American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (4 page)

Dooley, born into a wealthy St. Louis manufacturing family, told people he was destined to become a “society doctor” until he was transformed by his exposure to human suffering in Southeast Asia. Many Americans felt patriotic pride in Dooley’s mission. It was as if he were serving the world’s far-flung poor on behalf of all Americans, and many believed his people-to-people diplomacy enhanced their nation’s reputation.

Popular culture in the 1950s was full of stories that prepared the soil for deeper U.S. involvement in Asia by romanticizing the capacity of Americans to reach out peacefully and effectively to grateful Asians. James Michener, the king of best-selling writers about the Pacific, was especially enthusiastic about Asian-American bonding. In 1951, while the United States was bogged down in a bloody and frustrating war in Korea, Michener offered the heartening news that on every Pacific island he visited, he was invariably approached by a person of “good sense and responsible years” who asked this question: “
Did the American government send you
out here to report on whether or not we want America to take over this island? Let me tell you, my friend, we dream of nothing else. When will America adopt us?” Michener would have his vast readership believe that Asians were virtually begging the United States to run their countries and would view it not as an imposition of colonialism but as a blessing. Perhaps America could indeed be, as Henry Luce had envisioned, “the Good Samaritan of the entire world.”

Michener’s first major success was
Tales of the South Pacific
(1947), his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of stories that was adapted into one of the most popular musicals of all time,
South Pacific
(1949). It ran on Broadway for five years and has been reprised ever since in countless community and high school productions. The cast album was the number one best-selling record for more than a year and the sound track from the popular 1958 film version of
South Pacific
sold five million copies. When the show was revived on Broadway in 2008, it won seven Tony Awards. This pleasing and sentimental romance has moved countless Americans to imagine tropical Asia as a site in which American virtue blossoms as fully as the romance at its center.

South Pacific
features a young navy nurse, Ensign Nellie Forbush, a “cockeyed optimist” from Little Rock, Arkansas. While serving in the islands during World War II, she falls in love with a wealthy, middle-aged French plantation owner, Emile de Becque. But when Nellie discovers that de Becque is a widower who has two children from his marriage to a Polynesian woman, she is horrified. As Michener’s original story bluntly put it, to marry a man “who had lived openly with a nigger was beyond the pale.” So is the prospect of becoming stepmother to two mixed-race children. Nellie calls off the engagement. But when de Becque nearly dies on a mission to help the Allies defeat the Japanese, Nellie’s heart melts. She concludes that her racial prejudice is mere “piffle.” As the curtain falls, audiences cheer as the happy foursome sits down to eat on a patio overlooking the Pacific.

As Christina Klein has persuasively written,
South Pacific
—and many other early Cold War stories about Asia—offered the heartwarming suggestion that American overseas interventions foster love and racial tolerance. American ideals are not betrayed by war, but fulfilled. The willingness to embrace others
like adoptive parents
could be good for everyone. The needy would be uplifted, and American virtue amplified.

In reality, most midcentury American white people found the prospect of social contact with people of color discomfiting or unimaginable, and segregated neighborhoods and schools were the norm throughout the land, whether institutionalized by law (as in the South), or by the standard practices of banks, Realtors, school committees, and individuals. Even cross-race adoptions were forbidden or discouraged. In 1949, Pearl Buck, who had written a famous book about China called
The Good Earth
, started Welcome House, the first agency to promote the adoption of biracial Asian American children by white parents.

The persistence of racism was not just a domestic problem. Many foreign nations, especially the Soviet Union, frequently criticized American hypocrisy. How could the United States call itself the “land of opportunity” and the leader of the Free World when it continued to deny millions of its own people basic civil rights? American diplomats did their best to accentuate the positive. They pointed to the achievements of individual Negroes like Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in baseball in 1947, or Ralph Bunche, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Or they cited Truman’s decision to integrate the military in 1948 and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.

But those signs of progress could hardly stand up against the evidence of
ongoing racial violence and injustice
. In 1955, for example, a black fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till was tortured and lynched in Mississippi for allegedly saying “bye, baby” to a white woman. His murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury (and later bragged about their crime to the press). Till’s mother asked for an open casket to reveal her son’s mutilated body to the world. In 1958, two young black boys in North Carolina, ages seven and nine, were charged with rape and jailed after a white girl kissed one of them on the cheek in an innocent game of “house.” After four months of civil rights protest and international outrage over the “kissing case,” the charges were dropped. And in 1961 the ambassador from Chad, a newly independent African nation, was driving from the United Nations to Washington, DC, to present his credentials to President Kennedy. When he stopped for a cup of coffee on Route 40 in Maryland, he was denied service because of his color.

Though a growing number of whites agreed that there was a “Negro problem,” few perceived that racism was deeply entrenched in white-controlled institutions and culture. There was even less acknowledgment that all people of color, including Asians, were the targets of racial hostility. Anti-Asian racism had been stoked by decades of “yellow peril” imagery in which hordes of nameless, indistinguishable Asians—often depicted as rodents, apes, or reptiles—threatened white America. The knife was sharpened by three American wars in Asia—against Filipinos at the turn of the century, Japanese in World War II, and North Koreans and Chinese in the Korean War.

In light of those realities, many Americans must have been relieved by Michener’s claim that Asians would love to be “adopted” by Americans. Also reassuring were press reports from Japan during America’s postwar occupation (1945–1952) promoting the idea that wartime hostilities had evolved into a warm teacher-student alliance. And
South Pacific
suggested that racial prejudice was unnatural and easily overcome. As one of the musical’s best-known songs put it, you had to be “carefully taught” to hate and fear people “whose eyes are oddly made” or have skin of a “different shade.” Nellie showed how easy it was to dispense with all that piffle.

In many corners
of post–World War II culture, Americans were encouraged to care about Asia and the Pacific. Books like
Deliver Us From Evil
(1956),
The Ugly American
(1958), and
Hawaii
(1959), long-running musicals like
South Pacific
and
The King and I
, and numerous films, articles, and travel accounts all told compelling stories that raised public awareness of these distant lands. More than that, they suggested that Americans should be concerned about Asia not just because it harbored the threat of Communism, but because humanitarian commitments overseas exemplified the nation’s highest ideals; they were a fulfillment of our national destiny.

What happened to that vision? It didn’t die in 1961 with Tom Dooley, but it was soon eviscerated by the escalating war in Vietnam. By 1965, Dooley himself was well on his way toward
historical obscurity
, and by the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, about the only thing most Americans could remember about “Tom Dooley” was an old Kingston Trio song of the same name, which began, “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley.” Worse still, the song wasn’t even about Dr. Dooley; it was about a nineteenth-century murderer. But before Dooley could be forgotten he had to be discredited.

In the early 1960s, when the number of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam was still below fifteen thousand and fewer than a hundred of them had died, a small but committed opposition to American policy began to develop. Its first significant actions focused less on petitions and protests and more on something less dramatic: research. All social movements require information and analysis, but it was especially crucial to the early anti–Vietnam War movement because the mass media generally supported official claims about the distant war and its necessity. From today’s vantage point, with critical evidence readily available on the Internet, it is hard to recall a time when finding and distributing information that fundamentally challenged the government required so much effort. The three TV networks offered only fifteen minutes of nightly news (CBS was the first to move to thirty minutes in September 1963). Dissenting views rarely made it into those broadcasts, and the major newspapers and magazines also tended to reinforce the stated objectives of U.S. foreign policy.
For critical analysis
, you had to read small-circulation magazines or newsletters that most Americans had never heard about, such as
The
Nation
,
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
, and, in the mid-1960s,
Ramparts
.

Ramparts
magazine was founded in 1962 as a liberal Catholic quarterly, but by 1965 it had become an important organ of New Left opinion. The young radicals of the New Left believed postwar liberals were essentially indistinguishable from conservatives—too slow to support civil rights and other domestic reforms at home and too eager to embrace militant Cold War policies overseas. They also rejected (at least until the late 1960s) the doctrinaire, undemocratic traditions of the Communist “Old Left” and called for an expansion of “participatory democracy” to give citizens a greater voice in everything, including the shaping of foreign policy in the nuclear age.

Ramparts
ran its first major article on Vietnam in January 1965. Written by Robert Scheer, it was called “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley.” The main point was to demonstrate that Dooley’s vision of idealistic Americans saving South Vietnam was fraudulent. Though Scheer did not question Dooley’s “well-meaning” motives, he argued that the doctor was nonetheless a “master publicist” of government lies and distortions about Vietnam. Dooley had given Americans the false impression that Vietnam was mostly a Catholic country. Equally deceitful was his suggestion that most Vietnamese were hostile toward the Viet Minh—the revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh who defeated France. In fact, most Vietnamese viewed the Viet Minh as patriotic heroes.

But Scheer had much bigger fish to fry than Dooley. In his telling, America moved into Vietnam not to rescue a suffering majority of that country’s poor, but to prop up a tiny elite against the wishes of the masses. He found much of his evidence hidden in plain sight, information that had been ignored or explained away by most of the media. For example, he quoted Dwight Eisenhower’s 1963 memoir in which the former president wrote: “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that, had elections been held at the time of the fighting [against France], possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.” This view was published even earlier in a 1955
Look
magazine article by Leo Cherne, a founder of American Friends of Vietnam, who expressed concern that “
if elections were held today
, the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese would vote Communist.”

These statements stood in flat contradiction to the dominant public claim that Communists could only seize all of Vietnam through subversion, terror, and military support from China and Russia. Here were the former president (Eisenhower) and one of the strongest public supporters of the American-backed government in South Vietnam (Leo Cherne) admitting that the Communists could have won at the ballot box; that Ho Chi Minh was supported in the South as well as the North. It was not the Reds who had made elections impossible, but the United States and Diem. It was the Diem government, with U.S. encouragement, that refused to hold the nationwide elections promised by the Geneva Accords. The nation that had proclaimed itself the leader of the Free World, a supporter of self-determination and democracy everywhere, had forced the Vietnamese majority who supported Ho Chi Minh to find other means besides the democratic process to achieve their political goals.

Just as shocking, Scheer (and his sometime coauthor Warren Hinckle) argued that Ngo Dinh Diem was essentially handpicked by the United States to be the leader of South Vietnam. Diem was a devout Catholic bachelor, and his popular support in Vietnam was “minuscule,” but he gained the crucial support of a small group of prominent Americans even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu. From 1950 to 1954, while his nation was mired in a bloody war, Diem was mostly overseas, much of the time in the United States, where he often stayed at the Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York. From there the “absentee aristocrat” met and impressed Cardinal Francis Spellman, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Senators John Kennedy and Mike Mansfield. These men, along with dozens of lesser known but influential people such as Edward Lansdale, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., General William Donovan, Henry Luce, Leo Cherne, Joseph Buttinger, Harold Oram, Wesley Fishel, Angier Biddle Duke, Congresswoman Edna Kelly, and Congressman Walter Judd, formed what
Ramparts
dubbed
the Vietnam Lobby
, a politically diverse and loose-knit group, most of whom became members of the American Friends of Vietnam when it formed in 1955.