The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [204]
By-passing a Declaration was one result of the limited-war concept developed during the Kennedy Administration. In a remarkable statement of that time* McNamara had said, “The greatest contribution Vietnam is making … is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire.” He believed this to be “almost a necessity in our history, because this is the kind of war we’ll likely be facing for the next fifty years.”
Limited war is basically a war decided on by the Executive, and “without arousing the public ire”—meaning the public notice—means parting company with the people, which is to say discarding the principle of representative government. Limited war is not nicer or kinder or more just than all-out war, as its proponents would have it. It kills with the same finality. In addition, when limited on one side but total for the enemy, it is more than likely to be unsuccessful, as rulers more accustomed to the irrational have perceived. Urged by Syria and Jordan to launch a limited war against Israel in 1959, President Nasser of Egypt replied that he was willing to do so if his allies could obtain Ben-Gurion’s assurance that he too would limit it. “For a war to be limited depends on the other side.”
Johnson’s resort to war as soon as the election was over received the appropriate comment in a cartoon by Paul Conrad showing him looking into a mirror and seeing Goldwater’s face looking back at him. Dissent from this point on, though as yet confined mainly to students, extremists and pacifists, grew loud and incessant. A National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam was formed, which organized protest rallies and assembled a crowd of 40,000 to mount a picket line around the White House. Draft-card-burning spread, following the example of a young man, David Miller, who courted arrest by ceremoniously burning his card in the presence of Federal agents and who suffered two years in prison for the act. In horrible emulation of the Buddhist monks, a Quaker of Baltimore burned himself alive on the Pentagon steps on 2 November 1965, followed by a second such suicide in front of the UN a week later. The acts seemed too crazed to influence the American public, except perhaps negatively, as equating anti-war protest in the public mind with emotional misfits.
If dissent was passionate, it was far from general. Hard-hat sentiment, which so distinguishes organized labor in America from its counterpart abroad, was expressed by the AFL-CIO Council. In an unveiled warning to members of Congress in the mid-term election of 1966 the Council resolved, “Those who would deny our military forces unstinting support are in effect aiding the Communist enemy of our country.” Labor’s rank and file shared the sentiment. When an unorthodox mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the Ford suburb, put a referendum on the municipal ballot in the 1966 election calling for a cease-fire followed by American withdrawal “so the Vietnamese people can settle their own problems,” he was answered by an overwhelming vote in the negative.
Influential voices, however, were taking up the dissent. Even Walter Lippmann sacrificed his carefully cultivated cordiality with Presidents to the demands of truth. Denying the argument of “external aggression,” he stated the obvious: that there were never two Vietnams but only “two zones of one nation.” He poured scorn on the policy of globalism that committed the United States to “unending wars of liberation” as a universal policeman. The conversion of Lippmann and of the New York Times, which now opposed deeper involvement, added respectability to the opposition, while inside the government doubts that the war could be militarily resolved were coming into the open. The President’s close and trusted press secretary, Bill Moyers, tried steadily to outflank the hawks at the government’s top by reporting the disillusions of lesser officers, agents and observers. The Moyers network, initially created at Johnson’s request for contrary views, proved too uncomfortable