There may never have been a war fought at such great cost with so little conviction.
Much if not most of the American establishment opposed the Vietnam War. What’s most extraordinary was the prominence of those who were most opposed: they included the three presidents who prosecuted it most fiercely. It was people outside of the establishment who genuinely, passionately supported the war and pushed to see it through. This split, between the liberal elite that found itself doing something it desperately wanted not to do, and conservative outsiders pushing for what proved to be an impossible outcome, became an embedded feature of American politics that remains with us in twisted form to this day.
Three presidents prosecuted the war. Each one understood it was an insoluble problem for which their only tool was greater military involvement even as each understood that their involvement wasn’t working.
John F. Kennedy, embarrassed by the Bay of PIgs adventure, distrusted the military and sought, in vain, for an unconventional policy that would succeed where conventional measures were, at best, costly and unpromising. He tried briefly to send a CIA operative, Edward Lansdale, to deal with the problem surreptitiously, and when that idea was shot down by the Pentagon, turned to an advisor, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, in the hopes that his counter-insurgency concept could achieve what the Army in the usual way could not. The historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who was close to Kennedy, would argue later that, had Kennedy lived, he would have taken America out of the war. Most scholars are dubious. But Kennedy was undoubtedly a reluctant warlord.
No one was more tragically conflicted about the war than Lyndon Johnson. On no one did the burden weigh more heavily. And yet it was he who prosecuted the war most vigorously. Johnson, oddly given his cowboy persona, was the least capable of confronting the military over its failures. Egged on by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he stuck with Gen. Westmoreland long past the point where it was obvious that Westy was out of his depth. From the time Johnson took over in 1963 until he withdrew his name from the presidential race in 1968, the American presence in Vietnam grew from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of men – to no avail. Johnson knew it was hurting him politically. He did his best to fudge the figures as the commitment of American troops mounted. He resorted, in effect, to buying time through misdirection. By 1967 and almost certainly earlier, he was as desperate to end the war as any student radical. But he was in a bind: anti-communist to the core and caught up in a military campaign from which he saw no escape. The war diminished his domestic achievements. It led ultimately to his political destruction.
Nixon’s approach to Vietnam was … complicated. He ran for office on the promise of ending the war and then lifted the restrictions that had supposedly hampered the military by bombing and invading Cambodia and Laos. But then, when going all-out to win failed again (as it had failed Johnson), he too wanted nothing more than to find a face-saving way to withdraw. Peace with honor, he called it. One could argue, no doubt hyperbolically, that the war drove him mad. Certainly, the Christmas bombing in December 1972 was irrational: the violent, futile gesture of a troubled man. He did finally find a way out, an escape that was no victory, and by no means honorable, with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1973.
The president, by definition, is a pillar of the establishment, its figurehead, its leader. These three presidents all were deeply conflicted over the war over which they presided. All three wanted to be done with it. The strangeness of their situation is striking.
Consider the contrast with their predecessors. Roosevelt was absolutely committed to winning the war against Japan and to supporting the war against the Nazis. He needed no one on his right to urge him to greater efforts. Far from being troubled by doubt, he effectively marshaled the forces, political and military, needed to achieve victory. Similarly, on a lesser scale, Truman committed America to Korea in response to the communist incursion. Truman too was unconflicted: he was confident he was doing the right thing and saw it through.
When it came to Vietnam, the administration was at war with itself. It’s a spectacle that had its analogue in the media.
Opposition to the war was led by the establishment press: in particular by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and by the reporters who most famously wrote about Vietnam for these papers. The Times’s man, David Halberstam, Harvard-trained, sponsored by that most connected of establishment correspondents, the New York Times’ man, James “Scotty” Reston, was among the first to suss out the weaknesses in the American military deployment. He became and remained a critic. Neil Sheehan, another Harvard alumnus, by all accounts was haunted by the war. His anguished essay in the New York Times magazine in October 1966, “Not a Dove, But No Longer a Hawk,” encapsulated perfectly the liberal dilemma. Between them Halberstam and Sheehan delivered an analysis of the war through their later writings that has remained the establishment’s last best case for what went wrong. The Best and the Brightest and A Bright Shining Lie both effectively eviscerate the war’s conduct.
The establishment - including three presidents - was against the war. It was conservatives in Congress and blue-collar workers - Nixon’s “middle Americans” - who were most likely to believe the war could and should be pushed, at whatever cost, to a victorious conclusion. These hawks and their supporters, including a number of Republican senators, made peacemaking hard. Among members of the press, no one represented their view more consistently than the Chicago Daily News Asia correspondent, Keyes Beech.
Beech, who dropped out of school at sixteen to work as a copyboy at a St. Petersburg newspaper, spoke to and for the much-derided Silent Majority. Through his honest reporting and occasional opinion pieces he assured his readers that the cause was just and the price was worth it. His articles, distributed through his paper’s well-regarded foreign news service to some seventy newspapers, found a bigger audience than either Halberstam or Sheehan. Beech was better known in the hinterland. Its inhabitants identified with him. He had been a Marine. He had a wryly subversive sense of humor. He was one of them.
To be clear: I think Beech was wrong to support the war in Vietnam as long as he did, but he had a clear position, based on strongly held beliefs and values, and he stuck to it without qualm. A succession of presidents and the elites that surrounded them did not.
Thanks for reading!
Cartoon by Patrick Dorion
Thanks for this, Jonathan. My brother and I were clearing a yard as lawn service workers in Carmel in the 80's. The guy who owned the place engaged us in conversation and found out about our Dad. He had read his articles. He invited us inside the house for sandwiches and milk. It was a nice gesture and a nice afternoon