The "Silent Majority" Speech

Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right

Scott Laderman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351858946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The "Silent Majority" Speech treats Richard Nixon's address of November 3, 1969, as a lens through which to examine the latter years of the Vietnam War and their significance to U.S. global power and American domestic life.

The book uses Nixon's speech – which introduced the policy of "Vietnamization" and cited the so-called bloodbath theory as a justification for continued U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia – as a fascinating moment around which to build an analysis of the last years of the war. For Nixon's strategy to be successful, he requested the support of what he called the "great silent majority, " a term that continues to resonate in American political culture. Scott Laderman moves beyond the war's final years to address the administration's hypocritical exploitation of moral rhetoric and its stoking of social divisiveness to achieve policy aims. Laderman explores the antiwar and pro-war movements, the shattering of the liberal consensus, and the stirrings of the right-wing resurgence that would come to define American politics.

Supplemental primary sources make this book an ideal tool for introducing students to historical research. The "Silent Majority" Speech is critical reading for those studying American political history and U.S.–Asian/Southeast Asian relations.

CHAPTER 1

Richard Nixon, the Cold War, and Southeast Asia

The Cold War made Richard Nixon. When he ran for Congress as a Republican from Whittier, California, in 1946, he had spent the previous decade practicing law, working for the Office of Price Administration, and serving in the U.S. Navy. His professional future looked bright. But that future took a public turn when World War II came to an end. In September 1945, just weeks after the Japanese surrender, Nixon received a letter from a banker in his Southern California hometown asking whether he would be willing to take on Representative Jerry Voorhis, the popular New Deal Democrat who held the state’s expansive Twelfth District seat. The idea of public service appealed to the young lawyer. Nixon excitedly agreed. He would “tear Voorhis to pieces,” he said.¹ How? By smearing him Red. Nixon would discover what a valuable tool red-baiting could be, and he used it to great effect.

Anticommunism was not new to the Cold War. The American financial and commercial establishment, which by 1945 oversaw the world’s preeminent industrial economy, had long been hostile to communism, socialism, and anarchism, all of which threatened the nation’s capitalist juggernaut. Even labor unionism, which was intended to provide workers with some semblance of power in their workplaces, was generally viewed hostilely. The antipathy of American elites grew as the twentieth century progressed. When Russia underwent a political revolution during World War I that overthrew Czar Nicholas II’s detested regime, the Woodrow Wilson administration was initially jubilant. But after the provisional government that had replaced the czar was overthrown by the anticapitalist Bolsheviks, or communists, in late 1917, Washington grew angry. Bolshevism, President Wilson said, represented “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos.”² In addition to overseeing a “Red Scare” led by his attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, the president joined a number of allies – most significantly the British and French – in an ill-fated intervention in Russia from 1918 to 1920. The overseas campaign may have failed, but it underscored a growing American consensus in the halls of power: communism was unacceptable and had to be destroyed.

Still, the United States was at times forced to accommodate itself to its existence. The constitution offered some protection to domestic communists, who reached probably the height of their influence during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the capitalist economy failed and approximately a quarter of the American workforce could not find jobs. And internationally, Washington learned, communists could serve as crucial allies in a global crisis. Such was the case with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union during World War II when the Americans and the Soviets shared a common enemy in Nazi Germany. But with the end of the Second World War in 1945, a new epoch began. Washington enjoyed a monopoly of atomic weapons; it occupied Japan, half of Korea, and a substantial portion of Germany; and wartime production had laid the foundation for a capitalist golden age. The United States was the world’s dominant economic and military power. It would be a couple of years before the Cold War was unambiguously established, but, even in those first months following the German and Japanese surrenders, rank anticommunism once more became acceptable. And Nixon exploited it.

His Democratic opponent in 1946 was not a communist. Indeed, he was despised by communists as a “red-baiter” and the sponsor of legislation in 1940 that forced communists to register with the federal government. But Nixon didn’t care. “Fellow travelers” was a term used to refer to those sympathetic to the views of the Communist Party, and Washington’s fellow travelers were “wild about” Voorhis, Nixon claimed. The young California lawyer did everything he could to tar him. Nixon made the incumbent look like a “Red dupe,” wrote biographer John Farrell, in a classic case of guilt by association.³ Nixon proved an expert at it. He trounced Voorhis at the ballot box, winning 56 percent of the vote. It was only a year since World War II ended, and Richard Milhous Nixon was going to Congress.

Once in Washington, the new representative from California only sharpened his attacks on the left. He joined the House Education and Labor Committee that crafted what became known as the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which seriously weakened the power of organized labor. He was assigned to the bipartisan Herter mission to Europe that would assess the need for massive U.S. foreign aid (i.e., the Marshall Plan); such aid, Nixon wrote of its utility in combating the Soviet Union, would give the European people “food & shelter & security and a chance for freedom & peace they will [use to] resist the totalitarian pressure.”⁴ And he was granted a seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which became the leading vehicle of the 1940s and 1950s for ferreting out communists, alleged communists, and those said to have communist sympathies. As a member of HUAC, Nixon helped to take down Alger Hiss, a former State Department official alleged to have been a Soviet spy, and he proved eager to go after New Dealers, Hollywood, and any others he saw as insufficiently hostile to the supposed communist conspiracy.

When Nixon decided to move beyond the House and run for the U.S. Senate in 1950 against actress, opera singer, and congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, he smeared her much like he smeared Jerry Voorhis. Her voting record on “Un-American Activities and Internal Security,” according to a “pink sheet” disseminated by the campaign, was virtually identical to that of Vito Marcantonio, a New York Democrat that the “pink sheet” called a “notorious Communist party-liner.” In fact, Nixon himself had voted the same way as Marcantonio hundreds of times.⁵ But that didn’t matter. Nixon defeated Douglas by an even larger margin than he had Voorhis four years earlier; he won the Senate race by nearly twenty percentage points. Two years later he would appear as the vice presidential nominee on the Republican presidential ticket of Dwight Eisenhower. They won, and in 1953, at the age of 40, Nixon assumed the second highest office in the United States. By then, given his willingness to manipulate the facts, the Democrats had taken to calling him “Tricky Dick.” His massaging of reality was only beginning.

*****

Domestic anticommunism was one thing, but U.S. foreign policy was another. It was in Nixon’s capacity as vice president that he first began to seriously address the violence, politics, and uncertain future of Vietnam, which in 1953 was more than seven years into a bloody anticolonial conflict. Until World War II, when imperial Japanese forces occupied much of China and Southeast Asia, Vietnam had been a relatively sleepy backwater of the French empire, which had created a large colony in what is today Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This colony – or, more accurately, this grouping of colonial territories – was given the name French Indochina by the government in Paris. France, like most of the major global powers, had set out in the nineteenth century to colonize portions of Africa and Asia. This followed the colonial conquests of the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch in earlier centuries, including the multinational colonization of North America that, following an eighteenth-century anticolonial war against the British, culminated in the creation of the United States. With complex histories that feature competing governments, private individuals, and corporate entities, parsing the detailed particulars of colonization worldwide is an enormously complicated undertaking. But, in Southeast Asia, the Dutch (Indonesia), the British (Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, and Brunei), the Portuguese (East Timor), the Spanish (the Philippines until 1898), the Americans (the Philippines after 1898), and the French (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) all participated in the imperial race.

Vietnam’s experience with French colonialism was not its first. As far back as the second century BCE, the Vietnamese people had suffered the domination of their neighbor to the north, living for over a thousand years under Chinese rule. It was not until 938 that they successfully threw off the Chinese yoke. Apart from a relatively brief period of further Chinese occupation in the fifteenth century, the Vietnamese were able to maintain their sovereignty and continue their own creeping conquest of southern territory until the mid-nineteenth century, when they began to face gradual French colonization. This was not, however, the first Vietnamese encounter with Europeans. French and other explorers, merchants, and missionaries had begun making their way to Vietnam in the sixteenth century. They sought riches, engaged in trade, and proselytized in the name of Christianity. While Vietnamese were fiercely protective of their independence and cultural patrimony, they were also politically divided, with deep frustrations over corruption, inequities in land distribution, taxation, and the often unjust treatment of ethnic minorities.⁶ Foreigners exploited this discontent. In the late 1850s, France began military hostilities against the Vietnamese imperial leadership, and in 1862 it acquired its first Vietnamese colony, Cochin China, in the southern third of the country. By 1884 the government in Paris controlled all of Vietnam.

The French colonization inspired local hostility and countless acts of resistance. Vietnamese drew on their proud, centuries-long history of rebellion in creatively crafting their response to French domination. But, in what would later prove an ironic turn, they also looked to the United States – which had its own history of anti-European rebellion – as a model for their national ambitions.⁷ Phan Boi Chau, for example, one of the most prominent Vietnamese intellectuals, poets, and revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extolled “the genius of [George] Washington” in uniting eighteenth-century American patriots and defeating the British. “Venerate Washington who served as commander-in-chief,” he wrote. “Follow the example of Washington.”⁸

No individual was more influential in organizing resistance to French colonialism, however, than the man known today as Ho Chi Minh. Ho, after whom Vietnam’s largest city, the former Saigon, is today named, spent decades agitating for Vietnamese liberation. He, like Phan Boi Chau, looked to the United States as a model and potential ally. Ho had become active in left-wing politics while living in France from 1919 to 1923 – he was a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920 – and he joined with other Vietnamese nationalists in seeking the independence of his ancestral homeland. During the Versailles peace conference following World War I, Ho, operating under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”), wrote to the American representative at the conference, Secretary of State Robert Lansing. President Woodrow Wilson had recognized the right of self-determination in his Fourteen Points speech in 1918, and Ho and his fellow Vietnamese revolutionaries took this call seriously. They sought greater rights for the Vietnamese people until “the principle of national self-determination [passed] from ideal to reality.”⁹ But, despite its consonance with American political rhetoric, their plea fell on deaf ears. The United States never responded to their entreaties, and French colonialism continued.

It took World War II to finally bring about change. Germany had invaded France in 1940, ushering in four years of collaborationist rule and Nazi occupation. Germany’s Asian ally Japan, which had decades earlier colonized Korea, Taiwan, and the Ryukyu Islands and in 1931 occupied the Chinese region of Manchuria, took over much of Southeast Asia, including French Indochina, in the early 1940s. The French collaborationist government, popularly known as Vichy France, offered virtually no resistance; indeed, it continued to administer Vietnam under Japanese control. The Vietnamese now faced two occupying powers: France, which they had been opposing for decades, and Japan, which spoke of liberating Asia from European colonization but in fact proved just another colonial oppressor. A militant resistance group formed in response. Founded in 1941, the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or Viet Minh, was a coalition led by the Indochinese Communist Party to resist French colonial rule and Japanes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• A Brief Note on Language
• Timeline
• Introduction: Toward “Peace”
• 1 Richard Nixon, the Cold War, and Southeast Asia
• 2 Vietnamization and the Illusion of Peace
• 3 Nixon and the Bloodbath Theory
• 4 The “Great Silent Majority” and Right-Wing Revanchism
• Epilogue: Conjuring Nixon in the Twenty-First Century
• Documents
• Index