Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
248
Kennedy was perplexed not that Khrushchev would use nuclear leverage, but
that he had personally lied about the contents of the ships going to Cuba for
the last few months. “The lies, Kennedy concluded, were more dangerous
than the missiles,”
7
evidence that Khrushchev might do anything. Military
advisers to the president urged immediate offensive action, but Kennedy
maintained his command and his cool, having learned his lesson during the
Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Not wanting to be a dangerous fool, Kennedy also did not want to appear
weak, and from October 22 to 28, he matched Khrushchev with one hair-
raising public threat after another. Kennedy made the world know that the
United States would not allow the missiles to remain. He ordered a full naval
blockade and promised to sink any Soviet ships that crossed the line, but
secretly he allowed a number of ships to get through as a goodwill gesture
to Khrushchev. An invasion force assembled on the beaches of Florida, and
Kennedy even considered evacuating all cities along the East Coast. He could
smell Armageddon.
The Cuban missile crisis passed into history on Sunday, October 28, when
the two leaders reached an agreement—part public, part private—as a way
for both of them to save face. Khrushchev promised to dismantle all launch
sites and return the warheads to the Soviet Union. That was public. And Ken-
nedy
promised never to invade Cuba. That was also public. Inside a veil of
letters, Kennedy also agreed to remove missiles stationed in Turkey. Perhaps
the most dangerous days of the Cold War had ended, though the rhetoric,
weapons making, and fear lasted—as Paul Simon sang, “Still crazy after all
these years”
8
—until the last days of Soviet power in the early 1990s. With
regard to Cuba and the Soviets, John F. Kennedy had proven himself worthy of
leading the most powerful nation in the history of the world, not so different,
perhaps, from the deft, scripted maneuvers of James Tiberius Kirk, captain
of the Enterprise, that flying fortress of futuristic freedom. There were other
tests for Kennedy
, however, including one in Vietnam.
The Vietnam Era: Civil Rights, the Great Society, and War
What is power? If power is the ability to destroy, then white segregationists
and the United States military had power. In April 1962, when Martin Luther
King Jr. called for a civil rights march to protest segregation in Montgomery,
Alabama, the sheriff of Montgomery, Bull Connor, unleashed snapping and
charging German shepherds and blasted fire department water hoses at full
force against nonviolent protesters, many of whom were children. That was
the power to destroy. But the use of power bears unforeseen consequences.
Bull Connor’s bully tactics had far less historical force than the persistent
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
determination of black and white demonstrators who used their battered bod-
ies to teach the nation how to feel compassion. King was thrown into jail in
Birmingham, where he wrote a letter on whatever scraps of paper he could
scrounge. That Letter from Birmingham Jail became the bible of the civil
rights movement in its eloquent demand for immediate justice. The letter
had the power to educate. Bull Connor and others like him had the power of
guns, dogs, and hatred.
F
rom the pulpits of their feet and the thrones of their voices, the downtrod-
den
broadcast their plight, and it became impossible not to listen. On August
28, 1963, over 200,000 people marched on Washington, DC, to revolutionize
the politics of race in America. Many people gave speeches that day to the
hopeful advocates of change packed together in pride on the National Mall.
And there was music, too: a young folk singer named Bob Dylan; the harmoni-
ous
trio Peter, Paul and Mary, who sang Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”; and
Mahalia Jackson, a Louisiana-born gospel singer who had serenaded President
Kennedy at his inaugural. In the festival spirit of high expectations, the young
leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John L.
Lewis, a future congressman who had been smashed in the head with a wooden
crate during the Freedom Rides of 1961, criticized Kennedy’s impending civil
rights bill for not offering protections for “young children and old women from
police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations.”
9
Lewis
said that with or without the government’s help, “by the force of our demands,
our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the desegregated South
into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God and
democracy.”
10
He spoke well, but few people could talk in the lyrical dream
language of Martin Luther King Jr., who gave the last address of the day.
Some things that we hear, or see, or touch are so right they seem to have
been pulled out of a shared ancestral well of memory, like words inscribed on
DNA. When King took the stage, he spoke partly from his notes and partly
from that well of memory, a place he always returned to when speaking.
“Now is the time,” he said, “to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s
children.” The words poured out of him, an American hymn. There at the
end of a long good day, after cheese sandwiches had been passed through the
crowd, after the hot sun had heated the people, King dove deeper into the well
of truth, set his script aside, and said, “I say to you today, my friends, that in
spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It
is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. . . . I have a dream that my
four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by
the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” His voice was
unique, sweet and strong, with an occasional slight quiver as though the emo-
tion might overwhelm him.
What he wanted was what his audience wanted,
AMERICAN STORIES
250
to be able to sing out “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we
are free at last!”
11
On the winds of King’s words, the movement soared and
gained more powerful advocates. The day after the march, President Kennedy
met with King and congratulated him. Peace was power.
Three months later, John F. Kennedy, who had lately addressed racism
as a national moral issue, who had been learning that some causes could
not wait, was shot to death in Dallas, Texas, while sitting next to his wife,
Jacqueline, in an open car in a motorcade. He was wearing a back brace that
day to ease the muscle pain that never seemed to let up, and after a first bullet
passed through his neck, the brace kept him from slumping over, allowing
the second bullet to enter his skull. He died on November 22, 1963, taking
a certain portion of national light with him into his grave. Grief poured like
rain, but Kennedy’s death gave sanction to the next president to push through
bold programs for social justice. Lyndon Baines Johnson took very little time
to declare war on poverty, to infuse federal money into inner-city housing, to
create Medicare insurance for the elderly, and to invite young people into his
domestic peace corps, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). And Johnson
railroaded Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act through Congress. Kennedy’s legacy
was Johnson’s mantle; and it was a mixed legacy, alternately transcendent
and troubled.
Whatever
legislative good Kennedy had actually done for the civil rights
movement—which his critics claimed was too little and too slow—or for
international peace, he had inspired much of the nation, and the assassin’s
bullets dampened the exuberance Kennedy called forth. But national mourning
could last only so long, and Johnson, a respected politician with immense clout
on Capitol Hill, accomplished more liberal governance than perhaps anyone
ever had in the history of the nation. However, just as Kennedy had been left
a Cold War legacy by his predecessors in office, he bequeathed to Johnson
an escalating struggle in the poor and distant nation of Vietnam. Johnson’s
choices concerning Vietnam did a lot to ruin the chances for his Great Society
program at home. Military power proved to be, in this case, the most impover-
ishing
power of all. By the time Johnson declared that he would not run for a
second term as president in 1968, the costs of Vietnam had sapped the Left’s
momentum and had robbed the U.S. Treasury of money that would otherwise
have gone into urban renewal, schools, and other uplifting programs.
Since
the early 1950s, the United States had been footing about 80 percent
of France’s colonial war in Vietnam, which the French called “Indochina.” The
situation on the ground was confusing, with many different political parties
and factions vying for control. From a distance, however, a few things were
relatively clear. The United States wanted France’s support in Europe to halt
communism. France wanted its colony back: Indochina was rich in rubber trees
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
and opium (which the French trafficked as heroin all the way to the United
States, often through Cuba). Ho Chi Minh, a French-educated revolutionary
who had also spent time in Moscow, led the Vietminh, a nationalist-communist
militarized organization that had fought against the Japanese invaders during
World War II. In 1945 and 1946, Ho had asked the United States to help him
establish a democracy throughout North and South Vietnam, which, he said,
could become “a fertile field for American capital and enterprise.”
12
The French
demanded that the United States stay away from Ho, whose communism they
highlighted. In order to get French anticommunist support, the United States
agreed. Ho’s eight requests for help were answered with silence. With no other
source for assistance, Ho turned to China and the Soviets, who were more
than glad to help. The fighting dragged on until 1954, when a French force at
Dien Bien Phu was slaughtered by Ho’s Vietminh forces, led by General Vo
Nguyen Giap, a former history teacher. An armistice was signed, stipulating
that, for the time being, Vietnam would be divided at the seventeenth paral-
lel
and that in 1956 one set of elections would be held for the entire nation.
President Eisenhower looked on but never actually had the United States
sign the armistice. When 1956 rolled around and it became obvious that Ho
Chi Minh would win easily in the North and South, the United States and its
allies in the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, the South Pacific
counterpart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) said that they would
defend South Vietnam’s political integrity against any outside aggressors—a
not terribly surprising statement given an internal U.S. government document
admitting that South Vietnam was, in essence, a creation of the United States.
The elections never took place. Historian Stephen Ambrose points out that, in
fact, with its SEATO partners, the United States “violate[d] the Geneva agree-
ments
by bringing Vietnam into an alliance system.”
13
The United States was
willing to break international law because senior administration officials had
the hubris to think they knew best. Ho Chi Minh did not get elected because
the United States would not allow a communist a shot at an open election.
Instead, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been living in exile in New Jersey, was
installed as president of South Vietnam.
President Eisenhower was afraid of something he called the “domino ef-
fect,”
the theory that if one nation went communist, it would surely topple
its neighbors into communism also, one after the next. His thinking was as
black and white as a domino and entirely simplistic: he made the mistake of
assuming that communism was monolithic. But Ho hated the Chinese, once
having said, “It is better to sniff French dung for a while than eat China’s all
our life.”
14
And in 1969, the Soviets and Chinese got involved in a small border
war. Nevertheless, by the end of Eisenhower’s term in office in 1961, he had
sent more than 1,000 military “advisers” to Vietnam to train and advise the
AMERICAN STORIES
252
South Vietnamese army, and there were CIA agents at work also (who were,
incidentally, orchestrating the opium trade formerly run out of Laos by the
French military.) South Vietnam’s President Diem, a Catholic, rudely ruled a
majority Buddhist populace, greatly reducing the chance for democracy in his
country; his regime was called an emerging “fascist state” by a Saigon-based
CIA officer named Edward Lansdale.
15
South Vietnamese communists, the
Vietcong, were killing thousands of Diem’s supporters in the countryside;
Diem retaliated by ordering whole villages destroyed if they were suspected
or accused of collaborating with the Vietcong. During the summer of 1963,
Buddhist priests protested Diem’s regime by pouring gasoline over their
yellow robes and setting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon. It was a
civil war, and the United States was already deeply involved when, within a
month of each other, Kennedy and Diem were assassinated.
Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency with 16,000 U.S. troops in Viet-
nam.
There were 220,000 by the end of 1965 and 543,000 by late 1968.
16
The
war had become one part civil strife; one part Cold War with the United States,
the Soviets, and the Chinese funding their respective allies; one part direct
conflict between U.S. forces and the North Vietnamese army; and finally, a
terrible mess because U.S. combat troops were often at a loss to determine
who was friend and who was foe. How, though, did Vietnam transform from
an American concern to an all-out American war?
Korea had established the precedent for U.S. military engagement in
Southeast Asia, and the Cold War set the basic context of fear within which
both the Korean and Vietnamese wars took place. Communism, capitalism,
nationalism, colonialism, democracy, and totalitarianism were the driving and
dividing forces of the mid-century. These “isms” mattered to people because
they equaled freedom and power. Regrettably, many bad things were done in
the name of freedom. In 1964, with President Johnson fully in control of U.S.
foreign policy, a small incident in a body of water few Americans had ever
heard of gave him a pretext to escalate American involvement in Vietnam.
On August 2, a U.S. naval vessel, the Maddox, was fired on as it was skirt-
ing
(and perhaps crossing into) North Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin. The North
Vietnamese were feeling twitchy because the Maddox’s spy mission took
place
at the same time South Vietnamese commandos were raiding the North
Vietnamese coast. Two days later, the United States claimed that the Maddox
had
been fired on a second time, an attack that never actually happened, as
newly released National Security Agency documents make clear.
17
Johnson
went before Congress and claimed the Maddox had been in international waters
when it was fired on twice in two days. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, granting Johnson the authority to make war. That was the power
of a lie, or at least an untruth. (When irrefutable revelations about the incident
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
came to light in December 2005, the results of the military and administration
officials’ lie could not be undone; the war was already over.)
With his new war-making authority, Johnson initiated nearly nonstop bomb-
ing
of North Vietnam: first, “strategic” infrastructure targets like oil dumps
and munitions depots; later, cities like Hanoi, the capital of the North. By
1970, when Nixon was in office and continuing to order bombing raids over
North Vietnam (and neighboring Cambodia and Laos), the United States had
dropped more bombs than had been dropped in the entire history of World
War II. But the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong would not give up.
They and their commanders, like Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969, knew
they were not just fighting the U.S. military; they were fighting against the
will of the citizens of the United States to continue spilling money and blood
into a cause that seemed, as the body count mounted, to make less sense to
more people. “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” asked the
folk-rock group Country Joe & the Fish in 1965. “Don’t ask me, I don’t give
a damn,” answered the chorus. “Next stop is Vietnam.”
18
Tim O’Brien: Citizen Soldier
When the U.S. government and military sent American boys into combat in
South Vietnam in 1965, probably more than 50 percent of the population,
and in some villages 100 percent, supported the Vietcong. This had been
true ever since 1956, when Eisenhower and Diem refused to allow elections.
What is more, an even larger majority of South Vietnamese citizens opposed
their own government. Diem and his successors were at best inept. The U.S.
military force of citizen soldiers was, in essence, being deployed to support
an unpopular regime against a relatively popular, indigenous foe. College
deferments and plum placements in the U.S. National Guard ensured that the
draft army was composed overwhelmingly of the poor. And although African-
Americans constituted less than 15 percent of the U.S. population, “blacks
accounted for 24 percent of all Army combat deaths” in 1965.
19
Commanding
officers disproportionately placed black soldiers in front-line combat units.
Brown, black, and white soldiers held on as best they could with the aid of
CIA-transported opium injected under noxious clouds of Agent Orange, a
poisonous defoliant used to wipe out wide swaths of jungle in a failed effort
to steal cover from the North Vietnamese army (NVA). By war’s end, at least
one-third of Vietnam’s jungles were ruined, the wildlife gone, and the poison
sunk into the ground. Nonetheless, plenty of lush arboreal canopy remained
to provide cover for the NVA. One marine, Leo Cawley, remembered a grue-
some
incident from 1966 when the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) shot
an antitank explosive into a bus full of Buddhists. “Everywhere there were
AMERICAN STORIES
254
dead, spattered with blood,” Cawley recalled. “What did it all mean? These
were the Vietnamese that we were supposed to be defending. It was some
gook hassle the gunnery sergeant explained. . . . We had freed up the ARVN
to crush the Buddhists.”
20
It really is no wonder that the average American GI upgraded the World War
II phrase SNAFU (“Situation Normal All Fucked Up”) to FUBAR (“Fucked
Up Beyond All Recognition”). Fifty-eight thousand American men died in
Vietnam, and more than 300,000 more were wounded, some of whom went
home to participate in antiwar demonstrations as members of Vietnam Veter-
ans
Against the War (as did John Kerry, a future U.S. senator and contender
for the presidency in 2004). More than 4 million Vietnamese people—men,
women, and children—were wounded and killed between 1945 and 1975,
when the North Vietnamese forces declared victory through unification. Of
those injured, an uncountable number were South Vietnamese civilians hurt by
ARVN and U.S. soldiers unleashing their machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols,
and mortars into so-called free-fire zones, plots of land in which anything
moving could be shot.
In
1968, a college graduate named Tim O’Brien received his draft notice.
O’Brien had grown up in a small Midwestern town where the driving force
was devotion to God and country. Most of the men he knew were veterans
of World War II, Korea, or both. They huddled together at the local Veterans
of Foreign Wars post, nursing their beers or coffees, and told tales about the
rightness of serving in the military. Tim O’Brien had decided by the time his
draft notice arrived in the mail that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was wrong-
headed,
misguided, and immoral. Because of this conviction, he faced the
toughest choice in his life up to that point. Should he show up for duty because
his government told him to? Should he refuse to report for duty and face jail
time, thereby acting on his conscience? Or should he flee the country, never
to return, thereby acting on his conscience and saving himself years in a tiny
jail cell? He wondered which choice was right and which choice was brave.
The year of Tim O’Brien’s decision, 1968, was a tough year for the United
States. The Tet Offensive showed North Vietnamese and Vietcong tenacity.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed. President Johnson
told the nation he would not run for a second term. And antiwar demonstrations
picked up intensity. Men burned their draft cards. Cities burned after King’s
assassination. And although the public would not find out about it until more
than a year later, 504 residents of a tiny village called My Lai were lined up by
ditches and assassinated by a U.S. military company under the cold direction
of Lieutenant William Calley. Under these tensions near and far, Tim O’Brien
mulled over his options.
In
his memoirs, O’Brien recalled, “The summer of 1968 . . . was a good
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
time for talking about war and peace.”
21
So he jotted his thoughts onto napkins,
debated moral philosophy with friends, played golf and pool, gulped coffee,
and remained confused—not about the war, but about whether he should
enter into it. “I was persuaded then, and I remain persuaded now,” he wrote,
“that the war was wrong. And since it was wrong and since people were dy-
ing
as a result of it, it was evil.” But O’Brien thought he could be “mistaken,
and who really knew, anyway?” Perhaps if he had been an orphan, he would
have evaded the draft, but “piled on top of” the philosophical conundrums
“was the town, my family, my teachers, a whole history of the prairie. Like
magnets these things pulled in one direction or the other, almost physical
forces weighting the problem, so that, in the end, it was less reason and more
gravity that was the final influence.” In August 1968, Tim O’Brien boarded a
bus to boot camp and entered the U.S. Army to fight a war he disagreed with
in a country he had never seen against a foe he did not know.
After going through infantry training; after suffering through the national-
istic
platitudes of a chaplain who refused to discuss morality and preferred to
lecture about unquestioning “faith and discipline”; after listening to officers
inculcate loathing for the Vietnamese people into the raw recruits by yelling
things like “Dinks [Vietnamese] are little shits. . . . If you want their guts,
you gotta go low”; and after deciding not to go AWOL by flying to Europe,
Tim O’Brien did his one-year tour of duty in Vietnam from February 1969
through March 1970.
After
sleeping in jungles; after hiking through jungles; after figuring out
how to sleep with mortar explosions “splitting the ground”; after soaking in
the brotherhood of obscene misery and fear; after learning that “REMF means
‘rear echelon motherfucker’” (someone with a cushy job away from the front
lines) and that “no one in Alpha Company gave a damn about the causes or
purposes of their war”; after realizing that some of his fellow soldiers carried
around Vietnamese body parts as trophies, like Mad Mark who “unwrapped
a bundle of cloth and dangled a hunk of brown, fresh human ear under the
yellow beam of light”; after all that and more, Tim O’Brien came home with
unfinished and unpolished conclusions: “Now, war ended, all I am left with
are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates.
It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings
are
heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers
are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper
and others didn’t and most didn’t care.”
The Vietnam War ended for the United States in 1973, when the last U.S.
troops left, though a few American personnel remained until 1975 when the
North Vietnamese took Saigon, which they renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The
conflict began as a colonial war and morphed into another fragment of Cold
AMERICAN STORIES
256
War fear and confusion. The United States committed itself unthinkingly to
“containing” communism wherever and however it might appear. “Contain-
ment”
sounds like a jar but looked like burning gasoline, the kind called
napalm that was dropped on jungles, villages, and people.
W
as it brave for Tim O’Brien to face his fear of violent death and go into
battle? Would it have been braver for O’Brien to burn his draft card and go
to jail in defense of his opposition to a war he thought wrong? Is it more
courageous to fight with fists and guns or to fight with words and peaceful
deeds, as Martin Luther King Jr. tried to do during his too-few years? Does the
answer depend on circumstance? As O’Brien explains it, “Courage is nothing
to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what
they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It’s acting wisely, acting
wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is endurance of the soul
in spite of fear—wisely.”
Notes
1. Permission to reprint this portion of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech was graciously
granted by Amanda LaForge, Chief Counsel, Democratic National Committee.
2. Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Touchstone, 2000),
367.
3
. Max Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Krushchev, and the Cuban
Missile Crisis (New York: Ballantine, 2004), 34.
4.
Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War
Victory (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 172.
5
. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy J. Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Krushchev,
Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 12–13.
6. Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War, 41.
7. Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War, 76.
8.
“Still Crazy After All These Years” was the title of a Paul Simon song released
in 1975, arguably not possible without the events of the 1960s and, at any rate, a fit-
ting anthem for the Cold
War.
9. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., Let Nobody Turn Us Around:
Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2000), 407.
10.
John Lewis and Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the
Movement (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace, 1999), 228.
1
1. John E. Lewis, A Documentary History of Human Rights: A Record of the
Events, Documents and Speeches That Shaped Our World (New York: Carroll and
Graf, 2003), 475–477.
12.
George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam,
1950–1975 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 10.
13.
Stephen Ambrose, To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 129.
14. Herring, America’s Longest War, 15.
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IN LOVE AND WAR: 1961–1969
15. Ben Kiernan, “The Vietnam War: Alternative Endings,” American Historical
Review 97, no. 4 (1992): 1123.
16. Marilyn Young, Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991),
166; Kiernan, “Vietnam War,” 1131.
17. Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The
Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” National Security Archive, www.gwu.
edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf.
1
8. Country Joe and the Fish, I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag (Vanguard,
1967).
19.
Scott Sigmund Gartner and Gary M. Segura, “Race, Casualties, and Opinion
in the Vietnam War,” Journal of Politics 62, no. 1 (2000): 116.
20. Kiernan, “Vietnam War,” 1132.
21. All quotations of Tim O’Brien are taken from If I Die in a Combat Zone Box
Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Laurel, 1969).