Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome, Part II
How the Government, the Military, and Business Conspired to Roll Back the 1960s and Suppress Democracy
The Vietnam War and the protest movements that grew out of it remain some of the most misunderstood moments in American history. Conventional wisdom and popular culture depict the period as one of “hippies,” “sex, drugs and rock and roll,” and various other manifestations of youthful excess ranging from the quirky to the alarming, all best left in the past. Ignored are the radical political critiques developed by movements influenced by US intervention in Vietnam. And rarely discussed outside the confines of academia is the attempt by government and business elites to reverse-engineer changes in public opinion which had developed as a result of these peoples’ movements. To the extent that academic and popular historians have probed this territory, their conclusions have sadly not reached public consciousness.
It is these issues that I will attempt to sketch out in this three-part series.
In Part I, I briefly described pre-existing movements and how they were changed by the Vietnam War, and how new, dedicated struggles arose to bring the war to an end.
In Part II, I lay out the origins of the resulting Vietnam Syndrome, which were numerous yet interrelated. Then I will explain why the state and the business class immediately moved to roll back (or “kick,” to use George H. W. Bush’s phrase) the Vietnam Syndrome, and how their effort to do so merged with and energized their existing project to bring an end to the “New Deal Consensus.” An important subset of this will be the exploration of how the military itself, as a distinct entity from the business community and other government bodies, attempted to counter the Vietnam Syndrome by way of changes to its warfighting doctrine.
In Part III, I will argue that the United States is currently experiencing a new iteration of the Vietnam Syndrome, albeit with slightly different characteristics, which is having a major impact on the present political discourse, despite receiving limited attention and analysis.
*The views in this essay are solely those of the author as a private citizen and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States government or the Department of Defense.*
PART II: THE VIETNAM SYNDROME
ORIGINS OF THE SYNDROME
A Washington Post columnist succinctly described the Vietnam Syndrome as “the belief that any large-scale American military intervention abroad was doomed to practical failure – and perhaps also to moral iniquity.”[i] The Vietnam War era was the first (and really the only) time when the American public was forced to come face-to-face with the reality of America’s role abroad. Prior to the Vietnam-era revelations of mass killings and covert operations, a whole terrain of Cold War conflict had been mostly invisible to the average citizen.
Once the United States got bogged down in Vietnam, the existence of this hidden terrain slowly began to come to light. Perhaps the best-known example was the My Lai Massacre, wherein American troops brutally murdered scores of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the eponymous hamlet. The incident only made headlines thanks to the dogged reporting of journalist Seymour Hersh.[ii] The US Army attempted to explain My Lai as an unfortunate aberration that was totally unrepresentative of the character of the broader conflict, but as the growing antiwar movement knew, My Lai was not an aberration, it was the norm.
Indeed, more than a few Vietnam veterans went on record about this. One of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) stated that “My Lai was not an isolated incident” but rather “only a minor step beyond the standard official United States policy in Indochina.”[iii] Vietnam veteran Ron Ridenhour, who also helped expose the My Lai atrocities, later commented that what happened at My Lai was “not an aberration.”[iv]
To some extent, the press was aware of this as well. For example, Newsweek reporters Kevin Buckley and Alex Shimkin investigated the outcome of Operation Speedy Express, the Ninth Infantry’s “major offensive to gain control of a large and heavily populated region of the Mekong Delta.” Their conclusions, which were partly suppressed, were horrifying. Speedy Express was apparently largely directed at civilians, with the death toll from just one province of the entire delta enough to make “the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison.”[v]
As more antiwar voices, with significant numbers of Vietnam veterans in their ranks, denounced the war as one continuous My Lai Massacre, Americans were made to rethink certain assumptions about the nature of military force, assumptions that had until then gone more-or-less unchallenged since the second world war, specifically, the “notion that in our relations with other peoples we have generally assumed a benevolent role.”[vi]
Later, in 1971, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret internal study of the war effort, which revealed that the government was routinely lying to the public about the prospects of success in Vietnam. The study had been leaked to the Times by former marine and RAND corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg in an unprecedented act of whistleblowing that infuriated President Richard Nixon and stunned the nation.[vii] Nixon’s later resignation in order to avoid the prospect of impeachment for his vast amount of brazenly illegal conduct left the presidency in the hands of former Vice President Gerald Ford and further convinced a disillusioned citizenry that nothing in government was trustworthy anymore.
But the shocks kept coming, with perhaps the biggest jolt being the revelation that American intelligence services were spying on American citizens. In late 1974, Hersh reported that the CIA had “conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the anti-war movement and other dissident groups in the United States.”[viii] The revelation of this program, which the CIA called MH-CHAOS, led to calls for a congressional investigation into the CIA. President Ford, nervous about the effects of probing too deeply into the workings of the intelligence community, decided to preempt such an investigation by creating his own “President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States,” headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and staffed by a reliable group of political, military and economic elites who could be counted on not to look too hard or to reveal too much.[ix]
Despite Ford’s attempts to keep the “Rockefeller Commission’s” results as dry as possible, what little was revealed set off a firestorm of inquiry which led to subsequent hearings. A Senate investigation became inevitable, and thus the “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” better known as the Church Committee, was born, along with its counterpart in the house, the Pike Committee. Together, they (along with a seemingly unending barrage of newspaper reporting) uncovered: plots to assassinate foreign leaders (notably Cuba’s Fidel Castro), attempts to induce mind control under the MK-ULTRA program by dosing unwitting victims with LSD or torturing them with electroshock therapy, the internal cover up of the “suicide” of one of the CIA’s own scientists, the existence of the National Security Agency (NSA), an FBI-run counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO) to harass and even murder civil rights leaders, and other damning material.[x]
The Church Committee’s final report was released in April 1976, and soon the CIA was deluged with Freedom of Information Act Requests to declassify more information. These in turn led to much more damaging revelations, particularly MK-ULTRA, which seemed more like something out of science fiction.[xi] It became apparent that citizen and press skepticism toward the national security state would outlast the war and the formal investigations.
All of this contributed to widespread public mistrust and even contempt for the military and the national security apparatus, which up until this point had always enjoyed the loyalty – or, at the least, the apathy – of the public. Now that the reality of overt and covert US conduct at home and abroad had been exposed within the mainstream press, Americans were forced to take notice, and they did not like what they saw. The shock and anger generated by revelations of mass civilian casualties in the war, domestic spying, extrajudicial murder, coverups and lies on a colossal scale, Watergate, the treatment of blacks and women, and the eventual resignation of President Nixon all coalesced in the form of the public’s newfound skepticism toward military interventions and security state activity – the Vietnam Syndrome.
Understandably, government leaders reacted with alarm – more toward the public’s outrage at the revelations than to the revelations themselves. Now that the true nature of American power was becoming clear to ordinary people, what would become of American foreign policy? There was serious concern within power structures that policymakers would no longer be able to operate as they had been doing since the dawn of the Cold War. Secrecy had been key to everything up until that point. When President Eisenhower gave the go-ahead to begin operations “to bring about the replacement of the [Cuban] regime with one more devoted to the interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US,” he emphasized that secrecy must be of paramount importance, imploring that “Everyone must be prepared to swear he has not heard of it.”[xii] Later, the army would attempt to keep My Lai quiet by confining the perpetrator to a military installation. Nixon would keep his intensified air war against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from reaching the public by having Air Force Generals falsify reports, and by simply failing to announce the new policy, which was apparently enough to conceal it from journalists.[xiii] This kind of secrecy, however, could no longer be taken for granted. The public was beginning to take an interest in what was going on, and even the once-reliable press appeared to have abandoned its loyalty to the security state.
THE STATE-CORPORATE REACTION
The effort to roll back the Vietnam Syndrome was swift, and soon merged with an existing plan to roll back the New Deal. While the New Deal and subsequent domestic spending on World War II had been a boon to both businesses and the American middle class, the business community was only willing to tolerate the latter and not the former. Businessmen were intent on ensuring that the nation did not fall back into a recession or depression, and for that they needed guarantees of government support for industries, mostly those related to defense production such as aircraft manufacturers. It had been widely understood in the business community that government spending had ended the downturn, and there was little appetite for going back.[xiv]
Simultaneously, however, it was important from the business perspective to restrict or roll back pro-labor policies that were left over from the New Deal years, which were much less acceptable, for ideological and economic reasons. The historian Frank Kofsky explained this too-often overlooked phenomenon: “politically dominant business groups in general were quick to welcome arms spending as a means of warding off both of the downturn of the economy and the inception of a welfare state.”[xv] In other words, businesses wanted to use the state to run the economy to avoid more hard times via subsidies to corporations but not through the inception of social programs that would exclusively benefit the public.
The trouble with this was that the public was generally supportive of the New Deal (having been the primary beneficiary) and did not want to see cherished programs taken away. Political leaders were well aware of this. Eisenhower not only resisted calls to prune the New Deal, he actually expanded it. His administration secured $1 billion in additional funding for education, expanded Social Security coverage, and spent over $100 billion on the interstate highway system, which became the largest public works project in the nations’ history. Eisenhower furthermore had no problem levying taxes on the most fortunate, overseeing highest income tax rates of over 90 percent throughout his two terms.[xvi] Far from repudiating the New Deal, Eisenhower gave it bi-partisan legitimacy. And he was scathing toward suggestions that anyone try to tamper with it.
As he memorably wrote in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” He acknowledged that it was only business interests that wanted to do away with those things, and he apparently felt comfortable ignoring them because they were only “a tiny splinter group” consisting of “Texas oil millionaires” who did not matter because they were few in number and because “they are stupid.”[xvii]
But the business class never gave up on its attempt to reverse the trajectory of the American welfare state, and they soon appeared to find a vehicle for their ambitions in presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who unlike Eisenhower fully believed in undoing the gains working people had made. However, Goldwater’s backers made a fatal mistake: they ran a candidate who was too honest. Goldwater was eager to explain to audiences on the campaign trail the “benefits” of pure free-market economics, and most people were appalled by what they heard. But Goldwater refused to moderate his message. He went to Tennessee and advocated the sale of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He spoke about privatizing social security in front of groups of retirees. He disparaged the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, apparently in a bid to win the Jim Crow vote. And he bashed the popular Medicare program, one of incumbent President Lyndon Johnson’s most popular initiatives, despite its popularity with older voters. Goldwater promptly “suffered the worst defeat of any major-party presidential candidate in a century and a half.”[xviii]
The business class learned a painful lesson: when seeking to repeal popular programs, great care must be taken not to openly announce the intention to repeal popular programs. Going forward, these efforts would be carried out in a much stealthier manner, and they would be given a tremendous boost by the unrest generated by the war in Vietnam. Once it became clear that protesters were not just challenging racism, or one particular war, but “the free enterprise system,” many advocates of “economic freedom” began to sound the alarm.
Prominent among them was noted University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who chided businessmen for being too friendly to the aims of the activist groups. In a now-infamous New York Times op-ed, Friedman condemned unnamed, and likely mythical, businessmen for being too socially conscious. To the extent that corporate executives believed that business had a responsibility for “providing employment, eliminating discrimination, [and] avoiding pollution,” they were “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism,” and acting as “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades” (for what it’s worth, corporations attempting to avoid pollution is not, in fact, the definition of “pure and unadulterated socialism,” but no matter). Friedman advocated the view that the only duty businesses should pursue was the duty to maximize profits for their shareholders.[xix]
Friedman’s slightly elevated tone was nothing compared to Lewis Powell, the noted corporate lawyer and board member of some of the most politically powerful corporations in the country. Powell drafted “a brilliant battle plan detailing how conservative business interests could reclaim American politics” for the Chamber of Commerce.[xx] Like Friedman, Powell argued that American businessmen were far too passive in the face of such existential threats as Ralph Nader (“the single most effective antagonist of American business,” according to Powell’s “battle plan”), and that they should mobilize their resources to influence higher and secondary education, television, textbooks, and the courts in a more business-friendly direction.
Powell’s language and suggestions were at times alarming. He suggested that “national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” He forthrightly acknowledged that the business community had the power to shape public opinion (“the greatest capacity in all history to produce and influence consumer decisions”) and encouraged it to actively do so via an advertising blitz in order to create “a sustained, major effort to inform and enlighten the American people.” In other words, if public opinion was at odds with business interests, then public opinion would have to be changed.
The push by businesses to sway public opinion away from critiques of the economic system had a profound impact on the shaping of future political discourse. It complimented efforts by the Nixon administration to remove certain people from the democratic process altogether. Launched by Nixon and continued by subsequent administrations, the “War on Drugs” was seen as a surefire way to imprison the people most likely to object to wars, poverty, and racism. That this was the motive behind aggressive antidrug policies was made clear by Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman. In his diary, Haldeman summarized Nixon’s thinking: “the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”[xxi] Nixon’s domestic policy aide John Ehrlichman years later clarified that the Nixon administration
had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.[xxii]
Now that businesses were funding favorable (from their perspective) economic policies and the state was deflating (and even indirectly criminalizing) dissent, all that remained was the military. Vietnam had “done a number” on the military’s public standing. This eventuality had been feared by top brass prior to US escalation in the war. Numerous military leaders had warned early on of the dangers that Vietnam could pose for the public’s view of the armed forces should it turn into a “quagmire.”[xxiii] Now that this prediction had come true, the officer corps, like the rest of the politico-economic elite, were eager to find ways to make Americans love their military again. To some extent, Nixon’s gradual troop withdrawals (which paradoxically were accompanied by increases in bombing) helped to weaken the antiwar movement.[xxiv] But public skepticism of the military was now pervasive, and it would require more than this to bring the mood back to where it had been before the war.
The solution, in the eyes of many high ranking figures within the uniformed services, was to develop new frameworks for warfare that would prohibit another Vietnam from ever taking place again. Many of these men believed that Vietnam had been a war waged by know-nothing civilians against the advice of the armed forces – and they were at least somewhat justified in believing this.[xxv] Therefore, the thinking of the top brass went, the military should develop a list of criteria to be met before they would give their endorsement to any future overseas commitments. This was soon codified in the form of the Weinberger Doctrine, named for Reagan’s Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, but in fact designed by the military leadership itself in order to “insulate the armed services from another Vietnam-like disaster,” as military historian Andrew Bacevich put it. The Weinberger Doctrine created “a series of tests, in essence preconditions,” that would have to be met before American military force could be used. Bacevich elaborated:
Chief among those preconditions were the following: to restrict the use of force to matters of vital national interest; to specify concrete and achievable objectives, both political and military; to secure assurances of popular and congressional support; to fight to win; and to use force only as a last resort.[xxvi]
General Colin Powell would later modify this credo, resulting in the creation of the “Powell Doctrine.” Powell added two new requirements: first, there had to be a clear exit strategy, in order to prevent ambiguous, long-term, Vietnam-esque engagements, and second, the military would need to use “overwhelming force.” The idea behind the Powell Doctrine was the same as that of its precursor: “not to facilitate but to impede intervention.”[xxvii]
Until the implementation of the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine had done its work and the public had been shepherded back to 1950s-style reverential views of the military, the government had to tread carefully when using force abroad. The Carter and Reagan administrations were loath to use American ground troops in their efforts to destroy the left in Central America, and even the secondary method of disruption, covert action, could no longer be undertaken without the public objecting, and “a strong anti-intervention movement emerged to protest Reagan’s aggression in Central America,” with “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam” becoming a common refrain.[xxviii]
Ultimately, however, the two doctrines, combined with other forms of opinion management mentioned above, had the desired effect. Following Vietnam, the only major US military engagements abroad – Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Iraq (1991) – were well-defined, well-planned, and above all, brief, thus preventing major opposition from developing, despite all being based on shady or outright false pretexts, and in the case of the Gulf War, requiring blatant state propaganda in order to generate enough public enthusiasm. As a result of this series of swift victories over poorly-armed, inferior enemy forces, the military was able to steadily regain public respect. The impact on public opinion was noticeable. Commenting on the results of the US invasion of Panama on public opinion, Secretary of State James Baker III claimed that the brief war finally stopped “the mindset of the American people about the use of force in the post-Vietnam era,” and that it “established an emotional predicate that permitted us to build the public support so essential for the success of Operation Desert Storm…”[xxix] American leaders were even more ecstatic about the Gulf War. In what a reporter called a “spontaneous burst of pride,” President George H. W. Bush said of the war, “By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”[xxx]
Popular culture assisted in this endeavor. After its brief flirtation with anti-establishment themes, Hollywood quickly resumed perpetuating narratives that loaned themselves to the needs of the military and intelligence services. Skeptical films like Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Salvador, and Platoon gave way to barely disguised military recruitment vehicles such as Top Gun and its endless imitators. On the literary scene, the bestselling novels of reactionary neoconservative Tom Clancy “reflected the cult of national security” and thus primed audiences to accept the hawkish outlook of the Reagan administration. Indeed, Reagan himself promoted Clancy’s work, calling the absurd Hunt for the Red October “my kind of yarn.”[xxxi] And in the 90s, reactionary films like Forrest Gump rewrote the history of the antiwar movement in order to depict the protestors in the most negative possible light. Commenting on their portrayal as “arrogant jerks” in films like this, historian Christian Appy observes a serious consequence: “In the decades since 1980, few, if any, prominent Americans have publicly praised the courage and determination of peace activists who opposed our most unpopular war.”[xxxii]
By and large, the public seemed to support the Gulf War,[xxxiii] and antiwar protests, while they did exist, were limited, and nothing compared to those which erupted during Vietnam. By quickly driving the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and then departing, the Bush administration was able to tout an easy victory which was generally popular (or at least, not wildly unpopular) and which did not lead to protests that threatened the economic and social order. Once again the US military could fight ground wars in foreign countries without having to worry about public opposition. The relatively uncontroversial nature of post-Vietnam conflicts combined with corporate propaganda that assaulted the welfare state but glorified the military state[xxxiv] had brought American culture out of the radical, skeptical 1960s and into an era where overt power could be safely and projected abroad with little controversy. We will examine where this has led in Part III.
[i] Dionne Jr., E.J., “Kicking the ‘Vietnam Syndrome,’” Washington Post, 4 March 1991.
[ii] Hersh, Seymour M. Reporter: A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 pp. 100-119
[iii]Quoted in Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990. 1st ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991, p. 256
[iv] Quoted in Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War In Vietnam, New York: Picador, 2015, p. 5
[v] Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, New York: Viking, 2015, pp. 179-180.
[vi] Herring, “Reflecting the Last War: The Persian Gulf and the ‘Vietnam Syndrome,’”
[vii] Young, Vietnam Wars, p. 260
[viii] Hersh quoted in Kinzer, Stephen. Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019, p. 214
[ix] Kinzer, Poisoner In Chief, pp. 214-215
[x] Kinzer, Poisoner In Chief, especially pp. 222-229; Hersh, Reporter, pp. 280-284
[xi] Kinzer, Poisoner In Chief, pp. 232-242
[xii] Kinzer, Stephen. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War. New York: Time Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2013 p. 288
[xiii] Young, Vietnam Wars, p. 263 and p. 367, fn. 17.
[xiv] Kofsky, Frank. Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, pp. 40-42
[xv] Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948, p. 252
[xvi] Kruse, Kevin. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015 p. 87
[xvii] Kruze, One Nation Under God, p. 86
[xviii] MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking, 2017, pp. 132-135
[xix] Friedman, Milton. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits.” New York Times, September 13, 1970.
[xx] Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Anchor Books, 2017 p. 88
[xxi] “Haldeman Diary Shows Nixon Was Wary of Blacks and Jews,” New York Times (AP) May 18, 1994
[xxii] Baum, Dan, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016
[xxiii] Buzzanco, Robert. Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1999, p. 89
[xxiv] Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life, p. 112
[xxv] Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life, p. 20
[xxvi] Bacevich, Andrew J. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 47-48
[xxvii] Bacevich, The New American Militarism, pp. 51-52
[xxviii] Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life, p. 135
[xxix] Baker quoted in Appy, American Reckoning, p. 295
[xxx] Dowd, Maureen, “War Introduces a Tougher Bush to Nation” New York Times, 2 March 1991
[xxxi] Hixson, Walter L., “‘Red Storm Rising’: Tom Clancy Novels and the Cult of National Security,” p. 606
[xxxii] Appy, American Reckoning, p. 266
[xxxiii] Herring, George C., “Reflecting the Last War: The Persia Gulf and the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’” Journal of Third World Studies, Vol. X, No. 1, 1993, p. 44
[xxxiv] Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin described this phenomenon: “That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its huge budgets means that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the military is distinct from government. Thus the most substantial element of state power is removed from public debate.” Democracy Inc., p. 199