American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (48 page)

To view photographs and images discussed in American Reckoning, or relevant to it, please go to the author’s website. You will also find a time line of significant dates. Go to: ChristianAppy.com.

I
NTRODUCTION
: W
HO
A
RE
W
E
?

“I didn’t know there
was
a bad war”:
Christian G. Appy,
Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides
(New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 449–52. After the Vietnamese boys were killed, George Evans engaged in antiwar activism while still in Vietnam. After the war he became a poet and writer. He is the author, among other works, of
Sudden Dreams
and
The New World.

“One of the most important casualties”:
Washington Post
, May 1, 2000.

“We didn’t know who we were”:
Robert Stone,
Dog Soldiers
(New York: Ballantine, 1975), p. 57.

roughly three-quarters of Americans . . . trusted the government:
http://www.people-press.org/2013/10/18/trust-in-government-interactive/.

By 1971, 58 percent:
George C. Herring,
America’s Longest War
, 4th ed.
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), p. 300.

“they were called and they went”:
Harry Haines, “‘They Were Called and They Went’: The Political Rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran,” in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud,
From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 81.

Special Operations Forces:
See Nick Turse, “Special Ops Goes Global,” http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175790/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_special_ops_goes_global.

C
HAPTER
O
NE
: S
AVING
V
IETNAM

“I have never seen anything funnier”
:
Thomas A. Dooley, MD,
Deliver Us From Evil: A Story of Viet-Nam’s Flight to Freedom
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), pp. 38–39. On Dooley, see the excellent biography by James T. Fisher,
Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).

Operation Passage to Freedom
:
Ronald B. Frankum Jr.,
Operation Passage to Freedom: The United States Navy in Vietnam, 1954–1955
(Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007); Fredrik Logevall,
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam
(New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 637–38.

“You preach of love”
:
Dooley,
Deliver Us From Evil
, pp. 11–12. In the
Reader’s Digest
condensed version of
Deliver Us From Evil
, the Potts story is moved to the end.
Reader’s Digest
, April 1955, p. 172.

“Love one another”
:
Dooley,
Deliver Us From Evil
, p. 19. On American representations of Vietnamese as childlike and submissive, see Mark Bradley,
Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

“massive retaliation”
:
Neil Sheehan,
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
(New York: Random House, 2009), pp. 146–50.

“selling America”
:
Dooley,
Deliver Us From Evil
, p. 124.

“Rest assured”
:
Ibid., pp. 71, 124. Graham Greene, the British novelist, offered a critical view of U.S. aid, “permanently stamped with the name of the donor,” compared with that of private Catholic agencies. The
Sunday Times
(London), May 1, 1955. Private Catholic agencies gave more than $35 million to support refugees from the North; see Seth Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 131.

“manifest destiny”
:
Anders Stephanson,
Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).

American exceptionalism
:
Godfrey Hodgson,
The Myth of American Exceptionalism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Walter L. Hixson,
The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Reader’s Digest
:
Fisher,
Dr. America
, pp. 72–74; John Heidenry,
Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

“the whole sordid story”
:
Dooley,
Deliver Us From Evil
, p. 17. Dooley began making speeches at the request of navy commanders as early as October 1954, honing his skills with a standard speech he called “Treatment for Terror”; Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man
, p. 151.

What’s My Line?
:
Dooley’s appearance can be viewed on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rurr0xhQmQA.

Peace Corps
:
Gerard T. Rice,
The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1985), pp. 18–22.

“we haven’t been trigger-happy”
:
http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-13-1960-debate-transcript.

“How many of you”
:
James Tobin, “JFK at the Union: The Unknown Story of the Peace Corps Speech,” http://peacecorps.umich.edu/Tobin.html.

“All of us have admired”
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25928.

“haven for draft dodgers”
:
Tobin, “JFK at the Union.”

magazine polls
:
Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man,
p. 138.

“an astonishing 99 percent”
:
Ibid., pp. 60–66.

“the rights of God”:
I
bid.
, pp. 66, 80, 82; Steve Rosswurm,
The FBI and the Catholic Church, 1935–1962
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).

“This is a book of Christ”
: Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man
, p. 159.

reader might wrongly conclude
:
At the June 1, 1956, meeting of American Friends of Vietnam, Monsignor Joseph Harnett, head of the National Catholic Relief Service in Vietnam, felt obliged to correct that misimpression and inform the gathering that no more than 5–10 percent of Vietnamese were Catholic. American Friends of Vietnam,
America’s Stake in Vietnam
(New York: Carnegie Press, 1956), pp. 42–43.

“civic religion”
:
For the classic interpretation of the “civic religion of the American way of life,” see Will Herberg,
Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 72–91. Others often refer to it as a “civil” religion, including supporters of it such as Robert Bellah and Samuel Huntington. “God” was read primarily in Christian terms, though the idea of a “Judeo-Christian” tradition as central to American identity emerged in the 1950s. In 1952, Eisenhower said, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.”

“Without God, there could be”
:
For Eisenhower’s 1955 speech, see http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10414&st=&st1=.

“exert upon the world”
:
Henry Luce, “The American Century,”
Life
, February 17, 1941.

free and fair election
:
Indeed, a major goal of the June 1, 1956, conference was to justify the decision to deny the elections called for by the Geneva Accords. Senator John Kennedy said, “Neither the United States nor Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance.”
America’s Stake in Vietnam,
p. 13. Hans Morgenthau, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, was the one panelist to argue that the elections should go forward; see p. 69.

two of the featured speakers
:
Dooley and Kennedy met each other earlier that year, on February 17, 1956, at a lunch that included Cardinal Francis Spellman. Fisher,
Dr. America
, p. 84.

“rammed into each child’s ear”
:
America’s Stake in Vietnam
, p. 37. In
Deliver Us From Evil
, Dooley places this story four months later, in December 1954. The
New York Times
reported no Viet Minh violence against Catholics in this period (not itself evidence that it didn’t occur but an indication of the absence of evidence to corroborate Dooley’s claims). According to the
Times
on December 31, 1954, North Vietnam had initiated twice-daily political education meetings, especially designed to win over Catholics, but claimed that “this control of the people is being instituted without violence. . . . The Viet Minh . . . is making a great propaganda effort to win over the Roman Catholics. On Christmas Eve masses were celebrated in the churches, decorated with pontifical banners.”

“This is our offspring”
:
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Vietnam-Conference-Washington-DC_19560601.aspx.

“Did the American government send you”
:
James Michener,
Return to Paradise
(New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 434–35. Also cited in Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man
, p. 117.

like adoptive parents
:
Christina Klein,
Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 143–90.

ongoing racial violence and injustice
:
On Emmett Till, see Stephen J. Whitfield,
A
Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). What Till actually said to the storekeeper Carolyn Bryant remains in dispute. On the “kissing case,” see Timothy Tyson,
Radio Free Dixie
:
Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chaps. 4–5. On Malick Sow, the Chad ambassador, see Mary L. Dudziak,
Cold War Civil Rights
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 152.

In many corners
:
Klein’s
Cold War Orientalism
is the indispensable source here.

historical obscurity
:
Dooley’s name does not appear in many important histories of the war, including David Halberstam’s
The Best and the Brightest
(1972), Frances FitzGerald’s
Fire in the Lake
(1974), Stanley Karnow’s
Vietnam
(1983), Neil Sheehan’s
A Bright Shining Lie
(1988), and A. J. Langguth’s
Our Vietnam
(2000).

For critical analysis
:
There were, of course, other sources for early critical opinion on the war. For example, Leo Huberman published a number of articles in the
Monthly Review
from 1954 to 1965 attacking U.S. policy. A leading African American journal,
Freedomways
, founded in 1961, was a source of important articles on decolonization movements and opposition to U.S. foreign policy. Carol Brightman began a monthly newsletter in 1965 called
Viet-Report
. Key antiwar analyses from Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn came somewhat later. On
Ramparts,
see Peter Richardson,
A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America
(New York: New Press, 2009).

“if elections were held today”
:
Scheer cited the Cherne quotation later in 1965 in a pamphlet called
How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam,
published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1965, p. 29. Most of that pamphlet is reprinted in Marvin E. Gettleman et al.,
Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War
(New York: Grove, 1995), pp. 115–34.

the Vietnam Lobby
:
Joseph G. Morgan,
The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955–1975
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Fisher,
Dr. America
, pp. 90–115; Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man
, pp. 217–62.

five media moguls
:
Henry Luce (
Time/Life
), William Randolph Hearst Jr. (
New York Journal-American
, etc.), Malcolm Muir (
Newsweek
), Walter Annenberg (
Philadelphia Inquirer
), Whitelaw Reid (
New York Herald Tribune
).

“Behind a façade of photographs”
:
John Osborne, “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam,”
Life
, May 13, 1957.

heads chopped off with a guillotine
:
A. J. Langguth,
Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 100; Appy,
Patriots
, p. 58.