American Conservatism, the Vietnam War, and the Politics of Natural Law

The Conscience of a Movement: American Conservatism, the Vietnam War, and the Politics of Natural Law A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Matthew Kyle Yates, M.A. Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Peter L. Hahn, Advisor Robert J. McMahon, Advisor Kevin Boyle Copyright by Matthew Kyle Yates 2011 Abstract The rise of a conservative ideology within a broader New Right Movement in the United States is well documented among scholars of domestic U.S. history. That said, historians so far largely have ignored how foreign policy in general—and the Vietnam War in particular—both elevated and shaped conservatism as a leading political tradition. Debates over foreign aid, war strategy and tactics, the draft and Antiwar Movement, and Vietnamization shattered the New Right into warring camps, even as these issues drew the attention of the American electorate to the New Right as a whole. By the mid-1960s, conservatives ranging from intellectuals to media figures won preeminence within the broader New Right, not simply because of their views on domestic policy, but also as a result of their persuasive articulation of an evolving ideological position on these foreign policy issues. This dissertation will present an intellectual history of conservatism to argue that domestic debates about the Vietnam War gradually redefined the emergent philosophy as a politics of natural law theory, one well situated within the broader context of American and Western political philosophy. ii Dedication I dedicate this work to my family: Jill, Ron, Mike, Jenny, Giselle, Leigh, and Chico. iii Acknowledgments This project has colored nearly every moment of the last two years of my life, and as such it has grown with me as I have grown as a historian. I wish to thank foremost my advisors, Peter Hahn, Robert McMahon, and Kevin Boyle, who provided many ideas, insights, and fresh perspectives when I needed them most. I am also in great debt to the archivists at the many collections I have examined, but wish to single out Susan Irwin and Linda A. Whitaker at the Arizona Historical Foundation for their invaluable guidance in the early stages of my research. Finally, without feedback from and conversations with my friends, Ryan Dawkins, Robyn Rodriguez, Mark Soderstrom, and Ryan McMahon, I would remain stuck in the research rooms. iv Vita June 2001……………………………………….Lake Central High School May 2005……………………………………….B.A. History and Global Governance, Indiana University May 2007……………………………………….M.A. History, The Ohio State University August 2008…………………………………….Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: United States Foreign Relations History Minor Field: Modern United States History Minor Field: Modern East Asian History v Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………….……………………………...…………ii Dedication………………………………………………………………...………………iii Acknowledgements……………………………….……………...…………………….…iv Vita……………………………………....……………………………………………..….v Introduction………………………………………………………………………….….....1 Chapter 1 – God and Man at War: Divisions within the Early New Right...................................................................................................................................21 Chapter 2 – The Alchemy of Goldwater: Foreign Aid and the Politicization of the New Right……………………………………………...………………………….59 Chapter 3 – A Conservative Creed: Total War and the First Excommunication………………………………………………………………………104 Chapter 4 – The Anti-Antiwar Movement: The Draft, Dissent, and Second Excommunication………………………………………………………………………151 Chapter 5 – Dealing with the Devil Machiavelli: Vietnamization and the Morality of Détente……………………………………………………………………..199 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...238 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………248 vi Introduction “A dynamic law requires that two masses—nature and man—must go on, reacting upon each other, without stop, as the sun and a comet react on each other, and that any appearance of stoppage is illusive.”1 The end of history is not nigh. History never has been, nor ever will it be, near its end, as long as human beings continue their distinctive searches for meaning. Yet equally indicative of the human experience is the need for one, true meaning, for absolute certainty, for a vision of history that provides a clear, fixed goal for human striving. To many individuals, history has meaning if and only if it approaches a morally good, comprehensible end, whether humanity or the divine defines that end. A visionary reformer, after all, requires a vision. A movement for change needs a conscience. A group employs a moral compass to direct its membership, to give its membership an objective, to avoid dangerous detours, to justify its very existence. So Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history and the last man” with his fashionable 1992 book of the same name. Liberal democracy, in his view, had won the age-old contest over the human soul against its final challenger, Soviet communism, and stood ready to propel our species into a new millennium of peace and prosperity. By September 11, 2001, few people remembered Fukuyama’s bold work for anything other 1 Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams,” in Adams (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 1156. 1 than his central claim to the finality of a American or Western-driven, liberal democratic history.2 Twenty-first century observers began to wonder if man and man, if nature and man, had once again resumed their dynamic, perpetual reaction against one another. Undeterred, individuals continue to seek the ends of history, particularly in the realm of contemporary American politics. So Samuel Tanenhaus proclaimed the “death of conservatism” in his fashionable 2009 book of the same name. “Today’s conservatives,” Tanenhaus opined, “resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.”3 Within a year, the Tea Party Movement freed conservatives from that “rigor mortis” when it steeped the American Right in renewed enthusiasm over traditional issues like tax policy, race relations, and the size and scope of federal government. But even as Tanenhaus’s critique quickly faded into obscurity, Jill Lepore sought to continue his theme when she proclaimed the Tea Party as dead on arrival. Its narrative of the American founding, she argued, was a caricature of the true record. As a result, the Tea Party deserved moral condemnation, not to mention political irrelevance.4 Tanenhaus and Lepore are simply the most recent in a long line of liberal historians who have struggled to downplay the influence of conservatism in modern America. Before the election of Barack Obama infused a newfound sense of hope into the liberal movement and its scholarly defenders, these historians dourly chronicled the “fall” of liberalism in the face of the reciprocal “rise” of conservatism in the postwar era. Geoffrey Hodgson’s 1996 survey, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America, 2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 3 Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009), 7. 4 Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Evolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton: Princeton, 2010). 2 synthesized this view for disheartened liberals in the Clinton Era, when even the liberal- in-chief conceded ground to his political opponents.5 But if history does not have one, “true” end that we can know with certainty, then it is difficult to put much stock into any of these narratives. The problem with the idea of an “end of history” is not that such ends are always political. All human actions in society are inherently political. When an individual promulgates an “end of history,” rather, he or she demands action in pursuit of a goal that is both ineluctably subjective and intended to direct the behavior of others. It is an effort to make history as much as it is to write history. Conservatism is not “dead,” nor is it “rising” or “falling” in any meaningful way. To make any of these claims is to impute a political judgment upon conservatism before the historical process even begins, not to mention beg the questions of what an idea’s “mortality” signifies, or “rising” and “falling” in what terms? Rather, I suggest that historians constantly reexamine intellectual, political, and social movements like conservatism by asking what “conservatism” means, or at least what it used to mean, in given contexts at certain periods in time. This is not an argument for historical semantics, but rather a plea for a more rational, feasible analysis of concepts that can be so complex, so wrapped up in the politics of the historical period in question as well as those of the present, that their causal use (and abuse) obfuscates more than it illuminates. 5 Geoffrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). The “rise and fall” narrative trope, of course, is not limited to conservative and liberal histories of the postwar era. It has a long and storied life of its own in Western historiography, going back to at least Edward Gibbon’s classic Tory history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). 3 In the 1950s, it would have been

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