Posted on 05/02/2015 11:42:13 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The GOP’s destructive Vietnam mythology: How the right’s self-glorifying delusions led to decades of avoidable war
It only took about five years from the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, for the American right to succeed in burying the moment under mounds of revisionist horse shit. Ronald Reagan, speaking at a campaign appearance in the summer of 1980, said,
It is time that we recognized that [the American War in Vietnam] was, in truth, a noble cause… We dishonor the memory of 50 thousand young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful.
Reagan’s letting-down-the-troops angle was a brilliant rhetorical tactic. According to the story he and his fellow conservatives told, the only problem with the Vietnam War was that we hadn’t “let the soldiers win it.” By the time he took office, Reagan’s conscience-free take on the war had gained traction among a public eager for easy absolution and a restoration of America’s “standing in the world.” It would go on to serve as convenient justification for other, similarly doomed wars of adventure in the years to come.
The story of the fall of Saigon as the right tells it is not one of American hubris getting its comeuppance via popular revolution or withdrawal of broad support at home, but one of sinister betrayal by spineless bureaucrats, cowed by selfish, pampered, troop-hating radicals. America’s failure was not one of dubious moral judgement on the part of its ruling class, but rather moral turpitude on the part of its young people. Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz saw the era as one of “wild excess…self-glorification and narcissism…” by “an incredibly spoiled, self-indulgent generation….who were taught to think everything they say is right,” a perfect articulation of the self-justifying canard at the heart of what has become our popular understanding of the war, and of the similarly upside-down, false histories now being spun about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Throughout the Reagan/Bush years, right-wing fabulists worked tirelessly to convince the public that the peace marches and race riots of the ’60s had done more damage to this country than the war and racism that sparked them. That idealistic, pot-smoking, occasionally idiotic and arrogant teenagers, along with a small number of genuine radicals on the left, were more harmful than the paranoid, war-mongering, racist, sexist, corrupt, Constitution-subverting presidents, politicians, generals and police who spied on, tear-gassed, beat, slandered, suppressed and murdered countless numbers of their fellow citizens, not to mention 3.4 million people in Indochina, and the 58,000 American soldiers sent to kill them and die for no reason.
The right’s willfully amnesiac version of the ’60s is such conventional wisdom now that even ostensibly “liberal” journalists can’t seem to help resorting to its tired tropes. In interviews given a few years ago while promoting his documentary about 1968, Tom Brokaw defined the era with a hypothetical, illustrative scenario: A man works hard and plays by the rules all his life, raises himself out of the working class and by the ’60’s is raising two kids in a comfortable home. He sits down to dinner one night to be told by his teenage daughter, who’s wearing, in Brokaw’s words, “a blouse without a brassiere,” that she’s on the pill, and, by his son “with hair down to his shoulders, that he shouldn’t worry, because he “knows how to get out of the draft.”
For Brokaw and other mainstream journalists, the defining traumas of the ’60s were inflicted by protest-marching, draft-dodging, long-haired sons, and braless daughters on the pill. (Oh, and yes, there were also some assassinations, and they were bad, too, in a generic, completely decontextualized sort of way.) The worst injury of the decade was to the delicate sensibilities of hardworking, middle-class white men.
This vision of the era has become so entrenched it’s almost impossible to imagine a figure like Brokaw describing an opposite, and far more essential version of the same scene: one where, say, a young man of draft age thinks that defending a corrupt dictatorship in a civil war on the other side of the world goes against everything for which his father’s generation supposedly fought. One where maybe it’s the son who’s offended, by the way his father treats his wife, or talks about his one black co-worker, or seems so untroubled by his job at Dow Chemical. Or maybe a scene where the draft dodger is named Cheney and he tells his dad he has “other priorities” than fighting communism. But, unless Norman Lear has a sudden career resurgence, that kind of restoration of sanity is not going to happen any time soon.
That’s too bad, because the hard lessons of the ’60s would come in handy in 2015, if they weren’t obscured by the right’s self-serving fables. It was only a few years ago that George W. Bush said about the fall of Vietnam that, “The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms, like boat people, re-education camps and killing fields.” It was an obscene and almost psychedelic distortion of reality.
With the secret, unconstitutional bombing of Cambodia by Richard Nixon, the United States knocked over the first of the only dominoes that would ever fall in South East Asia, and dragged Cambodia into a civil war that led to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. Without the Vietnam War, Pol Pot would almost certainly never have come to power. His regime was a creation of our war, in the same way that ISIS is the offspring of our occupation of Iraq in 2003. The Killing Fields only ended after the Vietnam War, when the Vietnamese, our former enemies, overthrew the Cambodian tyrant. But none of those facts were troubling enough to Bush to keep him from spinning the story his own way. Not because they aren’t true, but because they aren’t known anymore. Because we hardly ever hear about them.
The alternate-reality conservative narrative of those times needs to be confronted and challenged. America’s capacity for self-refection being what it is, a popular reckoning with the truth is not going to happen any time soon, but taking even baby steps in that direction might help us avoid repeating the moral mistakes of the Vietnam Era: the concocting of grand paranoid fantasies like the domino theory and the Bushies’ “clash of civilizations,” waging wars of choice against countries that have done us no harm, cultures we know nothing about and whose languages we refuse to learn, in the self-glorifying delusion that it’s our destiny to save them from themselves. It might keep us from wallowing in self-indulgent self-pity, and force us to acknowledge the damage we’ve done to ourselves and others.
The important, lasting injury we did to ourselves in Vietnam wasn’t inflicted by American protesters or draft-dodgers. Despite the way they’re depicted in popular culture, those dissidents were, for the most part, mainstream, middle-class families, sickened by a war they watched on their televisions every night (as opposed to the Iraq War, which was rendered invisible by an administration that learned the political lessons of Vietnam all too well.)
My parents, both products of working-class families and graduates of a tuition-free public university, marched often with other suburban families. They never carried the Vietcong flag, or saw anyone else do it. They never committed any acts of violence. They did have rocks thrown at them by construction workers, and they were spit on (unlike the humiliated, returning soldiers of right-wing legend) but they kept marching, because they thought that was the right (and American) thing to do.
Their story is absent from the right-wing telling of their times. One of the central themes of that telling is that the “excesses” of the sex-crazed, drug-addled left helped create the modern conservative movement, and no doubt that’s true. But that movement has succeeded, in part, because it has grossly exaggerated the excesses of the left and washed its own from collective memory.
Isn’t the “self-indulgent behavior” of the three-martini generation at least relevant to the discussion? Didn’t members of that generation, led by the alcoholic Richard Nixon, commit the far more reckless and destructive acts of the time period?
Very few influential right-wing figures of the time have reexamined those moral failures. For Pat Buchanan, the years of My Lai, and the Chicago police riot were years when conservatives “got to point at these kids and say Is that who you want running your country?” His defining memory is, “…when they had the riots at Columbia and Mark Rudd took over the campus. I wrote a statement [for Nixon] denouncing these over- privileged kids for what they were doing … Let me tell you, they didn’t have any support in Middle America.”
This unsurprising lack of reflection and remorse on the part of conservatives has been aided and abetted for years by the he said-she said ethos of modern journalism, which confuses evenhandedness with objectivity (and is itself one of the more insidious legacies of the 1960s.) It leads the public discussion toward a subtle, often unconscious, ratification of a false history, a history that has in turn been the basis for much of the success conservatives have enjoyed over the past 40 years.
The real history of the Vietnam era is too valuable to ignore . The ’60s was not only a time when, as the cliché has it, “the social fabric was torn.” It was, more profoundly, a time when the social contract was torn, by our leaders. The injury those leaders inflicted on American life was far more acute, and more definitive, than the reaction to that injury by their children.
So JFK didn’t get us into the war the military and Eisenhower didn’t want, Eisenhower himself would have had to start the Vietnam war if his time in office had stretched to 2 more years?
You seem devoted to JFK mythology, that’s for sure.
“You seem devoted to JFK mythology, that’s for sure.”
And on occasion you post incredibly stupid comments, that being one of them. Kindly keep your ignorant speculations about what I think to yourself.
I happen to be very familiar with how our involvement in Vietnam developed. I lived it beginning with my dad’s tour in 1962. We had Vietnamese officers rotating through our home for years as they came to the states for training. Most Americans didn’t know the place existed when it was a daily part of my life.
Eisenhower was dealing with a lower level insurgency than what Kennedy dealt with. But if Ike had two more years in office and had to deal with it he wouldn’t have used the half measures and gradual escalation that JFK, LBJ and Nixon used to conduct the war. That just helped North Vietnam.
North Vietnam was the root of the insurgency and it had only two major cities. Instead of screwing around with counter insurgency campaigns and sporadic bombing, Hanoi and Haiphong harbor would have been treated to something out of Curtis LeMay’s handbook. The Marines wouldn’t have gone to shore in South Vietnam, they would have landed in the North and occupied it. There was no reason the war had to drag on.
Hmmm, I don’t recall the antiwar scum chanting, “Hey, hey JFK, how many kids did you kill today?”
Hmmmm, in 1963, years before the people had started turning against the war, at least years before the young turned against it, the over 50 crowd pretty much never supported the us getting involved in Vietnam.
you-””LBJ gets the blame for sending in combat troops the next year but as far as I can see the chaos set in motion by Diem’s death forced LBJ into choosing between a major American military role or a decision to abandon South Vietnam.””
ME-“No JFK, no Vietnam war,”
you-””I think that’s overstating it. The Communists had a vote in all of this. They ramped up their insurgency around the time Kennedy took office and he either had to increase our aid to Vietnam or let them get overrun.””
No, you are obsessed with defending JFK and the mythology, you seem to want to switch to whatever works, no JFK didn’t start the war when he sent in 16,000 troops, or that he had to start the war because he was forced into it for some reason.
Eisenhower stood by and watched as the French lost their Vietnam war, he evidently didn’t us to get into another war in Asia.
No JFK, then no Vietnam war for America, Nixon would not have sent in the 16,000 troops.
No JFK, then no Vietnam, the election of JFK destroyed America. As destructive and incompetent and corrupt as JFK was, the passing of his immigration policy after his death, made recovery for us, impossible.
We still have forces in Korea. How was the justification of Vietnam any different from that?
“No, you are obsessed with defending JFK and the mythology,”
You are an idiot.
America would still be America, if JFK had not been elected, and Eisenhower’s vice president had won instead.
I doubt that you are capable of learning anything that runs counter to your goofball conviction that JFK was solely responsible for the Vietnam war but I’ll post this for others.
Here is President Eisenhower in 1954 speaking of the strategic importance of Indochina (that’s Vietnam) to the free world using what would become the famous falling dominoes analogy. Eisenhower’s domino theory was the basis for Kennedy and Johnson’s decisions to defend South Vietnam from conquest by the Communist North:
Q. Robert Richards, Copley Press: Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? I think there has been, across the country, some lack of understanding on just what it means to us.
THE PRESIDENT. You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things.
First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs.
Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.
Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.
Now, with respect to the first one, two of the items from this particular area that the world uses are tin and tungsten. They are very important. There are others, of course, the rubber plantations and so on.
Then with respect to more people passing under this domination, Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can’t afford greater losses.
But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people.
Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand.
It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go—that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.
So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10202
Yet Eisenhower had no intention of sending 16,000 troops to Vietnam, and he watched as the French were defeated.
As I said earlier, “So JFK didn’t get us into the war the military and Eisenhower didn’t want, Eisenhower himself would have had to start the Vietnam war if his time in office had stretched to 2 more years?
You seem devoted to JFK mythology, that’s for sure.”
You can go to his website and read about his book complaining about how awful he thought his father was. From that you might conclude that he'd agree that the 60s generation had a lot of problems, but Birkenhead presents a whitewash here.
I get that people have ambivalence about their parents and their parents' values, but Peter's writing here really doesn't reflect the negative side that he apparently stresses in his book. It looks like focus on common political enemies has clouded his vision of the environment he grew up in.
“Yet Eisenhower had no intention of sending 16,000 troops to Vietnam,”
A “fact” that exists only your mind and the Magic Eightball that you employ to divine Eisenhower’s intentions.
Eisenhower sent American military advisers and US AID workers to South Vietnam as soon as the French left. He described his intention to defend Indochina in the “falling dominoes” press conference, which typically you ignore since it doesn’t support your pet Kennedy obsession.
“You seem devoted to JFK mythology, that’s for sure.”
Not a bit. You just think that anyone who doesn’t agree with your Kennedy obsession is “devoted to JFK mythology”. On that issue you’re a kook, plain and simple.
President Nixon: Let’s be perfectly cold-blooded about it. If you look at it from the standpoint of our game with the Soviets and the Chinese, from the standpoint of running this country, I think we could take almost anything, frankly, in my view, that we can force on [South Vietnamese president Nguyen van] Thieu. Almost anything; I just come down to that. You know what I mean?
Because I have a feeling that we would not be doing, like I feel about the Israelis, I feel that in the long run we’re probably not doing them an in—a disfavor due to the fact that I feel the North Vietnamese are so badly hurt that the South Vietnamese are probably going to do fairly well.
Also due to the fact—because I look at the tide of history out there, South Vietnam is probably never gonna survive anyway. I’m just being perfectly candid. I—
Henry Kissinger: In the pullout area—
President Nixon: There’s got to be—if we can get certain guarantees so that they aren’t . . . as you know, looking at the foreign policy process, though, I mean, you’ve got to be—we also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important. It’s terribly important this year.
But can we have a viable foreign policy if a year from now or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam? That’s the real question.
Kissinger: If a year from now or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy— if it looks like as if a result of South Vietnamese incompetence. If we now sell out in such a way that, say that in a three- to four-month period, we have pushed President Thieu over the brink, we ourselves—I think there is going to be—even the Chinese won’t like that. I mean, they’ll pay verbal—verbally, they’ll like it—
President Nixon: But it will worry them.
Kissinger: But it will worry everybody. And domestically, in the long run it won’t help us all that much, because our opponents will say we should have done it three years ago.
President Nixon: I know.
Kissinger: So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.
Well, that plus the fact that he didn't intervene to prevent the North from defeating France, and the record of his entire 8 years in office.
Eisenhower had no intention of sending 16,000 troops to Vietnam, and he watched as the French were defeated, that isn't speculation, it is fact.
Eisenhower’s veep went to his grave thinking he had been beaten out of office in 1960. Goldwater said Eisenhower’s veep was “the most dishonest man I ever met.” GA’s Lester Maddox said the same of Ga Jimmuh Carter. Maybe Nixon’s defeat in 1960 was the beginning of the end.
JFK stealing the 1960 election did end America, there is no recovering from his immigration law.
Well, the American people have perpetually had a liking for those who steal elections. They think it’s humorous. When the victim of election theft sets forth his case, the GOP turns the other way, as it [Trent Lott in particular] did to Woody Jenkins in LA in 1996.
You show JFK as bad, but even Dan Quayle slithered into a corner when Lloyd Millard Bentsen, Jr., said, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” I still get angry over Quayle’s pitiful reply.
“it is fact.”
Let’s hope that you never go to trial and try to sell a jury on your version of what “facts” are. They aren’t likely to accept your guesses about what other people’s intentions are as being equal to “facts”.
But if we were going to make an educated guess about what Eisenhower’s intentions for Vietnam were we would look to his own words rather than your imagination. Ike warned that the loss of Indochina to Communism would be a disaster for the Free World and he used the ‘falling dominoes’ illustration to make his point. Those are facts, not something we have to guess about.
You keep claiming that “Eisenhower had no intention of sending 16,000 troops to Vietnam”. The fact is that President Diem is the one who was holding down the number of American troops stationed in South Vietnam, a fact you obviously are blissfully ignorant about, and it was only after the Communist insurgency grew that Diem agreed to increase the number of advisers in his country.
“At a conference in Washington, D.C. on February 12, 1955 between officials of the U.S. State Department and the French Minister of Overseas Affairs, it was agreed that all U.S. aid would be funneled directly to South Vietnam and that all major military responsibilities would be transferred from the French to the MAAG under the command of Lieutenant General John O’Daniel. A problem arose however, because the French Expeditionary Force had to depart from South Vietnam in April 1956 pursuant to the Accords. After the French defeat, it was renamed the MAAG Vietnam in 1955, as the United States became more deeply involved in what would come to be known as the Vietnam War.”
The facts (the real facts, not the imaginary kind you like to play with) are that the Communist insurgency ramped up after Kennedy took office and the 700+ MAAG personnel Diem allowed Ike to station in Vietnam weren’t sufficient.
“The next few years saw the rise of a Communist insurgency in South Vietnam, and President Diem looked increasingly to US military assistance to strengthen his position, albeit with certain reservations. Attacks on US military advisers in Vietnam became more frequent. On October 22, 1957, MAAG Vietnam and USIS installations in Saigon were bombed, injuring US military advisers.[4] In the summer of 1959, Communist guerrillas staged an attack on a Vietnamese military base in Bien Hoa, killing and wounding several MAAG personnel.[5] During this time, American advisers were not put in high ranking positions, and President Diem was reluctant to allow American advisers into Vietnamese tactical units. He was afraid that the United States would gain control or influence over his forces if Americans got into the ranks of the army. The first signs that his position was beginning to shift came in 1960, when the number of official US military advisers in the country was increased from 327 to 685 at the request of the South Vietnamese government.[5] By 1961, communist guerrillas were becoming stronger and more active. This increased enemy contacts in size and intensity throughout South Vietnam. At this point, Diem was under pressure from US authorities to liberalize his regime and implement reforms. Although key elements in the US administration were resisting his requests for increased military funding and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troop ceilings, MAAG Vietnam played a significant role in advocating for a greater US presence in the country.[6] Throughout this period relations between the MAAG Vietnam and Diem were described as “excellent”, even though the advisers were doubtful of his ability to hold off the insurgency.[7]”
“Newly elected President John F. Kennedy agreed with MAAG Vietnam’s calls for increases in ARVN troop levels and the U.S. military commitment in both equipment and men. In response, Kennedy provided $28.4 million in funding for ARVN, and overall military aid increased from $50 million per year to $144 million in 1961. In the first year of the Kennedy administration, MAAG Vietnam worked closely with administration officials, USOM, and the US Information Service to develop a counterinsurgency plan (CIP). The CIP’s main initiatives included the strengthening of ARVN to combat the Communist insurgency, which had the corollary effect of strengthening Diem’s political position.[8] At the same time President Diem agreed to the assignment of advisers to battalion level, significantly increasing the number of advisers; from 746 in 1961 to over 3,400 before MAAG Vietnam was placed under U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) and renamed the Field Advisory Element, Vietnam. At the peak of the war in 1968, 9,430 Army personnel acted as advisors down to the district and battalion level to train, advise and mentor the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Republic of Vietnam Marine Corps, Republic of Vietnam Navy and the Vietnam Air Force.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Assistance_Advisory_Group
The fact is that the Eisenhower presidency is already over, so you can quit pretending that we don’t know what he would have done.
No JFK, then no Vietnam.
Your devotion to protecting JFK, is extraordinary.
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