American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (9 page)

The widening fissures in Congress came to national attention in early 1966 when Fulbright held televised hearings on the Vietnam War. They attracted
thirty million viewers
every day. One witness, George F. Kennan, was the career diplomat who first and most
famously recommended that “containment
” define U.S. Cold War relations with the Soviet Union. Kennan’s views had great weight in postwar Washington, coming as they did from an expert on Russia who had spent many years in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union,” Kennan wrote in an influential 1947 article, “must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Many policymakers regarded him as a principal architect of U.S. Cold War policy.

How mind-blowing it was, therefore, to hear his testimony before the Fulbright committee in 1966. The great Cold War advocate of U.S. power and resolve sat before the cameras and described the Vietnam War as an “unfortunate” and “unpromising involvement in a remote and secondary theater.” Even worse, it had done profound damage to our foreign relations and national identity: “
The spectacle of Americans inflicting grievous injury
on the lives of a poor and helpless people . . . people of a different race and color . . . [is] profoundly detrimental to the image we would like [the world] to hold of this country.” The hawkish Democratic senator Frank Lausche from Ohio was not happy with the testimony: Mr. Kennan, aren’t you “the designer and architect” of the containment policy? Don’t you support that policy?

“Senator Lausche,” Kennan responded, “I bear a certain amount of guilt for the currency of this word containment. I wrote an article . . . in 1947 [that] got much more publicity than I thought it would get. . . . I did not mean . . . that we could necessarily stop [Communism] at every point on the world’s surface. . . . I failed to say, I must admit, in that article . . . that certain areas of the world are more important than others; that one had to concentrate on the areas that were vital to us.” The great architect of containment now regretted his role in promoting a broad-brush policy that was endlessly invoked to justify warfare in Vietnam.

Viewers also saw Senator Fulbright grill recently retired general Maxwell Taylor. Unlike Kennan, Taylor expressed no guilt. He had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1962 to 1964 and then ambassador to South Vietnam.
Fulbright asked Taylor
if he saw any moral distinction between the American napalming of Vietnamese villages and Viet Cong murders of civilians by “disemboweling [them] with a knife.”

Taylor: “We are not deliberately attacking civilian populations in South Vietnam. On the contrary, we are making every effort to avoid their loss.”

Fulbright: “We drop napalm bombs on villages just deliberately . . . it is not by accident we are doing this.”

Less than a year after his televised hearings, Fulbright published a book called
The Arrogance of Power
. No chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has ever written such a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy. While Fulbright insisted that U.S. foreign policy was based on “the best intentions in the world,” he was deeply disturbed by many specific policies and the sanctimony, hypocrisy, and arrogance with which they were carried out. We could see evil in others, but not in ourselves: “
We see the Viet Cong
who cut the throats of village chiefs as savage murderers but American flyers who incinerate unseen women and children with napalm as valiant fighters for freedom . . . we see the Viet Cong as Hanoi’s puppet and Hanoi as China’s puppet but we see the Saigon government as America’s stalwart ally . . . we see China, with no troops in South Vietnam, as the real aggressor while we, with hundreds of thousands of men, are resisting foreign intervention.” In early 1967,
The Arrogance of Power
made the
New York Times
best-seller list and sold 400,000 copies.

Vietnam War debates were going mainstream, but the harshest criticism of U.S. policy rarely appeared in major news outlets. When writer Martha Gellhorn returned from Vietnam in September 1966, her articles were rejected by almost every U.S. publisher, which is why one of her most penetrating exposés appeared in the most unlikely source imaginable—the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
There, in the January 1967 issue with Audrey Hepburn on the cover, was Martha Gellhorn’s article “Suffer the Little Children.” The subhead read “It’s Time to Talk of the Vietnam Casualties Nobody Dares Talk About: The Wounded Boys and Girls.” Gellhorn had convinced the
Ladies’ Home Journal
that her article about the Vietnamese victims of U.S. military policy was “purely humanitarian,” not “political,” and they agreed to run it.

“
We love our children
,” it begins. “We are famous for loving our children, and many foreigners believe that we love them unwisely and too well.” In fact, we might be “too busy, loving our own children, to think of children 10,000 miles away,” or to understand that the parents there, “who do not look or live like us, love their children just as deeply, but with anguish now and heartbreak and fear.”

Gellhorn takes us inside the “desperately crowded” civilian hospitals. “The wounded lie on bare board beds, frequently two to a bed, on stretchers, in the corridors, anywhere.” Often there is only one meal a day. The floors are littered with garbage because the hospitals cannot afford to have them cleaned. Even so, these patients are fortunate; most wounded civilians cannot get to hospitals or die on the way.

In the children’s ward at the Qui Nhon hospital, Gellhorn met the victims of a U.S. napalm attack. A badly burned seven-year-old boy “moaned like a mourning dove. . . . His mother stood over his cot, fanning the little body, in a helpless effort to cool that wet, red skin . . . her eyes and her voice revealed how gladly she would have taken for herself the child’s suffering.”

Through an interpreter, Gellhorn interviewed the grandfather of another burned child from the same village. He told her that “Vietcong guerrillas had passed through their hamlet in April, but were long gone. Late in August, napalm bombs fell from the sky.” An American surgeon explained that the napalm rarely struck young men; most of them were away from the villages fighting for the Viet Cong or the South Vietnamese army. When U.S. bombs hit villages, he reported, they often “hit women and children almost exclusively, and a few old men.”

Then there was the awful testimony of a “housewife from New Jersey, the mother of six” who had adopted three Vietnamese children. She was visiting South Vietnam “to learn how Vietnamese children were living.”

Before I went to Saigon, I had heard and read that napalm melts the flesh, and I thought that’s nonsense, because I can put a roast in the oven and the fat will melt but the meat stays there. Well, I went and saw these children burned by napalm, and it is absolutely true. The chemical reaction of this napalm does melt the flesh, and the flesh runs right down their faces onto their chests and it sits there and it grows there. . . . These children can’t turn their heads, they were so thick with flesh. . . . And when gangrene sets in, they cut off their hands or fingers or their feet; the only thing they cannot cut off is their head.

Gellhorn’s reporting so enraged South Vietnamese authorities they never issued her another visa. She was effectively banned from the war zone. Her many appeals to U.S. authorities fell on deaf ears. “
I was told politely
that after all the South Vietnamese ran their own affairs.”

The appearance of such a damning article in
Ladies’ Home Journal
exemplifies the dramatic transformations brought by the war and the political ferment of the 1960s. With a circulation of seven million,
LHJ
was one of the so-called Seven Sisters—the leading women’s magazines of the era, primarily aimed at married, middle-class homemakers with children. These magazines had rarely run
any
articles about the Vietnam War. Only one other appeared in
LHJ
during the two years before Gellhorn’s “Suffer the Little Children”—a brief piece about the supportive wife of an army helicopter pilot. “
If we don’t stop the Communists
from taking over by force in Vietnam,” she said, “we’ll eventually have to stop them somewhere else and it could be worse. That’s the way Doug feels, and he’s over there.” The article closed with a letter from Doug about Vietnamese children: “These little babies are really cute, but they don’t have much of a chance in life.”

The Seven Sisters had typically ignored or criticized women activists. In 1965, for example,
LHJ
ran a piece about Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit mother of five who was murdered in Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan for marching in support of black civil rights. The article focused on a group of mothers who overwhelmingly believed Liuzzo had “
no right to leave her five children
to risk her life for a social cause.” As one of them said, “It was a shame, but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.”

Many women began to reject that idea. Outraged by the war, they joined groups like Women’s Strike for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Another Mother for Peace, and the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. In the spring of 1966, well before Gellhorn’s article appeared, women were at the center of an emerging movement against the manufacture and use of napalm.

Napalm is a highly flammable gel
invented during World War II and first used for strategic bombing—the destruction of entire cities and their populations from the air. Napalm bombs explode on contact, producing giant fireballs that spray gobs of burning, sticky gel in every direction. If the gel gets on your skin it burns ten times hotter than boiling water and cannot be wiped away. Those nearby who are untouched by fire or gel can nonetheless die from suffocation, heatstroke, or carbon monoxide poisoning.

Aerial bombing of civilians began before World War II, but on a much smaller scale, and the practice was widely condemned. On the very day World War II began, President Franklin Roosevelt urged every nation to refrain from “the ruthless bombing from the air of civilians” that has “profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.” It was, he insisted, a “form of inhuman barbarism.”

In the final year of World War II, however, the United States carried out the most devastating air attacks in history—the firebombing of a handful of cities in Germany and sixty-seven in Japan, all of it followed by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Robert McNamara, an aide to General Curtis LeMay, helped plan and analyze the firebombing. In the 2003 documentary
The Fog of War
, McNamara recalled the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945: “In that single night, we burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women, and children.” After the war, General LeMay said to McNamara: “If we’d lost the war we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

“I think he’s right,” McNamara continued. “He—and I’d say I—were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

In 2003 McNamara expressed guilt for the firebombing of Japan, but could still not admit moral failings as secretary of defense in the 1960s—only errors of judgment. Yet he had authorized massive napalm bombing in Vietnam, fully understanding that it was an indiscriminate weapon of terror. By war’s end, the U.S. had dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, far exceeding the 16,500 tons dropped on Japanese cities during World War II.

The anti-napalm campaign of 1966 was part of a rising, global outcry against American aggression in Vietnam, though some activists argued against this single-issue focus. The major injustice, they argued, was not the use of a single weapon but the war itself—the very presence of the United States in Vietnam and its denial of Vietnamese self-determination. Why single out napalm? Wouldn’t any and all weapons used in such a war be unjust? But the campaign gathered support because napalm was such an egregious example of the indiscriminate violence the United States was unleashing on the very people it claimed to be protecting from “Communist aggression.” Drawing attention to its horrifying effects would highlight the routine suffering inflicted by the U.S. on Vietnamese civilians.

In the 1966 anti-napalm campaign, four activists from California were dubbed the Napalm Ladies. In addition to leafleting and collecting signatures, the Napalm Ladies decided to commit an act of civil disobedience by blocking truck deliveries of napalm to a loading terminal on San Francisco Bay. Aware of the media stereotype of antiwar activists as young, scruffy radicals, the four women consciously played up their status as middle-class housewives. As Joyce McLean recalled, “We wanted to present a very different image. . . . We would dress as ladies. We wore heels.
I wore my pearls and gloves
.”

Stories like these were multiplying by the thousands in the late 1960s, but they got cursory attention (if any) from a national media that dominated news coverage in the pre-Internet era. In fact, just as the anti-napalm campaign was taking off, the
New York Times
ran a series of articles denying that napalm was causing substantial civilian casualties. In a March 1967 piece, Dr. Howard Rusk said he had visited twenty hospitals in South Vietnam and found “
not a single case of burns
due to napalm and but two from phosphorus shells.” He further claimed, without providing evidence, that the Viet Cong were killing and wounding more civilians than American and Allied forces. The
Times
editorialized that napalm burns in Vietnam were “negligible” and not as common as burns “caused by the
improper use of gasoline
as a cooking and lighting fuel.”

The
Times
ignored Martha Gellhorn’s reports on napalm and the special feature of
Ramparts
that appeared at the same time. Called “
The Children of Vietnam
,” it was a photo-essay written by William Pepper. It included six pictures of Vietnamese children who had been victims of napalm attacks. Pepper estimated that a quarter-million South Vietnamese children had already been killed in the Vietnam War and another 750,000 wounded. And even the
Times
article that claimed civilian napalm casualties were “negligible” undermined its credibility by quoting a U.S. pilot describing napalm as a “terror weapon” that worked well with cluster bombs and white phosphorus. The pilot offered his own explanation for why napalm was so controversial: “
People have this thing
about being burned to death.”