American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (49 page)

“Winston Churchill of Asia”
:
Langguth,
Our Vietnam
, pp. 131–32.

“The peoples of Southeast Asia”
:
Wesley Fishel, “Vietnam’s Democratic One-Man Rule,”
New Leader
, November 2, 1959. For another classic pro-Diem article that both acknowledges and justifies his use of “many of the time-tested techniques of modern totalitarianism,” see William Henderson, “South Vietnam Finds Itself,”
Foreign Affairs
, vol. 35, no. 2 (January 1957), pp. 283–94.

“Jesus Christ!”
:
Richard Reeves,
President Kennedy: Profile of Power
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 517.

denied any responsibility
:
New York Times
, November 2, 1963, p. 1.

The Communist-led insurgency
:
See David Hunt,
Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

despite Kennedy’s escalation
:
Marilyn Young,
The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 89–104.

a new form of criticism
:
William Prochnau,
Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles
(New York: Crown, 1995).

71 percent of Americans
:
Poll cited in Herring,
America’s Longest War
, p. 300.

The CIA’s Edward Lansdale
:
Cecil B. Currey,
Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American
(Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1998), pp. 156–61; Jonathan Nashel,
Edward Lansdale’s Cold War
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 60–64.

U.S. Information Agency
:
Fisher,
Dr. America
, pp. 78–79; on Baker, see Jacobs,
America’s Miracle Man
, p. 149. Daniel Redmond, a navy officer who knew Dooley and participated in Operation Passage to Freedom, also disputes Dooley’s atrocity stories. See Appy,
Patriots
, pp. 47–50. Another skeptical insider is Howard R. Simpson,
Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952–1991
(New York: Brassey’s, 1992), p. 127.

may not have realized
:
Fisher,
Dr. America
, pp. 48–49, 122, 196–97.

a navy sting operation
:
Ibid., pp. 82–89.

His Laotian project was supported
:
Ibid., pp. 95–102; Randy Shilts,
Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military
(New York: Ballantine, 1994).

“sob sisters”
:
David Milne,
America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), p. 151.

American officials said
:
LBJ asked Leo Cherne, head of the International Rescue Committee, to go to Vietnam to support official claims that the refugees were escaping Communist aggression.
New York Times
, June 10, 1965, p. 5. For evidence that the U.S. policy was intended to generate refugees, see, for example, William Conrad Gibbons,
The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part 4
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 544–46.

military operation called Cedar Falls
:
Jonathan Schell,
The Real War: Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War
(New York: Da Capo, 2000), p. 94.

more than five million South Vietnamese
:
Frances FitzGerald,
Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
(New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 569–70.

“It became necessary”
:
The statement first appeared in an AP article by Peter Arnett on February 8, 1968.

“destroy all of South Vietnam”
:
Jan Landon, “Kansas Was Bobby’s First Campaign Stop,”
Topeka Capital-Journal
, December 10, 2006.

the
Phoenix of Hiroshima
:
Elizabeth Jelinek Boardman,
The Phoenix Trip: Notes on a Quaker Mission to Haiphong, North Vietnam
(Burnsville, NC: Celo Valley Books, 1985).

“the fracture of good order”
:
http://www.tomjoad.org/catonsville9.htm.

“life is cheap in the Orient”
:
Filmmaker Peter Davis allowed Westmoreland three takes to revise this statement. Davis used the third take. Desson Thomson, “Hearts and Minds Recaptured,”
Washington Post
, October 22, 2004.

“We want to know we’re still good”
:
Dana Sachs,
The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), p. 90.

the judge threw out the case
:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/daughter/peopleevents/e_babylift.html.

South Vietnamese were abandoned
:
Frank Snepp,
Decent Interval
, 25th anniversary ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

C
HAPTER
T
WO
: A
GGRE
SSION

“Would you believe”
:
Ladies’ Home Journal,
January 1967.

“I would never have chosen”
:
Martha Gellhorn,
The Face of War
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), p. 224.

“the only work I want”
:
Gellhorn to Leonard Bernstein, December 7, 1965, published in Caroline Moorehead, ed.,
Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
(New York: Henry Holt, 2006), p. 324. On the
Guardian
offer, see Caroline Moorehead,
Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
(New York: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 348.

stowed away on a hospital ship
:
Kate McLoughlin,
Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the Field and in the Text
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 118–26. Hemingway’s piece on D-day in
Collier’s
gives the false impression that
he
landed at Normandy, e.g., “If you want to know how it was in an LCV[P] on D-Day when we took Fox Green beach and Easy Red beach . . . then this is as near as I can come to it,”
Collier’s
, July 22, 1944, p. 57.

Dachau
:
Gellhorn,
The Face of War
, p. 184.

“Red Fascism”
:
Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s–1950’s,” in Walter L. Hixson,
The American Experience in World War II
(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 14.

“We failed to halt Hirohito”
:
John Prados,
Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), p. 29. Historians are divided about Eisenhower’s view of intervention in support of the French. Many think he was reluctant or at least ambivalent (Robert Buzzanco, Gareth Porter, David L. Anderson), while Prados makes a strong case that Eisenhower favored intervention but would not do so without united support. For his full analysis, see
The Sky Would Fall: Operation Vulture: The U.S. Bombing Mission in Indochina, 1954
(New York: Dial Press, 1983).

“We must not let it happen again”
:
Mark A. Kishlansky, ed.,
Sources of World History
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 298–302.

“You have a row of dominoes”
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=10202&st=&st1=.

“The time has come”
:
The original text can be viewed at the JFK Library website: http://www.jfklibrary.org. Search for “Speech given on Indochina, Washington, DC, April 6, 1954.”

A Gallup poll
:
H. Bruce Franklin,
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 51. For the Illinois American Legion resolution, see Ernest Gruening and Herbert W. Beaser,
Vietnam Folly
(Washington, DC: National Press, 1968), p. 105.

had made a mistake
:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/7741/gallup-brain-americans-korean-war.aspx.

“Never again should we fight”
:
The best analysis of military skepticism about intervention in Indochina from the 1950s through the Vietnam War is Robert Buzzanco,
Masters of War: Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

many officers wanted assurances
:
David H. Petraeus, “Korea, the Never-Again Club, and Indochina,”
Parameters
, December 1987, pp. 59–70; Daniel Ellsberg,
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
(New York: Viking, 2002), p. 62.

Jacobo Arbenz
:
Christian G. Appy, “Eisenhower’s Guatemala Doodle,” in Appy, ed.,
Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 183–213.

170 major covert actions
:
Tim Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 76.

articles mentioning “Communist aggression”
:
The
Boston Globe
shows a similar pattern for “Communist aggression” (1872–1945: 2; 1946–1960: 759; 1961–1975: 382).

even in the months before his assassination
:
The war’s long, brutal history after Kennedy’s assassination has understandably produced lots of speculation about whether he would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived and been reelected. It is, of course, impossible to know. For an important analysis that debunks the idea that Kennedy would have pulled out, see Noam Chomsky,
Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture
(Boston: South End Press, 1993), pp. 46–47. For a variety of views on the subject, see James Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, eds.,
Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

Project Beefup
: George Herring,
America’s Longest War
, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), pp. 103–109.

“Look at that carrier!”
:
Prochnau,
Once Upon a Distant War,
pp. 19–21.

MACV . . . shoulder patch:
Barry Jason Stein,
U.S. Army Patches, Flashes and Ovals: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cloth Unit Insignia
(Insignia Ventures, 2007).

China’s support of North Vietnam
:
Qiang Zhai,
China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000), pp. 135, 179.

I. F. Stone’s Weekly
:
The complete archive is available online at ifstone.org. D. D. Guttenplan,
American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. 396. Guttenplan believes “A Reply to the White Paper” “was probably the single most important issue of the
Weekly
ever published.”

Night of the Dragons
:
At least twenty-two times the film identifies the Viet Cong with the words “aggression,” “terror,” “invasion,” “murder,” “killer,” and “assassin.” At least thirty-six times the “South Vietnamese” are identified with the words “peace,” “secure,” “build,” “defend,” “protect,” “freedom,” “free world,” “courage,” and “future.” The poll is cited in Walter Gormly, “Americans Can’t Name Vietnam Enemy,”
The Mennonite
, July 5, 1966, p. 448.

necessary to defend
ourselves
:
On August 4, LBJ told some congressional leaders that “some of our boys are floating around in the water.” It was one of his more flagrant lies. Lloyd C. Gardner,
Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), p. 138.

They were lying
:
Fredrik Logevall,
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 198; George W. Ball,
The Past Has Another Pattern
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 379; Edwin E. Moise,
Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Every commando was either killed
:
Richard H. Shultz Jr.,
The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam
(New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 28–29.

“grandma’s nightshirt”
:
Robert Dallek,
Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 179.

“talked and talked and talked”
:
Goldwater quotations are taken from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, July 16, 1964, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm. Hanson Baldwin’s column is from the
New York Times
, May 26, 1964.