The Sixties Anti-War Movement
Much has been written about the sixties antiwar movement and the wonderful, sustaining idealism of those years, the era that defined a generation. During that time, from 1968 to 1973, the years when I more or less dropped out of Lahser High School through my senior year at Berkshire, I participated in dozens of antiwar demonstrations, notably in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Berkeley, California. Some of these demonstrations ended in violence, most did not, yet they were an integral part of my education, and like the Civil Rights Movement from which they drew so much inspiration and guidance, they taught me almost everything I know about moral courage.
What were those years like?
At Lahser I had friend with whom I often debated the war. He didn’t much like it either but believed that if your country was at war you had an obligation to serve. I believed that if you thought the war was a tragic mistake you had an obligation to peacefully try to end it. We respected each other and throughout these debates remained good friends. A short time later he enlisted and shipped to Vietnam. He died in October 1972 when his Chinook helicopter was shot down by a Soviet SA-7 missile. That’s what those years were like.
Out on the street you never knew what would happen. All it took was some asshole throwing a rock or police firing tear gas canisters into the crowd for all hell to break loose. In Berkeley, I witnessed two of Reagan’s troopers grab a boy who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, hold him face down on the street, and beat him so badly with their clubs that I’m sure they broke both his arms. This wasn’t the Hanoi Hilton but the United States of America and in an act of civil disobedience the boy had refused to move when ordered. At Berkeley, Kent State, and Jackson State kids were indiscriminately shot and killed. Yet nearly everyone I met during those demonstrations either knew someone serving in Vietnam or who had died there. These soldiers were our classmates and brothers. Their lives were being wasted. We brought them home. In the history of civilization you don’t see that happening very often.
Many Americans, especially those belonging to Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” never could face up to the distinction, routinely equating dissent with the anti-military excesses of the New Left, a deliberately false perception that lingers to this day. But the antiwar movement wasn’t like at all, not for the majority of men and women of conscience who took to the streets and demanded better of America, and certainly not for those of us who had friends who died in Vietnam. For us, the war was a tragedy of incommensurables.
Indeed, from the early military advisors in Vietnam who refused to falsify reports and had their careers destroyed; to men like CIA analyst Sam Adams who fought against the military’s manipulation of intelligence and had their careers destroyed; to Colonel David Hackworth, the most highly decorated soldier in Vietnam, who warned America that it was fighting “a lousy war” run by “ticket punchers” and “dilettantes” and had his career destroyed; to the journalists who wrote the truth of their experiences amid accusations by the right of aiding and abetting the enemy; to the young men and women who took to the streets and demanded that America put its house in order and at long last adhere to the ideals it proclaimed; and, finally, to the men who had the courage to fight in Vietnam – well, to a young man searching for his place in the world it seemed as though we were living in an age of heroes, however tragic the circumstances.
For many of my generation and for me personally, the war was a classic example of self-deception brought on by the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy years, the hubris and incompetence of the Pentagon, Johnson, and Nixon administrations; and long after the light at the end of the tunnel had faded, by the belief that the United States had to persevere in Vietnam or lose her credibility among nations. I distinctly remember Lyndon Johnson telling a group of cheering war supporters that if we didn’t make a stand Vietnam we’d be fighting the communists on “the beaches of Waikiki.” As incredible as it seems now, a fair number of Americans believed that.
Sadder still was the exchange between U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and Major General William E. DePuy, co-architect of Westmoreland’s war of attrition. The exchange occurred during the third meeting of the Wise Men. Composed of American’ most distinguished elder statesmen, among them General Mathew Ridgeway who had been tasked with cleaning up McArthur’s mess in Korea, the Wise men had gathered in Washington to advise President Johnson on the war in the wake of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, which had occurred on the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, January 31, 1968.
Tet had stunned the nation. How could an enemy that was demoralized and “unable to launch a major offensive,” according to General Westmoreland’s earlier pronouncements, suddenly launch a well-coordinated surprise attack on over a hundred towns and cities across South Vietnam, at one point breaching the wall of the U.S. embassy in Saigon?
When General DePuy reported that 80,000 enemy soldiers had been killed, U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg asked what the killed-to-wounded ratio was.
“Ten to one. Three to one, conservatively,” remarked DePuy.
And the total number of enemy troops serving in South Vietnam?
“230,000” DePuy said.
“General, I am not a great mathematician,” replied Goldberg exasperated, “but with 80,000 killed and with a kill-to-wounded ratio of three-to-one, or 240,000, for a total of 320,000, who the hell are we fighting?”
Not only had General Westmoreland made the cardinal error of fighting a guerilla war by conventional means, but he and his senior intelligence staff under pressure from Washington had also been cooking the books. In Washington, McNamara had been running the war largely as a statistical enterprise, and by deliberately underestimating the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese orders of battle, the official estimates of enemy strength, Westmoreland had been able to reassure the nation in a November 1967 public relations campaign that America had reached the “crossover point,” the stage where our forces were killing enemy troops faster than they could be replaced and therefore winning the war, the so-called “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Public reaction to this subterfuge was furious and swift. Fresh from Saigon and speaking from his anchor’s chair at CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted journalist in America, warned the nation: “We have been often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.... For it seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” Even the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of antiwar sentiment, was forced to admit that “the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven’t already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.”
When pressed for a realistic assessment of how long it would take to win the war in an earlier meeting with Clark Clifford who had recently replaced Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense, the military leadership couldn’t say. Five years? Ten years? No one knew, though some on the right wanted to go nuclear if China intervened, light it all up.
In the end the Wise Men, who had previously endorsed the war, recommended disengagement and negotiations with Hanoi. A few days later, Johnson shocked the nation by announcing that he would no longer seek reelection as president of the United States. The war ended seven years later. By then South Vietnamese sovereignty, never a bright prospect, was wishful thinking, having been bargained away two years earlier by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in exchange for the release of our prisoners of war. During those negotiations, there had been no realistic provision made for the South Vietnamese who supported us. They were promised the world, then left to fend for themselves.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tells us that knowledge isn’t only about determining where our beliefs come from, but what entitles us to hold them. Knowledge requires reasoning, evidence, justification, and fact.
By the end of the war in sheer tonnage we had dropped more bombs on Vietnam, a country smaller than California, than we had in both theaters World War II – and by a factor of nearly three to one. At the war’s height in early 1969 we had 543,400 troops serving in-country. By comparison, in 2003 President George W. Bush would invade Iraq, a much larger country, with half that number of troops, and with predictable results. Despite all the right-wing complaining about fighting the war with one hand tied behind our back, we did not lack for resources or firepower. Nor did we lack for courage in the soldiers who fought there. Those are the indisputable facts.
Given the time; the place; the likelihood that China would intervene as she had in Korea if America pressed too far; the chronic instability of the South Vietnamese government, the death and destruction an expanded air war rained down on the Vietnamese people; and the nationalistic nature of the Vietnamese war itself (a war of independence that had been going on for nearly a thousand years and wasn’t about to stop now), American victory in Vietnam would have been Pyrrhic at best, if possible at all, as General Ridgeway had warned Eisenhower after the French defeat at Dienbeinphu in 1954 and as De Gaulle had warned Kennedy. “The doves were right,” McGeorge Bundy, an architect of the war, noted a few months before his death in 1996 on a copy of a memo he had once written to Lyndon Johnson. Decades earlier Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a principle architect of the war, had quietly come to the same conclusion. The war never should have been fought in the first place.
That was the thing. There was no credible justification for it, an indelible fact that was obvious right from the start of the Sino-Soviet split, for the very idea that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, had something to fear from a tiny third world country halfway around the globe, was simply beyond the pale, as any number of historians have since averred.
The war permanently changed my outlook on life. For one thing, it left me with a profound respect for the average American soldier, yet nothing but contempt for leaders who fail to perform due diligence when lives are at stake. (Intellectual laziness and the predilection to act on the flimsiest of preconceptions are the real Vietnam Syndrome. And we would see it all again in the run up to the American invasion of Iraq.)
It also made me highly skeptical of the doctrinaire, especially the Sixties Left and its counterpart, the Reagan Right. Reality doesn’t wrap itself up in nice, neat little packages as these people assume. Moreover, social stability and progress imply the interplay of two opposing ideas: the notion that there’s enormous value in ideas that have stood the test of time, and the countervailing fact that in the history of civilization all the great moral advances have been unprecedented. It seems to me that both points of view are integral to what Marcus Aurelius calls the well-ordered soul. But most of all, the war made me realize just how little we honor the requirements of genuine scholarship.
The men who gave us the Vietnam War were among the most celebrated intellects of their day. They were MIT professors, Rhodes Scholars, corporate presidents, Harvard deans, business school professors and graduates. They were men who should have known to question assumptions and in some cases did know but abandoned their judgment in favor of loyalty and a cause. As Henry Adams might have said, it was a colossal failure of education.