29b: The Age of Malaise

Like Truman and Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy believed in the domino theory. He considered the US-supported client regime in South Vietnam a domino worth fighting for. He did not send US combat troops to South Vietnam, but he did depose South Vietnam's President Diem. Diem was indeed corrupt, but none of his successors did much better. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, bears responsibility for escalating the Vietnam War. According to Johnson, North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the US Navy in international waters on August 5, 1964. He requested and obtained from Congress wide powers to wage war against North Vietnam. In hindsight, it appears that Johnson managed the so-called "Tonkin Gulf Incident" to get a free hand to fight Communism: a worthy end which Johnson pursued by false means. In March 1965, the US unleashed its first massive bombing campaign, "Operation Rolling Thunder," but air power could not crush North Vietnamese morale. The first American combat units arrived in Vietnam that same month. By 1968 more than 500,000 American troops were in Vietnam, many of them draftees. Unlike the South Koreans, who fought hard for their country, the South Vietnamese were far less willing to die for their corrupt government. But despite the Americans' numerical and technological advantages, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese could not be beaten by traditional means. They were fighting as guerrillas on their home territory. They could strike and fade back into the jungle, while the US forces holed up in armed camps. Despite the extravagant promises of some American generals, the US was stuck with a war it could neither win nor extract itself from.

Most of America's wars had faced some opposition. New Englanders had resisted the War of 1812; "Copperheads" wanted Lincoln to leave the Confederacy alone; the America First movement fought FDR's attempts to prepare for World War Two. But the anti-Vietnam War movement was the first in American history to gain strength as the war went on. For the first time, American TV watchers could follow the war on network news; the only other major domestic news was the often violent anti-war protests springing up around the nation. Eventually, the increasing costs of war, human and financial, forced President Johnson not to run for re-election in 1968. Eisenhower's former Vice-President, Richard M. Nixon, was elected President, pledging to end the war with honor. But instead he dragged the war out by "Vietnamization:" the US would not retreat, but would gradually let the South Vietnamese assume the burden of fighting. In 1970 Nixon actually extended the war into Cambodia and Laos, hoping to destroy Viet Cong staging camps. The result, however, was two more countries dragged into chaos. The 1973 Paris ceasefire agreement between the US and North Vietnam brought about Nixon's cherished "peace with honor." Freed of the Vietnam burden, Nixon pursued a more friendly and more realistic relationship with Red China. In return for granting the People's Republic de facto recognition, Nixon gained a counterweight against the Soviets. In January 1975, aid to South Vietnam ceased. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975. 58,000 Americans had died, and hundreds of thousands were wounded, fighting for a government which could not fight to save itself. The evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon, complete with helicopters and gunfights, was the ultimate symbol: for the first time ever, America had fought a war and lost.

America's failure in Vietnam was but the largest of several setbacks in the 1970s. US support of Israel led to an Arab oil embargo in 1973, which sent the world economy into spiraling inflation which lasted year. The Watergate scandal brought down first Vice President Agnew and then, in August 1974, President Nixon himself. His immediate successors, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, were decent men who maintained the status quo instead of actually leading. In the last year of Carter's presidency, the US suffered the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis. The shah of Iran, a despotic ruler but America's faithful anti-Communnist ally, had been deposed by a Shiite Muslim regime in 1979. When he was allowed to receive medical treatment in the US, the new Iranian regime stormed, the US Embassy in Tehran, took the inhabitants hostage, and kept them until 1981. Carter achieved more working for world peace; he brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and caused the Panama Canal Zone to be returned to the Panamanians. But he couldn't make a dent in what he rightly termed America's "malaise." If anything, his well meaning but often inept policies contributed to it.

Not that the USSR was riding a hot streak, either. The Soviet people had long since tired of paying  for their nation's costly military buildup. Living in cramped, shabby apartments, working at dreary jobs, standing in long lines for scarce and worthless consumer goods, they had come to see Communism as a bad joke. Nor did Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev have any new ideas for combatting the Soviet malaise. Lost in a senile, alcoholic fog, he did as his sycophantic advisors told him. One such bright idea was the invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. One would have assumed that someone in the Soviet hierarchy would have learned the necessary lessons from the American fiasco in Vietnam, but what Brezhnev wanted was what the Soviet Union got. Soon, the USSR was up to its neck in a bloody and expensive guerrilla war which it could neither win nor get out of. The United States was able to pull itself out of its malaise with the same hard work and positive attitude Americans had shown riding out the Great Depression. But the Afghan War would be the powder keg which blew the rotten Soviet state sky high.