Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [51]
PEACE WITH HONOR
By the time General Shoup’s tirade against American militarism hit the newsstands, Richard M. Nixon had succeeded Lyndon Johnson as president. Guided by Nixon’s promise to achieve “peace with honor,” the process of getting out of Vietnam proved nearly as protracted, and at least as costly, as getting in.
The new president had little use for the moral daintiness to which the proponents of flexible response had been prone. Nixon’s preferred modus operandi emphasized toughness. By the time he ended the war—or at least ended direct U.S. involvement in it—Strategic Air Command B-52s had rained bombs on North Vietnamese cities with an intensity reminiscent of the raids that B-29s had conducted against Japanese cities nearly three decades earlier.
Operation Linebacker II, which deposited over twenty thousand tons of high explosives on Hanoi and Hai Phong from December 18 to December 29 in 1972, signified a brief reversion to the Curtis LeMay school of power projection. Yet this “Christmas bombing” marked that school’s permanent closure. Rather than a portent of things to come, it was a final backhanded salute. Never again would the United States employ violence on such a scale with such little regard for exactly who was being killed and what was being destroyed.
By this time, LeMay himself had become an embarrassment, mocked and vilified rather than venerated. Between the moment Johnson became president and the day he surrendered the office to Nixon, a tsunami had swept across American culture. Among the many things affected was the national security consensus. For ordinary citizens, especially younger ones viewed by the state as prime timber for military service, Washington’s insistence on calling the shots globally no longer commanded automatic assent. To those who had been radicalized by the events of the 1960s, both at home and abroad, the notion that American values were universal values and that the United States should be granted special privileges in advancing those values seemed laughable.
Large numbers of Americans had lost faith in the sacred trinity as well. In the wake of Vietnam, they no longer believed that policies based on global presence, power projection, and interventionism worked or were morally justifiable. In the eyes of such critics, LeMay’s approach, which had once defined the American way of war, now became so repugnant as to be unimaginable.
Hollywood, typically a lagging indicator of changes in the zeitgeist, managed in this instance to anticipate the shift in attitudes. During the early Cold War, films such as Strategic Air Command (1955), directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart, and Gathering of Eagles (1963), directed by Delbert Mann and starring Rock Hudson, treated SAC—and LeMay—with a respect approaching reverence. The men charged with standing ready to wage nuclear war (for the women who stayed home tending the kids) were dedicated professionals, maintaining a firm grip on their humanity despite bearing the weightiest responsibilities.
By the time Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb appeared in 1964, a cultural switch was ready to flip. Directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens, Dr. Strangelove depicted SAC’s ethos as an amalgam of arrogant condescension (Gen. Buck Turgidson), quasi-religious fanaticism (Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper), and mindless obedience (Maj. T. J. “King” Kong), laced with a tincture of Nazism (Dr. Strangelove himself). None of Kubrick’s warrior-protagonists demonstrated more than a tenuous hold on reality.
Several decades later, Strategic Air Command and Gathering of Eagles, serious movies