Montgomery Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam called the Vietnam War a "second American Civil War" before a standing-room-only crowd in Cook Auditorium yesterday afternoon.
Halberstam, who won the Pulitzer for his Vietnam coverage for the New York Times, will be in residence at Dartmouth until Feb. 28. Halberstam is a best-selling author and the third Montgomery Fellow of Winter term.
Vietnam "was not just an unfair business but the second American Civil War," Halberstam said. "It was us against us ... The division of region and class tore at us and is still in many ways unresolved."
He said the war in Vietnam was a collision of foreign and domestic policies, which demonstrated that those who thought they had freedom of choices really did not. The leaders were "locked in by a pernicious domestic policy dictated by an age of anxiety," Halberstam said.
He said Vietnam-era politicians inherited the legacy of McCarthyism, a paranoid anxiety that followed World War II. He said it was an age when the two Superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were isolationist and insecure.
"It was like two blind dinosaurs, each thinking the other was the oppressor," Halberstam said. "The traditional powers were out of the picture and these two sleepy isolationist nations sat there trying to figure our where they were with each other and how to divide the world."
Atomic weapons "took away the security blanket of the oceans and turned them into streams," Halberstam said. He said nothing showed the nation's anxiety more than the stripping of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance.
This age of anxiety clashed with an American domestic policy focused on Republican fears that the party was losing influence.
The Republicans, grappling for issues in an era of economic prosperity, latched onto Senator Joe McCarthy's idea that Democrats were soft on communism and attacked them as traitors, Halberstam said.
When John F. Kennedy was elected president a decade later, he was unwilling to take a fresh look at China.
"Essentially the map of the world did not have China on it," Halberstam said. "It was a map of the McCarthy-Dulles era."
He said the nation's leaders denied the new threat, suppressing important CIA intercepts showing the size of forces on the Chinese-Russian border.
Halberstam said American politicians should have learned a lesson from the war in Indochina. "It should have taught us that we ought not go into it," Halberstam said.
He said the war in IndoChina showed the Vietnamese the advantage of being nimble and attacking only when superior in number.
Americans entered the Vietnam conflict when it became apparent that Vietnam might "go under" to the communists.
While many thought the conflict would be short-lived, "no one had a sense of the terrain and how it could swallow up 500,000 men," Halberstam said. "We were not fighting the Luftwaffe but something in the heads of the people."
Halberstam said the Vietnamese realized they could persist indefinitely, but the Americans would tire of fighting.
"The Tet Offensive brought it home to the people," he said. "People realized that maybe this wasn't a war that could be won ... And if these people could be that brave against such technical odds, maybe there was something to admire about them."
He said the victory was a political victory -- the Vietnamese were willing to stay around long enough for the cameras to catch them.
