In 1964, the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell announced the death of the American ruling class and invented an acronym. He discerned in America a decline in the "authority of an establishment which is now based on an increasingly castelike White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant (WASP) upper class."⁽¹⁾ Things did seem to be changing in America. John F. Kennedy had shown that a person of Irish Catholic descent could be elected president. The Bay of Pigs débacle apparently consigned to oblivion a group whom journalist Steward Alsop called "the Bold Easterners." These were "the Ivy Leaguers, the Socialites, the Establishmentarians" who had hitherto run the CIA.⁽²⁾ The idea of a foreign policy "Establishment" was not new, but Baltzell's doom-laden acronym energized and popularized the WASP concept in much the same way as Frederick Jackson Turner's obituaristic essay had popularized the frontier thesis seventy years earlier.⁽³⁾

As continuing political correctness campaigns attest, the concept of the old ethnic order even today shows continuing signs of vitality. The term WASP ironically became fashionable just when Baltzell diagnosed the demise of the élite it described. Yet the application of the last three letters of the WASP acronym to the governance of America in the 1960s is, as Baltzell anticipated, problematic. This is demonstrable in regard to that thorny policy problem, the Vietnam War. It is not just Kennedy himself who was no WASP: names like Erlichman, FitzGerald, Haldeman, Katzenbach, Kissinger, McNamara, Nixon, Rostow, Schlesinger and Sorensen also fail to conjure up images of Anglo-Saxonism. The suggestion in this brief essay is that Baltzell was correct in perceiving the beginning of the end of the WASP. However, the more important point in relation to the Vietnam War is that it is still helpful to conceive of a newer élite. One might term this élite the White Old Rich Men, or WORM.

This essay springs from a methodological inversion. In writing my book Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War and a companion volume on women and foreign policy, I sought to invert the social historian's concern with impact of war on society, and to ask how society affects war.⁽⁴⁾ The question soon arose, how do you define society? I decided to follow society's 1960s definition of itself, as revealed in the relative salience of certain categorizations in political discourse. For purposes of the debate over Vietnam, society defined itself in term of race, age, wealth and gender. The black, the youth, the poor person and the female could be found in the ranks of the protesters, and this generated extensive comment.
     
Peace Now! discussed the four popularly-conceived social groups, African Americans, students, labour and women. Members of these groups articulated an ideology that defined the WORM as the warmongering ruling class. In this essay, I make a further inversion, and look not at the rank and file, but at the WORM themselves.

As far as leadership is concerned, the conflict in Vietnam was a white man's war. The enemy was a non-white race. Black men such as UN undersecretary general Ralph Bunche and Massachusetts Senator Ed Brooke had a certain say in foreign policy, but it was minor. The FBI harrassed black opponents of the war like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. The progeny of the white ruling class did not have to serve in the war, even if some of them chose to, for example Jimmy Carter's son Jack. Instead, the poor, especially the black poor, were sent away to fight. Black soldiers went to Vietnam in numbers disproportionate to the African American percentage of the total U.S. population. When they arrived there, they went on the most dangerous assignments, and were killed and wounded to a greater degree than their white comrades. Black Americans saw all this, and rebelled against the war by protesting on campus, taking drugs, and fragging white officers.

But here, I would like to qualify the symmetry of this morality tale. In the war overall, black men fell in about the "right" proportion. In response to criticism, the selective service system was modified, the war was "Vietnamized," and an increasingly professional and white army did a disproportionate amount of fighting and dying on behalf of the USA in the later stages of the conflict, leading to the evening out of overall statistics. White men, of course, remained in charge of the nation. Their policy was still perceived to be white. But the truth is that, in terms of cost-evasion, it was less white than it had been in the earlier stages of the war.

The warmongers were old as well as white, according to anti-war protesters. This charge was especially heard on campus, where students had the anti-authoritarian agenda that is common to that age group but which was elevated to a high pitch in the early 1960s because of the struggle over civil rights, and resentment against double-standard liberalism. Without question, senior figures in policymaking circles were very much older than the young men who had to fight. Perhaps they acted like old men, sending out the politically powerless to do their fighting. They may have been out of touch with the "baby boom" generation. Yet, some awkward evidence needs to be considered. In the general population, members of the older generation were more likely to oppose the war than their younger compatriots. The average age of secretaries of state in their last year of office in 1949-1973 was 62.8, not a great increase on the figure for 1892-1905, which was 61.5. In real health terms given medical advances, the secretaries were more vigorous than their earlier counterparts.

The agist charge also needs to be placed in international perspective, and here one needs to look no further than the enemy. Bao Ninh, one of the war's most talented novelists, said "The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others like the politicians, middle-aged men with fat bellies and short legs."⁽⁵⁾ He spoke not of Washington, but of Hanoi, whose leaders had sent him and his comrades into battle against their southern brethren and the Americans. Bao Ninh was one of only ten to survive the successive campaigns fought by Glorious 27th Youth Brigade's original strength of 500. While it can be argued that almost all wars are run by relatively old men, it cannot be shown that age was the distinctive vice of sixties war leadership in America.

Another charge was that the Vietnam war was on behalf of the rich and privileged. The contentious draft issue does point in that direction. Draft avoidance was widely resorted to by the more privileged members of society. College exemptions favored those who could afford to go to college. Once again, it might be asked whether such privelege was a property of that particular time and place, or whether it is not a characteristic of most societies in most wars. It has yet to be shown that there was a greater polarization of wealth in sixties America than at other times that led to the formation of a distinct set of governing-class attitudes towards the Vietnam War. Furthermore, there was firm blue-collar support for the war. The phrase "silent majority" originated not with President Nixon, but with AFL-CIO chief George Meany, in a 1967 speech affirming labor's support for the war. Nixon was able to prolong the war at least partly because of labor's support, indeed sometimes he represented the war as the crusade of the ordinary man, and its opponents as the idle rich — be it noted, here, that WASPs were prominent in the opposition!

Finally, there is the protesters' assertion that it was a men's war. There was no woman in senior foreign policy making positions except for Margaret Chase Smith, the minority leader on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The war diverted resources from Great Society programmes that might have benefited women, introduced a new vocabulary that denigrated the female sex, and coincided with a decline in the number of women in the professions and in politics. However, from a certain perspective the argument that men used the war to put women down may be questioned. Not all women were in an essentialist sense committed to peace. Margaret Chase Smith supported the war. Men in the peace movement treated women abominably, a circumstance that alienated feminists and would-be protesters: if it was a men's war, it was for the first few years a men's peace movement, too. The declining participation of women in politics in the 1960s suggests that they were not highly motivated to oppose the war, at least not at first. The fact that women came out more heavily against the war from 1968 on does not necessarily mean that the Vietnam War was a men's war, certainly not more than any other.

The sixties idea that white old rich men ran the Vietnam war can be challenged then, especially as a characterization relating to time and place. Yet, the WORM conceptualization was more defensible than the WASP one. WORMism existed as a state of mind, especially within the Movement. As a concept applied to one time and place it was vulnerable theoretically. As a universal critique of war it was more useful, and in America it was effective as a mindset that helped to stop the war.

     ¹E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 9. This essay derives from a paper given on April 8, 2000 at the annual meeting of the British Association for American Studies at Swansea, Wales. The present draft had been modified in the light of comments offered at that time by William Issel (San Francisco State) and Karen Miller (University of Michigan), for which I am grateful.
     ²Stewart Alsop, The Center: The Anatomy of Power in Washington (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968), pp. 228-29, 233.
     ³See Priscilla M. Roberts, "The American ‘Eastern Establishment' and Foreign Affairs: A Challenge for Historians," SHAFR Newsletter, XIV (Dec. 1983) and XV (March 1984).
     ⁴Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) and Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917-1994 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
     ⁵Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, trans. Phan Thanh Hao (London: Minerva, 1994 [Hanoi, 1991]), p. 68.