Fifty years ago this December, U.S. forces in Southeast Asia embarked on a bombing campaign of North Vietnam amidst the holiday season with Christmas one week away. President Nixon, frustrated over peace talks with the North, broke off negotiations, believing aerial bombardment might force the northern communists’ hand. The “massive new bombing campaign,” wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, was not meant to win the conflict but rather ensure “the American departure is ‘honorable’” and to humble the North Vietnamese government into returning to negotiations with more reasonable demands from the U.S. perspective. “For that we have caused, are causing, and presumably will continue to cause the most terrible destruction in the history of man.”[1]In a follow up column on December 25th, he lamented that this Christmas, “in the eyes of the world, the Christian peace offered by the United States is the peace of the inquisition: conformity or tormented death.”[2]
Unsurprisingly, considering the polarization of politics around the war then and now, Lewis’s position drew critics, one of whom had emerged as a leading intellectual and fierce anti-communist: poet and historian Robert Conquest. The feud that ensued between the two men encapsulated the controversies and debates over the conflict in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates that heated rhetorical clashes over foreign policy often bludgeon nuance and obscure the views of those most affected by such policies and puts forward the arc of the war’s historiography that would follow, in some cases making arguments that would be taken up by critics and supporters of the war nearly a decade later.
While at the New York Times, Lewis was a longtime critic of American policy in Southeast Asia, particularly under Nixon, and reacted poorly to a January 12, 1973 column by Conquest in the Sunday Times, an august London newspaper. In a column called “The Propaganda of Atrocity,” Conquest took aim at the commentators and leaders who used atrocities as a means to cloud vision and policy — or, as the historian wrote, “to present a specific allegation in such a way as to make the blood boil and so to preempt or inhibit judgement.” For Conquest, the issue did not hinge on which state committed the most crimes: “[T]he loser, in terms of Western opinion, is not that state that commits the most atrocities so much as the one whose enemies have the best propaganda machine.”[3]
Conquest’s bonafides regarding horrible authoritarian regimes were well established by 1973. During the 1960s, without access to archives or intelligence about the Soviet Government itself, Conquest correctly ascertained the systematic repression and violence at the heart of the Soviet regime, publishing in 1960 the landmark study Power and Politics, which documented the horrible nature of Josef Stalin’s regime. “His historical intuition was astonishing,” remarked Norman M. Naimark, a respected historian of Eastern European history, at the time of Conquest’s death in 2015. His second book, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the Thirties, published eight years later was mostly a validation of his earlier book, which Conquest had wanted to title, “I Told You So You Fucking Fools.”[4] Who were those “fucking fools”? Mostly historians and other folks on the left who either disputed Stalinist atrocities or argued they were an aberration in the Soviet system.
Lewis, much like Conquest, broke new ground in his field. During the course of his career, he won two Pulitzer Prizes, transformed legal journalism with his coverage of the Supreme Court and books like Gideon’s Trumpet (1964), and later devoted himself to human rights issues abroad, covering the Biafra War in the late 1960s and tirelessly fought for the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Domestically, he was a full-throated supporter of the civil rights movement.
In January 1973, renewed attention to the U.S. bombings of North Vietnam brought both domestic and international condemnation. In his column, Conquest appeared rather untroubled by 1,300-1,400 dead from these raids claimed by the North Vietnamese and ridiculed those who compared the bombing to Hiroshima and other World War II acts. He argued that we’re all guilty of supporting “armed struggles” that result in civilian deaths, and in a subsequent letter to Times editor William Rees-Moog cautioned the left about its practice of what he characterized “asymmetrical humanitarianism,” over playing atrocities so as to distort the real villains and blurring lines of support.[5]
Yet, Conquest’s certitude, or what some might even label contempt for nuance on the issue reared its head in his Times piece, particularly when it came to Anthony Lewis. “Admirers of the IRA, the Arab terrorists and the Vietcong indeed most support or condone the killing of civilians on purpose,” he noted while adding a harsh aside. “In any case, such stuff comes particularly ill from those who openly advocate Communist victory in Vietnam, such as Mr. Anthony Lewis and the Swedes.”[6]
“My beliefs are in print, so they are no secret,” an angry Lewis wrote to Rees-Moog the same day of the article’s publication. “I have condemned Soviet oppression, and such acts as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in words as strong as I know how to use. While in Hanoi I wrote critically about the totalitarian aspects of that regime. I have written against violence as a political tactic in Ireland, Israel, and elsewhere.”[7] Lewis added that his issue with U.S. policy in Vietnam had to do with his belief that its efforts were “disproportionate to any conceivable political end.” While he admired Conquest a great deal for his work on Soviet history, this piece was little more than “guttersnipe in the pattern of Joseph McCarthy.” The dispirited Lewis asked Rees-Moog to convey his feelings to Conquest. [8]
The Times editor passed on Lewis’s correspondence to Conquest who dug in his heels further, describing Lewis’s writing to Rees-Moog as “highly emotional, intemperately worded attacks on American barbarism, brutality and what have you.” Such language alienated and embarrassed Lewis’s own left-wing friends who supported many of the same causes often lauded by the New York Times columnist. Conquest also dismissed the Czech example as irrelevant, found Lewis’s accusation of McCarthyism as “McCarthyite itself” and argued that he hadn’t misrepresented Lewis at all, but if Lewis could convince him otherwise, he would address it in a letter to the newspaper after all: “I make no claims to infallibility.”[9]
Unsurprisingly, Conquest’s letter which Rees-Moog passed on to Lewis did little to mollify the NYT journalist, who soon after contacted the historian directly. Yes, perhaps he was overly sensitive, Lewis wrote, but then any American accused of communist sympathies, especially in regard to Southeast Asia, would be. He had hoped Conquest could convey privately that there was nuance on the issue, without ascribing anyone pro-communist standing.[10]
Friends with both men, Times journalist Bernard Levin offered to intercede. Levin conveyed to Lewis that while Conquest hewed to the “Those who are not with us are against us,” line of thinking more than most, “Bob was no more a McCarthyite” than Lewis was a red, though he also conceded that Conquest had misunderstood Lewis’s position.[11]
Levin also reached out to Conquest defending Lewis: “He loathes the idea of communist regimes anywhere the same way we do.” Conquest had gotten Tony’s “attitude squarely wrong”; portraying him as a “softhead … is really wide of the mark indeed.” Rather than supporting communist takeover of South Vietnam, Lewis simply believed that continuing the war perpetuated far greater harm. The fact was that the United States did not have the right or perhaps even the ability to determine South Vietnam’s fate. “I don’t mind my enemies having the wrong view of my friends, but I do mind my friends having the wrong view of each other,” Levin wrote.[12]
Lewis and Conquest argued round and round about just what counted as openly advocating for communist victory in Vietnam. Conquest trolled Lewis magnificently, always returning to the same point that under the circumstances, Lewis’s solution led to communist triumph. He offered to write a letter to the Times acknowledging that rather than advocating for communist victory, Lewis advocated for open surrender to the communists in Vietnam and then raised an almost proto-“politics of civility” argument. “You will in any case have gathered… that my objection was far more to your use of indiscriminate atrocity propaganda against the American Government and Forces than to your opinions as such.”[13]
Throughout their disagreement, Conquest managed to channel the arguments of revisionist supporters of the war, nearly a full decade before works like Norman Podhoretz’s Why We Were in Vietnam (1982) began to emerge. In his 1982 work, Podhoretz defended the moral and political motivations driving U.S. intervention, maintained the anti-communism movement in South Vietnam had been robust, and that opposition to the war provided shallow critiques.[14] Opposition to the war, for Podhoretz and some other members of the revisionist school, amounted to aiding the enemy often by exaggerating the depth of U.S. atrocities and downplaying the North’s totalitarian rule. For example, Podhoretz, just as Conquest did in 1973, rejected comparisons between the Christmas bombings and U.S. raids on Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. The former resulted in up to 1,500 dead, the latter 35,000 and 80,000 respectively. Conquest made similar points in the offending article and stuck to them in his correspondence with Lewis.[15]
In a 1971 column, Lewis argued that Nixon would be better off negotiating for a withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam, agreeing to a prisoner swap and some sort of power sharing agreement with the communists. Conquest equated this with openly advocating for communist triumph: “It seems to me that you are quibbling; perhaps the world of emotive words you inhabit has cut you off from the world of meaning. For you would not… deny that you have stood for American withdrawal regardless of the results in South Vietnam… it would be an insult to your intelligence to suggest that you did not realize that that would have meant… Communist victory.” [16]
In the same letter, however, Conquest tellingly admits he never formally documented Lewis actually advocating surrender in print but instead argued that he thought once he had formulated it “beyond cavil, you would accept it.”[17]
Lewis summarized his rejection of Conquest’s point succinctly, “What you have demonstrated is a belief in the following progression of thought: I favored unconditional withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. I therefore favored ‘surrender.’ I therefore ‘openly advocated communist victory.’ And all four-legged animals are horses.”[18] Conquest responded that he found Lewis’s “surrender policy less repulsive than the extravagant nonsense,” he used to “justify it.”[19]
A second aspect of the Lewis-Conquest feud relates to agency, notably that of South Vietnam’s citizens. If there is a consistent aspect to U.S.-Vietnam policies during the war and for the war’s U.S. historiography over the first decade or two, it was a two-pronged general disregard for the actual opinions of the Vietnamese and an inability to fully face the war’s moral dimensions. Even the early works that were critical of U.S. involvement pulled punches. Arthur Schlesinger’s “quagmire thesis” argued that, though mistaken, the war had been “a tragedy without villains.” [20]
If The Vietnam War documentary produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is evidence of the general view of the conflict, the consensus remains oblivious to the U.S.’s moral or legal culpability in Vietnam or, more generally, for the Cold War. To the war’s legality and morality, in his critique of the documentary, historian Christian Appy took it to task for its “reticence to question the fundamental legality and justice of America’s war in Vietnam … The Vietnam War characteristically fails to draw the most damning conclusions from the evidence it provides.” It barely gave voice to the anti-war movement and could have easily included a few respected foreign policy experts who could have demonstrated how, even if one disagrees, “the North Vietnamese had good reason to claim that the United States was waging a war of aggression, not the other way around.” [21]
And what of the nation’s Cold War containment policy, which was hailed as a U.S. success by the 1990s? Tony Judt reminds us that whatever victories containment delivered in Europe were undermined or “offset by long term damage to its reputation farther afield: in Vietnam for example, or the Middle East. The Soviet Union was not the only ‘loser’ in the cold war,” Judt wrote in a pointed review of revisionist historian John Gaddis’s 2006 work, The Cold War: A New History.[22]
Fully in line with this emerging tradition, Conquest never once raises this issue of Vietnamese agency and even dismisses Lewis’s attempts to discuss this fact as “canting moralistic abuse.”[23] Here Conquest, like so many others of the time, refused to consider the implications of the war on the South Vietnamese and, as noted, even dismissed accusations of “mass bombings” by comparing them with atrocities carried out in World War II, which elides the very moral issue at the heart of the question.
To his credit, Lewis raised the issue of Vietnamese self-determination. Like others, he once mistakenly believed that the U.S. could intervene and establish some form of democratic rule. Diem, however, drew his power from U.S. support. Under his rule, South Vietnam did not enact democracy. Diem, a Catholic in a largely Buddhist nation who trafficked in the kind of patronage guaranteed to alienate his fellow Vietnamese, did not legitimately represent the interests of its citizens, a point that has been driven home by historians such as George Kahin, who noted in 1986 that the U.S. effort – predicated on the strength of the Diem regime – was doomed from the start. The Diem government was the furthest thing from an indigenous expression of the South Vietnamese people.[24] “I came to that view when it became clear to me how destructive and corrupting the results of our intervention had been for the people of Vietnam,” Lewis wrote. [25]
Lewis suggested to Conquest parallels by which to reconsider his argument. The United States could not fight communism everywhere; it had not in Cuba, Chile, or Czechoslovakia. Drawing on the last example, Lewis noted that in 1968, had the U.S. and NATO promised to intervene in order to roll back the Soviet takeover of the country, would the Czechs have chosen that path if it meant, as it had in Vietnam, “a third of their people would become refugees, their most valuable forests would be poisoned, millions would be killed and wounded, more bombs dropped on their country than everywhere in World War Two and so on.” No one ever bothered to ask the Vietnamese any of this. Yet, the U.S. had intervened.[26]
Despite being steeped in the history of the USSR and its human rights violations, Conquest refused to engage the Czechoslovakian example, stating that it was irrelevant since it could only be analogous if the U.S. entered a small-scale war there and then withdrew, an unlikely scenario considering the nation’s location in central Europe. He did at least concede that a case for not getting involved did exist and against the “Macnamarite conception of the war.”[27]
Still, Lewis had his own blindspots. As with many observers at the time, few ever grasped that Vietnamese support of communism, whether in the North or South, derived a great deal from a nationalist desire to be rid of foreign influence rather than dedication to communist ideology, a point made in subsequent years by Kahin and other historians. Both Lewis and Conquest were products of imperial powers and this mindset simply was hard to shake. At one point, Lewis writes in arguably Orientalist fashion, “one of the bitterest lessons for us Americans in Vietnam has been that the Vietnamese do no share our view of life.” Perhaps, or maybe, they simply didn’t share America’s vision of life under occupation.[28]
It’s fitting that it was Henry Kissinger who once said that academic knife fights are so brutal because the stakes are so low — Kissinger’s corrupt, ethereal presence hangs over the Christmas bombings and toxicity of the debate between the two intellectuals. The poisoned dialogue emerged almost immediately and with no help from then non-existent social media. While both men traded insults, Conquest excelled. He accused Lewis of “messianic righteousness,” characterized his complaint as “fantasized,” repeatedly argued Lewis’s arguments had “no substance,” and advised him “do something about the beam in your own eye.”[29] When Lewis attempted to engage Conquest on substance by offering the above explanations for his own position on Vietnam and the Czech example, Conquest responded with clinical cynicism: “As argument your letter is null; as abuse it is puerile.”[30] For his part, Lewis suggested that Conquest’s inability to come down from his argument and admit error was a sign of his cowardice: “This correspondence will have served a purpose if it gives you some insight into your lack of courage.”[31]
Journalism is often described as history’s first draft. One might add debates between journalists and writers to this cliché. The arguments that unfolded between Conquest and Lewis became the hardwired base of the future historiography, which shaped U.S. perceptions of both the war and Vietnam. Similar discussions are happening now on Twitter about current conflicts.
For example, liberal Chris Hayes and pseudo genius Elon Musk recently expressed unexpectedly similar takes on the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe. Are we witnessing the future neo-revisionism of the Ukraine – Russo Conflict of 2022? It’s a question worth considering, especially in light of the 50th anniversary of the Christmas Bombings and peace treaty of 1973, the latter which nearly goes nearly unmentioned between Lewis and Conquest aside from references to Enoch Powell (displayed in the letters above).
Conquest eventually put an end to the debate by announcing the conversation over, and Lewis, apparently rhetorically exhausted, complied. However, the conversation stuck with him. Lewis had been London Bureau chief through 1972, returning to America in time for the Watergate debacle in 1973. After some prodding from Levin about the state of nature in the U.S. upon his return, Lewis replied sarcastically. “It’s wonderful here. What other country has a chief executive who proudly produces tax returns that show he gave $295 to charity on a salary of $250,000? If I weren’t such a restrained fellow, I’d write Robert Conquest to hurry up and come over to have a look while that is still possible.”[32]
Nixon, of course, later credited Conquest for helping to end communism through his work. Perhaps, but Conquest’s view of events in Vietnam was a blinkered one that obscured the actual people affected by them; yet it continues to shape the way we explain the Vietnam War to ourselves then and now. One imagines it is hardly an isolated incident.
References
[1] Anthony Lewis, “Vietnam Delenda Est,” New York Times, December 23-24, 1972, Box II: 50, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[2] Anthony Lewis, “Good Will to Men,” New York Times, December 25, 1972, Box II: 50, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[3] Robert Conquest, “The Propaganda of Atrocity,” The Times, January 12, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[4] William Grimes, “Robert Conquest, Historian Who Documented Soviet History, Dies at 98,” New York Times, August 4, 2015; Jack Hanson, “I Told You So You Fucking Fools,” Partisan Magazine, August 5, 2015, accessed October 5, 2022, http://www.partisanmagazine.com/the-algonquin/2015/8/5/i-told-you-so-you-fucking-fools. Notably, Jay Nordlinger at National Review argues the story is apocryphal, https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/09/robert-conquest-appreciation/.
[5] Robert Conquest to William Rees-Moog, January 18, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[6] Robert Conquest, “The Propaganda of Atrocity,” The Times, Box II:64, Folder 5, January 12, 1973, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[7] Anthony Lewis to William Rees-Moog, January 12, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[8] Anthony Lewis to William Rees-Moog, January 12, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[9] Robert Conquest to William Rees-Moog, January 18, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[10] Anthony Lewis to Robert Conquest, January 29, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[11] Bernard Levin to Anthony Lewis, January 29, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[12] Bernard Levin to Robert Conquest, January 26, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[13] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, January 26, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[14] Norman, Podhoretze, Why We Were in Vietnam, (New York: 1982), 121-122, 197; Gary R. Hess, “The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History vol 18, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 244.
[15] Robert A. Divine, “Vietnam Reconsidered,” Diplomatic History vol 12, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 87.
[16] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 5, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[17] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 5, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[18] Anthony Lewis to Robert Conquest, February 21, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[19] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 22, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[20] Arthur M. Schleinger, Jr., The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941-1966 (Boston, 1967), 31-21.
[21] Arthur M. Schleinger, Jr., The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941-1966 (Boston, 1967), 31-21.
[22] Tony Judt, “Whose Story Is it? The Cold War in Retrospect,” in Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 373.
[23] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 19, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[24] George Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: 1986), 103, 323.
[25] Anthony Lewis to Robert Conquest, February 9, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[26] Anthony Lewis to Robert Conquest, February 7, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[27] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 9, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[28] Anthony Lewis to Robert Conquest, February 7, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[29] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 19, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 1, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[30] Robert Conquest to Anthony Lewis, February 19, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[31] Anthony Lewis to Robert Conquest, February 15, 1973, Box II:64, Folder 5, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[32] Anthony Lewis to Bernard Levin, December 13, 1973, Anthony Lewis Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.