Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 by Marilyn Young

Author:Marilyn Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Despite such powerful criticism, Congress continued to fund the war. And although many testified before the Fulbright Committee that Vietnam served no vital American interest and that unilateral withdrawal would do the United States no permanent damage (“it would be a six months’ sensation, but I dare say we would survive it in the end,” George Kennan said), remarkably, not one critic advised immediate and unilateral withdrawal. Church interrupted his questioning of one witness to make sure neither he nor the Committee was being misunderstood: “I do not know anyone around this table, certainly no members of the Foreign Relations Committee, that has advocated withdrawal…under the present circumstances…in Vietnam.”19

For the “respectable opposition,” novelist and journalist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1967, “unilateral withdrawal has become steadily more unthinkable as United States intervention has widened.” Kennan, Fulbright, Church, all retained a “sympathy for American power,” in McCarthy’s telling phrase, that prevented their advocacy of immediate and unilateral withdrawal. Indeed, she thought that the more they talked, the clearer it became that at some level they did not really oppose the war, “or not enough to stop thinking of it in terms of ‘solutions,’ all of which imply continuing the war by slightly different means….”20

Nonetheless, and despite still optimistic reports from Westmoreland and the Saigon Embassy, the intensity of public opposition to the war seriously worried some senior officials. “A feeling is widely and strongly held,” John McNaughton, assistant secretary of defense, wrote McNamara in a May 6 memorandum, “that ‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind…. Related to this feeling is the increased polarization that is taking place in the United States with seeds of the worst split in our people in more than a century.”21

McNaughton wanted the president to repudiate the National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM-288) he had himself drafted in March 1964 and which had served as the explanation and justification of the American war. “We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam,” that earlier memorandum read. “Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance…” for the “South Vietnam conflict is regarded as a test case of U.S. capacity to help a nation meet a Communist ‘war of national liberation.’” Now McNaughton urged a clarification of U.S. war aims that cast them in the most limited terms, and McNamara was in full agreement. The draft presidential memorandum prepared for Johnson and submitted to him on May 19 stated the U.S. commitment as “only to see that the people of South Vietnam are permitted to determine their own future.” However, even this commitment ceases “if the country ceases to help itself.” Moreover,

our commitment is not:

to expel from South Vietnam regroupees, who are South Vietnamese (though we do not like them),

to ensure that a particular person or group remains in power, nor that the power runs to every corner of the land (though we prefer certain types and we hope their writ will run throughout South Vietnam),

to guarantee that the self-chosen

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