Hermeneutics

By the early part of 1965 there were 125,000 American combat troops in South Vietnam and massive aerial bombings of North Vietnam were getting underway. A large-scale antiwar March on Washington, involving roughly 25,000 students, took place later the same year. The presence of so many troops in Vietnam and the mass protests against them would persist for almost a decade-until the last U.S. soldiers departed Vietnamese soil in 1973 and Saigon had “fallen” in 1975. How did America get involved in Vietnamthe first war it admittedly lost? And what happened during the Vietnam era? In the early 1950s the U.S. sent aid and arms to Vietnam in order to assist

the French in their effort to regain their former empire in Indochina. By 1954 America was paying approximately 80 percent of the French war expenses, which involved annually hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time China and Russia sent assistance so that Vietnam constituted, in fact, a contested site in the international “Cold” War waged by the U.S. against communism and its potential spread. Among other unstable sites in this period were Korea and various countries in Central Europe. After the cataclysmic defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam was divided into North and South at the seventeenth parallel. As part of the 1954 Geneva agreements, Vietnam was supposed to hold elections, which Ngo Dinh Diem (the leader in the South) refused to allow in 1956, with President Dwight Eisenhower acquiescing in this violation. Soon afterward the Vietcong emerged in the South in active and armed opposition to Diem, who, nevertheless, received continued support from the U.S. When President John Kennedy took office in 1961, America had had an

extensive, decade-long involvement in Vietnam. He furthered this part of the war against communism in several ways: by ordering the Department of Defense to make plans to save Vietnam (which he approved in May 1961), by committing 7,000 troops for base security in November 1961, and by secretly authorizing a coup against Diem in November 1963. Other flash points in the international struggle against communism at this time included the Berlin Wall Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (preceded by the

invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961), and the Space Race with the Soviet Union. (Uri Gagarin was the first man in space in 1961, followed by John Glenn in 1962.) Behind the political decisions of the early Vietnam era was the postwar liberals’ commitment to internationalism and to anticommunism, which the Kennedy presidency symbolized. Shortly after President Lyndon Johnson assumed office, the North Vietnamese

evidently attacked some American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin during August 1964. Passed by Congress, the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” authorized the President to protect U.S. troops. Within a year, more than a hundred thousand American troops were fighting in Vietnam and bombing of the North was undertaken on a large scale. As the war escalated from the mid-1960s onward, opposition increased at

home and abroad. In 1965 came the March on Washington and in 1966 Martin Luther King, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, spoke out against the war. Over the course of the decade, opposition expanded, manifesting itself in especially dramatic ways at the March on the Pentagon in 1967 (memorialized by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night [1968]), at the disruptive convention of the Democratic Party in 1968, and at the siege of Kent State University by the National Guard in 1970. Marches, sit-ins, draft-card burnings, desertions to Sweden, exile in Canada, and other forms of protest were common and well publicized in this period. Meanwhile, the “monolith” of international communism showed signs of breakage. In 1960 came the Sino-Soviet split; in 1968 the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops; in 1969 armed clashes along the border between Russia and China; and in 1970 a workers’ strike in Poland. The effect of such incidents was to call into question the fundamental concept of the Cold War-the threat of coordinated worldwide communist aggression and the resultant domino theorywhich motivated and justified American involvement in Vietnam. Among the most influential of antiwar intellectuals was the linguist Noam

Chomsky, who in 1967 published in The New York Review of Books a series of challenging essays, especially “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” and “On Resistance.” Several years later Chomsky collected these and other antiwar essays in American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), which was dedicated “to the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war.” In Chomsky’s assessment, the Vietnam War was a criminal act of immorality, an obscene example of American imperialism, an expression of an aggressive, depraved will to power-all of which scholar-experts in and out of government had a responsibility for fostering. Citizens of the Vietnam era witnessed not only growing radicalization of

the intellectual community (especially university students) but increasing calls for civil rights and justice by blacks, women, American Indians, homosexuals, and other disenfranchised groups. In 1963 a mass demonstration for civil rights by blacks took place in Washington, D.C., during which Martin Luther King delivered his now famous speech “I Have a Dream.” The next year King received the Nobel Prize and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. In

1965 violent riots broke out in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles; in 1966 the radical Black Panther Party was founded; in 1968 several American black athletes made a black power salute upon receiving medals at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. The women’s movement, initiated symbolically by the publication of Betty Friedan’s challenging The Feminine Mystique (1963), came to preliminary fruition in the 1966 founding of the National Organization of Women, which issued a Bill of Rights for Women in 1967. The agitation of women led to liberalization of abortion laws in three states by 1970 and the opening of Senate hearings on an Equal Rights Amendment during the same year. This was also the year that Kate Millett published her influential Sexual Politics. The protests of women, blacks, and other groups, the highly visible criticism of the war, and the general disenchantment with all forms of repression, authority, and domination were manifested not only in mass marches, riots, and rallies, but in movies, popular songs, books, and political movements. Among the latter were the unisex, civil rights, antiwar, human potential, gay rights, commune, beat, hippie, and psychedelic movements. What the various movements and protest groups across the country

revealed were dramatic changes taking place in attitudes and awareness, in morals and manners, in sensitivity and sensibility. The grounds of consciousness and ethical behavior seemed to be shifting. Heterodoxies proliferated, making the whole era appear a gaudy carnival. This cultural change approximated less conventional struggle than guerrilla warfare, having many fronts and numerous invisible troops. The whole idea of a university, for example, was called everywhere into question-especially in California at Berkeley, in New York at Columbia and Cornell universities, and in Ohio at Kent State University. In fact, in all sectors of the country campus upheavals occurred. Simultaneously, movements toward liberalization or liberation happened in numerous places around the globe: in America, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Vietnam, to be sure, and in Algeria, Ghana, Cuba, the Congo, Bolivia, Ireland, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Cambodia, Chile, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa. Many Third World countries, in an impoverished condition analogous to the Third Estate in prerevolutionary France, sought to escape the economic control and cultural hegemony exerted by First World countries via multinational corporations and politicaleconomic alliances. America was frequently portrayed, in such countries, as the worst of the new imperialists. When added up, the demands for liberation both at home and abroad constituted something of a widespread, broad-based consensus, casting the nation into a period of fecund, however threatening, instability and soul searching. The conscience of the nation demanded careful examination and national presuppositions needed reconsideration-two tasks engendered by the many heterogeneous and multifaceted protests lodged against the country and sustained throughout the Vietnam era. American intellectuals participated in protest movements, seeking variously

to liberate oppressed groups, to realign fundamental values, to promote an examination of conscience, to liberalize restrictive laws and cultural practices,

and to get the U.S. out of Vietnam. Within China, in contrast, intellectuals experienced purges during the Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966 and lasting until 1969. Under the direction of Mao Tse-Tung, Chiang Ching, and other leaders, and with the approval of the Communist Party, the young Red Guards dismantled the cultural superstructure of the nation: schools were shut down, libraries destroyed, dance companies and symphonies closed, books burned, foreign influences stamped out, artists dismissed from posts, and teachers publicly humiliated. Estimates suggest that as many as 400,000 people died at the hands of the Red Guard.1