Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

At the same time, however, there was a small, less connected, but still influential number of southern members of Congress who served as some of the most prominent congressional doves, questioning the wisdom, legality, and eventually the morality of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Democratic senator Albert Gore of Tennessee and Republican senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky had expressed their doubts to both Kennedy and Johnson through 1965, usually in private, about the wisdom of American involvement in Vietnam. By 1966 and 1967, respectively, these private doubts became public advocacy of withdrawal from Vietnam. Though Gore and Cooper did much to emphasize their dissent over Vietnam, the most influential southern “dove” on Vietnam, arguably the most important “dove” in Congress, was J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Fulbright, to his lasting regret, had been Johnson’s floor manager for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the Senate. From mid-1964 through early 1966, Fulbright watched as Johnson slowly but surely escalated the war. The Arkansas senator became increasingly concerned that Johnson was leading the United States into a full-scale war to defend a South Vietnamese government that did not have the backing of its own people. As early as December 1964, Fulbright staked out his position on the escalation that at that point was only beginning. The senator, during questioning in Foreign Relations Committee hearings of Maxwell Taylor, then American ambassador to South Vietnam, said in early 1965, “If you want to go to war, I don’t approve of it…. I am not going to vote to send 100,000 men, or it would probably be 300,000 or 400,000.” 13Over the next year, he continued to voice his concerns as Johnson, his friend and former Senate colleague, increased troops levels and bombing targets. Fulbright greatly angered the president in a foreign policy speech in the Senate on 15 July 1965 in which he proposed that the administration’s policy should be to bring an “end [to] the war by seeking a negotiated settlement involving major concessions on both sides ” (emphasis added). 14

In January 1966, Fulbright’s break with the administration became total when, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in response to a bill providing for a supplemental appropriation to fund the war, he opened full-scale nationally televised Vietnam hearings, in fact debating with Johnson administration officials the wisdom of continuing the war as the war raged on in Vietnam. Fulbright and Gore had been the only southern senators and some of the first legislators in all of Congress to officially break with Johnson over the war. In these hearings, both southern senators grilled Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, and others under the lights of the television cameras.

Fulbright began the hearings stating that he and others had been “deeply troubled about our involvement in Vietnam and it seems to us… that now is an appropriate time for some examination of our involvement there for the clarification of the people in this country.” The committee challenged or questioned almost every aspect of U.S. policy decisions regarding Vietnam. When Rusk suggested that the United States fought in Vietnam to ensure that South Vietnam could make their own decisions regarding their future, Fulbright shot back, “Do you think they can be a completely free agent with our occupation of their land with 200,000 or 400,000 men?” Fulbright and Gore went on to assert that by voting for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution they did not intend to give Johnson a blank check to engage in a full-scale war. 15

The hearings included experts such as George Kennon, the father of U.S. containment policy, who advocated liquidating the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It also explored such questions as what defines an atrocity and what is an acceptable military action. The hearings also brought out some of the confusion over Johnson’s Vietnam policies. When Ambassador Taylor suggested that U.S. military objectives were to convince the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong to stop their aggression in the South, Fulbright responded, “This is just another way of saying ‘unconditional surrender’… The idea of negotiating a compromise, which is something less than we want, seems to me to be consistent with a limited war. But if they give up and come to our terms, this is what I would call unlimited commitment… using whatever we need to bring about the result.” He drove the point home in a colorful fashion, “Maybe I’m too stupid to understand what it means when you say, ‘We are going to do what it takes to make them come to the conference table.’ This to me means they are going to have to, as they used to say in the Ozarks, holler ‘Enough’ or say ‘calf-rope.’” 16

One of the most controversial debates of the hearings involved the question of what constitutes an atrocity in war. Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, a confirmed hawk, defended the war effort, the U.S. and South Vietnamese military, and the Domino Theory against what he considered unfair attacks that gave aid and comfort to the enemy. While many on the committee took the opportunity to make speeches in front of the television cameras, Long seemed to make more of them than most committee members, save possibly Fulbright.

In a rambling opening statement, Long remarked that Communists, and some senators, had charged that the United States, by its actions in Vietnam, was an “international criminal.” The senator appointed himself as defense attorney to “plead my nation Not Guilty.” After asking Ambassador Taylor to attest to the excellence of several U.S. military units, he contrasted the U.S. efforts with the brutal tactics of the Vietcong, who he claimed had killed 50,000 civilians, including, “in one year alone, 456 mayors in little villages.” Taylor suggested the numbers were probably far higher. Long then challenged the senators and the television audience members to consider “how we would feel if that many mayors or officials in our community had been destroyed.” 17

“War is inherently a rather atrocious activity, is it not?” Fulbright observed when his time came around again to speak. The ambassador agreed. “If we are to talk about such things,” Fulbright continued, “we are reminded about air raids on Tokyo, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki.” When Taylor protested, saying that Japan used ruthless tactics treating prisoners and attacking Pearl Harbor, the Arkansas senator observed, “Isn’t it true that each country always believes the other one commits the atrocities, and that God is on their side? Isn’t this typical of all wars…. What difference, really, morally or any other way, do you see between burning innocent little children and disemboweling innocent citizens? Isn’t it only the means you use?”

The purpose of his questioning, Fulbright insisted, was not to justify the heinous acts of the Communists. He was attempting to debunk one of the chief tenets of U.S. society, American exceptionalism, that inspired U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “We sometimes think we’re the only good people, and I certainly don’t think we are bad people. But I don’t see any great distinction between using the weapons we happen to have to kill innocent people [when our enemies do the same]. I don’t think we should claim great superiority because we happen to have nuclear bombs and other side doesn’t.” 18

The 1966 Vietnam hearings solved little, but they still had a significant impact on U.S. attitudes about the war in Vietnam, at least in the short term. After the hearings, Johnson’s approval ratings on Vietnam plummeted from 63 percent in January to 49 percent in February. Pat Holt, a Texan and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee staff, believed that, because of the hearings, some Americans realized that “the dissenters were no longer a bunch of crazy college kids invading dean’s offices and so on; they were people of substance.” 19Although Americans’ public support of the war wouldn’t effectively wane until after Tet, the work of Fulbright, Gore, and others in a large sense made Vietnam dissent respectable.