American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (50 page)

“We don’t want our boys”
:
Gardner,
Pay Any Price
, p. 144.

“to protect American lives”
:
His comments are most easily found online at “The American Presidency Project” maintained by the University of California, Santa Barbara, by searching under the Public Papers of the Presidents by date: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26922&st=&st1.

“Find me some Communists”
:
Randall Bennett Woods,
J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 96–105; Eric Thomas Chester,
Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965–1966
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Abraham F. Lowenthal,
The Dominican Intervention
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

“Men were running up and down”
:
The President’s News Conference, June 1, 1965, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=27013.

“We are sober and satisfied”
:
Congressional Record
, Senate, September 15, 1965.

“Senator Halfbright”
:
Logevall,
Choosing War
, p. 393.

thirty million viewers
:
Estimated by
Time
magazine, February 25, 1966, p. 21, cited in Andrew J. Huebner,
The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture From the Second World War to the Vietnam War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 183.

famously recommended that “containment”
:
George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,”
Foreign Affairs
, July 1947. The article was originally signed with the pseudonym “X.”

“The spectacle of Americans inflicting grievous injury”
:
Committee on Foreign Relations,
The Vietnam Hearings
(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 112; for Senator Frank Lausche’s exchange with Kennan, pp. 129–131.

Fulbright asked Taylor
:
The Vietnam Hearings
, p. 222.

“We see the Viet Cong”
:
J. William Fulbright,
The Arrogance of Power
(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 107–108; for book sales, see Woods,
Fulbright
, p. 144.

“We love our children”
:
Martha Gellhorn, “Suffer the Little Children,”
Ladies’ Home Journal
, January 1967, p. 109.

“I was told politely”
:
All of Gellhorn’s Vietnam War articles are included in
The Face of War
, pp. 221–281. Her efforts to secure another visa to go to South Vietnam are described on pp. 262–263.

“If we don’t stop the Communists”
:
Ladies’ Home Journal
, September 1965.

“no right to leave her five children”
:
Ibid., July 1965.

Napalm is a highly flammable gel
:
Franklin,
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
, pp. 72–75.

“I wore my pearls and gloves”
:
From
Napalm Ladies
, a short documentary produced in 2010 by the San Jose Peace and Justice Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omkdv8gz_PM.

“not a single case of burns”
:
New York Times
, March 12, 1967

“improper use of gasoline”
:
Ibid., October 1, 1967, and December 10, 1967.

“The Children of Vietnam”
:
Ramparts
, January 1967.

“People have this thing”
:
New York Times
, December 10, 1967.

crispy critters
:
Tim O’Brien,
The Things They Carried
(Boston: Mariner Books, 2009 reprint, 1990), p. 226.

five hundred protests
:
Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan,
Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 107.

“Nothing will ever taste any good”
:
Adam Fairclough, “Martin Luther King Jr. and the War in Vietnam,”
Phylon
, vol. 45, no. 1, 1984, p. 22.

people packed into Riverside Church
:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm.

“abject surrender”
:
Life
, April 21, 1967, p. 4;
Washington Post
, April 6, 1967.

a nine-year-old boy
:
The boy was Hart Hooton. See his “Marching for Peace,”
Huffington Post
, January 18, 2010.

Norman Vincent Peale
:
Cited in Rick Perlstein,
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
(New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 281.

“creeping permissiveness”
:
Cited in Jonathan Schell,
The Time of Illusion
(New York: Vintage, 1976), p. 131.

“We consider it a crime”
:
The first sentence in the quotation comes from a GI newspaper,
The Ally
, issue no. 1, http://www.sirnosir.com/archives_and_resources/library/articles/ally_02.html. The second sentence was quoted in the
New York Times
, November 21, 1967.

“Our aggression”
:
Time
, August 14, 1972.

“the enemy bore down”
:
Tom Engelhardt,
The End of Victory Culture
, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 4–5.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE
: P
APER
T
IGERS

“field marshal”
:
William Westmoreland,
A Soldier Reports
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), p. 138.

Viet Cong commandos
:
Phillip B. Davidson,
Vietnam at War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 335–336; Mauldin quotation from
Boston Globe
, February 8, 1965, p. 3.

“We have kept our gun over the mantel”
:
Memorandum for the Record, February 6, 1965, in U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–68
, vol. 2, January–June 1965, document 77; Lyndon Baines Johnson,
The Vantage Point
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 124–125; William Conrad Gibbons,
The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War
,
Part 3
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 61–64; Logevall,
Choosing War
, p. 326; Kai Bird,
The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 306–307.

slumped against a wall, and vomited
:
Prados,
Vietnam
, p. 113. Prados got this detail from Theodore C. Mataxis. Then a colonel and a chief U.S. adviser to II Corps, Mataxis was stationed at Pleiku and accompanied Bundy on his inspection.

“self-confident to the point of arrogance”
:
Time
, June 25, 1965.

“Mac, I can’t hear you”
:
Richard Goodwin,
Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 258–59.

“They made a believer out of you”
:
David Halberstam,
The Best and the Brightest
(New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 517–18; for the sissy comment, see Michael Beschloss,
Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 341.

“What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?”
:
Ibid., p. 371.

“six months’ sensation”
:
The Vietnam Hearings
, p. 124.

major purge within the State Department’s
:
John Paton Davies Jr.,
China Hand: An Autobiography
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012);
Robert P. Newman
, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992
).

Mac Bundy did his best
:
Bird,
The Color of Truth
, p. 272.

“Bob and I believe”
:
Larry Berman,
Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983), p. 39.

“a policy of sustained reprisal”
:
The Senator Gravel Edition,
The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Vol. 3
(Boston: Beacon Press,1975), pp. 687–91.

“Ol’ Ho isn’t gonna give in”
:
Gordon M. Goldstein,
Lesson in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
(New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2008), p. 159.

the “cardinal” principle
:
Ibid., pp. 166–67.

letter to the editor of the
Harvard Crimson
:
The letter is dated April 20, 1965, and is cited in Gardner,
Pay Any Price
, pp. 204–5.

Bay of Pigs Invasion
:
Jim Rasenberger,
The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs
(New York: Scribner, 2011); Howard Jones,
The Bay of Pigs
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

MAD
magazine:
The October 1963 cover featured Castro smoking an exploding cigar.

The CIA even brainstormed a sinister plan
:
Don Bohning,
The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–1965
(Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006). Operation Northwoods was the name of the proposal to have U.S. agents hijack U.S. planes or bomb U.S. targets and blame the attacks on Cuba to build a pretext for invasion; http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/.

Cuban missiles represented a “domestic political problem”
:
Bird,
The Color of Truth
, pp. 226–29.

“making our power credible”
:
The journalist was James Reston.
See James Carroll’s account: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/10/14/new-presidents-set-dangerous-precedents/3BkelmrNmJruLMDYzFTauJ/story.html.

Adlai “wanted a Munich”
:
David Munton and David A. Welch,
The Cuban Missile Crisis
(New York: Oxford, 2007), p. 2007; McGeorge Bundy,
Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
(New York: Random House, 1988), p. 434; Eric Alterman,
When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences
(New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 93–95.

“I cut his balls off”
:
Alterman,
When Presidents Lie,
p. 92.

deeper into the Vietnam quagmire
:
Still one of the best analyses of how the quagmire metaphor gets the history of U.S. intervention completely wrong is Daniel Ellsberg’s essay “The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine,” in his
Papers on the War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), pp. 47–135.

“I’ve just come back from Vietnam”
:
Ellsberg,
Secrets
, pp. 144–45.

had not requested the troops
:
Gardner,
Pay Any Price
, p. 184.

“To avoid a humiliating US defeat”
:
The
Pentagon Papers, Vol. 3,
p. 695.

“the domino theory is much too pat”
:
Bird,
The Color of Truth
, p. 291. The first major written refutation of the domino theory by a U.S. official came from CIA analyst Sherman Kent in June 1964. Soon dubbed the “Death of the Domino Theory Memo,” it circulated throughout the intelligence community. It concluded, “We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far East. . . . With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam,” Bird, p. 285. There is no evidence that anyone briefed LBJ on this memo or William Bundy’s.

Bundy swallowed his opposition
:
Ibid., p. 295.

“We cannot win, Mr. President”
:
George McT. Kahin,
Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam
(New York: Anchor, 1987), pp. 371–72.

“The reasons why we
went into
Vietnam
:
George C. Herring, ed.,
The Pentagon Papers: Abridged Edition
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), pp. 138–39.

“unzipped his fly”
:
Robert Dallek,
Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson and His Times
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 491. The story was told to Dallek in a letter from Daniel M. Giat. Giat, in turn, was told the story by Arthur Goldberg. Giat wrote the screenplay for
Path to War,
a TV movie about LBJ’s Vietnam War decision making.