Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [46]
Although nonconformists always exist, they rarely matter—a dictum that applies to American statecraft no less than to theology or any other pursuit that rests on faith rather than empirical evidence. Yet as Lyndon Johnson sent U.S. troops in ever-increasing numbers to fight in Vietnam, he inadvertently created conditions in which heresy flourished and heretics gained a serious hearing.
The war triggered massive protest. At first, President Johnson (and his successor, Richard Nixon) sought to co-opt their critics, professing their own abhorrence of war and commitment to peace. When that didn’t work, they tried to ignore the commotion in the streets. When that too fell short, they impugned the motives of those who opposed their policies and questioned the patriotism of those resisting the war. Still, the complaints voiced on the outside resonated with figures on the inside. Individuals who might normally have been counted on to defend the Washington rules now had the temerity to admit their own loss of faith. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War emboldened such insiders to express doubts about matters that hitherto had seemed sacrosanct. It was as if cardinal archbishops suddenly began questioning Rome on the fundamentals of Roman Catholic belief.
Among the prominent figures breaking ranks, two in particular still stand out: Sen. J. William Fulbright and Gen. David M. Shoup. Their perspectives differed as did their proposed remedies, but together they fashioned a sustained and probing critique of the American credo. That their attempt to displace that credo met with defeat does not detract from the gallantry of their efforts. That the record of their apostasy has all but vanished from public memory only testifies to the thoroughness with which the defenders of the party line were able to scrub clean the status quo.
An erudite and flinty Democrat from Arkansas, Fulbright served from 1959 to 1974 as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and in that position made himself a force to reckon with. As Lyndon Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War, the senator became increasingly vocal not only in opposing it but in questioning the assumptions that informed U.S. policy. Through a series of Senate hearings, speeches, and writings, he vented those concerns, most completely and compellingly in his widely read 1966 book The Arrogance of Power.
Fulbright’s purpose in writing the book was to expose as defective Washington’s existing approach to exercising global leadership and to offer an alternative. On all matters pertaining to foreign policy, Fulbright took for granted American good intentions. Problems occurred when good intentions were married to seemingly bottomless reserves of power. The result was self-delusion combined with a tendency to lose touch with reality. Power, Fulbright wrote,
tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations—to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. . . . Once imbued with the idea of mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s work. The Lord, after all, would surely not choose you as His agent and then deny you the sword with which to work His will.1
According to Fulbright, this described the delusions to which Washington had succumbed since World War II. Among the chief fruits of those delusions was the disastrous and utterly