American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (12 page)

And so a year later, during the tense, thirteen-day missile crisis of 1962, many advisers, especially in the initial days, pushed the president to launch air strikes against Cuba, or even a full-scale invasion. Robert Kennedy told his brother that if he did not get rid of the missiles, he would be impeached.

It is here that JFK deserves praise. While his undeclared war against Castro had precipitated the crisis, he and Khrushchev resolved it peacefully. Throughout the crisis JFK repeatedly resisted those who urged him to launch a preemptive military attack against Cuba to knock out the missiles. Instead, he called for a naval blockade and diplomatic contacts with the Soviets.

The crisis was resolved not by bluster and bravado, but by patience, flexibility, and a willingness on both sides to negotiate and compromise. The standoff that might have led to millions of deaths ended because Khrushchev ordered his navy to honor the U.S. blockade and because he and Kennedy cut a deal—Kennedy would publicly pledge never to invade Cuba and then (without a public announcement from either side) he would remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Turkey; in turn, Khrushchev would remove the Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba.

The official story has JFK staring down his opponent until Khrushchev backs down. The key line that sealed this narrative in American memory was attributed to Secretary of State Dean Rusk when news arrived that Soviet ships had not tried to penetrate the U.S. blockade: “We’re eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked.” High School history textbooks have used that one-liner for generations as a stirring summary of the crisis. Mac Bundy and his colleagues promoted that victory narrative, the “triumph by John F. Kennedy over Cuba.” Excluded from the story was the U.S.-sponsored attack on Cuba that led to the crisis and the diplomatic flexibility that resolved it.

The administration’s most glaring cover-up was its denial that it had agreed to remove U.S. nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet removal of missiles from Cuba. Everyone involved took a pledge to keep the deal secret. Public knowledge, they feared, might give the impression that the president had made a major concession with a gun at his head. They did more than deny the truth. President Kennedy actually attacked UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson for supporting the idea of a tit-for-tat deal on the missiles. The president told the
Saturday Evening Post
that
Adlai “wanted a Munich
,” thus accusing his fellow Democrat of being a weak appeaser for recommending the very terms that JFK had used to resolve the crisis.

The story JFK really wanted told was put more crudely in private. Talking about Khrushchev with friends, the president said, “
I cut his balls off
.” Diplomacy had saved the day, but instead of celebrating that, Kennedy and his aides preferred Americans to believe that peace had been preserved by their manliness.

The need to demonstrate presidential “balls” has been an underacknowledged but enduring staple of American foreign policy. Aggressive masculinity shaped American Cold War policy, and still does. Deep-seated ideas about gender and sexuality cannot be dismissed as mere talk. They have explanatory value. U.S. policy in Vietnam was driven by men who were intensely concerned about demonstrating their own, and the nation’s, toughness. As every other justification of the war grew threadbare, it became increasingly important to appear “firm.”

The appearance of manly resolve was especially crucial for policymakers as it became ever clearer that the United States was not achieving its objectives in Vietnam. They expanded the war not because they strongly believed more troops and more time would turn the tide, but because they were afraid to appear weak.

One of the most popular, but mistaken, ideas about the Vietnam War is that American leaders were lured deeper and
deeper into the Vietnam “quagmire
” because they didn’t know what they were getting into or because they had a naive and arrogant faith in U.S. power and technology. It is certainly true that U.S. policymakers were ignorant about many things in Vietnam, and also arrogant. But most were not confident about the prospects for an ultimate victory. For all their public talk of “progress,” in private they often expressed, like McGeorge Bundy, a pessimistic realism about the many failures of U.S. policy and the poor odds of future success.

In the fall of 1966, for example, Robert McNamara was flying home from one of his many “fact-finding” trips to Vietnam. Shortly before landing, he said to some of his aides: “We’ve put more than a hundred thousand more troops into the country over the last year, and there’s been no improvement. Things aren’t any better at all. That means the underlying situation is really
worse
!” Ten minutes later, McNamara walked across the tarmac to a clump of journalists, microphones, and television cameras. “Gentlemen,” he said, “
I’ve just come back from Vietnam
, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that we’re showing great progress in every dimension of our effort. I’m very encouraged by everything I’ve seen and heard on my trip.”

Public expressions of confidence like that fed the false impression that the worst error American policymakers had made was to underestimate the difficulty of fighting counter-guerrilla warfare. They must not have understood what they were getting into. They had unwittingly stepped into an alien world, full of unexpected dangers and unpredictable snares. With each innocent and well-intentioned step, each new escalation based on renewed confidence that it would be sufficient to achieve the objective, they had walked deeper and deeper into the morass, sucked down so far that every effort to pull out only took them in deeper.

The quagmire metaphor allowed Americans to believe their nation was victim of a deadly foreign trap. Vietnam had called out for help and Uncle Sam got sucked into the swamp. Our innocence was savaged by alien and hostile forces we could neither understand nor defeat.

That may be a more palatable story than the actual one, but the historical record does not support it. American war planners were not lured unwittingly into Vietnam; they moved in deliberately and without an invitation. The United States played the essential role in creating South Vietnam and blocking the democratic elections to reunify Vietnam in 1956. The Vietnam War grew out of years of unilateral and aggressive U.S. policymaking. When the first battalions of American combat marines arrived in March 1965, the new leader of South Vietnam, Dr. Phan Huy Quat,
had not requested the troops
; he had not even been consulted.

Nor were the key war managers notably optimistic. They expanded and prolonged the war with full knowledge that the prospects for success were, as Bundy put it, impossible to estimate “with any accuracy.” They saw the dangers ahead and plunged in anyway. They created their own quagmire and eventually ordered three million American troops to fight in it. Those soldiers did not have the benefit of the intelligence reports and classified memoranda that contained the deep doubts of the men who sent them to war. Many went to Vietnam believing what they had been told—that they were there to save the South Vietnamese from Communist aggression and help them be free and independent.

What would those soldiers have thought if they were privy to a classified memo written in March 1965 by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton? While outlining the “course of action” in Vietnam, McNaughton includes a brief, haunting breakdown of American objectives in Vietnam:

US aims:

70%—
To avoid a humiliating US defeat
(to our reputation as a guarantor). 20%—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. ALSO—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. NOT—To “help a friend,” although it would be hard to stay in if asked out.

Here at the beginning of 1965, at a moment when there were still fewer than thirty thousand American troops in Vietnam, and fewer than five hundred American fatalities, key officials believed the primary goal in Vietnam was to prevent a blow to America’s “reputation.”

Withdrawal was unthinkable only because policymakers believed it would be an intolerable blow to America’s image, and their own. The few internal dissenters were easily dismissed. For example, in the fall of 1964 Mac Bundy’s brother, William Bundy (an assistant secretary of state), offered a cautious recommendation of withdrawal from Vietnam. Even if Communism triumphed throughout Vietnam, he argued, at least it “would be a
Vietnamese
solution without Chinese participation.” Furthermore, Vietnam had no interest in letting China dominate it and “would bend every effort . . . to keep it that way.” Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the 1950s, “
the domino theory is much too pat
.” It was simply wrong to believe that Communism was a monolithic, unified threat. In fact, a Communist Vietnam “would be to some extent a buffer against further spread of Chinese influence.” Defeat in Vietnam would be “bearable.”

William Bundy’s heresy was quickly squashed by McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
Bundy swallowed his opposition
and agreed to support escalation. “Never again,” writes biographer Kai Bird, “would Bill Bundy attempt to make the case that the Americans should walk away from Vietnam.”

The only other reasonably high-ranking insider to recommend withdrawal was Undersecretary of State George Ball. His opportunity came in July 1965 when President Johnson convened key figures to discuss a request by General Westmoreland to raise the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam to 125,000 immediately, with another 75,000 by year’s end.

“
We cannot win, Mr. President
,” Ball began. “This war will be long and protracted. The most we can hope for is a messy conclusion. . . . The enemy cannot even be seen in Vietnam. He is indigenous to the country. I truly have serious doubt that an army of Westerners can successfully fight Orientals in an Asian jungle.” Ball suggested that the U.S. find a way to get Saigon—the allies—to demand a U.S. withdrawal. In any case, it was time to get out and cut our losses.

“But George,” the president responded, “wouldn’t all these countries say that Uncle Sam was a paper tiger, wouldn’t we lose credibility breaking the word of three presidents, if we did as you have proposed?”

“No, sir,” Ball said. “The worse blow would be that the mightiest power on earth is unable to defeat a handful of guerrillas.”

If others had rallied to Ball’s position it might have made a difference. But no one did. Withdrawal, for them, was an unthinkable option.

By 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton concluded that avoiding humiliation had moved from 70 percent of America’s goal in Vietnam to 100 percent. “
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. . . . We have not hung on to save a friend, or to deny the Communists the added acres and heads.”

To preserve an image of strength, LBJ systematically escalated the war. Perhaps the most shocking moment in Robert Dallek’s biography of Johnson comes when a group of reporters pressed LBJ to explain why he continued to wage war in spite of so many difficulties and so much opposition. The president “
unzipped his fly
, drew out his substantial organ, and declared, ‘This is why!’”

Other key policymakers may not have displayed their genitals, but all the men who sent America to Vietnam felt a deep connection between their own masculinity and national power. They imagined foreign policy as a constant test of individual as well as national toughness. LBJ’s masculinity had different roots and expressions but was not fundamentally different from John Kennedy’s or Mac Bundy’s. The primary distinction was one of economic class. Unlike Johnson, who had a hardscrabble childhood in the Texas Hill Country, the foreign policy establishment was composed overwhelmingly of privileged men. It was an astonishingly homogeneous group. Their ideas about manhood were forged in a common set of elite, male-only environments—private boarding schools, Ivy League secret societies and fraternities, military service in World War II, and metropolitan men’s clubs. As historian Robert Dean has demonstrated, this “imperial brotherhood” viewed themselves as stoic and tough-minded servants of the state. Intensely driven and competitive, they also regarded themselves as part of a fraternity of like-minded men whose core commitment was to advance American power. Indeed, any serious challenge to American power was felt by these men as a blow to their own. They may have disdained LBJ’s crudeness, but they were every bit as concerned about demonstrating their manly resolve.

Johnson talked about the connection between masculinity and Vietnam with writer Doris Kearns Goodwin. After leaving the presidency in 1969, Johnson convinced her to help him with his memoirs. She spent many weeks at his Texas ranch and eventually wrote her own biography of LBJ. At the ranch, Goodwin writes, “a curious ritual developed. I would awaken at five and get dressed. Half an hour later
Johnson would knock on my door
, dressed in his robe and pajamas. As I sat in a chair by the window, he climbed into the bed, pulling the sheets up to his neck, looking like a cold and frightened child.”

In that intimate, quasi-therapeutic setting, Goodwin took notes while LBJ talked:

Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam . . . I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II [at Munich]. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression. And I knew that . . . Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China. . . .

If we lost Vietnam . . . there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine.

Oh, I could see it coming all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up.