Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty

2. Hearts, Minds, and Herbicides: The Politics of the Chemical War

[ 53 ] 6 6      The Politics of the Chemical War In the late summer of 1962 Edward R. Murrow was concerned about crop destruction. Writing to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in August, Murrow, then serving as the director of the United States Information Agency, expressed his skepticism about the ability of the United States to “persuade the world—particularly that large part of it which does not get enough to eat—that defoliation ‘is good for you.’” Among the many issues Murrow raised in his memo was that the New Yorker magazine had just run a series of pieces that called attention to the ecological consequences of insecticides. The articles, written by Rachel Carson, became the basis for Silent Spring, the book that helped usher in the modern environmental movement in the United States.1 Two years later Carson died, but the ideas she popularized would fundamentally change the way people thought about chemical herbicides and insecticides. They would also complicate the crop destruction program in Vietnam, well under way at the time of her death. Often concerned more with the global perception of the chemical war than with the chemical war itself, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations consistently fretted over the politics of defoliation and crop destruction as they escalated the war in the mid-1960s. Throughout this period the military stubbornly clung to its belief that the military effectiveness of herbicide use outweighed any possible negative political consequences. From the Pentagon down to field commanders, it became a given that Ranch Hand CHAPTER TWO [ 54 ] CHAPTER TWO missions made life more difficult for the NLF without having overly adverse effects on local populations. But in the face of mounting outside pressure to justify this increasingly controversial program in an increasingly controversial war, the internal debates over the pros and cons of the chemical war took on added significance during the critical year of 1967. That year the RAND corporation, the Santa Monica–based think tank closely associated with the military and intelligence communities, released two scathing reports that called into question the herbicide program in general and crop destruction in particular. These reports, “An Evaluation of Chemical Crop Destruction in Vietnam,” by Russell Betts and Frank Denton, and “A Statistical Analysis of the U.S. Crop Spraying Program in South Vietnam,” by Anthony Russo, offered by far the most critical assessments to date of herbicidal warfare programs from within the military–industrial complex itself and touched off a serious debate within the Pentagon.2 The origins of this policy debate lay in how the political battles over the herbicide programs had played out in multiple settings, from Washington to the Vietnamese countryside, and how the chemical war shaped and was shaped by the battle for hearts and minds. Most of the literature on the chemical war has notably overlooked such aspects. Military histories like William Buckingham’s Operation Ranch Hand and Paul Cecil’s Herbicidal Warfare summarize and too often simply reconstruct the official military line on herbicides without interrogating the assumptions on which those policies were based; neither takes seriously the possibility that Ranch Hand was undermining support for the war in the countryside. Other works on the use of herbicides in Vietnam have traded advocacy for historical context , collecting firsthand accounts from veterans and other victims of Agent Orange without considering the ways in which people encountered the herbicides . Yet most of these works focus on Agent Orange at the expense of other chemicals, such as Agent Blue, thereby ignoring the vital component of crop destruction altogether.3 By focusing on crop destruction as it is addressed in previously ignored military records, I demonstrate that the political and psychological aspects of the chemical war were far from ancillary components of the military campaign. Rather, both the revolutionary forces of Vietnam and the U.S.led forces saw the propaganda battle over the program as a central front in the war. In this battle there was no clear winner: both the U.S.–ARVN forces and the NLF struggled to make their case to Vietnamese villagers, and both drew their share of blame from local populations. There were, however, clear losers: Vietnamese civilians were, as one villager put it, like [ 55 ] HEARTS, MINDS, AND HERBICIDES “a fly caught between two fighting buffaloes.”4 In rationalizing and justifying the use of herbicides and other chemical agents in Vietnam, U.S. policymakers consistently distinguished between civilian crops...