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

differences over the islands were slight, Kennedy had described Nixon’s view as “trigger-happy.” This prompted Nixon to strike back, suggesting that Republicans were actually more peace-minded than Democrats. It was Democrats, he argued—Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman—who had led the United States into the major wars of the twentieth century, not Republicans. “We’ve been strong, but we haven’t been trigger-happy .”
    At 2:00 a.m. the next day, Kennedy arrived at the University of Michigan, perhaps wanting to reclaim the mantle of peace that Nixon had momentarily seized. Ten thousand students had waited hours to catch a glimpse of the handsome young candidate, and Kennedy was not about to disappoint them. He stood on the steps of the Michigan Union and gave a short, unprepared speech. After a few banal comments on the importance of the election, he asked: “ How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers: how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service?”
    JFK’s campaign was flooded by offers from potential volunteers. A few weeks later, in San Francisco, Kennedy made his Peace Corps proposal more concrete. He introduced the subject with a single sentence: “ All of us have admired what Dr. Tom Dooley has done in Laos.” A round of applause erupted and Kennedy did not need to say more about Dooley—the young doctor had become a one-line symbol of service. JFK then called for “a peace corps of talented young men and women” to “serve our country around the globe.” Like Dooley, Kennedy viewed foreign service as inseparable from national service. By serving well abroad, you would serve America.
    JFK railed against the Eisenhower administration for filling American embassies with “men who lack compassion for the needy” and “do not even know how to pronounce the name of the head of the country to which they are accredited.” By contrast, he argued, Communist nations were deploying hundreds of well-trained and committed scientists, engineers, teachers, and doctors as “missionaries for world communism.” We can do better, Kennedy said. The cause of freedom depended upon it. Nixon quickly attacked the plan, saying it would become a “ haven for draft dodgers ,” a “cult of escapism.” A few days later, Kennedy was elected president by a margin of only 120,000 votes.
    In the heady months of transition from the Eisenhower era to Camelot, Dooley’s fame peaked. By then, magazine polls listed him as one of the ten most esteemed men in the world. A Gallup poll ranked him third, just behind the pope and President Dwight Eisenhower. At the apex of his celebrity, in January 1961, two days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Tom Dooley died of cancer. He was just thirty-four. The public had been following his struggle with the disease for months. The emotion stirred by Dooley’s death—a man who inspired so much youthful idealism—offered a small prefiguring of the nation’s grief when the young president was assassinated less than three years later.
    Along with their ability to awaken hopeful commitments, Dooley and Kennedy also shared a common religion. Both Kennedy and Dooley wore their Catholicism lightly enough to appeal to audiences that had just begun to shed older anti-Catholic prejudices. Yet Dooley’s popularity as a “medical missionary” was undoubtedly enhanced by the intense religiosity of post–World War II America. Formal memberships in all faith communities soared to more than two-thirds of the public and an astonishing 99 percent of Americans claimed to believe in God. In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, a formal declaration that loyalty to God and country were inseparable. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, published in 1952, sold more than twenty-six million copies its first year, and religious books accounted for almost half of the