Many liberals continued to urge a purification of the South Vietnamese government, of course, and a series of coups in Saigon demonstrated the impossibility of such a purification. More and more, therefore, liberals demanded that the United States simply withdraw. Some Americans were even beginning to understand the real alternatives before the Vietnamese people, and to say either that the Vietnamese people themselves would have to decide the question ("How many Vietnamese fought in our Civil War?" William Sloan Coffin demanded), or--the same thing made more explicit--that the NLF represented the vast majority of the Vietnamese people and deserved to win the war.

A conclusion so radically deviant from official American belief naturally led its adherents to question other American orthodoxies. College students were most prone to reach such a conclusion, if only because the draft forced them to consider the war as it did not those who were older. And their feelings took shape in the beginnings of a predominantly collegiate, radical counter-culture. (I don't mean to suggest that the war was the only reason.)

If the American government had had any sense, it would have begun to withdraw from Indochina as soon as the domestic opposition began to grow. If President Kennedy had lived, perhaps this would actually have happened. In any case, it's impossible to believe that if Johnson in 1964--let alone Eisenhower in 1958--had known what the war was going to do to the United States, he would have continued to fight, since America had no vital economic or strategic interests in Indo china. But the American government was not sensible, it had become locked into its policy, it believed that American prestige--the prestige of the political democracy impossible in Vietnam that it was fighting to impose anyway--was on the line, that victory was just around the corner. The war continued.

III

In order to continue the war effectively, the government needed to stop its opponents from hampering the war effort. Most antiwar liberals disliked the NLF as much as they disliked General Minh, General Khanh, General Ky, and General Thieu. But in a two-sided war, to oppose one side actively means helping the other. The generals had found themselves hampered by anti-communist liberals who insisted on preserving civil liberties and democratic forms in their efforts to stamp out revolution. General Thieu had himself triumphantly re-elected while his opponents languished in jail cells. Similarly, the American government found itself embarrassed by the anti-communist liberals who opposed escalating terror, wanted to know why General Thieu wasn't preserving civil liberties and democratic forms, and who denounced "forced-draft urbanization," a policy that consisted of bombing villages till their inhabitants moved to cities where they could be more readily controlled by the generals' police, as genocide.

IV

An American government deeply devoted to American democracy could have refrained from fighting its much weaker opponents by illegal and undemocratic methods; but then an American government deeply devoted to American democracy would not have been supporting the dictatorship of General Thieu. Only a government terrified by radical social change, anywhere--the very sort of government likely to exaggerate the strength and the radicalism of its domestic opposition--could continue to fight for government by tiger cage.

So just as the South Vietnamese government had made war on political democracy in order to keep Vietnam free, the American government began to undermine American democracy for the good of the republic. Demonstrators were no longer exercising their Constitutional rights; they were "bums;" it was all right to club them in Chicago, or shoot in Ohio, or herd into jail in Washington. Newspapers were no longer the safeguard of democracy, the cornerstone of a republican state. Or rather, they were now more than ever the safeguard of democracy--which was no longer acceptable to democracy's defenders. Nixon so feared people's knowing the truth about what was happening in Indochina simply because that would lead them to oppose the war, or worse, to oppose Nixon's reign at home. So it was important that no one know that the CIA had raised, trained and equipped a mercenary army in Laos, that no one know that the United States was bombing Cambodia, that no one know the history of American involvement in Vietnam. Each leak, therefore, led to new repressive attempts to stop the pipelines. When someone from Kissinger's staff revealed that Cambodia was being bombed, Kissinger had wiretaps placed on all his subordinates to find out who was responsible. When Ellsberg gave the Pentagon papers to the American people in whose name they had been compiled, the government wanted so badly to punish him that it tried to bribe his judge. When antiwar Democrats began denouncing the war, the Democratic Party added VVAW, the Panthers and the Communist Party to the list of organizations against whom it was proper to subvert democracy to defend it. Nixon never went as far as Thieu in making criminals of his opponents; but then the necessity for Nixon's struggle was born in his imagination. When Thieu threw his opponents in jail, as we have seen, he had good reason to believe he was taking a necessary step to delay an NLF takeover--for his opponents stood for the civil liberties and democracy which would bring the NLF to power. In the United States, on the other hand, middle-class democracy faced virtually no viable leftist threat. When Nixon's men broke into the Watergate Hotel, they were acting out of the same insecurity that led them to remain in Vietnam long after intelligent American liberals had recognized that this country's professed goals there were impossible to achieve. The United States had started out to make Vietnam more like America; it had succeeded in making America more like Vietnam.

To be continued. This is the first of a two part series.