Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (92 page)

Increasing numbers of America's combat soldiers were revulsed by the slaughter, and many thousands suffered from serious personality disorders thereafter. Others, however, grew callous and cruel. That happens in wars. William Broyles, a marine lieutenant, later described the experiences of his unit:

For years we disposed of the enemy dead like so much garbage. We stuck cigarettes in the mouths of corpses, put Playboy magazines in their hands, cut off their ears to wear around our necks. We incinerated them with napalm, atomized them with B-52 strikes, shoved them out the doors of helicopters above the South China Sea. In the process did we take down their dog-tag numbers and catalog them? Do an accounting? Forget it.

All we did was count. Count bodies. Count dead human beings. . . . That was our fundamental military strategy. Body count. And the count kept going up.
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A
COMMON ARGUMENT
of supporters of American escalation is that the war was lost not in the bush but on the home front in the United States. They emphasize the damaging role of two institutions: the media, especially television, for presenting an overly negative picture of American goals and accomplishments; and the universities, for succoring draft-dodging student activists against the war. The anti-war stance of the media and of the students, they say, encouraged a broader-based disenchantment that ultimately reached Capitol Hill.

In the long run the war indeed increased the skepticism—indeed the suspicion and testiness—of the media, which understandably grew disenchanted by glowing government handouts and public relations efforts. Their rising suspiciousness, which grew confrontational by the early 1970s, was a very important legacy of the war—one that reflected and intensified broader popular dissatisfactions with government. Prior to 1968, however, most newspapers and magazines supported Johnson's policies. Reporters necessarily relied heavily on handouts from American military and political leaders, and newspapers printed thousands of stories carrying greatly inflated statistics about enemy body counts and other supposed accomplishments of the military effort. As in the era of Joe McCarthy, journalists normally felt obliged to accept what office-holders and top military leaders—those who commanded relevant information—had to say.

Television news programs, too, tended either to soft-pedal the horrors of the war (footage of such horrors was hardly pleasurable to watch at dinnertime) or to go along with the administration until 1968. Walter Cronkite, the avuncular, much-admired anchorman for CBS news, came close to applauding Johnson's actions at the time of the Tonkin Gulf "crisis." Henceforth, he told viewers, the United States was committed to "stop Communist aggression wherever it raises its head."
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Then and for the next three years television newscasts not only had little criticism to offer of American troop build-ups but also presented a great many unflatering portrayals of anti-war activists, "hippies," and other critics of American institutions.

Although the conflict in Vietnam was America's first "living room war," newscasts devoted little of their evening broadcasts (only twenty-two minutes long excepting commercials) to actual fighting. With some notable exceptions there was not much footage of heavy combat that showed dead or wounded American soldiers; one later estimate found a total of seventy-six such cases in 2,300 newscasts surveyed between 1965 and 1970. In part because many battles were fought at night and in locations far from television cameras, TV coverage of combat tended to show soldiers leaping out of helicopters and dashing off into the bush. Sounds of artillery boomed in the background. By the late 1960s the presentation of such scenes probably accentuated an already widespread popular conviction that the war had no clear goals and that it was going badly. But it also showed the courage of American soldiers, not the most bloody aspects of the fighting. To a degree, such coverage may have helped to sanitize a sanguinary struggle.
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The influence of college and university students on American attitudes toward the war is a somewhat more complicated story. Clearly, the potential for student influence was enormous, for it was in the mid-1960s that the coming of age of baby boomers began to swell the already rising numbers of American young people on the campuses. The number of Americans aged 18 to 24 rose from 16.5 million in 1960 to 24.7 million in 1970, a jump of almost 50 percent. By then approximately one-third of this age group (or 7.9 million) was studying at least part-time at institutions of higher education. The explosive leap in the numbers of college-educated young people, one of the most salient demographic trends of the decade, promoted increasing amounts of talk by the mid-1960s about "youth culture," "youth rebellion," and "generation gap."

These demographic developments, moreover, interacted dynamically with changes in attitudes, notably the rise of liberal optimism, escalating expectations, and rights-consciousness. Millions of young people, especially those with the resources to pursue higher education, were swept up in the hopes for change that civil rights activists and others had done much to unleash and that Kennedy and Johnson had appealed to in order to promote liberal programs. As Bob Dylan had prophesied in his song "The Times They Are a-Changin'," many young people thought they had the potential to transform American life. Rarely before had two such interrelated and powerful trends—demographic and ideological—occurred at the same time. Reinforcing each other, they underlay much of the turmoil that distinguished the 1960s from the 1950s.
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A minority of these young people—again, mostly those with higher education—turned well to the left in the early 1960s. Some grew rebellious upon arriving on campuses that had become enormous and impersonal in recent years. Anger at bureaucracy and at the seeming indifference of authority figures fueled a good deal of the discontent of young Americans in the 1960s. Other students railed at what they perceived as complacency among older, affluent people who seemed to ignore social problems. Accumulating material goods, they said, might have been all right, indeed necessary, for their elders. But it was unsatisfying, even cold-hearted, to some in the younger generation. Many of the young, indeed, felt guilty that they were well-off while others were not. They believed above all that they must act—"put our bodies on the line"—against injustice. They would work to smash racism and poverty and transform the consciousness of the nation.
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Few of these young people were in open rebellion against their elders. On the contrary, they tended to be the children of relatively affluent and indulgent parents and to have gone to schools and colleges where they had been encouraged to think for themselves. (Nixon later grumbled that they were a "Spock-marked generation.") In general, they were more likely than others in their age group to have grown up in politically liberal families. Some were sons and daughters of radicals—or "red-diaper babies," as critics named them. Many displayed a special self-consciousness and self-confidence. Having grown up in a world that differed significantly from that of their parents, they imagined that their elders just did not understand. As Dylan put it:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin!
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

Among these young activists in the early 1960s were some who derived their ideas from radical thinkers of the 1950s, such as the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the free-thinking Paul Goodman, and Michael Harrington.
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Most of the philosophically aware young activists of the early 1960s liked especially to distinguish themselves from representatives of the "old" or Marxist Left, which they thought was doctrinaire. Labor unions, too, seemed to them stodgy and conservative, and liberals could not always be trusted. Most of the young activists considered themselves members of a new generation and of a New Left, a term that came into general usage in 1963. They would rid themselves of dogmatism and employ democratic procedures to generate sweeping social change.
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From the beginning, members of the New Left differed a good deal among themselves, and their major causes changed considerably over time. Some who joined the best-known protest group of the time, Students for a Democratic Society, focused in the early 1960s on developing community action against poverty. When the war on poverty began in 1964, they redoubled their efforts to revitalize the ghettos and other poor pockets of American society. Most SDS workers—and other young activists—were especially inspired by the civil rights movement. Student protestors who demonstrated in the highly publicized movement for free speech at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 included key leaders who had been radicalized by the racism that they had witnessed as civil rights volunteers in the South.
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Perhaps the most prominent young radical in the early 1960s was Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student who had worked with SNCC in 1961. Raised a Catholic, Hayden was a serious thinker with a commitment to elevating the spirit and improving human relationships in the United States. In 1962 he emerged as chief author of a major position paper of the SDS, the Port Huron Statement.
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This manifesto, widely cited (if not widely read) by fellow activists in the early 1960s, lamented the alienating affluence of American civilization and the consequent "estrangement" of modern man. Although it did not renounce capitalism, it echoed Mills (whom Hayden much admired) by asserting that "in work and in leisure the individual is regulated as part of the system, a consuming unit, bombarded by hard-sell, soft-sell, lies, and semi-true appeals to his basest drives." Hayden denounced what he deemed to be the intellectual aridity of American universities and called on college students to "consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power." The statement was vague about specific goals, welcoming, for instance, both decentralization of government and a larger welfare state. But it clearly aimed at harnessing the moral idealism of young people to humanize capitalism. This was to be done through the process of "participatory democracy," a rallying cry for many who joined the New Left in the 1960s.

Although the SDS and other radical groups attracted rising attention in the media during the early 1960s, they gained very few members at the time. In October 1963 SDS had six chapters (plus thirteen more on paper) and a total of 610 paid-up members. In January 1965, before LBJ escalated the war on a large scale, SDS had a few dozen chapters but still only 1,500 paid-up members.
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Most of them were still concentrating on the issue of poverty. Although some of its members had been active in demonstrations against nuclear testing, they had paid little notice before 1965 to foreign policies or to events in far-off Asia.

Johnson's escalation soon transformed the SDS and other New Left organizations. Some of the activists, to be sure, continued to concentrate on problems of the ghetto—Hayden was busy mobilizing the poor in Newark—and others focused on reforming the universities. But many new young people flocked to SDS and other New Left groups out of fear and anger at LBJ's foreign policies. As early as April SDS dramatized the anti-war cause by sponsoring a March on Washington. By 1966 SDS membership was three times what it had been a year earlier. Equally important, SDS and other student-dominated organizations were developing considerably more anti-war sympathy among otherwise apolitical university students, many of whom were frightened by the threat of the draft. No other group of Americans was nearly so vocal against the war—or so widely assailed by advocates of escalation—as the student New Left and its much larger band of student sympathizers.
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Some of the students were attracted to speakers at university teach-ins who emphasized the strategic fallacies of escalation. Hans Morgenthau, a prominent political scientist, repeatedly emphasized that Vietnam had little geopolitical importance and that the United States, like France in the 1940s and 1950s, was sacrificing resources as well as international prestige by tying itself down in the war. Other well-known American students of foreign policy, including George Kennan and the columnist Walter Lippmann, made similar points. They were realists who deplored the distortions that Johnson's military escalation was creating in foreign and defense policies.
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Most youthful opponents of the war, however, approached the issue from a moral point of view. Here they differed sharply from many of their elders, such as Johnson, who had lived through the rise of fascism and the struggles of World War II. The young, with a much more present-minded view of things, did not worry nearly so much about Communism or the Cold War. Where LBJ and his advisers applied the "lessons" of Munich and of appeasement, the young activists were sure that the conflict in Vietnam was a civil war, not a Communist conspiracy. They were appalled by the immorality, as they saw it, of American actions, which they equated with racism in the American South. Placards proclaimed their position: S
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