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.The French knew the impor-tance of those dikes; they built them.But again, at the darkest momentin the Indo-China war, the French didn t bomb the dikes either.Thereason then was that French Communists, their powerful labor union,and all the various shades of Socialists, anti-colonialist Liberals, andFrench labor leaders who in their politics criss-crossed the Communistlines, held a knife between the shoulder blades of the government inParis.America is in that position now.One wonders who is holding theknife at the back of President Johnson.Meanwhile our boys die. (P.42)The idea that the real enemy was internal shaped the politics ofAmerica s ultraright toward the war in Vietnam almost from the be-ginning.For them, support for the war was synonymous with oppos-ing the anti-war movement, and their rhetoric soon found its way into From Odysseus to Rambo 93the political and journalistic mainstream.On March 28, 1966, the NewYork Daily News editorialized that recent demonstrations against thewar gave aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war and therebyfitted the U.S.Constitutions s definition of treason. In April 1967,Gen.William C.Westmoreland, commander of U.S.forces in Vietnam,returned to the United States to lobby for increased troop levels inVietnam and while on American soil he blasted the anti-war move-ment as unpatriotic and warned that popular opposition to the warwould cost lives and prolong the conflict.7 By the fall of 1969, betrayalhad become a central theme of the Republican Party s political rhetoric.As noted earlier, in running for mayor of New York against JohnLindsay, a liberal who had come out against the war, Republican JohnMarchi accused Lindsay of having planted a dagger in the back ofAmerican servicemen in Vietnam (Bigart 1969).totheFantasies of Richard NixonThe politics of the ultraright resonated deeply with Richard Nixon.Nixon had cut his political teeth as a young Red-hunting member ofthe House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.His homedistrict in Orange County, California, was widely known as a BirchSociety stronghold.The Los Angeles area Birch Society claimed themembership of several political and economic elites, including mem-bers of the Chandler family, which owned and published the LosAngeles Times.According to the writer David Halberstam (1979, 118)the Times, which was once described as the most rabid Labor-baiting,Red-hating paper in the United States, virtually created RichardNixon.8Nixon s approach to the war was Birchesque.He campaigned forpresident in 1968 as a peace candidate by pointing out that he hadbeen raised as a Quaker and promising to bring the troops home.Hispath to peace, however, entailed an escalated war.After his electionas president, he unleased a ferocious air assault on the Vietnameseand extended the ground war into Laos and Cambodia.When the 94 From Odysseus to Ramboanti-war movement criticized these measures, Nixon did what anyBircher would do: he decried the anti-war movement as a communistconspiracy that was prolonging the war and that deserved to betreated as an internal security threat.The Nixon-Agnew Strategy: Smash the Left,Capture the CenterThe origin of the myth of spat-upon Vietnam veterans lies in thepropaganda campaign of the Nixon-Agnew administration to counterthe credibility of the anti-war movement and prolong the war inSoutheast Asia.Nixon had won election as a peace candidate, but hewas also committed to not being the first American president to lose awar.It was a contradictory agenda.When the Vietnamese undertooka fresh offensive against Saigon from sanctuaries in Cambodia in Feb-ruary 1969, Nixon began bombing that neutral country.Fearing thatthe U.S.peace movement would use the bombings to build oppositionto the war to new heights, Nixon tried to keep the bombings secret.But in May, with U.S.forces taking heavy losses on Hamburger Hill in the A-Shau Valley, news of the bombings leaked out.It was time tochange the subject (Karnow 1983, 591, 601).Deploying a propaganda technique that would be honed to perfec-tion during the Gulf War thirty years later, Nixon began to redefinethe war.From the spring of 1969 on, the war was going to be first andforemost about the men who were being sent to fight it (and not, mindyou, about the people who sent them there).In the first instance, thismeant prisoners of war.The administration s clever campaign to mus-ter public opinion around the POW issue was launched on May 19 ata press conference held by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird.Enthusi-astically promoted by the media, the POW issue soon dominated warnews to such an extent that the writer Jonathan Schell observed thatmany people were persuaded that the United States was fighting inVietnam in order to get its prisoners back.9The POW issue created new visions of the war for Americans.As From Odysseus to Rambo 95H.Bruce Franklin (1992, 54) wrote in M.I.A., or, Mythmaking in Amer-ica, The actual photographs and TV footage of massacred villagers,napalmed children, Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and mur-dered, wounded GIs screaming in agony, and body bags being loadedby the dozen for shipment back home were being replaced by simu-lated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian Com-munists. But with the revelations of the atrocities perpetrated byAmerican soldiers against civilians in the Vietnamese village of MyLai in the fall of 1969, America s vision blurred again.Hundreds ofthousands turned out for the Moratorium Days in October and No-vember of 1969, making it clear that, while the POW issue couldanimate pro-war sentiment to a degree, it was not enough.The POW issue had a certain humanitarian appeal to it, however,which might be extended to all soldiers in Vietnam.The Nixon admin-istration eagerly made the extension.Our boys in Vietnam, it argued,whether they were in prison or in the field fighting, could not beabandoned.Funding for the war would have to be continued, lest thesafety of the troops in the field be undermined; rhetoric against thewar would have to be curbed, lest the enemy be encouraged and ourboys feel betrayed.The thirty thousand GIs who had already died inVietnam would have been sacrificed for nothing if we were to quitnow.The war had to go on until we could have peace with honor, ifnot victory.As long as there were U.S.soldiers in Vietnam the warhad to be supported; to do otherwise would mean abandonment andbetrayal.So it was in the soldiers themselves that Nixon found theperfect reason to continue the war
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