Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [49]
Only after leaving active duty did he discover his inner Smedley Butler. Another cantankerous marine general and Medal of Honor recipient, Butler in retirement had famously declared that “war is a racket” and blasted U.S. foreign policy between the world wars as a game rigged in favor of Wall Street. Butler spoke from a populist perspective. Shoup’s visceral opposition to the Vietnam War prodded him to formulate an analogous critique.
In a speech to a gathering of students in Los Angeles on May 14, 1966, the former marine revealed his own populist inclinations, targeting what he saw as the bogus rendering of U.S. history that Americans had been conditioned to accept. In surveying the landscape of the past, Shoup saw mostly lies. When he looked at the present, he saw more lies, all of them intended to produce citizens “about as thoughtful as the inhabitants of a second-hand wax museum.” The following passage captures the overall tone of his presentation:
You are taught that our people can get what the majority wants, by the ballot. Well, we got President Wilson that way because his campaign slogan was, “He kept us out of war.” A few days after his inauguration we were in the First World War.
I don’t have to tell you what we have now [alluding to Vietnam], how we got it; nor what’s happened since. You’ve seen it happen.
The Johnson administration had sold the war under false pretenses.
You read, you’re televised to, you’re radioed to, you’re preached to that it is necessary that we have our armed forces fight, get killed and maimed, and kill and maim other human beings including women and children because now is the time we must stop some kind of unwanted ideology from creeping up on this nation.
Shoup mocked the notion of events in Vietnam—“8,000 miles away with water in between”—posing a threat to U.S. security. “I don’t think the whole of Southeast Asia, as related to the present and future safety and freedom of the people of this country, is worth the life or limb of a single American.”
Perhaps the people inhabiting the region deserved some consideration. If so, what they deserved above all was the chance to determine their own fate. Given half a chance, they were perfectly capable of doing just that, Shoup believed. If the United States kept its “dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they might well arrive at a solution of their own.” Although the creation of a just and equitable social order might require revolutionary upheaval, the United States should allow the local population to figure out what that revolution entailed rather than having some Washington-concocted blueprint “crammed down their throats.”
When it came to communism, Shoup was even more dismissive than Fulbright. In explaining the origins of the Cold War, Shoup offered a strikingly revisionist perspective. After 1945, “Russia had no nuclear weapons. We encircled her with nuclear bombs and missiles. . . . From here it was easy [for Kremlin autocrats] to get these people to forego butter for guns. To sacrifice and toil cheerfully so they could have some weapons to protect their homeland from the threat of destruction.”
Shoup acknowledged that the existing Soviet nuclear threat was real and menacing. Yet this was a problem that did not invite a military solution. By comparison, he characterized the Soviet ideological threat as mostly hype. “Don’t let yourself get too shook-up by the over-advertised encroachment of communism,” Shoup told his student audience. “Help people to get things and the idea of communism will strangle by its own umbilical cord.”11
The former marine was by no means the only senior military officer to speak out in opposition to the Vietnam War. Gen. Matthew Ridgway and Gen. James Gavin, prominent army officers who became prominent critics of U.S. policy, also voiced concerns. Yet Shoup was far