The “televised war” played a huge role of fuelling the antiwar movement. Scores of disturbing images and stories of war atrocities flooded into American living rooms and disturbed the American people who were “accustomed to viewing their soldiers as liberators, not avengers”. Many of these images politicised Americans to the antiwar stand point. However, the ‘silent majority’, “could and did tune out the war simply by changing the channel”. Despite this group, the protesters movement was fuelled and increasingly more pressure was placed on governmental leaders to justify U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.
Terry Anderson argues that without the antiwar movement it would have been inconceivable that LBJ would quit his job, and for Nixon to withdraw troops from Vietnam, actions quite inconsistent with their personalities. Furthermore, LBJ was forced to drop his ambitious vision of the Great Society, as the economic cost of the war in Vietnam was too great to fund Johnson’s domestic ambition. To kill one Viet Cong in 1967 the government spent $300,000, and it spent $50 to help one American out of poverty. The higher government too was forced to make significant changes to their policy in the later part of the war due its incumbent unpopularity. Nixon established a lottery instead of a draft; African Americans were treated more fairly, and in 1973 congress passed the War Powers Act which made a requirement of congressional approval of military involvement overseas lasting longer than 60 days. The Vietnam War had a huge impact on America, and over time that impact turned into ”lingering legacies” that in journalist Paul Vitello’s words, are “never finished”.
Perhaps the most significant legacy of the Vietnam War was in America’s foreign policy. Terry Anderson argues that the first important legacy of Vietnam in regard to foreign policy is that American leaders and experts in this area are fallible. The Vietnam war, according to Neu “exposed the darker side of American governmental behavior, bringing the melancholy discovery that American policies had sometimes been callous and careless”.[sic.] Former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara calls these mistakes in his 1995 apologia “terribly wrong”. Consequently Vietnam casts long shadows over America’s foreign policy. The scepticism that has developed since Vietnam toward U.S. military intervention abroad has created the “Vietnam Syndrome”. Every overseas conflict is scrutinised as having the possibility of becoming the disaster that Vietnam was. However American Presidents comfort the public that there will be no repeat of “the bungled thinking behind that war”. President George H.W Bush promised that the allied intervention to ‘liberate’ Kuwait, was “not another Vietnam”, and then withdrawing troops as soon as feasible, ending Desert Storm in 1991.
In a sense then, the antiwar movement was victorious, as historian George Herring stated: “The conventional wisdom in the military is that the United States won every battle but lost the war. It could be said of the antiwar movement that it lost every battle but eventually won the war”.
Despite the re-assuring efforts of Presidents of the United States that a disaster like Vietnam will never be repeated, the lies that were told to the public, and the soldiers of that war indoctrinated a generation with a distrust of American political and military leaders. This distrust survives to this day, as anti-Bush crusader Michael Moore asks the public to question the lies and motivations of our leaders in armed conflict. Moore states that there have presidents have told “big lies, little lies, lies that brought us down in the eyes of the world…presidents lied about Vietnam…Boatloads of lies for hundreds of years.”. The consciousness of questioning the motives of American leaders is the centre of Moore’s latest book, Dude, Where’s My Country? Moore cynically questions George Bush’s motivation for entering the United States into the war in Iraq in 2003.
The second legacy of Vietnam in regard to foreign policy is that it hit home that America was not invincible, a belief that has been programmed in Americans since the birth of their nation. The Vietnam War was waged, General Phillip B. Davidson observes, not only on a distant battlefield, but also “in the uncharted depths of the American psyche and in the obscurity of our nation’s soul”…it became apparent that it had changed the mental landscape of the nation. Neu believes this happened as a “distinctively American story” did not unfold in Vietnam”. When the conflict developed in unexpected ways the nature of America itself became the subject of intense cultural dispute. The collapse of South Vietnam left many Americans with a sense of loss and betrayal, as if, in the words of Arnold Isaacs, “it was some vital piece of America’s vision of itself-trust, self-confidence, social order, belief I n the benevolence and ordained success of American power-which had disappeared in the mountain mists and vine-tangled jungles of Vietnam, and which so many Americans wanted so desperately to get back”. P22
Perhaps the group of people most deeply affected by the blow to America’s ideological and military superiority were the Veterans of the Vietnam War. Arnold Isaacs argues that “the great majority were able to find some pride in their own conduct”. Isaacs continues that the confusion of being there, for many soldiers, created a disillusioned, cynical tone psychology towards the war, and to their country. In Ron Kovic’s autobiography Born on the Fourth of July, the powerful last words capture the “meaninglessness and existential wreckage of Vietnam”. ”All I could feel was the worthlessness of dying right here in this place at this moment for nothing”. Many of these veterans joined the antiwar movement on returning the U.S.. Many found it difficult to integrate back into society.
“moral confusion” p8 Isaacs
This was made even more difficult by popular culture’s portrayal of the Vietnam soldier. The mass media reversed the imagery of the soldiers of Vietnam with the soldiers of World War II. In World War II the soldiers had fought in the ‘good war’. Which Doherty describes the soldiers experience as an “American melting pot, a harmonious…warmth of male camaraderie, the communal connections of brotherhood, shared danger, and manly regard.” But the experience of Vietnam divided soldiers along all these lines. Vietnam soldiers had a solitary experience in-country. Soldiers were not in-country “for the duration”, but for “365 days and a wake up”. The limited tour of duty was initially conceived as a humane recognition that men under the duress of prolonged combat have their limits. Like so many pentagon policied, however, it had unintended consequences-namely, a tormenting personal isolation. From this isolation American soldiers supposedly went AWOL, and became bloodthirsty killing machines. The worst example of this was at My Lai were approximately 300 or more Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, were massacred.
And once again, the never-ending controversy that is Vietnam has found itself at the forefront of national news. Senator John Kerry is the first Vietnam combat veteran to win a major party's nomination for president. Journalist Paul Vitello says that “his candidacy may serve as one more battle of a war Americans never quite figured out how to win - or how to lose”. Mass political scrutiny has been directed towards Kerry’s service in Vietnam, and his anti-Vietnam sentiment he expressed at Senate Committee hearings followed the war. In the past being a veteran of a war was automatically part of a political resume, argues Vitello. "I can't remember there ever being a question raised about the war records of Eisenhower, JFK or Dole. But this is Vietnam. I guess it carries baggage".
In reawakening the ghosts of Vietnam which were a “crucible of a generation” Vietnam is just as a controversial issue today as it was over 30 years ago.
But that's Vietnam. It's never finished.
DeBenedetti et al, p.446.
DeBenedetti et al, p.446.
DeBenedetti et al, p.446.
