Gary Hess

Vietnam-era divisions still shaping politics, culture: Hess

Forty years ago, with the United States supporting a South Vietnamese government on the verge of collapse, incumbent President Lyndon Johnson campaigned as the peace candidate against Republican challenger Barry Goldwater.

“We don’t want our boys to fight for Asian boys,” said Johnson, but less than a year later, he took the country to war—a war so divisive that both supporters and opponents of the war in Iraq point to its lessons today.

Vietnam’s continuing legacy was Gary Hess’s topic for a Sept. 30 presentation in a packed Mylander Room in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union. A Distinguished Research Professor of history, Hess is also currently a fellow at BGSU’s Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, which sponsored his lecture.

Vietnam was controversial from the beginning, and “the divisions still cut through American society,” said Hess, the author of several books and now working on another that traces and analyzes the 40-year debate. At the center of that debate is a search for lessons, an effort to explain America’s only lost war and to avoid a repeat, he said.

By the late 1960s, the perspective of so-called “doves” became the orthodox view—the U.S. was ignoring the history of Vietnamese nationalism with the French, and Americanization was doomed to fail, Hess noted. From the doves’ viewpoint, American security wasn’t at stake, and “the war was fundamentally unwinnable,” he said.

“Hawks,” meanwhile, became increasingly frustrated by what they saw as wrong-headed strategy that couldn’t meet military objectives. But “hawkishness became fashionable,” Hess said, on Nov. 3, 1969, when President Richard Nixon appealed for the support of “the great silent majority” in a speech to the nation.

Pledging “peace with honor,” Nixon asserted that defeat comes only from within—referring to anti-war activists—and called for patriotism and unity with the president. Since then, Hess pointed out, those themes have become part of conservative ideology and a dominant force in American politics.

Also opposing the orthodox view, even from the war’s start, was revisionism that argued the war was justified and winnable, and interjected “if only” history into the debate, he said.

Revisionists have contended the outcome would have been different if only:
--the U.S. had recognized the war was a conventional war of aggression by North Vietnam, had bombed the North from the beginning and had blocked its ports to halt supply shipments from its Soviet allies. Isolating North Vietnam would have crippled Hanoi, and the insurgency in South Vietnam would have “withered on the vine.”
--the U.S. had won the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese through an expanded pacification program.
--civilian leadership had let the war be waged to win, without misrepresentation by the media and other internal opposition.

The latter, “failure of will” argument was embraced by some conservative Democrats who turned to the GOP after other Democrats gravitated to the 1960s counterculture, Hess said. They later became part of a neoconservative movement that emerged in the 1980s and 90s, and has proponents at the top levels of the Bush Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

Whether revisionism is sound history can’t be proved or disproved, he said, but its clash with the orthodox view of Vietnam continues to influence U.S. culture. In part, that’s because the conflict shaped the views of current leaders who came of age then. Its importance runs deeper due to the emergence of, and reaction to, the counterculture—a factor that he maintains has contributed to less civility in political discourse.

The ongoing debate has now been extended to Iraq, where Hess sees both similarities and differences with Vietnam.

In both places, men and supplies have easily been able to cross a porous border, and credibility has been an issue with the U.S.-backed governments. But unlike in Vietnam, where the enemy was clearly defined and its objectives were known, it’s difficult to see the Iraqi insurgents’ vision for the future beyond driving out the U.S. and the new government it supports, he said.

Most people in the Third World have a grasp of the American experience in Vietnam and think they could outlast the U.S. under similar circumstances, he pointed out. Noting the added element of people fighting for their home territory, he believes the insurgents in Iraq cast themselves in some historical role, “as irrational as they may seem.”

“The level of loss in Vietnam is just staggering,” Hess said, noting that the 58,000 American casualties helped make the war so divisive and Americans, eventually, war weary.

Conservatives assert that the 1,000-plus deaths in Iraq, while tragic, are a small sacrifice compared to Vietnam, and that the U.S. must stay the course, he said. But war weariness, he added, is possible again with a populace that’s always dissatisfied when it sees what’s perceived as lack of progress and chaos.