that point forward, a majority of Americans consistently told pollsters that the war was a mistake.18 The straightforward assumptions undergirding containment had been replaced by nagging questions, and even disillusionment; the optimism that had accompanied Johnson’s electoral victory in 1964 and his Great Society program in 1965 now seemed a distant memory. When Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection, his attempt to deliver a message of national unity was overshadowed by his ominous tone. “There is division in the American house now,” he said. “There is divisiveness among us all tonight.”19
The war’s chief influence on the human rights story was its effect on the American self-image. For a people accustomed to believing in their nation’s basic decency, the war presented a difficult moral quandary. The bombing campaigns, attrition tactics, and search-and-destroy missions not only revived age-old questions about the rights of civilians during wartime, but also convinced many Americans that their nation had become an agent of suffering. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reflected these misgivings when he wrote to President Johnson in May 1967, “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness and in the world image of the United States.”20 President Nixon would later fuel these controversies by expanding the war into Cambodia and Laos and periodically stepping up bombing of North Vietnam. Macabre stories trickling back from combat veterans also spurred questions about the rights of Vietnamese prisoners and American troops alike. For many Americans, the callousness of the war was summed up in what one officer allegedly told a reporter following an artillery barrage on the village of Bến Tre during the Tet Offensive: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”21 The source of the quote went unverified, and in fact may not have existed, but the statement became part of the war’s mythology nonetheless. Beyond the stories and rumors were the television and print images of the fighting. It is difficult to prove the impact that news coverage had on public opinion about the war, but there is little doubt that war footage and the Pulitzer Prize–winning images of Eddie Adams and Nick Ut humanized the violence and spawned greater public scrutiny of military decisions in a way that print journalists could not.22
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, April 1967 antiwar sermon was a fascinating moment in this national transition. Not only was this a turning point in King’s civil rights crusade, symbolizing as it did his movement away from mainstream activism, but his phrasing also anticipated human rights activists’ critique of American foreign policy in the years to come. He offered a moral criticism that emphasized the war’s unjustness and ultimately asked Americans to ponder their nation’s capacity to cause, or prevent, suffering in the world. He lamented the violence, the civilian victims, and especially the paradox that America’s rhetoric of high moral purpose could not mask its support of a corrupt, unpopular government. Despite American promises of peace, democracy, and land reform, he asserted, the Vietnamese people “languish under our bombs.” Children were “running in packs on the streets like animals … degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food,” while others were “selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.” What did Vietnam’s poor think of us, asked King, “as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” America, he proclaimed, desperately needed a “radical revolution of values…. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”23
The controversial My Lai massacre arguably influenced Americans’ perceptions of their cause in Vietnam more than any single event. My Lai was a South Vietnamese village where American soldiers killed as many as five hundred civilians during a raid in March 1968. The killing was kept secret for many months, but the story eventually made its way to the Pentagon’s top brass. The Army charged several soldiers with misconduct in September 1969, and two months later investigative journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story to the public. In the longest trial in Army court martial history, upward of two dozen officers and enlisted men were charged with premeditated murder and related crimes, though only Lieutenant William Calley was convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison in March 1971 but served only eighteen weeks at Leavenworth followed by three and a half years of house arrest.
The story may not have had such resonance if it had not been for the public release of official photos that clearly showed that most of the victims were unarmed women and children. Once the photos were published, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird privately bemoaned the impossibility of “sweep[ing] the whole thing under the rug.”24 The administration feared that the story could lead to reprisals on American POWs, hinder the ongoing peace talks, and provide “grist for the mills of antiwar activists.” In terms of their ability to bring the violence of the war home to Americans, the pictures were among the most powerful and disturbing in the history of war photography. After seeing them in Time, presidential adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested that the images had irrevocably changed the war effort. “I fear the answer of too many Americans will simply be that this is a hideous, corrupt society,” he counseled Nixon. “It is America that is being judged.”25
As the news media publicized the trials and courts martial between 1969 and 1971, My Lai provoked a great deal of soul-searching and painful questions. Were the soldiers acting on orders against a legitimate threat? Or had the war driven ordinary American boys to become hardened killers capable of slaughtering women and children without remorse? The public reaction was divided and highly politicized. One side saw in the massacre an illustration of America’s dark side writ globally. They were troubled that American soldiers had killed so many innocents, and angry that only one person was convicted of war crimes. “We sense, all of us,” wrote a columnist, “that our best instincts are deserting us, and we are oppressed by a dim feeling that beneath our words and phrases, almost beneath our consciousness, we are quietly choking on the blood of innocents.”26 A former Marine wrote to his senator, “I am today ashamed to be an American…. I feel unclean.” The journalist Peter Steinfels asserted that My Lai was “a cancer in the conscience of America…. Is this nation taking a mass ‘Manson murder’ to its heart as an act of patriotic duty, of soldierly duty? Are our consciences that stunted, our sensitivities so shriveled?”27
On the other side, many refused to believe that a “massacre” had taken place, or simply chalked My Lai up to the ugly realities of war. Some believed that the defendants were being railroaded and that the good name of the United States and its military were being besmirched by the news media and foreign enemies. National Review assailed the “collective madness” of media outlets whose “irrational and irresponsible comment” threatened the Vietnam mission more than all the antiwar protestors combined.28 Others denied that America’s cause in Vietnam was unjust or that American society was “sick.” “I feel [Lt. Calley] is being railroaded,” wrote an Army veteran to his senator. “You congressmen sent us over there, now damn it back us up. War is war. This is a cold cruel fact.”29
The Nixon administration knew that many Americans sought to punish the perpetrators, but it was also clear that domestic public opinion favored Calley. When Nixon commuted Calley’s sentence, one of the prosecuting attorneys complained directly to the president and expressed shock that so many Americans did not seem to grasp the trial’s legal and moral underpinnings—that it was “unlawful for an American soldier to summarily execute unarmed and unresisting men, women, children, and babies.”30 Nixon did not defend Calley, but in his memoir he attacked his own opponents for politicizing the affair and for ignoring North Vietnamese war crimes. “Calley’s crime was inexcusable,” wrote Nixon, but “the whole tragic episode was used by the media and the antiwar forces to chip away at our efforts to build public support for our Vietnam objectives.”31 In fairness to Nixon, although his commutation may have seemed insensitive relative
