5

Southerners and the Debate over the War’s Conduct, 1967

On August 9, 1967, Senator John Stennis opened the hearings of his Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee (SPIS) on the “conduct and effectiveness of the air war against North Vietnam”—hearings that would “involve the overall policy and philosophy governing and controlling the conduct of the entire war.” The decisive year of 1967 was largely devoted to an “increasingly angry and divisive [national] debate” over the merits of the war’s continued escalation and especially the role of bombing in the US effort. This debate left the nation increasingly disillusioned and more divided than at any time since the Civil War. By August, a Gallup Poll found that only 33 percent of respondents approved of President Johnson’s handling of the war (versus 52 percent who disapproved), and only 34 percent believed the United States was making progress, compared to 56 percent who answered that American forces were “losing” or “standing still.”1

As during the previous two years, when the Johnson administration was making the critical decisions for war, southerners—be they policymakers, congressional representatives, or the public—took an active role in this debate over how best to conduct the conflict. Together with the GOP nationally, southern hawks pressured Johnson to press for a military victory by escalating the war, particularly through more aggressive bombing of North Vietnam. In so doing, these conservative southerners and a clear majority within the region endorsed Johnson’s rationale for intervention and continued to provide the most solid sectional support for the war, all the while harshly castigating the president’s ostensible restraint and failure to pursue a clear strategy for victory. The high point of this southern pressure came with the SPIS hearings on the air war. Just as Fulbright and the SFRC dissenters had defied Johnson’s effort to avoid a public debate over the war’s rationale and the decisions leading to massive US involvement, Stennis and his hawkish cohort infuriated LBJ by engaging in the “closest thing to a real debate” over the strategy and conduct of the conflict.2

Although the majority of white southerners advocated this more hawkish perspective, a vocal southern minority continued to argue for deescalating the war, curtailing or even ending the bombing of North Vietnam, and pursuing a negotiated settlement. Senators Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper remained among the nation’s most significant antiwar voices and were joined in September 1967 by Thruston Morton (R-KY). These prominent dissenters, together with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who voiced an outspoken condemnation of the war during 1967, provided influential counterpressure against Johnson’s persistent escalation of the war and in so doing elicited additional public discussion of the conflict. As had become the pattern by 1964, numerous individual southerners adopted and voiced many of the antiwar arguments.

While the debate over the war raged across the nation and within the South, the predominance of conservative, evangelical, Protestant religious beliefs also sustained Dixie’s robust anticommunism and support for the war. A third dynamic, the intersection of the Civil Rights Movement and the war, was much more complicated. Among most southern whites, African American opposition to racial segregation or the war in Vietnam was objectionable, and both smacked of radical, even communist influences. Southern blacks, as well as African Americans nationally, were more divided, disagreeing over whether to oppose the war and over the impact antiwar stands had on their battle for domestic equality. These differences became apparent when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and especially Reverend King denounced the war as a distraction from the campaign for domestic civil rights and unjustly burdensome for African Americans.

Despite the presence in Vietnam of 448,800 US troops at the end of 1967 (up from 385,000 the year before), the escalating monetary and human costs yielded only national frustration, mounting domestic dissent, and a military standoff. The war’s monthly costs had grown to $2 billion and forced President Johnson to raise the possibility in his State of the Union address of enacting a surtax to meet war costs. Draft calls ballooned to 30,000 per month, and by the end of the year 13,500 Americans had died in Vietnam. Although this vastly enlarged US military involvement had prevented imminent North Vietnamese–Vietcong victory in mid-1965, it had produced no readily discernible progress thereafter. It had, however, elicited growing domestic antiwar protests, the most prominent to date being the fifty-thousand-strong March on the Pentagon in November.3

Against this backdrop, President Johnson faced unrelenting pressure over the first nine months of 1967 to expand both the air war over North Vietnam and the number of US troops in South Vietnam. The president’s response led New York Times correspondent James Reston to declare in March, “Johnson looks more and more like a man who has decided to go for a military victory in Vietnam.” In late February Johnson added fifty-three Rolling Thunder targets, approved the rebombing of several power plants, and endorsed naval bombardment of the North and the mining of selected inland waterways. While implementing these missions, the United States also attacked two North Vietnamese MiG airfields and several additional industrial targets. The president subsequently released sixteen new bombing targets in July and another twenty-nine in August. All told, Rolling Thunder sorties had increased from 79,000 in 1966 to 108,000 in 1967, and bomb tonnage had gone from 136,000 to 226,000. The number of US troops grew apace—from 385,000 at the end of 1966 to 448,800 a year later.4

Still, Johnson stopped short of the “all-out” war advocated by southern hawks, General Westmoreland, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). In mid-March, the JCS requested an additional 201,000 troops for an ultimate total of 671,616; mobilization of the reserves; permission to invade Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam; the mining of Haiphong harbor; and the end of restrictions on bombing around Hanoi, Haiphong, and along the Chinese border. In short, they “called for mobilizing the nation to win the war.” Sticking to his decision for a limited war, LBJ approved the expanded target list noted above and granted Westmoreland another 50,000 troops; but he rejected an invasion of North Vietnam or neighboring countries, unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam’s two population centers, and the mining of Haiphong.5

Ironically, as southern hawks were poised to initiate a yearlong campaign to fundamentally alter the conduct of the war, two Dixie natives traveled to Hanoi in hopes of furthering a negotiated settlement of the conflict. Although admittedly of the “Confederate persuasion,” Harry S. Ashmore and William C. Baggs were aligned more closely with Fulbright, Cooper, and Gore than with Russell, Stennis, and Tower. Both were World War II veterans and distinguished journalists—Ashmore as editor of the Charlotte News, Arkansas Gazette, and Encyclopedia Britannica and Baggs as editor of the Miami News, which won three Pulitzers under his direction. By the mid-1960s, these liberal Democrats were both persistent opponents of segregation and members of the board of directors of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The center, located in Santa Barbara, California, was devoted to easing Cold War tensions and promoting international peace. When Luis Quintanilla, a Mexican intellectual and former diplomat, secured an invitation for center representatives to meet with Ho Chi Minh, Ashmore and Baggs traveled to Hanoi, arriving on January 6, 1967, the same day Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times ended his much more visible visit.6

Ashmore and Baggs’s observations confirmed Salisbury’s assertions that US bombing had gone well beyond military and industrial targets and had destroyed entire civilian neighborhoods in Hanoi’s suburbs and in other North Vietnamese towns along Route 1, the main road connecting Hanoi and Saigon. These observations became public much later when Baggs published a series of twelve articles in the Miami News. In the interim, the two met with State Department representatives prior to embarking for North Vietnam and agreed to make every effort to maintain the confidentiality of their journey, meetings, and impressions. The itinerant southerners claimed they clearly understood their unofficial status as “mere messengers and observers, not negotiators,” and “never confused” their standing or role. Similarly, while acknowledging their “sharp” criticism of the administration’s conduct of the war and their desire to see the “conflict ended,” they emphasized that, unlike some “radical American peace activists,” they had never “transferred their sympathies, and . . . political allegiance, to Hanoi.”7

Operating from this perspective, Ashmore and Baggs had several meetings with Hoàng Tùng, the editor of the principal Communist Party paper and a member of the party’s central committee, and a remarkably frank and informal two-hour session with Ho himself. Like numerous westerners who had met with Ho over the previous twenty-five years, these two Americans were impressed with his charm, urbanity, nationalist devotion to Vietnamese independence, commitment to a Marxist political economy, and habitual chain smoking. Upon their return to Washington, Ashmore and Baggs faithfully reported Ho’s and North Vietnam’s long-standing and unalterable position that there could be no negotiations until the United States unconditionally ended the bombing of the North. If the bombing ceased, Ho professed flexibility on all other issues, including the infiltration of North Vietnamese military personnel and supplies into the South, the withdrawal of US troops, and the timing and process for reunifying Vietnam.8

Buoyed by their sense that Ho and the North Vietnamese seemed to have met all US conditions for negotiations, save an absolute “guarantee to close the border” between the North and South to infiltration, Ashmore and Baggs returned to Washington during the week of January 15, 1967, to report on their talks. Their guarded optimism was promptly dashed when neither Rusk nor Johnson met with them. The secretary of state dismissed them as “just two more frustrated seekers of the Nobel Prize,” and LBJ explained to Fulbright, “I can’t talk with everybody who’s been over there talking with Ho Chi Minh”—despite the fact that only two Americans had done so since the initiation of Rolling Thunder two years earlier. Although low-ranking State Department personnel were less overtly dismissive, the futility of the envoys’ efforts became glaringly apparent when Johnson killed a much higher-level, potentially more promising peace overture that had been in play simultaneously with the aid of the USSR and Great Britain.9

Although Ashmore publicly denounced Johnson’s “double-dealing” in an article published the following September, he and Baggs were back in Hanoi at the end of March 1968, when LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection and that US bombing would be confined to the most southern portions of North Vietnam. Fearful that Johnson was about to agree to General Westmoreland’s requests for an additional two hundred thousand US troops, the two southerners had returned to Vietnam hoping to facilitate negotiations and head off an even larger war. Through additional meetings with Tùng, they again ascertained a useful sense of North Vietnamese perspectives and composed a joint memorandum of understanding, which the North Vietnamese viewed as their formal reply to Johnson’s March 31, 1968, speech and restriction of US bombing. The unconditional cessation of US bombing of the North remained the absolute prerequisite for substantive talks, and Hanoi offered Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as the preferred site for peace talks. Despite the Dixie duo’s remarkable access to high-ranking North Vietnamese officials and candid discussions, and another revelatory trip down Route 1, State Department officials exhibited even less interest in their information or opinions, and Rusk and Johnson remained off-limits. Disillusioned and embittered, Ashmore and Baggs emerged from their experience as unofficial envoys convinced that Johnson was a “thin-skinned bully,” that Rusk was “preeminently the Cold Warrior,” and of the validity of the “Fulbright Law”: “you can’t trust” the State Department. Although the likelihood of the Ashmore-Baggs efforts yielding a diplomatic breakthrough was never great, these efforts, like those of Frazier Woolard, revealed the diversity of southern opinion, even as their curt dismissal by Johnson and Rusk embodied Dixie’s majority prowar perspective.10

While Ashmore and Baggs sought a path to negotiations, the fundamental debate over the conduct of the war continued, and southern hawks and their constituents sustained their demands for a traditional military victory. No advocate of an unfettered military effort was more important than John Stennis. By 1967, Stennis had made the war his “number one priority,” and from his chairmanship of the SPIS the Mississippi senator systematically hounded Secretary of Defense McNamara, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Johnson administration. The SPIS released three critical reports during March 1967. The most important appeared on March 27, examined “tactical air operations in Southeast Asia,” and concluded predictably that the “restrictive rules of engagement in the war over North Vietnam” had been a “very significant factor in the tactical air problems in Southeast Asia.” The restrictions, according to Stennis and the SPIS, had contributed to the “sacrifice of many American lives and aircraft losses extending into billions of dollars.” To curtail these losses and defeat the enemy, the Johnson administration needed to adopt the “recommendations of responsible commanders to strike more meaningful military targets in North Vietnam.”11

Stennis reiterated and elaborated this familiar message in speeches and letters to constituents. Most fundamentally, he continued to advocate following the “advice of military leaders” and doing whatever was “necessary militarily to win on the battlefield.” Stennis was always in close communication with the JCS, and his declarations translated into an endorsement of the military commanders’ attempt in March and April to push Johnson toward an all-out war. The SPIS chairman acknowledged the “risk” that more aggressive US actions could “provoke Red China to full intervention in the war,” but he deemed this risk necessary and asserted the United States had to “be prepared to meet Red Chinese aggression . . . with whatever military might is necessary to repel it.” The requisite “full national decision to win” embodied not only these military steps but also making prosecution of the war the nation’s “first priority . . . very far ahead of the social welfare programs” and silencing all criticism of “our purpose or our motives.”12

Stennis moved beyond his customary arguments in two respects. First, he worried that the United States had far too many international treaty commitments that the nation was “honor-bound to meet . . . just as we are honor-bound to follow through in Vietnam.” Following the Vietnam War, the United States needed to undertake a “sober evaluation” of these commitments, determine the ones “absolutely necessary to our national security,” and allocate the resources required to fulfill them. Second, the senator declared that the United States should never again become “involved in a major war by executive escalation of military intervention.” He opposed any subsequent “diplomatic” war not “declared by Congress as provided for in the Constitution.” Like Fulbright, Stennis had begun to rethink the traditional southern deference to the executive in foreign policy and war making.13

Despite these objections to Johnson’s conduct of the war, Stennis remained a faithful and influential supporter of the conflict’s funding from his membership on both the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees. A host of other southern Democrats afforded LBJ similar backing, even as they habitually called for more aggressive tactics. Richard Russell, in his last year of significant influence before being overtaken by declining health, remained a close Johnson confidant and supporter. The Georgia senator also continued to argue for more aggressive bombing of North Vietnam and the closure of Haiphong harbor, while opposing any congressional actions designed to “cut back on the military action” in Southeast Asia. Only ongoing military pressure, he avowed, would force a Korea-like settlement, thereby saving American lives and bringing “an honorable conclusion” to the war. Although he dismissed a US invasion of North Vietnam as the “surest way to create a long period of hostilities of great magnitude in that area,” Russell was unmoved by the moral objections of antiwar critics. He could see no difference between the bombing of North Vietnam and the attacks on Germany and Japan during World War II. The rising public opposition to the war reinforced his preference for an air campaign over indecisive search-and-destroy ground tactics. In early May Russell admonished Johnson, “We’ve just got to finish it soon because time is working against you both here and there.”14

Mendel Rivers concurred, warning, “The war is getting very unpopular the way we are conducting it . . . the American people just don’t believe in waiting and waiting.” While professing to be a “staunch supporter” of the president and defending Johnson’s “carefully controlled” policies designed “to avoid expansion of the war,” Russell Long incongruently deplored all “off-again, on-again, Finnegan” truces and bombing halts. Agreeing with Russell and Rivers that Americans wanted “to get it over with,” the Louisiana senator called for a bombing campaign to “bring the Communists to their knees.” If these US actions drew the USSR and China into the war militarily, Long “would step up” the “effort and fight them too.”15

Far less dramatic than Rivers or Long, Senators Ervin, Ellender, Sparkman, and Smathers assumed their customary places in the phalanx of prowar southerners. Decrying antiwar senators who had “contributed nothing to the settlement” of the war while giving “the enemy the impression” that the United States would tire of the effort, Sam Ervin asserted that the only viable policy was “to strike the enemy hard enough to defeat him or bring him to the conference table.” Allen Ellender continued to agonize over the fiscal and human costs of the war, noting that it was necessary to pay for not only the “logistics” to sustain American troops “but also the support of their widows and children.” But, like Ervin, he perceived no alternative to a more forceful bombing campaign. John Sparkman and George Smathers were more uncritical backers of the administration. Both emphasized that US involvement in Vietnam was akin to prior Cold War confrontations in Korea, Berlin, and Cuba; that the United States could not appease communist aggressors; that US objectives were confined to realizing “a peaceful and honorable” solution; and that US withdrawal would give South Vietnam over to “terror unleashed against defenseless civilians” and shatter America’s international standing. Sparkman stated approvingly that LBJ would “not surrender to extreme views” and was “conducting a responsible and careful military operation in Vietnam.”16

Among southern Republicans, Strom Thurmond maintained his ultra-hawkish positions. “More bombing” and the closure of Haiphong were his keys to victory. The South Carolinian had no doubt the United States possessed the requisite “power,” and he hoped the US public would “demand” that President Johnson “win the war.” Although he agreed with Thurmond on these basic points, Senator Tower, also a member of the Armed Services Committee, had emerged by 1967 as a more prominent and thoughtful southern Republican voice on Vietnam. By the end of the year, Tower had visited Vietnam and East Asia four times in twenty-four months, and over the course of the war the Texas Republican traveled to Vietnam more often than any of his congressional colleagues. A navy veteran of World War II and former political science professor at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Tower had been elected in 1961 at the age of thirty-five to fill Lyndon Johnson’s seat when LBJ moved to the vice presidency.17

During 1967, Tower built on his prior Vietnam positions. The senator expressed “100 percent” support for Johnson’s “basic policy . . . to protect and guarantee the independence of South Vietnam.” Indeed, the United States had no choice. As the world’s “most powerful nation,” America had inherited “the mantle of world leadership” and become the “first line of defense” against “communist aggression.” Failure to convince the enemy on this “small front” that war was “too costly an instrument of national policy” would lead inevitably to conflict “on a broader front later . . . at a much greater cost in human life.” Like Stennis, Russell, and Thurmond, Tower summarily rejected additional truces or bombing pauses. Only “unrelenting pressure on the enemy” and the “traditional American guts and determination” to wield superior power effectively would secure victory.18

The son and grandson of Methodist ministers and the holder of degrees from both Southwestern and Southern Methodist Universities, Tower moved beyond other southern legislators by extensively defending the morality of US intervention in Vietnam. In a commencement speech to the first graduating class at Houston Baptist College and on numerous other occasions, he vigorously rejected all accusations of immorality associated with US involvement in Vietnam. To the contrary, the United States was championing a “transcendent moral ethic—the right of mankind to determine its own destiny within its own ethical and religious convictions.” This fundamental right, together with the belief that man was “created in the image of God,” was “at the heart of the Judeo-Christian ethic.” Since military force was “neither morally right nor morally wrong,” the US use of force for this moral purpose and America’s meticulous regard for the safety of noncombatants was ethically justifiable and in blatant contrast to the Vietnamese communists’ “deliberate” use of “brutality and wanton terrorism” against defenseless South Vietnamese “victims.” Under these circumstances, US “failure to use military force” in this “proper place” for the “proper purpose” would be “disastrous and highly immoral.”19

Senator Tower’s conservative religious defense of US actions in Vietnam faithfully reprised the beliefs of most southerners and helps explain the region’s ongoing support for the war. Aptly describing the nation’s Bible Belt, a Charlotte Presbyterian minister observed, “Religion is what really makes and keeps the South a separate, solid and stable culture.” A contemporary Gallup poll elucidated this observation. Southerners by margins of 9, 10, and 7 percent over the closest region, respectively, were the Americans most likely to view “organized religion” as a “relevant part” of their lives, to believe that religion could “answer all or most . . . problems,” and to read the Bible regularly. Most of this southern religion was decidedly conservative—Protestant, evangelical, often fundamentalist, and solidly behind the Cold War campaign to contain and defeat atheistic communism. Most southerners viewed Vietnam as a crucial struggle in the large Cold War battle that “divided believers from nonbelievers, faith from godlessness, morality from immorality, and democracy from tyranny.” Given these elemental distinctions, Vietnam and the accompanying confrontation with the Soviet Union and China were necessary and, therefore, just and moral wars. Unlike more liberal religious adherents in the North and East, most southerners were appalled at any suggestion that God was dead or that the United States might fail to defend Christianity in Southeast Asia. The southern majority just as ardently rejected the assertions by some liberal Christians that a moral equivalency existed between the United States and its communist adversaries. Good versus evil allowed for no such parity and rendered calls for disarmament or unconditional negotiations anathema. Only victory was acceptable. An indignant Tennessee resident declared, “Coexistence and peace are . . . advocated Communist policies. Coexistence . . . means our compliance to their demands; peace means our enslavement.” With negotiations out of the question, “if we maintain our Christian civilization, we’ll have to fight for it.”20

Not all religious southerners arrived at these foreign policy positions. As letters to political representatives and editors demonstrated, other Dixie residents doubted that North Vietnam and the Vietcong posed a threat to the United States and, therefore, questioned whether the war was defensive and just. These antiwar southerners often contended that the United States had intervened in a Vietnamese civil war and that this intervention was at odds with the same Christian republicanism that Tower and prowar southerners cited to justify the conflict. Dixie doves also decried the massive US bombing of a small, less developed country; the chemical destruction of the environment with herbicides; and the loss of life on both sides, especially the killing of Vietnamese civilians.21

The attitudes of southern Presbyterians and Baptists toward the war clearly demonstrated Dixie’s religious perspectives on Vietnam. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS, the southern wing of the Presbyterian Church from 1861 to 1983) maintained a generally conservative and supportive stance throughout the war. This governing body did compose a series of questions about the war in 1967, indicating that its backing of US military measures was not unconditional, and the General Assembly endorsed selective conscientious objection in 1969 by a vote of 260 to 164. The crucial momentum for approving this issue turned on a speech by Paul Taylor, a Medal of Honor recipient from Alexandria, Virginia, whose son had been killed in Vietnam. Taylor beseeched his fellow commissioners to “give an honest alternative to young men other than being criminals.” He recounted advising his son of his three choices: to lie about being a general conscientious objector (CO), opposed to all wars rather than just Vietnam; to be a “coward and run”; or to “join and take . . . a chance in doing something he didn’t believe in.” The PCUS and the nation, Taylor concluded, needed to “give a man a chance to be an honest patriot and a Christian.”22

Although the General Assembly concurred in this instance, a 1968 poll of more than twelve hundred readers of the PCUS’s Presbyterian Survey revealed that Taylor was far more skeptical of the war than the majority of his fellow parishioners. In response to the question of whether the United States should “immediately and unconditionally stop the bombing of North Viet Nam,” 884 objected versus 231 who agreed—a margin of 79 versus 21 percent. The query as to whether the United States “should use all military strength necessary (short of nuclear weapons) to achieve victory” elicited a similar margin of 75 percent (806) in favor versus 25 percent (260) opposed. By rejecting withdrawal and endorsing aggressive military measures, southern Presbyterians agreed with their regional neighbors.23

Far more conspicuous in his dissent than Taylor, Dr. George Edwards, a faculty member at the Presbyterian Louisville Seminary, and his wife, Jean, embodied the minority status of religious opponents of the war. A World War II CO and a forceful proponent of civil rights, Edwards braved the epithets of hostile Kentuckians to organize peace marches, advise conscientious objectors, and even aid draft resisters and deserters as they fled to Canada. Described by Anne Braden, a fellow Louisville civil rights and peace advocate, as “the most militant pacifist you ever saw,” Edwards denounced the Vietnam War as “the most obnoxious example of American Imperialism.” When critics accused him of being a communist and anti-Christian, Edwards told the seminary’s 1967 graduating class, “the church” and the “ministry” faced “the tests of freedom. The shrill cries of the racists, the nationalists, the birchers, and the anticommunists are raised in every corner where the Christian faith seeks its unhampered application.”24

Had Edwards been a Southern Baptist, easily the largest denomination in Dixie, he would have experienced an even more hostile reception. Indeed, a delegate to the 1968 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) asked an antiwar Baptist student protestor, “Why don’t you go on and become a Presbyterian and leave us alone?” Several polls in 1968 and 1969 yielded similar sentiments. The first found that 75 percent of 500 Baptist ministers surveyed in Florida and Louisiana deemed a US victory in Vietnam imperative, and 47 percent endorsed the use of nuclear weapons. Another poll revealed that 97 percent of Southern Baptists opposed any pause in the bombing of North Vietnam and endorsed increased US military intervention if it were needed to achieve victory. Although the SBC came to grudgingly acknowledge conscientious objection by 1972, Southern Baptists remained adamantly opposed to selective CO status.25

Billy Graham, the “quintessential Cold War evangelist,” was the most prominent Southern Baptist supporter of the war. Graham continued to believe that communism was not only an “economic interpretation of life” but also a “religion . . . inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against God Almighty.” The stakes could not have been higher, since the Cold War struggle would “end either in the death of Christianity or the death of Communism.” The North Carolina minister contended that communism had to be “stopped somewhere, whether it is in Hawaii or on the West Coast,” and he agreed with President Johnson that “it should be stopped in Vietnam.” Graham, like Richard Russell and other prowar southerners, recognized the US intervention had become a “mess,” and he harbored grave reservations about a successful outcome. Still, he had “no sympathy” for clergymen who advocated US withdrawal from Vietnam. Even if the United States confronted “an all-out war with Red China,” Americans “had to clean up the mess rather than turn their backs on the South Vietnamese.” Nor could he abide protestors who “so exaggerate our divisions . . . they could make Hanoi confident” of victory.26

Other important SBC figures echoed Graham’s sentiments, often in more strident terms. Following a visit to Vietnam in 1966, Wayne Dehoney, the president of the SBC and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Jackson, Tennessee, declared, “I am returning more convinced this nation is doing the right thing.” He was “encouraged by the physical aspects of the war in Vietnam but even more thrilling was the spiritual climate” in which “American youth [was] in its finest hour. They build schools, churches, and hand out candy.” H. Franklin Paschall, SBC president in 1967 and 1968 and pastor of the First Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, decried any effort “to have Southern Baptists join the left-leaning-liberal church groups in stabbing our Viet Nam boys in the back!” To the contrary, if “‘total victory,’ that is total destruction of North Vietnam,” were necessary “to bring about negotiations for a just and honorable peace,” he was “for it.” In mid-1967, a Texan informed LBJ that he made “no apology for my patriotism” and “would be sorely disappointed if the Baptist denominations should take a position which might in any way be considered . . . unpatriotic.” Other Southern Baptists left no doubt that they deemed antiwar protestors unpatriotic. Dale Cowling, pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Little Rock, declared that persons encouraging the “youth of America to rebel against military service . . . should be dealt with sternly on grounds of threatening the national security.” And the editor of the Baptist Record in Jackson, Mississippi, deemed antiwar protest equivalent to rejecting “God, the church, moral standards, [and] patriotism.”27

As these heartfelt opinions suggest, opposing the war within the SBC could be a lonely, professionally hazardous undertaking. Jess Moody, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach, Florida, and president of Palm Beach Atlantic College, discovered this after addressing the 1969 annual conference of Southern Baptist pastors in New Orleans. While recognizing the reality and importance of the larger Cold War struggle, Moody rejected the domino theory and the assumption that North Vietnam threatened the United States. He agreed that the United States had to “stop communism” but doubted that this could be achieved “by using the techniques of communism.” Could, he asked, quoting Jesus, “evil means cast out evil means? Can hate cast out hate? Can war cast out war?” In the aftermath of this speech, Moody claimed he was “never seriously considered” for another “denominational post.”28

Moody’s dissent paled compared to that of William Wallace Finlator, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Finlator, also an aggressive advocate of racial reform, was, like the Presbyterian George Edwards in Louisville, conspicuous as an exception to his prowar, southern church congregants. Pastor Finlator castigated the United States for reneging on its commitment to Vietnamese elections in 1956 and its pledge to “refrain from using force in that nation.” These actions, together with US support for “puppet” South Vietnamese governments, were “an exposure of the moral bankruptcy of American foreign policy—all in the name of God.” In 1965 the outspoken North Carolinian urged President Johnson to initiate negotiations for US withdrawal and to appeal to the UN to secure Vietnam against outside interference. In contrast to the majority of SBC clergy, Finlator encouraged and participated in antiwar protests and urged the government to recognize CO claims from persons “both inside and outside of the church.” His 1971 campaign to have the SBC petition President Nixon to decriminalize draft evasion was even more radical. He called for amnesty for “the hundreds of young men who have gone to Federal jails and the thousands and thousands of others who have fled to Canada and elsewhere because their consciences refused to let them fight in a war that is now widely regarded as immoral, unwarranted, and brutal.” Needless to say, the SBC rejected his resolution.29

Religious values also helped stimulate opposition to the war among southern African Americans. In explaining his antiwar position in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized that the Christian gospels were meant “for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white for revolutionary and conservative,” and he declared that his ministry was “in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them.” Andrew Young, the executive director of the SCLC, was more succinct: the war violated the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” and “mass murder” was “no way to solve problems.” Later in 1967, Young urged the nation to choose between “the cross and the flag.” The African American Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC), the first Baptist convention to oppose the war, declared in 1965, “The Church of Jesus Christ, the PRINCE OF PEACE—must always contend militantly that war is wrong!” Later in 1972, the PNBC characterized the war as “immoral, murderous, and wasteful.” As with Dixie’s whites, religion could also prompt black support for the war. In 1963, on the eve of decisive US intervention, King himself had voiced the broader Cold War religious rationale for containment: “Communism and Christianity,” he wrote, were “fundamentally incompatible”; and “a true Christian” could not “be a true Communist.” The latter adhered to “ethical relativism,” which justified “almost anything—love, violence, murder, lying” in pursuit of the US adversaries’ “millennial end.”30

To the extent religion influenced black opinion, these antiwar arguments appear to have been more persuasive since southern African Americans were less supportive of the war than their white neighbors. During 1966, 35 percent of blacks opposed the war; by 1969, the figure had increased to 56 percent. African Americans were consistently more in favor of withdrawal and more opposed to escalation than whites. In 1966, 16 percent of blacks favored withdrawal versus 11 percent of whites, and 33 percent of African Americans endorsed escalation compared to 48 percent of whites. By 1968, black percentages on withdrawal and escalation were 37 and 20; white preferences were 23 and 39. And in 1970 the black percentages for these categories were 57 and 10, as opposed to 37 and 29 for whites. In addition to religious and moral concerns, African American opposition derived from a priority placed on domestic, especially economic and racial, issues; an identification with nonwhite opponents of outside colonial domination; and a growing sense that blacks were being drafted, serving, and dying in Vietnam in numbers disproportionate to their place in American society.31

Black southerners were correct in believing that they were bearing a disproportionate burden of the fighting in Vietnam. Like African Americans nationally, southern blacks were more likely to be drafted. Between 1965 and 1970, blacks constituted about 12 percent of the nation’s population. During that period, the percentage of African Americans drafted ranged from 13.4 percent (1966) to 16 percent (1967 and 1970) of the total draftees. At the height of the war, in 1967, 64 percent of eligible blacks were drafted, compared to 31 percent of eligible whites. More likely to be assigned to combat units, black soldiers were also wounded and killed more often than whites. The death rate for blacks was especially alarming in the early years of the war. From 1961 through 1965, African American deaths comprised 18.3 percent of casualties in the US Army. In 1966, the black percentage of all combat deaths rose to 22 percent before falling to 14 in 1967. For the overall span of US involvement, from January 1, 1961, through April 30, 1975, 12.6 percent of the 58,022 US deaths were African Americans. Even while dealing with the death of a loved one in Vietnam, African Americans could be graphically reminded of their place in southern society. In 1966 white elected officials in Wetumpka, Alabama, blocked the burial of Jimmie Williams, a black paratrooper, in the local public cemetery; and two years later, the family of Bill Henry Terry Jr. had to obtain a court order for him to be interred at the previously segregated Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham, Alabama. Fort Pierce, Florida, authorities also refused to allow Pondexteur Eugene Williams’s burial in the town’s all-white cemetery.32

Although African American protests against these conditions and more general black opposition to the war reached a crescendo in 1967 with Reverend King’s speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, black discontent had been mounting for several years. On August 4, 1964, in the midst of developments in the Gulf of Tonkin, Robert Moses, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader, noted that President Johnson “wants to send soldiers to kill people on the other side of the world, . . . while here in Mississippi he refuses to send anyone to protect black people against murderous violence.” A year later, in July 1965, members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party declared, “No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man’s freedom, until all Negro People are free in Mississippi. . . . No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that the White American can get richer.” In January 1966, SNCC equated the death of activist Samuel Younge in Alabama to “the murder of people in Vietnam, for both Younge and the Vietnamese” were “seeking . . . rights guaranteed them by law.” SNCC expressed “sympathy” for Americans “unwilling to respond” positively to the “draft” or to commit “aggression” in Vietnam. Building on African American contentions since the turn of the century, the SNCC statement highlighted the inconsistency of blacks being called upon to protect freedom in Vietnam, “to preserve a ‘democracy’ which does not exist for them at home.” Where, SNCC asked, “is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States?” As a Stennis constituent wrote the senator, the “cry of freedom half way around the world” could only appear dubious to blacks, “when they don’t even have the freedom to listen to your speech from the galleries of the Mississippi House of Representatives.”33

When SNCC information director Julian Bond endorsed the 1966 statement and asked if the “energy” devoted to “destroying villages thousands of miles away” might not be better used in “building villages here,” he was barred from taking his seat in the Georgia legislature, to which he had been elected in 1965. The young legislator tellingly asked why he was not accorded the “same privilege” of criticizing LBJ as was granted white southern conservatives such as Richard Russell and James Eastland. King agreed and quickly came to his defense, warning that the nation seemed to be “approaching a dangerous totalitarian periphery where dissent becomes synonymous with disloyalty.” The SCLC leader was “tired of the press and others trying to brainwash people” and suggested that there were “no” war-related “issues” being discussed. Building on Bond’s stand for nonviolence, King asserted that the United States could only defeat communism through “moral power,” by demonstrating that “democracy” was the best form of government, and by “making justice a reality for all God’s children.”34

Another, far less prominent southerner joined King in defending SNCC and Bond. From Prospect, Kentucky, Henry Wallace castigated the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for failing to endorse SNCC’s opposition to the war, in which “Negro soldiers, whose enemies are in the U.S., not half-way ’round the world, are killing and being killed in a much higher proportion than white soldiers.” Wallace had previously deemed it “tragic in the extreme for the Negro to fight and kill and perhaps be killed for the power structure of the white man’s war against colored Asians,” and he lamented that the NAACP had effectively sided with the “‘war hawks’: The White Citizens Councils, the KKK, [and] the rest of the anti-Negro hoodlum element.” Indeed, Wallace concluded, the NAACP was “fast becoming the leading Uncle Tom of the civil rights movement.”35

In contrast to King’s defense, SNCC and Bond provoked hostile responses from both whites and blacks across much of the political spectrum. By challenging US involvement in Vietnam on the grounds of morality, patriotism, and race, SNCC and the young legislator had touched on multiple raw nerves, particularly in the South. The Louisville Courier-Journalcame closest to a sympathetic response by defending Bond’s “right to speak his mind” and denouncing the Georgia legislature’s “highhanded action.” Georgia lieutenant governor Peter Zack Greer spoke for most of his white constituents by denouncing Bond’s position as a “glaring, sad and tragic example of a total lack of patriotism.” Eugene Patterson and the Atlanta Constitution, which had consistently supported the Civil Rights Movement, also upheld the right to “dissent” from US policy in Vietnam, but even the pro–civil rights editor was outraged. Patterson, who backed Johnson’s Vietnam policies, was certain that the “SNCC outburst” did not represent the views of “a majority of Negroes in this country.” SNCC, Bond, and civil rights advocates, the editor declared, only undermined their laudable domestic objective by blundering into “the thicket of foreign policy.” Bond had moved beyond dissent and charged his country with “murder, deception, aggression” and was guilty of “sympathizing with and . . . even admiring” draft resisters.36

Whites were not the only harsh critics. The NAACP and the Urban League quickly disavowed SNCC and Bond, and in early 1966 King had yet to persuade his own SCLC to publicly oppose the war. These positions reflected the hesitation of civil rights leaders to break openly with President Johnson, who had been critical to the passage of the landmark civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965, and the black fear of distracting attention from this crucial domestic reform. African American reluctance to join antiwar critics also embodied the ongoing black dilemma over the desire to serve the nation, demonstrate patriotism, and enhance the case for more equal treatment at home, while daily confronting the disparity between America’s stated foreign policy objectives and the treatment of domestic minorities.

Other southern black critics also opted decisively for the ongoing demonstration of African American patriotism and national loyalty and against linking civil rights actions and antiwar protests. In Atlanta two Morehouse College professors dismissed the SNCC position as “senseless” and destructive of the “whole civil rights movement.” By mixing the issues of civil rights and the war, suggesting defiance of the draft law, and thereby addressing “highly sensitive and complex foreign policy issues that touch all Americans in . . . a raw sensitive way,” SNCC endangered progress at home. Blacks had worked too long to convince Americans “that protesting and demonstrating against racial injustice” was “not treason,” only to risk having such efforts squandered by rash actions. Southern black papers ranging from the Democratic Norfolk Journal and Guide to the Republican Atlanta Daily World and Jackson Advocate concurred. Both the Journal and Guide and the Daily World extolled the bravery and patriotism of black soldiers and expressed deep discomfort with SNCC and Bond for appearing to endorse draft resistance. Although both papers doubted that Bond would have been expelled from the Georgia House of Representatives had he been white, the Journal and Guide described him as “rash” and “impolitic” and dismissed his stance as unacceptable to “patriotic, law-abiding American citizens.” The Daily World agreed and castigated any actions that conveyed the “impression” that African Americans were unwilling to bear their fair “share of responsibility” for “military service.” The Advocate berated Bond as an “ill-advised Negro” and the “dupe” of the “most sinister [communist] forces in the world today.”37

Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the US Army in April 1967 raised similar, very southern issues of race, religion, and patriotism. Together with Reverend King, Ali was a well-known African American, possessed a truly international presence, and became the “most visible symbol of resistance to the draft.” Born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942, the talented young boxer had represented the United States in the 1960 Olympic Games and gone on to become the heavyweight champion of the world in 1964 at the age of twenty-two. His problems with the draft and the US justice system followed soon thereafter. Ali, who converted to the Nation of Islam and changed his name in 1964, had failed the mental aptitude portion of predraft testing. As the demand for soldiers increased and standards for induction were lowered, his score left him eligible for the draft, and in February 1966, he was reclassified and notified that he would soon be called for service. The following month Ali petitioned his Louisville draft board for deferment as a conscientious objector. He based his petition on his Muslim faith and the Koran, which limited adherents to participation in defensive, holy wars. His attorney also cited the absence of blacks on his draft board. His petition was denied, and he was directed to appear in April 1967 at Houston, Texas, where he refused induction. Ali’s refusal led to his conviction in June of draft evasion, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. He remained free while his case was appealed and eventually overturned by the US Supreme Court, which upheld his CO status in June 1971.38

Race and religion were at the heart of Ali’s response to war and the draft. He emphasized, “I am a member of the Black Muslims, and we don’t go to war unless they’re declared by Allah himself.” That the young athlete sincerely acted on principle was evident when he declined a noncombat military assignment in the US Army and the opportunity to serve safely in the National Guard. Still, sincere dedication to the Muslim faith counted for little in 1960s America, particularly in the South. Ali’s racial views and connection of the war to the domestic treatment of blacks also proved inflammatory. He told a Louisville audience, “Why should they ask me and other so-called Negroes to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs on brown people in Viet Nam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” Ali had emphasized previously that he had “no personal quarrel with those Vietcong” and subsequently asserted in 1970 that African Americans should not wage war on their “Asian brothers” since “they never lynched you, never called you nigger, never put dogs on you, never shot your leaders.” For Ali, religion and race trumped patriotism.39

Protests by the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, SNCC, Julian Bond, and Muhammad Ali were important, but all paled in comparison to those of Reverend King, the South’s and the nation’s most influential African American. Although King did not devote a complete speech to the war until February 1967, he had begun expressing grave reservations as early as March 1965. Like leaders of the NAACP and Urban League, King recognized President Johnson’s decisive role in the passage of the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills and was reluctant to criticize the administration’s Vietnam policies—hence the relatively muted nature of his early comments. In March 1965 he called for a negotiated settlement and judged that the war was “accomplishing nothing”; in June he recommended involving the UN in these negotiations; in July he told a meeting of the SCLC the war “must be stopped” and the Vietcong included in peace talks; and in August he expressed his concern over the daily “reports of villages destroyed and people left homeless” and of “an ever-widening war” and urged an end to US bombing of North Vietnam. Even these positions, which differed little from those of Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper, were too strident for other major civil rights leaders and King’s SCLC, where Andrew Young dismissed the peace movement as a “band wagon that’s playing a ‘square’ tune.” Johnson, who, according to one staffer, rejected the idea of a “separate Negro view of foreign policy,” was enraged by King’s seeming lack of gratitude and loyalty and dispatched Senator Thomas Dodd (D-CT) to proclaim that King had “absolutely no competence” in international relations and had succeeded only in alienating “much of the support he previously enjoyed in Congress.”40

If Johnson, whites generally, and more restrained African Americans were distressed at King’s 1965 pronouncements, they grew more aggrieved as the SCLC leader became progressively and more outspokenly antiwar over the ensuing two years. Diverse considerations impelled Reverend King toward more shrill denunciations of the war. Linking racial considerations to some of the public figures and newspapers that objected to his addressing the war, King rejected their “assumption that foreign policy is a white man’s business.” He understood that the war consumed precious resources that might have been used to relieve domestic poverty and inequality. In December 1966 he lamented, “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America. . . . The chaos of the cities, the persistence of poverty, the degenerating of our national prestige throughout the world are compelling arguments for achieving peace agreements.” Religious and humanitarian convictions also prompted the Baptist minister to recoil from the violence, destruction, and death in Vietnam. He told his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in February 1966 that it was “just as evil to kill Vietnamese, as it is to kill Americans, because they are God’s children.” In a subsequent newspaper column, King elaborated: “A war in which children are incinerated by napalm, in which soldiers die in mounting numbers while other American soldiers, according to press accounts, . . . shoot the wounded enemy as he lies upon the ground, is a war that murders the conscience.” More mundane considerations also figured into King’s assessment. He recognized that his previous, more restrained pronouncements had not been effective; and after passage of the two landmark civil rights bills and the subsequent splintering of the Civil Rights Movement, the SCLC leader had far less to lose politically by opposing Johnson.41

King articulated a full-blown antiwar stance in early 1967. In February, at a conference in Los Angeles, he made his first full public speech against the war. He situated the war as part of a larger effort designed “to turn the clock of history back and perpetuate white colonialism.” This futile effort demonstrated “our paranoid anti-communism” and a “deadly Western arrogance” and further embodied “the triple events of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.” To this fundamental critique of US foreign policy, King added his more specific objections to American intervention in a Vietnamese “civil war,” “recalcitrant unwillingness” to halt the bombing and negotiate, the war’s “nightmarish” physical casualties, and the terrifying possibility of “nuclear destructiveness.”42

Six weeks later, on April 4, King delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at the Riverside Church in New York City before an audience of three thousand. He reiterated many of the points he had made since March 1965. The war was “an enemy of the poor”; it commandeered “black young men who had been crippled by our society” and sent them “to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia” that had been denied in “Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” Acting out of racism and “deadly western arrogance,” the United States had “rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination” in favor of a South Vietnamese client state that was “singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support.” The United States needed to acknowledge its mistakes, “atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam,” and “take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.” King’s prescription for ending the war included an end to the bombing of North and South Vietnam, a “unilateral cease fire” to “create the atmosphere for negotiations,” recognition that the National Liberation Front would “play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government,” and setting a date for the withdrawal of “all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.” By calling for an end to the bombing in South Vietnam, a unilateral cease-fire, and a designated date for US troop withdrawal, King had gone much further than major white southern antiwar figures. To these comparatively inflammatory recommendations, he added the argument that the pursuit of “immense profits of overseas investment” had corrupted US foreign policy, that young American men should seek CO status if they deemed “the American course in Vietnam . . . dishonorable,” that the United States had become the world’s “greatest purveyor of violence,” and that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese had ample reason to distrust the United States.43

Although the SCLC had joined its leader in the antiwar column in late 1966, only SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality agreed with his hardline stance. Both the Urban League and the NAACP quickly disassociated themselves from any combination of the civil rights and peace movements. The latter condemned such an association as “a serious tactical mistake” that aided “the cause neither of civil rights nor of peace.” Other prominent African Americans, ranging from Bayard Rustin and Ralph Bunche to Jackie Robinson, voiced objections. Several southern black papers were also critical. The Norfolk Journal and Guide feared King’s “verbal bombshell” had provided ammunition to critics of the Civil Rights Movement, divided “civil rights forces,” and “damaged if not destroyed” the movement. Sounding the familiar theme that patriotic service would benefit blacks following the war, the Dallas Post Tribune asserted that African Americans had to “help our country fight this involved and tragic war.” The far more hawkish Atlanta Daily World and Jackson Advocate, both Republican papers, were even more critical. The Daily World objected to King taking any stand on a war in progress and denounced him for “encouraging young men to shirk the draft”; and the Advocate considered his pronouncements “absurd and ridiculous” and asked if “the United States should roll over and play dead” as communists “take over the world.” By 1967, King’s provocative denunciation of US foreign policy and the war was a minority position not just among civil rights activists but also among African Americans more generally. According to a May 1967 Harris Poll, 48 percent of blacks disagreed with his position on the war, 25 percent approved, and 27 percent had not yet decided. Significantly, like southern white opponents of the war, King could not successfully mount a persuasive antiwar brief, even among a majority of African Americans, upon whom the war fell most heavily and who were far less supportive of the conflict than whites.44

King may have elicited a mixed response from African Americans, but the reaction of southern whites was far more uniformly hostile. Andrew Young subsequently offered an incisive explanation for much of this reaction: “International relations in the 1960s were largely the province of an elite club of upper-class white males.” This elite and most other whites were “as surprised to find a Southern black preacher with strong and sophisticated opinions on international policy” as they were “by the opinions themselves.” Agreeing with arch-segregationist George Wallace, who had altered his campaign mantra from “Nigger-nigger-nigger” to “Commie-Commie-Commie,” and who traced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Communist Manifesto, many southerners reflexively linked King and the Civil Rights Movement to the Cold War communist threat. A Virginian asked, “Just what color does the real Reverend King represent? Black with shades of pink? Or red with shades of black?” Another resident of the Old Dominion wrote directly to King, declaring the United States had never witnessed “a bigger hate merchant and absolute hypocrite than you.” One southern hawk called not just for “the use of every modern weapon at our disposal” in Vietnam but also government action to “stop completely the domestic activities of the scores of communist-supported traitors such as M. L. King, [Stokely] Carmichael, our Berkeley friends, etc.” A Louisiana resident, who denounced Carmichael’s “rantings and ravings,” expressed even greater scorn for King for not “preaching . . . the gospel of Jesus Christ but a tirade against his own government.” Noting that King had based a portion of his opposition to the war on its diversion of national attention from pressing domestic problems, a rural Georgian asked if the head of the SCLC would support the “war if it focused attention on the civil rights movement.” King, he concluded, “would rather see some negro in Podunk, Iowa get his ‘civil rights’ than to see millions in Vietnam get their human rights.” Adding another southern racial perspective, an Alabama opponent of the war called for US withdrawal by arguing that the Soviet Union and China sought to “drain us to the core,” thereby making it “easy . . . for these Communists and Negroes to take over the Government.”45

White southerners were also outraged at Muhammad Ali’s initial disqualification for service and his ultimate refusal to be inducted. To a Texas couple, it seemed “indefensible” that Ali could “lack sufficient intelligence to learn to shoot firearms.” Inappropriate “political influence” must have been responsible for “such an outrageous injustice to the entire country and its armed forces.” Demonstrating the class resentment often directed at antiwar protestors, a Mississippian pronounced the “handling of the drafting of Cassius Clay . . . a disgrace” akin to “to others who are rich” and who avoided the war with the help of “friends or kin in very high places.” Another disgruntled southerner declared that if Ali were not thrown “in jail . . . , every white person should refuse to serve, and every draft board in the United States should resign.”46

Southern politicians were equally strident in their denunciations. Following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Ali’s conviction for draft evasion, several southern congressmen expressed this outrage. William F. Nichols (D-AL) derided the court’s decision as “another black eye” for the US military and a “stinging rebuke to the 240,000 Americans still in Vietnam” and the 50,000 who had died there. Louisiana Democrat Joe Waggoner disparaged Ali as a “phony” who had ostensibly been exempted for “questionable religious beliefs” but must have been allowed to avoid induction “because he is black and a prizefighter.” George W. Andrews (D-AL) compared Ali to Lieutenant William Calley, who had been convicted earlier in 1971 of murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968. Calley was “a poor little fellow” who had “volunteered and offered his life for his country,” only to be convicted of murder “for carrying out orders.” Ali, by contrast, had “thumbed his nose at the flag” and was “still walking the streets making millions of dollars fighting for pay, not for his country.”47

As this national debate over the conduct of the war raged on during 1967, Senators Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper sustained their antiwar advocacy. Fulbright began the year on January 9 by assuming his customary position as the only person willing to forthrightly oppose President Johnson in a White House meeting of Democratic committee chairmen. While endorsing a resolution to cap US forces in Vietnam at 500,000 the following month, the Arkansas senator also reiterated his “regret” at not holding hearings on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and for uncritically accepting Johnson’s assurances that no military escalations were under consideration. Portraying himself as “a simple Ozark hillbilly,” Fulbright contended that since the United States had intervened “more or less casually by mistake,” it would be far more honorable to admit that mistake than to “wipe off the face of the earth a small, weak, underdeveloped country.” America needed “to confess its mistakes in judgment like I am willing to confess mine” and to pursue a negotiated settlement instead of an unobtainable military victory. To a constituent, he prophetically argued that a negotiated settlement was possible only if the United States halted the bombing, committed to a date for the withdrawal of its troops, and agreed to a genuine compromise. Although it would be another five years before President Nixon grudgingly accepted this prescription, Fulbright had provided the alternative policy Johnson had demanded the previous year.48

Amid rumors and discussions over the major escalation of the war during the spring and President Johnson’s summons of General Westmoreland home for a positive public update in April, Fulbright’s apprehensions mounted. On July 25, in another meeting of the Senate committee chairmen with LBJ, the senator resumed his lecturing of the president by boldly stating, “Mr. President, what you really need to do is stop the war.” He continued, “The Vietnam war is a hopeless venture. Nobody likes it. . . . Vietnam is ruining our domestic and our foreign policy. I will not support it any longer.” An infuriated Johnson responded, “Bill everybody doesn’t have a blind spot like you do. You say don’t bomb North Vietnam on just about everything. I don’t have the simple solution you have.” The president then played his hole card. If Fulbright and opponents of the war wanted the United States out of Vietnam, they could repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: “You can tell the troops to come home. You can tell General Westmoreland that he doesn’t know what he is doing.”49

At least a part of Johnson’s angry response derived from his realization that Fulbright was right about both the war’s domestic and international impact and the slight chance of gaining a military victory. LBJ also agonized over the responsibility of ordering “the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle.” As the war ground on and the deaths and injuries mounted far beyond his expectations, “the war became a source of great personal grief.” Admiral Thomas Moorer observed, “You always discussed Vietnam [with Johnson], no matter where you were”; and the president sincerely told the parents of a US soldier who had died in Vietnam that there was “no American killed or wounded in battle for whom I do not feel a sense of personal responsibility.” Senator Russell eventually sought to avoid visiting his old friend in the White House because he could not bear to see Johnson crying uncontrollably over the war and US casualties. But as Johnson had confided to Lady Bird in 1965, “I can’t get out. I can’t finish with what I’ve got. So what the hell do I do?”50

Through the summer of 1967, the president slogged on, hoping against hope for a military breakthrough, and Fulbright continued his antiwar campaign. In addition to his Senate and public speeches and direct personal appeals to Johnson, the SFRC chairman sought to enlarge the southern antiwar contingent. Specifically, he attempted to recruit fellow southerners John Sparkman, Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin. With no chance of appealing to his more hawkish Dixie colleagues to support an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a negotiated settlement, he turned instead to overtures designed to regain a more integral Senate role in the conduct of US foreign relations—a role that would come at the expense of the executive branch. In July Russell voiced alarm over a possible US intervention in the Congo and warned against becoming embroiled in “local rebellions and local wars” where the United States had “no stake and . . . no legal and moral commitment to intervene.” Fulbright responded with his previous complaint that the executive branch had persistently committed the United States to strategic obligations without proper congressional involvement. He also proposed a Senate resolution stating that a US national commitment “necessarily and exclusively” resulted from the “affirmative action taken by the executive and legislative branches” via “a treaty, convention, or other legislative instrumentality specifically intended” to create “such a commitment.” Fulbright introduced this resolution on July 31, 1967, describing it as “a conservative position which seeks to recover in some degree the constitutional role of the Senate in the making of foreign policy.”51

Both Russell and Ervin forcefully endorsed the resolution. Russell knew of “nothing . . . more in need of clarification” than “alleged commitments of the United States all over the world”; and Ervin considered the resolution “a real, a lasting, and a most significant service to the country.” The following month, Fulbright held SFRC hearings on the resolution, which provoked considerable public discussion and congressional consternation when Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach termed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution the “functional equivalent” of a congressional declaration of war. Fulbright had “planted the seed that would flower” into subsequent congressional challenges to executive domination of Vietnam policy and US foreign policy more generally, but he once again failed to move Russell, Ervin, Sparkman, or Stennis over to the antiwar column.52

Despite this tactical failure, Fulbright could take solace from the ongoing antiwar advocacy of Albert Gore and John Sherman Cooper and, by late spring, the conversion of Senator Thruston Morton (R-KY), who began to bolster the arguments of this influential southern group. Gore remained particularly apprehensive that the US intervention in Vietnam could lead to a direct military clash, even a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union or China. He emphasized to his constituents that there would be “no winner,” only “losers,” regardless of which nation “suffered the greatest damage” from the use of nuclear weapons. Cooper agreed. Responding on May 15 to the rumors of an imminent escalation of the war, Cooper worried such a step could foreclose “the last possibility for a peaceful settlement”—that “ever increasing bombing” could lead China and Russia into the conflict or even provoke World War III.53

To these familiar arguments, the senators added two contentions certain to ruffle feathers in Dixie. Gore’s fellow southern Baptists no doubt agreed with his assertion that America’s Judeo-Christian culture with its “noble,” democratic impulses confronted “Communism, a type of materialistic religion,” which had “adopted war as an instrument for its expansion.” The senator’s Christian constituents were equally certain to have rejected his portrayal of the United States as a coaggressor when he characterized the Cold War as a “confrontation between two aggressive cultures” with the American side being “evangelical in its zeal.” Cooper was equally provocative when he likened US actions in Southeast Asia to Soviet attempts to establish a military presence in Cuba. Just as the United States viewed the USSR as “an intruder in the Western Hemisphere” and a security threat, perhaps China feared the American presence in Vietnam as “threatening its security and interests.”54

By mid-May 1967, Fulbright’s, Gore’s, and Cooper’s antiwar credentials were prominently established; but signs of Thurston Morton, Cooper’s moderate Republican colleague from Kentucky, rethinking his hawkish position were significant from the perspective of the generally prowar Republican Party, congressional dynamics, and southern support for the war. On May 11, Morton warned that a reported streamlining of the US–South Vietnamese pacification effort might lead to a “long-term and massive American occupation . . . to secure a postwar Vietnamese Government.” Twelve days later, Morton returned to the Senate floor to voice his dismay over a recent poll indicating 45 percent of Americans favored “a policy of total military victory” in Vietnam. While denouncing this “dangerous illusion,” he enumerated what total military victory would entail. It required identifying and neutralizing the VC forces, who controlled “75 percent” of South Vietnam’s hamlets; “destroying or driving out” North Vietnam’s units in the South; demolishing Hanoi’s “military installations and much of her population”; and likely facing a “total war with China.” In mid-August, the senator went even further by joining Fulbright, Gore, Cooper, and Reverend King in their call for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a “de-escalation” of the war, leading to American “disinvolvement.”55

As debate over how best to conduct the war extended into the summer, observers ranging from New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple Jr. to the keen North Vietnamese military observer General Vo Nguyen Giap pronounced the conflict a “stalemate.” With no discernible progress, draft calls surpassing thirty thousand per month, and the cumulative effect of images and accounts of American suffering and death, popular support for the war declined precipitously. July polling found that 46 percent of those polled agreed with Apple and Giap that the United States was “standing still,” and only 34 percent believed America was “making progress.” This Gallup Poll also revealed that 41 percent of those questioned felt the United States had made a “mistake” in sending combat troops to Vietnam; by October, that percentage had increased to 47 percent, a majority of those polled. The mounting public disillusionment was also evident in Gallup’s August results, which placed Johnson’s approval rating for his handling of Vietnam at 33 percent (down from 41 percent in January) versus 52 percent disapproval.56

The South’s 1967 polling responses to the war aligned with patterns established over the previous three years. Dixie remained the region least approving of Johnson’s performance as president and his handling of the war. In January 38 percent of southerners consulted approved of his work as chief executive, versus 46 percent nationally and 44 percent of the next most negative region; by November, these figures were 37, 41, and 36, respectively. Dixie residents were also most critical of LBJ’s handling of Vietnam. Only 32 percent approved of this facet of his foreign policy in January, and the region’s positive assessment fell to 25 percent in September (versus 67 percent disapproval) and never exceeded 35 percent over the course of 1967. Even in Texas, only 45 percent of voters approved of Johnson’s handling of his duties as president, versus 39 percent who disapproved. Much of his home-state response divided along party lines of Democratic endorsement and Republican and independent objection. When asked to express one thing they liked or disliked about LBJ’s presidential performance, 37 percent of Texas respondents expressed “dislike” of his Vietnam policies, versus 16 percent professing “like.”57

Most southern responses to more specific Vietnam questions confirmed the region’s martial image. Dixie was the American region most in favor of going “all-out to win a military victory in Vietnam,” even if that effort included using “atomic bombs.” Thirty-three percent of Dixie residents endorsed this alternative, and 52 percent objected, compared to national responses of 26 and 64, respectively, and 26 and 65 for the next most warlike region (the Midwest). Southerners were also most supportive of a “military man” as the leader of the South Vietnamese government—43 percent versus the national response of 36; least in favor of a long bombing pause over North Vietnam or the offer of economic incentives to the Vietcong to induce negotiations; and most willing to pay higher taxes “to help pay for the war in Vietnam.” Still, even as they endorsed an aggressive military posture, southerners, like the remainder of the nation, had clearly become disillusioned with the costs of the war. In both February and May, Dixie residents were most in agreement with the assertion that the United States had erred in sending troops to Vietnam; and in October southerners trailed only the East (37 to 41 percent) in supporting an immediate withdrawal of American troops.58

Letters to editors and senators amplified these poll results. Usually reflecting the national frustration with Johnson’s limited-war strategy and failure to defeat a seemingly weaker opponent, the prowar arguments remained largely unchanged. An Arkansas attorney who had served in World War I declared there should be no “Marquis of Queensberry Rules in War,” and a Louisiana resident railed at America’s “Powder Puff War.” Another Fulbright correspondent agreed that it made no sense to invest the resources required to “be the most powerful nation on earth,” to “build such a power and then be afraid to use it.” A North Carolinian dismissed limited war as a “farce” in which the United States annually lost “thousands of young boys” while “getting no closer to an end.” “I wonder,” asked a High Point, North Carolina, resident, “how a Mother and Father or wife who have lost a son or husband feel knowing their son or husband may have lived” with “the full backing of our military power.”59

An Atlanta attorney was certain that, with the “exception of a small but loud-mouthed group of misguided pseudo-intellectuals, publicity-seekers, and plain traitors . . . Americans agree whole-heartedly” that the United States should employ “all conventional military means, to destroy any targets in North Vietnam which are directly or indirectly in support of the enemy’s operations against our troops and South Vietnam.” Another southerner proclaimed that it was “long past the time that the military be unmuzzled and unmanacled, and any person, politician or otherwise, who impedes their efforts” should be deemed “guilty of treason and . . . be dealt with accordingly.” Nor should the unmuzzled military worry unduly about “North Viet Nam’s so-called civilian population,” which “fully deserves an intensive bombing to reduce their ardor for aggression.” How, asked another southerner, was it “humanitarian to consider the lives of American fighting men less important than the lives of civilians in North Vietnamese cities?” A Baton Rouge father and veteran of World War II and Korea decried the “war of attrition” and the “weak guts” in the State and Defense Departments. The Johnson administration should “be told now that the American people are up to their ears in the liberal frightened communist vomit that says we must allow Russia and even our allies to prolong this senseless fight.”60

Consistent with Gallup polling, one Georgia resident did not “object to paying additional taxes for the support of the war,” but he added a significant caveat—only “if we are seriously attempting” to prevail militarily. Other essentially prowar southerners had similar reactions to President Johnson’s call in 1967 for a surtax to help fund the war. A Virginian declared he was “bitterly opposed” to the proposed surtax since the nation’s budget deficit resulted from “the wild, cynical, and staggering political give-away programs” rather than the war. For antiwar southerners, their aversion to taxes provided a central argument. One stated simply, “I am very unhappy about the tax money spent on the war in Vietnam.”61

Fiscal concerns constituted only one species of the southern public’s ongoing dissent. The possibility of war with China haunted the South’s antiwar public as well as its most dovish senators. A Memphis resident reminded Senator Gore “that World War I started because of bluffs that were called”; and a crusty Mississippian, who had flown in both World War II and Korea, lectured Senator Stennis on the danger of a “stray bomb load” near the North Vietnam–China border. From Jackson, this former pilot described how MacArthur “misjudged the Red Chinese.” Was his hawkish senator “absolutely positive that this increased bombing will not cause China to come to the aid of North Vietnam? If you aren’t positive, it is comparable to a man trying to drive a car . . . blindfolded—he doesn’t know what he is doing and shouldn’t be doing it.”62

Southern dissidents added other political and strategic reservations. A Russell constituent contended there was “no stable nation” in South Vietnam “on which to build a ‘Far Eastern line of defense.’” To the contrary, the country was “plagued with utter corruption,” and the South Vietnamese were “incapable of—and woefully uninterested in—democracy.” Many southerners worried that the United States had become dangerously overcommitted in Southeast Asia. A Virginian linked the war’s reported cost of $2 billion per month to the nation’s “general protector role of world freedom” and called for a reappraisal of “the foreign policy that makes the U.S. the public defender and provider of every nation.” An “eighth generation white Southerner” added an ironic twist to the issue of US overcommitment abroad. “How,” she asked, “can we be presumptuous enough to tell Asiatics how to put their houses in order when our own is such a mess?” Indeed, the United States was “reaping the results of a hundred years of indignities heaped on our Negro citizens.”63

For some southerners, US actions were so immoral they warranted comparisons to those of Nazi Germany. Was the use of “torture, gas, and civilian bombing evil only when it is done by Nazis or Communists?” A Korean War veteran and a self-described “patriot and productive member of the community” informed Senator Ervin, “Every day our great country resembles a bit more the Germany my family fled in the 1930s.” And a staunch advocate of states’ rights, who was aghast at the federal government’s increasing power, equated US actions at home and abroad: “In Viet Nam and in Social Reform we are tilting with windmills. . . . You cannot wipe out poverty or nationalism—they are the only truly immortal things.” Some problems simply could not be “fixed by Uncle Sam.”64

Against this backdrop of public and political discord, Senator John Stennis led the most concerted congressional effort to force President Johnson to fundamentally alter his conduct of the conflict by scrapping his policies of gradualism and limited war in favor of unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam. Although the president had approved nearly one hundred new Rolling Thunder targets since January and granted General Westmoreland an additional fifty thousand troops in July, he had not consented to the bombing of areas closely adjacent to Hanoi or along the Chinese border, the bombing of Haiphong and mining of its harbor, or the invasion of North Vietnam and neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia. By overseeing the SPIS hearings in August to appraise the “Air War Against North Vietnam,” Stennis, together with his allies on the subcommittee, attempted to transform the conduct of the war from Johnson’s policy of “defeat avoidance” into the “all-out” pursuit of victory advocated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their most hawkish backers. In addition to his conviction that graduated bombing pressure on North Vietnam was a flawed and failed policy, Stennis and other SPIS hawks feared that without tangible progress an increasingly frustrated and impatient American public might force the compromise settlement Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper were advocating. Stennis and Senator Stuart Symington (D-MO), both tireless boosters of the military, warned that a stalemated war could unfairly discredit US airpower, and they shared Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson’s uneasiness that the military leadership rather than civilian leaders and bureaucrats would “take the fall” for failure in Vietnam.65

The setting and tone of the Stennis hearings contrasted sharply with those directed by Fulbright the previous year. Held behind closed doors in the Old Senate Office Building in deference to security concerns, the sessions, which ran from August 9 through 25, included no bright lights, no television crews, and no cheering audiences. Nor were there tense confrontations among SPIS members, who unanimously favored a more aggressive military posture in Vietnam, or between senators and the military witnesses. To the contrary, the proceedings were rather chummy. Stennis assured US Army general Earle G. Wheeler, “This is not an adversary proceeding. . . . We are working together.” Later, the senator told Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, “This is just in the family, Admiral, and I am not trying to spring any surprise question on you.”66

Stennis’s idea of working together was to afford the military commanders what Newsweek dubbed a “sanctuary” from which to assault the Johnson administration’s strategy of gradualism and bombing restrictions. Stennis and the SPIS envisioned the military testimony as precisely the information necessary to convince the American public that the war was winnable and that aggressive bombing would force the Vietnamese communists to concede. By influencing the public, Stennis and his fellow hawks hoped to push President Johnson to abandon gradualism and adopt the shared SPIS-JCS bombing recommendations. Although the hearings were technically closed, “informed sources” provided the press with the essence of the testimony, and on August 15, Stennis began releasing the opening statement of each witness. These military-friendly dynamics, purposeful leaks, and selected news releases produced what New York Times reporter James Reston described as great pressure from the “old militant coalition of leading military and naval officers, Republican political leaders, and Democratic committee chairmen” and what Newsweek characterized as the “hawks . . . making their supreme effort.”67

This supreme effort was clear from the hearings’ organization, which was structured to discredit Secretary of Defense McNamara and by extension President Johnson and the administration’s wartime leadership. The subcommittee first questioned Admiral Ulysses S. G. Sharp, the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command (CINCPAC), on August 9 and 10; General Wheeler, chairman of the JCS, on August 16; and General John P. McConnell, chief of the air force, on August 22. Their collective military brief for unrestricted bombing was then used to interrogate McNamara on August 25, after which Stennis called General Harold K. Johnson, chief of staff of the army, General Wallace M. Greene, commandant of the marine corps, and retired USAF general Gilbert L. Meyers to rebut McNamara’s positions. The SPIS issued its final report on August 31.

Senator Stennis opened the hearings on the “conduct and effectiveness of the air war against North Vietnam” on August 9 with a statement that clearly conveyed the subcommittee’s objectives. Even before taking any testimony, the senator outlined his long-held personal “opinion” that “it would be a tragic and perhaps fatal mistake . . . to suspend or restrict the bombing.” “Gratified” that the announcement of the hearings had apparently prompted Johnson’s “step-up in the air operations . . . and increased pressure on the enemy,” he hoped this pressure would “be further increased . . . and that it will hasten the end of this unhappy war.” By “restricting the flow of supplies to the south,” bombing had “saved the lives of many brave Americans.” Therefore, to constrain Rolling Thunder would be “to throw away” America’s “military advantage.”68

Working from these key assumptions, the Mississippi hawk carefully presided over the hearings but left most of the close questioning of witnesses to others, such as Symington, Strom Thurmond, Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME), Howard C. Cannon (D-NV), Henry Jackson (D-WA), and SPIS chief counsel James T. Kendall. Still, Stennis pointedly elicited testimony from Admiral Sharp agreeing that the bombing restrictions had left many US pilots free only to attack “tree tops”; that many of their missions were “almost an act of futility” since numerous valuable targets had not been “authorized for strike”; that the graduated escalation of the bombing and target restrictions left US pilots much more vulnerable to North Vietnam’s antiaircraft system; and that “any thought of stopping the bombing” was, in fact, “unthinkable.” From General Wheeler, Stennis obtained the declaration that the JCS had consistently “advocated” that the United States “find a way of obstructing or stopping the flow of war making materials and other supplies” through Haiphong. As Sharp’s day before the committee ended, Stennis also voiced his hopes for the proceedings. Since the public was growing increasingly restive, they needed “to know more about this war.” With appropriate probombing information, many of their questions “could be explained.” The “American public,” he continued, would “accept anything if they understand it.”69

Strom Thurmond, the other southerner on the SPIS, assumed a far more vocal role. Like those of Stennis and the other senators, the South Carolina Republican’s views on the war were well established and consistent with majority opinion in Dixie. Thurmond voiced the essential southern perspective when he declared that despite disagreeing with LBJ’s “conduct of the war,” he was “backing the President in being in Vietnam” since “we cannot afford to lose Southeast Asia to the Communists.” He lamented that US efforts had yielded a “stalemate” and declared wars could not be won “by fighting defensive actions.” Thurmond could see no justification for sacrificing “thousands and thousands and thousands more” Americans “just to end up with a stalemate.” The senator contemptuously dismissed those who disagreed as “possessed of [an] appeasing mind” and influenced by “world opinion or Communist propaganda or State Department propaganda.”70

From this perspective, Thurmond’s persistent question was, “If President Johnson gave you the authority as a military man to take the steps necessary to win this war, . . . what . . . should be done that we are not doing now?” The answer he sought and consistently received was to remove all bombing restrictions over North Vietnam and to close Haiphong harbor. For dissenters who feared China’s military intervention, he confidently asserted the PRC would only intervene if the United States sent troops into North Vietnam and that Chinese leaders “must surely know” that “we could destroy their . . . ability to become a world power so far as atomic weapons are concerned.”71

In response to such leading and unfailingly friendly questions, the first three military witnesses, Admiral Sharp and Generals Wheeler and McConnell, contended that unrestricted US airpower was “the controlling instrument of military power,” which the Vietnamese communists could not “successfully oppose.” All agreed with McConnell’s assertion that the US bombing of North Vietnam “has been, is, and will continue to be both effective and essential.” To curtail or end the bombing, Wheeler added, would be viewed by the enemy as “continuing weakness and wavering on our part.” The bombing had destroyed key military and industrial targets, impeded the flow of men and materiel south, and signaled to Hanoi and the NLF that continued “aggression” would lead to “penalties of still greater severity.” Without the ongoing bombing of the North, as many as eight hundred thousand additional American troops would have been required and many more US casualties incurred in South Vietnam. Only Johnson and McNamara’s incremental increases in the bombing of North Vietnam after February 1965; the restrictions on striking key targets near Hanoi, Haiphong, and the Chinese border; and the failure to close Haiphong harbor had prevented US air power from decisively impacting the conflict. Sharp, Wheeler, and McConnell assured the SPIS that numerous additional targets remained to be attacked.72

Just as Secretary of State Rusk’s testimony had been the key moment of the Fulbright hearings in 1966, Secretary of Defense McNamara’s clash with the SPIS on August 25 was the highlight of the Stennis proceedings. McNamara had run afoul of the nation’s military leaders and their congressional allies on the SPIS well before his dramatic confrontation with the hawkish senators. Much of the JCS’s dislike of the secretary resulted from his assumption of the decision-making authority previously reserved to the service heads. They also reacted viscerally to McNamara the person. Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times military editor, spoke for the chiefs when he wrote, “They have little use for what they consider his intellectual arrogance, his over emphasis on cost effectiveness instead of combat effectiveness, and . . . his coldness to people.” Compounding these significant irritants, McNamara fundamentally differed with the JCS over how best to fight the war. By agreeing with President Johnson on the need for gradualism and a limited war, the secretary rejected the military preferences. To this seeming disregard for the military leaders’ expertise and experience, McNamara added his conclusion as early as November 1965 that the war could not be won militarily. Over the ensuing twenty-two months, the secretary had become convinced that Rolling Thunder had failed and that additional bombing would not block the flow of goods from China and the Soviet Union into North Vietnam, incapacitate Hanoi and bring the North to heel, prevent men and goods from moving south, or prove decisive in South Vietnam. In sum, as he appeared before the SPIS, the Nation accurately observed that McNamara differed with the JCS and by extension the promilitary subcommittee “on practically every issue.”73

Through his opening statement and nearly five hours of withering cross-examination, the defense secretary articulated much of the analysis that has subsequently been used to explain why Rolling Thunder failed to force a seemingly weaker foe to the its knees. Although he stopped short of voicing his conviction that a negotiated, compromise settlement offered the only viable US exit from the war, his testimony pointed indisputably to that Fulbright, Gore, Cooper position. As a “predominantly agricultural” country, North Vietnam had “no real warmaking base . . . which could be destroyed by bombing.” Nor was there any evidence that bombing would alter the “resolve” of the nation’s leaders or lessen the “support of the . . . people.” Both the nature of the war in the South, which required only a few truckloads per day of nonfood shipments, and North Vietnam’s complex, resilient transportation system along the Ho Chi Minh Trail negated US efforts to stymie communist efforts in the South by bombing infiltration routes. McNamara was equally adamant that closing Haiphong would not yield victory. Were Haiphong harbor closed, the North Vietnamese would employ alternative land routes and waterways. Unwilling to stop with an explanation for the failure of US bombing to win the war, McNamara further contended that destruction of the ostensibly lucrative remaining targets cited by the chiefs would not produce a different outcome. As the secretary completed his testimony before the exasperated and infuriated SPIS, the New Yorker judged that he had cut “the heart out of the military case for bombing North Vietnam.”74

Stennis and the SPIS categorically rejected such an outcome. The subcommittee promptly called its three military rebuttal witnesses, who predictably impugned all of McNamara’s assertions and castigated the Johnson administration’s graduated bombing strategy and target restrictions. Were US planes unleashed to begin “hitting them on the jaw” rather than “slapping them on the check,” victory would follow. The SPIS then transmitted its report to the parent Senate Armed Services Committee on August 31. The subcommittee contended that while operating within the limitations imposed by Johnson and McNamara, the air war had achieved its objectives. US bombing had impeded the importation of goods into North Vietnam and their subsequent transport to the South, destroyed key military and industrial targets, and punished North Vietnam for its aggression. That these goals had not been more fully realized resulted not from the “impotence of airpower” but from “overly restrictive controls, limitations, and the doctrine of ‘gradualism.’” The “cold fact” was that Johnson administration policies, which conflicted with the “best military judgment,” had “not done the job” of forcing North Vietnam and the NLF to end the war on American terms. Therefore, the report continued in language that could have been lifted from a Stennis speech, “What is needed now is the hard decision to do whatever is necessary, take the risks that have to be taken, and apply the force that is required to see the job through.” Rejecting any “territorial limitation” or “temporary” bombing halts, the SPIS challenged President Johnson to release all bombing targets requested by the military and argued forcefully for the need to bomb the northeast quadrant of North Vietnam, which included the Chinese buffer zone, the areas around Hanoi, and particularly Haiphong harbor. If the president refused to make this “hard decision,” to fundamentally alter his conduct of the war, the subcommittee could not, “in good conscience, ask our ground forces to continue their fight in South Vietnam.”75

The Stennis hearings and report occasioned broad public comment and much disagreement over the sessions’ significance. Conservative publications applauded the subcommittee’s efforts. The National Review declared that the SPIS had “performed a major public service” by gathering the information and publishing its conclusions. Aviation Week’s editor, Robert Hotz, charged that US air power had been “frittered away” and opined that the “bitter exchanges” between the SPIS and McNamara revealed the senators’ “clear contempt for his credibility” and policies. More liberal press outlets reached opposing conclusions. The Nation noted the “serious schism” between the “military . . . on one side, and the other war-makers . . . on the other” and worried that the generals would not have “become as emphatic and venturesome before a Congressional committee” without feeling confident “the tide is running their way.” On September 1, following the release of the SPIS report, the New York Times entitled its lead editorial, “Generals Out of Control.” The paper criticized the military leaders’ “insurrection” and declared the “public campaign of some of the nation’s top generals for an extension of the bombing” had raised “serious issues of civilian vs. military control of defense and diplomatic policy.”76

Although no pollsters queried the public directly concerning the Stennis hearings, Harris results from October 1967, following the release of the generals’ testimony and the SPIS report, were instructive. Respondents to the question of how Johnson was handling the war answered 23 percent positive and 77 percent negative, the lowest assessment of his presidency. By December, the public also appeared to have adopted the SPIS-military brief for escalating the air war. Harris found a division of 63 to 37 percent favoring escalation over deescalation, compared to a majority endorsing deescalation in July, prior to the hearings. Also in December, respondents by a margin of 58 to 24 percent deemed it necessary “to convince the Communists they will lose if they continue the fighting,” and 63 to 24 percent opposed any bombing pause to test Hanoi’s willingness to negotiate. The December poll found Americans favoring the mining of Haiphong harbor by a margin of 49 to 29 percent, with 22 percent undecided. Stennis’s and Dixie’s aggressive positions seemed to have gained majority standing.77

The great bulk of John Stennis’s southern correspondents during 1967 agreed with these Harris results. Frustrated by American casualties and the failure to defeat the Vietnamese communists and desperate to escape the draining stalemate, they advocated decisive blows against North Vietnam. A Virginian declared, “The American people—the vast majority at any rate—want to see maximum force brought to bear to win the war at minimum cost to our boys in the field.” From Greenwood, Mississippi, came the complaint that “ordinary folks” had grown “angry . . . about our sons and husbands fighting a no-win battle.” The preferred approach: “Let’s forget the mistaken policy of graduated response and replace it with a policy of total response” designed to bomb North Vietnam into submission.78

Just as Fulbright and the SFRC dissenters faced detractors the previous year, Stennis heard from opponents of this majority southern opinion on the conduct of the war. An eighty-five-year-old Alabamian was outraged at the military’s perspective. Senators such as Stennis reminded this octogenarian “of a bunch of young birds in their nests. When the mother birds return to the nest ALL OPEN THEIR MOUTHS AND GET IN POSITION TO SWALLOW AND THAT IS JUST WHAT YOU DID.” Others were more succinct: “We just could be where we don’t belong.” Or, “Big men admit being wrong. . . . We are WRONG OVER THERE.”79

The most discussed response from southern legislators to the SPIS push for a fundamental shift in the conduct of the war came from Senator Thruston Morton. The Kentucky Republican had voiced his alarm at the possible US pursuit of “total victory” in May. During August and September, the senator agonized along with the nation over how best to achieve an “honorable withdrawal” from the “two wars in Viet Nam.” He believed the United States could “whip the North Vietnamese” but feared the force necessary to do so would draw “China into the picture.” The second war, “a civil war in the South,” was even more problematic, given the Vietcong’s control of much of rural South Vietnam. Morton doubted the United States could replace the NLF with a “loyal government . . . in each and every village.” Nor did he believe that Hanoi would negotiate “while under fire” from US bombing. Since it was apparent that neither the US air war nor ground strategies were working, Morton favored confining US bombing to “supply lines,” ending the attacks near “metropolitan areas,” and eliminating search-and-destroy ground operations in favor of defending major population centers.”80

In a prominent Senate speech on September 28 Morton adopted an unusual public posture by admitting he had been “wrong” in supporting the US military escalation in Vietnam. The senator bemoaned the “disastrous decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy” over the previous three years, the “root cause” of which he traced to the “bankruptcy” of the US position in Vietnam. Unable to envision a “military solution” to the conflict, he called for “an immediate cessation of all bombing of North Vietnam,” combined with aggressive “political and diplomatic action.” While reiterating his prescription for changes in the US ground strategy, Morton urged the Johnson administration to pressure the South Vietnamese government to adopt reforms and to make it clear that the United States expected an “appropriate response” from North Vietnam and the NLF if America implemented “unilateral disengagement.”81

Deeply disturbed by Morton’s speech, President Johnson summoned the senator to the White House for an unsuccessful session of arm twisting. Fulbright welcomed Morton’s conversion to the antiwar perspective and perceived a decisive “swing in opinion in the Senate, as well as in the country.” Reporter Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post agreed and cited Morton as a “political weathervane” who symbolized the “millions of American voters” who “along with many religious leaders, editorial writers and elected officials—appeared to be changing their views about the war.”82

The reactions of Kentuckians to Morton’s change of heart on the war mirrored the South’s conflicted attitudes on Vietnam rather than any clear growth of antiwar sentiment. A Frankfort resident observed presciently, “It is apparent that you have no intention of running for public office again.” What was less evident to this hawk was why the senator had “sold out to the liberals.” Another critic scolded Morton for having joined the antiwar company of Martin Luther King and northern liberal Democrats such as John Galbraith, Norman Cousins, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Other Morton constituents praised his revised position on the war. They recognized that “few men” were “big enough to admit they made a mistake in judgment” and that “great courage” was required to change his “position on such an important issue.” As was so often true of antiwar southerners, several hastened to assure Morton they were “loyal Americans,” as opposed to “peaceniks,” “radicals,” “beatniks,” “left-wingers,” or “pinks.”83

Responses to the SPIS hearings from congressmen and the public were instructive, but President Johnson’s reaction remained decisive. LBJ was no more receptive to the SPIS debate over the nature of the war than he had been to the SFRC hearings the previous year. Following a dinner party with the president, vice president, and several other Democratic senators on September 21, Senator George McGovern described LBJ as a “confused man—literally tortured by the mess he had gotten into in Vietnam. He is restless, almost like a caged lion.” Deeply disturbed by McNamara’s loss of confidence in Rolling Thunder and movement toward the Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper position, Johnson was also distressed by the secretary’s face-off with Stennis, the JCS, and the SPIS—a confrontation that graphically exposed the rift between the administration and its military leaders and their congressional allies. The president deplored the generals’ blatant attacks on his policies and bluntly told JCS chairman Wheeler, “Your generals almost destroyed us with their testimony in the hearings,” and the JCS were admonished not to “wash any more dirty linen in public.” Although Johnson tilted further toward the Stennis position by releasing additional targets on September 2, he rejected the SPIS-military recommendations to bomb or mine Haiphong harbor and target all other military installations in the heavily populated northeast quadrant surrounding Hanoi and Haiphong. He also refused to invade North Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos. In so doing he clung to his limited-war position and rejected the “all-out” alternative that would have altered fundamentally the conduct of the war. Stennis and the SPIS were no more successful than Fulbright and the SFRC in either convincing or forcing the president and his administration to adopt fundamentally new policies.84

Ironically, Stennis and his hearings may have hindered the outcome he sought. By seeking to discredit McNamara and the Defense Department, the Mississippi senator provided the public platform the secretary’s fierce personal loyalty to Johnson kept him from adopting on his own. From that platform McNamara articulated a formidable and effective brief against unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam and the accompanying risk of war with China. New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan suggested that McNamara’s antibombing arguments ultimately “helped the President to hold the line against the really drastic escalation of the bombing which the generals and their political friends” were advocating.85

Still, Stennis and the SPIS had brought the basic divisions between the Johnson administration and the military squarely into the public eye. The JCS brief for unrestricted bombing and McNamara’s rejoinder constituted the very debate over strategy that Johnson had so assiduously sought to avoid both publicly and within the administration. While making their case, Stennis, the SPIS, and the military leaders added to the “stab-in-the-back” explanation for the lack of US success in Vietnam. Whereas Rusk and other administration witnesses and supporters during the Fulbright hearings had blamed congressional dissenters, antiwar protestors, and the press for undermining the war effort and encouraging the enemy, the SPIS and the military pointed to Johnson and his civilian advisors as the principal culprits responsible for preventing US soldiers and fliers from winning the war. These hawks argued that the lack of military progress in turn prompted the decline of public support for the US effort. Given Dixie’s perceptions of the war as both necessary and winnable, southerners were particularly receptive to this whole array of stab-in-the-back explanations for the lack of US military success in Vietnam.

As the year ended, southerners had continued to play a prominent role in the national debate over US involvement in Vietnam. Much of that debate in 1967 was devoted to the preferred conduct of the military campaign against North Vietnam and the NLF, and Senator John Stennis faithfully represented majority opinion in Dixie. The Mississippi senator remained committed to containing Vietnamese communism but harshly criticized President Johnson’s limited-war strategy. The chair of the SPIS argued instead for the JCS preference for an “all-out” war and, along with other southern hawks such as Senators Russell, Thurmond, and Tower, pressured Johnson to adopt a far more aggressive bombing campaign against Hanoi. Like Senator Fulbright and the SFRC in 1966, Stennis and the SPIS stimulated national and, from LBJ’s perspective, unwelcome debate, advanced a species of the stab-in-the-back explanation for the lack of US success, but failed to alter the administration’s fundamental conduct of the war.

Through their responses to Gallup and Harris polling, letters to their political representatives, and the prowar positions of the influential Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church of the United States, the clear majority of southerners signaled their agreement with Stennis’s prescription for wining the war. Despite their vocal criticism of Johnson and his conduct of the war, southerners sustained their critical regional support for the conflict, and Dixie remained the nation’s most prowar region. Without that regional support, it would have been much more difficult for Johnson to have persisted in waging an increasingly unpopular war. But even among the prowar southern majority, the war’s accompanying agony was apparent. Many worried that the war’s costs and lack of clear progress were damaging national patriotism. Others had come to believe that the United States had erred in sending combat troops to Vietnam and objected to paying higher taxes or allowing their sons to go off to battle unless Johnson lifted all restrictions on the conflict’s prosecution.

Dixie’s African Americans felt the war’s agony most acutely. Long conscious of the disparity between the nation’s expressed mission to bolster democracy and equality abroad and the treatment of people of color at home, black organizations and individuals such as Reverend King, Muhammad Ali, SNCC, and SCLC denounced the war in Vietnam. They asserted that African Americans were bearing an undue burden of the fighting, and the war distracted American attention from the Civil Rights Movement and the pursuit of domestic racial equality. Fearful that such protests would alienate President Johnson, impugn African American patriotism, and harm the campaign for civil rights, other blacks castigated King, Ali, Julian Bond, and SNCC. As with the South’s white community, the war occasioned deep rifts and severe anguish among southern blacks; and the majority refused to openly criticize Johnson and the war. Prominent southern white proponents of civil rights dismissed black critics of US foreign policy as badly out of their element, while more hostile southerners arraigned them in far more caustic, often racist terms.

Still, King and black antiwar critics joined other opponents of the Vietnam conflict in offering trenchant criticisms of US involvement. Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper carried on despite the often-hostile responses of their constituents and congressional colleagues. Southern editors Harry Ashmore and William Baggs, like small-town attorney Frazier Woolard, provided striking, if less well-known, examples of southerners deeply committed to ending the war. Senator Thruston Morton was the most important convert to Dixie’s antiwar contingent during 1967. He joined a persistent minority who defied regional trends by registering a broad range of antiwar objections with their congressional representatives and neighbors.

Indeed, as 1967 concluded, four key southerners clearly propounded Dixie’s ongoing divisions and embodied the region’s prominence in the debate over the war. In an October 12 news conference Secretary Rusk reiterated his unwavering contention that any US adversary’s perception that “our treaties are a bluff” could produce “catastrophic” outcomes “for all mankind.” Clearly targeting domestic critics of the administration, the secretary castigated anyone who sullied the “credibility” of America’s “pledged word” and thereby subjected the “nation to mortal danger.” Senator Tower, just back from another trip to South Vietnam, praised the ARVN, agreed that the “only place we can lose this war . . . is in Washington,” and saw “no honor in vacating solemn commitments” and no “security in . . . turning away as aggression triumphs.”86

Senators Gore and Fulbright, two of the antiwar dissenters toward whom Rusk’s and Tower’s barbs were directed, pointedly disagreed with such assertions. In an extended Senate speech on October 24, Gore questioned the administration’s sincerity in calling for negotiations: “If in fact we are in mortal peril in Vietnam, what is there to negotiate?” The Tennessee senator bluntly rejected Rusk’s contention that either US “security” or “vital interests” were at risk there and proposed the neutralization of Vietnam as the only course through which the United States could escape the war with its “honor” intact. Six weeks later, Fulbright defended the right of dissent as “inalienable” and mocked the administration’s suggestion that all critics “ought to be gratified,” given Washington’s “restraint in allowing us to express our views.” He too dismissed Rusk’s arguments regarding US credibility. Far from instilling confidence in US foreign policy and the nation’s “readiness to discharge all of its prodigal commitments around the world,” the war had demonstrated American inability to suppress this “war of national liberation” and raised questions over whether the American people would permit “their Government to plunge into another such costly adventure.”87