On February 8, 1966, Royster was clearly having doubts about the conduct of the war in Vietnam. After a visit to Michigan State, he wrote: “Quickly you discover it’s not the fear of fighting that discourages the young or the old. It’s the thought of fighting for an uncertain purpose and with no prospect of a victory to end it. Suppose we did beat the Vietcong, so the question runs, what then? A man who fought in the jungles of Guadalcanal and thought he knew why, asks if his son dies in the jungle of Vietnam for what purpose will he have died?”
On May 24, 1966, Royster felt it necessary to counter arguments that the press coverage of the war was partly to blame for the antiwar protests: “A journalist owes nothing to those who govern his country. He owes everything to his country. This is as true, when you think about it, in war as it is in peace, and it applies as much to the frontline correspondent as to the editorial writer pondering the policy of nations in his littered sanctum. The difference is that in peacetime there is rarely any difficulty, either for the reporter who writes or for the reader who reads, in deciding when the interests of the authorities and the interests of the nation collide. Most of the time they are the same, but in peacetime the journalist need never hesitate to write something that may injure the one if it serves the other.
“In war it is not always so simple, as both editors and readers are rediscovering now that the nation is once more engaged in fighting on a distant battlefield and when—once more—the news sometimes deals with battlefield reverses, planning mistakes and logistical snafus. All of these things, one way or another, have lately been in the news about Vietnam.”
He concluded: “Every reader, if he will pause to reflect, will recognize that a newspaper serves illy when it keeps silence about the bunglings of generals or the ineptness of other officials, even if that may include the President. The reporter or editor who does so out of kindness to the individuals concerned, or out of some mistaken idea of ‘responsibility’ to the government, is not merely being cruel to those risking the hazards of battle. He is being irresponsible to his country’s cause.”
The Truman Doctrine that set about to contain Soviet expansionism and was central to the Cold War was broadly approved in principle by Americans. But it was the specifics, such as whether to fight wars against Communism on the Asian mainland, that was proving to be the divisive issue in American politics of the mid-1960s. A Journal editorial on May 25, 1965, titled “Policeman of the World” explored that question, which happens to be as heavily debated today with our latest wars as it was then. The Journal thought that, while there was abundant reason for disquiet about this seemingly new role, the dangers of an alternative course also have to be faced.
It was clearly the Soviet objective to try to foment Marxist revolutions in underdeveloped areas of the world. In trying to combat these efforts under the Truman Doctrine, “Will the U.S., as has been facetiously suggested, run out of Marines? Will it, like the Roman Empire, become so overextended it helps bring about its own downfall?”
These were good questions, the editorial conceded, and it allowed that it would take a great deal of restraint and intelligence to “continue opposing Communist aggrandizement and somehow avoid getting sucked into little wars all over.” Yet the picture was not as bad as it might look. Communist insurgencies were not succeeding in some countries, such as Brazil, even without U.S. help. And America had the advantage of being able to pick its spots and then inflicting sufficient damage on the Communists to possibly cause them to “tire of their gruesome game.”
The editorial concluded: “We can neither police the entire world nor abandon all responsibility in it, for in the end that means abandoning responsibility for our own institutions and interests. To find the dividing line between dangerous overextension and necessary action will be the key to policy and the measure of its wisdom.”
The Middle East was an arena of conflict in 1967 as it has been pretty much ever since. The Soviets were involved there as well, backing an Egyptian strongman, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was trying to divert attention from a failing economy by making aggressive moves toward Israel. On June 5, the Israelis launched a preemptive strike, an air attack that wiped out most of Nasser’s air force on the ground. The Six-Day War was on.
In my then role as a Journal foreign correspondent, I had been to Israel a short time before and had sensed the tension. But when the attack came, I was in London. I caught an El Al flight out of Heathrow for Israel. The DC-8 was piloted by El Al senior executives because all their young pilots were fighting the war. The flight was unusual because in place of several seats, it was carrying a shrouded jet engine, presumably from Rolls-Royce, to replace the damaged power plant of one of its fighters. The passengers were mostly reporters, although there was one teenaged American Jew who was going to join the Israeli Defense Forces. We landed at what was then Lod Airport in a blackout, and everyone cheered when the middle-aged El Al executives brought us in safely. Before leaving London, well aware of the complications of Israeli censorship, I had filed a front-page piece quoting predictions of military specialists at Jane’s Intelligence Review in London that Israel would try to make it a short war because of its enormous inferiority in numbers against the nations it was fighting: Egypt, Syria, Jordan and, nominally, Iraq. That certainly proved to be the case; the war was half over by the time I got there. I was soon busying myself reporting on its aftermath, asking some Israeli soldiers if they planned to return the Arab land they had captured. Their unsurprising answer: “No way!”
The Journal editorial at the outset of the war carried the exasperated title: “The Madness Breaks Out.” It noted that since the creation of Israel by the United Nations in 1948, a birth marked with an Arab attack that tried but failed to kill the new state in its cradle, the United States had tried to straddle the gulf between the two sides. It faulted the United States for trying to prop up Nasser with economic aid and getting only insults in return, not to mention the dictator’s turn toward the Soviets for military aid. Since the editorialists had no way of knowing how things would turn out, they raised the real questions of whether the Soviets would intervene and whether the United States would get sucked into a larger conflict at a time when it was heavily occupied in Vietnam.
The editorial concluded: “It is saddening that at this stage in human history certain states refuse to recognize the right of another to exist, especially when the Israelis have given numerous indications that they would, if permitted, cooperate with their Arab neighbors in building a better life for the whole area.” The Middle East remains a cauldron today, although in different ways from 1967. With the added dimension of a hostile Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon, and Jihadist Arab warriors practicing seldom-paralleled acts of brutality, the new ways are no more endearing.
Another event in 1967 saddened Journal employees. Dow Jones CEO Barney Kilgore, who had engineered the remarkable success of the newspaper we were working for, died at the age of 59. A Journal editorial called his a “Horatio Alger story,” reminding us that he was born in little Albany, Indiana; was a Washington columnist for the Journal at age 24; bureau chief at age 26; and Journal managing editor at age 32. By age 37, he was Dow Jones president and well on his way toward building Journal circulation to more than 1 million copies printed in eight plants around the nation, from a circulation of 33,000 just before he became managing editor.
The Journal editorialist, Royster no doubt, wrote that no one had ever seen Barney lose his temper or engage in flamboyant gestures. Despite his gift for self-containment, “there was a demon in him about what he wanted to create; his pride in his newspaper was as great as that of a composer for his symphony, and so was his jealousy for it . . . his friends can only tell you that he had a touch of genius and was to a full measure a gentleman. Such men are rare.”
The Journal’s skepticism about the Vietnam War deepened as the troubled world entered the year 1968 and antiwar protests became more intense and widespread. An editorial on February 23, 1968, titled “The Logic of the Battlefield” was controversial at the time and is debated even today among military historians and even members of the Journal editorial board.
It began thusly: “We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven’t already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.” It argued that the South Vietnam government we were supporting seemed increasingly hapless, whereas North Vietnam, adequately supplied with manpower and a large supply of Soviet and Chinese weapons, seemed prepared to carry on the war indefinitely.
The writer, Royster’s deputy Joe Evans, thought our current military tactics were “sad to see.” He wrote of “the wholesale destruction of towns and cities in order to ‘save’ them, killing or making homeless refugees out of thousands more civilians . . . Hence the question: Are developments on the ground making a hash of our original, commendable objectives?”
Joe acknowledged that losing in Vietnam would be “a stunning blow to the U.S. and to the West in the larger struggle with international communism.” At home “it will be a traumatic experience to have lost a war in which thousands of Americans died in vain.”
He concluded with: “Conceivably all this is wrong; conceivably the Communists are on the brink of defeat and genuine peace talks are about to begin. It doesn’t look that way, and as long as it doesn’t everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of defeat beyond American power to prevent.”
The editorial was sadly prophetic. South Vietnam would ultimately be abandoned by a U.S. Congress under pressure from antiwar demonstrations and would come under Communist rule, with further casualties as some South Vietnamese were liquidated or sent to “reeducation” camps. Many others, called the “boat people,” died trying to escape to Thailand in small boats. Worst of all, Cambodia would suffer a massive genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a particularly brutal Communist Party. American generals who fought the latter stages of the war would insist that all this need not have happened, that they had stalled the Communist offensive before Congress jerked the rug out from under their efforts. It would take Americans a long time to get over this defeat.
As if the Vietnam protests weren’t trouble enough, on a Thursday night, April 4, 1968, the world-famous civil rights leader Martin Luther King, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent protests against racial injustice and a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, was shot dead as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a white escaped convict, confessed and got a life sentence. The murder stirred up shock and racial rioting across a nation already unsettled by student demonstrations against the war.
Because the shooting came too late for Friday editorial page comment and there was no Saturday Journal at that time, Journal editorial commentary didn’t appear until the following Monday after a weekend of rioting. It said that King had become a special symbol of the civil rights movement because he offered the common man the opportunity to participate in his demonstrations while at the same time warning that they would be truly successful only if violence was avoided.
“Dr. King was the first to recognize that his tactics, however necessary he felt them, undeniably brushed with the dark impulses buried within men. Always he sought to awaken the conscience he knew also lay somewhere within men of every color.
“It’s especially sad that the act of one madman overwhelmed the good conscience of others and released in them dark impulses to violence. The injury is not only to his cause and to his nation, but also to the memory of a man who symbolized the way of non-violence.”
An editorial the following day took a tougher line toward the weekend of rioting and looting, pointing out that the principal victims were residents of black neighborhoods. It said the perpetrators were “not even remotely representative of the vast majority of the Negro people; the burning, the pillage, and killing were the work of those with little regard for Dr. King and with little thought of making a civil rights protest. They were looters and vandals, pure and simple.”
The editorial said that when “law and order are abdicated to hoodlums it’s all society that suffers, and those that suffer most grievously are the forgotten Negro people.”
A further comment on April 10 addressed the question of whether the foundations of American democracy itself were threatened by the widespread outbreak of civil disorder. Some voices were arguing that the American “experiment,” unique in world history, might finally fail. But the writer argued that “so far our political institutions are withstanding these severe shocks remarkably well—shocks likely to topple governments in other lands.
“And if it is thoroughly understood that the alternative to making the system work is anarchy and regimentation, then American democracy can still confound the predictions of downfall. In the future as in the past, we the people are capable of showing that a free society, for all its vulnerability, can be the strongest of all.”
During all the turbulence of April 1968, the Journal’s Vietnam correspondent, Peter Kann, checked in with an article about how there was a sense of unease among those conducting the war that major events affecting the war’s progress are being shaped elsewhere, “in Washington and Chicago, Moscow and Hanoi, and maybe Geneva.”
He reported with irony that combat soldiers were writing worried letters home asking after the safety of the endangered families in places like Newark and Detroit. There were dark jokes about President Johnson asking for more troops to open Route 1 between Washington and Baltimore. “While Washington burned last weekend, Saigon was safe and secure—outwardly back to normal. Pretty Vietnamese girls in white ao dais strolled in the park, shielding themselves from the sun with painted parasols . . .”
In a Thinking Things Over column titled “Man of the South” on April 16, Royster wrote about King’s unique perception about the nature of the civil rights struggle, that it had to be won through men’s hearts. He intuitively understood what was not so readily apparent, that there was among his white neighbors in the South a “great, if hidden, reservoir of good will, compounded both of a tradition of Christian charity and of a deep-seated guilt feeling about the past. The problem was to tap it,” and this he did “with the touch of a man who knew his people . . .
“In the rest of the country . . . there has been among the people no deep-seated guilt feelings about the past that could involve their hearts as well as their minds. There the relationship between black and white may be more correct but it is less personal. In the south a peaceful march to the rhythm of spirituals disturbs men’s hearts; elsewhere, unless it’s disruptive, it’s just another parade.”
An April 26 editorial took note of the positive ways that civil society was responding to the racial upheaval. Henry Ford II of Ford Motor Co. was heading a presidential task force determining how to create more urban jobs. J. Howard Wood, president of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, had proposed that the ANPA promote scholarships enabling young blacks to study journalism and had offered $100,000 from the Trib to start the ball rolling.
Said the editorial: “This is preeminently the American way—surmounting difficulties and building a better society through thousands on thousands of private efforts. Acts of good will and of good business, they interact and feed on each other until presently what had seemed impossible begins to look attainable after all. It is demonstrably more effective than massive Federal programs, which so far have done little good and not a little harm.”
That last point, if a bit jarring, might have been referring to such issues as public housing projects, which Journal editors argued often replaced viable urban neighborhoods with sterile apartment blocks in which crime often thrived and which, in many cases, lacked easy access to the service establishments, like dry cleaners or hardware stores, that populate normal neighborhoods.
Following on the heels of the King assassination came, just after midnight on June 6, the killing of Robert F. Kennedy, Jack’s brother, at a Los Angeles hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian from Jordan. Robert was campaigning for the presidency. The wave of violence seemed almost too much, but there was more to come, this time in Europe.
In August 1968, my wife Jody and I and our three children were visiting Jody’s family in Franklin, Indiana, enjoying the paid home leave from the Journal’s London base that I rated every two years. But news doesn’t recognize a reporter’s entitlement to a holiday. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. It was a nasty business for a while, as was the case for just about every Soviet power play of that era, and indeed some that the Russians are still pulling off today.
But after it was all said and done, the Journal in an editorial called it a “Defeat for Moscow.” The Czech people had resisted the Soviet invasion, and the Soviets had left Czech Communist Party first secretary Alexander Dubcek, who had attempted a liberalization reform known as the “Prague Spring,” in place. The editorial said the “Soviet failure to install a new puppet government and return Czechoslovakia to the Stalinism of the Novotny regime is both astonishing and encouraging. It requires no great perception to see that the Russians drastically miscalculated the reaction to the invasion within Czechoslovakia and throughout the world.
“The Soviets are not notably sensitive to world opinion, but the outcry from practically everywhere, including other Communist states and parties, must have sounded deafening to them.” The Journal called the outcome “a victory for the Czechoslovakian people and for human freedom.”
Although the editorial was quite valid, perhaps its tone was too optimistic. The Soviets left Dubcek in place only temporarily, then quietly shunted him aside and then expelled him from the Communist Party in 1969, clearing the way for the party to return to its old Stalinist ways. He wound up working in the forestry service. It would not be until 20 years later, when the Velvet Revolution overthrew Communism, that the Czechs would finally be free. When Dubcek appeared with Vaclav Havel, author of the overthrow, on a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square, he was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
The trials and disappointments of LBJ’s four years in office had persuaded him not to run for reelection. The Democratic candidate in 1968 was his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, an engaging former senator from Minnesota. The Republicans nominated the man who had lost to JFK in 1960, Richard M. Nixon. Nixon won in a close contest that came down to a few votes that swung Illinois his way. The race was complicated by the presence of two other strong candidates, peace crusader Eugene McCarthy, who attracted youth votes, and states’ rights defender George Wallace, who had strong defenders among southern white conservatives.
The postelection Journal editorial thus found it impossible to read any definitive mandate, “especially so against the background of this political year, a year of wrenching developments.” The whole public mood had been one of “vague but intense dissatisfaction,” said the editorial. Moreover, Nixon would face a Congress controlled by Democrats.
Yet the Journal chose to be hopeful, suggesting that the very indecisiveness of the polity created an opportunity for “a leader who can start to define precisely what it is the public wants. If the new President can rise to that unique challenge, he can reap the unique reward of putting his stamp on the political alignments and the political relevance of a new era.
“How it will work out in history depends on the incoming President’s vision, skill and luck, but a potential is there. The mandate the American people have given him is that most tentative but most powerful sort. It will be what Richard Nixon can make of it.”
On July 20, 1969, Americans, depressed by war news and racial and antiwar protests throughout the nation, finally got some good news for a change. On a Sunday evening, millions sat glued to their TV sets to witness the amazing spectacle of the lunar lander Eagle descending to the surface of the moon. Not just Americans, but people all over the globe, were able to watch this feat. At our flat in London, Jody and I and our three children had our TV on at 2 a.m. to see Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin in their white space suits and globe helmets becoming the first humans to have set foot on any soil other than that of Mother Earth. America displayed to the world that we were not a clumsy giant but a nation capable of remarkable technological achievements, just as JFK had intended when he set the Apollo moon program in motion in 1963.
The moon shot had been described by some cynics as a highly expensive publicity stunt to prove that Americans could beat the Soviets at their own game. The Soviets had begun the game on October 2, 1957, when they had launched the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth, making sure that the shiny Sputnik I was visible for all to see as it circled the planet and displayed Soviet technological prowess. The cynics had a point, but it was a powerful demonstration in a political sense. The moon shot proved American technological superiority. Any perception, here or abroad, that the Soviets were winning the Cold War at that point needed reconsideration.
The Journal editorial on July 22 was titled “Triumph of the Mind” and wondered if future historians would see the moonwalk as a singular achievement or the first of a series of “pointless extraterrestrial visits, of little benefit to man while his earthly condition deteriorates.”
But it argued that no amount of caviling about the cost “diminished the fact that human ingenuity, and the toil of thousands on the ground, devised near-perfect instrumentalities for the purpose.” The astronauts themselves displayed high courage in undertaking this most dangerous of explorations and richly deserved the world’s applause.
Vice President Spiro Agnew suggested trying for a manned landing on Mars by the end of the century, a far-fetched vision then but one that still stirs the imagination of space travel enthusiasts. The Journal cautioned against such grandiose ideas that would entail even greater risks and diversions of resources, commending a less feverish approach. “Apart from knowledge as an end in itself, what if any is man’s purpose in space . . . No one has given satisfactory answers and there may be none . . .
“Meantime, in praising the Astronauts the world in fact pays tribute to the wonders of the human brain and spirit.”
Whatever the practical arguments might have been pro and con, America and the West certainly needed the psychological lift the successful moonwalk provided. In the space of 20 years, the Soviets had responded to the American containment policy by enticing America into costly wars with Soviet proxies. The Korean War had been something of a draw, but it had saved South Korea, which would become a dramatic example of how market capitalism raises living standards that would contrast sharply with the Communist stagnation of North Korea.
In Vietnam, the United States lost, but perhaps gave other Southeast Asian leaders a warning of what could happen to them if they didn’t do a better job of winning the trust of peoples in their own lands and thereby inoculating themselves against Communist insurgencies. Whatever the reason, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwan all moved in the direction of more democratic governance and avoided the fate of their Vietnamese, Cambodian and Burmese neighbors. Geopolitics in the 1970s would remain dodgy for the Pax Americana but not as problematical as in the turbulent 1960s. The “Soviet containment” stand the United States made in Vietnam could perhaps at least claim that achievement.