American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (33 page)

The
Mayaguez
coverage did not encourage historical reflection, but it did provide the template for a major new American story, one that became commonplace in the post-Vietnam era—a story of American victimhood. The common denominator was this: an innocent America and its people had become the victims of outrageous, inexplicable foreign assaults. These attacks, whether from “rogue” nations, terrorist groups, or religious extremists, were broadly viewed as barbaric hate crimes with no clear motive or American provocation. Some of the stories were about real and devastating attacks on American officials, soldiers, or civilians, from the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981, to the 1983 suicide truck bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon, to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Other accounts greatly exaggerated the threat posed by foreigners. In the 1970s, Arab oil tycoons were said to hold the U.S.
hostage
by jacking up prices through OPEC. In the 1980s, Japanese corporations and investors were
buying up America.
And Mexicans and other brown-skinned people seemed always to be
pouring
across
our borders threatening to destroy American national identity. Then, more recently, came a “threat” that was not just an exaggeration but a flat-out falsehood: the Bush administration’s 2002–2003 claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that it was linked to the terrorists who had attacked the United States on 9/11, and that it posed a dire and imminent threat to U.S. security. Every one of those assertions was baseless, yet Bush used them to justify a preemptive war against Iraq. As with all the stories of American victimhood, it was mostly founded on a single potent assumption:
our
innocence and
their
treachery.

Stories about outside attackers are not new in American history. Since the seventeenth century, European settlers routinely depicted Native Americans as foreign aliens on their own land, menacing savages who slaughtered innocent colonists or took them hostage. The first American best sellers were stories about Euro-Americans, especially women, who were held captive by the Indians. And virtually every U.S. war to follow was justified as a righteous response to a real or imagined first strike by non-Americans—from the Boston Massacre (1770), to the siege of the Alamo (1836), to the sinking of the
Maine
(1898) and the
Lusitania
(1915), to the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (1964). But in all the wars before Vietnam, the United States had always triumphed (or, as in Korea, at least achieved its initial objective). The standard story featured an
unprovoked attack followed by glorious victory
. Temporary victimhood was quickly forgotten in the glow of righteous retribution.

Vietnam brought something wholly new and unexpected into the American war story: failure. And not just failure to achieve the war’s stated objectives, but failure to preserve the broad conviction that America was an exceptional force for good in the world. During the Vietnam War a growing number of Americans questioned the version of national history so vividly enshrined in high school textbooks of the 1950s—the idea that the United States was a peace-loving nation that had “accepted” world “leadership” only with the greatest reluctance and only to help other peoples secure the blessings of liberty.

The Vietnam War made a mockery of those convictions and by 1971,
58 percent
of the public believed their nation was fighting an immoral war. That conclusion led many to cast a critical eye backward to the violent origins and history of the nation—to the brutal displacement of Native Americans, to the history and legacies of slavery, to the dozens of military interventions throughout the world to support or install dictatorships friendly to U.S. interests, even to the most popular war of all—World War II—and the firebombing and atomic weapons that were used to wage it.

The critical thinking awakened in the 1960s endured beyond the Vietnam War, but in less visible forms and forums. With war’s end, public attention turned away from the damage the United States had inflicted on Indochina. Gone were the daily reminders of that faraway world left in ruins. The Communists won the war, but the victor’s prize was a wrecked land, with thousands of towns and villages damaged or destroyed, millions of acres defoliated, cratered, and holding countless unexploded ordnance and toxins, millions of people dead, wounded, or orphaned. Back in the States, American leaders spoke as if their own nation had suffered just as much.

In 1977, CBS reporter Ed Bradley asked newly elected president Jimmy Carter if the United States had any “moral obligation to help rebuild the country” of Vietnam. Carter responded: “Well,
the destruction was mutual
 . . . I do not feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability. Now, I am willing to face the future without reference to the past. . . . I don’t feel we owe a debt” to Vietnam.

“The destruction was mutual”? A small, poor country was pounded with five million tons of bombs, while a large, rich country remained physically unscathed; the country of 35 million had some 3 million people killed in the war—a majority of them civilians—while the nation of 200 million lost about 58,000 of its military troops. Had the United States lost the same portion of its citizens as Vietnam did, the memorial in Washington, DC, would have to include about 18 million Americans. Alongside the names of millions of military veterans, you would see the names of babies, young girls and boys, women and men of all ages.

American intervention in Vietnam coincided with the greatest stretch of economic growth and prosperity in U.S. history. While a majority of American civilians were enjoying unprecedented levels of material comfort, civilians all over Vietnam were struggling just to survive. In addition to the obvious perils of bombs and bullets, there were severe food shortages throughout the country. When the war ended there was another decade and more of widespread and unremitting hardship while America remained a relative horn of plenty.

In the 1970s, however, the U.S. economy faltered. The most obvious problems were stagnant economic growth and soaring inflation—stagflation. But larger underlying problems began to emerge, problems that haunt the U.S. economy to the present day—a declining industrial base, trade imbalances, overdependence on fossil fuels, surging deficits, and economic inequalities that would greatly widen in the 1980s and beyond. The economic concerns of the 1970s contributed to a growing feeling that the United States was in decline, not because of its own decisions and actions, but because it was a victim of forces beyond its control.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter became the first American president to acknowledge that the nation’s resources and capacities were not boundless.
In his inaugural address
he said: “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems . . . we must simply do our best.” Even in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt was generally more upbeat about the prospects for progress.

During the summer of 1979, President Carter offered an even bleaker assessment. The nation’s problems ran “much deeper” than “gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.” After ten days of intense discussions with dozens of people, Carter went on television to define the “true problems” plaguing America. His conclusion: The United States was
suffering a “crisis of confidence
 . . . a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” Many Americans had lost faith in the government, in democracy, and in the likelihood of a better future. Carter went on to suggest that recent history—“filled with shocks and tragedy”—was largely responsible for the damage done to the national spirit. The resolute assurance that the United States was exceptionally peaceful, triumphant, righteous, honorable, prosperous, and bountiful had come undone in just a few short years:

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate. We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

It was a forthright and insightful historical analysis from the president who once said he was willing “to face the future without reference to the past.” Faith in American institutions had plummeted indeed. For example, in the early 1960s, polls showed that about 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right.” By the mid-1970s, only about one-third maintained that faith.

Carter’s sweeping historical identification of profound problems—violence, unjust war, presidential crimes, a failing economy—might have been the platform on which to build support for sweeping reforms. Instead, with his dour modesty, he offered a boring checklist of small measures to address the energy crisis—import quotas, an energy security corporation, a solar bank, and an energy mobilization board. And what might citizens contribute? They should carpool and set their thermostats to save fuel. Not exactly a spine-tingling vision of resurgent America.

Even worse, many believed Carter was blaming individual Americans and their “crisis of confidence” for deep-seated problems. This was exactly what the American public did not want to hear, or believe. What did confidence have to do with the energy crisis, Vietnam, Watergate, and double-digit inflation? Carter’s address was soon dubbed the “malaise” speech. He had never used that word, but it stuck to him forever as if he were history’s greatest spokesman for vaguely defined psychological distress.

Conservative Republicans, and an influential group of former Democrats called neoconservatives, also blasted Carter for weakening U.S. foreign policy. He had stood by passively, they argued, as an Islamic revolution overthrew Iran’s shah Reza Pahlavi and as left-wing revolutionaries swept away the regime of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza. In a 1979
Commentary
article
,
neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick ripped the Carter administration for not doing enough to defend either man. However repressive they may have been to their own people, she argued, they were reliable American allies.

The Shah and Somoza were not only anti-Communist, they were positively friendly to the U.S., sending their sons and others to be educated in our universities, voting with us in the United Nations, and regularly supporting American interests. . . . The embassies of both governments were active in Washington social life, and were frequented by powerful Americans who occupied major roles in this nation’s diplomatic, military, and political life.

The Iranian revolution put an end to embassy parties for powerful Americans—Kirkpatrick was certainly right about that. It unleashed the most sustained and hostile anti-U.S. demonstrations the American people had ever witnessed. The Iranian street rallies became especially bellicose in the fall of 1979 after President Carter allowed the despised Shah to come to the United States for medical treatments. Angry Iranian crowds burned American flags and effigies of Jimmy Carter. They chanted, “
Death to America
! Death to America!”

Then on November 4, 1979, a group of militant Iranian students decided that anti-American protests were an insufficient response to the government that had supported the Shah’s police state for more than three decades and might (they feared) restore the Shah to health and then restore him to power. So they stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seized its employees. Massive crowds gathered outside to cheer on the radical students and denounce the Americans who had worked in the “
den of spies
.” The Ayatollah Khomeini gave sanction to the action, and for the next 444 days, the hostages were held captive.

The media covered the crisis with a daily intensity that had few, if any, peacetime precedents. Soon after the hostage-taking, for example, ABC began airing a nightly special called
America Held Hostage
. It was conceived as a short-term project. To the surprise of network executives, the show regularly attracted a larger audience than Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show,
so they extended it indefinitely. As time passed, ABC (and other news outlets) began keeping track of the days, even adding the count to the title of the show:
America Held Hostage: Day 93
,
America Held Hostage: Day 94
. After four months, ABC renamed the show
Nightline
and mixed in other topics. However, the hostage crisis remained the major story and the counting of days continued.

Most American viewers had little understanding of why the Iranian revolutionaries so detested the Shah and the U.S. government. Occasional media efforts to explain the causes were dwarfed by the sensational images of angry mobs burning American flags. The root of the crisis went back to 1953, a story vivid to Iranians, but largely unknown in the United States. That was the year the
CIA launched its secret plan to overthrow Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.
Mossadegh had recently nationalized the Iranian oil industry, an action President Eisenhower viewed as intolerable. It not only deprived Western oil companies of profits, but persuaded the president that Iran was moving toward Communism. Mossadegh was, in fact, an anti-Communist nationalist, but Eisenhower ordered the CIA to oust the democratically elected leader. The CIA’s covert operation—involving bribes and phony mob protests—was a stunning success. Mossadegh was arrested and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. In his place, the United States restored full control to the Iranian monarchy under Shah Reza Pahlavi. One of the Shah’s first acts after the coup was to give U.S. companies control of 40 percent of Iran’s oil.