American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (8 page)

Congress was equally gullible. It not only accepted the claim that North Vietnam was the major threat to South Vietnamese self-determination, but fully supported LBJ’s request for a resolution giving him the power to escalate U.S. intervention without a declaration of war. The resolution sailed through Congress in 1964 after a shadowy “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin involving U.S. destroyers and a few tiny North Vietnamese patrol boats.

On August 4, 1964, just before midnight, LBJ went on national television with an ominous announcement: “Aggression by terror against peaceful villages of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” On August 2 and again on August 4, Johnson claimed, North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at two U.S. destroyers, the
Maddox
and the
Turner Joy
,
in the Gulf of Tonkin. “It is my duty,” the president said, “to take action in reply.” Sixty-four American fighter-bombers were already beginning their “retaliatory” mission against North Vietnam.

Suddenly the official stakes had shifted. From the days of Tom Dooley through the JFK presidency, the United States claimed to be in South Vietnam on an idealistic mission to save the infant nation of South Vietnam and prevent Communism from spreading through the region. Now, in 1964, President Johnson was saying military strikes were
necessary to defend
ourselves
. The next day LBJ sent Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify in support of a resolution authorizing the president to use military force at his discretion. The administration had drafted the resolution months before; it only needed the right moment to send it forward. Now was the time. Rusk and McNamara assured the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright, and his colleagues that they had unequivocal evidence that the Vietnamese had twice committed unprovoked acts of aggression against U.S. destroyers.

They were lying
. They did not know for sure that there was a second attack. The
Maddox
commander, John Herrick, sent an urgent “flash message” warning that “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen” may have caused a false alarm. He suggested “a complete evaluation before any further action [is] taken.” The administration was not willing to wait. LBJ and his aides may have initially believed the second attack had occurred, but just a few days later the president told Undersecretary of State George Ball, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”

There was a more serious lie. The one North Vietnamese attack was far from unprovoked. U.S. destroyers were not sailing innocently through the gulf. In fact, they were engaged in an intelligence-gathering mission that was part of a secret war the United States had been waging against North Vietnam since 1961. For years the U.S. had been sending South Vietnamese commandos on Swift boats to attack the coast of North Vietnam. Sometimes targets were shelled and machine-gunned from the ocean, other times the commandos came ashore to blow up targets. Larger U.S. ships often tracked these raids from farther out at sea. One purpose of the raids was to provoke the North Vietnamese military to turn on its radar systems so they could be identified and mapped for possible future bombing attacks. That is precisely what the
Maddox
was doing in the Gulf of Tonkin. On July 31, 1964, four South Vietnamese gunboats had attacked some coastal islands off North Vietnam. The
Maddox
went along to collect electronic data. On August 2, North Vietnamese patrol boats sped toward the
Maddox
. The
Maddox
opened fire first and then the PT boats launched several torpedoes, all of them missing. There was not a single American casualty. Then the United States ordered another destroyer into the gulf with instructions for both ships to zigzag provocatively near the site of the first incident.

Since 1961, the CIA had also been sending teams of South Vietnamese commandos into North Vietnam to gather intelligence and sow rebellion against the Communist government. These missions were a complete failure.
Every commando was either killed
, or imprisoned, or began working for the North. By the time the program was finally shut down, some seven hundred South Vietnamese commandos had been lost.

Though the details of the secret war against North Vietnam would not emerge for decades, enough evidence had leaked out to warrant the suspicion that the United States was in fact the aggressor and had provoked the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. On July 23, 1964, for example, the
New York Times
ran a front-page story under the headline “Sabotage Raids on North Confirmed by Saigon Aide.” Air Commodore Nguyen Cao Ky “confirmed today that ‘combat teams’ had been sent on sabotage missions inside Communist North Vietnam.” Ky “indicated that clandestine missions had been dispatched at intervals for at least three years.” An American general at the news conference “tried to suggest that Commodore Ky did not have a complete command of English and might be misinterpreting questions.” The media and Congress did virtually nothing to follow up on Ky’s stunning revelation, and it effectively disappeared.

Only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson got exactly what he wanted: a boost in his popularity and a blank check to do whatever he wanted in Vietnam without a prolonged congressional debate. His approval ratings jumped from 42 to 72 percent overnight, and the resolution gave him the power “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The authorization was so broad Johnson quipped to aides, “It’s like
grandma’s nightshirt
—it covers everything.”

The resolution also helped LBJ fend off right-wing critics who branded him soft on Communism. His foremost critic was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Johnson’s 1964 Republican opponent for president. The hawkish Goldwater, a general in the Air Force Reserve, believed the Democrats were losing the Cold War. Just before the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, at the Republican National Convention, Goldwater attacked both Johnson and recently assassinated President John Kennedy. Both had “
talked and talked and talked
and talked the words of freedom,” but each one had failed to deliver the reality. “Failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam.” And now, “the Commander-in-Chief of our forces . . . refuses to say—refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory.”

By contrast, Goldwater had pledged to do whatever it took to win, even suggesting the use of “low-yield atomic weapons” to block the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops and supplies into South Vietnam. It did not strike everyone as a nutty idea. Hanson Baldwin, the military editor of the
New York Times
, offered a supportive column claiming that a single “nominal-yield” atomic bomb could “clear” as much forest as twenty-five million pounds of napalm.

In the face of Goldwater’s attacks, LBJ shored up his tough-guy credentials by launching a major air strike against North Vietnam in response to a tiny attack (provoked by the United States) that did not produce a single American casualty. After that demonstration of force, LBJ finished off his presidential campaign sounding like a peace candidate. He promised that his decisions regarding Vietnam would be “cautious and careful,” not provocative and rash. He did not seek a “wider war.” Reckless hawks like Barry Goldwater, Johnson warned, might incite China to enter the war in Vietnam as it had in Korea. “
We don’t want our boys
to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved in a nation with 700 million people [China] and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”

LBJ was elected in a landslide. Few voters could have predicted that he would go on to escalate the war almost as fully as Goldwater recommended. LBJ’s great fear was that failure in Vietnam might destroy his political opportunity to become the greatest liberal reformer in U.S. history. He wanted his Great Society programs to surpass the New Deal reforms of his hero Franklin Roosevelt. For a while it worked. From 1964 to 1966, Johnson drove Congress to pass the most ambitious set of domestic legislative reforms in U.S. history—landmark bills on civil rights, health care, education, poverty, transportation, the environment, consumer protection, immigration reform, federal support for the arts and sciences, freedom of information, public broadcasting, and dozens more.

Johnson believed ongoing success hinged on his ability to curb debate about the war in Vietnam. That proved impossible, even in Congress, where he had a supermajority of Democrats. Senator William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, soon regretted his support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. At first, he tried privately to dissuade LBJ from escalating the war. But he went public with his opposition after witnessing LBJ’s handling of another, nearly forgotten, military intervention—the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic.

At the end of April 1965, Johnson rushed four hundred marines to Santo Domingo. Within weeks, thirty thousand more American troops were added. On April 28, LBJ announced that he had acted “
to protect American lives
.” That was it—no details. Two days later he added a second motive: “There are signs that people trained outside the Dominican Republic are seeking to gain control.” Two days later he elaborated, sounding a bit defensive: “There was no longer any choice.” If he had not acted, Americans “would die in the streets.” If that wasn’t convincing, he had an ace in the hole: Communism. “Communist leaders, many of them trained in Cuba,” were taking “increasing control” and “the American nations cannot, must not, and will not permit the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.”

It soon became clear to Fulbright that all of these claims were wildly inflated or completely fabricated. There was no convincing evidence that American lives were in peril or that pro-Castro Communists were seizing power in the Dominican Republic. The turmoil was caused by a popular movement to restore Juan Bosch to power. A liberal intellectual and writer, Bosch had become the nation’s first democratically elected president in 1963 but was soon overthrown by a military coup—with U.S. approval. LBJ claimed that Communists were orchestrating the movement to reinstate him. Lacking evidence, the president browbeat the CIA and FBI to provide some. “
Find me some Communists
in the Dominican Republic,” Johnson ordered FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover came back with fifty-three names, but even this short list was later discredited.

In response to skeptical questions, LBJ told wild stories of Americans under attack. “
Men were running up and down
the corridors of the Ambassador Hotel with tommy-guns,” he told journalists at a press conference in June 1965. “Our citizens were under the beds and in the closets and trying to dodge this gunfire. Our Ambassador, as he was talking to us, was under the desk.”

Senator Fulbright suspected the president of lying. He had his Foreign Relations Committee call witnesses. His hearings showed that the administration had concocted phony evidence. The State Department had urged the American ambassador in Santo Domingo to say that American lives were in peril to give LBJ a legal justification for intervening.

Fulbright was an Arkansan gentleman with cosmopolitan tastes, a Rhodes scholar more at ease with intellectuals than poor country farmers. Unlike President Johnson, Fulbright was not given to political arm-twisting. He didn’t like it and he wasn’t good at it. Though he would become one of the most prominent Senate critics of the Vietnam War, he did not pressure his colleagues to take up the cause. He believed logic and reason should carry the day. He studied the issues and devoted hours to patient, methodical questioning of witnesses.

But underneath the calm demeanor, a fire was building. On September 15, 1965, he entered the Senate Chamber and gave a two-hour speech. He not only attacked the Dominican intervention but launched a broadside critique of U.S. Cold War policy. The United States, he claimed, fails “to understand social revolution and the injustices that give it rise.” Instead of supporting the “great majority of people” who were poor and oppressed, America sides with “corrupt and reactionary military oligarchies.” Despite the “Fourth of July speeches” about America’s revolutionary tradition, we are “much closer to being the most unrevolutionary nation on earth.
We are sober and satisfied
and comfortable and rich.”

It was a brave speech, but it effectively ended Fulbright’s relationship with the president of the United States. LBJ thought Fulbright’s criticism was an intolerable betrayal. The senator would no longer be invited to state dinners and no longer called in for serious consultations. Behind Fulbright’s back, the president called him “a frustrated old woman,” a “crybaby,” and “
Senator Halfbright
.”

Fulbright’s Dominican dissent illustrates that protest against the Vietnam War had many roots. Critical questions raised about Vietnam built upon concerns over many other issues: military interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere, the nuclear arms race and nuclear testing, civil rights, women’s rights, poverty, pollution, conformity, education, and much more. This variety of critical thinking produced a peace movement of great diversity and energy, fed by many streams.

Fulbright’s dissent had a second major significance—it showed that even some members of the establishment were beginning to question the intellectual and moral underpinnings of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. As early as 1965, years before Republican Richard Nixon became president and took responsibility for the war, a Democratic president was being attacked by a high-ranking member of his own party. Others soon joined in.

That was a huge change. After World War II, there had been two decades of broad agreement about the aims and conduct of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. There were some heated debates about how and where to intervene overseas (Should we defend Quemoy and Matsu?), but those seem like minor squabbles compared with the shouting matches of the 1960s.