64. Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb

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To all us right-thinking lovers of reason the reflex anti-communists, the kind that supported Joe McCarthy, were dumbheads, but how about the senators and Congressmen who drew on those dumbheads for support? They were of the postwar generation John Gaddis (recognized "dean of Cold War studies," and teaching at Ohio U.) credits with a very reasonable aim, to apply the great lesson of World War II: stop aggression early. They needed the bumper hawks so that they could avoid the catastrophic mistake of their predecessors, letting the Nazis get strong before they could be stopped. If only, they thought, they could have had American bumpers plastered with 'get them fascists' when Hitler sent his soldiers into the Rhineland.

So Barry Goldwater and those bumper hawks were working for peace. Yes, peace. Not in the way of the mild but in the way of the stern: through credible threat. "When we make war on you we don't stop until we've crushed you." That was the way of the Romans, and it accounts, say the stern, for the longest periods of peace the world has ever had. (At the moment, in 2011, they would say that way accounts for the long peacefulness of the two countries most thoroughly crushed in World War II.)

It's a respectable way. Ask historians. If you define peace as time without blood-spilling (not cold) war then, they'll tell you, the stern way has the advantage over the gentle way. Examine the periods during which people lived in peace and see what gave it to them. Count up the days. Severity wins.

To make it win, though, you have to have credibility. If you don't have a track record of successful severity, something approaching the Roman, or the Spartan (or the British, at times), nobody will believe your stern threats, the ones that keep them from spilling blood.

So there's the rationale for throwing your all into Viet Nam. You're doing it for your track record, which gives you credibility, which gives you enemies who fear you, and neutrals who respect you. How can you hold back?

You wouldn't, readers, be university people if you weren't ready with a dozen reasons but our interest now is clarity, and I think we've made a gain there. What looked like a war between dumbheads, armies of the night, comes into focus as a reasonable conflict. All the thinking politicians who made use of an unthinking base (and what thinking politician doesn't?) to avoid the mistakes their predecessors made were thinking reasonably. Acting to meet a threat on time is reasonable, and acting to maintain credible threats is reasonable. (Remember, "reasonable" does not mean "right.") On the other hand, all the apparently mindless Yippies had their minds on a reasonable goal too, to avoid complicity in a crime.  Everybody was acting reasonably.  There's the sixties for you.

In the event, some of us wound up justifying Yippies and some of us wound up justifying Hawks.  I wound up on the Yippie side but my reasons are too long for here. Next post: Why the Yippies Were Almost Right.

63. Hawks and Yippies, 1968

To be "good," you have to be "a good citizen," and in a democracy that means being "engaged" in politics, and that means supporting a side. But you have to support a good side, and if one side is doing more good than another you have to support it. But sometimes the goodness is very hard to see, and in riots it can be impossible.

It was close to impossible, at least for me, in the student riots of 1968. I'd come back from East Asia ready to believe that anti-establishment riots by university students, the enlightened, the well taught (by people like me), were almost sure to be good. They might not be as good as the Korea University students, demanding that their government live up to the democratic ideals taught them by their American-studies professors, but still, they'd be good.

In the 1967 March on the Pentagon the university students, at least the ones I saw, looked pretty good. And I thought I saw them clearly. Then in 1968 I didn't know what I was seeing. There on the screen were the Yippies. There were our students, painted like savages. Soon on bookstands there would be Jerry Rubin's "Do It" and Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book." What the hell did all that have to do with ending the war in Viet Nam? How could it possibly serve the good cause?

Irrelevance, diffusion of force, childishness — that's what we all saw in those people. Yet we had to call the side they were on the "good" one. It had to be good. The other side was the uneducated, unenlightened one: get-them-commies, nail-that-coonskin-to-the-wall, get-your-heart-in-America-or-get-your-ass-out.

Well, if you have to be on a doubtful side you'll find a way to explain the bad in it. Some of my colleagues and I told ourselves that in all that incomprehensible behavior the students were making a comprehensible moral statement: "We refuse to be accomplices in a national crime." Avoiding complicity in a crime is as morally respectable a thing as you can do, right? Hadn't we just been calling for it in Germany? "Where were the good Germans?" Well, the good Americans, those Yippies, were saying, "We're bailing out, and we're calling your attention to this open hatch here in your heartless bomber." The obscenity we saw on a 19-year-old's forehead said, "I am not Curtis LeMay."

I had seen some Curtis LeMay types during my own service. They loved what they were doing. War was their life, what they had trained for. But to keep it up they had to have an enemy. With the Axis gone they didn't need much of an excuse to turn somebody into an enemy, and the communists were giving them plenty of excuses. Those career war guys were dangerous and the bumper hawks made them more dangerous (great heavens, they could push us through Viet Nam right into a war with the Chinese). So the Yippies were onto something, it was rational, they were good, and we were good in supporting them.

That took some seeing, but we eventually saw it or came up with it. What we peace profs were incapable of seeing in 1968 was that the other irrational ones, the bumper hawks, might have been onto something too. You could make a case for their rationality. Next post: Why the Viet Nam Hawks Weren't So Dumb.