Why were bombing and mining so popular? Republicans laid the political groundwork for them throughout the 1960s, with Nixon leading the way. On January 26, 1965, before Johnson sent in American combat troops, Nixon told the Sales Executive Club of New York that the Air Force and Navy could win the war on their own. How? “By naval and air bombing of the Communists’ supply routes in South Vietnam and by destroying the Vietcong staging areas in North Vietnam and Laos.” Nixon congratulated himself on the courage it took to say the war could be won without American boots on the ground. “The course of action I advocate is one that is not popular in America and would probably not get a vote of confidence in Congress or by a Gallup or Harris poll.”1 (Neither Gallup nor Harris asked Americans if they’d prefer to win the war without having to send in the Army, but who wouldn’t?) Johnson ultimately did use air and naval power in North Vietnam and Laos to destroy supply routes and staging areas, but the victory Nixon predicted did not occur. This failure did nothing to diminish Nixon’s status as a foreign policy eminence. Hawkish attacks tend to make the attacker look stronger, tougher, firmer than the attacked, even if experience proves them wrong. Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the GOP’s 1964 presidential nominee, soon called for air strikes on Hanoi if bombing supply routes alone didn’t “do the trick.”2 Rep. Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Republican Conference, cast air strikes as a way “to protect American lives and minimize the number of casualties. One such step, already long overdue, is to retarget our bombing raids on more significant targets in North Vietnam.”3 In a major speech in the House on June 16, 1965, Laird called for air strikes on Haiphong harbor. The following month, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, R-Michigan, said that using airpower and sea power “against significant military targets” was the way to force North Vietnam to settle on acceptable terms.4 On CBS’s Face the Nation after Thanksgiving 1965, Nixon called for the policy he would announce seven years later as president: bombing military targets in Hanoi and mining Haiphong. By the end of 1965, Nixon’s policy had become the party’s, adopted by the Republican Coordinating Committee, whose twenty-eight members included congressional leaders, governors, RNC officials, and all past presidential nominees: “Since it appears that the major portion of North Vietnamese military supplies arrive by sea, our first objective should be to impose a Kennedy-type quarantine on North Vietnam,” coupled with “maximum use of American conventional air and sea power against significant military targets.”5
LBJ’s Senate mentor, Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, cracked the formula for a Vietnam victory of the political sort. Continuing the war might ultimately bring success, he told the Senate on March 21, 1966, “but the American people are going to be very unhappy about it, and someone who comes along and says, ‘I will go in there and clean this thing up in six months,’ will, I am afraid, have some advantage over the senators who say, ‘Let’s play this thing along for ten or twelve years.’ ” That day Russell came out for mining Haiphong.6
As air and naval bombardment of the North failed to yield victory in the 1960s, a stabbed-in-the-back myth began to emerge, blaming the failure on restraints and restrictions that allegedly kept America from using its power effectively. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the former Air Force chief of staff, told Human Events in 1967: “We always set up a bunch of arbitrary rules so that we can’t use the power we are capable of bringing to bear. Consequently we have a long, drawn-out war and I think the loss of life is much greater in the long run than it would be were we to use the force necessary to stop it early in the game.” LeMay noted that the United States had already used more explosives on North Vietnam than Germany had dropped on England in the Battle of Britain, “but we haven’t gotten much in the way of results.” Bombing slowed down the North’s movement of supplies, LeMay said, but didn’t stop it. This didn’t shake LeMay’s faith in bombing; he just thought it needed to be used against other, better targets: “We have to go back a little bit farther to the source of supply. I would close the harbor of Haiphong and certainly prevent anything from getting into the country.” The United States could bomb the harbor or blockade it, said LeMay. The possibility that closing Haiphong would not prevent supplies from getting into the North—that the Communists would change their supply routes as they had before—just didn’t come up then.7
Gov. Ronald Reagan, too, blamed the lack of victory on restrictions. “There [is] still a list of targets that are not open to bombing by our forces,” he complained during a September 12, 1967, press conference. Reagan saw the failure of the escalating air and sea bombardment of the North merely as an indication that LBJ had not escalated fast enough: “The war might have ended, because doing it all at once might have brought the enemy to the bargaining table,” Reagan said. He favored further escalation “to win the war as quickly as possible.” The possibility that Hanoi might be able to handle faster or greater escalation just didn’t come up then, either.8
Republicans and conservatives had a well-crafted narrative of the Democrats’ failure in Vietnam before Nixon entered the White House. It blamed the Democrats for using too little force, or using it too late, or imposing restraints and restrictions that prevented it from being used against the right targets. Reagan came up with the perfect metaphor when, as president, he told Vietnam veterans, “You fought as bravely and as well as any American in our history, and literally with one arm tied behind you. Sometimes two.”9 The metaphor, so vivid and clear, spared Reagan the burden of identifying which targets needed to be hit, which restrictions and restraints needed to be lifted, to reap victory in Vietnam. It also avoided identifying who did the alleged tying, why, or how, sparing Reagan the additional burden of providing evidence to back up his accusation. As a case, it was weak; as an expression of the stabbed-in-the-back myth, which depends on the suppression (or manufacture) of evidence, it was perfect. Reagan’s words also contained a kernel of truth: defeat in Vietnam truly was not the fault of the American soldiers sent to Vietnam. It was the fault of the politicians who sent them there without ever coming up with a strategy to win the war.