Review, David W. Levy, The Debate Over Vietnam (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991)

The Maryland Historian, Spring/Summer 1992

In his memoir A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo comments that the U.S. Marine Corps trained for Vietnam by imitating tactics used by the British during the Malayan uprising of the 1950s, a conflict which bore only superficial resemblance to the one in Vietnam. “So, as always sees to be the case in the service,” Caputo wrote, “we were trained by the wrong war.” As David Levy, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, argues, American policymakers were similarly “trained by the wrong war.” The United States entered Vietnam on the basis of an intellectual consensus that had been worked out in the late 1930s to justify American entry into World War II. But the consensus unraveled as the differences between the two wars—both moral and political—became apparent to increasing numbers of Americans.

Proponents of a more active American role in world affairs during the late 1930s based their arguments on two major foundations. First, they said, the United States possessed vital interests throughout the world that were threatened by the policies of Germany and Japan. Second, the internationalists contended, in the present struggle there could be no question of which side represented good and which side evil. But, as Levy says, in the minds of those advocating greater international involvement, “the two propositions were almost inextricably joined, combined so intimately, so unconsciously, that it was hard to see that the blend was, in fact, composed of two ingredients.”

This combination of arguments survived World War II to become the basis of the Cold War ideological consensus, with the Soviet Union supplanting the Axis Powers. Americans supported this consensus for a variety of reasons, but, Levy says, throughout the 1950s no one questioned what might happen if the two fundamental principles ever diverged. “The debate over Vietnam,” according to Levy, “occurred when this venerable blend of ideas seemed, to large numbers of Americans, to divide into its component parts, the parts each drawing the nation toward differing courses of action.”

For advocates of the war, the two basic ideas of the consensus—that U.S. national security was endangered and the enemy was immoral—were tied together by the “demonic specter” of communism. The perception of a threat to national security took several forms, but was seen most significantly in the “domino theory,” the idea that if one country in Southeast Asia fell to the Communists, the rest would follow in rapid succession. It was further argued that the United States needed to show the Communists the futility of undertaking wars of national liberation, and that failure to do so would result in other, similar insurgencies. But, Levy says, the “mere use of the word [communism] was often thought sufficient, by advocates of American participation, to excuse themselves from embarking upon laborious elaborations of why the fight was necessary.” For the war’s supporters, the lesson to be learned from the debate of the 1930s was clear—the United States must not engage in a policy of appeasement toward aggression as the Allies had toward Hitler at the 1938 Munich conference.

Opponents of U.S. policies in Vietnam argued on several bases that the war did not meet the criteria outlined by the consensus view. They claimed that national security would not be adversely affected by American withdrawal. But most importantly, Levy says, they attacked the war on a variety of moral fronts. First, antiwar spokespeople said the war was not really a response to an invasion of South Vietnam, but rather the United States was interfering in a civil war to prop up an unpopular government. This argument, Levy says, was the most vigorously contested of the entire debate, because both sides saw that the war’s morality was based on this question of whether the United States was responding to outside aggression. Finally, opponents decried the nature of the war itself. In Vietnam, Americans saw their country using its vast technological superiority to devastate a country in the name of saving it. The brutality of American policy in Vietnam numbed the moral sensibilities of those who fought there and the people back home who watched the war unfold on their television sets. If advocates of the war viewed Munich as the appropriate analogy, opponents drew upon another symbol from World War II—the Nuremberg trials for war crimes.

The debate over Vietnam came to include an extremely broad cross-section of the American people. But, as Levy points out, this debate was really a series of smaller debates taking place within the context of a wide variety of particular subcommunities. Levy looks at how the debate unfolded within several of these subcommunities. Within the Republican party, for example, the debate was relatively muted as the party managed to maintain a general consensus throughout the war. But the war shattered the Democratic party as several prominent Democratic senators and congressmen openly challenged the policies of President Lyndon Johnson. Among the relatively small but extremely influential subcommunity of public policy intellectuals, the issue of the war shattered the ideological consensus they had shared throughout the 1950s, as an increasing number of intellectuals grew outspokenly critical of the war while others moved rightward and demanded the administration take a harder line in Vietnam. The debate over the war also took place within most major religious denominations. And among African Americans, the issue found articulate spokespersons on both sides. Many blacks felt a personal sense of loyalty to President Johnson for his civil rights and antipoverty programs, while others, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., condemned the war for diverting attention away from these programs.

Levy’s book is most valuable in outlining the parameters of the debate within these various subcommunities. But by eschewing a chronological approach in favor of a thematic one, he fails to make clear the process by which the debate came to dominate American politics in the late 1960s. The consensus which Levy describes so effectively dominated the major social, political, educational and media institutions in the early part of the decade that the antiwar movement had to emerge from outside these institutions. It first grew out of the New Left, a loose coalition of mainly white college students, strongly influenced by the Civil Rights movement, who emphasized such vaguely-defined principles as anti-imperialism, “participatory democracy,” “authenticity” and “personal politics.” For New Leftists, Vietnam focused all these concepts on a single issue. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a major New Left group, organized the first major antiwar demonstration in April 1965. Only slowly did antiwar sentiment work its way into the major American institutions and become “respectable.” But as the antiwar movement became gradually domesticated, the New Left grew increasingly isolated from the movement it had done so much to create, as radical activists began using more revolutionary rhetoric and tactics. Levy fails to explain this process of the growth of the antiwar movement, the way in which it developed outside the political mainstream, and how it was gradually integrated into it.