In April 1967, the AAAS magazine, Science, reported that Defense Department officials were having trouble recruiting scientists to perform military research. Former Stanford defense researcher Harold Adams explained, “There is a fundamental revulsion on Vietnam in the egghead community. Academics would rather support the forces of life than those of death.”39 Over the next few years, scientists would increasingly employ the metaphor of choosing “forces of life” over “forces of death” to explain their antipathy toward military research.
In April 1968, when Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection, scientists flocked to support antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. In May, Scientists and Engineers for McCarthy was formed, with five thousand dues-paying members, including more than 115 members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and 12 Nobel Prize winners. Frustrated Humphrey supporters confessed that they had abandoned attempts to organize a scientists’ support group. On the Republican side, neither Richard Nixon nor Nelson Rockefeller had even made the effort.
In January 1969, MIT graduate students and faculty members called for a national research stoppage on March 4 to alert the public to how the “misuse of scientific and technical knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind.”40 Approximately thirty universities participated. The events at MIT proved to be the high point of the national effort. Speaker after speaker emphasized the need for scientists to assume responsibility for the social consequences of their work. In the most passionate address, which the Boston Globe called perhaps “the most important speech given in our time,” Harvard biologist George Wald asserted that the real purpose of government was to preserve life, but “our government has become preoccupied with death and the preparation for death.” He said, “We scientists, we opt for life.”41
Events that spring exacerbated the public’s mistrust of science; they were highlighted by a nine-day takeover of Stanford’s Applied Electronics Laboratory and the growing furor over the use of chemical and biological weapons, which forced the Nixon administration to announce a partial cessation of their use in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, Nixon’s threats continued. Neither Moscow nor Hanoi took them seriously. Nguyen Co Thach, North Vietnam’s foreign minister, said that he had read Kissinger’s books. “It is Kissinger’s idea that it is a good thing to make a false threat the enemy believes is a true threat. It is a bad thing if we are threatening an enemy with a true threat and the enemy believes it is a false threat. I told Kissinger that ‘False or true, we Vietnamese don’t mind. There must be a third category—for those who don’t care whether the threat is true or false.’” Thach even disputed Kissinger’s claim to having issued an ultimatum in August: “Never has Kissinger threatened us in the secret talks. Because if he threatens us, we would turn our backs. We would stop the talks. They could not threaten us for we knew that they could not stay in Vietnam forever, but Vietnam must stay in Vietnam forever.”42
Thach understood a basic truth that U.S. leaders never grasped: the Vietnam War was about time, not territory or body counts. The United States wreaked unconscionable destruction; it won every major battle. But it could not win the war. Time was on the side of the Vietnamese, who didn’t have to defeat the Americans but simply to outlast them. They would pay a terrible price for independence and freedom. But they would ultimately triumph. North Vietnamese military leader Vo Nguyen Giap explained, looking back:
We won the war because we would rather die than live in slavery. Our history proves this. Our deepest aspiration has always been self-determination. That spirit provided us with stamina, courage, and creativity in the face of a powerful enemy.
Militarily, the Americans were much more powerful than we were. But they made the same mistake as the French—they underestimated Vietnamese forces of resistance. When the Americans started their air raids, Uncle Ho said, “The Americans can send hundreds of thousands, even millions of soldiers; the war can last ten years, twenty years, maybe more, but our people will keep fighting until they win. Houses, villages, cities may be destroyed, but we won’t be intimidated. And after we’ve regained our independence, we will rebuild our country from the ground up even more beautifully.”43
Policy makers arrogantly assumed that the United States’ superior wealth, technology, and firepower would prevail by inflicting such suffering that the Vietnamese would rationally calculate that the price of victory exceeded the benefits. Nixon, in fact, bore some responsibility for Americans’ ignorance of Vietnamese history and culture. As a charter member of Washington’s China lobby—anti-Communist zealots in the Congress, military, media, and business who blamed the State Department for the “loss” of China in 1949—Nixon had hounded the most knowledgeable China and East Asia experts out of the State Department in the 1950s. In explaining the U.S. blunders in Vietnam, McNamara later admitted:
I had never visited Indochina, nor did I understand or appreciate its history, language, culture, or values. The same must be said, to varying degrees, about… Kennedy… Rusk,… Bundy, …Taylor, and many others…. When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita.
Worse, our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance…. The irony of this gap was that it existed largely because the top East Asia and China experts in the State Department—John Patton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s… we—certainly I—badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement.44
Ignorance of the enemy filtered down through the ranks. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, strove mightily to understand the Americans. U.S. infantryman Larry Heinemann, who later won the National Book Award for his novel Paco’s Story, attended a literary conference in Hanoi in 1990, where he met Hanoi University Professor of American Literature Nguyen Lien. Heinemann recounted their conversation:
I asked him what he did during the war…. He said that his job was to go to Beijing and learn English and then go to Moscow University to read and study American literature. Then he went back to Hanoi and out to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and gave lectures on American literature to the troops traveling south… he talked to them about Whitman, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald.
A lot of Vietnamese soldiers carried translations of American literature in their packs. Le Minh Khue—a young woman who worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail disarming bombs—carried Ernest Hemingway. Professor Lien asked me this question, “Now what Vietnamese literature did the American military teach to you?” I laughed so hard I almost squirted beer up my nose.45
While U.S. leaders and the troops they deployed remained in the dark about the country they were invading, the American people were discovering the ugliness of the war their tax dollars were financing. As the November 15 mobilization neared, freelance journalist Seymour Hersh reported that U.S. forces had massacred up to five hundred civilians in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, which the GIs had nicknamed “Pinkville” for its strong Viet Cong sympathies. Many of the women had been raped. The slaughter had gone on so long that the soldiers interrupted the killing and raping to take lunch and cigarette breaks. Not a single round had been fired at the U.S. infantrymen in return.