Word: distrusters
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...other hand, a tendency toward "administration distrust" was the highest positive correlate with support for escalation in Korea; most people who favored escalation were also suspicious of government activities in general. This distrust seems to have transcended foreign policy, reflecting a dissatisfaction with Truman Administration efforts on a wide variety of fronts, and often including a belief that certain officials were disloyal and working against the interests of the country...
WITH TWO independent sets of attitudes (isolationism-interventionism, and trust-distrust), it is possible to subdivide the Korean War public into four groups, and then make the all-important correlations to SES. Modigliani does this, listing the groups in the order of their socioeconomic rank: 1) distrusting interventionists--want to win the war, favor escalation; 2) trusting interventionists--adhere to present policy; 3) distrusting isolationists--desire to end the war quickly, one way or the other; 4) trusting isolationists--favor an immediate withdrawal...
...trust-distrust factor as formulated for Korea cannot possibly lie behind the uniformly distributed preference for escalation in Vietnam. Those Korean days were rife with rumors of Communist infiltration into the government; hence, distrust of government could easily focus on the "soft on Communism" issue, and from here it was a logical step to assume that escalation in military activity was the proper measure, simply because an ambivalent government was unwilling to take...
...contrast, our present distrust of Washington centers around such issues as the discovery of the "credibility gap", not the Red scare; it is difficult to see how preference for escalation could be associated with a disbelief in government casualty figures and progress reports. This fact leaves Professor Modigliani at a loss; he implies we must hold our breath till direct empirical evaluation of the Vietnam trust-distrust factor is possible. In the meantime, at least one interpretation deserves investigation...
THERE can be little doubt that during the Korean War, administration distrust was essentially a manifestation of anti-Communist sentiment. This feeling was sufficiently strong to render any government action suspect. In the case of Vietnam, however, the anti-Communist component appears negligible; the credibility gap controversy seems to be a product of sheer indignation on the part of the public, without any ideological underpinnings...