American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy

the issues and devoted hours to patient, methodical questioning of witnesses.
    But underneath the calm demeanor, a fire was building. On September 15, 1965, he entered the Senate Chamber and gave a two-hour speech. He not only attacked the Dominican intervention but launched a broadside critique of U.S. Cold War policy. The United States, he claimed, fails “to understand social revolution and the injustices that give it rise.” Instead of supporting the “great majority of people” who were poor and oppressed, America sides with “corrupt and reactionary military oligarchies.” Despite the “Fourth of July speeches” about America’s revolutionary tradition, we are “much closer to being the most unrevolutionary nation on earth. We are sober and satisfied and comfortable and rich.”
    It was a brave speech, but it effectively ended Fulbright’s relationship with the president of the United States. LBJ thought Fulbright’s criticism was an intolerable betrayal. The senator would no longer be invited to state dinners and no longer called in for serious consultations. Behind Fulbright’s back, the president called him “a frustrated old woman,” a “crybaby,” and “ Senator Halfbright .”
    Fulbright’s Dominican dissent illustrates that protest against the Vietnam War had many roots. Critical questions raised about Vietnam built upon concerns over many other issues: military interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere, the nuclear arms race and nuclear testing, civil rights, women’s rights, poverty, pollution, conformity, education, and much more. This variety of critical thinking produced a peace movement of great diversity and energy, fed by many streams.
    Fulbright’s dissent had a second major significance—it showed that even some members of the establishment were beginning to question the intellectual and moral underpinnings of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. As early as 1965, years before Republican Richard Nixon became president and took responsibility for the war, a Democratic president was being attacked by a high-ranking member of his own party. Others soon joined in.
    That was a huge change. After World War II, there had been two decades of broad agreement about the aims and conduct of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. There were some heated debates about how and where to intervene overseas (Should we defend Quemoy and Matsu?), but those seem like minor squabbles compared with the shouting matches of the 1960s.
    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