History of the Twentieth Century by Martin Gilbert

Author:Martin Gilbert [Gilbert, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7953-3732-1
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Challenges of Modernity

1968–79

In Vietnam, at the beginning of 1968, the government of Hanoi proclaimed a truce for the seven-day period of the Tet holiday. The truce was a skilful act of deception. On the night of January 30–31, three days into the holiday, 70,000 Vietcong troops attacked American and South Vietnamese forces throughout South Vietnam. In Saigon, 4,000 Vietcong struck the centre of the city, penetrating the American Embassy. For six and a half hours the battle for the embassy was seen on television screens throughout the United States, watched by fifty million Americans.

Within twenty-four hours American military authority was restored in Saigon, and almost all the Vietcong attackers were killed. Then an incident took place that was to disturb millions of Americans. On February 1 an Associated Press photographer, Eddie Adams, and a Vietnamese cameraman, Vo Suu, working for the American National Broadcasting Company, saw a patrol of South Vietnamese troops with a prisoner, who was taken up to General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnam police. The general then drew his revolver and shot the prisoner in the head. Adams took a photograph of the execution, and Vo Suu filmed it. The next morning the photograph was in every American newspaper. In the evening NBC broadcast the film. It was edited slightly, explained the journalist and Vietnam war historian Stanley Karnow, ‘to spare television viewers the spout of blood bursting from the prisoner’s head’. But it made a shocking impression, casting a dark shadow on how the American public regarded the South Vietnamese authorities, their allies.

When the Vietcong overran the important coastal city of Hué they murdered as many as 3,000 supporters of the South Vietnamese authorities. No cameraman or filmmaker with instant access to American television screens was present. After the Vietcong were driven out of Hué, South Vietnamese soldiers carried out reprisals of their own. The bodies of many of those whom they killed were thrown into the same mass graves as those killed by the Vietcong.

In March, as the fighting continued, 50,000 Vietcong were killed. In one instance, in the village of My Lai, American troops massacred a hundred South Vietnamese peasants, women and children among them. American policy in Vietnam was leading to growing protests inside the United States. Senator Albert Gore, father of a future Vice-President, Al Gore, told a student audience in Idaho: ‘We are destroying the country we profess to be saving.’ At a White House luncheon the singer Eartha Kitt told Johnson’s wife: ‘You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.’ On March 12 Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination, standing in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-Vietnam War ticket. He won forty-two per cent of the vote. Three days later Senator Robert Kennedy declared his candidature. He had offered not to put his name forward for the Presidency if Johnson offered to ‘re-evaluate’ America’s role in Vietnam. Johnson declined to do so, declaring on March 17: ‘We are going to win.

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