American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (3 page)

By the end of the 1950s, Dooley was, in effect, America’s poster boy for foreign service, just the kind of figure Senator John Kennedy had in mind when he proposed the
Peace Corps
during his 1960 presidential bid. The idea had been percolating for years (and even proposed in Congress), but Kennedy had not yet endorsed it. He and some of his aides worried that Republican candidate Richard Nixon might attack the plan as a naive and ineffectual approach to the Cold War.

On October 13, 1960, JFK squared off with Nixon in their third of four televised debates. As usual, they argued about who would be a tougher and more effective opponent of Communism. Much of the debate focused on the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, a few miles off the coast of China. Would the United States defend the islands in the event of a Red Chinese attack? Nixon said yes. Kennedy said yes too (but only if the attack included a direct threat to Taiwan). In those early Cold War years, Americans were learning that any spot on the globe, no matter how obscure or previously unknown, might suddenly be proclaimed crucial to national security.

Though their differences over the islands were slight, Kennedy had described Nixon’s view as “trigger-happy.” This prompted Nixon to strike back, suggesting that Republicans were actually more peace-minded than Democrats. It was Democrats, he argued—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman—who had led the United States into the major wars of the twentieth century, not Republicans. “We’ve been strong, but
we haven’t been trigger-happy
.”

At 2:00 a.m. the next day, Kennedy arrived at the University of Michigan, perhaps wanting to reclaim the mantle of peace that Nixon had momentarily seized. Ten thousand students had waited hours to catch a glimpse of the handsome young candidate, and Kennedy was not about to disappoint them. He stood on the steps of the Michigan Union and gave a short, unprepared speech. After a few banal comments on the importance of the election, he asked: “
How many of you
who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers: how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service?”

JFK’s campaign was flooded by offers from potential volunteers. A few weeks later, in San Francisco, Kennedy made his Peace Corps proposal more concrete. He introduced the subject with a single sentence: “
All of us have admired
what Dr. Tom Dooley has done in Laos.” A round of applause erupted and Kennedy did not need to say more about Dooley—the young doctor had become a one-line symbol of service. JFK then called for “a peace corps of talented young men and women” to “serve our country around the globe.” Like Dooley, Kennedy viewed foreign service as inseparable from national service. By serving well abroad, you would serve America.

JFK railed against the Eisenhower administration for filling American embassies with “men who lack compassion for the needy” and “do not even know how to pronounce the name of the head of the country to which they are accredited.” By contrast, he argued, Communist nations were deploying hundreds of well-trained and committed scientists, engineers, teachers, and doctors as “missionaries for world communism.” We can do better, Kennedy said. The cause of freedom depended upon it. Nixon quickly attacked the plan, saying it would become a “
haven for draft dodgers
,” a “cult of escapism.” A few days later, Kennedy was elected president by a margin of only 120,000 votes.

In the heady months of transition from the Eisenhower era to Camelot, Dooley’s fame peaked. By then,
magazine polls
listed him as one of the ten most esteemed men in the world. A Gallup poll ranked him third, just behind the pope and President Dwight Eisenhower. At the apex of his celebrity, in January 1961, two days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Tom Dooley died of cancer. He was just thirty-four. The public had been following his struggle with the disease for months. The emotion stirred by Dooley’s death—a man who inspired so much youthful idealism—offered a small prefiguring of the nation’s grief when the young president was assassinated less than three years later.

Along with their ability to awaken hopeful commitments, Dooley and Kennedy also shared a common religion. Both Kennedy and Dooley wore their Catholicism lightly enough to appeal to audiences that had just begun to shed older anti-Catholic prejudices. Yet Dooley’s popularity as a “medical missionary” was undoubtedly enhanced by the intense religiosity of post–World War II America. Formal memberships in all faith communities soared to more than two-thirds of the public and
an astonishing 99 percent
of Americans claimed to believe in God. In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, a formal declaration that loyalty to God and country were inseparable. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, published in 1952, sold more than twenty-six million copies its first year, and religious books accounted for almost half of the decade’s nonfiction best sellers. Biblical epics were a staple of 1950s Hollywood.

The religious awakening of the 1950s was partly inspired by Cold War anxieties and a powerful need to contrast America’s religious faith with “godless Communism.” Director Cecil B. DeMille appeared at the beginning of his blockbuster film
The Ten Commandments
to encourage audiences to link his Bible stories to the Cold War conflicts of 1956. The central question, he said, was whether men would be “ruled by God’s law, or by the whims of a dictator like Ramses. Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls under God? This same struggle is still going on today.”

Of all American denominations, Catholics made the most striking gains in this period. Their numbers doubled from 1940 to 1960. One of the most popular television shows of the mid-1950s was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s
Life Is Worth Living
, which often attracted more than thirty million viewers even when it ran opposite Milton Berle’s popular comedy hour. Sheen’s anti-Communism was a model of restraint compared with that of Cardinal Francis Spellman, who called on his New York flock to defend
“the rights of God
and man against Christ-hating communists whose allegiance is pledged to Satan!” Yet Sheen fully embraced Cold War Americanism, and his popularity reflected the broader culture’s growing tendency to regard Catholics as loyal patriots and to discard the prejudiced assumption that Catholics were bound to parochial, Old World allegiances. That shift helped John Kennedy get elected president.

Catholics were especially fervent fans of Tom Dooley. After his death, many promoted his canonization, and his books were sometimes read as nearly sacred texts. The review of
Deliver Us From Evil
in the Catholic journal
Torch
claimed that Dooley’s actual subject was not Vietnam, but Christ. “
This is a book of Christ
. This war in Viet Nam is His Passion, this suffering His; this blood is shed in His name. And all this love and this labor and dedicated skill are the compassion of His Sacred Heart.”

Dooley never went that far, but he certainly encouraged the hyperbole. His book is full of devout refugees clinging to rosaries and crosses, tortured priests, and Catholic schoolchildren hideously punished for their faith. And a
reader might wrongly conclude
from Dooley that most Vietnamese were Catholic (instead of 5–10 percent).

The deep religious underpinning of early Cold War policy is partly concealed by the era’s flamboyant consumerism and pleasure-seeking. Pink and aqua appliances, hip-wagging rock ’n’ roll, cars with shark-size tail fins, and the three-martini lunch all seemed at odds with piety. But in 1955, theologian Will Herberg argued that the most striking characteristic of the religious awakening of the 1950s was its coexistence with rising secularism. He attempted to reconcile the paradox by suggesting that the heart of American religious faith, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, conservative or liberal, was an adherence to the “
civic religion
” or “common religion” of “the American Way of Life.” Faith in God was widely viewed as the sine qua non of national identity, the essence of what it meant to be an American and the foundation of the country’s central institutions and values.

Speaking in support of the American Legion’s 1955 Back to God campaign, President Eisenhower said, “
Without God, there could be
no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first—the most basic—expression of Americanism.” The idea that religious faith framed the Cold War competition with Communism was a pervasive sentiment, informing the politics of people as different as Catholic conservative Cardinal Spellman and Catholic liberal senator Mike Mansfield, Protestant conservative publisher Henry Luce and Protestant liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Henry Luce’s famous 1941 call for an “American century” was a classic expression of civic religion, of “God and country” boosterism, the fusion of religion and nationalism. Born in China to Presbyterian missionaries, Luce presided over a publishing empire that included
Time
,
Life
,
Fortune
, and
Sports Illustrated
magazines. “The American Century,” his landmark essay, urged the nation to “
exert upon the world
the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” American ideals were the new gospel that needed to be promoted, even if it required force. “We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world.”

In 1941, Luce’s view was hardly dominant. It was nearly ten months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and isolationist sentiment was still strong; at least half the country wanted the United States to stay out of World War II, never mind take on responsibility for the entire world. By the mid-1950s, however, Luce’s brand of American universalism was flowering.

It was in full bloom on June 1, 1956, at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, site of the first public conference sponsored by the American Friends of Vietnam. This politically diverse organization had formed the prior year to promote the South Vietnamese government of Catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem. The group included people as different as General John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and socialist Norman Thomas, as well as Senator John Kennedy and Dr. Tom Dooley. Their differences exemplify the broad consensus that shaped and supported early U.S. Cold War foreign policy.

This loose coalition of internationalist cold warriors was acutely aware of the importance of public relations and the need to tell a clear and persuasive story to gain support for their cause. The American Friends of Vietnam helped write a Vietnam narrative that dominated American political culture at least until Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in an American-backed coup in November 1963, just a few weeks before Kennedy himself was killed.

Here, in brief, was how the story was typically told:

After World War II, French control over Indochina was threatened by Ho Chi Minh’s Communist insurgency. This Red aggression had to be put down or it would spread uncontrollably across Southeast Asia. Therefore, the United States gave billions of dollars in aid to help France defeat the Communists. Despite U.S. support, France lost the war in 1954.

When the great powers met at Geneva to set the terms of peace, they ceded control of North Vietnam to the Communists. The United States felt a responsibility to keep South Vietnam free. Although the Geneva Accords called for an election in 1956 to reunite Vietnam under a single government, American leaders encouraged South Vietnam to cancel it because the Reds could not be trusted to conduct a
free and fair election
. Instead, the United States supported the creation of a permanent South Vietnam under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. America would provide mature and indispensable guidance to this infant nation.

This narrative was reinforced by
two of the featured speakers
at the American Friends of Vietnam conference, Tom Dooley and Senator John Kennedy. Dooley beseeched the audience to see Communism “not as a distant, far-away, nebulous, ethereal thing—but as an evil, driving, malicious ogre” capable of unimaginable forms of torture. “I wish I had photographs here of the hideous atrocities that we witnessed in our camps every single day.” Lacking photographs, he told a story. During his “very first week” in Vietnam he claimed to have taken custody of a group of Catholic schoolchildren who had been caught saying the Lord’s Prayer by Communist guards. To punish the children for their “treason,” the guards “
rammed into each child’s ear
a chopstick; rending the canal, splitting the drum.”

When it was Senator Kennedy’s turn to speak, he began with what had already become a Cold War cliché—the idea that containing Communism in small countries like Vietnam was necessary because otherwise it would spread from one nation to another. “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike.” All three metaphors presented Communism as innately expansive and aggressive, a “Red Tide” that must be held back at all costs. But then Kennedy switched to yet another metaphor: the family. “If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future. . . .
This is our offspring
. We cannot abandon it.”

It was an appealing image—flattering to every generous impulse of a great and wealthy nation, and all the more compelling when paired with Dooley’s account of tortured children in need of protection. We would only be doing what was right and necessary, fulfilling the obligation of a parent to a child.

These sentiments greatly helped build popular support for Cold War policies. Dooley and Kennedy encouraged Americans to imagine themselves the adoptive parents of needy Asian children and childlike nations. Though both men were raised in privileged families, each expressed compassion for the less fortunate. Kennedy liked to quote a line from Luke: “Of those to whom much is given, much is required.”