1
The U.S. actions that eventually led to the Vietnam War began in 1946, when, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States began to advise and financially support France’s la sale guerre or “dirty war” against Vietnamese Nationalist communist forces. The militant Ho Chi Minh, who during the 1930s worked internationally as a secret Comintern agent for the Soviet Union and helped form the Indochina Communist Party, led the communist forces (also called the Vietminh) against France. The Vietminh fought for Vietnamese independence in a country that had been a French colony for roughly a century.1 The United States initially justified its support of France in the conflict by explaining that France was an ally and needed assistance retaining its colonial holdings in the wake of the Second World War.2 As the dirty war continued into the 1950s, however, the United States focused less on securing a French colony and more on defending Vietnam against communism.
The U.S. agenda changed because these were the watershed years of the Cold War, when the Soviets and Americans—former anti-Nazi allies of World War II—and their respective communist and democratic political systems transformed into enemies. A series of aggressive actions by the USSR—the subversion of postwar regimes in Greece and Turkey, a communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Berlin blockade—threatened the potential influence of the United States in the postwar environment and provoked a strong U.S. response focused on forming a large democratic alliance. In 1947, the United States established the Truman Doctrine, which pledged military and economic assistance for any countries fighting against communism, because, as Truman maintained, totalitarian regimes coerced “free peoples” and thus “undermine[d] the foundations of international peace and . . . the security of the United States.”3 In 1948, the United States implemented the Marshall Plan, a massive program of economic aid to western Europe, created to curb communist influence in Italy and France. In 1949, a coalition of European nations and the United States created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an allied defense against Soviet incursion. Mao Zedong’s establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 and China’s entry into the Korean War, backing North Korea, in October 1950 also pushed the United States to fear that a loss of Vietnam to the communists would be the end of democracy in Southeast Asia.4 This worldview marked the beginning of the “domino theory,” which ruled American foreign policy regarding communism in Southeast Asia into the mid-1960s.5
The dirty war lasted until 1954, when Ho Chi Minh’s forces defeated a French army 80 percent funded by the United States.6 The final battle of the war was at Dienbienphu, where a French garrison fell on May 7, 1954.7 France’s defeat did not immediately lead to the creation of a communist country. China and the USSR feared that such a move would be a pretext for U.S. intervention in Indochina, and thus a new war. As a result, the conclusion of the fighting led to seventy-four days of negotiations in Geneva between the Vietminh and the French, as well as countries with a significant stake in the outcome: Cambodia, Laos, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China (which was making its first appearance on the international diplomatic stage). The negotiations resulted in the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, which split Vietnam into two countries at the 17th parallel, along which would run a thin, ten-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone, known as the DMZ.8 Two states came to be created on each side of theDMZ. The Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) would control the North, with its capital in Hanoi. The democratic State of Vietnam—alternatively known as the Government of the Republic of Vietnam or South Vietnam—would be established in the South, with its capital in Saigon. France would transfer its power to the South (under the democratic Vietnamese rule of Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem). The Accords stated that the creation of two states was a temporary solution, meant to allocate space for each side to retreat its forces until 1956, when elections would be held to reunify the country.9
From the beginning, while both North and South Vietnam outwardly supported the Accords, neither side truly complied. Numerous Vietnamese communists failed to retreat from the South to the North, and joined by those sympathetic in the South to their cause, they formed a growing oppositional movement to renew their struggle.10 For its part, the United States saw the accords as giving the Communist Party of Vietnam too much power and consequently began providing substantial military and economic aid to the South. This aid came directly under the cover of a newly created coalition of anticommunist countries inspired by NATO: the Southeast Asia Trade Organization (SEATO), comprising the United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and Pakistan. In August 1954, the United States, via the CIA, began conducting secret sabotage missions against the communist forces in the South, in direct violation of the U.S. promise at Geneva to “refrain from the threat or the use of force” in the country.11
Until 1956 the South Vietnamese government and its leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, were able to keep the communists at bay through a series of repressive laws.12 Yet these laws provoked the communists. In 1957, they commenced attacks as well as assassinations of politicians and others associated with the South Vietnamese government. By 1959, communist armed forces (which became commonly referred to as the Vietcong or VC) were regularly involved in firefights with the South Vietnamese army. At the same time, more and more South Vietnamese—both communists and those sympathetic to the communist cause—joined the National Liberation Front (NLF). The NLF was the political arm of the Vietcong and was employed as an umbrella organization to embrace anyone in the South who opposed Diem and wanted to reunify Vietnam.13 Also, the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party—located in North Vietnam—privately resolved to help the Vietcong use force to overthrow Diem.
Between 1961 and 1962, because of the increasing power of communist forces both inside and outside South Vietnam, it became progressively clear that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), or the military of South Vietnam, could not adequately defend the country. In 1961, there were more than one hundred ambushes and attacks on ARVN posts per month. Between 1959 and 1961, the number of South Vietnamese government officials assassinated by the Vietcong increased from twelve hundred to four thousand a year. By 1962, almost thirteen thousand communist cadres had infiltrated the South from the North. These forces were supplied from the North via the Ho Chi Minh trail, a network of roads that ran north and south through Laos, and with American weapons captured from the South Vietnamese or sold by Diem’s corrupt military officers.
In response to this situation, during 1962 and 1963—the last two years of President John F. Kennedy’s administration—the United States dramatically increased its aid to South Vietnam and Diem. The form of Kennedy’s aid differed in character from what it had been historically. It significantly enlarged the presence of American (CIA and military) “advisers” at all levels of the Vietnamese military and government, from eight hundred, which it had been throughout the 1950s, to more than nine thousand.14 Following the lead of a report by his advisers Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy also supplied South Vietnam with military hardware, such as helicopters and armored personnel carriers. This increased U.S. military investment in South Vietnam was kept secret from the American public.
Over the next few years, Kennedy’s aid did little. One of its more dramatic failures was the addition of helicopters, which the VC quickly learned to shoot down with antiaircraft guns. This period also saw the striking collapse of major U.S.-devised initiatives like the Strategic Hamlet Program, launched in 1962. Reminiscent of earlier approaches pursued by the United States in South Vietnam (such as the “Agroville” scheme, which had failed three years previous), the program sought to concentrate peasants into more defensible positions and segregate them from VC influence.15 Yet it backfired and proved one of the most destructive ARVN strategic maneuvers. South Vietnamese peasants, moved to unfamiliar hamlets outside their villages, refused to defend them against other Vietnamese who had grown up in or near the area. In displacing villagers far from their homes and farms, the program also created masses of poor and distraught men and women. In all, the Strategic Hamlet Program resulted most often in the conversion of peasants into communists or communist sympathizers.16
The continuing decay of the Diem government further impeded Kennedy’s aid. Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu was mentally unstable, and it was believed he was negotiating secretly with the North.17 Nhu’s wife occupied the place of first lady of South Vietnam (as Diem was celibate), and infuriated many in the population by her arrogance and by instituting puritanically repressive social laws. She abolished divorce, made adultery a crime, closed Saigon nightclubs and ballrooms, and allowed cafés to remain open with the stipulation that the women who worked there (many of whom were prostitutes) wear white tunics that made them look like dental assistants. Conjointly, in 1962–1963, Diem began to severely antagonize the Buddhist population, which had been protesting the regime at the same time as the NLF. One of the most harrowing examples of this occurred on the birthday of the Buddha, on May 8, 1963. Buddhist crowds were angered because the government censored a popular monk’s radio address, and the regime used the army to disperse the crowd. A stampede resulted in which eight children died. In the summer, Buddhist unrest became international news. On June 11, a sixty-year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc climbed out of a motorcade, sat down on the ground, and as other monks and nuns encircled him allowed himself to be doused with gasoline and lit on fire, thus committing ritual suicide. Buddhists and others watched him in reverence, prostrating themselves as he burned in the streets. A photograph of the scene, taken by Malcolm Browne, an Associated Press photographer who had been tipped off by the monks, was on the front page of almost every significant international newspaper the next morning. Further Buddhist protests provided a variety of dissidents (who hadn’t joined the NLF) an outlet for nationalist tendencies.18 Members of Diem’s government even came to the Buddhists’ defense. Madam Nhu’s father, Tran Van Chuong, quit his post to denounce the government alongside the Buddhists.19 Foreign Minister Vu Van Mau resigned and shaved his head like a Buddhist monk as a gesture of protest.20
Though Washington told Diem to conciliate with the Buddhists, Diem decided to raid Buddhist pagodas in South Vietnam in his belief that they were harboring communists. In conjunction with the near-collapsed state of the Saigon government, this action led the United States to quietly encourage a coup (originally proposed by South Vietnamese generals) to remove Diem. Engineered by Henry Cabot Lodge (the U.S. ambassador in Saigon), the coup eventually took place on November 1. ARVN units seized Saigon, disarmed Nhu’s security forces, and occupied the presidential palace. Though the coup intended to spare the lives of Diem and Nhu, insurgents captured and murdered them both. Diem’s murder allegedly shocked Kennedy, who himself would be killed three weeks later.21
After the coup, the situation in South Vietnam became even more politically unstable.22 During the seven months between December 1963 and June 1964, the South Vietnamese leadership changed hands four times.23 In January, the commander of the First Corps, General Nguyen Khanh (with the help of the Catholic General Tran Thien Khiem), toppled the junta that had displaced Diem only three months before.24 Following Khanh’s move was a demi-coup by the “Young Turks”: Generals Nguyen Cao Ky, Nguyen Van Thieu, Nguyen Chanh Theiu, Nguyen Chanh Thi, and Le Nguyen Khang.25 Then Khanh retook power, after which Van Theiu, Ky, and Nguyen Huu Co proclaimed themselves the National Leadership Council and Ky was selected to be chief of the Executive Council charged with the day-to-day administration of the country.
During this period, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—in many respects the chief architect of American involvement in Vietnam—began making it clear to Johnson and his administration (newly installed following Kennedy’s assassination) that he believed U.S. strategies were grossly in error. This was a startling turnaround, since throughout his management of the armed forces in Vietnam until that point, McNamara had consistently assured Kennedy of the military’s stable progress. According to McNamara, the Southern regime and its hold on the countryside were now deteriorating much faster than he had anticipated.26 To make matters worse, in late 1963 the North Vietnamese, fearful that the United States would further escalate the conflict, persuaded the Soviet Union to support them. This move heavily bolstered defenses around North Vietnam’s major cities and coastline and solidified the conflict as another principal site of U.S.–Soviet Cold War engagement.27
In the summer of 1964, the nature of the U.S. role in Vietnam changed drastically. On August 2, it was reported that North Vietnam had conducted an unprovoked attack on the USS C. Turner Joy and the USS Maddox, two American ships stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two days later a second attack was reported. Though the details of the second attack were unclear—and years later it was concluded that the attack never happened, and that the initial North Vietnamese attacks were actually provoked by U.S. espionage—President Johnson and his staff seized on the sequence of events to justify the implementation of a new military plan, which had been prepared two months before.28 The plan formally established a conflict in Vietnam, and as a result, Johnson proposed a congressional resolution to authorize military force in the region—without, however, making a formal declaration of war. Known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the measure passed both the House and the Senate, with only two dissenting votes, on August 7, 1964.29
Following the passage of the resolution, the government undertook reprisal attacks against the DRV, yet on the whole it exercised caution.30 According to polls, the country approved of Johnson’s actions, and he and the Democratic Party rode this approval into the election of 1964.31 Against the hawkish Republican candidate Barry Goldwater—who wanted to expand the conflict in Vietnam—Johnson called himself the “peace candidate,” and during the campaign he pledged to “never send American boys to Vietnam to do the job that Asian boys should do.”32 Johnson’s strategy worked. In November 1964, he won by the largest margin in U.S. history up to that point.
After the election, U.S. strategy was heavily debated. Johnson’s Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to wage a massive bombing campaign in North Vietnam. They believed it was the way to make the communists submit and to stabilize the regime in Saigon. The Joint Chiefs’ faith in such an action stemmed from an almost mystical American confidence in the supremacy of U.S. air-power as a result of its successes in World War II.33 Civilians in the Pentagon were more hesitant. They argued for more selective bombings, which they believed would sufficiently pressure the communists. Outside these two groups, George Ball, one of the president’s advisers, proposed “an immediate political solution that would avoid deeper U.S. involvement.”34 Johnson stalled making any decisions. He did not want to intensify the conflict, and he was worried that any U.S. move would prompt a communist response that the current U.S. force in Vietnam (of twenty-three thousand) could not withstand. By the end of the year, the only decision Johnson made was to preapprove retaliatory bombings of North Vietnam immediately following the occurrence of what was defined as “a spectacular enemy action.”35
Such an action took place on the night of February 6–7, 1965: the Vietcong attacked army installations in Pleiku, South Vietnam. These attacks led first to the Johnson administration’s approval of a series of retaliatory air strikes, code-named Operation Flaming Dart. Flaming Dart lasted through the month of February and focused on air bases and logistics and communications centers in North Vietnam and the DMZ. On March 2, 1965, Flaming Dart gave way to an order of sustained bombing missions, called Operation Rolling Thunder, in which pilots dropped over eight hundred tons of bombs on North Vietnam every day.36 Rolling Thunder initially continued for eight weeks. The United States believed that after a strong show of force, the war would come to a quick end. In the words of the David Halberstam, the United States conceived its strategy as “the use of power to prevent using power.”37
Rolling Thunder did not end the war. In actuality, its only immediate effect was to cause the first official deployment of U.S. ground troops in Vietnam. For as Johnson had been advised since he began the bombing missions, air campaigns necessitated the defense of air bases with ground troops. Troops began arriving in South Vietnam on March 8, 1965, when thirty-five hundred American marines deployed in response to a formal request from the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, to protect an airbase in Danang.38
As was the case with the bombing missions, Johnson initially deflected criticism from the American public by representing the deployment of troops as a short-term expedient. Also, he requested few troops. The president quickly had to find other means to defend his policies, however, because he had to commit additional men. Soon after Westmoreland’s original request, Johnson sent two more marine battalions to South Vietnam and then roughly nineteen thousand logistical troops. Then the State Department disclosed, “almost casually,” that American forces were no longer in South Vietnam for defensive purposes but would engage in attack missions. Or as one marine commander of the time put it, the military would now be able to “start killing the Vietcong instead of sitting on their ditty box.”39 Following this disclosure, Rolling Thunder continued unabated and even more troops streamed into the country. During the summer and fall of 1965 there began a rapid and sustained increase in military inductions. Between January 1962 and June 1965 there were eighty-seven hundred draft calls a month; in July the number rose to twenty-nine thousand a month.40 By the end of 1965 there were two hundred thousand soldiers in Vietnam.
From the beginning of Flaming Dart, the 1965 actions of the U.S. government in Vietnam gave rise to constant U.S. newspaper, magazine, and television coverage, which would continue virtually unabated until the war’s conclusion. David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, and Harrison Salisbury were among the major journalists covering the conflict in the United States. Browne, who wrote and photographed for the Associated Press, and Halberstam, of the New York Times, had shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on South Vietnam and each released a book on the war in 1965 (Browne authored The New Face of War and Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire).41 Tim Page, Sean Flynn, Don McCullin, and Phillip Jones Griffiths were the most significant photographers of the war. Walter Cronkite of CBS News was the primary television news anchor reporting critically on the unfolding conflict.
Television was crucial to the domestic understanding of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was the first war to ever be regularly seen on television, the primacy of which led the war to be dubbed, by New Yorker columnist Michael Arlen, the “living room war.”42
Flaming Dart and Johnson’s subsequent military moves of the spring of 1965, accompanied by consistent American media coverage of them, provoked the first significant antiwar protests in the United States.43 On April 17, 1965, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the biggest and most important activist organizations of the New Left during the 1960s, held the first major march against the war in Washington, DC. Twenty-five thousand people showed up in what was the largest march ever recorded to date in the nation’s capital.44 SDS’s march led to other antiwar marches that year at the University of California, Berkeley, in New York City, and again in Washington. The first “teach-in” took place in the spring of 1965 at the University of Michigan. This new form of protest quickly spread to many other college campuses.45 Characteristically, teach-ins were lectures given to students outside of class hours by experts or academics (from inside and outside the university) engaged with U.S. foreign affairs. These lectures sought to inform students about U.S. policies in Vietnam. Due to its calm and scholarly nature, the teach-in immediately appealed to a broad segment of the student population, many of whom might have been against more involved or aggressive demonstrations.46Though these initial marches and teach-ins generally focused on stopping the war, they often—as societal protest would do until 1970—concentrated on the issue of the draft, a fact that is well-known about Vietnam-era protest. Students were characteristically the target age for the draft and antiwar students fought (in some cases for many painful years) to avoid fighting in a war they did not support.47
In addition to marches and teach-ins, in 1965 significant numbers of American intellectuals began to write against the conflict. Periodicals were the main vehicle for the expression of this mode of dissent, and the most popular were The Nation, Commonweal, theNew Yorker, Dissent, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Partisan Review, New Republic, Evergreen Review, Ramparts, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and the New York Review of Books. The New York Review of Books arguably offered the most sustained concentration of antiwar writings for the largest readership.48 There were also small, although influential, mainstream publishing projects that sought to feature and promote intellectual opposition. One was Authors Take Sides on Vietnam: Two Questions on the War in Vietnam Answered by the Authors of Several Nations, published by Simon and Schuster in 1967. Its construction was relatively simple, though it contained a wealth of intellectual perspectives. Its editors, John Bagguley and Cecil Woolf, invited more than three hundred well-known authors from several countries to answer the following questions: “Are you for, or against, the intervention of the United States in Vietnam? How, in your opinion, should the Vietnam conflict be resolved?”
Before discussing the antiwar movement any further, it must be said that it did not function independently from the rest of 1960s sociopolitical engagement, but was consistently involved in and intertwined with other political and social movements such as the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, black power, Chicano rights, the women’s liberation movement, and gay rights. (Good illustrations of this are the graphics of Emory Douglas, the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from the late 1960s until the party disbanded in 1979–1980.) This was plainly because those involved in antiwar protest activities were routinely involved in protesting other issues during the politically vibrant 1960s, though for many the antiwar movement led to a general political awakening and an involvement in these other issues.
Other contemporary movements also provided examples of engagement for the antiwar movement. The civil rights movement in particular presented the predominantly white antiwar movement with some of its central approaches to protest, such as its methods of civil disobedience and moral witness.49 Established links between the civil rights movement, black nationalism, and the antiwar movement made this broader connection possible. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the leading groups involved in the civil rights movement, was the first to forge such a link. This took place in early 1964 at a memorial service outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, for three SNCC workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner). All three had been killed near there that summer by the Ku Klux Klan after the first day they had volunteered as part of Freedom Summer, a huge push to register southern blacks to vote in the forthcoming presidential election. As Howard Zinn explained:
It was a very tense and very moving memorial. Mrs. Chaney [James Chaney’s mother] was there. Bob Moses [one of the central figures in SNCC] held up a copy of the Jackson [Mississippi] newspaper and it said something like LBJ SAYS “SHOOT TO KILL” IN THE GULF OF TONKIN. The Tonkin Gulf incident had just taken place and here were these three fellows who had been murdered and Bob Moses was making the point of the connection with the violence that the government was tolerating [in Mississippi]—they refused to send federal marshals to Mississippi to protect the civil rights workers, [and] they were ready to do violence in Asia.50
Malcolm X, a national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, who appealed to many blacks in the early 1960s because of his charismatic rhetoric and his use of bold black nationalist tactics, also linked the war to the African American struggle in 1964. He called the U.S. government hypocritical for drafting African Americans to Vietnam when they “could not even register to vote without fear of being murdered.”51 In January 1965, in a speech at Oxford University, he argued that Africans and African Americans should be on the same side as the Vietnamese, “those little rice farmers” who defeated French colonialism, and he predicted that the United States would lose the Vietnam War.52
Martin Luther King most famously connected the African American struggle and the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967, in a speech he gave at New York City’s Riverside Church. Although he had held antiwar views before this time, King refrained from making it a focus previously because his critics saw the war and civil rights as separate issues and his speaking on the war as possibly jeopardizing the cause of civil rights. As testament to the power of images to change one’s point of view, photographs published inRampartsof women and children victims of American attacks were the major catalysts for King’s speech.53 King said that the photographs, which he had seen in January, left him “nauseated and energized,” and he told an associate (who asked why he was not eating anything that night) that “nothing will ever taste good to me until I do everything I can to end the war.”54 At Riverside Church, King explained to the crowd that the American government’s repression of the Vietnamese liberation struggle was parallel to its domestic repression of blacks. Correspondingly, to young men, both black and white, who considered American policy “dishonorable and unjust,” King recommended boycotting the war through conscientious objection.55 This (albeit brief) introduction to the developing relationship between the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, black power, Chicano rights, the women’s liberation movement, and gay rights concludes the process of providing the very necessary historical context for explaining the focus of this study, how American artists engaged with the war. The following chapter now explores the origins of artistic antiwar engagement.