American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy Page A
Authors: Christian G. Appy
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Frank Lausche from Ohio was not happy with the testimony: Mr. Kennan, aren’t you “the designer and architect” of the containment policy? Don’t you support that policy?
“Senator Lausche,” Kennan responded, “I bear a certain amount of guilt for the currency of this word containment. I wrote an article . . . in 1947 [that] got much more publicity than I thought it would get. . . . I did not mean . . . that we could necessarily stop [Communism] at every point on the world’s surface. . . . I failed to say, I must admit, in that article . . . that certain areas of the world are more important than others; that one had to concentrate on the areas that were vital to us.” The great architect of containment now regretted his role in promoting a broad-brush policy that was endlessly invoked to justify warfare in Vietnam.
Viewers also saw Senator Fulbright grill recently retired general Maxwell Taylor. Unlike Kennan, Taylor expressed no guilt. He had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1962 to 1964 and then ambassador to South Vietnam. Fulbright asked Taylor if he saw any moral distinction between the American napalming of Vietnamese villages and Viet Cong murders of civilians by “disemboweling [them] with a knife.”
Taylor: “We are not deliberately attacking civilian populations in South Vietnam. On the contrary, we are making every effort to avoid their loss.”
Fulbright: “We drop napalm bombs on villages just deliberately . . . it is not by accident we are doing this.”
Less than a year after his televised hearings, Fulbright published a book called
The Arrogance of Power
. No chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has ever written such a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy. While Fulbright insisted that U.S. foreign policy was based on “the best intentions in the world,” he was deeply disturbed by many specific policies and the sanctimony, hypocrisy, and arrogance with which they were carried out. We could see evil in others, but not in ourselves: “ We see the Viet Cong who cut the throats of village chiefs as savage murderers but American flyers who incinerate unseen women and children with napalm as valiant fighters for freedom . . . we see the Viet Cong as Hanoi’s puppet and Hanoi as China’s puppet but we see the Saigon government as America’s stalwart ally . . . we see China, with no troops in South Vietnam, as the real aggressor while we, with hundreds of thousands of men, are resisting foreign intervention.” In early 1967,
The Arrogance of Power
made the
New York Times
best-seller list and sold 400,000 copies.
Vietnam War debates were going mainstream, but the harshest criticism of U.S. policy rarely appeared in major news outlets. When writer Martha Gellhorn returned from Vietnam in September 1966, her articles were rejected by almost every U.S. publisher, which is why one of her most penetrating exposés appeared in the most unlikely source imaginable—the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
There, in the January 1967 issue with Audrey Hepburn on the cover, was Martha Gellhorn’s article “Suffer the Little Children.” The subhead read “It’s Time to Talk of the Vietnam Casualties Nobody Dares Talk About: The Wounded Boys and Girls.” Gellhorn had convinced the
Ladies’ Home Journal
that her article about the Vietnamese victims of U.S. military policy was “purely humanitarian,” not “political,” and they agreed to run it.
“ We love our children ,” it begins. “We are famous for loving our children, and many foreigners believe that we love them unwisely and too well.” In fact, we might be “too busy, loving our own children, to think of children 10,000 miles away,” or to understand that the parents there, “who do not look or live like us, love their children just as deeply, but with anguish now and heartbreak and fear.”
Gellhorn takes us inside the “desperately crowded” civilian hospitals. “The wounded
“Senator Lausche,” Kennan responded, “I bear a certain amount of guilt for the currency of this word containment. I wrote an article . . . in 1947 [that] got much more publicity than I thought it would get. . . . I did not mean . . . that we could necessarily stop [Communism] at every point on the world’s surface. . . . I failed to say, I must admit, in that article . . . that certain areas of the world are more important than others; that one had to concentrate on the areas that were vital to us.” The great architect of containment now regretted his role in promoting a broad-brush policy that was endlessly invoked to justify warfare in Vietnam.
Viewers also saw Senator Fulbright grill recently retired general Maxwell Taylor. Unlike Kennan, Taylor expressed no guilt. He had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1962 to 1964 and then ambassador to South Vietnam. Fulbright asked Taylor if he saw any moral distinction between the American napalming of Vietnamese villages and Viet Cong murders of civilians by “disemboweling [them] with a knife.”
Taylor: “We are not deliberately attacking civilian populations in South Vietnam. On the contrary, we are making every effort to avoid their loss.”
Fulbright: “We drop napalm bombs on villages just deliberately . . . it is not by accident we are doing this.”
Less than a year after his televised hearings, Fulbright published a book called
The Arrogance of Power
. No chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has ever written such a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy. While Fulbright insisted that U.S. foreign policy was based on “the best intentions in the world,” he was deeply disturbed by many specific policies and the sanctimony, hypocrisy, and arrogance with which they were carried out. We could see evil in others, but not in ourselves: “ We see the Viet Cong who cut the throats of village chiefs as savage murderers but American flyers who incinerate unseen women and children with napalm as valiant fighters for freedom . . . we see the Viet Cong as Hanoi’s puppet and Hanoi as China’s puppet but we see the Saigon government as America’s stalwart ally . . . we see China, with no troops in South Vietnam, as the real aggressor while we, with hundreds of thousands of men, are resisting foreign intervention.” In early 1967,
The Arrogance of Power
made the
New York Times
best-seller list and sold 400,000 copies.
Vietnam War debates were going mainstream, but the harshest criticism of U.S. policy rarely appeared in major news outlets. When writer Martha Gellhorn returned from Vietnam in September 1966, her articles were rejected by almost every U.S. publisher, which is why one of her most penetrating exposés appeared in the most unlikely source imaginable—the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
There, in the January 1967 issue with Audrey Hepburn on the cover, was Martha Gellhorn’s article “Suffer the Little Children.” The subhead read “It’s Time to Talk of the Vietnam Casualties Nobody Dares Talk About: The Wounded Boys and Girls.” Gellhorn had convinced the
Ladies’ Home Journal
that her article about the Vietnamese victims of U.S. military policy was “purely humanitarian,” not “political,” and they agreed to run it.
“ We love our children ,” it begins. “We are famous for loving our children, and many foreigners believe that we love them unwisely and too well.” In fact, we might be “too busy, loving our own children, to think of children 10,000 miles away,” or to understand that the parents there, “who do not look or live like us, love their children just as deeply, but with anguish now and heartbreak and fear.”
Gellhorn takes us inside the “desperately crowded” civilian hospitals. “The wounded
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