James S. Olson

The Official Story

During the years of the Vietnam War, public trust in American politicians reached an all-time low. Journalists coined the term “credibility gap” to describe the chasm between official descriptions of the war and the reality of the conflict. The phrase “credibility gap” was first used by reporter David Wise in a May 23, 1965, article for the New York Herald Tribune. At the time, there were only a few thousand American combat troops stationed in South Vietnam, but the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. Public suspicions about the truthfulness of the Johnson administration escalated as well. Murray Marder, a reporter for the Washington Post, popularized the term “credibility gap” in an article on December 5, 1965, in which he argued that government officials were being disingenuous in painting a rosy picture of a war that was actually going quite badly. The 1971 publication in the New York Times of the so-called Pentagon Papers exposed to the entire world just how disingenuous public officials had been. Four American presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—had been guilty of misleading the American people.

Coolidge and the Historians. By Thomas B. Silver. (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic, 1982. xviii + 159 pp. Tables, notes, and index.

back upon A decade of upheaval in American history. The countrys youngest president, having succeeded a conservative Republican and having sounded a clarion call to the progressive forces in the country, is now gone forever from the presidency. An activist Democratic president skillfully shepherds legislation through Congress, but wolfish war follows close on the heels of domestic reform. Radical protests against the system, and a few bombings, ignite national hysteria. The president retires in bitterness, soon to die. His Republican successor at first holds forth the hope of restoring the national composure, but he is replaced by his vice-president after a truncated term marred by economic dislocation and executive scandal unprecedented in American history. Would it pass understanding if the new president set aside his clarion so that he might speak softly to his countrymen? As there are times during the nations history that require its citizens to summon up their last reserves of daring and courage, are there not other times that call for the exercise of moderation and sobriety? Does not prudence comprehend all of the virtues? Imagine a statesman ascending to the presidency after a decade of war, national hysteria, recession, and scandal. Imagine that the next five years are characterized by peace, national calm, unprecedented inflation-free prosperity, and rigid executive integrity. Would not the citizens bestow their gratitude upon the statesman who presided over such a time? And if it is true, as a famous political scientist once said, that we approach the subject of prudence by studying those to whom we attribute it, would not such a statesman be worthy of the attention of our political scientists and political historians? When I wrote at the outset of this article about a decade of upheaval in American history, I had in mind the period from the first administration of Woodrow Wilson to the death of President Harding. During the five years following the decade 1914 to 1923, President Calvin Coolidge won the admiration and the gratitude of the American people. His three predecessors had begun their terms full of hope for the future, and had ended them, respectively, in defeat, repudiation, and death. Coolidge in-

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When they completed their investigation of the My Lai massacre, the Peers Commission concluded that a systematic cover-up of the incident had occurred at every level of command in the Americal Division. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had rescued some of the villagers, had reported the incident to his chaplain, Captain Carl Creswell, and to Colonel Oran K. Henderson, commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade, but a thorough investigation of the allegations never took place. It was not until Ronald Ridenhour’s letter of March 29, 1969, more than a year after the massacre, that the army launched a formal investigation.

The Cover-Up

The 23rd Infantry Division, also known as the Americal Division, had been deactivated in April 1956 after several years of service in the Panama Canal Zone. General William Westmoreland reassembled and reactivated the unit on September 25, 1967. He assigned Americal troops to I Corps in Vietnam, where the unit was to work cooperatively with the 1st Marine Division. Charlie Company, part of Americal’s 11th Infantry Brigade, was deployed to Quang Ngai province in I Corps in December 1967. For the next three months, the troops participated in search and destroy missions, trying to locate the notorious Vietcong 48th Local Force Battalion, which operated regularly in the region.

Experience in War

On March 29, 1969, Ronald Ridenhour, a Vietnam War veteran, wrote a letter to American political leaders outlining what he had heard about the events at My Lai and calling for a thorough investigation. The letter triggered formal inquiries in Congress and in the U.S. army. More than seven months later, on November 13, 1969, Seymour Hersh’s investigative articles about My Lai appeared in newspapers around the country, as did a piece by Robert M. Smith in the New York Times. Early in December 1969, Life magazine published Ronald Haeberle’s graphic color photographs of the massacre. The cover-up of the incident, which had been systematic at all levels of command in the Americal Division, was finally over. The entire world now knew about My Lai.

Exposure and Investigation

In the following selections, American and South Vietnamese participants and witnesses describe what happened on the morning of March 16, 1968, in My Lai village. Their testimony raises a number of compelling moral and psychological issues. As you read the documents, you will discover that some of the troops, without question, obeyed Lieutenant William Calley’s order to kill civilians. There is little doubt about the reality of such orders, but in your opinion, are the troops who obeyed guilty of murder and war crimes? Other members of Calley’s platoon knew immediately that such orders were illegal, and they refused to obey. But even those who disobeyed Calley’s orders did not actively engage in stopping the killing. They simply refused to participate. To what extent might they be accomplices to the slaughter? Also, they did not report the alleged war crimes to higher authorities as required by the Geneva conventions. Did such behavior render them guilty of participating in the cover-up of the massacre? Only Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot, actively worked to protect Vietnamese civilians from the American troops. He even threatened to fire on his own men if they continued the slaughter. Was he right or wrong in his actions? In addition, Thompson was the only American at My Lai that day to report the massacre to superior officers.

The Assault on My Lai

In 1863, at the height of the Civil War and at the behest of the War Department, the distinguished political scientist Francis Lieber undertook a codification of existing international law on the rules of land warfare. The War Department published Lieber’s work as A Code for the Government of Armies in the Field and instructed Union soldiers to conduct themselves according to its conclusions. The code’s guiding principle was as follows: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.”

The Official Rules of Modern Warfare

from his personal interviews with five surviving early immigrants. Together with the authors own life history these interviews add data on the human dimension of Korean-American history. In sum, this book is a most comprehensive book which examines the Korean immigration to America in the contexts of history and international relations. When augmented by empirical data on the recent Korean immigrants, this book would prove to be the best textbook available for the study of Korean-Americans.