Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [52]
From the late 1940s through the 1950s, a smattering of peaceniks apart, most Americans had seen nuclear weapons as legitimate, useable, even essential weapons. Across mainstream America during the age of Truman and Eisenhower, nukes had on balance been coded “good.” Yet the general sense that nuclear weapons entrusted to the hands of responsible U.S. officials made war less rather than more likely did not survive the 1960s. Bit by bit, more or less in tandem with racial prejudice and anti-Semitism, nukes were recoded as “bad.” Their use became unthinkable, their very existence a bane to humanity. To depart from these views was to mark oneself a Neanderthal.
By 1968, this had become LeMay’s fate. As that year’s vice presidential nominee of the American Independent Party running alongside George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, the aging general insisted that a few well-placed nuclear bombs could still reverse the tide in Vietnam and thereby made himself a laughingstock.
The former SAC commander’s rapid descent from the status of national hero to dangerous buffoon offered a vivid expression of the damage incurred by proponents of the sacred trinity during the Vietnam era. Yet SAC was by no means the only instrument of power to emerge from the 1960s the worse for wear.
By the end of the Vietnam War, journalistic charges that the CIA had spied illegally on American citizens, compounded by accumulating reports of Agency malfeasance and ineptitude, prompted outrage. This was especially true among congressional Democrats awakened to the dangers of an imperial presidency now that Republicans once again occupied the White House.15 “In the Congress,” the CIA’s chief historian has written, “there was no longer a consensus to support intelligence activities blindly.” House and Senate leaders suddenly evinced a curiosity to know what the CIA had been up to all these years and to have a greater say in whatever it might do in the future. The upshot was that “[f]or the first time in the Agency’s history, CIA officials faced hostile Congressional committees bent on the exposure of abuses by intelligence agencies and on major reforms.”16 The CIA also experienced a cultural recoding. It now became, in the phrase of the day, a “rogue elephant.”
Yet if, by the 1970s, the legacies of Curtis LeMay and Allen Dulles appeared tarnished, the army emerged from the Vietnam War in truly dire shape, rife with indiscipline, racked by an epidemic of drug abuse, and divided internally along racial lines. Proponents of flexible response had looked to the army to bridge the gap between the extremes of nuclear warfare on the one hand and covert dirty tricks on the other. Maxwell Taylor had, in fact, touted his old service as a reservoir of capabilities. Yet the various methods implemented by the army in Vietnam—counterinsurgency, pacification, and nation building, along with the “search and destroy” tactics devised by Gen. William Westmoreland, the senior U.S. field commander in South Vietnam—had singularly failed. The cultural coding appended to the U.S. military as a whole now read “incompetent.”
Worse, the resource most essential for replenishing the army’s reservoir of capabilities—soldiers—had become a scarce commodity. Previously, the army had seemed attractive as an instrument of power projection, in part because of the ease with which it could be expanded. In Washington you opened the tap, increasing the monthly draft call, and the army got bigger. Relying chiefly on conscription, it had gone from 190,000 in 1939 to 8 million in 1944, from less than 600,000 in 1950 to 1.6 million by 1952, from 963,000 in 1965 to 1.5 million in 1968.17 Draftees were cheap to boot: In 1965, as the U.S. commenced its buildup in South Vietnam, new recruits were paid $87.90