The Vietnamization of America

I remember this incident. It was in 1962 and the Ngo Dinh Diem regime was at the height (if that word can be used) of its powers. The Viet Cong were stealing the country away at night out in the provinces; but in Saigon, which was all that mattered in that feudal society, Diem and his family controlled all. He won elections by a comforting 99 percent. His photo was everywhere; his name was in the national anthem. He controlled almost every seat in the assembly. He owned the Vietnamese press. The constitution was his. The American ambassador was his messenger boy; a four-star American general believed his every word. If Diem could not control the Viet Cong, he could control the Americans. All, unfortunately, but their press. That was the shame of it; if you accepted millions of their dollars, you had to let in their reporters. It rankled with Diem but even more with high-ranking members of the American mission. The press, not the Viet Cong, was the only problem in Vietnam, General Paul Harkins told Defense Secretary McNamara. If they could only control the American press, housebreak them. Censor them. Something like that.

It rankled in particular with the head of the Central Intelligence Agency there, a man we may call J. R. In those days, I did not think of J. R. as being a representative of a democracy. He was a private man, responsible to no constituency. Later, I was to think of him as being more representative of America than I wanted, in that he held power, manipulated it, had great money to spend--all virtually unchecked by the public eye. J. R., of course, bristled over the problems of working for a democracy. He disliked the press intensely. It was all too open. How could one counter communism, which was J. R.'s mission--little black tricks that never worked, lots of intelligence (mostly lies) coming in from his agents--with a free press that caused trouble and was read by suspicious Senators and Congressmen? How could one accomplish anything with them? He delivered these tirades from time to time and, one night, he made one to William True-heart, then deputy chief of mission, one of the few high-ranking Americans to leave Vietnam with their integrity intact. J. R. went to it--against a free press, free reporting, lack of controls--what could serious men do? We had to stop this. Look at the way Diem handled public information and the way the Communists handled theirs. Finally, Trueheart gently interrupted; yes, it was all true, but if we didn't watch out, if we did these things and controlled the press, we might very well end up just the same as the Communists.

We were all much younger then. Spiro Agnew was a better-than-average municipal official outside Baltimore; John Mitchell was selling municipal bonds; and SNCC was considered a radical and dangerous civil rights group. Who would have thought that the little war, this mockery of a war, would finally give the U. S. convulsions that would threaten its fiber, its confidence, its democratic traditions, so that what had seemed like the promise of a golden American era under Jack Kennedy would end under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon with the darker shadows of another Weimar Republic hanging over us? Who would have thought that the tail would wag the dog; that as Saigon had seemed distant, arrogant and removed from its countryside--it was the duty of the peasant to honor the government, to get aboard, or the recourse would be force--Washington would seem ever more separated from the rest of its country, as though somehow there were a great moat around it? Each capital would come to be the mirror image of the other. Our country's nerves were jangled, its values were changing, it knew instinctively what did and did not work, and it regarded Washington as a manufacturer of most of what did not function. Washington was distant, removed and, yes, arrogant; there was a genuine swagger to Agnew. And there was an insensitivity to the real problems of the population and a belief that when those feelings were too openly and defiantly expressed, the only recourse was force.

We, who had been so sure, would export our values to Vietnam, where surely they would work. But our values would fail there, and, in failing, would so damage the major organism as to diminish belief in our democracy. The liberal democratic center, so damaged by the war, would begin to come apart. In its place would grow a new angry, alienated, militant and sometimes violent left (told not to be violent, its spokesmen would cite the national violence carried out in Vietnam); and then, in turn, on the right, a new menacing nationalism--angrier, anti-intellectual, bitter about the challenges to authority from the left, bitter about what they had done to the flag. Construction workers joyously beat up war protestors, encouraged, it occasionally seemed, by the White House.

The war had resurrected and given us Richard Nixon, who gave us Spiro Agnew, who would sound so much like J. R.; the problem was not the war and not the racial failure; it was those who wrote about them and those who protested them. Agnew spoke harshly and there was a touch of menace, an implicit threat in what he said when he talked about the press, particularly the TV networks. And Nixon gave us John Mitchell, who threatened, or promised--it was hard to tell the difference with him--that there was no such thing as the New Left, that the country was going so far right that we would not recognize it. One sensed with Mitchell, in those appearances on Meet the Press, a desperate attempt to control himself, not to say what he really thought; one could get a better glimpse of the real Mitchell through the words of his wife. A peace march reminded her of the Russian Revolution, with all those liberal-Communists in town. A shame they couldn't be deported. And, of course, her threatening late-hour phone calls to the Senators and newspapers that disagreed with her and her husband.

It wasn't surprising that Mitchell was an ominous figure in the country, for it was a sign of our times that we had politicized the police, that most dangerous of all acts in a democracy. The police had become a symbol, good or bad, depending upon which America you chose. They were a political force now and well aware of it. They had champions right through to the top; it was old-fashioned to be neutral about the cops, to think that their job was simply to enforce the laws. The laws themselves had become so controversial. So had the Presidency. The national anthem. The flag. The length of Marines hair. Bob Hope. Even football coaches. The outpouring of grief from the older and more authoritarian-minded America on the death of Vince Lombardi was extraordinary. He was the best of all possible symbols, a strict authoritarian and, better yet, a winner. When Lombardi died, the New York Daily News, perhaps the most patriotic if least informative of our major newspapers, gave him the space usually reserved for someone like Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower. And sportswriter Dick Young wrote: "Vince Lombardi has died and there is great sadness among the good people. He has left the world too soon, almost as though he couldn't stand to see what was happening to it. There is no longer a place for Vince Lombardi. He believed savagely in God, in Country and in Family."

It was astonishing the way the war dominated the country and distorted the process of American life. There was an irony to this, because the men who had planned the war had realized that Asian jungles are tricky and had planned a technological and mechanistic war with low American casualties--a war that would infect American society as little as possible. In a limited sense, they were right; considering how much killing there was, American casualties remained low. But there was a special price, a price to the soul; what it did was change the values of a nation, turn it away from the technological thinking that had produced the war. We were at the height of our powers; we poured 80 billion dollars a year into the defense budget. (John McNaughton, a former Assistant Defense Secretary, once told a group of Senatorial aides: Well, yes, it would take about one billion dollars to defend the United States, so that anything more in the budget was simply a reflection of our view of ourselves as a world power.) Thus the New Romans, with 79 billion dollars' worth of empire. Technological Romans. Yet the iron of this power, a nation that sent men to the moon and brought them back, that has intercontinental missiles, nuclear submarines--all the hardware--seemed curiously threatened. When bombs went off in America, and they did despite the defense budget, they were bombs thrown from within, thrown by Americans, thrown in protest of the defense budget as much as anything else.

Vietnam had turned us upside down, challenged our fundamental assumptions. Indeed, as late as May 1970, Joseph Alsop, a hawk columnist who had helped invent the war and had written optimistically each year since 1962 about imminent victory, had noticed during one of his frequent trips to the U. S. that all was not well here. He had written an appeal to Senator Edward Kennedy, deploring "the political lunacy" of the young in "passionately demonstrating against your own country's successes on the battlefield." (Alsop's belief that Kennedy, by changing his stand on the war, could change the young showed that he knew almost as little about American politics as about Vietnamese politics.) To which Kennedy, youngest brother and political heir to two men who had helped initiate the war, wrote in one of the most eloquent dissections of what had happened here: "We are a nation constantly being reborn, and we can thank our God that those newly arrived in our society will not casually accept the views and presumptions of their fathers, much less their errors. They do not protest their 'country's successes on the battlefield,' doubtful as those successes may be; they protest the very existence of the battlefield, for it has no place in their vision of the country that is to be theirs. And I support them in that."

It was not just the war, of course, that was tearing the fabric of this society; there were many other factors that contributed to the division: the spiritual vacuum that seemed to accompany material affluence and technological success, the great racial sores in the country, the hypocrisy in much of American life. But finally, it was the war that magnified all faults, that eroded if not destroyed the faith of so many people in this country. We had set out to impose our values on a foreign land; we would help them, teach them good things. We found them a president, wrote them a constitution, bought them an army. What more could they want? But we learned that they did not want these things. Then, having seen our values fail there, we re-examined them here at home and found the definition of our society, and what constituted success, wanting. We had begun the Sixties sure of our values, willing to export them to all nations: advisors, Peace Corps people, Alliance for Progress workers. On reflection, there was a colossal arrogance to a nation that sought to aid the poor of the world but would not help its poor at home; to a Congress that would approve all kinds of programs to help the poor Vietnamese peasants fatten their pigs so they would have juicier pork than the Viet Cong but sat back and laughed and joked when a bill came up asking for Federal funds to be used against the rats in the nation's greatest cities.

Mayor John Lindsay of New York, a city abounding in smog, racial failure(continued on page 166)Vietnamization of America(continued from page 118) and financial problems, would muse that perhaps he ought to discover a Communist guerrilla force in the city so he could get more Federal aid. We looked at Vietnam and found that what we claimed we were doing there was false; then we looked homeward and found that just as false. We were not the country we thought, not the country the history books taught us. And symbolically, if Vietnam was an example of technology used against human beings, then it was significant that the most important man of the past decade was not one of the great names of the era who had mastered that technology--McNamara, Bundy, Rusk, Kennedy--but a private citizen, Ralph Nader, who didn't work through any existing structure or political party. It was Nader who made the case against a kind of technology used only for bigness and profit, used against life rather than for it.

We were a democracy and were told often enough to be grateful for that privilege. We had choices, options, freedom. But they had snuck by us into the war, snuck by Congress, too. Then, as we went in deeper, as the reality of the failure out there came home to us, the Government seemed unable to do anything, only to get us in deeper, only to tell us that what we saw with our own eyes was not true. The feeling of frustration with the democratic process was enormous; we had elected Lyndon Johnson in 1964 because he wasn't Barry Goldwater and wouldn't get us into a war. We learned our lesson in 1968--and elected Richard Nixon because he wasn't Lyndon Johnson, for that reason and that reason alone. He would get us out of the war; he had a plan. So, having elected him, we found that all he had was the same old chauvinism of the past, the same rhetoric both harsh and foolish: peace with honor, we would not be humiliated, we would never lose a war. America somehow was different. We never lost wars. All our wars were just. Those of us who dreamed that it might be different, that a President could get up and speak humbly and tell the truth that the war was a great miscalculation, were struck once again by the arrogance of it all. We were told by Nixon that Vietnam was one of our finest hours (had it been one of our finest hours, he would have remained a New York City lawyer) and, to show it, he went into Cambodia. Vietnam begat Cambodia. Cambodia begat Kent State. Even his October 1970 peace proposals seemed to be aimed more at the American political scene than at the Vietnamese realities. Thus the widening of the gap between the two Americas.

I remember a dinner party for Nelson Rockefeller on the night of Kent State--not really a social occasion but a political one. Nelson and Happy wanted to meet some young people, writers and artists (it was lonely up there on Park Avenue; besides, it was an election year). A lovely evening, all black-tie, glittering women, great and famous men. Imported Cuban cigars. One's memories of Rockefeller were not necessarily bad; he had, after all, run against Nixon in 1960, been booed by the right wing in 1964 and had not been a particularly grievous governor, though being more fond of bomb shelters than most of us. That evening, however, he looked young but seemed old. It turned into an evening of unbelievable bitterness. Rockefeller had said no, he didn't plan to talk about the war or about the defense budget (he had cared about the war two years earlier, when it was an issue he could use against Nixon, but now he no longer cared, he had lost his passion on the war). He sensed our bitterness. He didn't share it, but he wanted to reassure us. It was great, fellas, just great that we could talk like this. Disagree. Express our feelings. It was the American way. What made us great as a country. I could not control myself that night, control my bitterness and anger and, in fact, hate, singling out this man, who (God save Standard Oil) was supposed to be one of our better politicians, this uniquely callous man. Didn't he know it had all gone beyond that, beyond his stupid Rotary Club speeches, that it was too late to congratulate us for having the opportunity to sit with him and smoke Cuban cigars and vent our impotence? Farewell to you, Nelson Rockefeller, you and all yours.

So in there somewhere was a loss of faith, a loss of confidence and belief. One sensed it in himself. I remember the first time I saw it, on opening day at Yankee Stadium in 1966 with a group of friends, mostly writers. One of them had a girlfriend along, and when they played the national anthem (a song that at its worst had been a bore), she refused to stand. She was already doing something called draft counseling. I thought her refusal to stand was a bit odd, but it was her business. Then later that year, watching the first major anti-war parade in the city, I remembered my own conflicting feelings, my anger when I saw the Viet Cong flag, a symbol of hostility toward our own country. I'm too numbed by it all now; I can't carry the Viet Cong flag nor my own. I find myself rebelling more and more against the symbols of my own country; the more patriotic the symbol, the more I withdraw. The more some speech invokes the greatness of the American past, the more dubious I am, not only of the present but of the past. I don't want any parades nor the national anthem nor the patriotic hanky-panky at half time (all, I suspect, that Nixon likes best; it is his America I withdraw from). The blind acceptance of it all: If it's American, it's good. Support it now and ask questions later. Trust in us, we know better.

All the old suspicions and doubts about the country are back, all the suspicions that must have been with my grandfather when he came to the country 80 years ago, which ebbed and disappeared through two generations of Americanization, better education, shorter hair, no beards--all to make it and then, having made it, to become alien again in one's own land. The police must have been very visible to him when he came to this country (just as he was visible to them, looking so different, so odd), and they must have disappeared from my father's view just as he disappeared from theirs. But now they are back in my view; for the first time, the sons of the upper class, disillusioned about the war, wearing their hair long, smoking pot, can see the police, and vice versa. Now I am alien again, my hair a bit longer; when I'm on an airplane, I look around and see all the nice young businessmen, out hustling, playing the game; I wonder what they think about the war and I look at their hair--after all, they look at mine. Our distaste is mutual. I judge them just as they must be judging me.

If this is happening with me (after all, I am a gentle 36--not too young, not too old--in the middle of the battlefield, and I can remember World War Two, and I'm grateful to this country for that, grateful for my education, largely liking my life), it is the same with others on both sides, driven from the center, driven from faith, reverting to what they had been, to older prejudices, be they right-wing prejudices against kids, against long-hairs, against Negroes and Jews or the other side's age-old prejudices against the military and the police. (Sometimes I wonder, when I see upper-class kids baiting the cops, if it isn't a new form of upper-class snobbism against the lower class.) There is a new arrogance to this country, a lack of willingness to compromise, to temper personal prejudice. Jerzy Kosinski, a writer who fled Poland for America and received a National Book Award in 1969, said that America has changed radically in the decade he has been here. It has become more European, less centrist; the people are more outspoken, more shrill. He is, I think, absolutely right: We have moved away from the rational concept of events (in part because the events themselves, engineered by men like Bundy, Kennedy and McNamara, who were supreme rationalists, turned out to be so irrational). We find reflections of our new doubts everywhere. It is not, I think, surprising that Richard Nixon liked the film Patton so much. It is an odd and brilliant film, a film for our time. The doves will see it and come out dovier; the hawks will emerge hawkier. Nixon surely found in it confirmation (continued on page 236)Vietnamization of America(continued from page 166) of the view he holds of himself, of the fact that authoritarian strength will triumph over soft dissent.

So we are all being Vietnamized, all a little differently, none of us the same. I grew up, like so many others, believing that this country worked, that it groped its way. sometimes slowly, sometimes awkwardly, toward a better life; and, essentially, that the future was going to be better. Now I'm not so sure. I see the tension and the hate and the bombings and the reaction to the bombings, and read The New York Times Magazine with its regular articles comparing us with the Weimar Republic, and I'm not sure that the future is so bright. Indeed, there are times when I am wide awake and rational and I get the cold chill of a bad dream, a sense that we may live through something very terrible in our lifetimes. To use the quotation from Emerson that George Ball, then Undersecretary of State, used when he made his valiant last desperate attempt to turn American policy around on Vietnam in 1965: "Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind."

• • •

Answer: It was a ditch. And so we started pushing them off and we started shooting them, so altogether we just pushed them all off, and just started using automatics on them. And then--

Question: And babies?

Answer: And babies. And so we started shooting them, and somebody told us to switch off to single shot so that we could save ammo. So we switched off to single....

--Excerpt from an interview with Paul Meadlo on the events at Song My.

The thing about us as a nation wasn't so much that we were different but that we thought we were different. In the early Sixties, we were a nation sure of our morality. We had our religion and, if it didn't really question the social and ethical problems of the day in most communities, it was booming ahead, nonetheless (in fact, it was a pretty good rule that the less the pastor questioned the local mores, the larger and more beautiful his church). We had our political system, which was free, and our capitalist enterprise, which worked miraculously. We were, it seemed, freer, richer and more pious than other nations. Our myths were our dogmas. When we went to war, we won those wars and found in the winning, in the prosperity that followed, proof that we were somehow different. Even in the brief flickering moment of doubt, the mid-Fifties, when Sputnik flashed (could the Communist system build a bigger rocket?), we doubted only our power, never our morality and decency.

Later in the decade, of course, we were secure again, even in our power. Our virility was restored, our space men flashed ahead of Soviet space men. We had harnessed our power to our morality, at least in space, where one could see it and boast of it, though perhaps not in our inner cities; we had resisted the temptation to be, most dangerous of all words, soft. Even our poets warned us against that. "Be more Irish than Harvard," Robert Frost had warned that Irish Harvard man John Kennedy at his Inauguration, not realizing that academe had produced a new brand of very tough bombardiers. We had always indulged ourselves in the belief in our nobility of intention, and the post-War years had confirmed our finest suspicions about ourselves. We became rich and the East was poor (that two oceans had separated us from the ravages of two great wars did not occur to us very often). More, it was not just financial superiority: The trail of refugees coming across Europe, east to west, confirmed our sense of values: capitalism was better than communism, more humane, its earlier abuses tempered by new liberal legislation that only a democracy could produce. President Kennedy could go to Berlin in 1963 and stand at the Wall, the symbol of our light and their darkness, and, carried away by the emotion of the moment, put aside his prepared statement and say that whether people felt that competition between East and West was judged on economics, politics or personal freedom--let them come to Berlin. Perhaps Europe, more cynical, torn by two terrible wars, more aware that no one ever wins a war, was tired of the old competitions; but here in America, we still believed that God was on the winning side. Ours.

While Europe had turned away from politics and war, tired and cynical after terrible bloodletting in this century, we still believed. (The French had failed in Indochina before us, but the men who planned our war were not deterred by that; they regarded the French as inferior people corrupted by too much defeat and too much good wine; they weren't a can-do society.) We were activists, believing that it could all change. This was the meaning of the Kennedy era--that we could elect a handsome young activist President who could diagnose the world's ills and then do something about them, that the establishment would, with a good deal of conniving and manipulation, respond. To be involved, that was it. Kennedy's favorite quotation was from Dante, that the hottest places in hell were reserved for those who sat neutral during a time of great crisis.

As Kennedy had challenged Americans to have higher hopes, to become involved, and as those years ended with the country mired in Vietnam, there would be an enormous disappointment and disillusion with the conventional processes. We were not different, we were the same as others. Just as powerless. But our sense of frustration was even greater because we had expected to share in the power and found that we could not and because we were living in a country that exercised such awesome power that when we failed to control it, the sense of disaster and horror was so much greater because we loosed so much more devastation on the world. Thus the withdrawal from conventional politics. Some would turn to more radical politics, seeing in Vietnam and the inability to reverse it a far deeper failure of the system, not just an aberration but a reflection. Some would become bombers, answering the violence around them with violence of their own. Some would become almost European in their attitudes toward politics, believing there are no answers, that politics is all, to use their word, shit; that the answer is in self, in humanism. The answer is to drop out, to turn to drugs, to become a mystic of sorts, away from the jarring crowded competitive race that is America. Drop out to communes, new villages, new, less competitive ways of life. Drop out of the existing political parties that seem so archaic and corroded into something newer, more personalized, narrower and angrier. If the party didn't include workers or farmers and was not a majority party, that was all right. The existing parties were throwing the vote away, in that they were a continuation of what existed, which was all false. Politics to them was something different than to their predecessors: It was a way of finding and expressing self; not, as it always had been before, the reverse, the individual going into politics to become part of something larger, greater, broader.

So the war in Vietnam began what will surely be an age of disillusion here at home, an age stunning in its speed, one more product of the incredible velocity of life that now marks the American culture. Ten years from grand illusion to loss of faith. Who would have thought of protesting Jack Kennedy's nomination at Los Angeles in 1960? Oh, perhaps there was a lingering hope of Stevenson, but Jack seemed to represent us at our best--handsome, stylish, intelligent, graceful, witty, tough. The fact that he was also very, very rich and thus able to use his money outrageously to bend the corrupt processes did not bother us then. He didn't represent the best of us, he represented the best of the rich. His concerns, therefore, were not necessarily our concerns, the pressures on him not necessarily the pressures on us. Thus, perhaps, Vietnam, and thus, perhaps, the Bay of Pigs. But the shadows had darkened by 1964. Kennedy was dead. Though the war in Vietnam was still a small one, it was growing and it seemed more in the tradition of the Bay of Pigs than of the Peace Corps. The best of an entire generation had gone to Mississippi, a summer of deaths and cracked heads and tough sheriffs; and they had encountered local resistance and what appeared to be Washington's insensitivity.

In 1964, at Atlantic City, there was tension in the air, not within the processes; within what were deemed the processes, Lyndon Johnson had every vote. If he had signified Ho Chi Minh or Nasser as his running mate, he could have pulled it off. But for the first time, and this was significant, the people who were outside the processes, the disenfranchised, for whom the processes seemed distant and exclusive and arrogant, were demanding to get in. That was the significance of 1964; it was embryonic, but it was there. What would happen in the next four years would not end this sense of frustration, but, indeed, feed and fuel it.

By 1968, there was a full-scale war, a very big and dirty war, and those people who four years earlier had thought they were part of the processes, the very people who had helped keep the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party out in 1964, now felt themselves excluded and powerless--the white liberal as nigger. So it was a great symbolic event, a bitter and violent confrontation, reflective of a country whose political system has not kept up with its needs, its politicians curiously insensitive to the demands of the occasion, the young people around them no longer interested in the old warnings: Be nice. Behave yourself. We may not be very good, but if you don't put on your good manners and swallow your disappointment, you may get something worse. The terrible thing about people who choose the lesser of two evils, Hannah Arendt once wrote, is that they soon forget they have chosen the lesser of two evils.

The young, who had said, in effect, it no longer works, you do not hear and you do not listen, your only answer to protest here and anywhere else is force, were, indeed, proved right in the streets of Chicago. This was not, after all, a challenge at some third-rate university where an insensitive university president had failed or a challenge at some bad local draft board or the protesting of a speech by the Secretary of State. Rather, this was a challenge to the heart of democratic society, in its (allegedly) most open function. The fact that, at this most democratic rite, the dominant role seemed to be played by the police was one more chilling lesson of what we had already lost and a warning of what might come next. We had gone through a jarring, tearing decade, torn apart by a stupid and senseless war, and we had lost much of our democratic balance.

Perhaps what we need now is for some great rich democratic nation to export its values to us, and its advisors, to teach us democracy, to help us with our values and institutions.