American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (51 page)

“Johnson would knock on my door”
:
Doris Kearns Goodwin,
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 252–53.

Ideas about gender
:
Ruth Rosen,
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America
(New York: Viking, 2000); for an early analysis of how some Vietnam veterans rejected older models of masculinity, see Robert J. Lifton,
Home from the War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).

“On the Rainy River”
: O’Brien,
The Things They Carried,
pp. 37–58.

“I’m not going to waste the rest of my life feeling guilty”
:
Bird,
The Color of Truth
, p. 401.

“Credibility Gap”
:
Stephen L. Vaughn, ed.,
Encyclopedia of American Journalism
(New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 123.

“I call it the Madman Theory”
:
H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
(New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 122.

Operation Duck Hook
:
Jeffrey Kimball,
Nixon’s Vietnam War
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 158–70.

turned the White House into an armed fortress
:
Tom Wells,
The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California, 1994), pp. 352–95.

“Let us also be united against defeat”
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2303&st=&st1=.

greatest outpouring of protest
:
Marilyn Young,
The Vietnam Wars
, pp. 247–50.

“we live in an age of anarchy”
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2490&st=&st1=.

repeatedly watched
Patton
:
Richard Reeves,
President Nixon: Alone in the White House
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 199–200, 210–11.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR
: V
IE
TNAM
, I
NC
.

Governors’ Conference in Seattle
:
This text comes from the
New York Times,
August 5, 1953. In Eisenhower’s presidential papers, the text has been edited with an eye to greater clarity: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9663&st=&st1=.

“The [Malayan] peninsula”
:
In the filmed version of this passage, most readily seen in the documentary
Hearts and Minds
, Eisenhower does not say “Malayan peninsula.” Instead he says something that sounds like “Incrop” or “Encraw” Peninsula. The official papers of the president have made it the Malayan Peninsula. That makes sense given the reference to tin and tungsten. Malaya was a far more important source of those products than Indochina.

Vietnam’s “primitive economy”
:
America’s Stake in Vietnam
, pp. 22–23.

triangular trade that bolstered global capitalism
:
Andrew J. Rotter,
The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 49–69, 141–64.

“two halves of the same walnut”
:
Walter LaFeber,
America, Russia, and the Cold War
, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), p. 52.

It required trading partners
:
Rotter,
The Path to Vietnam
, pp. 127–140. For the importance of economic planning and regulation in Japan, see Chalmers Johnson,
MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982).

“the keystone of United States policy in the Far East”
:
The Pentagon Papers
, vol. 1, p. 450.

“Economic expansion is the driving force”
:
Cited in James Peck,
Washington’s China: The National Security World, the Cold War, and the Origins of Globalism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), p. 42.

“We want nothing for ourselves”
:
Lyndon Johnson, “Peace Without Conquest,” April 7, 1965, http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650407.asp.

“empire for liberty”
:
Richard H. Immerman,
Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). As Immerman points out, Jefferson eventually changed his original formulation from “empire of liberty” to “empire for liberty.”

It predated the Berlin Blockade
:
See, for example, Stephen Kinzer,
Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
(New York: Times Books, 2006).

Commercial Import Program
:
The Commercial Import Program is sometimes referred to as the Commodity Import Program.

Here’s how it worked
:
Kahin,
Intervention
, pp. 85–88; David L. Anderson,
Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–61
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)
,
pp. 156–57; James M. Carter,
Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954–1968
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 75–79.

Ky getting $15,000 a week
:
See William M. Hammond,
Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962–1968
(Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1989), p. 265.

A typical story in this genre
:
Life
, February 25, 1966, pp. 49–52.

confidence in the effectiveness of aerial warfare
:
Significantly, Rostow did not take part in the post–World War II study that evaluated the effectiveness of Allied bombing (the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey). That study raised many doubts about the ability of strategic bombing to dampen the political morale and commitment of opponents. On Rostow’s early life, see David Milne,
America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), pp. 15–40.

Rostow’s book received admiring reviews
:
Walt Whitman Rostow,
The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Many modernization theorists, like Rostow, were also great believers in American exceptionalism. That posed a tricky philosophical problem. If the U.S. is exceptional, how can its ideas and institutions be exported? People like David Potter (
People of Plenty
, 1954) and Rostow resolved the conundrum by identifying abundance as the factor that most explained America’s exceptional history and created the conditions for unparalleled democracy, opportunity, and political stability. Thus, if abundance, through economic growth, could be reproduced elsewhere, “exceptionalism” might be exportable. See Nils Gilman,
Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 66–68.

“crude act of international vandalism”
:
Cited in ibid., p. 197.

“Walt writes faster than I can read”
:
Halberstam,
The Best and the Brightest
, p. 158. Also Mark H. Haefele, “Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth: Ideas and Action,” in David C. Engerman et al.,
Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), pp. 88–97.

Toward the Good Life
:
Michael Latham,
Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000), pp. 180–81.

“useless—worse than useless”
:
The Hilsman quotation comes from an interview that was done for episode 11 of
The Cold War
, produced by CNN in 1998. Hilsman believed the program had failed but only because it had not been executed as he recommended. He believed the Ngo family had corrupted the program by building the strategic hamlets in a scattered fashion as opposed to an “ink blot” growing outward. Hilsman does not address the inherent problems caused by forced relocation; http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/hilsman1.html.

“ruthless projection to the peasantry”
:
Latham,
Modernization as Ideology
, p. 176.

“a wholesome and not unexpected phase”
:
The satire is reprinted in Robert Manning and Michael Janeway, eds.,
Who We Are: An Atlantic Chronicle of the United States and Vietnam
(Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown Books, 1969), pp. 41–46.

“We and the Southeast Asians used those ten years”
:
Kim Willenson,
The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War
(New York: New American Library, 1987), p. 390.

Huntington had quibbles
:
On Huntington’s critique of modernization theory, see Nils Gilman, “Modernization Theory, The Highest Stage of American Intellectual Growth,” in Engerman et al.,
Staging Growth
, pp. 62–66.

“forced-draft urbanization”
:
Samuel Huntington, “The Bases of Accommodation,”
Foreign Affairs
, July 1968. Available online at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/23988/samuel-p-huntington/the-bases-of-accommodation.

bomb Vietnam into the future
:
Latham,
Modernization as Ideology
, p. 151.

“There were all these wonderful jobs”
:
Appy,
Patriots
, pp. 319–21.

“students at Saigon’s teacher training college”
:
Don Luce and John Sommer,
Viet Nam: The Unheard Voices
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 286.

had to import its major crop
: FitzGerald,
Fire in the Lake
, p. 466.

“I want to leave the footprints of America”
:
Gardner,
Pay Any Price
, p. 197.

pushing to get “cheap TV sets” into Vietnam
:
See U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States,
1964–1968
, vol. 4, Vietnam, document 79, February 19, 1966, and document 86, February 26, 1966; Gardner,
Pay Any Price
, p. 299. FRUS documents are available online at: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v06/ch4.

“Ports a-Go-Go”
:
Richard Tregaskis,
Southeast Asia: Building the Bases
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 224–28.

nine million cans of beer and soft drinks
:
Time
, December 24, 1965.

Theft and corruption
:
New York Times
, August 21, 1966; Dan Briody,
The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money
(New York: Wiley, 2004), pp. 165–66.

base . . . at Dong Tam:
Tregaskis,
Southeast Asia: Building the Bases
, pp. 292–94; Meredith H. Lair,
Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 73.

eleven million tons of asphalt
:
Lair,
Armed with Abundance
, p. 71; Tregaskis,
Southeast Asia
, p. 2; Reagan quotation cited in Lou Cannon,
President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime
(New York: Public Affairs, 2000), p. 163.

“Riddle the son-of-a-bitch!”
:
Richard Tregaskis,
Guadalcanal Diary
(New York: Random House, 1943), p. 58.

died while swimming
:
Tregaskis died on August 15, 1973, at age fifity-six. Initial reports said he had drowned, but an autopsy showed that the cause of death was a heart attack. His papers are at Boston University; http://www.bu.edu/dbin/archives/index.php.

“Never before in history”
:
Tregaskis,
Southeast Asia
, p. 1.

“Whatever the outcome of the war”
:
Time
, January 7, 1966.

an astounding quantity of American goods
:
Lair,
Armed with Abundance
; on the Camp Enari PX, see p. 151.

“massage parlors” and “steam baths”
:
Heather Stur,
Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 58–59, 91–92, 162–77.

“25-acre sprawl of ‘boom-boom parlors’”
:
Time
, May 6, 1966.

a consortium of large American construction firms
:
Robert Bryce,
Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate
(New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 106.

RMK-BRJ employed
:
New York Times
, May 26, 1966. See also Victor Perlo,
The Vietnam Profiteers
(New York: New Outlook, 1966), p. 20.