From Humiliation to Human Rights

Until the Vietnam War, U.S. presidents seldom spoke of humiliation. The Public Papers of the Presidents, word-searchable through UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, record just sixty-five utterances of the word in all its variations before 1961.¹ When presidents did refer to humiliation, it was usually to that of other nations, not their own. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman never publicly entertained the thought of U.S. humiliation. Dwight Eisenhower did so just once, only to repudiate the “attitude of humiliation” with which Senator John Kennedy greeted the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite.² Kennedy’s claim that Sputnik marked a humiliating “missile gap” helped him win the White House in 1960 in a close contest with Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, and previewed his tendency to see the Cold War as a proving ground for U.S. prestige. Seeing the United States as locked in a zero-sum global competition with its rivals, Kennedy evoked the prospect of national humiliation before the world five times during his brief presidency.

It was thanks to Kennedy and the men around him, including his chief rivals for the presidency and successors to that office—Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—that the U.S. presence in Vietnam grew into an American War against Vietnam, a war that lasted until 1973, involved nearly three million U.S. troops, and cost some 3.5 million lives.³ And it was through their pronouncements and strategic doctrine that the war became “an effort directed entirely toward building up a certain image by force of arms . . . a piece of pure theater,” as reporter Jonathan Schell put it. If Americans intervened in Vietnam to demonstrate their strength, they persisted for fear of looking weak. “The present U.S. objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation,” Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton wrote as the war escalated.⁴ “We will not be humiliated. We will not be defeated,” Nixon vowed as the United States withdrew.⁵ But the frequency with which Nixon warned against that fate—ten times during his five years in office—suggests doubts on that score, doubts confirmed by Saigon’s collapse. “The greatest disaster in American foreign policy has ended,” wrote the Boston Globe; “We got nothing for our effort but pain and humiliation.”⁶

The two excellent books under review here offer complementary histories of U.S. defeat in Vietnam and its legacies. Christian Appy’s American Reckoning and Barbara Keys’ Reclaiming American Virtue would seem to have little in common. Appy has written a fast-paced but expansive synthetic history pitched to the undergraduate lecture hall. While distinctive within the survey literature on the war for its emphasis on ideas and scant attention to geopolitics, it falls well within Vietnam War historiography and seldom ventures beyond those parameters. Keys, on the other hand, offers an exhaustively researched monograph focused on the human rights revolution of the 1970s and geared toward the graduate seminar and expert researcher. Appy synthesizes an eclectic mix of popular and published sources, while Keys digs deep into dozens of archives. But both books concern the way Americans experienced defeat in Vietnam as a national humiliation, and how outrage and embarrassment shaped their responses to what Keys calls “the trauma of the Vietnam War” (p. 48). Precisely because they are different, these books illuminate the dynamics by which the war upended U.S. politics and foreign policy in the short term but left both strangely unchanged over the longue durée.

Since publishing Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam in 1993, Christian Appy has been an essential contributor to scholarship on the American War in Vietnam, while managing to stand out from that field’s mainstream. Whereas much of the earliest work on the...