Marcia A. Eymann, Charles Wollenberg, eds. What's Going On?: California and the Vietnam Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 209 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-24243-2; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-24244-9.

Reviewed by Joseph Palermo (Department of History, California State University Sacramento)
Published on H-California (May, 2005)

The Golden State's Role in the Vietnam Era

This extraordinary companion volume to an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California drives home the fact, as Marcia Eymann writes in the introduction, that "California was at the vortex of the storm created by the Vietnam War." This oversize book contains some powerful and evocative images, as well as eleven incisive articles examining the pivotal role the Golden State played in the 1960s as a center of political dissent, a processing point and site of armaments production for the U.S. military, and the locus of right-wing backlash embodied by the rise of Ronald Reagan. The authors, many of whom participated in one capacity or another in the politics of the era, address these diverse aspects of California history with clarity and insight. This well-edited work dispels many of the myths that plague the popular commentary of the "Left Coast," showing that California, like the nation as a whole, was deeply divided.

In a superb essay, Jules Tygiel covers Ronald Reagan's rise to prominence and outlines Reagan's call for an ever more aggressive war policy in Southeast Asia. Without the war as a catalyst for Reagan's brand of conservatism that directed its ire against the peace movement and the counterculture, his career would not have been as successful. Tygiel shows that Reagan's targeting of the counterculture allowed him to campaign as an "outsider" in 1966 when he ran for governor and thereby "transform[ed] the message of conservatism from an ideology of the privileged elites to one with a populist base." Reagan remained "an ardent hawk on the Vietnam War," Tygiel states, and "frequently staged prayer breakfasts and homecomings for returning veterans and prisoners of war" (p. 53). Reagan marshaled the pro-war forces of the state in much the same way Senator Robert F. Kennedy had galvanized the anti-war forces during his California primary campaign. (The editors might have included a chapter on Kennedy's 1968 campaign, which crystallized the ideological conflicts this volume covers and would have provided a fitting bookend to the rise of Reagan. It is noteworthy that Los Angeles became Robert Kennedy's Dallas.) Tygiel gives the reader the sense that California produced not only a peace movement and a counterculture, but was responsible, in part, for the demise of Kennedy-Johnson liberalism due to the meteoric rise of the conservative Right with Reagan as the emblematic figure.

Robert Schulzinger's article thoughtfully analyzes Hollywood's conflicting narratives of the significance of the era by unpacking the meaning of two antithetical Vietnam movies. Schulzinger colorfully elucidates the Hollywood angle by contrasting John Wayne's pro-war machismo, put to celluloid as excrementitious agitprop in "The Green Berets," with Jane Fonda's tale of the human and emotional costs of the war in "Coming Home." The latter film, featuring the female star who was labeled "Hanoi Jane" by her detractors from groups ranging from the John Birch Society to "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," is a period piece like Wayne's exertion but far more nuanced and complex in portraying the changing roles of women and the personal toll of the polarization caused by the war. Schulzinger's piece reminds us that the Hollywood system is a California phenomenon with national implications powerfully mirroring the Vietnam era.

Jeffrey Lustig's piece combines the best of a participant's recollection of the élan of the period with a social and political analysis that only three decades of hindsight would allow. Some historians might criticize Lustig's defense of the "symbolic direction" that a segment of the California peace movement took in the Sixties, illustrated by Jerry Rubin and the Yippies' call for "levitating" the Pentagon. "The movement had not been built through conventional politics," Lustig writes. "The people who joined were not looking for training in practical politics; they were working to end a war that was fully backed by practical politicians" (p. 71). It is certainly true that the Vietnam War had few critics among "practical politicians" in the early stages, but by 1967 Senators Eugene McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, and J. William Fulbright were raising important criticisms of the war. Still, Lustig's point is well taken that "the California movement's strength lay in its firm moral stand, its imagination, and its audacity in breaking through the stale forms with fresh appeals"(p. 71). Lustig does a fine job showing that it was in California that the symbolic politics of creative protest and the counterculture reached their full fruition.

The contributions from other experienced scholars such as Clayborne Carson, Ruth Rosen, and George Mariscal provide excellent overviews of the roles of African Americans, women, and Chicanos in widening protests against the Vietnam War. Their fresh assessments of the growing awareness of, and confrontations with, the injustices of race and gender relations in California in the 1960s give this volume an enriching social dimension. Marc Jason Gilbert offers an incisive piece on the war production, the processing of soldiers, and the rise of "Silicon Valley" in California in this period. And John F. Burns rounds out the discussion by focusing on the California veterans who found themselves "back in the world" after a confusing and brutalizing experience in Southeast Asia. Often anthologies of this kind have difficulty flowing together, but most of the articles contained in "What's Going On?" produce a seamless scholarly appraisal of California in this period worthy of high praise.

The only piece that might have taken a bolder analytical framework is the final article by Andrew Lam concerning the Vietnamese "diaspora" that accompanied the United States' ignominious defeat in April 1975. Lam's focus is on the lives of the half million or so Vietnamese who emigrated to California and their "negotiating between East and West, memories and modernity, traditions and individual ambitions" that led to a "process of re-creating a whole notion of what it means to be Vietnamese" (p. 196). Lam's narrative thrust is typical of monographs on immigrant history: ordinary people come to a new land, band together in strong communities, work hard and play by the rules, and eventually attain a form of what might be called the "American dream." Few could argue with such a trope, but what would strengthen this retrospective on California and Vietnamese immigrants would be at least a passing mention of the fact that the Vietnamese, unlike other immigrant groups, were fleeing the aftermath of a ten-year, catastrophic bloodbath perpetrated by the very nation to which they chose to settle. Most Vietnamese did not come to California under the relatively benign circumstances similar to those of my grandparents' who came from southern Italy in the early twentieth century. They were refugees from a made-in-the-U.S.A. human disaster that spokespeople for the California peace movement (contained in this volume) had argued was little more than an extended series of war crimes.

Although impossible to assess accurately, a percentage of the Vietnamese who fled to California in the late 1970s had been allied with, or connected to in some way, a murderous, corrupt, incompetent U.S. client regime in Saigon. Lam's triumphalist immigrant narrative might have taken this unsavory fact into account. Didn't Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, known for his kind words about Adolf Hitler, open a liquor store in Los Angeles after the war? One wonders how many others like Ky also settled in California. How did the vicious civil war in Vietnam that left over three million Vietnamese dead affect the seemingly harmonious, studious immigrant communities in California? Lam simply ignores this difficult question.

Overall, this work makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of California's recent history and its pivotal role in the political tumult of the 1960s. This book sheds new light on the ideological and cultural fissures that reverberated eastward from the West Coast during the Vietnam War era and continue to influence the nation's political debate.

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Citation: Joseph Palermo. Review of Eymann, Marcia A.; Wollenberg, Charles, eds., What's Going On?: California and the Vietnam Era. H-California, H-Net Reviews. May, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10546

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