability above all else and pursued a policy that would ensure a military victory.Footnote ³⁰

Even before the new constitution was promulgated, rivals Kỳ and Thiệu began courting military support for their respective candidacies. Loan deployed his police to extort campaign funds from wealthy personalities and swing the vote to Kỳ in unyielding areas. With both men planning to run, American officials were divided as to whom the United States should support but agreed that there should be no joint military ticket. This would deny civilian candidates any chance and would do little to improve the image of the RVN in the United States and internationally. Efforts were made to induce Kỳ or Thiệu to drop out or to encourage them to join a civilian ticket. To resolve the impasse, the Armed Forces Council met in June. The details of the meeting remain unclear but it was finally decided that Kỳ should run as Thiệu’s vice president. After the AFC decision, Kỳ told a CIA contact that he had no intention of relinquishing power, that Thiệu would merely be a figurehead, and that Kỳ would be president in all but name. The generals had drawn up a plan for a “secret military committee” which would continue to guide the government from behind the scenes. It seems that Kỳ, at the very least, expected to have authority to appoint the prime minister and cabinet. With the generals resolved to support a Thiệu–Kỳ ticket, they persuaded promilitary deputies in the provisional National Assembly to eliminate civilian candidates on dubious grounds, including Big Minh, and obstructed the campaigning efforts of others.Footnote ³¹

Thiệu and Kỳ won a plurality with just 35 percent of the vote. The surprise runner-up was the relatively unknown lawyer Trương Đình Du. Du waited until his candidacy was approved before announcing a peace platform, which included an unconditional bombing halt and talks with Hanoi and the NLF. He won 17 percent of the vote, including a plurality in several provinces west of Saigon, where he earned support among followers of the recently established Tân Đại Việt party, an outgrowth of the more liberal Southern branch of the Đại Việt party that had established grassroots support in the area. Former prime minister Trần Vӑn Hương swept the vote in Saigon where, according to Kỳ’s ally and mayor of Saigon Vӑn Vӑn Của, the election had been honest and probably reflected the electorate’s preferences. Lower house candidate Trần Ngọc Châu reported that a district chief in Kiến Hòa and the Bình Định province chief told him they had manipulated the results to ensure a Thiệu–Kỳ victory. Americans feared that such actions would discredit the entire process. Amid concerns about irregularities, the Constituent Assembly only narrowly approved the election results.Footnote ³²

In the senate elections, forty-eight ten-person slates competed for six places. As it was a nationwide race and no slate could claim broad appeal, a minuscule portion of the vote was enough to gain election. This allowed three right-wing Catholic slates to mobilize their loyal grassroots networks to secure half the seats in the senate. Although Ambassador Bunker received approval from Washington to make cash payments to “recruit” candidates for the elections to the lower house, the vote returned more representative deputies. Because of the constituency basis of the election, candidates with the support of locally influential groups could secure election with a small plurality of the vote. The lower house would prove more independent of the government than the senate, a venue in which opposition deputies denounced corruption and misrule. But the elections underscored the fragmentation of noncommunist politics, and the opposition would develop no common political program. As Deputy Trần Ngọc Châu later noted, the new constitution and elections had provided “a façade of democracy masking what was essentially the dictatorship of a military junta (engaged in its own internal power struggle).”Footnote ³³

Thiệu’s ascension to the presidency by no means ensured his domination of South Vietnamese politics. For a year after the September 1967 election, Thiệu and Kỳ jostled for supremacy and worked through their aides and supporters to undermine one another’s power. Thiệu at first appeared to uphold his commitment to consult with senior generals on major decisions and acceded to Kỳ’s wishes on the composition of the cabinet. At the same time, however, Thiệu sought to isolate his vice president. Within weeks of the election, Thiệu’s and Kỳ’s staffs occupied opposite wings of the Presidential Palace, and one aide compared crossing the central vestibule to crossing the Bến Hải River, the waterway that divided North and South Vietnam. Kỳ complained to US Embassy officials that, on several occasions, he had attempted to see Thiệu only to be told that he was “sleeping, eating, busy with other visitors etc.” The president had not returned any of his calls.Footnote ³⁴

The Tet Offensive proved a galvanizing event for the RVN. Although North Vietnamese leader Lê Duẩn had expected students to play a key role in the “general uprising,” student leaders called off their protests against the regime and joined the reconstruction effort.Footnote ³⁵ Local self-defense groups sprang up in several towns and cities to protect neighborhoods against communist infiltration, often against the wishes of local government officials. The months after the offensive saw large increases in ARVN volunteers. Some groups now viewed their political survival as dependent on the continued viability of the RVN, including some central Vietnamese Buddhist leaders who were horrified by the communists’ murders in Huế, and now sought to work through the legislature to end government repression against Buddhists. The Vietnamese Confederation of Labor, despite the recent imprisonment of its leaders by General Loan’s police, reconciled itself to the government and enthusiastically embraced training members for civilian militias.Footnote ³⁶

But the new government squandered opportunities to hold this coalition together. American officials implored Thiệu’s government to establish an anticommunist front, which would unite the RVN’s many and fragmented noncommunist constituents. Thiệu’s and Kỳ’s aides proceeded to organize rival groups. In the aftermath of the Tet attacks, Kỳ assumed the most visible role, heading the Recovery Task Force and chairing cabinet meetings to coordinate the government response. Rumors circulated that Kỳ was using the task force to launch a power grab and that a forthcoming constitutional amendment would allow him to assume concurrently the roles of vice president and prime minister. Although Kỳ’s aides were likely responsible for these rumors, Kỳ complained about Thiệu’s “continued, though unfounded suspicions” about the vice president’s plans to overthrow him. Neither the armed forces, Kỳ noted, nor international opinion would tolerate this. Bunker consoled himself that there had, at least, not yet been an “open break” between Thiệu and Kỳ.Footnote ³⁷

The Tet Offensive produced serious anxieties about American intentions. Rumors circulated in Saigon that the offensive was the result of a joint US–North Vietnamese plot, and RVN policymakers feared the beginning of an American deescalation. As Ambassador Bùi Diệm wrote from the embassy in Washington, DC, “it looks like the limits of limited war have been reached.”Footnote ³⁸ Rightwingers in the National Assembly expressed growing concern that the United States would unilaterally negotiate a deal with Hanoi that might include a coalition government with the communists. Throughout 1968, Thiệu adopted a hard line on the peace talks, insisting that they focus only on the cessation of hostilities and not questions of the RVN’s political future. Saigon would not negotiate with the NLF and demanded that Hanoi engage in direct talks with the RVN. In addition, the government increased the size of the military and began to broach the subject of gradual American troop withdrawals. Increased South Vietnamese self-reliance, the new government hoped, would serve as an alternative to a settlement. With improved security after the Tet Offensive, Thiệu tried to bypass the new legislature and instead establish links between the central government and the countryside by devolving to the villages responsibility for governance, defense, and development.Footnote ³⁹

American officials saw Thiệu’s first few months in office and his response to the Tet Offensive as uninspired and lethargic. Kỳ initially appeared to enjoy a surge in power and prestige in the wake of the offensive, but in the following months Thiệu made a series of moves and benefited from several fortuitous events that definitively resolved the power struggle. In March, Thiệu assumed the power to appoint province chiefs, taking this privilege away from the four corps commanders. Under the pretence of an anticorruption drive, he purged chiefs appointed during Kỳ’s premiership and replaced them with loyalists. When Kỳ met with senior generals on March 31 and together they demanded that Thiệu uphold his promise to consult them on important decisions, the president chose not to attend the meeting and pressed ahead. In May, he replaced Kỳ’s chosen prime minister. Kỳ suffered a further diminution in power during the second wave of NLF attacks in May and June 1968. Loan was severely wounded in fighting in May and retired, while several of Kỳ’s closest associates were killed or wounded on June 2 when a US helicopter gunship accidentally fired on a building in which they had gathered in Chợ Lớn. Within weeks, Thiệu had replaced these officials, as well as two more of the corps commanders.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although Thiệu remained apprehensive about possible coup attempts and even issued coup alerts in September and October, he benefited greatly from the perception among the generals that the United States would not accept any further political instability. By September 1968, Minister of the Interior General Trần Thiện Khiêm reported that the secret military council had collapsed and military leaders had lined up behind Thiệu.Footnote ⁴¹

Conclusion

A significantly large constituency of political and military elites accepted the RVN as legitimate, or saw its potential for legitimacy, and were committed to the preservation of a noncommunist Vietnamese state, even if they believed its institutions required reform. But could these groups have rallied around a common program? The diversity of RVN politics and the schisms within regional, religious, and political movements was such that developing a platform that could appeal to all noncommunists presented profound challenges. Military officers, hardline anticommunist politicians, Northern Catholic refugees, moderate noncommunist and antimilitary Southerners, and the followers of the Buddhist revival could all agree on their opposition to a communist takeover but were themselves factionalized and differed in their attitudes to crucial issues such as the extent of military power, the pace and extent of democratic reform, regional and religious representation, the role of the United States in Vietnam, and the degree to which the NLF should be accommodated.

As such, the United States attempted to plug the void of political and military power in South Vietnam. At the heart of this strategy was US support for the South Vietnamese military, which American officials perceived to be the most reliably anticommunist institution. In the absence of noncommunist unity, an authoritarian military-led state took root, one that swung between reform and repression because it was too weak and divided to accommodate or suppress the country’s fissiparous forces. A broad-based and truly representative government might have rallied against the revolution or attempted to maintain popular support by reaching a settlement with the NLF and calling for an American withdrawal, almost certainly leading to further conflict with the military and hardline anticommunist groups.

The RVN was dependent on the United States for its survival, but the success of the American war effort was equally dependent on the emergence and maintenance of a viable and legitimate RVN government. The alternatives – the use of overwhelming military force to compel North Vietnam and the NLF to submit, propping up a deficient South Vietnam indefinitely, or negotiating a political settlement that would preserve an independent South Vietnam – were not politically feasible. The very fact that so many groups in South Vietnam were united in their opposition to communism, if nothing else, convinced some Americans that an adequate anticommunist government might emerge. But the United States could not control political events in South Vietnam, and the likelihood of such an outcome lay in the hands of Vietnamese, not Americans. The dilemma for the United States was that the success of the intervention required political stability but the intervention itself was inherently destabilizing. Not only was the US presence one of the most contentious political issues in the RVN, but US military power also allowed the RVN’s noncommunists to fight among themselves. This may indicate that the war was unwinnable, but not for the reasons frequently posited. Further studies of South Vietnam’s postcolonial politics would therefore do a great deal to explain the failure of the American war effort.

More than ten years ago Sophie Quinn-Judge observed, “We can follow month by month Robert McNamara’s or Lyndon B. Johnson’s agonizing over their choices, but still have to speculate about much that occurred in Hanoi.”Footnote ¹ Since then, our understanding of domestic politics in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) has improved due to the better accessibility of sources inside and outside Vietnam and the resulting studies by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Merle Pribbenow, Pierre Asselin, and others.Footnote ² However, in comparison to our knowledge about decision-making in the US administration during the war, information about the inner workings of the socialist state in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam is still limited.

Factional Infighting and the Campaign against “Modern Revisionism”

The year 1964 marked a watershed in the history of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It marked the victory of those in Hanoi who advocated a direct military intervention in the South in order to topple the government in Saigon, establish a communist-controlled coalition government, and unify the whole country under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam before the United States intervened militarily. Others, such as General Võ Nguyên Giáp, were afraid that by sending North Vietnamese troops to the South Hanoi might itself provoke direct American intervention. They therefore favored a more cautious approach, a protracted guerrilla people’s war. At the same time, they worried that the militant line proposed by the party leadership under First Secretary Lê Duẩn might alienate the Soviets.

The rift between these two factions came to the fore during the 9th Plenum of the Central Committee at the end of 1963, which an East German journalist in Hanoi called “the most massive confirmation of disagreement in the [Vietnam Workers’] party.”Footnote ³ Lê Duẩn managed to prevail: at the end of the plenum the Central Committee issued a concluding statement that became known as Resolution 9 and fully supported his aggressive line. It called for an escalation of the insurgency in the South and “gave DRVN decision-makers a blank check to wage war in the South.”Footnote ⁴ In addition, the resolution attacked “revisionists” within the socialist bloc who still propagated the theory of peaceful coexistence and were thus undermining the world revolution. Whereas these attacks still criticized “revisionists” in general, later in February 1964 the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP, Lao Động Party) launched a campaign against “modern revisionism” that specifically targeted moderates within the party who had expressed reservations about the militant course of the Lê Duẩn faction.

It was Lê Duẩn’s closest ally Lê Đức Thọ, the head of the Party Organization Committee, who proclaimed the start of the campaign in a series of articles in the party newspaper Nhân Dân (The People). He called for absolute party discipline and demanded that all cadres should be fully committed to the new aggressive line. As a direct reaction to the division within the party that had come to light during the 9th Plenum, Lê Đức Thọ denounced “factionalist and divisive activities” that had undermined the unity of the VWP.Footnote ⁵ This was aimed at party members such as Hoàng Minh Chính, head of the Institute of Philosophy, whose proposal for the plenum had endorsed the principles of peaceful coexistence and economic cooperation, and all those who had supported his ideas during the meeting. Next to Hoàng Minh Chính, Lê Liêm, Deputy Minister of Culture, Dương Bạch Mai, Vice President of the Vietnamese–Soviet Friendship Association, Bùi Công Trừng, Deputy Chairman of the National Commission of Science and Technology, and Ung Vӑn Khiêm, former foreign minister, ranked first among those eyed by the DRV security apparatus. In addition, the Ministry of Public Security and the army’s Security Service (Bảo vệ) targeted all other intellectuals, civil servants, artists, and journalists who were suspected of not fully supporting the new militant line of the party leadership.

In the following months, the campaign attacked institutions that had been identified as “bulwarks of modern revisionism”: the National Commission of Science and Technology, the party’s publishing house Sự Thật (The Truth) and its director Minh Tranh, the army newspaper Quân Đội Nhân Dân (People’s Army), and other smaller newspapers and journals. People who were held responsible for spreading “revisionist ideas” were demoted and sent to the countryside. Everybody had to attend “reeducation classes” to fully absorb the substance of Resolution 9.Footnote ⁶

In order to enforce absolute conformity with the party line, Tố Hữu, the “culture tsar” of the party, opened a “special front” in the field of culture. He complained that the DRV authorities had not been careful enough when selecting foreign films, books, and plays and that therefore too many “cultural items with revisionist contents” from other socialist countries had entered the country. Thus, for example, Soviet films that only described the dark side of war, thereby blurring the boundaries between “just” and “unjust wars” and spreading defeatism, had influenced cultural life in North Vietnam.

Therefore, Tố Hữu together with Hồng Chương, Deputy Editor of Học Tập (Study), the party’s theoretical journal, started a systematic campaign to track down “revisionist influences” on cultural activities in the DRV. It turned out to be the most intense ideological struggle in the field of literature and art since the campaign against the so-called Nhân Vӑn–Giai Phẩm clique in the 1950s. The campaign significantly restricted cultural exchange, such as the import of films from those socialist countries that were denounced as “revisionist.” Foreign films imported into the DRV but classified as “problematic” were henceforth shown only to a restricted audience. This was common practice until the postwar period.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, in the summer of 1964, all students from the DRV studying in Eastern Europe were called back home to purge them of any “revisionist influences.” Subsequently, only a few students who were specializing in natural sciences were allowed to return to their host countries.

The antirevisionist campaign had a negative influence on relations between Vietnamese and foreigners from socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe staying in the DRV. Vietnamese who had regular contact with diplomats and other foreigners in Hanoi were classified as potentially “revisionist” themselves and increasingly monitored. The same applied to foreigners such as Georges Boudarel, Erwin Borchers, and Albert Clavier, who had lived in North Vietnam for a long time and whose contributions to the Vietnamese revolution had been previously welcomed by the party. Now they were also classified as “revisionist” and increasingly met with distrust. Access to the offices of Soviet and East German news agencies and embassies was closely supervised and gradually restricted. The “campaign against modern revisionism” in 1964 set the stage for the coming war and achieved the “mobilization of the entire country behind the war effort.”Footnote ⁸

After the demise of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 and developments in the Vietnamese theater of war, DRV media stopped their outright attacks against “revisionist socialist countries.” In the face of the escalation of war and US bombardments on DRV territory, the leadership in Hanoi realized that it was now in dire need of sophisticated weaponry from Moscow. Internally, however, the Lao Động Party continued to fight against “revisionist influences” in the DRV – not only in politics, but also on the “cultural front.”

At a meeting of literary critics in Hanoi in May 1965, culture tsar Tố Hữu propagated the concept of socialist realism and claimed that the overriding task of artists and literary critics was “to forge in all strata of society a very high revolutionary heroism, a readiness to fight, a certainty to win, and an absolute faith in the victory of the revolution.”Footnote ⁹

In line with what Nguyễn Chí Thanh and other militants had written in 1963 and 1964 on the character of the war against “US imperialists,” literature and film in the DRV after 1965 celebrated “the war as a feast for all the people.”Footnote ¹⁰ Writers and other artists had to paint war and the construction of socialism in glowing colors. They absolutely had to stick to the dichotomous classification of the warring parties as “good” and “evil,” and thereby contribute to the state’s narrative of a sacred war (chiến tranh thần thánh) against the “US imperialists” and the South Vietnamese “puppet regime.” To write about the “real” face of war, about suffering and death, was tantamount to treason.Footnote ¹¹ In other words, the authorities in Hanoi established full control over cultural and political expression – much in contrast to the less restrictive cultural policy of the Republic of Vietnam.

However, it was not the task of literature, music, and art alone to serve the war cause and to maintain wartime morale among civilians and soldiers; the whole propaganda machine in the DRV also had to foster popular support for the war and keep morale high. It did so by rigorously vetting and manipulating information on the war, by celebrating the heroic struggle against US and “puppet troops” in the South and quelling any information on the suffering and hardships of the North Vietnamese population and soldiers in the South – except for cases that could be presented as stories of heroism and self-sacrifice in order to boost morale on the homefront and on the battlefield. Thus, it censored news of the massive numbers of deaths on the Southern battlefield in order not to undermine morale.

The control of information in the DRV was so extreme that even journalists from other socialist countries who supported North Vietnam in the war against the United States were annoyed. Theoretically, they were allowed to talk to Vietnamese on the street, but the latter were forbidden to reply. And whenever an East German journalist, for example, asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi for a reply to an insensitive question, the ministry had to consult the VWP, which could take a long time.Footnote ¹² For example, the correspondent for the East German news agency ADN in Hanoi, Hellmut Kapfenberger, complained that, due to the authorities’ restrictive information policy, “the population of the DRV is one of the worst informed populations,” whereas at the beginning of the 1960s before the campaign against “modern revisionism” North Vietnamese society still had access to a great deal of information.Footnote ¹³

Domestic Security and Politics at the Beginning of the War

While the propaganda machine in Hanoi strictly controlled information and aimed to keep morale high, the DRV Ministry of Public Security (Bộ Công an) enforced ideological conformity as well; after the outbreak of the war it intensified its efforts to track down and eliminate any party members and individuals who dissented with the aggressive line of the Lê Duẩn leadership. Since he had been elected First Secretary of the Lao Động Party in 1960, Lê Duẩn had increasingly relied on the security apparatus and its minister, Trần Quốc Hoàn. Several decrees at the beginning of the 1960s expanded the role of the Ministry of Public Security, turning it into an “instrument of dictatorship absolutely loyal to the party” and creating a national security state in the DRV.Footnote ¹⁴

In order to harness the institutional means to carry out a vast cleanup campaign against real and imagined “counterrevolutionary elements,” the leadership in Hanoi granted the Ministry of Public Security comprehensive authority to oversee internal security in North Vietnam and to proceed against all suspects. To establish the necessary institutional capabilities, the DRV also carried out the professionalization and modernization of its security apparatus, which among other measures included setting up scientific and technical departments within the Ministry of Public Security. In addition, the ministry stepped up its cooperation with the party’s own Domestic Affairs Committee (Ban Nội chính) and the army’s Security Department (Cục Bảo vệ).

After the outbreak of the war, Minister Trần Quốc Hoàn launched an overall offensive that aimed at the modernization of the DRV security apparatus. He proactively sent delegations to Eastern Europe to learn from the experiences of the “fraternal” security services and ask for material assistance as well. The available evidence shows that not only the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany), and Hungary, but also Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the People’s Republic of China, had offered or upgraded assistance to the Ministry of Public Security in Hanoi. The aid provided by allied socialist countries to the DRV during the Vietnam War enabled the North Vietnamese security state to tightly control the public sphere and to suppress expressions of war weariness.Footnote ¹⁵

The DRV authorities responded to the sustained US bombing of the North and the deployment of hundreds of thousands of US combat troops in the South with a mass mobilization campaign that engulfed the whole population. This involved the mass conscription of males aged eighteen to forty and mobilization of women to replace men on the homefront.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, Hanoi built up an air defense apparatus with the support of the Soviet Union and China and evacuated the bulk of the younger population from the cities to the countryside. While especially at the outset the evacuation was carried out in a far from perfect manner, in general it was efficient. At the same time, the DRV tried to relocate its economy and localize production.

In spite of massive US intervention, party leader Lê Duẩn and General Nguyễn Chí Thanh, commander of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), still believed in a total military victory and followed an offensive military strategy in the South that led to extremely high casualty rates of 222,000 in the 1965–7 period among the PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam) and the PLAF (People’s Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam). This and other problems associated with the militant strategy of the party leadership led to dissent among some of those cadres who had been marginalized during the “antirevisionist campaign” in 1964. They reiterated an argument that had already been raised during the discussions in 1963 and labeled as defeatist: the party had underestimated the strength of the US war machinery in comparison to that of the French during the French Indochina War. At the same time, moderate cadres reestablished contacts with embassies of socialist countries in Hanoi such as the East German one and proposed a “more flexible foreign policy.” The VWP leadership, which unswervingly held on to the idea of a total victory and vigorously excluded diplomatic resolutions, quickly got to know about these activities.

The rifts within the party that had come into the open during the debates at the Central Committee’s 9th Plenum continued to widen. Thus, in December 1965, Lê Duẩn said in a speech to the Twelfth Plenum of the Central Committee that, “Ever since the resolution on twenty international issues was passed by the Central Committee’s 9th Plenum, our party’s Central Committee has held a steady course and has correctly implemented the policy laid out in that resolution. However, a number of comrades have mistakenly concluded that our party’s policy has changed.”Footnote ¹⁷ About one year later, in February 1966, Lê Đức Thọ, the infamous head of the Party Organization Department, issued similar warnings in Học Tập to those “few cadres” who had “erroneous and deviationist opinions” and criticized them for being “pessimistic,” of believing in the “plot of peace negotiations,” and only “relying on foreign powers.”Footnote ¹⁸ Events in 1967 were to show which “foreign power” he meant: the USSR.

In mid-1966 General Nguyễn Chí Thanh heated up the domestic climate even further. He defended his own offensive strategy and lashed out against those who overestimated the enemy and propagated “rightist ideas” and pessimism and lacked “resoluteness.”Footnote ¹⁹ His article aimed not merely at anonymous cadres, but directly at General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who had called into question Thanh’s offensive strategy in the South that involved suicidal clashes with US forces. Also against the background of this “battle of words” between the two generals, Lê Duẩn and Lê Đức Thọ increasingly became aware that Giáp was considering a challenge to their militant strategy. Further domestic developments in the DRV showed that Nguyễn Chí Thanh’s intervention had not succeeded in keeping his critics in their place and stopping the discussion about his military strategy and the option of peace negotiations.

The Soviet Union, which by 1966 had become the DRV’s biggest provider of military aid, tried to wield greater political influence on the VWP leadership. Soviet diplomats increasingly made contacts with those Vietnamese cadres whom they considered to be “pro-Soviet” and tried to push Hanoi to start peace talks with the Americans. East Germany was extremely close to Moscow, and so the GDR Embassy in Hanoi also intensified its contacts with certain Vietnamese politicians who had been sidelined in 1963 and 1964. For example, Ung Vӑn Khiêm, who had been deposed as minister of foreign affairs and since then had shunned the public eye, met the East German ambassador several times. He made no secret of his disapproval of the Cultural Revolution that had engulfed China. Officially, however, the party leadership in Hanoi abstained from any criticism. On the other side, Beijing, which had stationed 170,000 troops in the northern border provinces of North Vietnam and controlled transport logistics into the country, tried to counteract growing Soviet influence by pushing the leadership in Hanoi to wage a Maoist-style protracted guerrilla war and avoid peace talks with Washington at any cost.

Figure 17.1 A propagandist reads the latest news to workers at a Hanoi factory using a makeshift megaphone (February 13, 1968).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Against this background the increasingly sophisticated North Vietnamese security apparatus was in full swing. East European diplomats believed they saw signs that the domestic political climate in the DRV had relaxed, but at the same time diplomats and foreign journalists were still closely monitored by the North Vietnamese security service. Similar surveillance measures applied to those Vietnamese cadres who had already been targeted during the “antirevisionist campaign” in 1964. In the second half of 1966 several editorials in the party newspaper Nhân Dân urged vigilance against spies.Footnote ²⁰ New developments on the Southern battlefield and on the homefront in the DRV caused new challenges for the security apparatus.

Party Purge: The “Revisionist Antiparty Affair” in 1967

In 1967 the war escalated further, and fighting in the South caused heavy losses for the People’s Army of Vietnam. The DRV faced not only destruction caused by US bombardments on territory north of the 17th parallel, but also supply problems that were further exacerbated by slow deliveries of aid from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The evacuation of the urban population to the countryside also went far from smoothly. There were serious problems with hygiene, for example. In addition, the supply situation was very tense.Footnote ²¹

Against this background political tensions in the DRV gradually escalated over the course of 1967. One factor that contributed to this increasingly tense situation was the efforts of the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi to spread the ideas of the Cultural Revolution in the DRV. The local authorities did not openly criticize the chaotic internal developments in China, but tried hard to curb the propaganda activities of Chinese diplomats, and the police in Hanoi obstructed access to the Chinese Embassy and confiscated Chinese propaganda material. However, DRV authorities in the northern border provinces had a hard time preventing Chinese Red Guards and Chinese soldiers stationed there from propagating the ideas of the Cultural Revolution on Vietnamese territory and distributing leaflets that presented Võ Nguyên Giáp as “revisionist number 1” in Vietnam and accused him of planning to overthrow the Hồ Chí Minh government.Footnote ²²

At the beginning of 1967, First Secretary Lê Duẩn had decided to break the stalemate and change the course of war by launching a major military offensive in the South that would provoke a general uprising of the South Vietnamese people and topple the “puppet government” in Saigon. He entrusted his close aide General Nguyễn Chí Thanh with designing the concrete plan for the decisive offensive. However, during a stay in Hanoi in July 1967 Thanh unexpectedly died of a heart attack, which disrupted the power apparatus in Hanoi.

The preparations for the major offensive continued, but soon led to disputes within the leadership in Hanoi. Whereas Lê Duẩn and Vӑn Tiến Dũng, Chief of the General Staff, wanted to go for broke and advocated a general offensive even without decisively weakening ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and US forces in the South in advance, Võ Nguyên Giáp had advised caution and made the offensive contingent on a prior paralysis of hostile forces. As a result, Lê Duẩn reproached Giáp of wavering. In the end, the militant faction prevailed and the preparations for a general offensive continued. At the same time, the North Vietnamese police state tightened security further. In the summer of 1967, a few months before the start of the general offensive, it lashed out against those who did not fully support the plans of the militant faction led by party chairman Lê Duẩn or who were not deemed fully reliable.

Rumors of a purge were also afloat among diplomats from the socialist embassies in Hanoi. At the end of August 1967, the GDR ambassador in Hanoi, Wolfgang Bergold, reported back home that “nothing much was going on” because most of his colleagues were on leave.Footnote ²³ The Soviet ambassador complained that he only had a few reliable sources among and contacts with Vietnamese. Often the embassy “just received news that could not be verified and was sometimes contradictory. Thus, he mentioned rumors of arrests that we [the GDR Embassy] had also heard through the grapevine. Some said that ‘revisionist elements,’ others that pro-Chinese persons and still others that spies have been arrested, others are rumored to be under house arrest and then word is that they are kept in the ZK [Central Committee] to be educated.”Footnote ²⁴ Back in the summer of 1967, neither the Soviet nor the East German Embassy could verify these rumors, but it later became apparent that they were essentially true; they referred to one of the largest party purges in the history of the Vietnamese Communist Party, which became known as the “Revisionist Antiparty Affair” (vụ án xét lại chống Đảng).

On July 27, 1967, Hoàng Minh Chính, Director of the Institute of Philosophy, Hoàng Thế Dũng, former editor-in-chief of the army newspaper Quân Đội Nhân Dân, and two other journalists were arrested. The second wave of arrests in October hit a larger group of high-ranking cadres closely linked to General Võ Nguyên Giáp: Đặng Kim Giang, Deputy Minister of Agricultural Cooperatives, whom the DRV security apparatus identified as one of the “ringleaders”; Lê Liêm, Deputy Minister of Culture; and senior colonel Lê Trọng Nghĩa. All of them had served on General Giáp’s staff during the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, as head of logistical command, highest political commissar, and director of information respectively. Others arrested included Vũ Đình Huỳnh, Hồ Chi Minh’s former secretary, and Nguyễn Kiến Giang, former journalist for Học Tập.

At the end of November 1967, shortly after the second wave of arrests, the National Assembly in Hanoi passed a decree that specified the terms of punishment for treason, plotting with a foreign country, transmitting state secrets, planning a coup d’état, and espionage. This led to a third wave of arrests in December 1967, which affected the largest number of party cadres and nonparty professionals such as Vũ Thư Hiên, Vũ Đình Huỳnh’s son; even more officers close to Võ Nguyên Giáp such as Lê Minh Nghĩa and Đỗ Đức Kiên; and many journalists who had worked for journals and newspapers that in 1964 had been under strong suspicion of having propagated “revisionist” ideas. Others included members of the Institute of Philosophy, whose director Hoàng Minh Chính had been one of the first to be imprisoned in summer 1967. Other cadres were put under house arrest, such as the economist Bùi Công Trừng, who had also been sidelined during the “antirevisionist campaign” in 1964; Nguyễn Vӑn Vịnh, Deputy Defense Minister and Chairman of the Central Committee of Reunification; and former foreign minister Ung Vӑn Khiêm, who had dared to be quite outspoken in his talks with East German diplomats.

Those arrested were first incarcerated in the Hỏa Lò Prison in central Hanoi, the former French colonial jail where captured US pilots were kept. Later they were transferred to other prisons far from the capital, where they were held until 1972 and 1973 without any trial. Some of the “ringleaders,” such as Đặng Kim Giang, were placed under house arrest until 1976 or 1977. Even after being released, they continued to be closely monitored and socially isolated as “enemies of the Party.” As a form of collective punishment, their families also faced myriad problems.

When in 1981 Hoàng Minh Chính and Đặng Kim Giang submitted official petitions to the authorities asking for their case to be reopened, they were imprisoned once again. Đặng Kim Giang died under house arrest in 1983 because he did not get proper medical treatment; Hoàng Minh Chính died years later in 2008. The families of the victims are still struggling for rehabilitation of those arrested, but to this day their efforts have been to no avail.

The available evidence supports several different ways of explaining the background of the “Revisionist Antiparty Affair.” The official version propagated by the Vietnamese authorities, with Lê Đức Thọ at the forefront, became known as early as 1967 and since then has been repeated in histories of the Vietnamese security apparatus that are no longer classified as “top secret.”Footnote ²⁵ According to this narrative, Hoàng Minh Chính, Đặng Kim Giang, Phạm Viết, and others had tried to organize a faction to oppose the VWP, managed to gain the support of a number of high-ranking cadres, passed state secrets to the Soviet Embassy, and planned to topple the Hồ Chí Minh government. The memoirs of victims of the affair reveal that those arrested were constantly confronted with allegations that they had transmitted confidential information to the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi.Footnote ²⁶

Evidence that Hoàng Minh Chính and others had planned a coup d’état in collusion with the Soviet Embassy or that they posed a serious threat to national security is nonexistent. At the same time, available sources show clearly that, prior to the arrests in the summer of 1967, representatives of the “dove faction” in the DRV had increasingly ventured to meet Soviet and other East European diplomats and that the Soviet Embassy itself had also proactively tried to (re)establish contacts with those within the party who favored a more cautious military approach and peace negotiations with the United States. Thus, it can be argued that, by arresting moderate cadres, Lê Duẩn and his faction sent a clear signal to Moscow that any hopes that Hanoi could be pressured into peace negotiations were groundless. At the same time, the offensive against “pro-Soviet” elements within the party was meant to please Beijing. Thus, when Nguyễn Kiến Giang met Lê Đức Thọ after his release, the latter told him that one of the aims of the arrests had been to signal to the Chinese that Hanoi was still fighting “revisionism” and keeping a distance from the Soviet Union.

Besides this connection in Chinese–Soviet–Vietnamese relations, the preemptive strike of 1967 had other agendas. As Lien-Hang T. Nguyen has argued, “Le Duan and his faction orchestrated the arrests to capitalize on this fear [the spy fever] by whipping up paranoia with accusations of espionage and treachery in order to ensure that the planning for the Tet Offensive unfolded in the utmost secrecy it needed to succeed.”Footnote ²⁷ It was certainly not by coincidence that in February 1968 Lê Đức Thọ published a programmatic article in Học Tập that provided a belated rationale for the party purge: in it he warned against “rightist influences” in the party and “petty bourgeois elements” at the highest levels.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, the strike in 1967 hit not only those who had actively contacted the Soviet Embassy to find support for a moderate approach that included the option of peace talks with the United States, but all longstanding opponents of the Lê Duẩn faction who had dared to speak out against the militant line of the party leadership in 1963 and later. In addition, the harsh measures taken in 1967 also reflected a hardened party line that was not restricted to the debate about a correct military strategy.Footnote ²⁹

The arrested cadres were questioned in prisons all over North Vietnam about their alleged plans for a plot against the party with a foreign power, and the VWP leadership also launched an attack against attempts to undermine its system of agricultural cooperatives. Trường Chinh, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly and one of the bulwarks of party orthodoxy, signed a decree stipulating harsh forms of punishments for “counterrevolutionary activities.” He targeted in particular Kim Ngọc, the party chief of Vĩnh Phú province, who had initiated the so-called product-contract system, a moderate reform that allowed farmers more freedom in production.Footnote ³⁰

Similarly, in 1968 Tố Hữu, who had already acted as ideological watchdog during the “campaign against modern revisionism” in 1964, ordered the establishment of a commission charged with tracing “revisionist influences” in universities in the DRV. This campaign lasted for two years and was carried out with great ideological fervor inspired by the Great Cultural Revolution, which was taking place at the same time in China. At Hanoi University (Trường Đại học Tổng hợp), the person singled out as the main victim of the campaign was the well-known linguist Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, who was married to a Russian woman. In “struggle sessions” that were reminiscent of the land reform in the 1950s, his colleague Phan Cự Đệ accused him of receiving Soviet citizens in his private house, visiting the Soviet Embassy regularly, and acting as spy. The final report of the commission did not provide any substantial evidence for these charges, but the campaign had at least managed to create a “spy fever” in the academic world in DRV as well. Nguyễn Tài Cẩn kept his position; others, however, were removed.Footnote ³¹

In addition, the waves of arrest that shook North Vietnam in 1967 reflected a power struggle in the leadership in Hanoi. Since Lê Duẩn’s rise to power, his personal rivalry with Võ Nguyên Giáp had become obvious. Their competition further intensified because of Giáp’s more moderate and cautious approach to the struggle for the reunification of the country and to the military struggle in the South. The conflict had become evident during the debates preceding the historic 9th Plenum of the party in 1963 and then during the famous “battle of words” between the victor of the battle of Điện Biên Phủ, Giáp, and the second-ranking five-star general in the DRV, Nguyễn Chí Thanh. The latter was an integral member of the militant faction led by Lê Duẩn and served as a counterweight to Võ Nguyên Giáp. His sudden death in July had a clear impact on Hanoi’s balanced power structure, which was in danger in any case because President Hồ Chí Minh’s health was in decline. In addition to this, Giáp did not advocate the new plan for a decisive victory developed by Lê Duẩn and General Vӑn Tiến Dũng (the chief of the Army General Staff, who filled the void that Nguyễn Chí Thanh’s death had created): to launch a general offensive and incite an insurrection without crippling the ARVN and US armed forces beforehand.

Against this background it was certainly not by coincidence that many of those arrested in 1967 – such as Đặng Kim Giang, Lê Liêm, Lê Trọng Nghĩa, Lê Minh Nghĩa, Đỗ Đức Kiên, and Đinh Chân – were close to General Võ Nguyên Giáp and that Lê Trọng Nghĩa and Nguyễn Vӑn Vịnh (the latter “only” lost his positions and had his military rank downgraded) were actively involved in the General Staff’s preparation of the plans for the general offensive. That the purge of 1967 also aimed at Giáp himself and thus was part of internal factional infighting is further substantiated by the fact that when questioned by the DRV security apparatus the arrested persons were constantly asked about Võ Nguyên Giáp’s involvement in the alleged plot or – more concretely – whether he had maintained relations with the Soviet Embassy in Hanoi.Footnote ³²

Interestingly, in October 1967, months before the Tet Offensive started, Võ Nguyên Giáp left for Hungary – officially for “rest” and to undergo treatment for kidney stones. Hồ Chí Minh, who had made his objections against the risky plan for a general offensive known during a Politburo meeting in July 1967, was “convalescing” in China and only briefly returned for another Politburo meeting in December. There is evidence that at this stage, when a military offensive was on its way, Giáp and Hồ Chí Minh were politically sidelined. It was only at the beginning of February 1968 that Giáp returned to Hanoi – after the general offensive had started, the opposing ARVN and US forces had begun to crush it, and the general uprising in the South had not materialized.Footnote ³³

Võ Nguyên Giáp died in 2013 at the age of 102. During his lifetime, he at least indirectly rehabilitated some of his comrades who had been put into prison back in 1967. Still, to his last breath he maintained party discipline and took the memories on his role in the Revisionist Antiparty Affair to his grave. It is also possible that not only Lê Duẩn but also his close ally Lê Đức Thọ tried to settle a score during the Revisionist Antiparty Affair. Thus some of the victims and family members of arrested people claim that Lê Đức Thọ wanted to dispose of some unwelcome witnesses to his alleged dealings with the French during his term in the colonial prison of Sơn La at the beginning of the 1940s. It is difficult to substantiate these allegations, but it is striking that Đặng Kim Giang, Hoành Minh Chính, and Vũ Đình Huỳnh, three of the most prominent victims of the purge, and two journalists, Phạm Kỳ Vân and Lưu Động, had also spent some time in the prison of Sơn La.Footnote ³⁴

While the Revisionist Antiparty Affair unfolded, planning for the Tet Offensive continued in Hanoi. The general offensive began on January 30, 1968, with attacks in thirty-six of South Vietnam’s forty-six provinces. After the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and US forces had recovered from the initial shock, they repulsed the attacks and reoccupied areas taken by communist troops. Thus, the general offensive was a military defeat. In addition, Lê Duẩn’s hope for a general uprising in South Vietnam did not materialize. At the same time, Hanoi had struck a psychological blow against the American psyche.

It is improbable that in North Vietnam’s tightly controlled public sphere people would have dared to express dissatisfaction with the disappointing military outcome of the Tet Offensive.Footnote ³⁵ Those few cadres and intellectuals who had not completely backed Lê Duẩn’s risky plan for a simultaneous general offensive and uprising in the South, or who had attracted attention because they had previously expressed dissent with the militant strategy of the leadership in Hanoi, were behind bars and had been silenced.

Conclusion

As a result of the antirevisionist campaign in 1964 and the purge of 1967, First Secretary Lê Duẩn managed to finally assert his dominance over the Vietnam Workers’ Party. This dominance would last until his death in summer 1986.

By marginalizing and eliminating those who did not fully support his aggressive course, he did not just get rid of critics inside and outside the VWP; he also deprived the party of a critical and creative potential that could have been of some use during the war and especially in the immediate postwar period when the leadership in Hanoi mechanically started to force the socialist model of development on the former Republic of Vietnam. The purges in the DRV established orthodoxy in all fields, and it was only the death of Lê Duẩn in July 1986 and the subsequent launching of the đổi mới reforms that cleared the way for more heterodox voices. In more general terms, the war deeply affected state-making in North Vietnam. It allowed the Vietnamese Workers’ Party to perfect the party-state, to modernize and expand the security apparatus, to further social mobilization and bring the society in line in all fields – whether in politics or in culture.

It remains to be seen whether one day researchers will get access to the internal files of the party and relevant ministries and can thus shed more light on internal factional infighting in the DRV during the war. In 2018, Vietnamese state media for the first time addressed the wave of arrests of 1967 that so far had been a taboo issue, so there is a ray of hope.Footnote ³⁶

The protests against American military involvement in Vietnam constituted one of the most remarkable social movements in American history. From the first stirrings of dissent in the early 1960s, through to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, an estimated 6 million Americans took to the streets, wrote letters and signed petitions, participated in rallies and meetings, attended vigils, engaged in civil disobedience, burned draft cards, and spoke out against what they viewed as an unnecessary, tragic, and immoral war.Footnote ¹ This was peace activism on an unprecedented scale: in the words of the movement’s chronicler, Tom Wells, “never before had so many US citizens defied their leaders during wartime.”Footnote ²

In the years since the war’s end, scholars have labored to reconstruct a fully rounded picture of the antiwar movement. They have explored its origins, and emphasized the diversity of those who protested, and the innovative range of tactics deployed; pored over the movement’s internal failings and weaknesses; traced its impact on American political culture and subsequent social movements; and, perhaps above all, wrestled with the vexed – and vexing – question of what role, if any, the movement had in bringing the war in Vietnam to an end.

The antiwar movement of the Vietnam era emerged from the pacifist tradition and peace activism of the 1950s. In the autumn of 1963, for instance, the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (a group that had been founded in 1957 to campaign against nuclear testing and that became a leading advocate of arms control and nuclear disarmament) called on the US government to withdraw its support for the repressive regime of South Vietnam’s president, Ngô Đình Diệm. The following spring, 5,000 people took to the streets of New York City to demand a negotiated settlement in Vietnam. A few months later, Liberation magazine (launched in March 1956 by David Dellinger, A. J. Muste, and other prominent pacifists) published the “Declaration of Conscience Against the War in Vietnam”; signatories pledged noncooperation with the war effort, and support for those who resisted the draft. As the war itself escalated precipitously in the aftermath of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, antiwar activism proliferated. Teach-ins were held on campuses across the nation during the spring of 1965, raising awareness of the war and putting officials of the Lyndon Johnson administration on the back foot. The first national march against the war in Washington, DC, organized that April, saw Paul Potter, president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS, the nation’s largest and most influential New Left organization), call for the creation of a mass movement committed to radical change, which would be driven by the conviction that the war “in all its horror” was “but a symptom of a deeper malaise.” During 1967, 400,000 people took to the streets of New York for the Spring Mobilization, protestors clashed with police outside the Oakland Induction Center during the October “Stop the Draft Week” demonstrations, and, on October 21, 35,000 marched on the Pentagon to “confront the warmakers.” In an iconic piece of protest theater, some antiwar activists placed flowers in the guns of the military police. In October 1969 hundreds of thousands of Americans, in towns and cities right across the nation, participated in the Vietnam Moratorium while, the following spring, American campuses erupted in protest following President Richard Nixon’s announcement that US forces had invaded Cambodia (at Kent State University, four students were killed and nine wounded when Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators).Footnote ³

The movement was an amorphous, complex, and evolving coalition that drew together traditional peace organizations (the War Resisters League, SANE, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), the Old Left (the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of the United States of America [CPUSA]), the civil rights and student movements that constituted the heart of the New Left (including SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and numerous local groups (Chicago, New York, Madison, and Berkeley were important centers of antiwar activity). Throughout its existence, the movement was beset by disagreements over a number of key issues. Was the war in Vietnam a terrible “mistake” or the product of an imperialistic, militaristic, and exploitative “system” that required root-and-branch reform? Should antiwar organizations demand an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam, or merely call for a negotiated settlement? Was it more effective to organize national demonstrations or encourage local, grassroots efforts? Should communists, and communist organizations, be excluded from the organized antiwar movement? Should the movement focus solely on trying to end the war in Vietnam or embrace other causes – racial equality, women’s rights, the redistribution of power and wealth – as well? The arguments over these issues were often bitter, and reflected deep ideological differences and generational tensions, as well as disagreements about strategy and tactics. But, despite the infighting, the movement held together: on May 11, 1975, just a week or so after Saigon had fallen to the North Vietnamese, 50,000 Americans – many carrying balloons and streamers – assembled in New York’s Central Park for a final rally. Hanging over the speakers’ platform was a giant banner that read, simply, “The War Is Over.”Footnote ⁴

The Diversity of Dissent

In popular imagination and historical memory the antiwar movement is invariably represented as upper-middle class, and as heavily dominated by white students and radicals. The “individuals and groups we commonly associate with the era,” explains historian Penny Lewis, “are Dr. Benjamin Spock, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, the Students for a Democratic Society, the various mobilizations against the war, and [the Weather Underground]: students, intellectuals, professionals, celebrities; liberal or radical privileged elites.”Footnote ⁵ And yet one of the most significant scholarly developments over the past fifteen years or so has been to shift the focus away from this conventional portrait, and to emphasize instead the tremendous diversity of those who protested against the war.

This diversity was, in fact, recognized at the time. A 1967 CIA assessment, for instance, noted that under a broad “peace umbrella” one could find “pacifists and fighters, idealists and materialists, internationalists and isolationists, democrats and totalitarians, conservatives and revolutionaries, capitalists and socialists, patriots and subversives, lawyers and anarchists, Stalinists and Trotskyites … puritans and hippies.”Footnote ⁶ In recent years, scholars have sought to reconstruct the diversity of antiwar dissent by concentrating on groups – women, blue-collar Americans, people of color, and GIs – whose opposition to the war has tended to be pushed to the margins, even ignored completely, in conventional histories of the movement.

Women were a key antiwar constituency, and female antiwar activism was extensive and effective.Footnote ⁷ Prominent women on the antiwar left included Bettina Aptheker, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and founder of the Student Mobilization Committee (one of the most important antiwar organizations), and Angela Davis, a CPUSA activist and UCLA philosophy professor, who demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces from Southeast Asia, called for a “victory for the Vietnamese,” and urged her fellow Americans to support “liberation fighters” at home.Footnote ⁸

But, as historians such as Amy Swerdlow and Gina Denton have demonstrated, significant female support for the antiwar movement also came from middle-class liberals – perhaps most notably the respectable suburban mothers of Women Strike for Peace (WSP), which had been founded by the children’s books illustrator, Dagmar Wilson, in 1961.Footnote ⁹ Rooting their opposition to the war in the ideology of motherhood, WSP activists focused attention on the harm that the war, and particularly the use of napalm, caused to Vietnamese children. In December 1965, for instance, they organized for 100,000 antiwar cards, which asked “For the sake of our sons … for the sake of our children … give us peace in Vietnam,” to be sent to the White House. In 1966 a number of WSPers – dubbed “napalm ladies” and “housewife terrorists” by the press – attempted to block napalm shipments in San Jose. They also presented the office of General Lewis Hershey, head of the Selective Service System, with a coffin bearing the slogan “Not Our Sons, Not Your Sons, Not Their Sons.” Another Mother for Peace also deployed motherhood symbolically in the struggle against the war. Founded in March 1967, the group had 100,000 members by 1968; it famously coined the antiwar slogan “War is not healthy for children and other living things” and attracted the support of famous female celebrities, including Debbie Reynolds and Joanne Woodward. Other high-profile women to take a stand against the war included the writers Frances FitzGerald, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, and the singers Barbara Streisand and Joan Baez. On January 16, 1968, the 87-year-old Jeannette Rankin – the first woman to be elected to Congress, and a veteran peace activist (she had voted against American entry into both world wars) – led a march of 5,000 to the US Capitol to demand an end to the war.Footnote ¹⁰

The emergence of the women’s movement during the late 1960s added a further dimension to the antiwar struggle, and Betty Friedan, Robin Morgan, and Shulamith Firestone were some of the more prominent feminist critics of the war. In contrast to WSP, many second-wave feminists distanced themselves from appeals to motherhood. Feminists, moreover, were much more likely than their liberal counterparts to view the war in Vietnam as the product of a flawed, patriarchal system that produced militarism and imperialism abroad, along with oppression, inequality, and exploitation at home. Some within the women’s movement even proclaimed solidarity with the revolutionary women of Vietnam who had taken up arms, alongside men, to defeat the United States. As historian Ruth Rosen has noted, “one of the most popular posters in the early women’s liberation movement … featured a Vietnamese woman with a baby on her back and a gun in her hand.”Footnote ¹¹

The rise of the women’s liberation movement during the second half of the 1960s should, though, not obscure the continued role of an older generation of activists. In her 2011 book Building a Just and Secure World, Amy Schneidhorst explores the activism of progressive women who came of age during, and whose political sensibilities were shaped by, the Popular Front era. These women, who were active in WSP, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association), “influenced the structures, political platforms, and tactics” of the anti–Vietnam War movement. Despite their reliance on maternalist rhetoric and the politics of respectability, they were often sharp critics of American militarism, who came to view the war in Vietnam as an anticolonial struggle, rather than simply a civil war. Schneidhorst has also emphasized these progressive women’s commitment to organizing across racial and class lines, and their willingness to work alongside more “radical” organizations, especially those committed to civil disobedience and militant draft resistance. In contrast to the hoary old story of intergenerational conflict, she paints a compelling, and at times touching, picture of cooperation and support – with WSP activists picketing in support of militant antidraft campaigners, stumping up bail money for those arrested for civil disobedience, and helping to feed the “Yippies” who descended on Chicago to protest against the war during the Democratic Party National Convention in August 1968.Footnote ¹²

When it comes to the question of class, meanwhile, blue-collar Americans are typically characterized as having been broadly supportive of the Vietnam War and implacably hostile to the antiwar movement. It is certainly true that organized labor, and particularly the national leadership of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) under its president, George Meany, offered robust support for the military effort. Moreover, during the infamous “Hard Hat Riot” of May 8, 1970, construction workers attacked antiwar protestors in New York City – an incident that features prominently in standard histories of the era.Footnote ¹³ But, as Lewis has argued, “working-class opposition to the war was significantly more widespread than is remembered.” Some studies have even suggested that working-class Americans were more likely to have disapproved of the war than their middle-class counterparts – although it is important to stress that opposition to, or unease about, American military intervention in Southeast Asia was by no means the same thing as support for the antiwar movement. Meanwhile Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones has argued that the antiwar faction within the labor movement “developed a significant momentum” and ultimately helped pressure the Nixon administration into accepting a negotiated settlement in Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁴

In fact, some of the earliest antiwar dissent came from the ranks of organized labor, with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) passing an antiwar resolution in 1965 (they were joined in their stance by a number of other Old Left unions, including the United Electrical Workers). The most prominent union to oppose the war in Vietnam was the United Auto Workers (UAW), and in the autumn of 1967 its leader, Walter Reuther, called for a bombing halt and withdrew the UAW from the AFL-CIO in protest at its support for the war. Despite the much-touted support of the “hard hats,” and his own assiduous efforts to court blue-collar Americans, Richard Nixon faced a labor movement that was increasingly hostile to the war – and to the inflation, unemployment, and wage freezes that it was believed to have fueled. The Teamsters, the International Chemical Workers Union, the Alliance for Labor Action (which represented 5 million workers), the San Francisco Labor Council, and numerous unions in New York City endorsed the Moratorium protests of October 1969.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite the continued prowar stance of the AFL-CIO (on the eve of the 1972 election, George Meany urged American workers to vote for Nixon rather than George McGovern), Jeffreys-Jones has argued that the “burgeoning rebellion” among working Americans “gave Nixon notice that what could be achieved through his opening to labor was limited.”Footnote ¹⁶

As for the racial composition of the antiwar movement, the relatively modest levels of participation in many of the major antiwar marches among Black, Chicano, and other Americans of color was noted by contemporary commentators, and lamented by many leaders of the mainstream peace movement. But despite the antiwar movement’s difficulties in constructing a genuinely multiracial coalition, people of color were nonetheless an important antiwar constituency.Footnote ¹⁷ It is notable, for instance, that every major civil rights organization – including the “moderate” National Urban League and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – eventually came to oppose the war in Vietnam. And African American activists were – as historians such as Daniel Lucks, Joshua Bloom, and Waldo E. Martin have shown – among the war’s most forceful critics (for more on this, see Chapter 19).Footnote ¹⁸ Stokely Carmichael, for instance, accused the United States of committing “genocide” against “our brothers in Vietnam” and memorably claimed that “the Vietnam War ain’t nothing but white men sending black men to kill brown men to defend, so they claim, a country they stole from red men”; the Black Panthers condemned the “Yankee Imperialist” war of “aggression” in Vietnam; and Martin Luther King, Jr., called on the United States to “atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam,” “take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war,” and “get on the right side of the world revolution.”Footnote ¹⁹ African Americans – including the world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali – were also at the forefront of the draft resistance campaign. Amid the rise of Black Power, and given ongoing doubts about the antiwar movement’s ability, or willingness, to engage meaningfully with their concerns (particularly around the racial, and racist, aspects of the war abroad and its consequences at home), many Black critics of the war organized separately: the National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union was founded in early 1968, the Third World Task Force two years later.

Meanwhile by the second half of the 1960s Mexican Americans were, as Lorena Oropeza and others have shown, also mobilizing in increasing numbers against the war.Footnote ²⁰ At the center of this was the Chicano Moratorium. Founded in the spring of 1970 by Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzáles – a Democratic Party politico and onetime featherweight boxer turned community organizer and Chicano nationalist – and his Crusade for Justice organization, the Chicano Moratorium drew 20,000 to a rally in Los Angeles at the end of August. Six months earlier, members of the militant Brown Berets had led a 1,000-strong “March Against Death” in East Los Angeles, carrying a coffin and the photograph of a wounded Chicano soldier. Like their African American counterparts, Chicano opponents of the war were often spurred on by anger that they were fighting, and dying, in Vietnam in disproportionately high numbers, a growing sense of solidarity with the Vietnamese (who were seen as fellow victims of American “imperialism”), and a deepening conviction that the struggle for dignity, equality, and justice at home should take precedence over a war taking place on the other side of the world. As the popular antiwar slogan had it, “La batalla está aquí!” (“The battle is here!”). Speaking at an antiwar rally in Arizona in October 1970, Gonzáles declared that “the very government that you support in wars in Vietnam and Korea … is the same government that committed genocide against the Indian.” The real war was “not in Vietnam … not in Cambodia. It’s right here in these barrios. It’s right here in our community.”Footnote ²¹

GI Dissent

Writing in 2003, James Lewes complained that, by marginalizing GI dissent, historians had, effectively, disenfranchised a “whole class of activists.”Footnote ²² Such marginalization has also served to help perpetuate a misleading and highly damaging narrative of “protestors versus soldiers,” which has dominated the cultural and historical memory of the Vietnam War era.Footnote ²³ And yet, as Lewis has argued, “along with the college campus, the military itself must be seen as the other great mobilizing vehicle through which anti-war sentiment was stoked and action unleashed.”Footnote ²⁴ Certainly there can be no doubt that antiwar feeling within the military was substantial, and it is estimated that as many as one in four service personnel “participated in the military antiwar movement as soldiers or veterans” – a figure that “equalled the peak proportion of all activism among youth.”Footnote ²⁵ From a few, sporadic cases of resistance – including that of the Fort Hood Three who, in 1966, refused to be deployed to Vietnam – these isolated protests evolved, by the end of the decade, into a full-fledged GI movement.Footnote ²⁶ Built by soldiers, veterans, and civilian sympathizers, this movement – which lasted from roughly 1968 to 1973 – was, in the words of Derek Seidman, “broadly united by the common goals of organizing soldiers, ending the war, fighting racism, and defending troop civil liberties against military justice.”Footnote ²⁷

Central to the GI movement were the coffeehouses. Founded and staffed by civilians, and located near military bases, they offered a space where, as Lewis has noted, “soldiers could read the GI antiwar press and talk politics – but also just hang out, listen to music, and escape army life.” They also provided a forum where returning soldiers could give those about to depart for Southeast Asia information about what the war was “really like.” Furthermore, the coffeehouses facilitated the creation of GI organizations – such as GIs United Against the War in Vietnam (founded in 1969) – and more than 300 GI newspapers (including, famously, FTA). Several of these newspapers enjoyed wide circulation (including on US military bases overseas) and readerships in the tens of thousands, and helped to connect the GI movement to the local, civilian antiwar movement.Footnote ²⁸ For the historian Derek Seidman, the GI press constituted “the lifeblood” of the GI movement. Among other things, GI newspapers helped antiwar soldiers to develop a sense of community and collective identity, provided them with news and analysis that were often sharply critical of both the war and the military, furnished them with vital information about legal rights and access to civilian assistance (especially, perhaps, legal advice), and – through contributing to their content (often via the letters page) and by distributing the newspapers clandestinely on military bases – offered an outlet for active protest against the war and the military culture that sustained it.Footnote ²⁹

Such was the pressure of dissent that, by the early 1970s, the US military appeared in danger of unraveling. David Cortright – a Vietnam veteran turned peace activist and historian – has claimed that, in 1971, for every hundred soldiers, there were “seven acts of desertion, seventeen incidents of unauthorized absence, two disciplinary discharges, twelve complaints to congressmen, and eighteen non-judicial punishments.” As he concluded, “no armed force can function properly when faced with such internal disruption and resistance.”Footnote ³⁰ While some may question whether desertion, fabricating illness, evading or questioning orders, and “fragging” (killing an officer) should be considered a part of the antiwar movement, Lewis is in no doubt. “The problem with morale in the Vietnam-era military,” she writes, “was directly related to the doubts and criticisms that soldiers had concerning their mission, and the problems with the mission were highlighted among the public largely by the actions taken by and the educational practices of the antiwar movement.”Footnote ³¹ For Seidman, meanwhile, the GI movement demonstrates how, through the efforts of antiwar GIs, the “mass movements” of the 1960s spilled over into the US military itself.Footnote ³²

Back on the homefront, meanwhile, the main antiwar vehicle for returning soldiers was Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The group, which was founded in 1967 by Jan Barry and five other veterans, engaged in a number of high-profile protests – including the 1971 “Winter Soldier” hearings into alleged US war crimes and “Operation Dewey Canyon III” during April 1971, which culminated in 700 veterans throwing their medals over a wire fence that had been constructed around the US Capitol. With a peak membership of 30,000, VVAW exerted a powerful influence over the antiwar movement and the wider American public.Footnote ³³ According to Lewis, it also provided a “template for what to do right if you want an active working-class base for a social movement organization and for how to make working-class audiences take you seriously.”Footnote ³⁴

Figure 18.1 More than 2,000 people gather at an antiwar demonstration in New York City (December 6, 1967).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Geographical Breadth and Tactical Repertoire

As well as broadening and deepening the profile of antiwar activism, scholars have attempted to shift the geographical focus away from what Doug Rossinow has termed the “northern rim” (a so-called arc of dissent that extends from New York’s Morningside Heights to Ann Arbor and Madison, and then on to Berkeley).Footnote ³⁵ Some historians, notably Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Martin Klimke, have broadened the geographical frame outward to explore the international dimensions of antiwar protest, emphasizing the global activism of individual actors and the circulation of ideas, tactics, and slogans across national borders. By doing so, they have reminded us that antiwar activism should properly be considered an international, or transnational, phenomenon (for more on this, see Chapter 24).Footnote ³⁶ Others, in contrast, have gone local, whether writing the story of antiwar activism in particular cities – as with Michael S. Foley on Boston, Paul Lyons on Philadelphia, John Ernst and Yvonne Baldwin on Louisville, Raymond A. Mohl on Miami, and Rusty L. Monhollon on Lawrence – or regions. In addition to Robbie Lieberman’s important collection of oral testimony from midwestern antiwar activists, several scholars, whose number include Rossinow, Jeffrey Turner. and Gregg Michel, have pioneered the study of the antiwar movement in the South.Footnote ³⁷ When it comes to antiwar activism in Dixie, a picture has begun to emerge of a movement that developed momentum a little later than in the North (with the peak of activism between 1968 and 1970) and which was less reliant on SDS (and somewhat detached from the ideological disputes that hobbled the New Left during the second half of the 1960s), more moderate (white Southern activists tended to eschew the politics of confrontation), more connected to religion, and, in important respects, distinctly Southern in its character.Footnote ³⁸ In the spring of 1967, for instance, the Southern Students Organizing Committee (SSOC), the region’s leading New Left organization, planned the “Southern Days of Secession,” declaring that:

The movement’s diversity was also reflected in the wide array of tactics that activists deployed, including teach-ins, rallies, marches, vigils, lobbying, street theater, local referenda and electoral insurgencies, and protests against compulsory ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) on college campuses and the connections between universities and the so-called military–industrial complex (including long-running campaigning against Dow Chemical, the napalm manufacturer).Footnote ⁴⁰ Increasingly, antiwar activists – driven by a growing sense of frustration – resorted to confrontational, and sometimes rather abrasive, forms of protest. As the Catholic peace activist Philip Berrigan put it, “we had attended nonviolent demonstrations, written letters to government leaders, and met with government officials … nothing worked. No one listened.”Footnote ⁴¹ On April 15, 1967, for example, David Harris, a former student leader at Stanford, announced the formation of The Resistance, the first national antidraft organization while, on October 21, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam brought tens of thousands of protestors to the Pentagon in an attempt to “disrupt the center of the American war machine” and “call the warmakers to task.”Footnote ⁴² The following May, nine Catholic peace activists, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered the offices of the local draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. After forcing their way past the startled clerks, they ransacked the office, placing draft files into two large wire baskets which they proceeded to take into the parking lot and, in front of waiting reporters, doused them with homemade napalm and set them alight while saying a prayer. Charged with the destruction of government property, the so-called Catonsville Nine used their trial, which was held that autumn, as a forum for debating the legitimacy of the American war in Southeast Asia, and as a platform from which to encourage further antidraft activity. They helped to inspire further draft resistance – including a similar protest in Milwaukee, in which 14 activists destroyed some 10,000 draft files. Shawn Francis Peters’s The Catonsville Nine not only underscores the growing prominence of militant civil disobedience within the antiwar movement, it also reminds us of the important role that religion played in motivating, shaping, and sustaining protests against the war (after all, those indicted in Catonsville included two priests, four former missionaries, and a member of the Christian Brothers).

The religious dimensions of antiwar dissent have been explored more fully in Mitchell K. Hall’s history of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV). Founded in the spring of 1966, and shaped primarily by liberal Protestants and Jews, the organization drew notable support from, among others, Martin Luther King, Jr., the cleric, writer, and theologian Richard John Neuhaus, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, and Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin. With a substantial network of local chapters, and a membership of 40,000, CALCAV lobbied, rallied, picketed, and proselytized against the war and in favor of a negotiated peace settlement. As frustration with the war built, many CALCAV members came to embrace more militant tactics (including civil disobedience and offering help to draft resisters) and a more radical view of the war itself (seeing it as illustrative of deeper socioeconomic and political flaws of the country, rather than simply as a tragic mistake). By the early 1970s, in addition to protesting against the war, the organization was also turning its attention to other issues, including challenging what they viewed as excessive corporate power. Changing its name to Clergy and Laymen Concerned (CALC), it continued as a peace and social justice organization in the years following the end of the Vietnam War, campaigning against apartheid (and supporting the imposition of sanctions), calling for a nuclear weapons freeze, and opposing US military involvement in Central America.Footnote ⁴³

The Movement’s Legacy

Supporters and opponents of the war in Vietnam, as well as politicians, commentators, and historians, have been arguing about the antiwar movement’s legacy for decades – focusing on its effects on the 1960s New Left and exploring its influence on the wider political culture (including the politics of protest), as well as seeking to establish what impact, if any, the antiwar protests had on US policymakers and the military.

Opposition to the war in Vietnam came to occupy a central place within the wider story of the New Left. Student activists and groups helped to organize protests against the war and contributed key ideas, including a powerful critique of the “corporate liberalism” that they believed was responsible for the escalation of the war, arguing that war abroad, together with poverty and racism at home, were symptoms of a corrupt and repressive “system.” Opposition to the war, meanwhile, helped to raise the national profile of groups like Students for a Democratic Society and boosted the New Left’s popularity on campuses across the United States.

But according to Rossinow, one of the New Left’s most astute scholars, the war in Vietnam was a double-edged sword. While the war was undoubtedly a terrific recruiting sergeant, with opposition to the war helping to transform the New Left into a mass movement, this rapid growth proved highly unstable, overwhelmed existing organizational structures, and made genuine participatory democracy (which often relied on long, careful discussions to achieve consensus) increasingly untenable. Worse, the sense of moral outrage produced by the war, and growing frustration at the antiwar movement’s apparent impotence, helped propel the New Left toward Third World romanticism and the politics of revolution. This was a road that culminated, for some at least, in the nihilism and terrorism of the Weather Underground.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the end of the decade, the New Left was cut off from mainstream liberals – who were widely viewed as the enemy. Carl Davidson, who was elected SDS vice president in 1966, declared that the strategy of “working within the Democratic Party” was “so obviously bankrupt” that we “need not waste our time.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He was not alone. New Leftists in California refused to back Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, the liberal Democrat incumbent, in a tough election fight against Ronald Reagan in 1966, in part because of his support for the Johnson administration’s policies in Vietnam. The former Hollywood actor, and right-wing Republican, went on to win by almost a million votes.Footnote ⁴⁶

Without the war in Vietnam, some have argued, the trajectory of the New Left (and in particular of SDS) would have been quite different: it would have grown less rapidly; maintained its original focus on grassroots antipoverty organizing, the reform of college campuses, and the search for “authenticity” (a genuine sense of meaning, purpose, and community amid an increasingly atomized, impersonal, and individualistic society); and evolved into a more stable movement, with firmer links to the liberal–progressive tradition.Footnote ⁴⁷

While the Vietnam War may have contributed to the unravelling of SDS and the New Left, the antiwar movement would seem to have had a much more beneficial impact on the wider story of social activism. It is, of course, not at all surprising to learn that the anti–Vietnam War movement exercised a significant influence on subsequent peace and antiwar activism – including the protests against the nuclear arms race and the Reagan administration’s interventions in Central America during the 1980s. More recently, veterans of anti–Vietnam War protests have been at the forefront of criticism against the United States’ so-called War on Terror, and particularly the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Footnote ⁴⁸ But the movement’s influence extended well beyond peace activism, encompassing not only social justice causes on the left but also, more intriguingly, social movements on the political right as well.

Historians of the gay liberation movement have long recognized the important role played by the antiwar movement. Opposition to the war, together with what the historian Justin David Suran has characterized as a “radical antimilitarism” – were integral to the creation of gay identity during the late 1960s, and many of the founders of gay liberation organizations were veterans of the struggle to end the war in Vietnam.Footnote ⁴⁹ Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who helped to found the Philadelphia Gay Liberation Front in 1969, had been in the vanguard of antiwar organizing while a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and was arrested during the protests outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago for distributing a poster that proclaimed “Fuck the Draft.”Footnote ⁵⁰ New York’s Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which had been formed in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall riots of June 1969, proclaimed its solidarity with the Vietnamese, and modeled its name on South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front. In August 1969, meanwhile, the Youth Committee of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations called on gay rights activists to “totally reject the insane war in Vietnam and refuse to encourage complicity in the war and support of the war machine.” During the November 1969 Moratorium demonstrations in San Francisco some 15,000 gay and lesbian protestors joined in with chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win”; some even carried placards proclaiming “Suck Cock to Beat the Draft.”Footnote ⁵¹ Three years later, Boston’s GLF called not only for “the total withdrawal of all United States and United States–supported air, land or naval forces from Vietnam” but for the abolition of “all aggressive armed forces.”Footnote ⁵² Indeed, during the late 1960s, many gay liberationists came to embrace nonparticipation in the military as “a positive good,” arguing that to serve in the military was to offer aid and comfort to the imperialistic “war machine” and to reinforce traditional (and oppressive) heterosexual notions of masculinity.Footnote ⁵³

This story of the antiwar movement’s relationship with gay liberation is not, though, a wholly positive one. Many gay activists became disillusioned with their straight radical comrades for not taking gay liberation seriously enough; some even felt that the wider movement was homophobic. Charlotte Bunch, who helped found the Furies, a radical lesbian–feminist collective, explained that “the Left” “constantly told us that our oppression was not as great and not as important as [that of] the Vietnamese,” while Jim Owles, of New York’s GLF, recalled that when he was in the peace movement “they kept telling me there were greater things to work for than my own oppression and maybe I could be taken care of after the revolution.”Footnote ⁵⁴ These unhappy experiences were one reason why, when the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) was founded at the end of 1969, it decided to focus “solely” and “completely” on gay rights (though many members continued to protest against the Vietnam War in an individual capacity). Moreover, in the mid-1970s, as a number of gay rights groups began to shift their focus onto securing political, legal, and social reforms, rather than calling for a wider revolution, many gay rights activists rallied around Leonard Matlovich – a technical sergeant in the US Air Force and a decorated Vietnam veteran – after he came out publicly in order to challenge the blanket ban on homosexuals serving in the military.Footnote ⁵⁵

While the antiwar movement’s influence on the left has long been recognized, historians have more recently sought to focus attention on the less well-known connections with the New Right. Moving beyond the traditional interpretation in which antiwar protestors serve as a useful foil for conservatives espousing the politics of “backlash,” scholars have shown how some activists involved with the antitax, antibusing, and anti-abortion movements drew inspiration, and claimed legitimacy, from the antiwar movement, even as they attacked the “Sixties” as an age of excess and anti-Americanism.Footnote ⁵⁶ In his pioneering work on the anti-abortion movement, for instance, Richard L. Hughes has shown that its success during the 1970s and beyond was due in part to the ability of a small but influential number of activists – including veterans of the antiwar movement – to adapt modes of protest, and approaches to activism, that had come to the fore during the 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁷ At an anti-abortion rally held near the Lincoln Memorial on September 3, 1972, some 200 members of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition heard a speech from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV); sang a version of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” – “All We Are Saying/Is Give Life a Chance”; and, in an action that drew self-consciously on the burning of draft cards, set fire to 2,000 birth certificates.Footnote ⁵⁸ Meanwhile, the very first “March for Life” in 1974 – like the antiwar “March Against Death” five years earlier – “included its share of coffins, crosses, grim reapers, and photos of the dead.”Footnote ⁵⁹ During the 1980s, as the movement became much more dominated by the Christian right, the antiwar movement’s influence continued to be felt: in June 1989 raw eggs and maple syrup were poured over surgical instruments at the Summit Women’s Center in West Hartford, Connecticut, in a protest that mirrored that of Philip Berrigan and other radical pacifists who, back in October 1967, had poured blood over draft files in Baltimore.Footnote ⁶⁰

Did the Antiwar Movement End the War?

Ultimately, of course, millions of antiwar activists took to the streets during the 1960s and early 1970s in the hope that their efforts would help to bring the bloody conflict in Southeast Asia to a speedy end. The question of whether or not they succeeded is controversial and continues to divide historians.Footnote ⁶¹ For Wells, the anti–Vietnam War movement was “perhaps the most successful antiwar movement in history” and played a “major role in restricting, deescalating, and ending the war.” If it were not for the continued pressure of activists, who took to the streets in ever-greater numbers, claims Wells, then the “death and destruction” would have been “immensely greater.”Footnote ⁶² Yet, in his provocative 1995 book Telltale Hearts, and elsewhere, Adam Garfinkle suggested that, far from ending the war, the antiwar movement in fact “helped prolong it.” By engaging in tactics that were widely unpopular, antiwar activists, he claimed, served only to discredit opposition to the war, and thus helped prevent the public from turning against the war sooner.Footnote ⁶³

One major problem for historians is that we can only take an educated guess at how things might have played out in the absence of the teach-ins, marches, protests, and draft card burnings. There is also, for both historians and former activists, an understandable temptation to believe that the sustained activism of millions of Americans over many years simply must have had some sort of impact.Footnote ⁶⁴ Finally, of course, it is fiendishly difficult to disentangle the impact of antiwar activity from the wider military and political developments that affected the course of the war. Given all this, it is perhaps unsurprising that some scholars have sought to shift the terms of the debate. For Michael S. Foley, the question of “whether or not the antiwar movement prolonged the war” is not a “particularly meaningful” one. The “more important question is a moral one: to what extent is a citizen responsible to his country when the government is engaged in a violent war that he deems ‘illegal,’ ‘immoral,’ or ‘obscene’?”Footnote ⁶⁵

One thing is pretty clear: public opinion, as measured by polls, remained hostile toward the antiwar movement, even as support for the war in Vietnam waned. In 1968, for example, although half of Americans thought that the decision to go to war in Vietnam in the first place had been a “mistake,” almost three-quarters viewed the antiwar movement negatively – and even a quarter of those who supported a unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam had a “wholly unfavorable” view of antiwar demonstrators.Footnote ⁶⁶ One scholar has gone so far as to claim that antiwar demonstrations provided a short-term boost for support for the war.Footnote ⁶⁷ But it remains far from implausible to suggest that the antiwar movement’s very unpopularity was, perversely, a potential source of strength. The American people, one might argue, grew so tired of all the protests and disruption, as well as the seemingly endless nature of the conflict in Vietnam, that they simply wanted the war to end so that life could return to normal.Footnote ⁶⁸

In his landmark 1988 study Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves, Melvin Small argued that antiwar dissent was frequently taken into consideration by policymakers, and that opposition to the war, particularly among family members, affected them personally.Footnote ⁶⁹ From 1964 until 1968, the antiwar movement does appear to have played a role in restraining the bombing of North Vietnam, and discouraged the Johnson administration from expanding the war into Cambodia and Laos. Antiwar dissent, though, was not the only factor in play here. For one thing, LBJ worried that expanding the war would risk provoking Chinese or Soviet intervention. Moreover, he was keen to keep the war low-key in order to protect his ambitious domestic agenda. As he put it, “I simply had no choice but to keep my foreign policy in the wings … I knew that the day it exploded in a major debate on the war, that day would be the beginning of the end of the Great Society.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Meanwhile, in his pioneering study of Boston’s draft resistance movement, Foley has argued that the intensification of protests around the draft in 1967–8 served to force the Johnson administration onto the back foot. The White House responded with a major public relations campaign, headed by General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of US forces in Vietnam, which was designed to assure an increasingly anxious nation that victory was in sight. When the NLF appeared to seize the military initiative during the Tet Offensive of 1968 (they struck at thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals, and even briefly occupied the grounds of the US Embassy in Saigon), the American public was stunned, and the administration’s credibility shredded. With key officials now warning of a further surge in draft resistance, LBJ rejected Westmoreland’s request for an additional 200,000 troops, announced a partial bombing halt, and initiated efforts to find a negotiated settlement. This was, according to Foley, “the most obvious evidence that the draft resistance movement helped to rein in the war effort.”Footnote ⁷¹

For many, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the 1968 Democratic Party presidential nomination – which helped to topple LBJ – is viewed as a powerful example of the antiwar movement’s strength. But, as McCarthy’s biographer Dominic Sandbrook has argued, his campaign was less the creation of the antiwar movement than it was the product of an internal Democratic Party revolt, led by disaffected reform liberals who had long viewed LBJ with a mixture of resentment and suspicion. Moreover, despite the popular myth that young antiwar radicals shaved off their beards to campaign for him, it appears that “clean cut kids,” those already involved in liberal student politics, and earnest graduate students were more likely to be found stuffing envelopes, or trudging through the snow to knock on doors, than veterans of SDS and the New Left. Had it not been for the Tet Offensive, McCarthy’s quixotic bid for the presidency would have amounted to little more than a footnote in history. In the end, McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, which triggered LBJ’s decision to quit the race, was more a referendum on the president’s record than it was an outpouring of antiwar sentiment (some polls even suggested that a significant proportion of McCarthy voters supported a harder line in Vietnam).Footnote ⁷² In any case, the war in Vietnam continued for a further four years. Looking back on his campaign almost twenty years later, McCarthy wrote that it “probably had little or no effect on how the Vietnam War was conducted and how it finally ended.”Footnote ⁷³

Although Richard Nixon claimed in public to be completely unmoved by antiwar protests, the reality was somewhat different – and the massive Moratorium demonstrations that took place in October 1969 seem to have encouraged the White House to postpone plans for an all-out military offensive against Hanoi.Footnote ⁷⁴ Six months later, when Nixon announced that US ground forces would be sent into Cambodia, the outpouring of protest helped convince the president to withdraw the troops earlier than had been planned.Footnote ⁷⁵ Meanwhile the growth of antiwar sentiment within Congress curtailed the Nixon administration’s room for maneuver – although the extent to which this political development owed anything to the efforts of the organized antiwar movement remains highly contested.

Even some of the more sympathetic historians of the antiwar movement concede that public opposition to the war owed more to the terrible cost of the conflict, and the apparent stalemate on the battlefield, than to the actions of peace protestors. After all, despite almost a decade of fighting (including the dropping of 8 million tons of bombs and incursions into Cambodia and Laos), and the huge outlay of blood and treasure – 58,000 Americans were killed, along with more than a million Vietnamese, and some $200 billion was spent on the war – the United States proved unable to overcome the determination of the North Vietnamese, and their allies in the South, to fight for an independent, unified Vietnam.Footnote ⁷⁶ As the historian and antiwar activist Marilyn Blatt Young has noted, it would be “an act of supreme arrogance to imagine that without the antiwar movement, the Vietnamese would have fought less hard or less long.”Footnote ⁷⁷ It is a sobering but salutary reminder that the war was ultimately won, and lost, in the jungles of Vietnam, rather than on the streets of Berkeley, New York, or Washington.

Race pervades the history of the United States. It has been a powerful historical actor and, as such, played a critical role in the execution of the Vietnam War. Racism long defined what was possible for American people of color. By the time the United States had committed nearly half a million troops in Vietnam, however, racism had been discredited in scientific circles, and segregation as a national institution had been formally abolished. With white supremacy no longer acceptable as an ideological support, US policymakers could not permit racism as an acknowledged presence in foreign conflicts and interventions. At home, race remained a preoccupation because not all Americans accepted the challenges of an integrated society. Abroad, it had to be made illegible.Footnote ¹

This chapter defines race as an assemblage of traits based on perceived physical appearance and ancestry. As a term of classification, it has little scientific value. Race has considerable social salience, however, as a marker from which various assumptions may be made. Racism uses perceptions about physical traits and beliefs about descent to erect a system of hierarchy based on difference. Perceived cultural deficits have also been racialized as characteristic of people deemed inferior. Racial hierarchy organized chattel slavery in the United States. After the abolition of slavery, it was reconfigured to support a system of racial segregation embedded in the economic and political structures of American life.

Prevalent ideas about race widely circulating throughout the Western world buttressed segregation. Belief in the inequality of races had justified the Western conquest and economic exploitation of African and Asian lands and undergirded American Caribbean and Pacific conquests at the turn of the twentieth century. In the years between the world wars, French colonial practice envisioned a Vietnamese inferiority rooted not only in culture but also in bodily traits. American officials, like French colonialists, saw Asians through a buckled mirror of both cultural and racial distortion. Once engaged in World War II, belligerents on both sides of the Pacific theater racialized their opponents: the squat, bucktoothed Japanese officer of Hollywood fame had his counterpart in Tokyo’s projection of pale, snarling US troops.Footnote ² These distortions reverberated in the Vietnam conflict.

France in the American War

The racial narrative of US intervention in Vietnam starts with France. The French mission in Indochina began as a gradual process of colonization in the mid-nineteenth century. It embodied then-current orientalist ideas about culture and environment. To establish a permanent presence in a region that many Western commentators believed unsuitable for white people, French colonial administrators sought to encourage the acculturation of Asians and focused particularly on Eurasians. Generations of soldiers, officials, and merchants had sired children with Indochinese women. The job of “rescuing” these children was cloaked in humanitarian impulses but also aspired to create a “middleman minority” that would be loyal to France. This practice differed from that of such colonial powers as Britain and Germany, which tried to maintain clear status differences between white people and others. While French administrators viewed Southeast Asians as racial inferiors, they thought that mixed-race individuals could be redeemed, at least as a subject population. In a combination of callousness and paternalism, social workers canvassed the Vietnamese countryside in search of Eurasian children who looked white. They went so far as to forcibly wrest from their Indochinese mothers children whose French fathers had not claimed them. The children’s new homes would be state-supported orphanages run by private entities. Similar policies had been enacted in Canada, Australia, and the United States, where aboriginal youth were inducted into boarding schools that suppressed indigenous languages and limited students’ contact with their families. As in Vietnam, finding obedient, acculturated subjects was the goal.Footnote ³

In 1945 Vietnamese nationalists began a war of independence from France that troubled the United States because of the communist affiliation and radical nationalism of the Việt Minh and the region’s proximity to unsettled conditions in China. After the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Cold War became a significant factor, suggesting to US policymakers that Southeast Asia had to be secured for the West. The United States accordingly supplied France’s Indochina War with money and materiel. France fought this war with a largely colonial army. One historian suggests that as little as 10 percent of the fighting force was French. Instead soldiers from Africa comprised nearly a third of the Far Eastern Expeditionary Corps and contributed to a mixed-race population in Vietnam. Following the French defeat in 1954, Washington began gradually to displace Paris politically, culturally, and militarily.

America on a Mission

American leaders were uncompromisingly anticommunist, but some had doubts about extensive involvement in Southeast Asia. They differed over the extent to which foreign aid should be offered to fragile economies, the wisdom of pursuing military action on the Asian continent, the degree to which military action should proceed without congressional consent, and the extent to which global policing should take priority over homeland defense. These disagreements were overcome when proponents of intervention in the region achieved a rough consensus by defining their mission as noncolonial.

The United States did not perceive itself as imperialist and deliberately sought to distinguish its interest in Vietnam from that of France. It had comparatively few territorial possessions, and government officials sought to deny imperialist ambitions. After the Spanish–American War the United States granted formal sovereignty to Cuba; it withdrew its Caribbean protectorates during the Great Depression, restored Philippine sovereignty in 1946, and retained the Trust Territory of the Pacific for geostrategic reasons. Americans intended imperialism for practical purposes only. Intervention in Vietnam similarly would not be for territorial aggrandizement. Having emerged from World War II without significant civilian casualties or major damage to infrastructure, the United States had the resources to pursue its Southeast Asian program. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles did not believe France was up to a comparable task. France’s defeat by Vietnamese nationalists at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, the precariousness of the French Fourth Republic, and the concurrent Algerian War encouraged Washington’s determination to substitute French domination in Vietnam for American hegemony.Footnote ⁴

While US officials did not think they were replacing one form of colonialism with another, and were only doing what was necessary to block communist advances in Southeast Asia, their program in Vietnam took on both the appearance and the substance of practices earlier put in place by France. Both countries, for example, used language instruction as a strategic instrument. French was perceived as a cultural adhesive binding colonial subjects to the metropole. Later, as Americans claimed they came to Vietnam without a colonial agenda, they presented English-language instruction as simply a Cold War necessity. Anticommunism and the desire to promote modernization provided the chief rationale for their involvement. English was the lingua franca of technical assistance and development initiatives. This offended French officials who wanted the United States to function in Vietnam without usurping the historic role of the French language. A similar situation occurred in Congo in 1958 when Belgian officials became alarmed at the growing activity of the United States Information Service. This included not only the provision of English-language publications but also instruction in that language. Belgians clearly saw their influence as tied to the continuing predominance of French. The belief in American technical superiority was tied to the desire to spread the use of English.Footnote ⁵

The United States had no history of continual intervention in Southeast Asia as it did in Central America and the Caribbean. It defined its goals in Asia differently. A focus on modernization tied its foreign and domestic policies together in the 1960s. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and Vietnam pacification schemes had common roots in Progressive Era and New Deal reform. Plans to win over Vietnamese through major infrastructural projects and food programs represented an effort to internationalize reform and were premised on the desirability of uplifting populations perceived as backward and deficient. Despite missionary overtones, by the mid-twentieth century science rather than religion was the driving ideological force underwriting the technology of progress. Many nationalists in newly independent countries also embraced the doctrine. Race, at first glance, would seem unimportant in this context.Footnote ⁶

Modernization theory held that development, including industrialization and the growth of democracy, could be instituted and tracked scientifically. When proponents made invidious comparisons between Western and non-Western societies, space was left to reintroduce racial ascriptions and the culturally laden binaries latent in modernization thought. Target populations were urged to abandon putatively backward-looking habits, as tribalism was contrasted to civil society, tradition to modernity, communal life to individualism, and so on. Under the coercive circumstances imposed by the Vietnam War, the voluntary and cooperative aspects of modernization began to fade. Combat disrupted agricultural production, a staple of development, as a country once self-sufficient in rice now imported it from the United States. Some of the most ambitious programs, including farm aid and a development bank, fell prey to corruption. The American mission in Vietnam by the late 1960s came close to approximating France’s classic mission civilisatrice.

Race and the Military

The military was the preeminent agent of US power in Vietnam, although personnel on the ground included both civilians and soldiers. Race played a role in how the armed forces functioned in that country and in other theaters that supported the war effort. Less than twenty years separated the beginning of the Vietnam War and President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the armed forces. The military had previously placed African Americans in separate units, provided them with inferior equipment, and largely confined them to menial, noncombat pursuits. Many officers held a low opinion of Black soldiers, perceiving them as unintelligent and fit only for labor rather than for combat. In the navy, African Americans could only be cooks and stewards. The Marine Corps recruited a Black battalion in 1942 but kept it in camp until the war was almost over. Only afterwards did the marines name two officers, in 1945 and 1948 respectively, but gave them no units to command. There were success stories, like the specially trained Tuskegee airmen, but for most Black troops military service made the perception of injustice more acute. A particularly stinging experience occurred when Black soldiers guarding German POWs after World War II had to wait outside restaurants that served the Germans but barred them. These humiliations officially ended in 1948 but traces of Jim Crow persisted.Footnote ⁷

Just as Truman’s reforms were based on the stance that all soldiers were Americans and should be treated equally, they were also founded on the principle of unquestioning loyalty to the republic. But the civil rights insurgency, which increased dramatically after the war, began undermining the implicit rule against criticizing the country. Racial disparities could no longer be ignored, and conscription that converted citizens into soldiers meant a flow of ideas between the homefront and military sites. The Vietnam War exposed the clash between conventional civic ideology and the reality of Black second-class citizenship.

Racial conflict in the US military during the Vietnam War occurred everywhere that bases were located. The circulation of troops between Vietnam and these locales meant that soldiers were drawn into the conduct and the ethos of the war wherever they were. In Germany, Black troops protested negative experiences they endured as 13 percent of the 165,000-member 7th Army. Although racial conflicts occurred at US bases everywhere, Germany ranked highest for incidence and seriousness. Targeted for discrimination by white personnel and German civilians alike, African American GIs often found themselves barred from off-base housing. Some Germans routinely refused to serve Black soldiers in bars and restaurants and complaints to the US top brass were unavailing. Black servicemen were disproportionately subjected to nonjudicial punishment and arrest and numbered at least half of those imprisoned in stockades. They challenged discrimination in promotions, assignments, and the dispensation of justice. They complained about the open display of Confederate flags, cross burnings, and efforts by white soldiers to organize Ku Klux Klan chapters. Further causes of disaffection included poor leadership by ranking officers, their scarcity in the officer corps, and minority underrepresentation in the military police. While African Americans faced discrimination in other countries, the presence in Germany of the US 7th Army’s bases and their salience to the Cold War, combined with the remaining memory of the Third Reich, aggravated tensions. By 1970 racial conflicts in Germany had escalated, along with a general deterioration of morale. Observers noted a growing insolence and independent spirit among US soldiers generally. Antiwar newspapers emerged, evidently printed secretly on base. The banning of GI meetings and arbitrary punishments did not appear to stem the tide of dissidence.Footnote ⁸

African American troops in Germany were attuned to the Black Power movement at home. Many adopted Afros despite military rules that ordered short haircuts. Peace signs appeared. Soldiers wore pendants and other symbols of Black militancy that challenged customary uniform codes. The initial response of the authorities to this behavior was to suppress knowledge of the gravity and frequency of both peaceful protest and violent resistance. They did so by censoring publications, an action that suggested that more incidents occurred than were reported. By 1970, increased racial friction posed an image problem for a nation attempting to shore up its credibility in Vietnam and represent the armed forces as colorblind institutions.

President Richard Nixon responded by sending a delegation headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Render II to Europe to investigate racial conditions at US bases. The subsequent Render Report recorded the “frustration and anger” of Black soldiers. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird then ordered base commanders to set timetables for the elimination of all bias on bases and in surrounding communities. The report may have arrived too late and contributed too little, failing to avert a mutiny in the 7th Army late in 1971.Footnote ⁹

Foreign outposts were not the only sites of unrest. In Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, tacit housing discrimination practiced by local businesses with the acquiescence of resident top brass added to rising racial tension. In 1969, a white marine from Mississippi stationed at Lejeune was killed in a fight with a group of African American and Puerto Rican marines. Violence erupted in Hawai’i when white soldiers contested fifty Black marines who raised their fists in a Black Power salute at a flag-lowering ceremony.Footnote ¹⁰

According to congressional testimony by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of naval forces in Vietnam, long deployments, personnel shortages, and crowded shipboard conditions contributed to mutinies by Black sailors on the naval ships Kitty Hawk, Hassayampa, Constellation, and Intrepid in 1972 and 1973. The seamen complained of relegation to the worst jobs, verbal abuse by officers, and denial of the right to assemble in groups. Zumwalt accused flag officers of dragging their feet in implementing the navy’s equal opportunity programs.Footnote ¹¹

Racial conflict was also evident in the theater of war itself. In early autumn 1968, prisoners in the military stockade at Long Bình took over the overcrowded jail and burned down several buildings in the large facility where African Americans constituted more than 50 percent of the inmates. In 1969, at Camp Tien Sha in Đà Nẵng, one hundred Black troops, including marines, soldiers, and sailors, met to discuss discrimination in promotion, racial slurs, and disproportionate assignments to hazardous duty. Following the meeting they staged a peaceful march on headquarters, but no concessions were made. Other incidents at China Beach and Đà Nẵng proper and in Qui Nhơn indicated the persistence of racial division. Cross burning and the raising of Confederate flags remained flashpoints.Footnote ¹²

Communist forces hoped to benefit from these conflicts. James E. Jackson, a POW for eighteen months, told a reporter how his captors broadcast a speech by Stokely Carmichael that questioned the Black soldier’s role in Vietnam and cited American racism as a reason why he should not cooperate with the war effort. “This country will only be able to stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, ‘Hell, no, we ain’t going,’” Carmichael told a University of California, Berkeley, audience on October 29, 1966.Footnote ¹³ Manuel Marin, a Mexican American Seabee, related an appeal to racial solidarity made by a Vietnamese who pointed out to him the similarity of their skin colors. A Native American in the army reported a similar experience. Yet the sense that many minority GIs had that they were fighting a war against people of color did not make most of them yield to these solidarity arguments even though it sharpened their criticism of US racism.Footnote ¹⁴

Soldiers stationed overseas were aware of the cresting civil rights and antiwar movements. They received news of the uprisings in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit. Whatever their disdain for the antiwar movement per se, often perceived as the stomping grounds of discredited subversives, entitled youth who declined military service, and hippies, minority troops remained cognizant of activism at home and participated in fragmentary or symbolic forms of protest themselves. Most of those on assignments abroad had originally been stationed on troubled stateside bases. As National Guardsmen or army troops they had patrolled the streets of angry cities. News of domestic events reinforced the sense of many that they were embarked upon a contradictory mission.Footnote ¹⁵ The Pentagon chose several methods to address the unrest. One was to suppress the most violent manifestations, transferring or arresting alleged ringleaders. Another was to make minor concessions on such matters as hairstyle or military dress. A third way was to attempt to guide the development of citizen-soldiers and improve their performance. Military authorities thus embarked on a social science experiment.

Discourse in the 1960s was marked by an increasing rejection of segregation and a consensus in policymaking circles that discrimination and its effects, not biology, explained the United States’ persistent racial problems. Social science, however, was still prone to condemn the habits and attitudes of the poor and marginalized. Economist Daniel P. Moynihan, Assistant Secretary of Labor, rooted Black difficulties in mother-centered family structures, rather than in long-term unemployment, poor schooling, or racism. Moynihan’s March 1965 report for the Labor Department Office of Policy Planning and Research, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” called for the remasculinization of African American men. The study came at a time when the family wage, a breadwinner salary generous enough to allow a wife to stay home, was declining for all Americans. Moynihan suggested military service as a possible instrument of Black male revitalization.Footnote ¹⁶ His work struck a nerve: the era’s plays and films about African Americans, such as Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Nothing But a Man (1964), foreshadowed this gendered concern. While Black popular culture subject matter ranged widely, a perceived need for male self-assertion remained an abiding theme during the period.

Figure 19.1 Black Americans march in New York City, calling for an end to the Vietnam War (1967).

Source: Jill Freedman / Contributor / Premium Archive / Getty Images.

In 1965 the Pentagon unveiled its own response to this issue. The goal of Project 100,000 was to add 40,000 formerly rejected men to the army in 1966 and another 100,000 in succeeding years. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara referred to these men as being “salvaged” for military service.Footnote ¹⁷ In lowering its standards, the Pentagon meant to instill in young Black men a proper conception of manhood as interpreted by Moynihan and other “culture of poverty” theorists. They hoped the initiative could also undercut the disaffection increasingly being expressed in American cities through violent insurrection.

Many of these soldiers, called New Standards men, lacked the basic skills to qualify for specialized training, and half were shipped to Vietnam as combat troops. Ultimately, some 300,000 joined the program, 50 percent of whom were Black, in a country where some 10.5 percent of the population was Black. Fewer than 8 percent received any advanced instruction. In 1971 the Pentagon terminated the project because of its cost and the deescalation of the war. New Standards men suffered disproportionately from post-traumatic stress syndrome and other injuries that impeded their employability and reintegration into civilian society. Whatever benefits the Black family was supposed to reap from the experiment proved elusive.Footnote ¹⁸

Black people were not the only Americans to experience the varied dissonances of the Vietnam era. Discussions of race have historically been premised on the assumption of a racial binary: white and Black people comprise most of the population in the dominant narrative, with such groups as Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans being marginal. That discourse was abetted by the frequent ambiguity and indeterminacy with which those groups were historically categorized in the United States. Some state law characterized Latinos and Asians as white during some eras and as nonwhite in others. The lack of clarity sometimes provided non-Black minorities a buffer from the lowest common denominator of status that African Americans occupied but could also further a sense of alienation.

While Native Americans constituted no more than 0.6 percent of the US population, they numbered some 1.4 percent of the fighting force in Vietnam. Estimating the total number of Native American veterans is difficult because of the inconsistency with which non-Black racial groups have been classified. Native Americans might be catalogued as Caucasian or Hispanic depending on circumstances such as surname or place of residence. Unlike African Americans, warfare for indigenous men was often linked to warrior traditions that antedate European contact. Native Americans were generally less critical of their treatment in the military. Because of their average low levels of education, however, they were commonly assigned to combat operations. Here stereotypes about Native Americans’ prowess as hunters led to their overuse as scouts and consequent high casualty rates. While protest activity among Native Americans was low compared to other groups, many saw the Vietnam War as one from which they would gain little benefit.Footnote ¹⁹

Like Native Americans, Mexican Americans did not originally take an oppositional stance regarding military service or their place in US society. Mexican American leaders had approached the race question by positioning their communities as ethnic rather than racial entities. This strategy was aided by the uneven application of racial categorization to Mexican Americans. Although officially deemed white, they were widely discriminated against in the Southwest United States, where most lived. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), for years the major Mexican American civil rights organization, first followed a strictly assimilationist policy. LULAC had been less interested in fighting racial battles than in litigation designed to have Mexican Americans incorporated into mainstream white society. Some of the lawsuits it sponsored aimed at ending the exclusion of Mexican American children from white schools, not abolishing the principle of segregated schools. LULAC was also initially hostile to Mexican immigration in the belief that low-wage Mexican labor would undercut the gains that Mexican Americans had made. The American GI Forum, a Mexican American veterans’ organization, followed a similar policy.Footnote ²⁰

Strong assimilationist goals within Mexican American society thus encouraged loyalty among Vietnam-era soldiers. They at first prided themselves on stoic acceptance of conscription, a traditional masculinism, bravery, and achievements in war. Vietnam began to weaken this orientation as antiwar activists rejected the implicit assumption that Chicanos had to prove their belonging through conspicuous acts of Americanism. Yet Mexican American soldiers were more often influenced by their own experiences. Modest education, nontechnical skills, and sometimes a language barrier caused many to be assigned to less appealing and more dangerous work. On the USS Kitty Hawk, for example, they labored with African Americans and Filipinos on the lower decks of the ship. In the army, they noted their overrepresentation in the infantry and their absence from safe jobs in the rear. These observations led to an increasingly critical examination of customary patriotism. Americanism, some realized, did not have to be limited to embracing an Anglo identity.Footnote ²¹

Some 48,000 Puerto Ricans served in Vietnam, and oral accounts affirm that they experienced the war in ways that other Latinos did, but important differences existed. Many soldiers coming directly from the Caribbean island did not speak English and, while there was no universal policy regarding language, the informal prohibition on speaking Spanish by some US officers remained a source of difficulty. Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States was problematic for some. As a so-called Free Associated State with local powers, the island has no congressional representation and, while residents are US citizens, islanders cannot vote in presidential elections, although men during the Vietnam era were liable for conscription. During the height of the war in 1967, Puerto Ricans voted in a plebiscite to maintain the status quo, but the island’s position underlined the sense of being second-class citizens that many GIs felt. As a people of mixed-race ancestry, Puerto Ricans experienced racism in the military in ways that varied with their specific phenotypes. Some identified Puerto Rico’s liminal status with Vietnam, including one soldier who experienced a shock of recognition when ordered to set fire to the thatch roof of a village house that reminded him of the rural bohíos of his own tropical home.Footnote ²²

Asian American soldiers fought in the context of a highly problematic history. Despite a lengthy Asian presence in the United States, courts had rendered contradictory decisions about Asians’ right to citizenship, based on racial criteria. Japanese American soldiers during the Vietnam era included some who had been born in internment camps during World War II. The military also recruited men from Pacific territories. Guamanians and other Pacific Islanders comprised part of the complement that today occupies an official census category. An East Asian phenotype could create situations where Asian Americans were mistaken for Vietnamese insurgents. The common use of such racial expletives as “gook” (an epithet with origins among US troops in the Philippine War and reprised during the US occupation of Haiti), “zipperhead,” “dink,” and “slope” required Asian American soldiers to identify themselves in ways that were not required of others. Military planners exploited the resemblance between these troops and the adversary in humiliating ways. Surprise raids conducted by soldiers sometimes disguised as peasants were used against suspected communist sympathizers. To slip past enemy vigilance, the troops chosen for these actions were often Asian Americans, Native Americans, or any man of color thought to look sufficiently Vietnamese. On bases soldiers were trained for what they might encounter “in country.” There, Asian American and Polynesian soldiers were dressed as residents of an enemy village in simulations meant to prepare troops for field conditions. Through these dramatizations and an often-expressed mistrust by fellow soldiers, the Asian American soldier experienced two sides of the war.Footnote ²³

Crisis Mode

Military leadership, by inserting itself into civilian affairs, brought the war even closer to home. The army collected sociological data in efforts to predict domestic ghetto uprisings and spied on civilians to keep GIs away from influences deemed subversive. It maintained dossiers on soldiers who belonged to certain civilian groups, read “subversive” material, or contacted congressional representatives. Although the FBI filed weekly reports on African American and student organizations, the army claimed the Bureau’s data was inadequate for its purposes. Military intelligence could better enlist Black people and youth, and thus had greater ability to infiltrate organizations and monitor dissidents.

The civil rights movement had begun with claims on citizenship rights and a critique of the lapses of American democracy. The Vietnam War heightened participants’ sense of the contradictions between the country’s lofty ideals and its practices. Antiwar opinion among African Americans grew in 1966 in response to growing Black casualties, reports of bias in the military, and the inequitable nature of the draft in many communities. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) condemned all-white draft boards in Southern states, alleging that they targeted civil rights workers to derail the movement. Segregationist authorities used antidraft activism to discredit Black insurgency, prosecuting activists as subversives, and using conscription to banish troublesome young men. Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali garnered wide press coverage when he challenged his own draft status. During a 1967 appearance in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, he gave his reasons: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” Even without overt bias and manipulation, the Selective Service System was discriminatory, giving cover through student deferments to white middle-class youth while keeping militant Black college students in its sights.Footnote ²⁴

Draft resistance activities on historically Black college campuses led students to oppose the war and heightened their opposition to the nation’s continued recalcitrance on the civil rights front. Southern authorities responded to Black antiwar activity with repression. In 1967 police shot into a dormitory at Texas Southern University. In 1968 officers killed three students and wounded thirty at South Carolina State University. Later that same year, when Tuskegee University students took over the campus and refused compulsory participation in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, the Alabama governor called out the National Guard and the state police.Footnote ²⁵

Martin Luther King, Jr., had privately expressed misgivings about Vietnam as early as 1965 but had refrained from public criticism, despite urging from those civil rights and peace activists who had opposed the war early. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and certain Black Democratic politicians loyal to President Johnson had urged King to remain quiet. In late 1966 he finally spoke out when he accepted an invitation to deliver remarks at an April 4, 1967, meeting at the Riverside Church in New York City. His address, titled “A Time to Break Silence,” forthrightly posited a connection between racism at home, predatory capitalism, and brutal policies abroad targeting the poor and people of color. King referred to his early optimism that the United States was changing for the better. “There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.” Federal antipoverty initiatives promised reform. “Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” It was at this point that King “was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”Footnote ²⁶

The NAACP continued to back President Johnson despite protest from rank-and-file members. A resolution passed at its 1967 conference in Boston implied that condemning the war was off the table so long as the War on Poverty remained intact. The NAACP did not acknowledge that the conflict was draining resources needed to aid the poor. Other civil rights groups were less hesitant. SNCC and the Black Panther Party, for example, linked compromises and failures on civil rights to the war in Southeast Asia and called for a more assertive approach to American politics.Footnote ²⁷

Black Power activism differed from civil rights insurgency in claiming a broader field of both rights and oppositions. African American freedom, according to the civil rights movement’s discourse of citizenship, would be realized within the framework of the democratic nation-state. Black Power proponents, however, saw American nationalism as part of the problem exacerbating global conflicts. SNCC, for example, first emerged as an organization that strongly affirmed a liberal vision of the United States as inclusive and democratic. After years of political work in a violent South, bereft of meaningful support from the federal government, SNCC activists increasingly defined the Black freedom struggle as worldwide and sought international alliances of the oppressed. The granting to SNCC of status as a quasi-liberation organization by radical governments and national liberation movements abroad encouraged its practice as a challenger of US imperialism.

While SNCC remained a small group that would diminish considerably before finally extinguishing itself by the mid-1970s, its significance for race relations during the Vietnam era is that it helped to define a generational stance among the cohort of Black Americans that would fight the war and those who would fight against it. Along with the Black Panther Party and more local organizations, it disagreed that attaining legislative victories was sufficient to heal the United States’ racial divisions, and called for discussion of the best plans for Black liberation going forward. SNCC buttressed this with an internationalism that denounced colonial and neocolonial regimes and called on African American solidarity with those striving for self-determination abroad.Footnote ²⁸

Most African Americans, however, were more in tune with King’s expanded vision of the community of the poor. Even here activists came up sharply against the reality of the state’s repressive potential. Protestors placed by the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC, in 1968 vowed to remain there until the federal government took decisive action on poverty. In the spring they began constructing a shantytown on the National Mall that they named Resurrection City. Unnerved by 2,600 residents at Resurrection City’s peak, and especially by the presence of large numbers of young Black men, the Justice Department, local police, and the US Army made contingency plans for a violent insurrection in the city. In late June the authorities stormed the encampment and razed its flimsy tents. As noted above, the army was not only an overwhelming presence in Southeast Asia, but also a major player in the domestic racial drama of the period, a role that intensified in the aftermath of King’s assassination in April 1968.Footnote ²⁹

The ubiquitous fluidity of the military presence meant that race as well as the military were both inside and outside every zone of conflict. If the armed forces went to war in Vietnam, they also went to war in the United States in the form of riot suppression, surveillance, and infiltration. If there were civilian antiwar activists, there were also military deserters, saboteurs, and quiet dissidents. The military was thus embedded in all aspects of race relations during the period and in how people of color responded to the Vietnam War.

Vietnam also prompted Martin Luther King, Jr., and more radical activists to challenge the assumption that civil rights, and more broadly human rights, should be confined to specialist organizations, and the view that people of color were not entitled to stances on foreign policy. Critics assailed the forward edge of the civil rights movement for embracing a class-conscious, multiracial position on domestic issues and linking these to the war.

Linking the Movements

While African Americans had always been racialized subjects in the United States, not all nonwhite groups had such an unequivocal experience. Mexican Americans had adhered to a model of hyphenated ethnicity and Puerto Ricans to nationality. The war encouraged many to see themselves as racially defined in a conflict whose costs were disproportionately borne by people of color. The stage was thus set for collective action by multiracial antiwar coalitions such as the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Third World Liberation Front.

The questioning of customary authority in the society at large and Native Americans’ wartime experience helped alter the quiescence of native communities and revived an appreciation of traditional life. Native activism was thus the product of several cumulative factors. The rise of the environmental movement, coterminous with the war and the civil rights movement, led many Native Americans to reassess their relationship, both historical and contemporary, with the federal government and reclaim aspects of their historic ties to the land. The growth of the indigenous population and the increased number who lived outside reservations and rural areas made space to articulate more than one kind of politics.

While Native Americans were frequently regarded as inert symbols of the purity of nature, their rights to the environment were routinely violated. In the mid-1960s indigenous organizations and civil rights groups challenged Washington State’s violation of Native American treaty rights by holding “fish-ins,” netting and trapping fish according to traditional methods. In 1969 indigenous activists began a nearly two-year occupation of Alcatraz Island, claiming this disused federal property for natives. The increasing number of Native Americans living outside reservations and willing to operate politically beyond the constraints of tribal politics set up the conditions for later challenges to the status quo such as the 1972 occupation of the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the confrontation with federal agents the next year in Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Some of this activism involved both racialization and ethnicization of Native Americans who in the past had been submerged in specific tribal identities, but not all Native Americans accepted the new approaches.Footnote ³⁰

The reshaping of identity also played a role in antiwar resistance mounted by Mexican Americans. Adoption of the term Chicano signified a transition in thinking as the word had negatively connoted a lower-class status. In embracing it, Chicanos and Chicanas abandoned what might be called a politics of respectability: humble, loyal service to a state that questioned their citizenship and often denied them equal rights. As the African American freedom struggle began to realize concrete legislative gains by the mid-1960s accompanied by redistributionist federal policies, some Chicanos felt that quiescence and compliance – as well as cultivation of white personas – had not advanced their interests or provided opportunity. Renewed concern for the rights of farm workers emerged from a reevaluation of what it meant to be Mexican American. Changes in consciousness accompanied the emergence of a labor movement around the United Farm Workers Union. In California, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and Illinois, Chicano demonstrators protested police brutality, poor education, and the discriminatory draft system. In New Mexico, home for centuries to people of Spanish and Mexican descent, conflict with state authorities erupted over land grants bestowed long ago. The clash echoed Native Americans’ awakened consciousness regarding land rights. Some emerging organizations emulated the Black Panther paramilitary style, including the Chicano Brown Berets and the Puerto Rican Young Lords.Footnote ³¹

Beginning in 1969 Chicano activists organized a series of demonstrations in East Los Angeles. Under the rubric of the Chicano Moratorium, they brought together thousands of people to protest the Vietnam War and discrimination. The capstone demonstration took place on August 29, 1970, and drew 25,000 people in a protest unprecedented for its size and the Mexican American participation rate. For reasons that remain unclear, the Los Angeles Police Department fired on the assemblage and dropped tear gas, killing four people, including a Los Angeles Times reporter of Mexican descent, perpetuating the already existing tension between Spanish-speaking Angelinos and the police.Footnote ³²

Antiwar opposition among Asian Americans helped to invent the category Asian American as one that crossed lines of national origin and aspired to a united front of dissent. Before passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 and the arrival of Vietnamese, Hmong, and other Southeast Asian immigrants at the end of the Vietnam War, most Asian Americans were of Japanese, Chinese, or Filipino descent. Although their links to their original homelands were often attenuated, a popular perception was that they were foreigners. The nature of US relations with Japan and China over time influenced how immigrants were perceived. The long period of “Oriental” exclusion, anti-Chinese riots in the nineteenth century, arbitrary and conflicting efforts by courts at racial classification, and the World War II–era incarceration of Japanese Americans reaffirmed an outsider status and reinforced the cautiousness with which many Asian Americans had approached political participation.

At first glance, circumstances suggested that activism would thus be minimal within these communities. In Chinatowns, the strong anticommunist influence of Guomindang adherents had neutralized leftwing radicalism and quelled demonstrative opposition to US foreign policy. Yet the Vietnam War by the early 1970s had engulfed the entire Southeast Asian peninsula. Looking backward, Asian American dissidents could see the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955, the Bandung Conference, as a precursor for challenges to Western domination and as a call for Asian solidarity. Additionally, the lack of a common national origin as a source for a collective Asian American identity suggested another possibility: Asian Americans as a people of color, i.e., a racial group. As such, antiwar organizations like I Wor Kuen merged with the Chicano(a) August 29 Movement and made common cause with the Congress of African People. Some scholars suggest that Asian American radicals rejected their model minority status and embraced a racial identification based on their interpretation of Black militancy. Dissident Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay area sought direct counsel from the Black Panther Party in establishing an organization called the Red Guards. This late 1960s group avidly read the works of Mao Zedong but knew little of the character and excesses of the Cultural Revolution occurring in China. While students had some insulation from the draft, it was not secure, and they recognized that others in their age cohort were being sent to war.Footnote ³³

Racial self-definitions owed something to the meanings assigned to people in US popular culture. Only one major film of note dealing with the Vietnam War, The Green Berets (1968), appeared during the war itself. That film rehearsed familiar tropes about white American bravery in the face of foreign racial others. The film industry, pulp fiction, and cartoons had long provided a host of stereotypes about East Asians, many dating from the nineteenth century. Hollywood’s antidote to the lethal villain Fu Manchu was the partially Americanized detective Charlie Chan. During the war with Japan in the 1940s Chan came to represent the “good” Asian, in marked contrast to the flamboyant Orientalism embodied by the evil Dr. Fu Manchu and the cruel Japanese militarist. The Green Berets characterized the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces as the “good Asians” in this enduring convention.

Asian women could also be malevolent, calculating “dragon ladies” in league with Fu-like criminals. They were just as often described as eroticized, exotic, and passive victims of sex trafficking or other ills, and generally deprived of character development in fictional treatments. While Charlie Chan and his son (who called his father “Pop” in an informal manner comfortable to Americans) were portrayed as acculturated, no parallel role existed for Asian American women. Women who broadcast wartime propaganda for US enemies – Tokyo Rose, Peiping Polly, Hanoi Hannah – could easily have been non-Asian because they were simple voices but nevertheless helped fortify prevailing stereotypes which found few alternatives in popular media until after the Vietnam War ended.Footnote ³⁴

Children were generally spared from these representations. Large-scale adoptions of Korean children by US citizens began shortly after the Korean conflict ended in 1953. Orphans included the biracial offspring of white and Black American troops. The adoptions marked the beginning of a change in American racial attitudes, although approved adoptions initially followed racial lines. Korean children with white American ancestry were to go to white families, and those with African physical traits to Black parents. Unlike the media portrayal of Asian adults, the Korean orphans were considered innocent and redeemable candidates for assimilation into American families. Little public attention was given to the specific circumstances in which each had become parentless.

In Vietnam, American soldiers sired mixed-race children, as had French troops before them. As in the colonial period, children’s fate often hinged on paternal recognition. This recognition was not always an individual decision. During World War II and the Korean War, African American soldiers often had difficulty receiving permission to marry foreign nationals and repatriate their offspring. Some reported the top brass’s continuing resistance to Black veterans’ constituting such families during the Vietnam era. The federal government proved hesitant to allow paternally unrecognized children to immigrate. Abandoned children were disproportionately Black and were thought less likely to assimilate positively into Vietnamese society. Senator Mark Hatfield and others authored a bill that assumed moral responsibility for orphans left behind by US servicemen and proposed the creation of an agency to attend to their welfare. The bill was postponed and the plight of abandoned children in Vietnam left to private organizations to address.

Concerned officials then turned for advice to experienced French private agencies that still operated in the country and expatriated Vietnamese children. In 1975, as the war was collapsing and American defeat was imminent, private US groups with federal support began flying orphans to the United States. One of the planes carrying children in so-called Operation Babylift crashed, killing most of the young passengers. In the ensuing investigation, it was revealed that many evacuees had not really been orphans. American aid organizations had followed French precedent in removing children without maternal consent even though it was well known that mothers sometimes placed children in orphanages as a temporary measure while they sought work. US charities had also ignored the desires of both South and North Vietnamese governments, which opposed foreign adoption of Vietnamese children.Footnote ³⁵

The Babylift fiasco reflected the racial dynamics of the Vietnam era. Cavalier attitudes toward mothers and children in crisis by both Vietnamese and American authorities, the racial assessments made, the evasion of responsibility, and ultimately the hasty evacuation helped write the narrative of the war. While Americans have historically distanced themselves from the colonial legacy of domination over people of color, Vietnam reaffirmed hierarchical relationships based on force. At home, African Americans and other racial–ethnic minorities continued to challenge a white supremacy that had retreated from claims to legitimacy but remained a persistent structural element of US society.

On February 12, 1966, a crowd of approximately 15,000 people sat in a rain-drenched Atlanta Stadium to hear speeches by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, General Lucius Clay, and South Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations, Nguyen Duy Lien. The master of ceremonies was an Emory University student named Remar “Bubba” Sutton, who in December 1965 decided to organize a pro-Vietnam demonstration over dinner with fellow student Don Brunson. Sutton had recently heard Ralph McGill, liberal publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, call on students to “answer” the much-publicized antiwar student demonstrations. The event he organized, Affirmation: Vietnam, was designed to counter the image that the majority of students, or indeed Americans, questioned US policy in Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹ The student group intended to send a message to international audiences regarding the commitment of the majority of Americans to supporting President Lyndon Johnson’s military strategies and diplomatic goals. Within weeks of creating the group, Sutton and Brunson had acquired the use of twenty dormitory rooms from Emory University, drafted a constitution, and received tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service. They established links with student body presidents at colleges throughout Georgia and secured financial support from businesses to host a major pro-Vietnam event. The Emory Wheel editorialized that the antiwar “march on Washington and subsequent picketing of the White House during the holidays by pacifist student groups protesting administration policy in Viet Nam is but another slap in the face of common sense and reason.” “Each citizen,” the editors insisted, “has a duty to support his country in wartime, however much he might protest a certain action in time of peace.” It was time to “spread the truth about American sentiment.”Footnote ²

Affirmation: Vietnam attracted students from across Georgia and won the support of several celebrities, including veteran United Service Organizations (USO) entertainer Bob Hope, who emceed a documentary broadcast the week of the event titled “A Generation Awakes.” Singer Anita Bryant, who had previously taken part in Hope’s USO tours, altered her schedule to perform at the rally after Sutton’s late-night surprise visit to her Florida home. It was styled as a mass display of patriotic fervor and relied heavily on institutional support, whether from the universities, business leaders, veterans’ organizations, or state and national politicians, who rallied from across the political spectrum to attach their names to the event. While the rally itself received substantial press coverage both domestically and internationally and was thereby broadly successful, the activism of its organizers was short-lived. The students’ commitment to the speakers’ bureau that was created at the time of the rally may well have been heartfelt, but as Sutton readily acknowledged most students were now focused on returning to their studies.Footnote ³ Within two years, furthermore, antiwar activism was far more prevalent on the Emory campus, and university administrators were keen to appear neutral.

The ad hoc nature of Affirmation: Vietnam was representative of prowar demonstrations that took place throughout US engagement in Vietnam. The more successful events invariably tried to reflect widely held views about the United States’ moral purpose abroad, focused on endorsing the president’s existing policy, and utilized standard tropes relating to American patriotism. Student-led campaigns were the most successful in terms of achieving coordinated and sustained activism. Unlike their antiwar counterparts, however, prowar student campaigners relied on relationships with more established groups. As with Affirmation: Vietnam, these prowar campaigns were often reactionary in nature, designed to counter the image of widespread support for the antiwar movement, rather than intended to create a groundswell of popular activism in favor of any particular military or diplomatic strategy.Footnote ⁴

Many Americans proclaimed strongly held views about the importance of securing victory in Vietnam, and this chapter will consider the relevance and influence of their political and social activism. Yet, it is important to note the significance of indifference among those who often proclaimed prowar positions, which reflected adherence to the Cold War status quo rather than considered ideological engagement with the war. In sociologist David Flores’s study of contrasting views among Vietnam veterans, he noted that those who remained supportive of the war after engagement described “an absence of strong preexisting ideals before, during, and after their participation in warfare.” In contrast, veterans who became active opponents of the war described themselves as prior war supporters whose idealistic views of warfare had been undermined by the moral dilemma arising from the guerrilla conflict in Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁵ Flores was primarily concerned with how veterans remembered their experiences and the impact of memory on political views, but his study highlights one key aspect of prowar sentiment throughout the Vietnam War. Many individuals, regardless of socioeconomic background, ethnicity, age, or gender, supported the war because to do so required little engagement with the nature of the war itself or the consequences of military engagement. Supporting the war simply meant supporting the president’s policy, whether it was Johnson’s mass introduction of ground troops and aerial bombardment of North Vietnam, or Richard Nixon’s commitment to escalated bombing and Vietnamization, the incremental withdrawal of American troops, who were replaced with South Vietnamese personnel from mid-1970.

That most Americans became disillusioned with the war due to casualties, the perceived inequities of the draft system, and the apparent endlessness of the conflict is clear.Footnote ⁶ But it is also evident that Americans continued to respond positively to messages that celebrated global anticommunism and discredited the radical antiwar movement. As Steven Casey notes, the Johnson administration recognized that the antiwar movement provided an opportunity as much as a threat to his selling of the war during 1967. Polling in October of that year revealed that even among students 49 percent supported a hawkish view with 35 percent opposing the war, while among the public more generally only 5 percent stated that the war affected them personally, thus highlighting the “shallowness of the public’s frustration with the war.”Footnote ⁷ Nixon understood more explicitly the utility of domesticating the war through social and political division in order to buy time for his administration to continue the conflict and force a settlement. While his administration was unable to reverse the course of popular frustration with the seemingly endless war, it succeeded in redefining the meaning of victory in Vietnam and tied his promise of “peace with honor” to popular understandings of the United States’ moral purpose in the international arena.

This chapter will examine two distinct aspects of prowar sentiment: grassroots campaigns to promote popular support for the US mission, which successfully focused on support for American troops and prisoners of war during the later years of the conflict; and conservatives’ ideological commitment to securing military victory after 1964. Conservatives were not alone in pursuing outright victory in Vietnam, and there was considerable division within the movement about both the importance of this particular conflict and the utility of supporting Nixon’s policies relating to negotiation in particular. Yet, conservative political activists were far more consistent than any other group in maintaining support for the goal of defeating communism in Southeast Asia. As the war progressed both policymakers’ and conservatives’ definitions of victory changed, and conservatives increasingly adopted the patriotic perspectives put forward by less ideological prowar activists.Footnote ⁸ The war altered the character of the conservative movement, furthermore, prompting the development of alliances with social activists less committed to conservatives’ foreign policy goals. As Andrew Johns discusses, divisions over Vietnam among Republicans drove the party in new directions, allowing conservatives to reach ascendency in the Republican Party.Footnote ⁹ Prowar sentiment was therefore passive in terms of reflecting support for the Cold War status quo. It was active in terms of driving support for conservatives’ emphasis on delegitimizing antiwar activism and championing the need for a return to the superpower Cold War. Public opinion relating to Vietnam was fundamentally in flux throughout the period of US engagement in Southeast Asia and was broadly shaped by domestic events and the effects of the war at home more than by the course of the war itself. Prowar sentiment among Americans was therefore malleable, which made it difficult for the administrations to rely on popular backing. But it was a powerful agent in shaping American politics and contributed to the divisiveness of American society during the 1960s and beyond.

Grassroots Activism and American National Identity in Vietnam

There was little popular demand for US intervention in Southeast Asia during the 1950s and 1960s, yet public opinion rallied in support of Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam that began in March 1965, and the introduction of large-scale numbers of American ground troops was widely accepted as necessary. In late March, a clear plurality described themselves as agreeing with the “hawks” over the “doves,” with a quarter of those polled offering no opinion either way. The Affirmation: Vietnam rally was by no means an aberration, and early demonstrations of support for the war reflected its theme of supporting the president and undermining antiwar sentiment. While conservative organizations such as the American Conservative Union (ACU) made considerable efforts to promote the international significance of the conflict and offered specific military strategies for achieving more immediate success, there was little popular appetite for campaigns or rallies that focused on national security. Concerns about appearing opposed to peace further inhibited the development of campaigns that focused on policy in Vietnam, while many Americans remained reluctant to adopt the tactics of the increasingly vocal antiwar movement. Instead, prowar campaigners focused on supporting American men and women serving in Vietnam. But as David Levy notes, individual acts of support for the troops undertaken by “Young Republicans and Young Democrats; by Lions, Moose, Elks and Masons; by the American Legion, the Jewish War Veterans, the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars], DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution]; by church groups, women’s clubs, PTAs, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and Boy Scouts; by garden clubs, labor unions, and 4-H groups; by local newspapers and television stations” cannot be entirely separated from support for the war itself.Footnote ¹⁰ Demonstrations such as blood drives, gift programs, and particularly prowar rallies became more prevalent as antiwar sentiment became increasingly vocal. Open expressions of support for the American effort in Vietnam were not, however, undertaken merely because of social and moral rejection of the aims and methods of the radical left. Rather, they reflected faith in the rationale put forward by Johnson for US involvement in Vietnam: a belief that Americans were defending the independence of a weaker people; that they were extending democracy and protecting the freedom of the United States; and that the war was a vital aspect of undermining the Soviet threat. Many Americans may have had difficulty fully articulating the reasons why the war in Vietnam was directly related to American security, with the result that emphasizing support for the troops or for the government became the most relevant means of confirming United States involvement in Southeast Asia.

The most dramatic exhibition of support for American servicemen in Vietnam happened in May 1967, with the We Support Our Boys in Vietnam rally. New York Fire Department chief Raymond Gimmler developed the large-scale patriotic parade because of his disgust at the “peaceniks” and “anti-Americans” protesting the war effort. With the help of the American Legion, Gimmler established an organizing committee for a parade and insisted that his purpose was not to comment on administration policy or to oppose dissent. Rather, the committee resisted “attacks on our nation and the impression given to the world of a people who oppose their country. Above all we are striving to assure our fighting men in Vietnam that they have the full respect, love, prayers and backing of the American People.”Footnote ¹¹ The goal of national unity led the committee to avoid any ideologically narrow or partisan connotations. Yet, the parade was repeatedly portrayed as an antidote to the antiwar demonstration in New York in April 1967 where an American flag was infamously set alight. Gimmler’s aim was therefore to associate the antiwar movement with anti-Americanism, implicitly relating patriotism with support for the government’s objectives in Vietnam. Gimmler and his fellow activists contributed a great deal to the organization and promotion of the event, yet they relied heavily on the practical support offered by the American Legion and echoed its position of support for the war. The VFW also distributed material about the “mammoth Patriotic Parade,” while the organization’s New York department commander Herbert Brian likened the parade to the VFW’s Loyalty Day when “[we] first chased the Communists off the streets of New York.”Footnote ¹² The issue of fidelity to the United States served as a powerful rhetorical tool for those committed to the causes for which the country was engaged in Vietnam, even when the “causes” were reduced to matters such as basic anticommunism and protection of American values.

On May 13, approximately 70,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in a “forest of American flags” during a parade that lasted almost nine hours.Footnote ¹³ Conservative groups attempted to coopt the allegedly apolitical parade, with the New York Conservative Party’s poster urging citizens to “counteract the vicious anti-American spectacle” of the April antiwar demonstration.Footnote ¹⁴ The national board of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) associated its prowar position with the event, requesting that its chapter chairmen send “Victory in Viet Nam” buses to the parade. YAF asked attendees “to write their Congressman, US Senators, and President Johnson [asking them] to take all necessary steps [to] win the war in Viet Nam, to support those military advisers who recommend the bombing of airfields in North Viet Nam, [and] to enable American fighting men in Viet Nam to carry out the necessary missions to defeat the Communist aggressors.”Footnote ¹⁵ YAF’s objective was to incorporate its demands for change in administration policy, and particularly its effort to associate support for the troops with endorsement of removing the military restrictions on Americans fighting in Vietnam, into the main thrust of the parade.

Conservative hawks succeeded in that many who participated in the parade carried signs urging escalation, and many of the signs carried by participants urged the administration to “Bomb Hanoi.”Footnote ¹⁶ The New York Times reported that the “usual atmosphere” of the parade was “belligerent. It showed clearly in such signs as: ‘Down with the Reds,’ ‘My country right or wrong,’ ‘Hey, hey, what do you say; let’s support the USA,’ ‘Give the boys moral ammo,’ … ‘God bless us patriots, may we never go out of style,’ ‘Escalate, don’t capitulate.’”Footnote ¹⁷ While the parade was described as mainly orderly, “a dozen times paraders or their sympathizers attacked individuals displaying signs urging the end of the war or expressing such sentiments. A man who was said to be a bystander was smeared with tar and feathers.” The mood created by the march, particularly after the violent ejection of a group of antiwar protestors who claimed that they were expressing support for the troops by demanding their immediate return home, was ultimately one of faith in the American cause in Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁸

Parades of this nature served prowar politicians’ longstanding efforts to equate patriotic duty with support for a victory strategy in Vietnam. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona asserted in 1966 that he was “ashamed to … see [Democrats] telling the American people that our power has made America arrogant and self-righteous and expansionist and immoral.” “No American,” he asserted, “has the right to or the justification to level such charges against his country. And that goes double for doing it in a time of war and in a fashion that lends comfort to our enemies.”Footnote ¹⁹ Goldwater asserted that the war was just and necessary, but he also conveyed the message that patriotism demanded that the sacrifice of American life and resources be met with full national support. In criticizing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s decision to leave office in 1967, Goldwater asserted that “no honorable man can walk away from a war to which he has sent hundreds of thousands of men.”Footnote ²⁰

Figure 20.1 Pro–Vietnam War demonstrators at a rally in Central Park in New York City (April 27, 1968).

Source: David Fenton / Contributor / Archive Photos / Getty Images.

Goldwater was not alone in this view, particularly in his association of antiwar protest with un-Americanism. While recognizing that many Americans were frustrated with the war, conservatives also understood that broad antipathy toward the antiwar movement could prevent the growth of mainstream opposition to the war. Conservatives certainly promoted this process and actively welcomed the cultural and political polarization that the war appeared to be causing by 1967. Reagan explicitly articulated the negative impact of antiwar protest, lamenting in 1969 that because of domestic protest “some young Americans living today will die tomorrow.” Many of those marching in the name of peace, he declared, “carry the flag of a nation which has killed almost 40,000 of our young men.” Patriotism required support of those “entrusted with the immense responsibility for the leadership of our nation” and “rejection of those in our streets who arrogantly kibitz in a game where they haven’t even seen the cards with which the game is played.”Footnote ²¹

Late 1969 marked the high point of popular activism in opposition to the antiwar movement. The week of Veterans Day in November 1969 saw many Americans respond to Reagan’s call to arms. “National Unity Week” was developed by Edmund Dombrowski, a California orthopedic surgeon who wanted to challenge the divisiveness in American society he attributed to antiwar protest. The Committee for a Week of National Unity comprised local businesspeople and anticommunist activists and led to a petition drive to enhance popular involvement in local patriotic events. Angered by campus and peace activists, Dombrowski was also influenced by high school students opposed to the antiwar Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on October 15, 1969. They believed that the president was doing all he could to end the war, but did not want to have to parade in the streets to show their support. Within two weeks of the committee’s founding in mid-October, Bob Hope enthusiastically agreed to become its honorary chairman, and the committee distributed promotional leaflets and more than 200,000 “National Unity” bumper stickers on a daily basis for several weeks. Hope sent telegrams on behalf of the committee to governors and city mayors across the country, urging them to promote National Unity Week. The committee recommended that citizens fly the American flag, wear red, white, and blue armbands, turn on car headlights during the day, leave houselights on over the weekend, pray for prisoners of war, and sign petitions.Footnote ²² The committee’s primary theme was further encouraged by Nixon’s emphasis on the Silent Majority during his early November speech, and therefore used Vietnam as a means of locating individuals on a particular side of debates relating not only to the prosecution of the Cold War, but also to social, cultural, and moral norms.

During the same period, Charles Wiley of the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism (NCRP) developed a similar patriotic campaign. Wiley’s New York–based committee was founded in the wake of the original We Support Our Boys in Vietnam parade, and its staff of volunteers was rallied for specific campaigns. Wiley was a freelance journalist who was long established in anticommunist activism. He asserted that “Honor America Week” was not simply an “antimoratorium venture” but was rather a means of celebrating American unity. Undermining the antiwar movement was clearly a core goal, however. In reference to what he deemed acceptable criticism, Wiley declared: “Responsible criticism would be a disagreement with policy or short-term aims which would not at the same time suggest bad motives on the part of the United States, that would not question the greatness of our country’s heritage, the motivation of our servicemen or the basic honorable intentions of our leaders.”Footnote ²³ Wiley petitioned the White House for support, and publicly claimed to have received endorsements from Nixon and the cooperation of the major labor unions and veterans’, fraternal, police, and firefighters’ organizations.Footnote ²⁴ Adopting familiar patriotic tropes, the NCRP’s posters showed images of the Liberty Bell and an astronaut walking on the moon. Honor America Week urged patriotic Americans to use the flag as a symbol of loyalty to the president’s Vietnam policies. While referring simply to the need to “pray for our gallant men in Viet-Nam and an honorable peace as quickly as possible” in its posters, the NCRP made clear its association of “honorable peace” with a measure of victory in Vietnam. Future wars, which would bring “the enemy closer and closer to our shores,” would be the inevitable result of leaving Vietnam prematurely. The US commitment to its Vietnamese ally was tied to its moral integrity as well as its national security. Americans could not abandon their commitment to their allies or their dead. “When you think about conscience,” Wiley stated to CBS, “how do you explain to the loved ones of the nearly 40,000 Americans who thought they were dying to defend their honor – that their cause was immoral?”Footnote ²⁵

The National Unity and Honor America campaigns did not formally unite but cooperated to promote their programs among local veterans and civic groups. The New York Times reported that the two organizations “have offices three doors apart in downtown Washington” and were both involved in “suggesting ways to organizations around the country to generate and demonstrate support of ‘the President’s search for peace.’”Footnote ²⁶ Both campaigns asked little of their projected audiences – flying the US flag at full-staff, driving with headlights on, and attending veterans’ parades remained the staple means of projecting confidence in the president and the war. Tens of thousands of bumper stickers and buttons were distributed, but it was often unclear what organization was promoting these activities. The New York Times reported simply that a “coalition of veterans groups, educators and conservatives are sponsoring an ‘Honor America Week,’” while in New York the VFW, American Legion, Uniformed Firefighters Association, and Patrolmen’s Benevolent Society endorsed similar measures of demonstrative support for the president.Footnote ²⁷ Each organization relied on the traditional Veterans Day parade as a focal point for community activism. As the New York Times commented, from the Los Angeles Coliseum where World War II hero General Omar N. Bradley urged that America “keep the faith,” to the colonial streets of Manchester, NH, where housewives in a Silent Majority Division marched beside veterans, the war dead of the past were linked to the war effort of the present.Footnote ²⁸ Whether because of the publicity campaigns of the committees, because of Nixon’s rallying call to the “great Silent Majority,” or because of simple frustration with antiwar activism, the Veterans Day parades of 1969 received a turnout of unprecedented proportions throughout much of the United States.Footnote ²⁹

Activism in support of Nixon’s pursuit of peace with honor continued during early 1970, in no small part in response to antiwar attacks on the president’s decision to invade Cambodia in April. The most well-known demonstrations took place in lower Manhattan and became popularly known as the Hard Hat Riots. As the work of Frank Koscielski, Christian Appy, and Penny Lewis reveals, responses to the war among working-class communities were far more complex than suggested by the common stereotype of workers who supported the war because they had “less education [and] less interest in politics” and espoused a “more frequent resort to force.”Footnote ³⁰ Koscielski argues that the working people he analyzed “were no more supportive of the war than the general population” as a whole.Footnote ³¹ Appy also cites public opinion surveys that indicated little difference between the opinions of workers and those of middle- and upper-class Americans.Footnote ³² Penny Lewis’s work reveals the strength of working-class involvement in the antiwar movement and discusses the significance of contemporary media and scholars’ failure to acknowledge the relevance of class consciousness among working-class antiwar campaigners.Footnote ³³ There is a clear need to distinguish between the stance adopted by unions and the opinions of union members. As Lewis notes, “big labor’s embrace of the Vietnam cause confirmed the image of the working-class patriot who shouts ‘love-it-or-leave-it’ at young, entitled hippies.”Footnote ³⁴ The large-scale support for the war among prominent American figures of the Roman Catholic Church also cemented the image of ethnic working-class support for the anticommunist crusade in general and the Vietnam War in particular. Despite the inaccuracy of this stereotype as applying to the “working class” as a whole, and despite the failure of the public, media, and government to acknowledge the nuances of working-class attitudes toward the war, the image of patriotic “middle Americans” in favor of the war provided a compelling contrast to the supposed elitism of antiwar campaigners.

Writing in early May 1970, presidential aide Tom Charles Huston, a former chair of Young Americans for Freedom, asserted the need for White House officials to recognize the class resentment and anger of blue-collar workers. “Fed up with more, of course, than rampaging students,” Huston wrote, “construction laborers, clerks, store-keepers, taxi drivers or factory workers” were frightened of the rapid pace of change within American society and were “confused and frustrated and getting angry.”Footnote ³⁵ Huston was prompted to compose his memorandum by the events of “Bloody Friday” when construction workers in lower Manhattan attacked students protesting the recent killing of four students by Ohio National Guardsmen during an antiwar protest at Kent State University. Construction workers interrupted the antiwar protest and marched to nearby City Hall, where they forcibly hoisted the US flag to full-staff in repudiation of liberal Republican mayor John Lindsey’s decision to lower it to honor the students who had died. The violent attacks on protestors became headline news across the nation.

Nixon was certainly keen to make use of the issue and held a high-profile meeting with representatives of the New York unions at the White House, dismissing the advice of aides who warned that directly associating with those held responsible for the riots might alienate Americans angered by yet more violence. The White House encouraged Peter Brennan of the New York Building and Constructions Trades Union to organize the pro-Nixon demonstration on May 20, 1970. Designed to counter the negative image of rampaging and violent workers, the second march heavily evoked a love-of-country theme, reinforcing the link between patriotism and support for the war. The peaceful parade involved close to 150,000 people and included labor union members and their families, police and fire department officers, and thousands of individuals who wished to express their support for the president.Footnote ³⁶ Recognized at the time as expressions of faith in the Vietnam War, the pro-Nixon or pro-America demonstrations which took place throughout the United States in the aftermath of the Cambodian incursion limited the impact of antiwar demonstrations. While it was not possible to promote support for the war continuing indefinitely, these prowar demonstrations provided much-needed political capital as Nixon prolonged the increasingly unpopular war. Although those labor leaders who met with Nixon in May promised to continue the marches in support of the president, the May 20 rally was the last great parade in the vein of the We Support Our Boys in Vietnam parade. As Nixon intensified Vietnamization, so too did fervent supporters and patriots reduce their activism in favor of the Vietnam War. Few anticipated that the war would last almost another three full years.

In February 1970, 55 percent of those polled by Gallup indicated that they did not support an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, yet the number who did favor such a policy had risen from 21 to 35 percent since October.Footnote ³⁷ Shortly after the announcement of the Cambodia incursion a majority of Americans, 56 percent of those polled, stated that it had been a mistake to send troops to Vietnam in the first place, while only 36 percent insisted that it had been the right policy.Footnote ³⁸ Americans were increasingly divided over Vietnam, with higher numbers accepting the position that it was “morally wrong” for the United States to continue fighting the war. Such division did not easily reflect a simple hawk-versus-dove dichotomy, however, as by May 1971 only 42 percent were willing to accept a coalition government in Saigon that included communists if this was the only available means of securing a peace deal.Footnote ³⁹ For Americans who did not share the widening antiwar movement’s critique of the war as immoral, unnecessary, or unwinnable, support of Nixon’s policies of withdrawal and Vietnamization provided a positive means of interpreting the war despite growing frustration with its longevity. Nixon’s insistence that the war was winding down, despite intermittent bombing campaigns during 1971 and 1972, altered popular narratives about American goals in Vietnam. Rather than focus on winning the war, prowar activists increasingly emphasized the moral superiority of both the United States and war supporters through campaigns to highlight the plight of American prisoners of war and celebration of American servicemen.

Arguably the most successful prowar organization was originally founded in California in 1966 as the student-led Victory in Vietnam Association (VIVA). Its goals at that time were similar to those of Affirmation: Vietnam and focused explicitly on challenging the idea that students as a whole opposed US policy in Southeast Asia. Initially VIVA was led by students affiliated with the Republican Party who worked to establish chapters on campuses across the United States in order to bring “both sides of the Viet Nam question to the students.”Footnote ⁴⁰ One of VIVA’s primary goals was to project the Vietnam War in positive terms, which could be secured by emphasizing the barbarity and immorality of the Vietnamese communists. This implied a dichotomy between good American troops serving in Vietnam and an evil and corrupt enemy. One of VIVA’s most widely publicized initiatives was titled “Friendly Viet Cong” and presented photographic evidence of alleged communist atrocities, thereby providing compelling animation to VIVA’s campus demonstrations and tutorials.Footnote ⁴¹ According to VIVA, “this presentation has had profound results in that it establishes that terror is necessary for political control by the Viet Cong.”Footnote ⁴² Its literature further challenged the “allegation made by ‘antiwar’ groups that America [was] engaged in ‘reckless’ and ‘wholesale’ napalming of Vietnamese civilians.”Footnote ⁴³

This line of argument became more pronounced in response to the large-scale antiwar demonstrations of 1969. VIVA emulated National Unity Week activities by calling on individuals to “wear red, white and blue armbands, fly the American Flag and turn on their porch and car lights.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Judy Davis of VIVA charged protestors with betrayal of their fellow youth serving in Vietnam “to have Hanoi publicly endorse the moratorium and offer congratulations to the participants must certainly be the highest insult ever paid an American serviceman.”Footnote ⁴⁵ VIVA called for Americans to avoid demonstrations by channeling their energies into positive programs such as its own Operation Mail Call – the sending of letters and packages to American servicemen. While such programs reflected VIVA’s continuing dedication to the armed forces, the group’s rhetoric was couched in the terms of support for the present US military engagement. The demonstrations would surely be interpreted, according to VIVA, “as tantamount to calling for an American surrender in Vietnam without regard for the reason forty thousand Americans have given their lives.”Footnote ⁴⁶

By 1969, the concept of outright military victory in Vietnam was neither politically viable as a policy goal nor a useful means of winning popular backing, and so the group’s name was changed to Voices in Vital America. Soon after, VIVA developed the prisoner-of-war bracelet campaign, which enormously enhanced its reach beyond like-minded students. Engraved on each bracelet was the name of an American prisoner or individual missing in action and the date on which he went missing. Originally VIVA stated “it is to be worn with the vow that it not be removed until the day that the Red Cross is allowed into Hanoi to assure his family of his status and that he receives the humane treatment due all men.” This was subsequently modified, as Hanoi began to respond to international pressure and to use antiwar forces in the United States to satisfy demands regarding information on POWs. Bracelets were later expected to be worn until the POW was returned or an accounting was made, thus upping the demands and the stakes in the POW/MIA cause. By creating “a level of personal involvement and a visible display of Americans uniting behind a common cause,” VIVA was again able to tie its support for the war to its twin themes of encouraging demonstrative faith in the American system and promoting anticommunism abroad.Footnote ⁴⁷ As the Nixon administration discovered also, however, the POW issue did not lend itself to easy control. VIVA earned substantial income from bracelet sales and was able to open sixty-eight offices to distribute millions of bumper stickers and pamphlets by 1972. But these materials related almost exclusively to POWs and, while VIVA continued its support of the administration’s policy of phased withdrawal, public demands for a more rapid end to the war were fostered by VIVA’s emphasis on success being associated with the return of American prisoners. The ambiguous association of support for the troops or prisoners served prowar activists’ goals during the early years of the conflict, but by 1972 many Americans were prepared to accept a peace settlement that did little more than result in the return of American prisoners and celebrated American servicemen. Prowar activism helped change the meaning of victory in Vietnam, ensuring that Nixon’s declaration of “peace with honor” in 1973 appeared plausible. And, while Barry Goldwater might have declared the settlement a great victory, it was evident that the Peace Accords were far from what conservative national security hawks had expected to achieve when they supported the war in Vietnam.

Prowar Sentiment and the Development of the Conservative Movement

Vietnam was not the war that conservative political leaders and activists had wanted. There was little appetite for another ground war, given the widespread conclusion among conservatives that the Korean War had ended disastrously. Conservative political activists were conflicted over Vietnam during 1964 and indeed for much of the war. Their perspective on the international ambitions of the Soviet Union and its use of wars of national liberation convinced them of the importance of directly meeting the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. Their inaccurate belief that this campaign was being solely directed by Hanoi led them to push for military attacks against North Vietnam. Yet, this was not the war of conservatives’ choosing, and their concern that it distracted public attention from what they believed were more serious threats, such as Cuba, impacted the extent of their early commitment to the emerging conflict.

Demands for escalation increased dramatically following the military coup against Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of South Vietnam. Claiming that the administration of John F. Kennedy could not have been an “innocent bystander” in the coup, the Chicago Tribune asserted that US military officials had not been opposed to the Diệm regime and charged that “liberal correspondents” in Saigon had continued the propagandist drive which had also undermined Chiang Kai-shek and Fulgencio Batista.Footnote ⁴⁸ A subsequent article in the conservative weekly Human Events detailed the “inglorious role” of the United States in the overthrow of Diệm, and concluded: “The only sure thing in Vietnam today is that the United States has set an extremely controversial precedent by encouraging, for the first time in our history, the overthrow in time of war of a duly elected government fighting loyally against the common Communist enemy.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Conservatives began to talk of Vietnam as a vital test of American will and credibility. It was, Goldwater claimed, “as close as Kansas or New York or Seattle” in “the mileage of peace and freedom.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Conservatives were united in their rejection of the restrained military strategies originally implemented by the Johnson administration. Some, including Southern Democrats such as Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, favored a strong push for victory or an immediate plan to terminate US involvement. Governor George Wallace of Alabama insisted that he would simply hand control of the war over to the generals and either “win or get out” during his 1968 presidential campaign, and such an argument had particular appeal as a rhetorical tool for far-right figures such as Fred Schwarz. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly also “originally opposed sending American troops to Vietnam” and later “maintained that the Vietnam War was a Soviet-engineered distraction designed to weaken America’s defense capability.”Footnote ⁵¹ On the eve of the Republican National Convention in 1964, Goldwater simply stated that he would hand the management of the war over to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and say, “Fellows, we made the decision to win, now it’s your problem.”Footnote ⁵² For the most part, however, conservatives did not seriously advocate that the United States should either win immediately or pull out.

During 1964 conservatives overwhelmingly pushed the Johnson administration to escalate its air campaign against North Vietnam. In July, Human Events argued that because of Johnson’s “‘no-win’ policies” it was necessary to increase troop levels in South Vietnam.Footnote ⁵³ Goldwater’s presidential platform left little ambiguity regarding Vietnam and insisted that the United States should “move decisively to assure victory in South Viet Nam.”Footnote ⁵⁴ He insisted that the United States could not afford to fight a “defensive war”Footnote ⁵⁵ and focused on the importance of airpower to defoliate the pathways on which supplies traveled into South Vietnam and force Hanoi’s capitulation.Footnote ⁵⁶

Conservatives’ military options for Vietnam were based on the principle that the war should not be limited to South, or even North, Vietnam, and they denied that extension of the war into either Laos or Cambodia would escalate the conflict internationally. The conservative American Security Council argued that, by cutting off Laos and Cambodia as “a base of supply and sanctuary for the Viet Cong, both the military and the all-important psychological atmosphere in South Viet Nam could be transformed.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Ignoring the clear signs of French and British wariness about US military intervention, Goldwater claimed that “no responsible world leader suggests that we should withdraw our support from Viet Nam,” and committed the United States to learning the lessons of Korea: “In war there is no substitute for victory.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In no small part conservatives’ limited emotional commitment to Vietnam was determined by the perception that this was “Johnson’s war.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In spite of these conflicted perspectives on the war, the opportunity to directly challenge communist expansion trumped a deep hostility to Johnson’s understanding of international relations. Indeed, Johnson’s pursuit of limited war in Southeast Asia provided clear political opportunities for both Republicans and the wider conservative movement. Desperate to escape the connotations of extremism or radicalism associated with rightwing politics, conservatives associated with the National Review and the ACU viewed Vietnam as an opportunity to push for a stronger anticommunist foreign policy without attracting unwarranted claims that they were warmongers.

Nixon developed support among conservatives largely because of his challenge to Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁶⁰ While Reagan was certainly the preferred Republican presidential candidate among many conservatives in 1968, Nixon was readily identified as more than acceptable because of his longstanding calls for military escalation in Vietnam. Nixon privately revealed in early 1968 that he did not think military victory possible because of the public’s frustration with the costs of the war, and publicly let stand the flawed notion that he had a secret plan to end the conflict. As Nixon’s Vietnam policies developed during the first six months of his presidency, conservative reactions were mixed. Frustrations among hardline hawks that the administration had not ended the bombing pause introduced by Johnson in October may have been shared by conservative Republicans such as Goldwater and Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina). But few conservative political leaders rejected Nixon’s plans to reduce US troop numbers or questioned the president’s commitment to secure the freedom of South Vietnam. Before Nixon’s May peace proposal, Goldwater stated that he believed the administration may have “issued some ultimatums to the North Vietnamese which had not been made public.”Footnote ⁶¹ By July he asserted that troop withdrawals would not be allowed to hinder American objectives in Vietnam. Nixon was “not going to tolerate any soft peddling” with the North Vietnamese and would do what was “necessary militarily to bring this war to an end.”Footnote ⁶² While praising Nixon’s policies, claiming that “for the first time we have an administration that has the courage to look at the situation in Vietnam realistically,” Thurmond reiterated the need to acknowledge that Vietnam was but one element of a global struggle and that disengagement would depend on the international environment.Footnote ⁶³ The ACU continued to focus on ensuring that a coalition government was not imposed on Saigon, but it did not object to the NLF participating in free elections and essentially endorsed the process of Vietnamization.Footnote ⁶⁴ Within the conservative community, support for Vietnamization was based on the fundamental assumption that it would be coupled with more forceful military measures if the generous overtures of the United States were not met by North Vietnamese reciprocity. As such, support for Vietnamization was opportunistic among conservatives, presenting the possibility that the United States might finally use its military might to strike a knockout blow at Hanoi.

By January 1973 the conservative movement was highly fractured in relation to the Nixon administration and the pursuit of détente. Leaders at the ACU and National Review launched an ill-fated challenge to Nixon’s visit to China that was met with hostility from Republican leaders such as Goldwater. Such division undermined any serious conservative opposition to the slow winding down of the Vietnam War, and conservatives were buoyed by the resumption of bombing of North Vietnam in the wake of the Easter Offensive. There was considerable unease among conservatives, however, during late 1972 when the peace terms resulting from Kissinger’s secret negotiations significantly undercut conservatives’ minimum objectives. The proposal for a ceasefire-in-place was particularly unacceptable and, once negotiations broke down again in October, conservative supporters of the administration such as Goldwater and writer and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr., insisted that the administration could reach a settlement only when Hanoi was forced to concede.

The Linebacker II bombing campaign presented conservatives with a means to positively interpret the way in which the Vietnam War ended. While militarily significant, Linebacker II was principally designed to reassure President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu and also Nixon’s most ardent prowar constituency, his conservative supporters, that the proposed accords secured “peace with honor.” Goldwater was determined to use the bombing campaign to validate his philosophical objections to limited war. He lambasted those who protested the administration: “I insist there is no such thing as a limited war … When you go into a war, the more effort and power you put into it the quicker you win it – and at less cost and fewer casualties. President Nixon understands this but his predecessors apparently did not.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Conservatives remained concerned about the specific details of the peace terms and there is evidence that they expected true Vietnamization to allow the United States to return to the air war once the Peace Accords were inevitably violated by Hanoi. Yet, the tenor of the patriotic campaigns of the previous three years severely undercut conservatives’ interest in mounting a strong challenge to the administration at this time. Congressional opposition to Nixon’s policies only served to heighten conservatives’ willingness to accept the limited gains the administration had made.

Popular opposition to the bombing led to conservatives’ acceptance that the wider public simply would not countenance further military measures. Aware of the likelihood that Congress would limit resources for a continued war, Goldwater, Thurmond, and others were intent on supporting the president’s peace terms. This position was reinforced by the increasingly vocal and troublesome demands for immediate settlement emanating from the ranks of the POW/MIA campaign. POW/MIA organizations pressured the president to secure a settlement and the immediate release of prisoners. In many respects the movement Nixon had helped create for his administration’s benefit was now beyond government influence. Having persuaded the public that the POW issue was a priority in the war, it was difficult to call for patience when this noble goal was in sight.Footnote ⁶⁶ By January 1973 it was clear the administration would not continue the war for much longer. Conservatives were unwilling to be seen as extreme in matters of foreign policy and knew that opposition to the Peace Accords would be politically devastating. Despite all their protests of October and November 1972, in January 1973 conservatives rallied to champion the ending of the Vietnam War, declaring that the United States had achieved a great victory. In this sense, they aided the Nixon administration’s subtle abandonment of South Vietnam.

In the wake of American withdrawal a series of Welcome Home parades was organized by veterans’ groups and activists who had originated the We Support Our Boys in Vietnam parade. They reaffirmed the idea that patriotism was tied to supporting American servicemen and honoring their sacrifices. In several parades, participants wore hard hats intended to evoke popular memories of the most famous anti-antiwar events of the long domestic conflict over Vietnam. By 1973 fewer Americans were prepared to accept that the war had been necessary. And both the Nixon administration and conservative leaders had learned that patriotism was not something that could easily be harnessed for narrow political or strategic goals. Yet, if prowar sentiment had declined with each passing year of the war, it had also served to redefine American politics, undermining the association of many traditional Democratic constituencies with the party and cementing powerful alliances between intellectual and social conservatives. Conservative leaders had learned that their foreign policy objectives relied on appealing to popular understandings of American purpose in the world, while recognizing the limits to the public’s acceptance of war. In the wake of American defeat in Vietnam, prowar sentiment transformed into a socially powerful critique of the antiwar movement’s betrayal of the United States. Despite conservatives’ efforts, it was not possible to “win” the war by claiming that the United States should have tried harder to secure military victory. Nor did the public unanimously rally to Reagan’s definition of the war as a “noble cause.” Yet, prowar sentiment continued to play an important role in sustaining the divisiveness of the war years, ensuring that for many Americans the cultural Vietnam War did not end in 1973.

After spending what he thought was a wasted day in the Mekong Delta with a US infantry unit that had made no contact with the enemy, CBS reporter Bert Quint filed his most important story about the Vietnam War. Quint at first feared that he had taken “a walk in the sun,” a term that correspondents used to describe a combat mission when nothing happens. But he resolved that after “sweating my balls off here for ten hours … I’m not going to come up with nothing.” Quint had been in Vietnam for only a few weeks, “but long enough,” he recalled, “to give me this feeling” that US strategy was “leading to nothing.”Footnote ¹

That idea produced an unusual story on the CBS Evening News on August 8, 1967. Instead of a snapshot of a small part of the war, his report provided the “big picture,” something that Quint rarely tried to do. His theme was that the war was a stalemate. The lack of “bang, bang” or battlefield fighting in the film – a deficiency that often doomed a combat report – became an asset, since it revealed the frustration of US troops and the ineffectiveness of their strategy. “It’s a painful, foot-by-foot, paddy-by-paddy, stream-by-stream pursuit of an enemy that rarely stands and fights,” Quint explained, “that prefers to hit and then run, make for sanctuary in Cambodia when the going gets too tough, regroup, infiltrate back into Vietnam, and then hit again.” In this war of attrition, Quint thought it was hard “to know which side would wear out first.” The “statements by American officials that there is no stalemate, that real progress is being made, ring hollow down here,” he concluded.Footnote ²

Quint’s story ran only a day after a front-page article in the New York Times also concluded that the war was a stalemate. The author was R. W. Apple, Jr., the newspaper’s Saigon bureau chief, and he described Vietnam as “the most frustrating conflict in American history.” “The war is not going well,” according to “most disinterested observers” to whom Apple spoke. Enemy military forces were larger than ever; only a small portion of South Vietnam was secure; and without US troops, the South Vietnamese government “would almost certainly crumble within months.” “Victory is not close at hand,” Apple declared. “It may be beyond reach.”Footnote ³ Appearing on consecutive days in major national news outlets, Apple’s and Quint’s stories helped make “stalemate” a prominent and troubling theme in the reporting from Vietnam during the middle of 1967.

President Lyndon B. Johnson considered these stories about stalemate examples of war reporting that was distorted, misleading, and sensationalized. He complained that journalists dwelled on the shortcomings of American strategy, the excesses of US soldiers and marines in battle, or the ineffectiveness of pacification programs. “Nothing is being written or published to make you hate the Viet Cong,” he declared in a cabinet meeting. “All that is being written is to hate us.” Johnson was uneasy that military censors did not have to approve news stories and film from Vietnam as they had from the battle zones of World War II and Korea. US information officials rejected censorship for practical reasons; it was impossible to control the reporting of a press corps that numbered more than 250 at the end of 1965 and that had swelled to almost 700 two years later. They also worried about jeopardizing popular support for US military intervention by appearing to conceal important information about the war. The president, however, had a sardonic explanation for the absence of mandatory censorship. His administration had adopted that policy “because we are fools.”Footnote ⁴

While President John F. Kennedy had also worried about critical news coverage that challenged his administration’s upbeat pronouncements about the war, Johnson often considered such stories to be personal attacks. He maintained that Quint’s report showed that Walter Cronkite, the anchor of the CBS Evening News, was out to “get” him.Footnote ⁵ He told a visiting group of Australian broadcasters that the news media presented a one-sided view of the war aimed at discrediting him. “I can prove that Ho [Chi Minh] is a son-of-a-bitch if you let me put it on the screen,” the president insisted, “but they want me to be the son-of-a-bitch.”Footnote ⁶ President Richard M. Nixon denounced the news media even more stridently. Nixon believed that he had “entered the Presidency with less support from major publications and TV networks than any President in history.”Footnote ⁷ He called Vietnam reporters “bastards” who were “trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”Footnote ⁸

The journalists who covered Vietnam were never as myopic or malicious as Johnson and Nixon maintained. Indeed, their reports often emphasized the power and effectiveness of US military operations and the benevolence of Americans toward Vietnamese civilians. Still, the news media aroused presidential anger because many stories – even those about US victories – showed that the war was difficult and deadly, success was elusive and ephemeral, and official US assessments of the fighting were unreliable or unduly optimistic. As polls showed declining popular support for the US war effort, it became easy and politically expedient for Johnson and Nixon to blame the news media – and especially the television networks – for public discontent. Like so many parts of the American experience in Vietnam, the news reporting of the war became a polarizing issue.

Early Battles

The war became a major story in the US news media in the early 1960s as fighting increased between the South Vietnamese armed forces (ARVN) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) and as the Kennedy administration boosted the number of US military personnel involved in the war from 900 to more than 16,000. In early 1962, the New York Times became the first US newspaper with a full-time correspondent in Vietnam when it sent veteran war reporter Homer Bigart to Saigon. Bigart joined a small group of journalists working for wire services and news magazines, including some who were a generation younger, and a few, such as Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, who were just embarking on what became illustrious careers. Bigart’s articles contained scathing criticism of the South Vietnamese government and concluded that the United States was “inextricably committed to a long, inconclusive war.”Footnote ⁹

South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm fumed at such stories. He ordered the expulsion of Bigart and Newsweek stringer Francois Sully, another critic who minced no words. The US Embassy intervened on behalf of both journalists, although Ambassador Frederick Nolting probably disliked Bigart as much as Diệm did. Nolting, however, won reprieves for both reporters by arguing that deporting correspondents for two prominent US news publications could jeopardize public and congressional support for US aid to South Vietnam. When Bigart departed at the end of his assignment in July 1962, he published a wrap-up article in which he criticized South Vietnam’s “secretive, suspicious, dictatorial” rule and warned that the Kennedy administration might soon face the choice of “ditching” Diệm “for a military junta or sending troops to bolster his regime.”Footnote ¹⁰

The Kennedy administration preferred voluntary cooperation with reporters rather than coercive tactics to manage the news from Vietnam. A directive from Washington in February 1962 known as Cable 1006 established a set of guidelines aimed at encouraging journalists to report about the war in a manner that served “our national interest.” Particularly harmful were stories about US officers “leading and directing combat operations against the Viet Cong,” since Kennedy and his top aides wanted to maintain the fiction that Americans in uniform were no more than military advisors in a Vietnamese war. Also detrimental were stories about civilian casualties during military operations and “frivolous, thoughtless criticism” of the Diệm government. US officials should appeal to reporters in Vietnam to exercise self-restraint in these areas in the interest of national security. They should also provide correspondents with frequent briefings and transportation to battle areas, but exclude the news media from combat missions that were likely to produce unfavorable stories.Footnote ¹¹

These guidelines only exacerbated tensions between reporters and US officials. Bigart bridled at the notion that reporters were tools of US foreign policy. Information officers lost credibility as their accounts of fighting contradicted what reporters saw in the field. An acrimonious dispute occurred in January 1963 over the battle of Ấp Bắc, when ARVN military forces allowed a vastly outnumbered NLF infantry battalion to escape from their attack. “A miserable damn performance,” complained one frustrated US military advisor about the squandered opportunity for a major victory.Footnote ¹² That quotation appeared in several newspaper and magazine articles that variously described Ấp Bӑc as an example of South Vietnamese ineffectiveness, incompetence, or irresolution. To assuage Diệm’s anger over the torrent of media criticism, US commanders tried to spin Ấp Bӑc as a South Vietnamese victory since the enemy had fled the battlefield. Admiral Harry D. Felt, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, even visited Saigon and admonished Browne, who had written about ARVN inadequacies at Ấp Bӑc, to “get on the team.”Footnote ¹³ The upshot of this controversy was widening distrust between senior American political and military officials in South Vietnam, who doubted the fairness and reliability of much of the war reporting, and Saigon journalists, who thought that official sources of information lacked credibility.

The disputes over war reporting intensified during the Buddhist crisis, which became a major story in June 1963 when both print and television news outlets showed shocking images of the fiery suicide of a Buddhist monk protesting government restrictions on public religious celebrations. Acting on a tipoff, Browne went to a busy Saigon intersection on June 11 and photographed Thích Quảng Đức as he burned himself to death. “I suppose that no news picture in recent history has generated as much emotion around the world,” President Kennedy remarked.Footnote ¹⁴ Mass protests followed in Saigon, as did government allegations that communists had inspired them. The crackdown continued with raids on Buddhist pagodas and the arrests of hundreds of alleged subversives.

As the disarray in Saigon worsened, a flurry of news stories questioned whether Diệm’s unpopularity was destroying his government’s chances of defeating the NLF. President Kennedy even delivered a version of that message to Diệm during interviews in September on the inaugural broadcasts of the CBS and NBC evening news programs as they expanded from fifteen to thirty minutes. “The repressions against the Buddhists … were very unwise,” Kennedy told Cronkite. “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there.”Footnote ¹⁵ As Kennedy and his advisors discussed whether to encourage a coup against Diệm, the CIA scrutinized the reporting about the Buddhist crisis by David Halberstam, Bigart’s successor as the New York Times’s correspondent in Saigon and a frequent critic of the Diệm government. The CIA concluded that Halberstam’s articles were factually accurate but “invariably pessimistic” and at odds with the optimism of most US military officials in South Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁶

Kennedy had reservations about deposing Diệm, but he was certain that it was time for a change in the New York Times Saigon bureau. “Don’t you think he’s too close to the story?” the president asked about Halberstam in a White House meeting with Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. “You weren’t thinking of transferring him to Paris or Rome?” Taken aback by the president’s suggestions, Sulzberger canceled Halberstam’s upcoming vacation lest it appear that the Times was yielding to White House pressure.Footnote ¹⁷

Charlie Mohr got no such support at Time magazine when he filed a story in September 1963 about how Diệm’s government was losing the war. Articles in Time did not appear under an author’s byline. The writers and editors in New York who composed the magazine’s uncredited pieces drew on information from correspondents’ reports, but often changed the perspective and tone to fit the political outlook of the magazine. In the early 1960s, Time reflected the views of founder and editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce, who was an admirer of Diệm and a supporter of Kennedy administration policies in Vietnam. Mohr had become accustomed to rewriting and editing that muted his sharp criticisms of the Diệm government. In this instance, however, Mohr’s lengthy analysis of Diệm’s faltering war effort never appeared in an article that asserted that “government soldiers are fighting better than ever.” Time’s managing editor Otto Fuerbringer included in the same issue a critique of the Saigon press corps, an “inbred” club who “pool their convictions, information, misinformation, and grievances” and turn “the complicated greys of a complicated country … into oversimplified blacks and whites.”Footnote ¹⁸ Mohr decided that he would no longer be a target for a magazine “shelling its own troops.”Footnote ¹⁹ He quit and began working for the New York Times.

The reporting of Mohr, Halberstam, Browne, and Sheehan created doubts in US newsrooms, consternation in the US Embassy in Saigon, and outrage in the South Vietnamese presidential palace. Prominent journalists who were optimistic about the war reinforced these critical reactions. Marguerite Higgins, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her coverage of the Korean War and a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, toured South Vietnam in July 1963 and found that “the war is going better than ever.” She also impugned the motives of the Saigon reporters, alleging that they “would like to see us lose the war to prove they’re right.”Footnote ²⁰ Joseph Alsop, a leading syndicated columnist, visited Vietnam shortly after Higgins and also concluded that the war was going “remarkably well” in the countryside.Footnote ²¹ He blamed the “young crusaders” of the Saigon press corps for the government’s current problems. Their dark, foreboding stories had helped “to transform Diệm from a courageous, quite viable national leader, into a man afflicted with galloping persecution mania … and therefore misjudging everything.”Footnote ²² There is no doubt that Mohr, Halberstam, Sheehan, and Browne were convinced that the Diệm government had severe, even fatal, liabilities. What Higgins, Alsop, and Fuerbringer failed to understand was that these “young crusaders” were not opponents of the war, as they never questioned the goal of halting communist expansion in Southeast Asia. They wanted stronger US action to invigorate the South Vietnamese war effort. Their reporting and the backlash against it created what Halberstam called “a war within a war,” which continued after the coup against Diệm, the assassination of Kennedy, and the arrival of many new reporters in South Vietnam.Footnote ²³

Escalation

As the Johnson administration escalated US combat involvement in 1964–5, the news media expanded their coverage of the war. At the beginning of 1964, there were about forty reporters in Saigon. By the end of 1965, that number had increased more than sixfold. The three major weekly news magazines – Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report – enlarged their Saigon staffs and published many articles with news about the war, especially US military operations. Several major newspapers, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and Christian Science Monitor, also sent reporters or established news bureaus in Saigon. In July 1964, Garrick Utley of NBC became the first full-time television correspondent based in Saigon; Morley Safer of CBS was the second in January 1965. NBC and CBS usually had a larger contingent of reporters in South Vietnam than ABC, which was last in the ratings and waited until January 1967 to expand its evening newscast to thirty minutes. By 1967, however, all three networks were spending more than $1 million each year, then a substantial sum, on their Vietnam news coverage.

Hoping to make a fresh start at restoring their credibility, US officials once more rejected news censorship in favor of a new operating principle – “maximum candor and disclosure consistent with security considerations.”Footnote ²⁴ Candor, however, was often at a minimum. For example, during a visit to Saigon, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Arthur Sylvester, told Saigon correspondents, “Look, if you think that any American official is going to tell you the truth, you’re stupid.” His remark reflected a belief that the news media should be the “handmaiden” of government in wartime.Footnote ²⁵ Sylvester’s comment made some reporters indignant. Others scoffed at the official daily briefings about the war, which they called “the five o’clock follies” because those presentations suffered from half-truths, inaccuracies, and omissions.

The problems with candor reached all the way to the White House, as Johnson tried to divert attention from the expanding US military role in South Vietnam. The president even maintained that the major increase in US troop strength that he announced on July 28, 1965, implied no change in policy whatsoever. Johnson, however, found that his legendary powers of persuasion could not stifle criticism from some highly influential newspaper columnists. Arthur Krock of the New York Times disparaged the administration’s “evasive rhetoric” aimed at disguising “a fundamental change” in the mission of US troops.Footnote ²⁶ The president’s assiduous cultivation did not prevent syndicated political commentator Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist of all, from objecting to US involvement in a major land war in Asia that he considered neither wise nor winnable. The president was so embittered that he angrily referred to such columnists as “whores.”Footnote ²⁷

Johnson was even more concerned about television coverage of the war. Vietnam was the United States’ first television war, the first time that a majority of the American people relied primarily on TV for news about US troops in battle. Polls showed that the public considered TV the most believable news medium. It inspired such trust because of its ability to transmit experience. A newspaper or magazine could recount a search-and-destroy mission; TV could show the courage of soldiers or the fears of displaced villagers. Johnson worried about the emotional power of television film reports and the simplification inherent in stories that were usually no longer than three minutes.

A story in August 1965 from Cẩm Nê confirmed the president’s apprehensions. Morley Safer accompanied a battalion of US marines on a search-and-destroy mission in Cẩm Nê, a village south of Đà Nẵng that was supposed to be an enemy stronghold. The marines encountered some sniper fire, but they found only old men, women, and children when they entered Cẩm Nê. According to Safer, an officer said the battalion had orders to level the village. What made Safer’s story sensational was film of one marine using a cigarette lighter and another a flamethrower to burn down thatched huts as terrified peasants watched in disbelief. “Today’s operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature,” Safer asserted as he closed his report. “There is little doubt that American firepower can win a military victory here. But to a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of backbreaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”Footnote ²⁸

Johnson was infuriated. He telephoned Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, and began the conversation by asking, “Are you trying to fuck me?”Footnote ²⁹ The president thought that Safer must be a communist, but investigations could find no more damning information than that the reporter was a Canadian. Sylvester pressed CBS to replace Safer with an American reporter who could provide more sympathetic coverage, but CBS resisted.

Safer’s Cẩm Nê report created a furor, but it also raised fundamental questions about US military operations. Some administration officials recognized that there would be more stories like Safer’s as long as US forces burned villages. A new directive from the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) required greater restraint in future operations in civilian areas. The marines even tried to make amends by returning to Cẩm Nê and rebuilding the village, a story that Safer covered. Administration officials, however, still worried about what they called the information problem and how to deal with “fighting out in the open” in “a new kind of twilight war.”Footnote ³⁰ So, too, did the president, who fretted about how negative reporting like Safer’s or hostile columnists might influence public support for his Vietnam policies. While there was no immediate problem, Johnson predicted that difficulties could arise if the war lasted more than a year.

Another sensational challenge to US war policies occurred when Harrison Salisbury, the assistant managing editor of the New York Times, became the first journalist from a major Western news organization to report from North Vietnam. Salisbury’s first dispatch from behind enemy lines appeared on the front page of the Times as well as in dozens of other US and international newspapers on December 26, 1966. Twenty additional articles followed during the next three weeks. The main reason that his reports attracted wide attention was because they challenged the Johnson administration’s assertions that the bombing of the North was effective and that it damaged, with few exceptions, only military targets. The “ground-level reality” along Route 1, a major road that ran south from Hanoi, and an adjacent railway showed that heavy US bombing had not disrupted the movement of people and supplies. At Nam Định, Salisbury found no military targets, yet “block after block of utter devastation.”Footnote ³¹

These assertions as well as others about civilian casualties caused an uproar. Critics who doubted the accuracy or effectiveness of the bombing found validation in Salisbury’s on-the-ground observations. The Pentagon replied with a statement that US planes struck only military targets, although it was “impossible to avoid all damage to civilian areas.”Footnote ³² Salisbury faced fierce criticism from other journalists for belatedly revealing that he had relied on a North Vietnamese propaganda pamphlet for casualty figures. Yet this source was more reliable than Salisbury’s critics ever imagined. The pamphlet, like Salisbury, failed to mention that there were indeed military targets in Nam Định, including a power plant and petroleum storage facility. A secret CIA study, however, confirmed the accuracy of the pamphlet’s statistics about damage to residential areas and civilian casualties.Footnote ³³ Critics deprecated Salisbury as a mouthpiece for Hanoi, but even Philip Goulding, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, conceded that his reporting had damaged administration credibility.

Salisbury’s and Safer’s critical stories were exceptional. More common during 1965–6 were reports about US success in Vietnam. Television journalists often emphasized the bravery of American troops and their superior firepower. News magazines also provided upbeat assessments. Even the most liberal of the three major news magazines, Newsweek, supported Johnson’s decision to fight in Vietnam. US News & World Report offered the most conservative perspectives, emphasizing the need to halt the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and maintaining that the greatest obstacle to victory was White House restraint in the use of force. Television and print journalists commonly referred to “our” troops, ships, and planes and often called the enemy the “Communists” or the “Reds.”

Even though Johnson and his aides complained frequently about hostile reporting, there were many journalists who supported US policies in Vietnam. While Lippmann decried Johnson’s “messianic megalomania,” Alsop applauded the president’s “drive and imagination.”Footnote ³⁴ On television, there was little room for commentary on network newscasts because of the prevailing standards of objective journalism, including fairness, impartiality, and balance. News anchors, however, did occasionally express their personal views and usually favored administration policies. For example, ABC anchor Howard K. Smith hosted a special, prime-time broadcast in July 1966 and declared, “It is entirely good what we’re doing in Vietnam.”Footnote ³⁵

Johnson, however, did not find balance or diversity in such commentary or in the news media’s reporting of the war. He seemed to notice only those stories that showed US difficulties in battle or problems in pacification. “On NBC today it was all about what we are doing wrong,” Johnson declared in December 1965. “The Viet Cong atrocities never get publicized.”Footnote ³⁶ Yet the ABC and CBS newscasts that evening included stories about an enemy “terrorist” attack on US troops in Saigon.Footnote ³⁷ Johnson’s denunciations of the news media became increasingly vituperative. In March 1967, LBJ made the fantastic claim that CBS and NBC were “controlled by the Viet Cong.”Footnote ³⁸ The president also charged that NBC and the New York Times were “committed to an editorial policy of making us surrender.”Footnote ³⁹

Progress or Stalemate?

Johnson’s concern about media reporting became more urgent as the news from Vietnam grew bleaker in mid-1967. In July, NBC’s Howard Tuckner filed a discouraging report from Cẩm Nê, the location of Safer’s sensational story two years earlier. The South Vietnamese government had decided to destroy the village rather than defend it and moved its residents to a desolate “peace hamlet,” which one US worker described as a “concentration camp.” There were frequent stories about fierce fighting and heavy US losses near the demilitarized zone. Then Quint’s and Apple’s stories described the war as a stalemate. Also in late summer, Time abruptly shifted its perspective on the war when editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan ordered his staff to abandon its role of “cheerleader” for administration policy. The result was a series of articles about a deadlocked but increasingly deadly war.Footnote ⁴⁰

Once more, the president and his aides blamed hostile and antagonistic reporters for bleak news about the war. After the publication of the New York Times’s stalemate story, the president charged that Apple was a communist. Leonard Marks, the director of the US Information Agency, did not make such extreme allegations but informed Johnson that during a recent trip to Vietnam he had found that reporters had brought to their assignments “built-in doubts and reservations” and were searching “for the critical story which might lead to a Pulitzer Prize.”Footnote ⁴¹ Such comments reinforced the president’s conviction that the hostility of the news media was an important reason for sagging poll numbers. As Johnson had anticipated, public opinion became a problem as the war claimed lives and treasure at an increasing rate, yet with no end in sight. By August, polls showed that only one-third of the American people supported the president’s handling of the war. With public discontent so strong and an election year approaching, Johnson knew he had to reclaim public support. The result was a new public relations effort called the Progress Campaign.

Johnson urged his aides to “get a better story to the American people.”Footnote ⁴² With the help of a new Vietnam Information Group, the administration leaked reports about progress in the war to friendly journalists and prepared upbeat speeches for sympathetic members of Congress. “We have got to sell our product to the American people,” Johnson declared.Footnote ⁴³ The president did just that. He met with business leaders, educators, and union officials and was emphatic and insistent in denying that the war was a stalemate. At a televised news conference in November, he affirmed with words and gestures that the prospects for success in the war were rising. A few days later, General William Westmoreland, the commander of US forces in Vietnam, added his voice to the chorus of optimism while delivering a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, in which he asserted that “we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The news media gave these high-profile presentations a good deal of favorable coverage. US News & World Report ran two articles in the same issue, one from Washington – “Vietnam: War Tide Turning to US”– and another from Saigon, “The Coin Has Flipped to Our Side.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Such stories were important because the president believed that “the main front of the war was here in the United States.”Footnote ⁴⁶

There were also challenges in the news media to the president’s assurances of progress. In a rare editorial, Life magazine advocated a bombing pause, arguing that it would recoup domestic and international support for the administration’s “glaringly unsuccessful” war policies.Footnote ⁴⁷ Heavy fighting at Đӑk Tô, which claimed more US lives than any previous battle, got extensive and sometimes skeptical coverage. “It was a hard fight,” ABC’s Ed Needham observed in closing his report. “It hardly seemed worth it.”Footnote ⁴⁸ CBS aired John Laurence’s poignant story about a skirmish near Hội An that claimed the life of a young American soldier with red hair and freckles. “There are a hundred platoons fighting a hundred small battles in nameless hamlets like this every week of the war,” Laurence said. “They are called firefights. And in the grand strategy of things, this firefight had little meaning for anyone but the red-headed kid who was killed here.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Laurence used the death of an unnamed soldier to show that the war no longer served any useful purpose.

By the end of 1967, the Progress Campaign had achieved some success. Polls showed that 50 percent of Americans thought US forces were making progress in the war compared to only 33 percent five months earlier. The discontent with Johnson’s Vietnam policies had also diminished, although critics still outnumbered supporters by a margin of 11 percentage points, 49 percent to 38 percent (with the remainder undecided). These improvements had occurred because the Progress Campaign had raised expectations of good news from Vietnam. Then came the Tet Offensive.

“What the Hell Is Going On?”

Tet became the war’s “big story,” in the apt phrase of Peter Braestrup, a Vietnam correspondent for the Washington Post. Fighting occurred almost everywhere – in major cities and rural hamlets from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta. Attacks occurred on the US Embassy grounds and the South Vietnamese presidential palace. The war reporters could not possibly cover almost simultaneous attacks in more than 150 locations. They concentrated on the big battles that lasted the longest – the siege of the US base at Khe Sanh and the savage street fighting in Huế. The news media showed the war as it never had before – as stunning, brazen, ghastly, unpredictable violence on an unprecedented scale that overwhelmed all of South Vietnam. In Saigon, there were tanks in the streets, tactical airstrikes in residential neighborhoods, and civilians caught in deadly crossfire. On all three television networks there were disturbing scenes of correspondents or the members of their crews becoming casualties of the fighting they covered.

The most spectacular – and horrifying – image of the Tet Offensive was the summary execution of an NLF prisoner by the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. NBC and ABC showed film of the shooting on their evening newscasts. Many more people, however, saw Eddie Adams’s photo of the moment of the death, which appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the world and became one of the most reproduced images in history. NBC’s John Chancellor called the execution “rough justice on a Saigon street.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In contrast, Johnson’s national security advisor, Walt W. Rostow, thought that Loan might be “one of the heroes of the battle thus far.”Footnote ⁵¹ This powerful image of death became a convenient symbol that both critics and supporters of the war used to justify their positions.

The Progress Campaign became an early casualty of the Tet Offensive. The New York Times editorialized that the attacks “throw doubt on recent official American claims of progress.” Newsweek chided the Johnson administration for not providing “a realistic assessment of the situation in Vietnam.”Footnote ⁵² Johnson tried to rebut these criticisms by telling White House correspondents that the enemy had failed to achieve its principal goal of igniting a popular uprising against the Saigon government. Such confident assertions had limited effect. ABC’s Joseph C. Harsch bluntly declared that the Tet Offensive was “the exact opposite of what American leaders have for months been leading us to expect.” CBS’s Robert Schakne captured the prevailing mood of shock and uncertainty. “For Americans in South Vietnam,” he asserted, “the world turned upside down in the past week.”Footnote ⁵³

Walter Cronkite was also bewildered by the first reports of the Tet Offensive. “What the hell is going on?” he asked in disbelief. “I thought we were winning the war.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Cronkite went to Vietnam to make his own assessment, and he presented his conclusions in a special, prime-time broadcast in late February 1968. At the end of the program, he made a radical departure from his familiar role of impartial newscaster, hoping that his reputation as “the most trusted man in America” would make viewers willing to listen to his personal commentary at this critical moment. He explained that the frightful casualties, extensive destruction, and a staggering increase in refugees had not altered the pattern of the war. “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion,” he declared. While it was difficult for Cronkite to determine who had won and who had lost, there was one clear casualty, the credibility of the president and his top military and political aides. “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds,” Cronkite asserted.Footnote ⁵⁵ Johnson brooded over the broadcast. “If I’ve lost Cronkite,” he despaired, “I’ve lost the American people.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The coverage of Tet, like earlier reporting of the war, generated controversy. One of the most prominent critics was Peter Braestrup, who argued in his encyclopedic analysis of the Tet Offensive that the news media got the “big story” wrong. “Essentially, the dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam … added up to a portrait of defeat” for the United States and South Vietnam, Braestrup argued, even though historians “have concluded that the Tet offensive resulted in a severe military-political setback for Hanoi.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Braestrup anticipated by more than three decades the analysis of historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, who found that Hanoi’s bold bid for decisive victory in 1968 had disastrous effects on North Vietnamese military and political strategy.Footnote ⁵⁸ Journalists in February 1968 lacked the information and perspective of historians who wrote years later, but the best, like Cronkite, recognized that the enemy had suffered enormous losses, while still inflicting sharp blows on the perceptions of power in Saigon and Washington. What is striking is how closely Cronkite’s analysis resembled official US analyses, which emphasized the vulnerability of even the most secure locations in urban centers and the damage to rural pacification programs. For Cronkite, just as for most US officials in Saigon and Washington, the Tet Offensive had changed the war.

Johnson, too, criticized the coverage of Tet. In his memoirs, he deplored “the emotional and exaggerated reporting” that conveyed the impression “that we must have suffered a defeat.”Footnote ⁵⁹ On the day after he announced that he would not seek another term as president, he kept a previously scheduled commitment to deliver a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. No one, he declared, could be sure how televised scenes of fighting in Vietnam had affected public support for his administration’s policies, which then stood, according to the latest poll, at only 26 percent. He wondered aloud what influence television news, had it existed, might have had during earlier wars. Still, the president left no doubt that he believed that TV was responsible for the deep discontent with his war policies.

Figure 21.1 CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite covers the aftermath of the Tet Offensive for the special Report from Vietnam (1968).

Source: CBS Photo Archive / Contributor / CBS / Getty Images.

“Our Worst Enemy Seems to Be the Press”

In its June 27, 1969, issue, Life magazine published photographs of the 242 Americans in uniform who had died during one week of fighting in Vietnam, the week that included the recent Memorial Day holiday. The weekly combat figures were part of the ritual of reporting the war. MACV provided no specific figures about losses in individual battles, characterizing them only as light, moderate, or heavy. Instead, it released weekly casualty reports. Each Thursday TV anchors read the figures on the evening newscasts, usually providing no additional information. According to the Life article, numbers were no longer enough. At a time when the war had claimed a total of 36,000 American lives and took 242 more in a single week, “we must pause to look into their faces.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The article affected NBC news anchor David Brinkley, who departed from the usual recitation of numbers on the NBC evening newscast – the Huntley–Brinkley Report – only a few days later. Brinkley explained that, though the casualties “come out in the form of numbers, each one of them was a man, most of them quite young, each with hopes he will never realize, each with family and friends who will never see him alive again.”Footnote ⁶¹ Two weeks earlier, President Nixon had announced the withdrawal of 25,000 US troops from the war, the first step in what he called Vietnamization, or transferring combat responsibility to the ARVN. The troop withdrawal was also a way to mitigate public discontent with the war and the high weekly death tolls as Nixon searched for a way to win the peace, if not the war.

In his quest for what he eventually called peace with honor, Nixon considered the news media major antagonists. Like Johnson, he believed that journalists were out to “get” him. His allegations, however, were more vituperative and his methods for dealing with media opposition more vindictive. While House aides maintained lists of journalists arranged according to their friendliness or hostility. One compilation included only three television reporters in the category of “Generally for Us” while classifying twelve as “Generally Against” the administration.Footnote ⁶² These lists and the daily news summaries that aides prepared persuaded Nixon that a “solid majority” of journalists wanted “to bring us down.”Footnote ⁶³ Nixon encouraged assistants to retaliate against individual journalists by cutting off their access to White House sources or complain to news organizations about unfair stories. He even threatened to use the powers of the Federal Communications Commission to intimidate the networks.

By the time he became president, Nixon thought that television mattered more than newspapers or magazines in influencing public opinion on Vietnam. His administration made several efforts to stoke popular discontent with TV news coverage as a way of deflecting discontent about the war from the White House to the networks. The most prominent figure in these antimedia campaigns was Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who denounced network executives in November 1969 as “a tiny, enclosed fraternity” who deliberately skewed the news against the administration.Footnote ⁶⁴ Agnew attracted considerable attention because of his flamboyant rhetoric and affection for alliteration, as in his notorious description of Nixon’s critics as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Nixon, however, was always dissatisfied with the results of his aides’ efforts to bludgeon the news media into more favorable coverage of his Vietnam policies. He was upset, for example, with the news stories about the dispatch of US ground troops into Cambodia in April 1970. The president considered the Cambodian operation a “bold move” that showed the strength of his leadership. He complained that the news media dwelled instead on the campus protests against what seemed a dangerous enlargement of the war and the failure to locate the North Vietnamese command center, which was supposedly the main reason for sending US forces into Cambodia.

The animosity between the Nixon administration and the news media boiled over during Lam Sơn 719, a joint US–South Vietnamese military operation in Laos in March 1971 to cut the Hồ Chí Minh Trail and destroy North Vietnamese supply bases. Restrictions on air transportation kept many reporters stranded in rear staging areas. US commanders cited the dangers of enemy anti-aircraft fire. Reporters, who had braved hostile fire in many combat zones, wondered if US and South Vietnamese commanders were trying to keep them from covering the fighting. Nixon was anxious about a major test of Vietnamization since the ARVN was providing all the ground troops. He was adamant that “the operation cannot come out as a defeat.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The film of wounded and weary South Vietnamese soldiers returning from battle areas on US helicopters after meeting heavy resistance certainly looked like a defeat on the network newscasts. “There wasn’t anything orderly or planned about getting these men out,” NBC correspondent Phil Brady, a former US marine, asserted. “They were overrun and defeated.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Nixon was so furious that he charged that reporters wanted “the operation to fail since they oppose it and predicted it would fail.”Footnote ⁶⁷ After Lam Sơn 719 ended, ABC devoted more than half of its evening newscast on April 1 to a discussion among its four main Vietnam reporters who criticized the Nixon administration for obstructing the news coverage of the Laos operation and trying to discredit their reporting about the ARVN’s poor performance. “We’ve been lied to so many times that you begin to suspect that no one ever tells you the truth,” correspondent Don Farmer declared.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nixon, for his part, thought that during the whole operation “our worst enemy seems to be the press.”Footnote ⁶⁹

As American troops came home from Vietnam, so did US reporters. Those who remained filed stories about subjects they had rarely, if ever, covered during the war’s early years, such as poor morale, combat refusals, and drug use. No story illustrated more dramatically how the experience of Vietnam had changed the US Army than Gary Shepard’s film report for the CBS Evening News about a unit of the 1st Cavalry that smoked marijuana from the barrel of a shotgun they called Ralph. As the soldiers inhaled, a squad leader named Vito acknowledged that the film might get them all “busted,” but then nonchalantly said, “I don’t care.”Footnote ⁷⁰ By 1972, US ground combat troops had withdrawn, but the fighting continued between Vietnamese. CBS’s Bob Simon captured the agony of a war that had gone on far too long in a report about fighting in Quảng Trị province during the Easter Offensive in 1972. In the aftermath of battle, refugees became casualties when their vehicle struck a mine. The film showed children and babies scattered on the ground, “some … dead, some … not dead.” Simon wrapped up his story by declaring that there would be more fighting “and more words – words spoken by generals, journalists, politicians. But here on Route 1, it’s difficult to imagine what those words can be. There’s nothing left to say about this war. There’s just nothing left to say.”Footnote ⁷¹

Nixon did have more to say about Vietnam and the reporting of the war. He charged that journalists had “a vested interest in seeing the United States lose the war” and were “doing their desperate best to report all the bad news and to downplay all the good news.” Journalists had their own fears. Cronkite, for example, declared in a speech, “Many of us see clear indication on the part of this administration of a grand conspiracy to destroy the credibility of the press.” What Halberstam had called years earlier “the war within the war” continued until the last American troops left Vietnam.Footnote ⁷²

Conclusion

That “war within the war” has had enduring legacies. Some commentators, such as Robert Elegant, who covered Vietnam for the Los Angeles Times, blamed hostile media coverage for turning US success on the battlefield in Vietnam into defeat by undermining popular support for the war effort.Footnote ⁷³ So deeply embedded in popular memory is this belief in subversive reporting that an article in the Washington Post written fifty years after the Tet Offensive posed the question, “Did the News Media, Led by Walter Cronkite, Lose the War in Vietnam?”Footnote ⁷⁴ Some military leaders indeed thought that Cronkite and his colleagues had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In subsequent conflicts in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan, they limited access of reporters to troops and battle zones.

Yet the media coverage of Vietnam was hardly as skewed, slanted, or sensational as many critics allege. The American people experienced Vietnam as they had no previous conflict because television brought the war into their living rooms. Some of those film reports angered, outraged, and horrified individual viewers, but we can only speculate about the overall effects on the US public of TV news coverage or, for that matter, newspaper or magazine journalism. There is no detailed polling data that shows viewer or reader reaction to news reporting of Vietnam. In the absence of such systematic information, New Yorker critic Michael Arlen, who coined the term “living-room war,” suggested that television news programs may have “banalized” the war – making it seem “ordinary or remote” – by presenting a “stylized, generally distanced overview of a disjointed conflict” that usually failed to capture “any of the blood and gore, or even the pain of combat.” “It’s fascinating to me how misremembered Vietnam is,” Arlen recollected, “especially as far as the role that media played, that television played.”Footnote ⁷⁵

If there is disagreement about the public reaction, there is no doubt that news reports from Vietnam unsettled high officials in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations and led to persistent efforts to dismiss or disparage the stories in the newspapers or on the evening news. The reason that White House officials disliked what they read on front pages or saw on TV screens was not that the reporters in Vietnam were “too close to the story,” out to “get” the president, or determined to “stick the knife right in our groin.” Instead, what rankled presidents and their aides were stories about the hard realities, high costs, and inconvenient truths of a controversial war. The efforts of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to discredit the reporting of the television networks, prominent columnists, and correspondents for the nation’s leading newspapers established precedents, created arguments, and provided examples that a later generation of government officials used in 21st-century battles over “fake news.” Like so much of the US experience in Vietnam, the disputes over the reporting of the war remain part of the present, even as they recede further into the past.

During the period of direct American military intervention in South Vietnam, from 1965 to 1973, an estimated 4 million South Vietnamese were displaced from their homes, or a fourth of the estimated total population of 16 million at the time. By 1974, close to 1.5 million civilians had been killed or injured. Of those injured, 178,000 were physically disabled. The number of orphans and half-orphans reached 879,715.Footnote ¹ Government military casualties were estimated to be 250,000 at the minimum. The number of South Vietnamese who died fighting on the other side, for the insurgents, is not known but it has been estimated that the communist side, including North Vietnamese troops in the South and National Liberation Front (NLF) forces, suffered 1 million casualties. In addition, South Vietnamese terrain had been scarred by fighting, bombing, shelling, and defoliation.

No society could live through such a calamitous war with its fabric intact and its economy undamaged. South Vietnam would emerge scarred and transformed by the violence. The most important causes of South Vietnam’s trauma, besides the collateral damage of warfare, were the introduction of half a million US combat and support troops, their ferocious firepower, and their way of waging war, and the enormous military and economic assistance that the United States poured into South Vietnam to fight the war and to achieve nation building in order to win the population’s support for the government – or at least keep them from backing the communist side.

The American Presence

In his blog “Long Binh Post and the Vietnam War,” Ryan Moore describes the largest base in Long Bình, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Saigon, as “A virtual city of some 60,000 people at its height.” He adds, “Long Binh … had dental clinics, large restaurants, snack bars, a photo lab, a wood shop, post offices, swimming pools, basketball and tennis courts, a golf driving range, laundromats, and even a Chase Manhattan Bank branch. It had a nightlife scene, as well. Among the offerings were a bowling alley, nightclubs, and other so-called adult entertainment establishments.”Footnote ²

Besides US military personnel, American contractor RMK-BRJ also had a sizable presence in Vietnam. RMK-BRJ was a consortium of four of the largest American companies, established by the US Navy during the Vietnam War to build bases and infrastructure to facilitate the introduction of American combat troops and materiel. The ten-year contract awarded to RMK-BRJ eventually reached $1.9 billion – or $14 billion in 2017 dollars. Over this decade, RMK-BRJ employed a large number of Vietnamese, eventually training 200,000 Vietnamese in construction and other related skills and completing an undertaking that was considered historically the largest construction program for the military at that time. To build the massive naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, for example, 1,800 Vietnamese workers were hired – a third of whom were women. Seeing opportunities to make money, Vietnamese seized the chance to meet the needs of Americans. Services such as housekeeping, laundry, food supplies, and tailors sprang up around and on these bases, as well as bars and brothels.

In large cities, such as Saigon, construction and services also grew dramatically. To house up to 60,000 American troops in Saigon, for example, BEQs (Bachelor Enlisted Quarters) and BOQs (Bachelor Officer Quarters) were established, either constructed from scratch, like the Brinks, or converted from existing buildings like the Rex. Altogether, 500 different buildings scattered around the city were used to house these Americans. The number of American civilians also grew: both to run an enlarged aid program and to staff projects such as pacification and information. This created a huge demand for clerks, maids, cooks, drivers, and other services.

The American presence had a big impact from housing to employment. In Saigon, they sparked a construction boom, enriching building contractors they hired as well as owners of properties they rented at exorbitant amounts – paying two to three years’ rental in advance. They also took over the best restaurants and cafes, which became out of reach for ordinary Vietnamese, with the exception of those rich enough to afford the new high prices. Tự Do, the main street in downtown Saigon, turned into an American quarter, with bars attended by young women in mini-skirts, and tailor shops and stands selling gaudy souvenirs, displacing the old boutiques offering imported French food, fabrics, and jewelry. Vietnamese flocked to gain employment from the Americans as clerks, maids, and chauffeurs. Taxi and cyclo drivers preferred to pick up American passengers, who paid generous fares.Footnote ³ By 1969, Americans were employing 160,000 workers directly, mainly to tend to the needs of their soldiers and build their bases, and by 1972 more than half of South Vietnam’s national product was estimated to derive from services, and almost a third of employed Vietnamese earned a living in this sector.

Over the course of the war, American financial assistance grew dramatically as a component of nation-building and counterinsurgency. When the United States stepped in to replace France in 1954, South Vietnam was emerging from eighty years of colonialism with an economy still reeling from the damage inflicted by the war to end French control and dependent on French expenditures and aid. Beginning in 1955, US economic and military aid replaced that of France – eventually surpassing in magnitude what the French had been able to provide even with American assistance – in an effort to shore up President Ngô Đình Diệm. US aid helped create the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and an urban middle class as a base of support for his government. From 1955 to 1956, American aid surpassed half a billion US dollars, with $340 million in military assistance. The commercial assistance of $84 million allowed South Vietnam to import goods and commodities to raise the standard of living of its people, since the country was able to pay for only 20 percent of these imports. Through the Commodity Import Program (CIP), the United States provided dollars to private importers to buy goods from overseas, and proceeds from the sale of this foreign exchange – called counterpart funds – were used by the government to cover a budget gap amounting to 50 percent of its annual expenditures.Footnote ⁴ The American aid program enabled the country to begin recovering from the war for independence from France, and by 1960 its export earnings had risen to $85 million – the highest level it would achieve. In Saigon, a middle class of businesspeople, military officers, and civil servants, whose wages were paid by US aid, began to emerge. Gareth Porter has argued that, while the CIP created an urban middle class as the core of support for President Diệm and as a bastion against communism, it neglected economic development in the countryside and made South Vietnam dependent on imports.Footnote ⁵ Dependency on imports would dog South Vietnam throughout the war, as production became stagnant and could not meet the demands of the population. As late as 1971, South Vietnam still required $700 million a year in US economic aid.

For the duration of the war, economic assistance would remain a core component of US involvement. In 1964, a team of economists from the RAND Corporation went to Vietnam at the behest of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to study ways to better align its program with counterinsurgency efforts. In their report, they recommended that the focus of American assistance should be on urban areas. According to them, cities and towns were the core areas of the government, and concentrating US assistance there would increase its support and lessen the appeal of the NLF. In the countryside, they recommended that aid should be used as a carrot and given only to those who cooperated with the authorities, in order to induce people to side with the government, instead of being provided to the entire population without regard to their political attitude. In short, economic aid should not be aimed at economic development in the rural areas but at changing the peasants’ behavior and drive them away from the insurgents.Footnote ⁶ During the entire Vietnam War, economic aid would continue to be used as a counterinsurgency – rather than an economic development – tool. USAID would admit as much in a 1975 retrospective report, in which it stated that the goal of American aid at the time was to keep the South Vietnamese economy afloat long enough for the United States to reach its military objectives.Footnote ⁷

As the war escalated, American aid kept increasing, aiming to keep South Vietnam from sinking under the weight of the war’s ravages and demands because, as USAID stated in its 1975 retrospective report, the country’s very existence depended on sufficient economic and military aid.Footnote ⁸ From 1964 to 1971, the United States provided South Vietnam with $4.3 billion in aid or about $25 billion in 2016 dollars.Footnote ⁹ Another source of foreign exchange for South Vietnam was the purchase of đồng or piasters – the local currency – by the Pentagon directly from the government, at a favorable rate, for the use of its troops and military expenses in Vietnam, resulting in a windfall for the country. “In 1971, for example, the Defense Department paid Saigon $271 million [about $1.65 billion in 2017 values] for piasters which bought goods and services costing $116 million at the open-market rate [about $704 million in 2017 values].”Footnote ¹⁰

Figure 22.1 People doing their Tết (Lunar New Year) shopping in Saigon’s central market (January 20, 1970).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

This enormous infusion of money created a prosperous war economy in cities such as Saigon, which reached an unprecedented level of affluence, despite the reminders of war like B-52 strikes not far from its fringes, armed soldiers keeping watch from behind sandbags, and military trucks and jeeps trying to make their way in the chaotic traffic. But Saigon residents ignored these signs of a war that was raging in the countryside. For those who benefited from the American money flooding the country, life had never been so good. Later, after the US withdrawal, they would refer to the years of peak American involvement from 1965 to 1969 as “the golden age.”Footnote ¹¹

In addition to US-financed imports, goods pilfered from American warehouses, bases, and post exchanges (PXs), for use by US in-country military and civilian personnel, provided South Vietnamese with consumer goods they could only have dreamed of – or did not even know existed – previously. Saigon, the epicenter of US military and economic aid, and now home to 60,000 Americans, acquired a frenetic atmosphere, with sidewalk vendors hawking stolen goods, like Johnnie Walker, Prell Shampoo, Colgate toothpaste, Salem cigarettes, and other American consumer products, and shops blaring the latest pop music hits like the Beatles’ “Love Me, Do” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from huge speakers. Imported Japanese motorbikes poured into the streets of Saigon, replacing the heretofore-favored Vespa and Mobilettes, and killing Saigon’s old trees with their exhaust fumes. Luxury goods such as refrigerators became more readily available. To facilitate communication and provide the government with a powerful propaganda tool, the Americans introduced broadcast television and upgraded the telephone network. Telephones, once hard to obtain, also became easier to access.

Even remote places like Kontum and Pleiku in the Central Highlands, inhabited by tribal ethnic minorities called the Montagnards by the French, were transformed by the American military presence into honkytonk towns. As Kontum became the rest and recreation (R&R) center for US troops serving in the region, shoddy bars and restaurants, which also served as brothels, appeared overnight to meet their needs and desires.Footnote ¹² Pleiku was even more drastically transformed by the arrival of the US 4th Division in October 1966, which launched huge construction programs to build military installations, air bases, and roads. A large number of Vietnamese workers were imported to build these projects. Pleiku’s population mushroomed, and rickety huts and shops suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The main part of Pleiku became a GI enclave, with bars, snack shops, and steam baths. Jeeps, military trucks, bulldozers, and long convoys clogged the streets. Outside these cities, firebases, airstrips, helipads, truck parks, and billets marred the verdant plateau.Footnote ¹³

The huge increase in money in circulation and the imbalance in supply and demand for goods spurred inflation. In urban areas with a large American presence, free-spending GIs added to the economic strain. It was estimated that in one year American soldiers spent 8.12 billion piasters – about $70 million at the time. Prices rose steeply and suddenly. In Saigon, from April 1965 to July 1966, prices rose 125 percent. USAID estimated that on average prices rose 42 percent per year from the end of 1964 to the end of 1969.Footnote ¹⁴ Besides the large amount of money in circulation, inflation was also attributed to ineffectual government control, interdiction of transportation of goods by the NLF, fear of further devaluation of the local currency, and hoarding. Peasants still able to farm held on to large quantities of rice in the expectation that prices would continue to rise, and their hoarding caused the price of this basic staple to soar by up to 385 percent. While the urban rich, peasants who remained productive, and those who earned a good income from the Americans managed to maintain their standard of living, those employed in the Vietnamese government and military, estimated at one-third of the population, saw their real wages drop and whatever economic gains they had achieved eroded by inflation.Footnote ¹⁵

War and the Countryside: Population Control and Refugee Flow

The booming economy in urban areas such as Saigon stood in stark contrast to conditions in the countryside, the main locus of fighting. The Vietnam War was not one war but several wars fought simultaneously. While US combat forces waged a war of attrition against North Vietnamese regulars in the sparsely populated areas, the United States and the South Vietnamese government were engaged in a war for the “hearts and minds” of the people in the more populated regions. It was a war – called pacification – to root out the insurgents, destroy their regional and main-force units, and eliminate the cadres (the infrastructure) who operated among the villagers by proselytizing, collecting taxes, and recruiting fighters. This was accomplished with sweep operations, bombing and shelling, and economic support to win the peasants’ allegiance. In addition, from 1967 to 1972, a special program called “Phoenix,” initially coordinated by the CIA, was set up to identify, capture, and/or assassinate people suspected of operating on behalf of the NLF.

All these wars had a profound effect on South Vietnamese society. But it was the war for “hearts and minds” that transformed it the most. While NLF attacks contributed to the damage, it was mainly the US and government use of their enormous firepower – through bombing and shelling, helicopter attacks, sweep operations, “free fire zones,” and harassment and interdiction artillery fire to keep insurgents off balance – that forced millions of peasants to flee to urban areas such as Saigon, Đà Nẵng, Biên Hòa, and Vũng Tàu. As Gabriel Kolko has noted, after 1964 firepower would determine the “demography of South Vietnam … reducing the issue for a substantial portion of the peasantry to one of physical survival.”Footnote ¹⁶

In his book about the communist movement in Định Tường province in the Mekong Delta, David Elliott states, “No issue is more complex than the question of refugee movement. It was difficult to define ‘refugee’ in the fluid conditions of the time.”Footnote ¹⁷ For the government, refugees were people who had been driven from their homes in an area controlled or contested by the NLF and had lost their livelihood. They became more or less “‘permanently’ resettled long enough for the government to see and count them and recognize their request for assistance.”Footnote ¹⁸ But this definition excludes refugees who were not registered for assistance, temporary refugees – those who fled for a short period of time and then returned to their homes – or those who moved from one hamlet to the next, within hamlets, or to open areas in hamlets away from clumps of trees and vegetation to avoid bombing and shelling. It also excludes displaced people still living in areas controlled by the insurgents. If all types of refugees are included, the total of displaced people – including 1 million who fled to SaigonFootnote ¹⁹ – would be higher.

According to Stanley Karnow and David Elliott, American strategists deliberately drove peasants into urban areas controlled by the government to deny the insurgents the protection and support they needed to survive and succeed – a strategy described as “forced draft urbanization and modernization” by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington.Footnote ²⁰ General William Westmoreland, overall commander of US forces, and Robert Komer, his civilian deputy in charge of pacification, believed in this strategy. Komer stated that reducing the rural population would weaken the insurgency.Footnote ²¹

In his study of Định Tường province, David Elliott wrote that “forced draft urbanization … turned what most people regarded as a moral and practical problem, the vast refugee displacements in the rural areas, to advantage” for the South Vietnamese government because, as the people fled into towns and cities under its control, “forced draft urbanization” would act like an “industrial revolution, bringing progress and modernization, and immunizing the population from revolutionary mobilization.”Footnote ²²

The result was an enormous refugee crisis. In the cities, refugees from the countryside suffered physical and psychological degradation. From being productive members of society living in functioning communities in a verdant countryside, they found themselves crammed into slums lacking sanitation and amenities, and reduced to a struggle for mere economic survival. Family cohesion became strained as individuals searched for employment and food on their own. According to Kolko, up to one-fifth of these refugees eked out a living by selling food, shining shoes, peddling, and engaging in other forms of petty commerce. By 1974, this “sidewalk economy” would turn into the largest source of nonfarm employment in South Vietnam. A large number of young women would drift into prostitution to support themselves and their families.Footnote ²³

The influx of refugees into Saigon, eventually reaching 1 million, changed the city profoundly and frayed its social fabric. Many of the refugees built lean-tos with flattened tin cans, abutting against the walls of villas or in stinking alleys. Garbage piled up in many parts of town, attracting flies and rats as well as people who picked through it for something they could salvage. Orphans and homeless children, called the “dust of life,” slept on flattened cardboard boxes under the eaves of shops, pestered passersby for money, offered to shine shoes, or stole to survive. Crime soared as social norms cracked. Hospitals were jammed full of those civilians injured in the fighting who had managed to get treatment. Those who were not so lucky joined the number of the dead and wounded who were never registered in the war’s statistics.

Not everyone flocking into urban areas was fleeing the war. Some were looking for economic opportunities. Gerry Hickey, an anthropologist and long-time resident of Saigon, said in an interview that the presence of Americans in cities like Saigon also acted like a magnet, drawing people from the countryside to get jobs which earned them more money than they had ever made. These voluntary transplants discovered urban amenities such as electricity, modern transportation, cafes, and entertainment and – unlike the refugees driven from their homes – they would not return to their villages even if they could do so. According to Hickey, those who had managed to establish themselves physically and socially had discovered a new, better way of life.Footnote ²⁴

The United States accelerated pacification after the Tet Offensive, which in turn escalated the refugee crisis. The clear-and-hold strategy adopted by Westmoreland’s successor, General Creighton Abrams, amounted to the depopulation of the countryside, exacerbated by the heavier reliance of the administration of Richard Nixon on bombing and shelling to degrade the enemy’s capabilities and buy time for the government as US forces withdrew. Both sides of the South Vietnamese conflict also contributed to the crisis: the continued push for population control by the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) government following the departure of US troops worsened the refugee situation, as did NLF attacks on cities during the Tet Offensive of 1968 and afterwards. Following the ceasefire of 1973, both the South Vietnamese government and the communists embarked on a giant land grab, creating more refugees and war victims. The 1972 communist Easter Offensive and the final drive in 1975 to take over South Vietnam would bring the total of displaced people to more than 11 million people at the end of the war.

This massive movement of people turned South Vietnam into a predominantly urban society. In 1960, 20 percent of the population lived in urban areas. This number kept growing: 26 percent in 1964, 36 percent by 1968, and 43 percent by 1971, by which time “three-quarters of the urban residents were not native to their city.”Footnote ²⁵ According to the US Senate report on refugees, toward the end of the war 65 percent of South Vietnamese lived in urban areas.

Problems of Land and Labor in Rural Areas

The vast influx of people from the countryside into the cities, the government draft of 2 million men into its army, police, and paramilitary forces, the insurgents’ own draft of able-bodied males, and the number of civilians killed and injured: together these created a labor shortage in rural areas and a sharp drop in rice production. The countryside faced a paradoxical problem. There was plenty of land available because so much of it had been abandoned by those who fled, but there were fewer people to take advantage of this land surplus. Those who were left to cultivate the land were mostly old men and women. USAID estimated that 2.2 million acres (900,000 hectares) were abandoned (out of a total of 5.7 million acres or 2.3 million hectares of rice land) and taken out of production between 1964 and 1966, and that by 1973 about 1.4 million acres (560,000 hectares) of abandoned farm land still existed.Footnote ²⁶ “Rice production, once the mainstay of South Vietnam’s exports, dropped dramatically and by 1967, the country had to import 700,000 tons of rice.”Footnote ²⁷

Land had been one of the core issues for the communist movement. During the fight against French colonialism, the Việt Minh had carried out land reform to win the support of the poor and landless peasants. They took land from large absentee landlords, from smaller landlords who had fled into the French-controlled zone, or from landowners who collaborated with the French, and distributed it to poor peasants. Altogether, the Việt Minh distributed 1.5 million acres (600,000 hectares) of land – about a third of the available land in the areas they controlled, estimated at 60 to 90 percent of the territory in the Mekong Delta toward the end of the war in 1954. Since landholders still owned 65 percent of the land in the South at that time, and landless peasants were paying exorbitant rents for the land they tilled, the Việt Minh also pressured landowners in areas they controlled to reduce rent to 25 percent of the tenants’ crop at the most.Footnote ²⁸

Prodded by the United States, President Ngô Đình Diệm launched his own land reform in 1955–6 to wrest political control from the Việt Minh. But his policy did not recognize the Việt Minh land reform and essentially returned to landowners the land that had been confiscated for distribution to peasants. Under Diệm’s policy, those peasants who received land – seized from the now-departed French – did not get it free and had to pay for it under terms they considered onerous. By 1960, 75 percent of the land would be in the hands of 15 percent of the population. Poor peasants who tilled the land found themselves thrust back into the situation of having to pay rent once more and, although Diệm fixed maximum rent at 25 percent, this policy was not enforced and peasants could find themselves having to pay up to 40 percent of their crops in rent.

After Diệm’s overthrow, the issue of land reform was pushed into the background. Until President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu (about whom more below) implemented the Land to the Tiller program in 1970, governments in Saigon were not interested. US officials themselves feared that meaningful land reform would anger the landlords, who were influential supporters of the government. They were also concerned that land reform would be badly implemented and backfire. One of the influential voices counseling caution was Edward Mitchell, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a consultant to the RAND Corporation. In his study of the correlation between land tenure and rebellion, he concluded that government control was strongest in areas where land ownership was unequal, where landlords remained powerful and could keep tenants submissive. When the government enacted land reform, it destroyed this relationship and created an authority vacuum which the NLF, adroit at seizing political opportunities, would move in to fill.Footnote ²⁹ Robert L. Sansom, who conducted his own study of land reform on the ground in South Vietnam – as opposed to Mitchell, who had used statistical analysis at a remove – refuted this conclusion. Through his own field research, Sansom found that land ownership was more equitable in communist-controlled areas because of the land reform they had carried out, while it remained unequal in zones controlled by the government because of lack of reform. In short, “The fact that land was more inequitably distributed in GVN [Government of Vietnam] than in Viet Cong areas did not mean that the Viet Cong gained control in areas of equitable land distribution but that, in the areas they controlled, the Việt Minh and the Viet Cong, through their land reform programs, caused the land to be more equitably distributed.”Footnote ³⁰

It was Mitchell’s work, however, that influenced US policymakers, many of whom believed that land reform would destabilize the situation and chip away at government control. Thiệu’s Land to the Tiller program aimed to win political support and neutralize the potent appeal of the communists. By this time, the insecurity in the countryside and the labor shortage had induced landlords to shift their resources into more lucrative investments in real estate and commercial ventures in the more secure urban areas. This, combined with the government’s compensation for land they had already lost due to the communist land reform or for land they no longer had access to or could not farm because of the labor shortage, dispelled the resistance of most of the landlords. Land to the Tiller was implemented only in the Mekong Delta. The law gave permanent legal title to peasants who were already tilling the land – up to 6 hectares (15 acres) – regardless of how they had come into possession of it – in fact recognizing the communists’ land redistribution during the Việt Minh era and in the 1960s, when the insurgents took the land abandoned by those who had fled and distributed it to those villagers who were clinging to their hamlets. In addition, other peasants in the Mekong Delta could get up to 3 hectares (7.4 acres) free of charge. The implementation was slow and marred by corruption, and produced uneven results. Nevertheless, it ranked as the only meaningful reform in the countryside.

In David Elliott’s judgment, this land reform to some extent might have had a short-term impact on support for the government, but it was “too little, too late.” First of all, land was only one of many issues that fueled the war. Second, the Land to the Tiller program ratified what the communists had already implemented. And, third, transferring land ownership to the peasants was only as valuable as their prospects for survival in a war that gave no sign of letting up.Footnote ³¹ Land to the Tiller probably benefited the landlords more than the peasants, and land without peace was meaningless to people trying to survive. American experts who conducted an opinion poll about the program with 6,000 peasants found that it “did not create a decisive shift in political support” for the South Vietnamese government.Footnote ³² However, in his study Land to the Tiller in the Mekong Delta, based on interviews in four villages in the delta in 1971 and 1972, Stewart Callison argued that, although the “exact degree of the greater political support creditable to the LTTT [Land to the Tiller] Program alone cannot be identified, support for the insurgents in the Delta was waning in the early 1970s.”Footnote ³³

What transformed the countryside, especially in the Mekong Delta, more than the Land to the Tiller Program was the modernization of agriculture by Americans, who introduced high-yield Miracle Rice and mechanization – such as small tractors and rototillers. Miracle Rice, however, required heavy use of fertilizers, insecticides, and water, all of which necessitated the import of electric pumps and chemical products. By 1973, Miracle Rice accounted for almost one-third of South Vietnam’s rice production. Former landlords, now enjoying increased capital, were the ones who benefited the most since they had the means to buy the equipment, fertilizers, and insecticides, and to dominate the credit market, lending money to peasants at usurious interest rates. Mechanization also exposed farmers to the vagaries of the international market for chemical products, especially gasoline and fertilizers. Nevertheless, this modernization increased income for many peasants living in pacified areas – enlarged following communist setbacks after the 1968 Tet Offensive – and created a “middle peasant” class which would present problems for the communists when they tried to integrate these farmers into their socialist system of production following their takeover of the South in 1975.

Political Power and Social Structure

The war created a new power and social structure. After the overthrow of President Diệm in 1963, power fell into the hands of the military. Following a series of revolving door governments, General Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu emerged as president and strongman of the country in 1967. He would retain this position until he was replaced by General Dương Vӑn Minh just before the war ended in 1975. Thiệu consolidated his control by coopting a small group of senior military officers who owed their military, political, and economic power to him. Through him, they had access to American military and economic aid and a system of patronage and corruption. Thiệu himself selected the four corps commanders – generals loyal to him – as well as the military officers who ran the forty-three provinces, all of whom reported to him directly.

Under them were officers who were poorly paid and had few benefits. As of 1967, there were about 25,000 officers, 25 percent of whom were refugees from the North who had moved south in 1954. A large number of these were Catholics, who also accounted for one-third of the generals. Officers were overwhelmingly urban and from families that could afford to give them an education, since the ranks required a high school baccalaureate degree. Rank-and-file soldiers could not, therefore, aspire to become officers. The upper echelons of the army became a homogeneous, elite, urban power structure.

Second in influence in South Vietnamese society at the time were the entrepreneurs, merchants, and businesspeople who were allied with the senior military officers in business schemes facilitated by the vast import program and the enormous US military and economic aid. Among these, the most powerful were the overseas Chinese from Fujian operating in the district of Saigon called Chợ Lớn. In return for kickbacks to the powerful military elite, they gained control of major sectors of the economy, including banking, insurance, textiles, scrap metal, construction, food processing, and especially imports. The most powerful, Lý Long Thân (popularly nicknamed Thiệu’s kinh tài tsar), was rumored to manage President Thiệu’s personal financial and business holdings.Footnote ³⁴ Chinese economic dominance in the countryside, however, was waning with the dramatic drop in rice production and the end of rice export trade, which they had controlled. Right below the Chinese were a growing number of Vietnamese who were simply taking advantage of the economic opportunities afforded by the booming war economy. With the emergence of the military, their Chinese economic allies, and the newly rich Vietnamese, the old elite created under French colonialism became marginalized. Toward the end of the war, a new but small elite of technocrats educated in the United States would emerge and gain influence in the government. The most prominent was Hoàng Đức Nhã, President Thiệu’s nephew, who became his advisor.

Thiệu and the generals were able to acquire vast political and economic power because of the fractious nature of South Vietnamese politics. Political parties could not marshal any meaningful opposition due to their own very narrow base of support and their propensity for being coopted and outmaneuvered by Thiệu. While US support allowed Thiệu to consolidate his power and control, and kept the generals loyal to him, the estimated eighty political parties – headed by urban residents interested mainly in advancing their own interests, concentrated in Saigon and devoid of a nationwide following, and lacking in meaningful programs and policies – made it impossible for them to coalesce into a significant opposition bloc. The only notable bloc was an amorphous group referred to as the Third Force, which advocated neutralism and an end to the war. Although the Third Force, beginning in 1972, captured the pervasive war-weariness of the country and the desire for peace, its members could not agree on how to achieve their goals. It remained a Saigon-based group with little influence beyond the capital.

Under pressure from the United States, which wanted South Vietnam to project an image of a democracy worthy of support in the eyes of the American people, South Vietnam adopted a constitution and electoral democracy in 1967. But elections were usually a sham, and the generals could manufacture victories with lopsided majorities. Even when an opposition candidate could win a large number of votes, he could be thrown in jail under a trumped-up charge. Such was the case of Trương Đình Dzu who ran as a presidential candidate on a peace agenda in 1967, and was thrown in military prison after the election and imprisoned for most of the duration of the war.

In this situation, the army remained the most cohesive, best-organized, and largest group, and was therefore best positioned to retain power. As he began to withdraw US combat forces, President Nixon – fearing instability and seeing no viable alternative – would continue his support for President Thiệu, reinforcing his power and, by extension, the power of the South Vietnamese military. American reliance on Thiệu to keep the ship of state from listing gave him leverage to resist US pressure to enact political, economic, and social reforms. Although there was some truth in Thiệu’s claim that reforms were not possible in a time of war, the fact remained that the status quo he favored allowed him and his coterie to retain their control and privileges.

Politics and Religious Groups

For a time, the Buddhists – representing three-quarters of the population – were able to organize opposition to the government. After reaching the peak of their power in 1963 with the overthrow of President Ngô Đình Diệm, however, their influence began to wane. Their lack of organization and the fragmented nature of their following, divided into two main sects of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, eventually weakened their power. An attempt to unify into a political bloc – the Unified Buddhist Association – floundered after the leadership became split between a militant faction and a moderate faction after 1967 (some would say that the United States deliberately weakened the Buddhist organization to end the instability its followers fomented after the overthrow of President Diệm by coopting the moderate faction with monetary inducement).

Catholics, on the other hand, remained a formidable political force. Numbering about 1.5 million faithful, they were more cohesive than the Buddhists, had a well-organized hierarchy, and enjoyed a powerful reach within the military and civil administrations. They first acquired this power under the government of Ngô Đình Diệm, a Catholic. For a while following his overthrow, their influence diminished as that of the Buddhists rose. But under President Thiệu, another Catholic, their influence rose once again, thanks to the number of Catholics within the officer corps – especially among those holding senior ranks – and in the civilian branch of the government. Tension between Catholics and Buddhists, dating from the days when Diệm favored Catholics, continued to simmer below the surface.

The two other main religious groups, the Hòa Hảo and the Cao Đài, had limited political influence. The Hòa Hảo Buddhist sect, located in the southwestern part of the Mekong Delta, had about 1.5 million followers. Their strength was concentrated mainly in the provinces of An Giang and Châu Đốc. Their leadership was split, and infighting prevented them from gaining traction as an opposition group. Like the Hòa Hảo, the Cao Đài were splintered as a political force, and had little political influence.

At one juncture, South Vietnam’s polity appeared to overcome its divisiveness and closed ranks against the communists. The shock of the 1968 Tet Offensive angered the many factions, including the Buddhists – the group most in favor of an end to the war and negotiation with the communists – who opted to rally together in reluctant support for a flawed government out of fear of the violence and oppression the communists could inflict on them and the country should they win. Encouraged by the spirit of determination and their newfound solidarity, they begged Thiệu to implement reforms to strengthen the fight against the communists. However, the government squandered this golden opportunity, and Thiệu instead gathered more power into his own hands.Footnote ³⁵ Meanwhile, in the countryside, the troops continued to alienate the population with their abusive behavior as well as their failure to provide protection and their reluctance to fight. So, rather than seizing this chance to turn the situation around and put its house in order, South Vietnam sealed its own fate – long before communist tanks drove into the presidential palace in April 1975.Footnote ³⁶

Social and Cultural Disruption

Below the military and the newly rich who made their money from the American presence, a new economic class emerged: those who catered to the needs of the Americans, such as cyclo and taxi drivers, bar girls and prostitutes, tailors, maids, laundresses, and suppliers of foods like bananas, who could earn more than a cabinet minister. At the bottom were peasants, displaced from their homes and land who became the Lumpenproletariat in the cities and towns.

This social transformation and what they viewed as “decadent culture” (vӑn hóa đồi trụy) that American culture and money was fostering alarmed and dismayed social conservatives, older traditionalists, and many among the intelligentsia. But their protests remained limited to articles in newspapers and periodicals, and had little impact against the much stronger forces of war: dislocation and American monetary and cultural influence. The students, with the bravado of youth, were more prone to protests, which disrupted Saigon and Huế and sometimes turned violent. They struck a chord among the population, tired of the endemic corruption and suppression of the government. But they, too, could not extend their influence beyond Saigon and Huế. Their protests were impotent against the entrenched power of Thiệu and his generals.

As the fighting dragged on, war fatigue became pervasive. A 1969 American survey found that 85 percent of the people interviewed in twenty-one provinces wanted peace and security. While exhausted peasants struggled to survive physically and longed for peace, the war-weary city dwellers attempted to shut the destruction and killing out of their minds. They tried to carry on as normal, and to escape the unpleasant reality by embracing consumerism, the antiwar and romantic ballads of composer Trịnh Công Sơn, the languorous and poetic songs of the pre–World War II period – when popular Vietnamese music reached its creative peak – and other more recent lãng mạn (romantic) compositions. They also turned to Hong Kong–produced kung fu movies, cheap novels, love stories, Chinese kiếm hiệp or martial arts fiction,Footnote ³⁷ and – for those who could afford it – the good life. “The young in particular lived hurriedly, as though the good times would end too soon. To the distress of their elders, they started to imitate the freer lifestyle of the Americans. Children of middle-class families attended ‘boom’ parties, where they listened to loud rock music and gyrated to the latest dance from America. Or they crowded smoky nightclubs, where they could listen to singers imitating Johnny Mathis or Elvis Presley.”Footnote ³⁸ This turning away from the traditional lifestyle alarmed social conservatives who lamented that the young were “mất gốc” – losing their national identity and cultural roots.

Another way of coping for urban as well as rural South Vietnamese was to retreat into the family and focus on its interests and protection. The family had been the center of life for Vietnamese, but now it became even more important as a bastion against forces that could threaten its survival. Families with enough money or the right connections would do whatever they could to ensure that their sons, if drafted, would not have to serve in combat roles.

American Withdrawal and the End Game

The departure of US troops, starting in 1969, brought its own set of problems. The economy began to deteriorate. Economic development had been anemic, even nonexistent, because military expenditures consumed two-thirds of the government budget and corruption siphoned off whatever economic aid could have gone into boosting the economy. With the war raging, South Vietnam was unable to attract foreign investment. The overseas Chinese, who possessed the largest pool of capital in South Vietnam, were themselves unwilling to invest. Knowing that the generals’ power might not last, they preferred to transfer money abroad to keep their options open.Footnote ³⁹

In 1973, industrial output decreased 8 percent; in 1974, it dropped 24 percent.Footnote ⁴⁰ While agricultural production had increased due to modernization, the country still had to import 400,000 tons of rice in 1973. By 1970, the trade imbalance had worsened: South Vietnam exported $13 million worth of goods and imported $662 million in foreign products and commodities – with the shortfall being covered by American aid. War in the Middle East in 1973 fueled a dramatic rise in the prices of world commodities – such as oil and rice – and this created a huge problem for import-dependent South Vietnam. Although US support for imports kept growing – from $591 million in 1972 to $727 million in 1974 – South Vietnam could import only half of what it used to buy in 1972.

Inflation surged, and those on fixed incomes in the army and the bureaucracy had the hardest time making ends meet, which in turn destabilized the government’s legitimacy from within. Prices in Saigon rose 26 percent in 1972, 45 percent in 1973, and 63 percent in 1974. In an added blow, the departure of US troops deprived the economy of a large source of foreign exchange as the American purchase of piasters dropped from $347 million in 1969 to $97 million in 1974. The currency had to be devalued again and again, making imports more expensive and inflation worse. Since a third of the jobs were in service occupations catering to the Americans, the US withdrawal threw many people into unemployment. Income dropped precipitously. With fewer and fewer buyers, businesses and enterprises had to lay off their workers. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker reported from Saigon that the business recession was serious. South Vietnam was purchasing only essentials. Importers had stopped importing and were finding it hard to sell the merchandise they had. All new investment projects were being postponed. The fighting had reduced the export of rubber and lumber. As a result, manufacturing had slowed to a snail’s pace.Footnote ⁴¹ In all, 2 million people – a third of the work force – lost their jobs. In Saigon, the Thiệu government made some feeble attempts to address the crisis, such as hiring workers to sweep the streets and the gutters. But lack of planning and inefficiency, coupled with forces beyond its control – such as worldwide inflation – the continuing disruption and destruction of escalated warfare, and endemic corruption doomed Saigon.Footnote ⁴²

The economic crisis hit the urban areas the hardest. But the countryside also suffered. Modernization of agriculture had led to an increase in production but it also had made farmers dependent on the import of fertilizers and fuel for their pumps and equipment to grow Miracle Rice. Between 1972 and 1974, there was a worldwide shortage of fertilizers, and prices increased 285 percent. Prices for diesel fuel doubled. Although the price of rice the farmers could command rose 143 percent, this increase could not cover their costs. It was in this climate that the fertilizer scandal erupted in 1974, implicating Thiệu’s family and cronies, a minister of trade, and many province chiefs. As fertilizer prices rose in 1973, two-thirds of the $85 million in imported fertilizer was diverted, hoarded, and sold at inflated prices. The scandal provoked widespread protests.

In this crisis, hostility to President Thiệu and the endemic corruption of his government – which had been muted while American money was plentiful – grew alarmingly. Urban protests erupted on a scale not seen in years. Most significantly, Catholic priests – the most ardent of anticommunists – took to the street to protest the corruption which they feared would aid a communist victory. They were joined by students, Buddhist monks, and war veterans demanding assistance. The sight of riot police with their shields and the smell of tear gas became a common occurrence in Saigon and other areas. In a 1970 intelligence assessment, the CIA stated that “Political stresses … may in the long run significantly affect the ability of South Vietnam to hang together and continue the war as US forces withdraw.” Protests, it continued, had become more and more common, and there was a crisis of confidence within the government.Footnote ⁴³ On the military side, “economic contraction and reduction in aid that followed the withdrawal of American troops” forced the South Vietnamese army to fight “a poor man’s war” with less airpower and artillery support.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the same time, the difficulty of making ends meet and disillusionment about the continued fighting was sapping military morale, reflected in an unwillingness to fight.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the countryside, the peasants were sullen and exhausted by the violence and destruction, and in no mood to support a government they viewed as venal and abusive.

As the communists prepared their Spring Offensive of 1975, the South Vietnamese homefront, sapped by the long war, weakened by mismanagement and corruption, losing confidence in its government, and beset by uncertainty over continued American support, was teetering on the edge. The communist final push brought its collapse.

The victory at Điện Biên Phủ on May 7, 1954, ended the French Indochina War (1946–54) between Vietnam and France, and brought to Vietnam a temporary peace, but also a long-term division of the country into North and South at the 17th parallel, which lasted until April 30, 1975. Like the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula and the Berlin Wall, the 17th parallel became a symbol of the confrontation between two superpowers, namely the Soviet Union and the United States, during the Cold War. But the difference between these cases is that, during these twenty-one long years of division, North Vietnam became an object of the most terrible, bloody, and annihilative attacks, the legacy of which still remains.

According to an official report of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) dated September 23, 1975, during the air and naval war against North Vietnam, the Americans dropped over its territory 2,550,000 tons of bombs in total, more than Americans dropped on the Pacific, Europe, and Mediterranean fronts combined during World War II. All six big cities of North Vietnam were bombed, and half of them were completely destroyed. Moreover, 28 of 30 provincial towns, 96 of 116 district towns, and 4,000 of 5,788 villages were heavily bombed. In addition, 350 hospitals, 3,000 schools and universities, 491 churches, and 530 pagodas and temples were extensively damaged by bombs. In the economic sphere, 66 sovkhozes (state-run farms), 1,600 irrigation structures, 1,000 dykes, all harbors and power stations, all 6 railroads, and even all railway bridges were destroyed. About 40,000 cattle were killed. The American air and naval attacks killed 10,000 civilians and made 70,000 children orphans and another 10,000 disabled. And, in return, North Vietnam shot down 4,181 airplanes including 68 B-52s and 13 F-111s, captured 472 American pilots, and fired upon and sank 271 ships of different kinds.Footnote ¹

Fighting against the United States and Supplying the War in the South

Facing the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, on March 27, 1964, President Hồ Chí Minh convened a special political meeting to discuss the chances of the war being expanded through the direct participation of American soldiers. In his report to the meeting, President Hồ Chí Minh underlined North Vietnam’s twofold main task: on the one hand to preserve more human and material resources to increase aid for the struggle in the South, and on the other hand to promote national capacities for defense and to ensure they were ready to resist. He confirmed that “if they [the Americans] risk touching the North, they certainly will be defeated.” President Hồ Chí Minh called on all North Vietnamese to double their workloads and produce twice their output in order to better serve their Southern compatriots. This meeting played an important role in the warfighting, similar to the Diên Hồng meeting in the thirteenth century, organized by the Trần dynasty to discuss how to fight against Mongol invasions. After focusing on these twofold tasks of North Vietnam, President Hồ Chí Minh appealed to the people: “Keep in mind your oppressed Southern brothers and sisters as you toil, labor, and work on their behalf too.” Following this appeal, there was a series of competitions held among people in the whole of North Vietnam: for example, “Three Improvements” (ba cải tiến), “Three Undertakings” (ba đảm đang), “Three Readies” (ba sẵn sàng), “Three Firsts Flag” (cờ ba nhất; referring to the army movement encouraging all to be the best and the most uniform and to achieve the most), and “Medical doctors are as kind as Mother” (Thầy thuốc như mẹ hiền). Many proverbs, sayings about the North helping the South, appeared during this time, such as “There is not a single pound of rice missing, and the army is full, not lacking a single person” (Thóc không thiếu một cân, quân không thiếu một người). In Thái Bình, an agricultural province in the Red River Delta, there was a popular movement known as “rice field providing 5 tons of rice” (cánh đồng 5 tấn).

On August 7, 1964, the US Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed President Lyndon B. Johnson to greatly escalate US military involvement in the Vietnam War. The USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy were sent to the area that year in order to conduct reconnaissance and to intercept North Vietnamese communications in support of South Vietnamese war efforts. By the night of August 4, the US military had intercepted North Vietnamese communications that led officials to believe that a North Vietnamese attack on its destroyers was being planned. That night proved to be a stormy one. The Maddox and the Turner Joy moved out to sea, but both reported that they were being fired upon by North Vietnamese patrol boats. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution at the insistence of President Johnson, with the understanding that he would not use it to go to war. Facing the escalation of the US air and naval war against the North, in March 1964, the North Vietnamese Ministry of National Defense decided to increase the number of permanent soldiers to 300,000.Footnote ²

“Special Warfare” to “Limited Warfare”

North Vietnam transitioned from conducting “special warfare” (chiến tranh đặc biệt) to enter a new phase of working to defeat the United States in “limited warfare” (chiến tranh hạn chế) following Johnson’s approval in July 1965 of the search-and-destroy strategy of General William Westmoreland, the commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). That year, the Vietnamese people’s resistance to US military intervention entered a new period of “local warfare” (chiến tranh cục bộ) with the direct involvement of US soldiers in the South and an enlarged air war in the North. In the new situation, an important question rose to the fore: Should North Vietnam continue the cause of building the socialist transformation of its economy or cease and shift its attention southward? And, if it continued promoting socialism, how should it continue?

On March 25, 1965, the 11th meeting (Session III) of the Central Committee discussed and decided to move the North’s economy from a peacetime basis to a war one. The strategic redirection was a long, difficult, and challenging process. There was a comprehensive strategy including all aspects from ideological and structural ones, to economic construction, to defense capacities. Having considered the reality of wartime, on April 10, 1965, the National Assembly approved a resolution assigning its Permanent Commission the right to approve a state plan, decide on issues relating to the annual budget and taxes, and even to take the decision to convene the National Assembly at an appropriate time. In wartime, the best way to develop was to mobilize the capacities of localities. In April 1966, a government report confirmed: “Developing the local economy with a higher tempo than normal is the main direction for all locals to promote their own forces to fight against enemy according to the guidelines of the people’s war.”Footnote ³ According to these guidelines, all localities were assigned more power, in particular the right to establish an economic plan and a budget for their province. The state did not design a long-term plan; instead the plans ran for one or two years, according to the reality of the war. The production plan had fixed priorities; the first was to serve the demands of war and the needs of the people. To encourage people in the new situation of the war enlarging to the whole country, on July 20, 1965, President Hồ Chí Minh appealed to the people: “Even if [we have] to struggle for five years, ten years, or longer, we will also firmly struggle until complete victory.”Footnote ⁴

Parallel with building socialism, the CPV also had to construct defenses to fight against the air and naval war being conducted by the Americans. On January 2, 1965, the Politburo issued Decree No. 88-CT/TW concerning a Political Correction Campaign, requiring cadres and people to be fully aware of new situations and tasks in the new phase, “raising revolutionary quality and ethics and criticizing [any] appearance of individualism.”Footnote ⁵

In January 1965, the Defense Council met under the chairmanship of Hồ Chí Minh. It discussed and set guidelines for a national defense strategy in the new circumstances:

• To strengthen the nation’s defenses and to increase security and military preparedness.

• To strive to build up strong people’s military forces including a permanent force, a local force, volunteer militias, and a reserve force.

• To consolidate the North comprehensively by combining economic and defense tasks.

Based on Resolution No. 102 of the Permanent Committee of the National Assembly, on April 25, 1965, President Hồ Chí Minh signed a decree to announce official mobilization: a number of officers, noncommissioned officers, reserve soldiers, and some reserve civilians who were not yet serving in the army would be mobilized.

In 1965, nearly 290,000 people voluntarily joined the army, so that the number of permanent forces of the North reached 400,000 soldiers. Among them air defense and the air force were strengthened significantly with surface-to-air rockets, warning radar, and fighter jets. Logistics was the other unit that was strengthened rapidly. Đinh Đức Thiện, an alternate member of the Central Committee, who had a lot of experience in leading logistics and transportation during the resistance fighting against the French, returned to the position of director general of the logistics department. The volunteer militia was increased to 10 percent of the population. It was equipped with heavy machine anti-aircraft guns, ranging in size from 12.7mm to 100mm. In parallel the coastal defense force and the sapper forces were increased. In a short time the whole North became the great rear base of the people’s war, allowing it to attack and defend everywhere at any time.

From 1965 to 1967, the Americans carried out an air war against North Vietnam with intensive attacks. From the southern provinces close to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) such as Quảng Bình, Quảng Trị, and Vĩnh Linh, they crossed the 20th parallel heading northward in June 1965. The targets of the attack were military and economic, and especially transportation lines such as the Hàm Rồng bridge and the railways Phú Thọ–Yên Bái–Lào Cai, Hòa Bình–Lạng Sơn, Hanoi–Hải Phòng, and Đông Triều–Hòn Gai. On May 22, 1965, American aircraft bombed two Soviet fishing vessels under charter to North Vietnam in Hải Hậu (Nam Định), damaging one, killing two people, and injuring seven more. Another thirty sailors were rescued. On July 24, 1965, the anti-aircraft rocket troops participated for the first time in a battle together with other forces; they shot down three F-4 aircraft from the height of 23,000 feet (7,000 meters) in Hà Tây province (today Hanoi). In 1965, the total number of American aircraft shot down by North Vietnamese was 834, among them 163 in April, 111 in September, and 105 in October.Footnote ⁶ Up to April 30, 1966, the North’s air defense forces shot down 1,005 planes and captured many pilots.

In 1966, in order to support ground forces in the South, the Americans intensified the air war attacking the North. Over the course of two days in 1966, April 14 and 27, several groups of B-52s bombed National Route 12 through Quảng Bình province with the aim of cutting transportation through the border with Laos connecting with People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) Group 559, which was in charge of maintenance and extension of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. Alongside bombing of main transportation links, other targets of American attacks included military bases, industrial zones such as the Uông Bí and Cao Ngạn thermal power stations, the Cẩm Phả coal mine, and the Thái Nguyên cast iron zone, among others. Moreover, American aircraft bombed the areas surrounding Hanoi and Hải Phòng, focusing on gas and petroleum storage facilities. The more aircraft they sent, the more were shot down. During a single month from July 17 to August 17, 1966, 138 American airplanes were shot down (on average 4.4 aircraft a day). After more than one month of bombing gas and petroleum storage facilities, the CIA reported that 70 percent of North Vietnam’s gas and petroleum storage capacity had been destroyed. However, a secret document from the US Department of Defense had to admit that the bombing of oil storages had failed. There was no evidence to show North Vietnam faced any difficulties of lacking oil.Footnote ⁷

In 1967, a year of strategic importance for both the United States and Vietnam, American air forces increased their attack on North Vietnam and focused on six objectives, namely power facilities, industry, transportation, reserve fuel storage, airports, and air defense bases. On the one hand they bombed areas around big cities such as Hanoi and Hải Phòng; on the other hand they scattered land mines and torpedoes in rivers and estuaries, and controlled the coastal areas from the 17th to the 20th parallel with their navy. According to Don Oberdorfer, until the end of 1967, Americans dropped approximately 1,630,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam, more than dropped on European battlefields during World War II, double what it dropped in the Korean War, and triple what it dropped on the battlefields of the Asia–Pacific region during World War II. On average each square mile of North and South Vietnam received 12 tons (4.6 tons per square km) of bombs, about 110 lb (50 kg) of bombs per capita.Footnote ⁸ American bombardment caused heavy damage to North Vietnam. According to the CIA, the US Air Force’s Operation Rolling Thunder alone killed 13,000 people in North Vietnam in 1965, 24,000 in 1966 (of whom 80 percent were civilians), and approximately 29,000 in 1967.Footnote ⁹ According to research done by the PAVN General Staff’s Department of Operations, during four years of the American air and naval war (1964–8), 14,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and 60,000 North Vietnamese civilians were killed by bombs and bullets.Footnote ¹⁰ Beside the catastrophic levels of human lives lost, North Vietnam was heavily damaged materially: 391 schools, 92 healthcare facilities, 149 churches, and 79 pagodas were destroyed, while 25 of 30 towns and 3 of 5 cities were bombed many times.

But there was an irony: the more the Americans attacked, the less they achieved. The former US secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara admitted that “bombing did not achieve its basic goals: as Rolling Thunder intensified, US intelligence estimated that infiltration [of Northern soldiers into the South] increased from about 35,000 men in 1965 to as many as 90,000 in 1967, while Hanoi’s will to carry on the fight stayed firm.”Footnote ¹¹ McNamara did not know what his counterpart on the other side was thinking. According to Võ Nguyên Giáp in 1967, after two years of war, the more the Vietnamese fought, the stronger they became, and he believed they would definitively defeat the United States. Võ Nguyên Giáp pointed out the US mistake the Americans perhaps never considered: “the decision to bring a big expeditionary army to invade the south of our country was one of the biggest strategic mistakes in the history of American imperialism. Within this strategic mistake, the use of the air force and navy to expand the war to the North was again one of the most serious mistakes and one of the most stupid measures of the US imperialists. Still, the generals of the Pentagon were thinking that only escalation of the war to the North could take the initiative and improve the war situation.”Footnote ¹²

Building the Great Northern Homefront

The will of North Vietnam was confirmed decisively by President Hồ Chí Minh in his appeal on July 17, 1966, as the peak time of the war in both South and North Vietnam: “The war may last for five, ten, twenty years or even longer; Hanoi, Hải Phòng, and some cities, factories may be destroyed; however, the Vietnamese people are wholeheartedly committed. Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom. After the day of victory, our people will rebuild our country to be more comfortable, bigger, and more beautiful than today.”Footnote ¹³

Hồ Chí Minh’s persona represented the power of unity and national spirit in the struggle of fighting for independence and unification. He knew how to encourage people when they fulfilled their task excellently. On his birthday, May 19, 1967, he sent eight flower baskets to the missile and anti-aircraft artillery units around Hanoi, which had shot down seven American aircraft that day. On one afternoon in July 1967, having listened to the report of his secretary Vũ Kỳ about the artillery battery that was on the alert on the roof of Ba Đình Hall, Hồ Chí Minh withdrew 25,000 dong from honorariums he had received from international newspapers, and presented the monetary award to the soldiers to celebrate.Footnote ¹⁴

By the end of 1967, North Vietnam had already shot down 2,680 American aircraft. Amid the spate of victories, on June 16, 1967, the first female volunteer militia from Hoa Lộc commune, Hậu Lộc district, Thanh Hóa province, shot down an A-4D with infantry rifles. Following this, on October 14 and 24, 1967, a platoon of veteran volunteer militia from Hoằng Trường commune, Hoằng Hóa district, Thanh Hóa province, shot down two more American aircraft in their home area also with infantry rifles.

Alongside shooting down aircraft, North Vietnamese people still rescued many American pilots and kept them alive as prisoners of war after the latter had jumped out of their flaming planes. John McCain, later a US senator and presidential candidate, was retrieved by Mai Van On from Truc Bach Lake in Hanoi on October 26, 1967. Pete Peterson, who later served as the first American ambassador to Vietnam (from April 1997 to July 2001), was captured by Nguyen Van Chop on September 10, 1967, in An Bài village, An Bình commune, Nam Sách district, Hải Dương province.

Responding to President Hồ Chí Minh’s appeal, 268,974 young people voluntarily joined the army in summer 1966 with the spirit of “Split the Truong Son Mountains to save the country” (Xẻ dọc Trường Sơn đi cứu nước). The percentage of the population in volunteer militias increased from 8 percent in 1964 to 10 percent in 1965. The number of householders joining agricultural cooperatives increased from 84 percent in 1964 to 94.1 percent in 1967, and 94.8 percent in 1968. There were 23,264 agricultural cooperatives with 29,896 members.Footnote ¹⁵ Compared with 1964, the total value of mechanized agricultural output in 1967 increased 40.5 percent. During the period 1965–8, the production of food remained as high as in 1964; in fact in 1965 it was even higher at 5,562,000 tons. In industry, the number of factories increased from 1,132 in 1965 to 1,352 in 1969. However, due to war circumstances, the average industrial output decreased by 2 percent. In the academic year 1967–8 the number of students reached more than 6 million, compared to 4.5 million pupils in the academic year 1964–5. Accordingly, the number of teachers in schools increased from 77,685 in 1964–5 to 102,697 in 1967–8, and the number of lecturers in universities increased from 2,750 to 6,727. In 1964–5 there were 9,295 schools and 16 universities, and by 1967–8 those numbers had increased to 11,497 and 35 respectively. In terms of printing, in 1965 1,887 books were published in more than 22 million copies, while in 1968 this number increased by another 1,471 books, with 30 million copies published. In 1964 there were 176 libraries, then in 1967, even after the bombing, this number remained 176. In terms of public health, in 1964 there were 457 hospitals, 7 nursing homes, and 5,289 healthcare stations; by 1967 those numbers increased to 981, 50, and 6,043 respectively. In 1967, there were 60,000 medical doctors, nurses, physicians, and midwives and 9,435 pharmacists.Footnote ¹⁶

One of the most important tasks of the North during the war was supplying South Vietnam. Immediately after Resolution 15 (1959), the Politburo planned to establish a military transportation unit along the Truong Son Mountain range named Group 559 (mentioned above) and a maritime transportation unit in the East Sea (the South China Sea) named Group 759. In the beginning, Group 559 mostly transported supplies by bicycle. Based on the old communications roads that had existed during the French Indochina War, Group 559 reconstructed and opened roads, established stations along them, and arranged the first transportation of weapons and food to supply the South. Secrecy was the most important watchword of Group 559. Its most popular saying was “Walk without a trace, live without a shack, cook without smoke, speak without a voice” (Đi không dấu, ở không lán, nấu không khói, nói không tiếng). In August 1959, the first wave of soldiers and goods arrived in the South. On August 20, 1959, Group 559 handed over to the V Military District 31 tons of goods including 1,700 guns with ammunition. Up to 1960, each month Group 559 transported on average five tons of goods to Palin (Western Thừa Thiên Huế). In the meantime, Group 759 used fishing boats with motors and small ships of the T50 and T100 models to transport the first wave of goods from Hải Phòng port and the IV District to the provinces of V District and the southern part of Vietnam. In the first ten months of 1960, there were 5 ships (each carrying 50–60 tons) that traveled 21 times to the coastal provinces of the South.

To meet the higher demands from the South, in June 1965, the party decided to develop Group 559 into a “motorized transport network” (mạng lưới đường vận tải cơ giới) so that it could more quickly transport more soldiers, weapons, food, and other war materiel to the South. In parallel, on June 21, 1965, the prime minister issued Decree No. 71-TTg to establish “Youth Volunteers against the United States for the Salvation of the Country” (Thanh niên xung phong chống Mỹ cứu nước). Responding to guidelines from the government, from the middle of 1965, all the provinces of the North proactively organized their youth volunteer groups to meet the requirements of making transportation feasible. On April 25, 1965, Thanh Hóa province established its youth volunteer organization with 1,200 members. During June 1965 alone, 8,856 volunteers from Hà Tĩnh, Quảng Bình, Ninh Bình, and Nam Hà provinces joined Group 559 to help with transportation tasks. Until July 1965 the youth volunteer movement (in which women participants were the majority) set a record as the number of volunteers exceeded demand many times over.

This force of youth volunteers served mostly on the transportation network. According to this strategy, to ensure the transport network always flowed freely became the one central task of the whole party, the army, and the people; this task held strategic importance both for the consolidation and defense of the socialist North and for aiding the war of liberation in the South and supporting revolution in friendly countries. On the whole, from 1965 to 1968, more than half the personnel and 80 percent of the weapons, ammunition, and other technical means were sent from the homefront in the North to the battlefields in the South. Among these supplies, human resources formed the major part. During the three years from 1965 to 1968, 888,641 young people joined military forces, among whom 336,900 marched over mountains, across rivers, and through forests to reach the South. In 1968 alone, North Vietnam mobilized 311,749 in the army and supplied 141,084 soldiers for the fronts in the South. Among Northern regions, Military District No. 3 was prominent because it contained two-thirds of the Northern population.

Among the localities of North Vietnam, the autonomous Northwest Region played an important role in supplying the South. This region is mountainous with a difficult economic situation, and it was home to many different ethnic minorities. However, according to a regional party conference addressing the five-year mobilization drive from 1965 to 1969: “The outstanding achievement was that no single ethnic group had no person joining the army over the past five years. The quality [of the mobilization drive] was good. In general, it was clear that the party had pursued a long-term strategy of readying local forces as well as developing and building up the homefront.”Footnote ¹⁷

In the Northwest Region, in comparison to other regions of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), the mobilization of people into a professional army was no easy task because of the distrustful relationship in the past between the government and ethnic minority groups. Another reason was that many of the minority ethnic people had never left their home area and forests. However, thanks to the mobilization policy of the party, they “actively joined in all military services of the people’s army to fight the air war to protect the socialist North, to protect the homeland and revolutionary base, and to go to the front.”Footnote ¹⁸ Although North Vietnam was successful in mobilizing people for the army and converting the land into a great rear base, there were many violations of official policy. A report from the same autonomous Northwest Region pointed out such situations: “The number of desertions was 193 (9 percent of mobilized people). There were six cases of adultery that were judged, but this trend was increasing. There were also some cases that gave birth, but did not register for benefits.”Footnote ¹⁹

In order to promote mobilization of ethnic groups to the front, the best method was a policy of taking care of a soldier’s relatives and family who remained at home (chính sách hậu phương quân đội). In general North Vietnam was successful in implementing this policy, but it was far from perfect, especially in the autonomous Northwest Region; the report suggested it was important “(1) to make sure that post was sent from the front to the homefront; (2) the victory news of soldiers and their units was very important for their families and home regions; (3) when a death notice arrives for a soldier, it is important to have their effects [to give to the family].”Footnote ²⁰

In short, over the course of three years, 1965–7, of escalation of the air war against North Vietnam, Americans did not achieve their strategic objectives. North Vietnam was not destroyed, but instead was able to build up, develop itself, and supply the South. This reality led Secretary of Defense McNamara to admit: “All this led me to conclude that no amount of bombing of the North – short of genocidal destruction, which no one contemplated – could end the war.”Footnote ²¹

Figure 23.1 Women factory workers in Hanoi go about their jobs with their rifles nearby (August 14, 1965).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Conclusion

The Tet Offensive in 1968 was a turning point in the war, and put an end to the Johnson presidency with his limited warfare strategy. Under pressure from both Congress and the American people, President Richard Nixon planned a new strategy, “Vietnamization,” to end the war with peace and honor for Americans. According to DRVN president Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnamization was a continuation of the war by other means: Vietnamese fighting Vietnamese using American power. At the beginning of 1969, on the occasion of Tet, Hồ Chí Minh sent New Year wishes: “To fight so that the Americans quit; to fight so that the [South Vietnamese] puppets fall” (đánh cho Mỹ cút, đánh cho ngụy nhào). In order to do this, North Vietnam had to rebuild its economy, honor its duties and commitments to the South, and strengthen its own military forces for the next step of the war.

During 1965–8, with more than 100,000 bombing sorties and more than 1 million tons of bombs and missiles dropped, the American air war heavily damaged the North’s economy. In this context, on September 2, 1969, President Hồ Chí Minh died. In his Testament, Hồ Chí Minh expressed: “My ultimate wish is that our whole Party and all our people, closely joining their efforts, build a peaceful, unified, independent, democratic, and prosperous Vietnam and make a worthy contribution to the world revolution.”Footnote ²² On this occasion, North Vietnam was carrying out a series of political campaigns to learn and to follow Hồ Chí Minh’s Testament. On February 3, 1979, First Secretary Lê Duẩn published his work, “Under the Glorious Flag of the Party” (Dưới lá cờ vẻ vang của Đảng), to summarize the most important experiences of the leadership of the party over the previous four decades and to appeal to all party members and all people to forge ahead in the cause of revolution.

Hồ Chí Minh’s parting words and Lê Duẩn’s exhortations held more urgency as the North Vietnamese homefront suffered setbacks in the post–Tet Offensive war. For instance, the DRVN needed to set its priority on agricultural production because yields were declining: from 5.4 million tons in 1967 to 4.6 million tons in 1968. While the major cause of the agricultural setbacks was the US bombing under Operation Rolling Thunder, mismanagement also plagued the cooperatives. Following the suspension of bombing, poor management was the main cause of cooperatives’ low income. A report from the Northwestern Region underlined the North’s socialist model during the Vietnam War: “In general, the management of cooperatives had a lot of weaknesses: on average there were only between four to six working hours per day, and the value of each working hour was so low (in 1964 a working day cost 0.77 VND [dong], but in 1970 the same working day was valued at only 0.43 VND) that cooperative peasants did not work enthusiastically.”Footnote ²³

In short, during the Vietnam War, North Vietnam carried out two parallel tasks with equal emphasis: building socialism and supplying the South. These two tasks were closely interrelated. Without building socialism, there would of course be nothing to supply the South with. And without supplying the South the construction of socialism would be impossible.

More than that, between 1965 and 1968 North Vietnam faced being destroyed by the air and naval war launched by US forces, but kept its footing amid bombings and death. North Vietnam not only successfully built socialism, but it also fulfilled the task of supplying the South thanks to the nationalism and sacrifice of millions of people. In his “Lessons of Vietnam,” McNamara recognized one of the most important reasons for the US failure in Vietnam: “We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people (in this case, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong) to fight and die for their beliefs and values.”Footnote ²⁴