Lyndon Johnson had deftly employed the Gulf of Tonkin incident to secure a broad, congressional authorization for military actions in Vietnam and to establish his standing as a firm but cautious foreign policy leader. To his and the nation’s chagrin, neither of these accomplishments impeded the steadily deteriorating political and military situation in South Vietnam. Building on its earlier decision to dispatch regular army units south, Hanoi continued to wage big-unit operations with both NLF and NVA fighters. In May the communist military superiority over the ARVN was graphically demonstrated at Binh Gia, north of Saigon, where two South Vietnamese battalions were decimated. Employing both this military clout and accompanying political operations, the NLF had gained control over approximately one-half of South Vietnam’s territory and population. In response to Saigon’s acute political instability and obvious military vulnerability, LBJ chose war, first by initiating the sustained bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965 and then by committing US ground troops to the conflict during the ensuing spring and summer. Beginning with 25,000 sorties in 1965 and 79,000 in 1966, the Rolling Thunder campaign devastated North Vietnam with 643,000 tons of bombs over the following three years. Similarly, the president’s decision to dispatch some 200,000 troops in 1965 led to approximately 385,000 Americans being stationed in South Vietnam by the end of 1966 and a total of more than 530,000 by the time Johnson left office in January 1969.1
Southern congressmen played a decisive role in Johnson’s decisions for war by facilitating his strategy of suppressing congressional and public debate as he opted for this massive military involvement and by affording Johnson crucial and dependable support in the allocation of funds to prosecute the conflict. Consistent with Dixie’s belligerent tendencies, the southern public proved more supportive of the war than Americans from other regions, and important southern papers solidly endorsed the US efforts. But as the grave reservations expressed by southern senators after 1953 had foreshadowed, Dixie’s response to the Vietnam War’s escalation was far from unified. Indeed, by the end of 1966, Senators Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper had emerged as key congressional critics of the war; Fulbright had chaired SFRC hearings that stimulated the very public debate Johnson had sought to avoid; and that public debate in the South included a strong, but minority voice of dissent.
Although this massive military intervention in such a remote, seemingly insignificant country would have occasioned much contention, Johnson provoked even greater consternation in the South by fighting a limited war characterized by the gradual escalation of the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. His prosecution of the war was limited in several key aspects. The president never sought an official declaration of war, declined to activate the National Guard or reserves, and placed Cambodia and Laos off limits to US ground forces, thereby enabling the Vietcong and NVA to seek periodic sanctuary in these neighboring countries. LBJ and Secretary of State Rusk repeatedly emphasized that the United States sought only to preserve an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam and did not seek to destroy North Vietnam’s sovereignty as a nation or to displace its communist government. Consistent with these positions, Johnson refused to invade North Vietnam and placed strict guidelines on the bombing near Hanoi and Haiphong, the North’s two most populous cities. The president and Secretary of Defense McNamara further restricted bombing near the Chinese border and placed off limits Haiphong harbor, through which critical war materials flowed and where Soviet and other nations’ ships were docked. As if these various limitations were not sufficient to infuriate hawkish southerners, Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara only gradually accepted the military’s suggestions for bombing targets and advice to escalate the severity of the bombing. Boasting that the military could not “even bomb an outhouse without my approval,” LBJ and his advisors envisioned an overall strategy designed to inflict a level of collective pain sufficient only to convince North Vietnam to end its military campaign and support for the Vietcong in the South.2
Johnson and Rusk’s commitment to a limited war derived from several key assumptions. They feared that an overly aggressive prosecution of the conflict could draw China or the Soviet Union into the war or even escalate the fighting to the use of nuclear weapons. In July 1965, LBJ told a reporter, “There is . . . the right wing solution, which would be a nuclear solution. And, of course, we could pull out. . . . Neither of these alternatives being satisfactory, what are we to do?” Johnson then pondered the crucial question to which he never found the answer: “What will be enough and not too much?” What level of force would prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam without provoking a larger war? Johnson also recognized correctly that conservatives such as Russell and Stennis would readily cite the costs of a full-scale war or a losing effort as justification for eliminating the Great Society social programs. As LBJ confided to Under Secretary of State George Ball, “The great black beast for us is the right wing,” which would “put enormous heat on us to turn it [the war] into an Armageddon and wreck all our other programs.”3
The president’s profound suspicion of the military and determination to avoid a civilian-military confrontation added another crucial dimension to his decision to wage a limited war. This distrust led Johnson to treat advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), who consistently advocated troop increases and more aggressive bombing, with skepticism and at times even contempt. “The generals,” he remarked, “know only two words—spend and bomb.” At one point, Johnson screamed at the assembled JCS that he would not “let some military idiots talk him into World War III” and ordered them “to get the hell out of my office!” Haunted by President Truman’s clash with General Douglas MacArthur, Johnson instructed General William Westmoreland, “General, I have a lot riding on you,” and later, “I hope you don’t pull a MacArthur on me.”4
Fearful of pressures for overly aggressive military measures and that a “major debate on the war . . . would be the beginning of the end of the Great Society,” LBJ attempted to keep “foreign policy in the wings” during 1965 and, according to one historian, took the nation to war by “stealth.” Exercising “indirection and dissimulation,” Johnson and his administration never announced that Rolling Thunder quickly moved from a retaliatory to a sustained bombing campaign, justified the dispatch of what promptly became offensive US ground troops as only necessary to defend American air personnel and equipment, and carefully obfuscated and understated the July 1965 decision for up to two hundred thousand ground troops and the fundamental change in policy it entailed.5
Preventing a major congressional debate over these decisive 1965 decisions constituted an essential facet of Johnson’s stealth strategy. The president’s campaign for avoiding unwanted “goddamn speeches” in Congress took several forms, all of which benefited from the fact that he worked with Democratic majorities that outnumbered the GOP by more than two to one in both houses. Johnson applied his infamous “treatment” to both individuals and groups, and his cajoling, enticing, and threatening usually worked. For example, in February he scolded and helped temporarily silence Senator George McGovern (D-SD): “Goddamn it, George, you and Fulbright and all you history teachers down there [in the Senate]. I haven’t got time to fuck around with history. I’ve got boys on the line out there.” The president also hosted a series of briefings at the White House for congressmen and their wives. Together with McNamara and Rusk, Johnson presented the administration’s analysis of the Vietnam situation.6
Given Rusk’s ongoing confrontations with his fellow southerners, Senators Fulbright and Gore, the secretary’s interpretation of the war was instructive, as was his explanation of why the administration would reject all overtures for a compromise settlement of the conflict. Rusk decisively rebutted any suggestion of a “civil war” in Vietnam. The conflict had resulted instead from “external aggression” against “South Vietnam . . . directed from the North, commanded from the North, inspired by the North,” in blatant violation of the Geneva “agreements of 1954.” Rusk instructed the congressmen that combating this aggression, which was rooted in China’s “militant brand of the world revolution . . . subscribed to by Hanoi,” was critical to the US goal of “organizing . . . peace” worldwide on the bases of self-determination, peaceful change, and international law. Therefore, the United States could not appease these aggressors or “be driven out” of the region.7
In contrast to China’s and North Vietnam’s aggressive, forceful, and provocative actions, Rusk assured the congressmen that the United States had “no national appetites there, no need for bases, no desire for a permanent military presence,” and no inclination “to destroy the regimes in Hanoi or in mainland China.” The sole US objective was the “safety and the peace of these smaller countries.” Indeed, “there could be peace almost literally tomorrow” if North Vietnam were to “abandon its effort to take over South Vietnam.” In response to those congressmen such as Senators Cooper and Gore who had begun to urge negotiations, Rusk rejected any talks as “some sort of a screen” for abandoning South Vietnam or as endangering that nation’s independent, noncommunist status. Like the president, Rusk also reminded the representatives and senators not to oppose a leader who was “carrying out the most solemn commitment that this nation has made over a period of ten years” since 1954. Four presidents and the previous Congress, by voting 504–2 for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, had placed the nation’s credibility on the line while opposing aggression in Southeast Asia. Criticism of Johnson and the administration, Rusk emphasized, signaled American “disunity” and sent the wrong messages to the enemy.8
Secretary Rusk’s response to two very southern questions also revealed much about administration thinking that ultimately alienated many residents of Dixie. On February 18, a senator asked, “I’d like to know what is necessary to win that war. I don’t want to see another Korea”; and, on March 2, a second legislator asked if the administration was “willing to make the maximum effort that is necessary to solve this situation.” Rusk’s responses were vague and evasive. He professed no ability as a “prophet” and asserted that the administration could hardly “know . . . for certain” what victory would require since “the other side—Hanoi and Peking”—was also “helping to write that scenario.” The secretary could formulate no “prescription for the next year or next month,” which had not yet arrived. He was similarly obscure when asked if he expected the United States “to stay in Southeast Asia indefinitely.” He declared only that the administration would sustain the US practice of upholding its “commitments all over the world.” Like LBJ, the secretary of state assumed incorrectly that “there must come a point where the other side” would recognize that “we are not going to be driven out . . . by military action.”9
Johnson’s strategy for controlling public and congressional responses to the war also included a major public address at Johns Hopkins University on April 7. While situating Vietnam in the Cold War context of opposing communist aggression, he pledged, “We will not be defeated” or “withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.” To this promise of strength and resolve, he added his commitment to undertake “unconditional discussions” with North Vietnam in pursuit of a peace settlement. Despite this pronouncement, the administration’s refusal to include the Vietcong in such talks or to accept any settlement that compromised South Vietnamese independence embodied conditions that blocked all negotiations. Still, the president’s ostensible call for talks pacified many early opponents of US involvement. The same held true for Johnson’s final major point—his intention to request $1 billion from Congress to help fund a development project on the Mekong River as an inducement for Hanoi to agree to US peace terms. From this southern perspective on rural development, Johnson envisioned a transformation in Southeast Asia comparable to what the Tennessee Valley Authority had done for the American Southeast and rural electrification had done for the Texas Hill Country. Americans uneasy with the growing war responded favorably to this initiative, but the North Vietnamese did not. Johnson later complained, “I keep trying to get Ho to the negotiating table. I try writing him, calling him, going through the Russians and Chinese, and all I hear back is ‘Fuck you, Lyndon.’”10
On May 4, Johnson tightened the screws on potential congressional dissenters by requesting a supplemental appropriation of $700 million for use in the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam. The sum was relatively insignificant, but LBJ’s characterization of the vote portrayed congressional action as a reendorsement of his Vietnam policies, as the passage of what Undersecretary of State William P. Bundy described as a “small-scale new Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.” Johnson emphasized, “This is not a routine appropriation. For each Member of Congress who supports this request is also voting to persist in our effort to halt Communist aggression in South Vietnam.” By reiterating the administration stance that “national unity” was critical to US standing “in the world,” the president suggested that antiwar dissent undermined American foreign policy; and he added the powerful warning that opposing the requested appropriation betrayed American soldiers in the field: “To deny and delay this means to deny and to delay the fullest support of the American people and the American Congress to those brave men who are risking their lives for freedom in Vietnam.” When Congress approved the appropriation overwhelmingly, Johnson had not only forced the legislative branch to go on record again backing the war but also officially introduced the potent argument that hindering funding for the war was equivalent to abandoning the troops.11
As the Johns Hopkins speech and the May 4 supplemental appropriation demonstrated, Johnson’s acute political sensibilities and long congressional experience went far toward limiting debate and dissent, but he could not have kept Congress so well controlled during 1965 without the assistance of fellow southerners, particularly Fulbright and Russell. Had not the chairmen of the SFRC and SASC and Mike Mansfield (D-MT), the Democratic Senate majority leader, been unwilling to oppose the president or initiate a Senate debate on Johnson’s policies through most of 1965, LBJ could not have followed his relatively low-key road to war. Despite their essential complicity in Johnson’s strategy for downplaying the war domestically, neither Fulbright nor Russell had altered his grave reservations about US involvement in Vietnam. By the end of the year, both became more openly critical of Johnson’s prosecution of the war and in so doing embodied evolving and conflicting southern responses to the war.
Of these two southern heavyweights, Fulbright ultimately became the more persistent and outspoken critic of the war, but his open break with Johnson did not come until after the crucial decisions for widening the war had been made. After Fulbright had become chairman of the SFRC in 1959, many observers predicted he would head the State Department with Kennedy’s election the following year. Opposition to civil rights legislation doomed the Arkansas senator’s prospects, and the new president turned instead to Rusk and his liberal record on race. Most of Fulbright’s fellow senators would have agreed with George Smathers, who described the Arkansan as a “genuine” intellectual and one of the Senate’s “truly independent thinkers.” While still majority leader, Johnson had declared, “Bill’s my Secretary of State,” and explained the senator’s absence from late afternoon gatherings for Scotch and conversation by observing, “He’d rather sit in his office, reading books.” Contemporary legislators would also have agreed with Smathers that Fulbright could be “the most obstinate, obdurate, difficult fellow . . . you’ve ever seen. But . . . he was one hundred percent sincere.” Not so convinced of Fulbright’s sincerity, President Truman had dubbed him “an over-educated Oxford S.O.B.” A former Rhodes Scholar and law professor, Fulbright readily embraced the title “professor,” viewed himself as an “educator,” and envisioned the SFRC as a forum for debating and elucidating major policy issues.12
Fulbright’s distress over the war’s steady escalation and his growing conviction that the war was unwinnable were evident in both his private and his public observations. The senator voiced his reservations privately in executive sessions of the SFRC and the committee’s joint meetings with the SASC. In January he could see no developments warranting “escalation of the war”; in June, he asked US ambassador nominee Henry Cabot Lodge how this remote, “God-forsaken part of the world” could be deemed so “vital” to American national security; and later that month the senator decried “further escalation of the war” and declared it “clear to all reasonable Americans that a complete military victory” could come only at unacceptable costs to American resources and honor.13
Fulbright’s tense exchanges with Secretary Rusk also marked the beginning of the SFRC chairman’s ongoing confrontation with first the Johnson and then the Nixon administration over the role the Senate should play in US foreign and war policies. On January 8 Fulbright unsuccessfully sought “some reassurance” from the secretary of state that the administration would consult the SFRC and Congress before reaching any decisions to escalate the war. Rusk’s only reassurance was to promise that was “something the President and [congressional] leadership will talk to each other about.” When Fulbright persisted that he hoped that no such “decision” would be made without “at least feeling the pulse of this committee,” Rusk agreed only to “report” his “remarks” to Johnson. After Rolling Thunder had begun without such consultation, Fulbright returned to the topic on April 30 by complaining that in passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution the Senate had not anticipated dispatching thousands of ground troops to Vietnam. Since Congress was “traditionally” consulted when “large numbers” of troops were sent abroad, did the administration intend “to request any further authorization or approval by the Congress”? The senator also pointedly reminded Rusk that “a lot of us [senators] have been quiet” publicly because they did “not want to embarrass the administration.” While stating bluntly that the administration had no plans to seek additional congressional authorization for waging the war, the secretary of state defended the use of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as the legal and constitutional basis for expanding the conflict on the grounds that no one could have foreseen “last August what might be required.” As had been the case with the decision to commence Rolling Thunder, Johnson essentially ignored Congress as he opted in March and July to commit thousands of ground troops to the conflict.14
Although increasingly alarmed by the war’s escalation and frustrated by the administration’s refusal to consult meaningfully with the SFRC and Congress, Fulbright did not go into open dissent or hold hearings devoted to the war as several other senators requested. Rather, at Johnson’s behest, he served as the floor manager of the president’s request for $89 million, $19 million of which was to be devoted to the Mekong River Basin project. On June 7 the senator asserted that LBJ had exhibited “wisdom and vision” in seeking additional economic aid for South Vietnam development. Eight days later, in a supportive Senate speech delivered expressly at the president’s request, Fulbright praised Johnson for resisting “pressures” for expanding the war “with steadfastness and statesmanship” and for remaining “committed to the goal of ending the war at the earliest possible time by negotiations without preconditions.”15
Fulbright’s reluctance to break openly with Johnson derived from multiple considerations. They had a long association that had facilitated Fulbright’s rise to the chairmanship of the SFRC but also acquainted him with the personal wrath the president directed at opponents. The senator was grateful for the former and appropriately dreaded the latter. As Fulbright had noted while sparring with Rusk, he also recognized that Vietnam presented an exceedingly complex and “very difficult situation.” The senator further understood the war’s domestic political implications. If extensive “American casualties” were suffered, the Republicans would “talk about the ‘Johnson war’ the way they talked about ‘Truman’s war’ in Korea.” If the war were “settled by negotiations, they’ll claim we ‘lost’ Vietnam the way we ‘lost’ China.” Most important, however, Fulbright later explained, “I had supported him and we were good friends. I thought I could persuade him to change his mind.”16
Johnson’s July decision to commit massive numbers of American ground soldiers to the fray demonstrated that neither Fulbright nor other skeptics had deterred the ongoing escalation of the war. The senator’s alienation from LBJ and the administration increased over the remainder of the summer as the SFRC held closed hearings on Johnson’s decision in late April to send more than twenty thousand US troops into the Dominican Republic to head off an ostensible communist coup. The hearings revealed that Johnson had greatly exaggerated the communist threat and the danger to Americans in the Dominican Republic, and Fulbright’s September 15 Senate speech directly challenged the necessity and wisdom of the intervention. As Randall Woods, the biographer of both Fulbright and Johnson, has observed, the president personalized the criticism and viewed Fulbright as a “traitor and a coward.” LBJ had complained in February that Fulbright was a “cry baby” and that he could not “continue to kiss him every morning before breakfast”; and on the eve of the Dominican Republic speech, the president had groused to Richard Russell, “This damned idiot of a Fulbright” was going to “denounce our own . . . country and . . . government.” Following his speech, Fulbright had “no more access. No more phone calls. No more warmth. No more Air Force One.” When he was not invited to any official White House functions during the next year, Fulbright graphically described the isolation: “My God, I feel so alone. No one seems to give a damn. I feel at times that I am walking among the blind and deaf.”17
Fulbright’s growing opposition to the war represented an important but distinctly minority southern perspective. By the end of 1965, Richard Russell had become far more representative of Dixie’s view of the conflict. As Johnson’s mentor in the Senate, Russell had a much closer personal relationship with the president. The senator was a lifelong bachelor who often visited Lyndon and Lady Bird in the White House and at the LBJ Ranch, and the two men talked regularly on the phone. As chairman of the SASC, Russell, like Fulbright, had the leadership position and the personal stature to influence decisively public discussion of the war and perhaps even US policy. Throughout 1965, the Georgia senator continued to question the wisdom of US involvement both privately and publicly; but, again like Fulbright, he neither challenged Johnson directly nor called for the probing SASC hearings or congressional debate that might have compromised LBJ’s relatively low-key march toward war. In early March Russell commiserated with Johnson, telling the president he “couldn’t have inherited a worse mess.” While accepting the Georgia Association of Broadcasters’ Georgian of the Year Award on June 13, the senator emphasized that he had “never been able to see any strategic, political, or economic advantage to be gained” in Vietnam and cited leading military leaders who warned “that it would be an incredible mistake for the U.S. to engage in a full-scale land war on the Asian mainland.” Despite these perceptive reservations and his persistent opposition to US intervention after the mid-1950s, an opposition he never failed to cite, Russell discerned no viable route to withdrawal: the United States had a “commitment in South Vietnam. The flag is there. U.S. honor and prestige are there. And U.S. soldiers are there.” As he wrote to a constituent the following month, he saw no “honorable way we could withdraw . . . without shaking the confidence of the entire world in our pledged word.” Honor, credibility, and support for the troops trumped strategic, economic, and sound military considerations.18
Even as Russell moved toward a more hawkish position, he continued to hope for an alternative to major escalation of the war. On July 27 he responded to Fulbright’s call for a meeting in Majority Leader Mansfield’s Senate office. Significantly, Russell, Fulbright, and Mansfield were joined by southerners John Sparkman and John Sherman Cooper and by Vermont Republican George Aiken. This highly respected group agreed, and Mansfield reported to Johnson, that the United States was “deeply enmeshed in a place where we ought not to be; that the situation is rapidly going out of control; and that every effort should be made to extricate ourselves.” The senators also warned LBJ that the country was “backing the President on Viet Nam primarily because he” was “President, not necessarily out of any understanding or sympathy with policies on Viet Nam; beneath the support, there is deep concern and a great deal of confusion.” Despite the appeal of these important senators, Johnson announced his decision to commit ground forces the following day.19
Appearing on the CBS TV program Face the Nation on August 1, Russell endorsed Johnson’s troop decision as “about right for the conditions” the United States confronted in Vietnam. He also maintained his conviction that South Vietnam was of little economic or strategic value and added the telling denial that the domino theory was “necessarily” applicable to Southeast Asia and the admission that Ho Chi Minh would win a “plebiscite” conducted in South Vietnam. Still, according to Russell, the United States could not afford to lose in South Vietnam and incur the damage “to our world prestige and to our reputation for keeping our word under all conditions.” In a September interview in U.S. News and World Report, the senator predicted the United States might require 250,000 to 300,000 troops in Vietnam and articulated what would become his ongoing plea for more aggressive bombing of antiaircraft installations near Hanoi and Haiphong and the need to “render ineffective the shipping facilities of Haiphong harbor.” Russell elaborated to a constituent: it was “foolish . . . to be losing more fine young men and multi-million dollar airplanes bombing roads and bridges in North Vietnam to prevent the movement of materials of war when we can put the stopper in the bottle very easily by closing and blockading Haiphong.” It was time to “recognize that this is a real war” and to take the proper military steps.20
Although less influential than Fulbright or Russell, other important southern legislators assumed prominent positions on the war during 1965. Senators Albert Gore and John Sherman Cooper joined Fulbright as the most important southern congressional skeptics. Although Gore had risen from exceedingly humble beginnings, come to Congress in 1939 and moved to the Senate in 1953 as a contemporary of Johnson, and backed the Great Society social programs, he was never close to Johnson. LBJ, who sought to dominate every personal interaction, asserted, “I want people around me who would kiss my ass on a hot summer day and say it smells like roses.” Aptly described as a political “loner, a man not to be controlled,” Gore rejected any such posture. As one friend observed, “Show Albert the grain, so that he can go against it.” Gore’s maverick instincts and proclivity for aggravating Johnson were evident when the Tennessee Democrat indignantly opposed LBJ’s bid to continue presiding over the Senate Democratic Caucus after he had become vice president in January 1961. A livid Johnson responded by pointedly distinguishing “between a caucus and a cactus. In a cactus,” he noted, “all the pricks are on the outside.”21
Gore’s concerns about the war reached far beyond personal friction with Johnson. The senator had questioned Southeast Asia’s strategic and economic value during the Kennedy years, doubted the South Vietnamese capacity for democratic government, and worried that growing US involvement would lead to a draining ground war or confrontation with China. As the US role escalated, the diversion of funds and attention from domestic needs reinforced Gore’s foreign policy anxieties. These cumulative reservations had led the senator to call publicly for negotiations in December 1964 and January 1965. In his newspaper column and newsletter to constituents, Gore reiterated this policy preference by selectively praising the portions of Johnson’s Johns Hopkins speech that sought “unconditional negotiations” as opposed to US positions that demanded “unconditional surrender” by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. Gore voted for Johnson’s $700 million supplemental request in May but emphasized that he did so because it was “untenable” to send “American servicemen . . . into an area of danger” without providing them proper equipment. The senator added “emphatically” that his vote should not be “interpreted as a 100-percent endorsement” of US policy, but rather as his refusal to “deny support” to the troops.22
Gore was more outspokenly critical on July 28 following Johnson’s ground troop announcement. While assuming in a patronizing tone that Johnson had “carefully contemplated the danger” of the United States becoming “bogged down in endless war in Asia,” Gore lamented that the president had “reaffirmed” a policy that had not “worked well in any respect since 1954.” To the contrary, US actions had led to a “situation in Vietnam . . . worse than it was 10 years ago; . . . worse than it was 1 year ago, or 1 month ago . . . worse today than it was 1 week ago.” This mistaken policy had left the United States mired in “a war that makes little sense as it is being waged; . . . that we have scant hope of winning except at a cost which far outweighs the fruits of victory; . . . in a place and under conditions that no military man in his right mind would choose; . . . which threatens to escalate into a major power confrontation and which could easily escalate into nuclear holocaust.”23
Cooper shared Gore’s fear of a disastrous confrontation with the Soviet Union or China and joined the Tennessee senator in repeatedly calling for negotiations rather than military escalation in Vietnam. A native of rural Kentucky, Cooper was portrayed by columnist Drew Pearson as “homespun,” but the senator was no hick. He had earned an undergraduate degree at Yale and attended Harvard Law School. Tall, stately, notoriously forgetful, highly respected among his peers, and viewed uneasily by the Johnson administration as a senator of great influence, Cooper brought a diverse and impressive foreign policy background to the Vietnam debate. In addition to service in Patton’s Third Army during World War II, his past duties included delegate to the UN General Assembly in 1949, special assistant to Secretary of State Dean Acheson focusing on the formation of NATO in 1950, US ambassador to India in the late 1950s, and head of a JFK-appointed fact-finding mission in New Delhi and Moscow in 1961.24
In March Cooper urged the administration to state clearly that the United States was prepared to accept mediation by the 1954 Geneva Conferees, the UN, or another appropriate third party. While agreeing that the president could not accept US withdrawal from South Vietnam as a condition for peace talks, Cooper deemed the administration’s precondition that North Vietnam stop all “intervention and aggression” equally obstructive. Both sides were in effect requiring that their adversary accept “unconditional surrender” before talks could begin, thereby leaving “war as the only arbiter.” Simply to negotiate, Cooper emphasized, did not obligate the United States to accept an objectionable settlement. On May 5 he urged Johnson to pursue “a just and honorable settlement” through diplomatic talks. The United States had “nothing to lose by doing so.” After all, the communists had negotiated and compromised regarding Vietnam in 1954 and Laos in 1962. The senator also stressed that “no one can foresee the end” of an expanded Vietnam conflict, which could bring war with “Communist China” or even the “horrendous” prospect of “nuclear warfare” if “Soviet Russia should intervene.” A month later, the Kentucky Republican joined Fulbright in supporting Johnson’s request for additional funds for South Vietnamese economic development as the only alternative to an “escalated war” or an extended US presence as a “holding force.”25
Despite Cooper’s apprehensions and insights, he had not moved beyond the larger Cold War mind-set in mid-1965. Later in June, he told the Louisville VFW that although he opposed increased “bombing against such centers as Hanoi . . . unless it became necessary” to safeguard US “national security,” he also rejected American withdrawal because it “would break our commitments,” “cast doubt” on US willingness to uphold other obligations, and embolden the communists to “strike against other countries.” Even for the skeptical and cosmopolitan Cooper, credibility and the domino theory prevailed over doubts about Vietnam’s strategic value and fears of a larger, perhaps catastrophic war.26
Just as Gore and Cooper joined Fulbright in raising searching questions about the war during 1965, Senators John Stennis, Russell Long, and a host of other southerners enlisted with Russell as Johnson’s most stalwart Democratic supporters of the conflict. Elected to the Senate in 1947, Stennis, with Russell’s and Harry Byrd’s tutelage, quickly gained admission into the Senate “club,” or the group of senators who exercised decisive influence over crucial institutional processes and decisions. Stennis’s impressive work habits, attention to younger colleagues, and willingness to shoulder institutional burdens led others to characterize him as a “Senator’s Senator.” Following his appointment to the Armed Services Committee in 1951, he took an increasingly active interest in national defense and foreign relations. His influence over national defense policy grew dramatically when he became chairman in 1962 of the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee (SPIS) of the SASC. This powerful subcommittee exercised much of the Senate’s oversight of the Defense Department and was empowered to investigate all aspects of military affairs.27
It was fitting that Stennis reported Johnson’s $700 million supplemental request from the SASC and managed the bill on the floor of the Senate. Like Russell, Stennis had harbored grave reservations over US intervention in Vietnam, but, along with his mentor, the Mississippi senator grew increasingly hawkish once the nation was committed. Echoing the basic thread of LBJ’s letter to the Senate, Stennis left his colleagues virtually no alternative to supporting US soldiers in the field: “The only question” was whether the Senate was “going to give the men who we have already sent off to do jungle battle the tools with which to fight.” Should the Senate “refuse to pass the joint resolution . . . by less than an overwhelming vote,” it would inform “the world” the United States was “backing up” and would “soon . . . pull out.” Most important, he concluded, “it would be a direct message” to American soldiers that the nation was not going to furnish them the necessary “tools of war.” In announcing this stance, from which he never varied over the ensuing seven years, Stennis both reinforced the Johnson-Rusk strategy for ensuring congressional backing for the war and articulated Dixie’s faithful support for the military and executive requests for defense appropriations. In the House of Representatives, George H. Mahon, Mendel Rivers, and Robert Sikes adopted identical and equally strategic positions.28
As Stennis’s persistent objections after 1954 to direct US military intervention demonstrated, he had not adopted these hawkish perspectives thoughtlessly. In a joint session of the SFRC and SASC on April 2, 1965, the senator observed gravely that “putting those land troops in there” was “where the serious part” began. He also recognized that if Congress failed to “intervene or assert” itself in opposition to the war’s escalation, it was essentially “making a decision” to enforce the president’s actions. As the military situation continued to deteriorate, Stennis concluded that if the United States were “going to be effective,” it would have to “take over command.” He had arrived at this position, one so diametrically opposed to his 1954 perspective, because the United States had no choice but to “stand and fight,” to uphold its “commitments,” and to depart Vietnam in an “honorable” fashion. Still, as he warned his listeners in Meridian, Mississippi, on May 16, there was “no quick and easy solution to the Vietnam problem,” and US involvement would “become even greater before we reach the end of the trial.” More prophetic than he realized, Stennis, like most Americans, did not entertain the possibility that the United States might fail to impose its will on the Vietnamese.29
Senator Russell Long, the Democratic whip and a member of the SFRC, was more demonstrably hawkish than Russell and Stennis. The Louisiana senator asserted that the nation’s communist adversaries, especially the Chinese, sought “to take over the whole world” and “would stop at nothing” in pursuing this goal. The war in Vietnam was a “pure and simple” aggression “directed from North Vietnam” and the “latest effort by the Communists to seize new lands.” Rather than accept such “foreign conquest,” the United States should do “whatever” was “necessary to win”—including bombing Hanoi. Were this to draw Peking or Russia into the struggle, Long favored taking “them on”; “to start running” would leave “no place to stop except at our own borders.” The senator had no patience for critics of the war, the “modern day appeasers,” the “handful of Senators and Congressmen and the bearded beatniks” who undermined the president and led the communists to believe that “if they can just keep the pressure on us we will collapse after a while.”30
Even Long appeared moderate when compared to Mendel Rivers, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Perhaps the ultimate cold warrior, Rivers had once referred to West Point as “Tass West” and in August 1965 endorsed a potential preventive war in which nuclear weapons would be employed against China. Unless the United States was “prepared to risk the possible consequences of destroying” China’s “nuclear capability,” Rivers intoned, the war in Vietnam might have been fought “in vain.” Rivers once admitted “the lightning of intellect” never struck “the taproot of my family tree,” and this outburst regarding China’s nuclear capacity prompted LBJ to observe, “The damn fool that’s out here advocating bombing Peking ain’t got no business being chair of a committee.” A staunch proponent of air power, Rivers opposed sending US ground troops in early 1965; however, once they were dispatched, the Charleston congressmen declared he was “prepared to do anything to protect our troops.” By July, Rivers asserted what would become an increasingly prominent southern refrain. The war should be turned “over to the military. . . . The sooner we . . . let them select the targets, . . . the sooner we’ll win.” After a visit to South Vietnam in September 1965, Rivers lobbied forcefully for the bombing of Haiphong and asserted that “it would be foolish not to use all the weapons in our arsenal” should the Chinese “be so rash” as to intervene actively in the war. As 1965 ended, the congressman criticized Johnson’s “ridiculous” ground war of attrition and argued instead for playing the US “holecard” by bombing both Hanoi and Haiphong.31
While expressing a variety of concerns, other southern Democrats fell in line behind the war effort. Senators Allen Ellender and John McClellan worried about the volume of US aid, and Ellender and John Sparkman lamented the absence of support from major US allies; but all agreed by the summer of 1965 that the war had to be fought and won. Ellender, who had come to favor strategic bombing of North Vietnam, deemed the conflict one in which the United States “cannot afford to fight and cannot afford to quit.” Willis Robertson continued to worry about the US commitment. On June 15, he recalled for the Senate his grandfather’s maxim, “The tendency of everything is to be more so.” Since that had become the pattern of American involvement in South Vietnam, he renewed his suggestion for soliciting negotiations through the UN, if only to show “the world . . . where to place the blame” if North Vietnam refused. The Virginia senator’s reservations about Vietnam had increased markedly in the fifteen months since his attempt to warn LBJ about intervention in March 1964. Privately, Robertson suggested that “to win . . . might require” the use of “hydrogen bombs to destroy about one-half of the Chinese people”—a “bloodcurdling” action that would provoke international condemnation. And he further denigrated US prospects in a country that was “utterly unstable from a political standpoint,” “bitterly” divided by a “religious conflict between Catholics and Buddhists,” and devoid of any “conception of personal freedom” or “self-government.” Significantly, Robertson also agonized over the war’s fiscal implications and identified the drain on the US gold reserves that would become acute by 1968.32
Herman Talmadge perceptively recognized in February that bombing North Vietnam would not alter communist domination over the “approximately 90 percent” of the villages they controlled in South Vietnam, and in July he could “see nothing to be gained by an all-out war with North Vietnam.” But he also rejected withdrawal, since “all of Southeast Asia would rapidly fall under Communist control,” thereby jeopardizing the American strategic position “throughout all of Asia” and dealing a “tremendous blow to American prestige” worldwide. Senator Sam Ervin acknowledged that Vietnam was “one of the most baffling problems now confronting us” but lectured a skeptical constituent that to withdraw without an acceptable settlement “would destroy the last vestige of confidence which freedom-loving people have in the United States.” Representative Dante Fascell (D-FL) agreed that the United States could not afford “to be nibbled to death” and that no adversary could be allowed to doubt that Americans would “stand up, fight and die if necessary to protect what we believe in.” Convinced that “peaceful coexistence” was “part of the communist arsenal,” Senator George Smathers added his voice to this southern chorus.33
This growing phalanx of southern conservatives and their support for the war, and often for its more aggressive prosecution, carried significant implications. As Johnson feared, they began by 1965 to argue that meeting the war’s escalating costs required commensurate reductions in domestic programs. Stennis voiced this argument in September. Rather than enacting “additional welfare and social programs,” Congress and the president needed to “realize that the war on poverty is not the only war we are fighting.” Since the Vietnam involvement would “cost many additional billions of dollars,” the nation would “at some point . . . have to choose between guns and butter.” Ironically, many of Johnson’s most dependable southern backers of the war were also among the harshest critics of the Great Society. Their influence was not confined to this domestic political dynamic and its complications for the president. The emphasis of southern hawks on national honor, the futility of negotiating with communists, aggressive bombing, and traditional military victory both reinforced LBJ’s personal inclinations and narrowed his options.34
The national Republican Party and the few southern Republicans in 1965 had a similar impact. While endorsing the Cold War rationale for US intervention in Vietnam, Republicans had criticized both Kennedy and Johnson for pursuing a “no-win,” unfocused, and publicly obscure policy. Save the conspicuous exceptions of Senators Cooper and Jacob Javits (R-NY), all important Republicans demanded victory and advocated the aggressive bombing of North Vietnam. In February 1965 Congressman Melvin Laird (R-WI) could have been mistaken for a southern hawk when he contended that the United States should either “pull out completely or go all out and go in to win.” Among southern Republicans, Strom Thurmond, who had moved to the GOP in September 1964 in opposition to Johnson’s civil rights policies, remained blatantly belligerent. Thurmond opened the year demanding that the United States deny the enemy any “sanctuaries” in Southeast Asia and later asked Ambassador Maxwell Taylor if the administration planned to “just fight a defensive action like we did in Korea” or pursue “victory.” Was there a “plan to win,” or would the United States settle for a “stalemate and be subject to keeping our troops over there . . . indefinitely?” John Tower was similarly strident. In January Tower declared Johnson was unwilling to “come to grips with the seriousness of the situation” in Vietnam. The Texas senator opposed the use of US ground troops but endorsed massive bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail since “continuation of the present policy means continuation of a policy that is losing the war.” Although his views would change dramatically by the fall of 1967, Senator Thruston Morton (R-KY) agreed with Thurmond and Tower on the essentials of Vietnam policy. In October Morton advised a constituent that the United States should only negotiate from a military position of “relative . . . equality” with the North Vietnamese and PRC. He too dreaded the prospect of a “land war” and contended instead for “greater use of naval and air forces,” including a “quarantine” like that being enforced against Cuba and a “sharp step up of activity against strategic targets in North Viet Nam.”35
Southern newspapers overwhelmingly subscribed to Dixie’s emerging, majority prowar position. The Dallas Morning News applauded Johnson’s decisions for bombing and the dispatch of ground troops, derided the “peace-at-any price faction” in the United States, and emphasized that “worldwide confidence in America’s commitment to freedom” was at stake. Only by fulfilling this commitment, the Montgomery Advertiser agreed, could the United States avoid looking like “the ‘paper tiger’ which China contends we are.” The Advertiser editorial staff also pointedly distinguished between the Vietcong’s use of “terrorism” for “subjugating” others and the US “effort . . . at knocking out installations” and “reducing” enemy military capacity. Eugene Patterson, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, endorsed LBJ’s “surefooted” and appropriately firm bombing response to the clear “pattern of aggression.” As Johnson made the decision for ground troops in July, the Constitution opined that the United States should deploy “whatever forces are necessary” since there was “nothing to do but fight them, and fight them well.” From New Orleans, the Times-Picayune hoped Johnson’s retaliatory bombing in February would head off “a major Southeastern Asia conflict” by convincing the North Vietnamese they would “be among the greatest sufferers” and showing the Chinese they were “vulnerable to punishment.” When Rolling Thunder failed to restrain Hanoi or the Vietcong, the Times-Picayune fell in line behind the deployment of ground troops.36
Adopting a perspective similar to that of Senator Cooper, the Louisville Courier-Journal ultimately accepted the decision for war, but only after stressing the need for negotiations from February through July and with the unenthusiastic observation that the dispatch of ground troops was “a decision the nation had little choice but to support” and “pray that it is right.” Editorial page editor Russell Brinly and his staff responded to the initiation of US bombing of North Vietnam in February by urging President Johnson to promptly repeat the US “preference for a negotiated settlement” and to press for UN mediation. As the administration adopted its rigid negotiating position and marched toward the “major land war on the mainland of Asia” that Cooper and the Courier-Journal warned against, the paper’s editorials predicted that the war in Vietnam would “soon become a symbol of horror to most Americans. Only a quick victory would be acceptable,” but that was beyond “the realm of possibility.”37
The Texas Observer, an Austin weekly edited by Ronnie Dugger, was more unabashedly liberal than the Courier Journal, but not necessarily more antiwar. Dugger ran pieces applauding dissent and others clearly out of step with majority southern opinion. For example, John S. Ambler, an assistant professor of political science at Rice University, asserted that “saturation bombing from high altitude” at the cost of “numerous civilian lives” undermined the South Vietnamese government’s standing with its people and that US loss of prestige would be far greater if “we fight for another decade and still are forced to withdraw.” Otto Mullinax, a senior partner in a major Dallas law firm, charged the United States with subverting its “moral position in the world” by waging “aggressive undeclared war” in Vietnam. In both a fascinating debate with Republican congressman George H. W. Bush before the Junior Bar of Texas and a speech to the state convention of the Texas Liberal Democrats, Dugger criticized LBJ’s bombing of North Vietnam, which had turned world opinion “against us,” driven Hanoi closer to China, and harmed US relations with the Soviet Union. Fearful of land war in Asia and even a nuclear conflict, Dugger accentuated the need to pursue “peace with honor”; but he, like virtually all southern critics of the war in 1965, did not believe the United States could “unilaterally withdraw,” and he offered no clear prescription for forcing or inducing North Vietnam and the Vietcong to agree to US terms for negotiations.38
None of these other southern papers expressed reservations equivalent to the Courier-Journal or Texas Observer, but even the more hawkish dailies sounded perceptive notes of caution. The Advertiser considered an Asian land war “a chilling thought” and raised “the question of whether there is any way out, except out.” While rejecting “withdrawal and total defeat,” Eugene Paterson acknowledged to Atlanta Constitution readers that “total victory” in Vietnam was a “pipedream.” And the Times-Picayune recognized “the fighting might go on for years without a military decision” and considered US prospects bleak without a viable South Vietnamese government.39
Polling of the southern public revealed a similarly prowar majority. From May 1965, when systematic Gallup polling regarding Vietnam began, through the end of the year, the South, when compared to the East, Midwest, and West, was more inclined to believe that the war would be “won on the battlefield” rather than “in the minds” of the Vietnamese. Only 44 percent of southerners polled opted for the nonmilitary solution versus 50 percent of persons both nationally and from the other region (the West) least inclined to agree with this statement. Southerners were also most likely to respond “very well” (65 percent compared to the national average of 60) to the question of how US forces were performing in Vietnam, were most willing to “continue the war” alone even if the South Vietnamese stopped fighting, and were most opposed to inviting the UN to “try to work out its own formula for peace in Viet Nam.” Dixie’s 65 percent approval of the last question, versus 74 percent nationally and in the other least positive region (the West), revealed both the South’s decided unilateralist tendencies and its disdain for the United Nations. Reflecting the view of Dixie’s public opinion leaders from Fulbright and Cooper to Russell and Stennis, southerners frequently agreed that the United States should not have become “involved with our military forces in Southeast Asia.” These collective southern opinions helped make Dixie the region most dissatisfied with both LBJ’s overall performance as president and his administration’s “handling of the situation in Viet Nam.” In May only 49 percent of southerners endorsed Johnson’s work as president (versus 64 percent in the next most negative region), and the margin (47 and 63 percent, respectively) remained similar in September. Although the discrepancies were not nearly so glaring, the South was consistently three to seven percentage points less supportive of the president’s war leadership during 1965.40
The South’s established opposition to limited war and the rising demand for more aggressive bombing of North Vietnam constituted the decisive reasons for the region’s negative evaluation of Johnson’s performance as commander in chief. Dixie’s disapproval of Johnson’s domestic programs undoubtedly reinforced the negative assessment of his Vietnam leadership. From the southern perspective his most egregious misstep was to push the pace of African American “integration too fast,” a policy that caused southerners to brand him a “turncoat-son-of-a-bitch.” In the wake of Johnson’s passage of the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills, 61 percent of southerners expressed that opinion, as opposed to 40–45 percent of Americans nationally. Federal programs and the deficit spending associated with the Great Society intensified the South’s discomfort with the Civil Rights Movement, and all of these domestic matters influenced Dixie’s assessment of the administration’s war policies.41
Southerners’ letters to newspaper editors and their congressional representatives elucidated the polling data. Dixie’s prowar residents continued to denounce LBJ’s limited-war strategy. A Georgia physician voiced an unvarnished version of this position to Senator Russell. The United States “should go to war with an effort to win.” To do otherwise was “being dishonest and untrue to the youth of our nation whom we are sending to their death. . . . I feel we should bomb and destroy Hanoi and Haiphong and any other military target necessary to win the war. I think we should attempt to . . . obtain unconditional surrender with all means at our command, including atomic weapons.” From Savannah, the wife of a member of the USAF agreed: “If we are going to continue the war in Viet Nam . . . then in God’s name let us go in it to win.” Although the couple were newlyweds, neither dreaded the airman’s assignment to Vietnam if it would do “any good at all.” It would be “a small price to enjoy the heritage of freedom so painstakingly won and given to us by prior generations.” The young woman acknowledged that this assertion might sound “corny” but assured Senator Russell, “We believe it.” Indeed, she declared, “If the Army would recognize the fact that women would make much sneakier fighters than men . . . I would dearly love to be in the fray myself.”42
Prowar southerners asked why the war was being run by “political appointees rather than our trained military personnel.” Some contended that the State Department, replete with its “‘No Win’ policy,” was in “full charge of the Viet Nam debacle.” How else to explain Johnson’s “disgusting and humiliating” offer of the Mekong River project as a “bribe” to this “small Asian gangster nation . . . to stop fighting us”? Many more southerners cited Secretary of Defense McNamara as the civilian culprit responsible for the military’s restraint. A Tupelo attorney wrote representatively to Stennis urging an “irresistible uproar” from Congress demanding McNamara’s firing, and an indignant Mississippi parent informed McNamara, “Our boys are being killed because the Civilians in Washington won’t let General [Earle] Wheeler [chairman of the JCS] and his staff fight the war.”43
Regardless of whom they credited with overseeing the US war effort, most southerners flatly rejected negotiations with North Vietnam or the Vietcong. Since communists never kept their word, negotiations had invariably left “our side . . . empty handed”; and Vietnam talks would likely yield a coalition government that the communists would control via “subversion, treason, and murder.” Senator Gore’s mail following his renewed call for negotiations in February left no doubt of the prevailing southern perspective. His constituents termed his statement a “degenerate form of defeatism,” condemned his proposal as “a surrender,” denounced negotiations as a species of “appeasement” worthy of Neville Chamberlain, and began and concluded letters with “Dear Spineless Senator” and “Disrespectfully yours.” Even Willis Robertson’s far more reserved call for negotiations elicited a charge that he was “advocating retreat” with his “shabby display of lack of will and courage.”44
Southern backers of the war in 1965 and 1966 included an ongoing religious theme in their brief. A rural Tennessee woman stated the prowar perspective succinctly: “I feel that the world situation boils down to the fact that communism is fighting Christianity.” Another Gore constituent asked what could be “the basis of negotiations for a true peace in a war between the godless materialism of communism,” which asserted “God was created in the imagination of man[,] and the community of God-fearing men who believe that man was created in the image of God.” According to a third southerner, the United States, “as a Christian nation,” needed to “face up to the fact that communism is our enemy too” and “not just a foreign disease.” A Virginia physician traced US world leadership to “its form of government . . . based on the importance of the individual,” which derived “primarily . . . from the fundamental concept of the Christian religion.” Therefore, if US religious and political principles were “right and those of communism are wrong, . . . we have no choice” but to “do whatever is necessary” to prevail in Vietnam.45
To these arguments and opinions, prowar southerners added their condemnation of antiwar protestors. A Georgia father, whose son was serving in Vietnam, wondered “what he and his buddies think of these bastards that are burning their draft cards and being traitors to our country.” Another Georgian deplored these “insignificant, but ignorant, mentally incompetent, overeducated, cowardly, or disloyal” protestors, who “sought to embarrass the National Government.” Class tensions were evident when the owner of a North Carolina construction company complained to Senator Ervin that demonstrators should be “punished severely, but they are the ones who get all the breaks. They get out of serving in the military, and it seems as if they are patted on the back and treated like a first class citizen.”46
Southern opponents of the war offered equally heartfelt rejoinders. Expressing and acting on antiwar positions was difficult in Dixie’s prevailing prowar society. A rural Georgia woman in her late forties explained her apprehension to Senator Russell in October 1965. Over the previous “few months,” she had waged a daily battle “to get shut of the Mask of Fear” that had prevented her from taking a “stand on an issue, which is right, regardless of how many friends, neighbors, [and] leaders” she might “offend.” She had “Won” and was “now Free” to castigate Russell for his criticism of young protestors. Better the senator spend his time “erasing” the South’s “UnAmerican Segregation Laws” and taking a “stand based on TRUTH” if he believed “any part of the Bible and its teachings.” Given the South’s hostility toward demonstrators, another Georgian felt compelled to begin his letter lobbying for referral of Vietnam matters to the UN with the assurance that he was not “an unwashed beatnik” or “some kind of subversive. I bathe am a college graduate and have been fortunate in making well in the upper five figures for the last five years.” The only “organizations” to which he belonged were “the Baptist Church and the Human Race.”47
Like defenders of the war, Dixie’s critics worried that America’s NATO “allies” would offer no help, leaving the United States “to shoulder the responsibility alone.” Dissenters also portrayed the conflict as a “Civil War,” which the United States was “perpetuating and feeding,” only to become aligned with the weaker side. South Vietnam’s government had “no identifiable leadership,” and, as the ARVN “falter[ed] or disintegrate[d],” the United States would be left fighting alone. This position could be viewed only as “imperialism,” and since it served to “encourage the reunification of world Communism,” it was best described as “lamentable,” “stupid,” and “immoral.” With a nod to Korea, a second Virginian asked if the Defense Department had “any plans for occupying Indo China” if the war were actually won. Another southerner favored negotiations; but, while readily agreeing that US soldiers in the field had to be supported, he also voiced prophetic qualms to Senator Stennis. This Mississippian had “very serious doubts” about whether the American public “would support an all out war in Southeast Asia. . . . Our people are not remotely interested in having our young men sent there and sacrificed for what to them is a meaningless war.”48
Writing to the Louisville Courier-Journal, W. Forrest Smith cast the US dilemma in Vietnam in a broad, provocative, and distinctly un-southern perspective. Smith cited the Truman Doctrine’s pledge to confront communism worldwide as the root of the US proclivity for intervening in the affairs of other nations. This proclivity, together with US military power, left the world with a “Frankenstein on its hands” and the United States in “the embarrassing position of waging undeclared war on two small nations, neither of which had committed an unfriendly act against our nation.” The United States, Smith asserted, needed to realize “we are merely one sovereign nation in a big world, with no authority . . . to tell other nations what type of government” they should adopt or “to occupy their territory, establish military bases, destroy their property or murder their people.”49
Others, with moral qualms akin to Smith’s last prohibition, objected to the war on religious grounds during the 1965–1966 period and, in so doing, demonstrated how religion in the Bible Belt could lead to diametrically opposing stands on the war. A Winston-Salem, North Carolina, resident articulated clearly how religion could lead southerners to oppose as well as support the war. “As a Christian,” he declared, he did not believe that US policies were “in accordance with the will of God,” and this contradiction was “more important than ‘Saving Face.’” A Georgia minister asserted that President Johnson and his advisors had not “yet met Jesus Christ, in whose commandments is plainly written, thou shall not kill.” Other Dixie residents were “deeply ashamed” that the United States was “killing people half a world away”; appalled that America employed “chemical warfare,” which “perverts every ethic of the American Christian heritage”; aghast at “our continued ruthless and inhumane air assaults against a people who do not even have planes” for their defense; and “disturbed by our increasing propensity for playing God” with the fate of “emerging nations.” Terry Bisson, a Louisville resident, expanded on the issue of “bombing . . . Vietnamese civilians.” Perhaps “the murder of women and children” was “more humane with a bomb than a knife,” and such “distinctions” might be “comforting to Americans,” but they were far “too subtle for the dead.”50
Among the constituents who wrote to Senator Sam Ervin opposing the war was Frazier T. Woolard, an attorney from Washington, North Carolina, a small town on Albemarle Sound. Forty-five years old in 1965 and a navy veteran who had survived Pearl Harbor and the battles of Guadalcanal and Okinawa, Woolard had attended William and Mary and graduated from Duke Law School in 1954. Consistent with his minority southern opinion on the war, Woolard represented African American clients and actively aided blacks in securing professional positions. The North Carolina attorney deemed the Vietnam intervention strategically unnecessary and pronounced it “outrageous” to send “large numbers of troops” to fight in this “unjustified conflict.” His protest to Senator Ervin began an outspoken decade of opposition to the war, and the small-town lawyer’s experience graphically demonstrated Dixie’s majority support for the war and the potential implications for those who challenged that perspective.51
Woolard’s antiwar inclinations were informed and reinforced by his fascinating friendship with a South Vietnamese official, whom he encountered in 1966 while seeking information on local elections under Diem and his successors. A remarkable twenty-year correspondence and friendship ensued. During those two decades, Woolard’s Vietnamese friend, who had been educated at Hanoi University and the Sorbonne and was fluent in English and French, served periodically as a South Vietnamese diplomat and taught in a variety of private schools and universities. From this perspective, he afforded Woolard expert insights on Vietnamese nationalism and on governmental and popular conditions in South Vietnam. This cosmopolitan observer greatly appreciated Woolard’s sympathy for the Vietnamese people. From their initial letters in the fall of 1966, he expressed his “great joy of . . . miraculously meeting a friend in the desert” who understood the “agony of our people” and had the “courage and humanity to raise” his voice. The Vietnamese diplomat thereafter complimented the North Carolina attorney as “one of the very few people” who was “really concerned about the human condition” and willing “to give of their time and of themselves to help alleviate human suffering.”52
In addition to this correspondence, Woolard read widely on Vietnam and frequently wrote US government agencies requesting information. Among the contemporary authors he consulted were Bernard Fall, David Halberstam, Joseph Buttinger, Harold Issacs, George McTurnan Kahin, and Ellen Hammer. He also read Ramparts, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, New York Times, Greensboro Daily News, and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. From these materials, Woolard concluded that the United States was prosecuting an economically motivated war “to prevent a depression,” and he dismissed the domino theory as “mere propaganda.” He was appalled at what he considered US-induced destruction in South Vietnam and contended that the American presence had served to “suppress” rather than promote democracy. Were the Vietnamese allowed to express their political preferences, Woolard was confident they would choose Ho Chi Minh, who “despite his political flavor [was] first of all a Vietnamese nationalist whom the Vietnamese admire[d].” US policies and actions were especially troubling since the nation “itself was born in revolutionary violence” and was in no “position to regulate how other peoples establish their government.” The Vietnamese and Asians more generally should be allowed “to work their own problems out themselves” since “Caucasians” only created “more animosity and hostility.”53
As the war dragged on, Woolard became increasingly outraged at US policies. In August 1967, Woolard seized on a Johnson quote that his “administration hasn’t lost its ass yet.” The North Carolina firebrand informed the president that his policy of “killing . . . Asian peasants under the false propaganda of ‘helping them’” was a loser and that LBJ should “consider resigning.” During 1968, Woolard continued “smoking ‘like a locomotive,’” in the words of his Vietnamese friend, while spending considerable time attempting to establish a link between the American Friends of Vietnam, a US pro–South Vietnam group, and the CIA. He also defended the “insistent political demonstrators” at the Democratic national convention in Chicago who had greater “justice” on their side than the “[Mayor] Daley gang.” In contrast to majority southern opinion, Woolard sympathized with student dissent, which he correctly noted was part of a “worldwide phenomenon.” Over the following two years, Woolard wrote directly to Walt Whitman Rostow, Johnson’s former special assistant for national security affairs, and to Dean Rusk, reprimanding them for their roles in the “Vietnam war atrocity,” and informed his congressman, Walter B. Jones (D-NC), that the war was “criminal and those who support it knowing the true nature of the war are likewise guilty.” Building on this assumption, Woolard suggested the UN might form a “committee of non-aligned nations” to assess US war policies and the actions of American leaders. Although such suggestions were far too drastic for the vast majority of Woolard’s contemporaries or most subsequent commentators, his charges that US tactics such as search-and-destroy ground missions and the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign killed huge numbers of North and South Vietnamese civilians have since been substantiated. Therefore, his basic insight into the war’s impact on the Vietnamese people was correct.54
Unsurprisingly, given his antiwar views and vehement stands, Woolard became a black sheep in eastern North Carolina, and both his family and his law practice suffered. At the end of the war and after, several correspondents spoke to the ramifications of his unpopular positions. Two local North Carolina journalists wrote to Woolard in 1972. The first acknowledged that he had begun to accept substantial portions of Woolard’s antiwar brief after learning about the My Lai massacre and following the trial of William Calley. Prior to those events, he had “admired” his neighbor’s knowledge regarding the war, but “could not believe that you knew more than all the presidents, their cabinets and top advisors when they had all the information, much of which could not possibly have been available to you.” The second journalist, Bartow Houston Jr., wrote in late 1972, expressing “great admiration” for what Woolard “had to go through” in their community and for his opposition to the war “so very, very long before I learned what it was all about.” Two years later, Houston commented further on Woolard’s “mostly lonely efforts to prick the conscience of the American people.” He judged it “astonishing that a smalltown lawyer, faced with the task of making a living, should have emerged as such an erudite authority on the Vietnam War. . . . Not only were you right, you were one of the first in this nation who were ‘right.’ Your cries to the mostly unhearing populous may well stand as a monument to your concern for mankind.” Writing the same month as Houston, one of Woolard’s unhearing neighbors told him, “I am deeply sorry for anything and everything done to you by me. Some times our mouths just say too much. I think the whole thing began about the Vietnam War. May you and God forgive me.” At the time of her graduation from East Carolina University in May 1983, Suzanne Woolard, one of Frazier’s twin girls, may have had the last word: “I accept you for you—one hell of an individual.”55
Even as Frazier Woolard was beginning his lonely and courageous opposition to the Vietnam War in eastern North Carolina, a far more significant protest was brewing in the SFRC. Since May 1965, both committee staffers and members such as Jacob Javits, Frank Church, and Gore had been pressing Fulbright to hold public hearings on the war. While still hoping to convince President Johnson not to escalate the conflict, the chairman had stubbornly resisted. LBJ’s July 1965 troop decisions, the flap over the Dominican Republic intervention, and Fulbright’s subsequent social and official ostracism prompted the senator to begin rethinking his role in helping Johnson to suppress public debate. On January 11, 1966, Fulbright proposed public SFRC hearings, and the majority of the committee agreed on February 3.56
During the three-week interim that the SFRC deliberated over holding the hearings, several events solidified Fulbright’s resolve and helped produce the committee decision for the sessions that directly challenged administration policies in Vietnam. On January 24, Secretary Rusk appeared before the SFRC in executive session to discuss his recent trips abroad. The secretary reiterated standard administration positions on the war, and Fulbright engaged him in a nasty personal confrontation. The chairman, who was described as “personally intolerant” of Rusk and referred privately to Rusk’s “devious reasoning,” questioned the secretary’s understanding and representation of the Vietnam imbroglio, and the outraged Rusk responded that he was “extremely sensitive” about the “question of credibility and integrity” and “would never lie to the press.” The standoff left Fulbright even more convinced that Johnson was committed to disastrous military escalation and left a wounded Rusk wary of dealing with the SFRC.57
The following day, Fulbright attended a White House meeting of congressional leaders with the president. Addressing his reluctance to challenge Johnson overtly, General Earle Wheeler once explained, “You just don’t go in there and piss in the President’s soup”—an admonition Fulbright might have heeded, given his habit of doing just that. The Arkansas senator raised his familiar objections to escalating the conflict, contended that the United States was “taking the place of the French” and seeking to “reimpose colonial power,” and urged LBJ to continue the suspension of bombing over North Vietnam that he had begun reluctantly on December 24, 1965, in hopes of enticing Hanoi to negotiate. LBJ responded by pointedly ignoring Fulbright as he spoke and paying much closer attention to Senator Russell’s diametrically opposing message. Russell declared that the bombing “lull” had continued too long and caused unnecessary American deaths. His prescription was clear: “For God’s sake, don’t start the bombing halfway. Let them know they are in a war. We killed civilians in World War II and nobody opposed. I’d rather kill them than have American boys die. Please, Mr. President. . . . Go all the way.” Accentuating their inclusion among the group Secretary McNamara dubbed the “heavier bombing boys,” Rivers, Long, and Mahon strongly endorsed Russell’s position.58
Fulbright and opponents of the war found Senator Stennis’s January 27 address to a joint session of the Mississippi legislature even more troubling. As a member of the SASC and chair of the Preparedness Subcommittee, Stennis had particularly close ties to the US military and regularly represented Pentagon preferences. The senator voiced the dismay of most southerners by asking how the United States with its “great power” had failed to secure a “decisive and relatively quick military victory against a small and underdeveloped country like North Vietnam and the guerrillas in South Vietnam.” His answer: the administration’s decision “to fight what amounts to a holding action” and the civilian-imposed “restrictions” that prevented the military from “waging a hard-hitting and all-out attack in North Vietnam.” It was time to take the gloves off—to bomb Haiphong and halt the “flow of men and supplies from the North to the South.” Should these “stepped-up operations” provoke “Red China to full intervention in the war,” the senator recommended that the United States keep open the option of retaliating with “every weapon we have.” Winning would also require the United States to commit additional troops, and Stennis predicted four hundred thousand in Vietnam by the end of 1966 and perhaps as many as six hundred thousand thereafter.59
Stennis’s projection of a possible six hundred thousand US troops in Vietnam and his veiled proposal for using tactical nuclear weapons against China “scare[d] the hell” out of Fulbright, who feared that the Mississippi senator was speaking for the JCS and signaling a “gathering, incontrollable momentum, carrying us into open conflict with China.” To a reporter Fulbright exclaimed, “For God’s sake this is becoming a major war! I assume that this is still a democracy, that the Senate has a role to play in foreign affairs.” The SFRC hearings embodied that role. The Arkansas senator and other committee dissenters sought a public discussion about the war and its implications that would prompt the administration to slow the war’s escalation and avert a possible confrontation with China. Senator Gore was particularly blunt. Since closed sessions with Rusk and McNamara had yielded no discernible influence on Johnson, he deemed open, widely publicized hearings the opportunity “to go over the head of the President to the American people, and reach him by way of the people.” By soliciting the views of witnesses and projecting their own opinions, the skeptical majority on the SFRC mounted a direct challenge to Lyndon Johnson and his war and provided the first true public debate over the conflict’s origins and merits. Journalist and historian David Halberstam subsequently described the proceedings as disputing the “word of the President,” and Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) observed, “Bill Fulbright has a lot of guts to do a thing like this.” As Fulbright, Rusk, Gore, Sparkman, and Long actively participated in the hearings, they further demonstrated the emerging divisions in Dixie.60
To President Johnson’s acute discomfort, the SFRC hearings were not only held in open session but also televised nationally, with the key sessions running from February 4 to February 18. To bolster their antiwar positions, Fulbright and his allies called as witnesses General James M. Gavin (ret., USA) and George F. Kennan, the former foreign service officer who had formulated the doctrine of containing communism in 1946–1947 and had subsequently served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The Johnson administration countered with Rusk and General Maxwell Taylor (ret., USA), who had served both as chairman of the JCS and US ambassador to South Vietnam.
Opponents of the war mounted a withering attack on the rationale for US involvement in Vietnam. They emphasized the nationalist credentials of Ho and his followers, portrayed the conflict as being as much a civil war as one of outside aggression, and argued that Vietnam was of minimal strategic importance to the United States. The dissenters asserted that US intervention in Vietnam had deflected attention from far more important relations with the USSR and China and raised the prospect of war with the latter and even the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The antiwar critics rejected the mechanistic features of the domino theory and denied that US credibility was on trial in Vietnam. In so doing, they asserted that an outcome short of traditional victory would not decisively impair US credibility.
Together with Senators Fulbright, Frank Church, Claiborne Pell (D-RI), George Aiken (R-VT), and Wayne Morse, Albert Gore scored the administration. The Tennessee maverick regretted not having objected publicly to US-Vietnam policies “7 years ago” and contended this SFRC hearing should have been held “3 years ago.” Gore denied that the United States had any SEATO-related “specific commitment” to fight a war in Vietnam, and he sought to “disassociate” himself from “any interpretation” of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that embodied a “declaration of war.” The senator worried anew that if the United States became “bogged down” in Vietnam, the Soviet Union would be free to “work her machinations” in Berlin and Latin America; but he continued to fear most of all a nuclear war with China. Based on this threat, Gore, together with others on the committee, queried Taylor and Rusk regarding the upper “limits on [US] forces.” When Taylor responded that Hanoi would “decide” this depending on its pursuit of further aggression, Gore was appalled by the assumption there were “no limits on the forces to be employed until Hanoi capitulates.” It was precisely such uncontrolled escalation that could furnish the USSR troubling opportunities and lead to armed conflict with China. Given these “dangers and risks,” the senator prescribed negotiations rather than escalation in pursuit of elusive credibility and a potentially pyrrhic victory.61
Just as Gore raised a strong antiwar voice, John Sparkman and Russell Long joined Stuart Symington (D-MO), Frank L. Lausche (D-OH), and Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) as prominent defenders of Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Sparkman’s principal contributions came in the form of careful, pointed questions put to both pro- and antiwar witnesses. To Taylor and Rusk, was the intervention in Vietnam an application of containment akin to the Truman Doctrine? Was not the conflict a case of outside aggression rather than a “civil war”? Had the United States tried “every way” possible to get to the “conference table”? Had the United States attempted “insofar as practical” to avoid damage to “villages” and “civilians”? Would losing the war have a deleterious impact on neighboring countries in Southeast Asia? As the administration witnesses responded and elaborated, Sparkman facilitated presentation of the arguments Johnson and Rusk had been making over the previous eighteen months. From Gavin, Sparkman elicited the acknowledgment that force should at least be maintained “at its present level” and that Haiphong should be bombed because of its service “as a major port of entry for military supplies”; and from Kennan he gained the concession that a “satisfactory peaceful resolution of the conflict” was “not entirely visible.”62
Praised for knowing “how to get things done” as a legislator, Russell Long had been elected Senate Democratic whip in January and assumed the chairmanship of the Finance Committee in November. Despite his southern “corn-pone exterior,” one perceptive observer recognized that the canny Long was “never more effective than when confronted by liberals who think they are smarter than he is.” A “five-star hawk,” the Louisiana senator played the role of a “screaming eagle” who “wrapped himself in Old Glory like a beach towel,” in sharp contrast with the reserved Sparkman. Long rejected any suggestion of “rolling over and playing a dead dog” when confronted with communist aggression. If the United States instead recognized its “power” and was willing to “use it,” he was convinced victory was attainable. The Louisiana senator cited SEATO and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as ample justification for US involvement and harbored no doubts of the domino theory’s validity. The communists “planned to take over everything that borders on Red China, everything that borders on the Soviet Union, then everything that borders on everything that borders on that.” Long indignantly dismissed any suggestion that the United States had acted as an “international criminal,” as the communists and some senators had charged. Rather, in assertions that he also took to the floor of the Senate, the senator was convinced Americans were the “international good guy[s]” who followed the “rules of war” and were “just better and more honorable and more moral people than the Communists.”63
In his February 16 Senate speech, Long also charged “advocates of retreat, defeat, surrender, and national dishonor” with undermining the war effort and encouraging the enemy. Had northern public figures daily voiced such doubts during the Civil War, the struggle might “have gone the other way,” and the South “would have won the principles of States rights.” Gore angrily rejected these attacks on his honor and patriotism. He expressed satisfaction that the hearings had “not been characterized by intemperate and flamboyant language and arm waving.” Moreover, “the issue before the committee” was not “defeat, retreat, and surrender,” but whether the war was to be held within “manageable” limits or expanded into “an open end commitment for total victory” and even grow into a “global” conflict. Such a threat was “far too important to be considered with catch phrases and loosely selected slogans.” Unapologetic, Long retorted, “When I speak of my love for my great country, I am not embarrassed because now and then I become a little enthusiastic. I swell with pride when I see Old Glory flying from the Capitol.”64
Although southerners such as Gore, Sparkman, and Long played revealing and important roles in the SFRC hearings, Fulbright remained the most prominent committee member, and his exchanges with Secretary Rusk provided the hearings’ most dramatic moments. The SFRC chairman protested to Rusk that official discussion of US intervention had been “rather superficial” and challenged the administration “to clarify the nature” of US involvement and demonstrate that the “ultimate objective justifies the enormous sacrifice in lives and treasure.” Fulbright bemoaned the spiraling cost of the war, which he estimated as $15.8 billion for FY 1966, and objected to the argument that the preservation of US credibility made continued involvement and victory essential. Since considerations of “prestige and face” were “grossly exaggerated,” US policy should be based on “wisdom” rather than an elusive sense of national appearance. The essential nature of the conflict rendered Cold War credibility even less relevant, since Ho and his followers were “indigenous Vietnamese nationalists” who had begun their resistance seeking “liberation from French colonial rule.” Therefore, it was an “oversimplification” to term the actions of these “nationalistic Communists . . . a clear cut aggression” by North Vietnam against “a free, independent neighboring nation.”65
Moving beyond the US rationale for intervention in Vietnam, Fulbright questioned the administration’s and its supporters’ emphasis on US efforts to minimize casualties in contrast to Vietcong terrorism. In a direct challenge to America’s sense of exceptionalism, the chairman asserted that war was “inherently . . . atrocious” and that all combatants used the weapons they possessed. Technologically sophisticated countries such as the United States employed modern weapons such as airplanes and artillery to kill at long range; poorer, less well-equipped people by necessity used ostensibly cruder methods such as disemboweling or beheading. The United States could not “claim any great superiority because we happen to have nuclear bombs and fire bombs and the other side doesn’t.” Americans, Fulbright concluded, were not “bad people,” but neither were they “the only good people” because of “using weapons that we happen to have, and others don’t.” Fulbright was equally skeptical regarding administration claims of tirelessly pursuing an equitable, negotiated settlement. How, he asked, could bombing until North Vietnam was forced to negotiate on US terms be called anything other than demanding unconditional surrender or, as “they used to say in the Ozarks, holler ‘Enough,’ or say ‘calf rope’”?66
In his six-hour appearance before the committee on February 18, Rusk offered a “dignified and staid, often laborious,” and only briefly “impassioned” rejoinder to Fulbright and the SFRC dissenters. The secretary rejected any suggestion that Ho and his followers were nationalists or that the United States had intervened in a civil war. Instead, the struggle in Vietnam was the most recent battle in the larger Cold War, in which North Vietnam had committed “systematic aggression . . . against the people of South Vietnam.” In addition to the fate of South Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the very structure of world peace and a world consistent with American values hung in the balance. Only by confronting aggression head on could peace be preserved. Comparing China, the ultimate source of aggression in Asia, to Hitler’s Germany, Rusk contended that “an airdale [sic] and a great dane are different but they are both dogs.” Only by upholding the solemn commitments embodied in SEATO and containing China and North Vietnam could the United States avert a threat to the entire “human race.” The “pledged word of the United States” had to be taken seriously by both allies and adversaries; international observers had to understand “we . . . mean business.” To date, “every resource of [US] diplomacy” had been directed toward an equitable “political solution”; but all American overtures had met only North Vietnamese intransigence. Were Hanoi “prepared to call off the aggression in the south, peace would come in a matter of hours.”67
Like Taylor, Rusk refused to set any ceiling on US forces in Vietnam. Unless SFRC critics could forecast “exactly what the other side is going to do,” how could they expect the administration to specify limits on the American commitment? Nor should there be any limits, given the post-1945 pattern of US responses to aggression. Appealing directly to the national sense of exceptionalism and the self-image of peculiarly peaceful intentions, Rusk asserted that all US Cold War actions had been defensive and in answer to “specific steps of aggression launched by the other side.” The secretary was “convinced” that “no people in the world” were “more deeply peace loving than . . . the American people.” Rusk also reiterated one emerging strain of the “stab-in-the-back” explanation of the lack of US progress in the war. Dissenters, such as Fulbright and Gore, were prolonging the war since the North Vietnamese would negotiate only after realizing that US “internal differences” would not “pull us out of Vietnam and let them have the country.” Writing after the war, the secretary added that domestic dissent had “encouraged” the enemy “to stick it out,” to believe that “American public support for the war would collapse and that they could win . . . in the United States what they couldn’t win on the ground in Vietnam.”68
Given Fulbright’s and Rusk’s diametrically opposing perspectives on the war and previous confrontations, the virtually inevitable clash rocked the committee room as the secretary neared the end of his six-hour inquisition. The conflict involved personality as well as policy. The Senate’s foremost student of foreign policy versus the secretary of state. Rhodes scholar versus Rhodes scholar. Former football star at the University of Arkansas versus lackluster basketball player at Davidson College. Arkansas aristocrat and transplanted Washington sophisticate versus Georgia plebian and inveterate bureaucrat who shunned Washington society. Habitual maverick versus ultimate company man. Even without fundamental differences over US policy in Vietnam, such divergent personalities would have produced personal friction that belied their usual outward civility. But Fulbright also viewed Rusk as overly rigid and lacking the creative intellect to move beyond Cold War shibboleths. As the chairman cuttingly remarked to Rusk, “I wish these things appeared as simple to me as they do to you.” Rusk, a deeply religious and honorable man, resented Fulbright’s ongoing suggestions that the secretary had ignored or misled the SFRC, and he believed his adversary had acted dishonorably in his responses to the war. Rusk considered Fulbright a “poor chairman” of the SFRC, and in a thinly disguised reference to his adversary, Rusk complained in his autobiography of congressmen “who supported our policy initially and later changed their minds.” Their sin, he continued, was not in reversing their positions and offering a forthright explanation but in “misrepresenting what both they and the administration had actually done.” The secretary, a liberal on race whose daughter married an African American man, also traced Fulbright’s antiwar stance to racism, to what one historian has characterized as the secretary’s belief that the senator objected to “white men” having “to spill their blood to safeguard the freedom and independence of yellow men.”69
Fulbright touched off the personal confrontation with a fifteen-minute summary critique of Rusk’s testimony and administration policies. The senator reiterated his positions on the war and called again for a sincere US commitment to negotiations. After charging that the United States had never made “crystal clear” its willingness to support and accept the outcome of an election to select a government in South Vietnam, he contended that by excluding the NLF from talks, the administration was informing the Vietcong and North Vietnamese that only their “unconditional surrender” and participation at American “mercy” would bring the United States to the table. These actions contradicted Rusk’s claims to be aggressively seeking peace on all fronts. By attempting to “impose our will” unilaterally, the United States was acting like previous “great empires.”70
Rusk responded to this frontal assault with a series of questions. Did the “Senator . . . have any doubts about the good faith and credibility of the other side?” Later, in response to Fulbright’s assertion that there “must be something wrong with our diplomacy,” Rusk queried, “Senator, is it just possible that there is something wrong with them?” Was the Arkansan suggesting “we should abandon the effort in South Vietnam”? Although Fulbright dismissed this accusation, he returned to the need for a “conference,” which was unobtainable until “you propose reasonable terms” allowing “even the liberation front, to have an opportunity to participate in an election” whose outcome the United States was pledged to accept. Moreover, Fulbright contended, “Vietnam is their country. It is not our country.” From the enemy’s perspective, “we are obviously intruders” who “represent the old Western imperialism.” Certainly, the senator asserted, Rusk, a fellow southerner, should understand this response to outside intrusion. Following the American Civil War in “my part of the country[,] [w]e resented it for a long time. So did yours. You can remember this feeling.” After additional verbal fencing, Fulbright concluded that Vietnam was not the “kind of vital interest” that warranted further escalation and a possible “confrontation with China in a world war.” To avoid such a calamity, the United States was “quite strong enough” to compromise “without losing its standing in the world.”71
Fulbright’s and the SFRC’s challenge to Johnson’s Vietnam policies provoked a broad range of responses. Certainly the most important reactions came from the president himself, who was enraged but undeterred in prosecuting the war. LBJ resumed the bombing of North Vietnam on January 31, remarking derisively, “I don’t want to back out—and look like I am reacting to the Fulbrights.” Johnson also directed the FBI to monitor the hearings with an eye to linking the dissenters’ opinions to contemporary communist positions, but no such ties were detected. In an effort to overshadow the hearings and minimize their influence, the president flew to Honolulu for a hastily organized summit conference with South Vietnamese leaders. In a more direct and incisive response to the Gavin-Kennan testimony, President Johnson told assembled reporters on February 11 that he could discern no “great deal of difference “between what the dissenters were “saying and what the Government is doing.” He then focused on the principal weakness in the opposition brief. His critics had presented no “real program” that “offers a clear alternative . . . to what we are doing.” Johnson’s fury over what an aide termed Fulbright’s “sophomoric bitching” remained evident at an early May Democratic fundraiser in Washington when he greeted the audience by saying he was happy to be there “among so many friends—and some members of the Foreign Relations Committee.”72
Although the hearings had neither restrained Johnson’s ongoing escalation of the war nor produced viable, alternative policies, Newsweek observed correctly that the TV coverage had “lifted the dialogue out of the gray austerity of the Congressional Record and made it an authentic national event.” The “smoldering war” between Johnson and the “peace bloc on Capitol Hill” had “escalated into a full-blown national debate”—the very development that LBJ had so adroitly sought to avoid over the previous fifteen months. The hearings also helped to make opposition to the war more respectable. No one could confuse Fulbright, Gore, Gavin, Kennan, or the SFRC with the long-haired, often disorderly protestors who marched on Washington or denounced the war on college campuses. According to Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), “If such a group of respectable stuffed shirts as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee could question this war, it gave other people courage to question it.”73
National responses to the hearings and the war more generally revealed the growing disapproval of President Johnson’s handling of the conflict and the mounting frustration with the lack of US progress. The president’s approval rating in the Harris Poll fell from 63 percent (excellent or good) in January to 42 percent in June, with 58 percent rating him as fair or poor. From December 1965 to May 1966, the percentage of Americans committed to holding the line in Vietnam decreased from 65 to 47 percent, but the proportion of respondents favoring a more aggressive prosecution of the war against North Vietnam rose from 28 to 38 percent. According to pollster Lou Harris, “increased militancy . . . and a ‘get it over with’ mood” were becoming more prevalent.74
Dixie’s response to Gallup polling yielded similar but more pronounced trends. Set against their ongoing objections to LBJ’s social and civil rights programs, southerners continued to assess the president more harshly than citizens of other regions on both his overall performance as president and his “handling” of the “situation in Vietnam.” For example, in February 1966, only 42 percent of southerners approved of his work as president, versus 59 percent of Americans generally and 59 percent of midwesterners, the next lowest region. In April the respective numbers were 47 percent (South), 57 percent (national), and 54 percent (Midwest). That same month, 47 percent of southerners approved Johnson’s Vietnam policies, compared to 56 percent nationally and 51 percent in the Midwest. By October only 37 percent of southerners endorsed Johnson’s presidential work, and 35 percent backed his management of the war.75
Additional polling data demonstrated that the southern populace, mirroring the positions of its most prominent public figures, remained most inclined to view the “sending of troops to fight in Vietnam” as a “mistake.” But once the United States had intervened, southerners possessed the least faith in South Vietnamese political capacity, were most opposed to turning to the UN or the World Court as mediators, remained most in favor of “bombing big cities in North Vietnam,” and were most inclined to believe the war would end in an “all-out victory” for the United States and South Vietnam rather than “a compromise peace settlement.” The Gallup results for these last two questions were telling. Southerners were 7 percent more in favor and 10 percent less opposed to bombing North Vietnamese cities and were 5 percent more confident of all-out victory and 9 percent less likely to envision a compromised outcome than national responses. Consistent with these preferences for a military solution and their expectation of a traditional, victorious outcome, residents of Dixie were the most critical of Secretary of Defense McNamara and his oversight of the Defense Department and the war in Vietnam, most willing to rate the draft as “fair,” and most willing to have their sons serve in the military versus some form of alternative service.76
Other southern responses were less consistent with Dixie’s traditional promilitary, hawkish stances and reveal, like the public debate and constituent correspondence, that even the nation’s most belligerent region was deeply conflicted over Vietnam. When asked in June whether the United States should continue the war or withdraw its troops “during the next few months,” southerners were the least willing to continue: 45 percent versus, 46, 51, and 51 for the East, Midwest, and West, respectively. Similarly, the South most favored withdrawal if the South Vietnamese allies began to fight among themselves or if China sent troops into the fighting, which southerners predicted would happen.77
As the decisions for war and Dixie’s majority prowar preferences solidified during 1966, southern papers built on the positions they had adopted in 1964 and 1965. The Dallas Morning News praised Johnson’s pledge to “do what must be done to preserve” American ideals, asserted in July that his policies were “wrecking the Red timetable” in Vietnam, denounced antiwar protestors as “leaping leftists,” and upbraided Fulbright for failing to explain how to “stop a determined aggressor without being rude to him.” The equally prowar Montgomery Advertiser recommended providing General William Westmoreland “the men and the authority to wage a real war, not just a holding operation,” and advised Americans that victory might require maintaining “a military occupation indefinitely” to secure the anticipated “victory.”78
Publisher Ralph McGill, editor Eugene Patterson, and the Atlanta Constitution also remained solidly behind Johnson and the war. On January 26 the Constitution deemed the bombing moratorium begun on December 24, 1965, a “worthwhile risk” but anticipated and approved LBJ’s decision to resume bombing at the end of the month. In early February the paper pronounced as “honorable” US efforts “to defend, with its own lives, and raise up, with its own wealth, an impoverished and embattled people from whom it wants nothing” in return. Patterson subsequently argued that LBJ’s policies had “stabilized” the “military situation” despite contending with unprecedented “furor” from domestic critics who based “dissent . . . on nothing much more substantial than an endless detailing of why we were unhappy.”79
Turning specifically to the SFRC hearings, Patterson and McGill praised Taylor and Rusk and castigated Fulbright and the other dissenters. Taylor had explained US policies “coolly, precisely, and expertly,” and Rusk had displayed “scholarly sharpness” and “decisiveness,” while providing a “carefully framed and reasonably stated” overview of administration assumptions and actions. By contrast, Fulbright had engaged Taylor in an irrelevant debate over Dien Bien Phu and suggested irrationally to Rusk that there had to be something “wrong” with US diplomacy. The chairman could have been “more perceptive and open minded”; too often displayed “scholarly ambiguities”; and failed to rein in the intemperate Senator Morris, who drove the discussion “to a new low.” Patterson repeated administration charges that the sessions had yielded no viable alternative policies and confirmed Hanoi’s expectations of US “internal division and . . . wavering purpose,” thereby compromising the American “effort to wage war or to make peace.”80
While the Morning News, Advertiser, and Constitution augmented their prowar, proadministration perspectives, the Louisville Courier-Journal retained its skeptical view of the war. The Courier-Journal endorsed Senator Cooper’s call in late January for an extension of the bombing halt; and the paper worried that Johnson’s subsequent resumption of bombing was a “dangerous gamble” that “reopened the door” to advocates of blockading Haiphong, bombing North Vietnamese cities, and even a nuclear exchange with China. Like Kentucky’s highly respected senator, the Courier-Journal editorial staff continued to push for negotiations; and, like Fulbright, they favored including the Vietcong, who were “an integral part of South Viet Nam’s national life.” It would be “distasteful” to have to interact with “ruthless murders” but “still more bitter and more distasteful” to continue fighting a war that might be “ended by including the Viet Cong at the conference table.”81
The Courier-Journal’s assessment of the SFRC hearings was also more sympathetic than the prowar southern dailies’. The paper’s Washington bureau chief was impressed that Fulbright had lent his “prestige” to LBJ’s “critics.” The Arkansas senator had given “the foes of the President’s policy all the respectability of a Southern conservative, of a former university president, of a Phi Beta Kappa, of a Rhodes scholar.” In an incisive editorial, the Courier-Journal praised the hearings for providing “public exposure of this vital issue,” for emphasizing “the right and even the duty of patriotic Americans to protest their government’s policies when they believe them to be dangerously wrong,” and for specifying “every good reason to get out of our entanglement in Southeast Asia.” Still, the paper acknowledged the hearings’ limitations: “The current debate” had “aired all the important questions, but . . . provided no real answers.”82
As had been true during 1965, the Texas Observer assumed a stronger antiwar posture than any of these other southern papers. The Austin weekly featured Fort Worth congressman Jim Wright’s call for LBJ to propose a UN-supervised six-week truce followed by a free election to determine which groups would govern South Vietnam and Senator Ralph Yarbrough’s (D-TX) question on the Senate floor as to whether neutral nations might conclude that the United States was “stomping the tiger’s tail” and “trying to lure him into a war” by “dropping bombs only one minute from Red China.” The Observer ran a May article in which Ron Bailey, after a five-week stay in South Vietnam, concluded that the United States was losing despite “killing a lot of Viet Cong and a lot of others.” To prevail in this “incredibly complex war,” the United States would have “to defeat the main force enemy units, occupy every acre of countryside, and thus pave the way for political cadres to establish” a viable government—all objectives Bailey deemed unlikely.83
In Observer editorials, Ronnie Dugger and his staff charged that Johnson’s “lip-service to unconditional negotiations” had “debased the language” and diminished “confidence in his sincerity and candor.” The Observer lamented the “stark disparity between his [LBJ’s] humanitarianism at home and his . . . aggressiveness in Vietnam.” The president was acting on a “Texan’s simplistic frontier ideas about man-to-man relationships and how to behave in a fight” and seeking to impugn dissenters “with accusations” they were “communists” and “letting down our fighting men.” Only by “pulling back from the brink,” by restricting the bombing and the war’s escalation, and by negotiating in good faith could the president “reclaim his career and his nation from tragic disaster.”84
The reactions of individual southerners conveyed a fuller picture of Dixie’s attitudes toward the Fulbright hearings and the Johnson administration’s commitment to a major war during 1966. Consistent with polling data and the positions of major southern papers, most southerners maintained their prowar stances. The hearings left one Mississippi woman in an “absolute rage.” She found Fulbright’s “manner in questioning” General Taylor “shocking” and came away doubting the senator’s “loyalty to his country.” Others denounced the SFRC chairman’s “blind soft-headedness”; dismissed his comments as “the most asinine appraisal yet” by a “supposedly responsible” person; and deplored his proclivity for bias, “time wasting and quibbling.” Arkansans, even many of those generally supportive of Fulbright, were equally critical. An old Arkansas friend advised Fulbright “the time to criticize” had passed unless the dissenters could “offer specific, constructive criticisms and specific remedies either to cure wholly or partially this ill-advised venture.” Other Fulbright constituents agreed that Congress and the nation needed to “unite, not divide,” and “pull together as a people.” One far less sympathetic couple was “ashamed and humiliated” by “the image” Fulbright had presented of his “loyal patriotic” constituents; another Arkansas resident declared himself a “voter who will oppose you until you are voted out, as all pinkos will be”; and a Jonesboro woman suggested the senator “move to North Vietnam,” where he “would really be appreciated.”85
Albert Gore’s dissent elicited equally hostile comments. A frequent and caustic correspondent informed Gore that the televised hearings had revealed “brilliance, dignity and good manners on one side, and incoherency, slovenliness and bad manners on the other.” He continued, “I have been a liberal Democrat all my life. But brother am I through with you.” A twenty-nine-year military veteran sympathized with “Mr. Rusk, an honest, honorable, intelligent and well oriented public servant,” who had endured the SFRC “inquisition.” A Mumford physician perceived “no doubt” among US soldiers regarding their “objective” of keeping Southeast Asia “out of the hands of the Communists.” Among Americans, doubt existed only “in the minds of beatniks, the professional demonstrators, the civil rights leaders, the Communists, a small group of liberal democratic senators and the Committee on Foreign Relations.” “Senator,” he continued, “this is pretty sorry company for you to keep.”86
Southern critics of the hearings often praised Senator Long and generally agreed with the arguments presented by Johnson, Rusk, and Taylor. The open hearings served only to “tell the whole world all of our secrets,” “destroy any good image of the United States in the eyes of the world,” and leave countless Americans “confused as to the correctness of our position in Vietnam.” Most important, these public debates gave “aid and comfort to the enemy,” furnished “fuel for Communist propaganda,” and prolonged the war by “bolstering” North Vietnamese “morale.”87
Consistent with the pattern that had emerged over the previous two years, other, primarily antiwar southerners endorsed the hearings and the arguments of the SFRC dissenters. These southern skeptics deemed the public “debate . . . essential to our understanding” of the Vietnamese situation. The American people were “entitled to hear a full and frank discussion of that war, its background and its rationale.” The hearings, concluded an Arkansas voter, were “very informative and enlightening . . . one of the greatest services, if not the greatest, that the medium of television has performed.” Recognizing that Fulbright and Gore were challenging both the Johnson administration and the predominant prowar sentiment in Dixie, supporters of the hearings also lauded the senators’ courage. An Arkansas grandmother praised Fulbright as the state’s only representative with the “guts to disagree with LBJ,” and a Madison, Tennessee, dentist was pleased that Gore had “the courage” to take a stand, given “the pressure which you must face as a senator to conform.”88
Other southerners drew on the South’s historical experience and acute sensitivity to outside interference to argue against US intervention in Vietnam. One of Senator Robertson’s constituents likened combating the Vietcong to extracting “all the muskrats out of Back Bay and Dismal Swamp.” An Atlanta resident asked Senator Russell how, if southerners believed “that people as close as New York don’t quite know enough to tell us how to run Georgia,” he could assert that Washington knew “what is best” for a country “as far away” as Vietnam. A Mississippi native living in Florida wrote in a similar vein to John Stennis. “Washington office holders,” he contended, had sought to impose on “each and every foreign country, and our South,” a predetermined outside “way of life.” Should not “we in our South,” having been “in the same boat,” understand why this practice has led much of the world “to detest” the United States? In a particularly southern observation, a North Carolina dove asked Senator Ervin “what we would think if a foreign country” landed “troops on our shore to settle the negro question.” An Augusta, Georgia, dentist denounced Senator Russell, and by extension most other conservative southern Democrats, for “claiming you were against our initial involvement” but then supporting the war “completely.” This antiwar Georgian condemned the “neat political maneuver” with which Russell sought to “disclaim responsibility” for American deaths while still appealing to the hawkish southern public.89
Conditioned to be among the nation’s most overtly patriotic citizens, southerners worried that the Vietnam War was undermining American patriotism. In “her first letter to a senator,” a veteran Georgia schoolteacher noted that during World War II, “we were asked to sacrifice and did it willingly.” To her chagrin, she feared this attitude no longer prevailed: “The only people who are sacrificing are the boys who are serving in the Armed Forces and their families.” Why was the nation “losing” its “patriotism”? Perhaps, she concluded, it was “because people do not believe in this war.” Other southerners regretfully acknowledged this lack of national commitment. In January 1966 a Baptist minister from Jackson, Mississippi, anguished over the US failure to take more aggressive actions in Vietnam and feared that his nineteen-year-old son would soon be sent to the war. After professing complete devotion to America and its ideals and his contempt for “draft card burning,” he told Stennis, “Frankly . . . I am not willing to see my son and other dad’s sons go to Viet Nam to be shot at and suffer and die for NOTHING.” His deep discomfort was obvious as he ended the letter: “I hate to feel as I do. I would love to be able to give whole-hearted allegiance to everything our country is trying to do.”90
While arguing both for and against the war, southerners objected to the costs of fighting in Vietnam and paying for the Great Society. This pervasive fiscal conservatism, together with objections to the Civil Rights Movement and outrage at Johnson’s limited-war strategy, go far toward explaining the president’s low polling numbers in Dixie. Both the failure “to hit” the enemy “really hard where it will hurt” and Johnson’s “bankrupt give away policies” at home rankled one Georgian. Another Russell constituent denounced LBJ’s “appeasement” of the communist aggressors and his “Anti-Poverty Program.” An antiwar southerner expressed similar dissatisfaction over “the blundering wastefulness of the so-called ‘Great Society’” but cited involvement in Vietnam as “an even greater peril.” A “hard working” Memphis businessman opposed the “drain on my tax dollars” used to fight both the “Viet Nam war” and the “bogus war on poverty.” And a rural Arkansas woman wanted “no part” of spending for either the Great Society or the “billions of dollars” being consumed by US involvement in Vietnam.91
Although less pointedly southern, the heart-rending letters from parents and grandparents fearing for their sons’ and grandsons’ survival afford further insight into the turmoil and distress engendered by the Vietnam War. After watching her son “board a plane in Memphis . . . and fly off to war,” an Arkansas mother wrote pleadingly to her senator, “Oh, Mr. Fulbright, if there is anything you fellows up there in Washington can do to help stop this senseless war in Viet Nam, please set about doing it.” The grandfather of a young man “being examined . . . for college deferment” sent a similar appeal to Senator Stennis: “Is there anything you law makers in Washington can do to terminate that war that is costing us parents . . . our sons and grandsons?” Another Arkansan wrote his friend “Bill,” “If you want to see a heart breaking scene visit the Little Rock Airport any afternoon and see the dozens of boys there, many away from home for the first time—on their way to the West Coast. A lot of them so young that they have been nick named CRADLE FRUIT.” A seventy-four-year-old Mississippi grandmother of seven boys, one of whom was in Vietnam, the other six soon to confront the draft, concluded the situation “makes my heart heavy.”92
Letters from two other hardworking southern families, one solidly middle class, the other less well off, also conveyed the “soul searching” that was under way across Dixie and the nation. From Fort Smith, Arkansas, a military veteran, who worked as a railroad switchman and was married to a schoolteacher, wrote to Fulbright about his son and son-in-law, who would “soon . . . be in the service.” After commending the senator on the hearings and his opposition to the war, the railroad brakeman acknowledged, “Way off down here in Arkansas may not be conducive to making foreign policy but if we are to help furnish the servicemen, then we can help formulate some of the ideas.” Indeed, since “our lives depend upon” US foreign policy decisions, he and his family were entitled to “knowledge of our position in world affairs.” Speaking for a “family trying to improve ourselves,” he suggested Americans needed to “forget some of our competitive pride . . . and humble ourselves before our God and . . . simplify our actions by living the Golden Rule every day.” While this man’s son faced possible service in Vietnam, a Memphis father, also a veteran, confronted the reality of his son having been drafted. Having “worked at hard labor” and “raised a son and daughter” that any “citizen” who “knows them can be . . . proud of,” he was “sick” to his “stomach” at the outcome: “We are poor, proud & devoted to our country and fellow man and up until now I have felt that I was very patriotic.” His ultimate response echoed those of others worried about their children’s safety: “I’m not a hell raiser normally, but I’m not only mad, I’m bitter.”93
His bitterness and sorrow paled when compared to families whose relatives had died in the war. In a shaky hand a grieving Knoxville grandmother informed Senator Gore that the death of her grandson “brought home to me . . . all the horrors of war & the suffering of the many thousand[s] . . . who have lost their sons.” The young soldier’s aunt elaborated:
The whole family, his mother and brothers, his young wife and both families have just gone through the shock, the painful waiting for the body to arrive, and the final hours of the funeral and burial, filled with memories of a gay, mischievous boy grown to a bright and outgoing young man, about to be reunited with his wife and baby daughter for a furlough when he was killed. But even as we thought of him, we were aware of the many others, who have gone through, who are going through, who will go through a similar tragedy. And for what?94
This Knoxville family’s sorrow graphically conveyed the mounting agony that the Vietnam War was engendering across the South and the nation. Led by its southern president and secretary of state, the United States committed to war during 1965 and 1966. As Johnson and Rusk continued to act on many of the very southern assumptions and motivations that had prompted their responses to the growing crisis in Vietnam in 1964, key southern senators, especially Fulbright and Russell, facilitated LBJ’s successful effort to limit debate on the increasing US commitment to hostilities during 1965. Once Johnson had initiated the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign and dispatched thousands of US ground troops, southern senators and representatives provided the administration’s crucial and most dependable Democratic support for the war. By doing so, they also reinforced LBJ and Rusk’s pursuit of a military solution and refusal to negotiate seriously with Hanoi or the Vietcong or to entertain a compromise settlement. With this regional backing came constricted strategic and political options. A significant majority of southern newspapers and Dixie’s public also endorsed the US commitment, while objecting to Johnson’s decision to fight a limited war and remaining highly critical of the president’s civil rights and social agendas. Concern for national honor and credibility, overt patriotism, virulent anticommunism and adherence to Christian tenets as opposed to ostensible Soviet and Chinese atheism, and a preference for unrestrained military actions and solutions to international problems continued to underpin Dixie’s prowar stance.
The South’s prowar inclinations were evident in the region’s hostility toward antiwar dissidents. As Johnson committed the nation to war, Senators Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper grew increasingly restive, and the first two played a central role in the SFRC hearings, which occasioned the nation’s first true public debate on the war—the very debate that Johnson had worked so hard to muffle. Polling data, the caustic indictments of these senators, the experience of Frazier Woolard in small-town North Carolina, and the felt need of antiwar southerners to affirm their patriotism and deny they were beatniks or radicals all reflected the nature of majority southern opinion. Still, by late 1965, Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper had moved beyond both the US Cold War consensus and Dixie’s prowar perspective to claim their place among the most persistent and perceptive critics of the war. A hardy minority of southerners echoed their concerns and praised their courage in challenging President Johnson and their prowar neighbors and constituents. Antiwar southerners continued to assert geopolitical and religious objections to the conflict and to argue that honor required admitting the US mistake in intervening. They also voiced particularly southern criticisms. From a fiscally conservative perspective, they protested against the waste of money in this ill-advised war; and, citing the South’s sensitivity to outside interference, they asked how Dixie’s leaders could condone US meddling in Vietnam. But whether they backed or opposed the war, the region’s leaders, public, and press continued, as they had since the 1770s, to examine the war from a distinctly southern perspective. That would also be true during 1967 as the nation debated the proper conduct of the war; and as in 1965–1966, southern leaders and concerns played prominent roles in that debate.