American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Read Online Free

thousands of capsules of terramycin and with every dose of vitamins on a baby’s tongue, these words were said: “Dai La My-Quoc Vien-Tro [This is American Aid].”
    To most Americans in the 1950s, that seemed like good common sense. Of course the world should know about the size and generosity of our companies, and how much more the American way of life had to offer than Communism. And very few Americans in that era would have cringed at Dooley’s paternalism. At perhaps no other point in U.S. history did a greater portion of Americans share the powerful conviction that their nation was the greatest in the world, not only unmatched in its military and economic power but morally, politically, and culturally superior as well.
    The idea that America was chosen (and challenged) by God to stand above other nations had been developing for centuries. It was present even in 1630 when John Winthrop declared that the Puritan colony in Massachusetts Bay would be a “city upon a hill” that might inspire the world. That faith expanded along with the nation. By the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans believed it was their “ manifest destiny ” to seize the entire continent, even if it required a war against Mexico and further wars against Indians.
    In the years after World War II the faith in American exceptionalism reached its peak. In part, the exuberant nationalism reflected the triumph of World War II. No other nation emerged from that bloodbath in better shape. True, the United States had lost more than 400,000 people, a death toll surpassed only by the Civil War. But in the global context of sixty million dead, America had been spared the scale of suffering so common elsewhere, fueling the conviction that God or destiny had reserved a special role for the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. The Soviet Union, by contrast, had lost twenty-seven million, an unfathomable figure, and even many small nations had more war-related deaths than the United States. Vietnam, for example, lost at least a million and a half people in a 1944–45 famine caused by Japanese wartime exploitation.
    As the rest of the world struggled to rise from the rubble of war, the United States hardly missed a beat in transforming its humming factories and mills from the production of tanks and warplanes to cars and refrigerators. It had to be conceded that America was not perfect—racial discrimination and pockets of poverty were lingering problems—but the overriding view, at least among white people of reasonable means, was that these flaws were neither glaring nor permanent. The common chorus, sung in virtually every high school auditorium, at almost every Rotary Club luncheon, at barbecues and parades throughout the land, was that no other nation offered such abundant opportunity, such expansive freedom, such a bright and promising future. The fervent faith in American exceptionalism was the nation’s most agreed-upon religion of the 1950s. It was the central tenet of what was commonly called American national identity.
    The heart of American exceptionalism was the assumption that the United States was a unique force for good in the world. Although citizens might take pride in their nation’s armed might or the fact that it had never lost a war, there was also an unquestioned faith that America sought to share its blessings with the world. It was not an imperial aggressor seeking global conquest. It wanted for others only the great gifts enjoyed by Americans themselves—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and free enterprise. It would use its power to protect and advance those freedoms but never to assert its narrow national interests, and never without clear provocation or just cause.
    That was the conventional wisdom of Americans who read
Deliver Us From Evil
. The best seller might never have appeared without crucial assistance. Dooley was a gifted storyteller, but a clumsy and inexperienced writer. When Viking Press rejected