I was in college in the spring of 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he was sending combat troops—two Marine battalions—to South Vietnam. Thus, my professional life began in the decade of public debate, turmoil, and tragedy surrounding Vietnam.
What I didn’t know (among many other things, of course) was that the announcement of combat troops was disingenuous, one in a long line of disingenuous public statements from the president and his close associates. U.S. “advisers” had been quietly taking part in combat missions since 1961.[1]
Nor did I know that the seemingly sudden “Americanization” of a previously foreign war had been years in the making. Arch T. Allen, a retired attorney, brought this to my attention recently in a paper he wrote about the war. [2]
The Vietnam War, Allen points out, was managed behind a veil of duplicity. I suspected that in 1965, and the fact was confirmed in 1971, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked to major newspapers.
Did the “Vietnam syndrome” affect how historians viewed the U.S. Civil War? Here’s an argument that it did.
But first, recognize that historians have mixed feelings about the present. On the one hand, today’s issues can shed light on the past because “each generation asks a different set of questions.”[1] On the other, they can lead to presentism—reshaping the past by imposing today’s viewpoints.
I’m always on the lookout for such interplays. And that may have happened with the post-Vietnam era. I just learned that in 2002 the prominent Civil War historian Brian Holden Reid argued that the Vietnam War reshaped historians’ understanding of the American Civil War. [2] Reid’s article appeared in the journal of a British military-security think tank.
Of course, thousands of pages—thousands of books, perhaps—have been written trying to explain why the North won and the South lost. A major trope used to be that the North initially failed to win because it lacked bold generals willing to take their troops into battle—until Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commanding general.
I’m skeptical. Not that they won’t find out what happened—they may well do that—but whether it makes any difference depends on politics. If the politics are with them they will have an impact; if not, they won’t.
I’m going to illustrate my point by sharing the history of a massive congressional investigation that took place 78 years ago. It was a whopper. The investigation went on for six and a half months and the testimony took up 39 volumes. So what happened? The majority party signed the report; the minority party dissented. Nothing much changed, except for the lives of some who were barred or discouraged from testifying and the cryptologist who bore the mental scars of trying to get the facts out for the rest of his life—and undoubtedly some others I don’t know about.
I would like to share with you a stunning essay from RealClearHistory.[1] By “stunning” I don’t mean it is absolutely correct but it is eye-opening. David Pyne lists the wars the U.S. shouldn’t have entered or supported—but did. These wrong wars start with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and end with today’s Ukraine-Russia war. As for the wars we should have fought, he bluntly explains how they were badly managed.
Pyne writes:
“A study of the outcome of major wars America has fought over the past 125 years strongly suggests that U.S. military involvement in these conflicts has resulted in tragic and unforeseen consequences leading to tens of millions of unnecessary deaths while also serving to create new, and, in some cases, much more powerful enemies, making the U.S. much less safe and secure in the process.”
This man is not a left-winger writing for The Nation or Mother Jones. He is deputy director of a nonprofit organization, EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security. EMP refers to electromagnetic pulses, which can be used to disrupt the electrical grid and possibly other critical infrastructure. The organization was initially authorized by Congress as an advisory board and works with conservative members of Congress.
When I began looking into the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, I was surprised to find so much written about the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet Union was a major factor in the war against the Germans—it lost more soldiers than any other country in the war.
But how important was the USSR in the Pacific? Quite important, as it turns out. The Soviet Union, the atomic bomb, and the potential invasion of Japan all were tightly entwined in the decisions made in the last days of the war.
This is my third and final post on the American decision to use the atom bomb. I’m not trying to judge the decision. As an educated layperson looking freshly at history, I just want to understand it.
In my first post I pointed out that President Truman knew nothing about the bomb until Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. The bomb was used less than four months later. Thus, it had enormous momentum and would have been difficult to stop. (Given how ill Roosevelt was, it is strange that he did not inform his vice president of such a major event; one historian calls this failure “disgraceful.”)[1]
In the second post I discussed whether the U. S. demand for unconditional surrender kept the Japanese from surrendering. This remains a genuine question. Had the Americans assured the Japanese that the emperor could remain in his position, the “peace party” in Japan would have been even more eager to end the war.
However, the enormous resistance (and prominence) of the “war party”—even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and the emperor had prepared a surrender statement—weakens this otherwise persuasive claim. A violent coup to stop the emperor’s surrender statement from being broadcast to the public was almost successful; a general was killed in cold blood and another committed ritual suicide. [2]
