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 to the magnitude of the massacre, he was asking a valid question about the biases behind his opponents’ outrage. But then, it was also true that the soldiers at My Lai had killed hundreds of innocents, and Americans could not punish other nations’ war criminals as easily as they could punish Lieutenant Calley.
In addition to the My Lai investigations, several forums publicized allegations of human rights violations and atrocities in Southeast Asia. In 1971, a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War held a public “Winter Soldier Investigation,” which featured three days of antiwar testimony from Vietnam veterans of all services. The recurring themes in these testimonies were American brutality, arbitrary violence, and violations of the rights of the Vietnamese. Former Marine William Crandall’s opening statement set the tone of the event: “We went to preserve the peace and our testimony will show that we have set all of Indochina aflame. We went to defend the Vietnamese people and our testimony will show that we are committing genocide against them. We went to fight for freedom and our testimony will show that we have turned Vietnam into a series of concentration camps.”32 Critics charged that the allegations were sensationalized or that these veterans were anti-American; others rationalized the violence as an unfortunate reality of war. Whatever the truth, the testimonies were further ammunition for those questioning the morality of U.S. foreign policy. In the eyes of some observers, the war had placed the United States into the ranks of the world’s human rights abusers. When a congressional committee asked the former presidential adviser James C. Thomson, Jr., in 1972 whether a U.S. withdrawal might precipitate a bloodbath in Vietnam, he replied, “It strikes me that the bloodbath danger has to be put in the context of the daily bloodbath we have inflicted on three countries.”33
For more and more Americans, this moral criticism of the war—its violence, its uncertain purpose, and its ability to turn young men into killers—evolved seamlessly into indignation that the United States was supporting autocratic regimes worldwide. Daniel Patrick Moynihan aptly noted in 1970 that the younger generation, in particular, was “marked by the belief that its government is capable of performing abhorrent deeds.”34 Prominent congressional activists of the 1970s and 1980s like Donald Fraser and Tom Harkin saw Vietnam as the prime motivator for public and congressional examinations of America’s human rights record. In Harkin’s case, this inspiration came in 1970, when as a congressional aide he saw firsthand the infamous “tiger cages”