The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [213]
His was a terrible recognition. To see ourselves newly and suddenly as the “bad guys” in the world’s polarity and to know the agent was “my own government” was a development with serious consequences. Distrust for and even disgust with government were the most serious, beginning with alienation from the vote. “You voted in ’64 and got Johnson—why bother?” read a banner at an anti-war rally in New York. Vice-President Humphrey was unmercifully heckled at Stanford University. “The deterioration of every government,” Montesquieu wrote in the 18th century in his Spirit of the Laws, “begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”
The Administration’s war reports eroded its credibility at home, for which much of the blame rested with the military. Indoctrinated in deception for purposes of misleading the enemy, the military misleads from habit. Each of the services and major commands manipulated the news in the interests of “national security,” or to make itself look good, or to win a round in the ongoing interservice contest, or to cover up mistakes or glamorize a commander. With an angry press eager to expose, the public was not left in the usual ignorance of the often shabby deceptions lying beneath the hocus-pocus of communiqués.
Dissent spread to the establishment. Walter Lippmann spent an evening in 1966 persuading Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, hitherto firmly among the hawks, that “decent people could no longer support the war.” The alarming cost, reaching into the billions, mortgaging the future to deficit spending, causing inflation and unfavorable balance of payments, worried many in the business world. Some businessmen formed opposition groups, small in relation to the business community as a whole, but encouraged when the imposing figure of Marriner Eccles, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, spoke publicly for a group called Negotiation Now, organized by Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. An occasional ex-government voice broke silence. James Thomson, one of the internal dissenters who had left the Far East staff of the State Department in 1966, stated in a letter to the New York Times that there had always been “constructive alternatives” and, in an echo of Burke, that the United States as the greatest power on earth had “the power to lose face, the power to admit error, and the power to act with magnanimity.”
General Ridgway’s dislike of the war was well known. Reaching the independence of retirement, another of his stature, General David M. Shoup, recently retired Commandant of the Marine Corps and a hero of the Pacific war, joined him. The government’s contention that Vietnam was “vital” to United States interests was, he said, “poppycock”; the whole of Southeast Asia was not “worth a single American life.… Why can’t we let people actually determine their own lives?” Senator Robert Kennedy, the President’s nemesis, or so perceived, called for a halt to the bombing as futile and in another speech infuriating to the White House proposed that the NLF should have a voice in any negotiations. A milestone was passed when a single Senator, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, joined the lonely pair of Morse and Gruening to vote against a new appropriation bill of $12 billion for the war. In the House, Representative George Brown of California offered a Resolution to be added to this bill stating that it be the “sense of the Congress” that none of the funds authorized should be used for “military operations in or over North Vietnam.” Though only a Resolution and not obligatory upon the Executive, it was nevertheless overwhelmingly defeated by 372 to 18.
Despite twenty years of pronouncements ever since Truman about the “vital” interest of Southeast Asia to the United States and the dire necessity of stopping Communism,