Vietnam, war, and the United States

Interactions among Vietnam, war, and the United States go back much farther than many realize, including having a direct influence on the Japanese attack at the Battle of Pearl Harbor. In early 1941, the U.S. had troubled relations with Vichy France, which controlled what was then French Indochina.

1941-1945

The U.S. gave two conditional embargoes to Japan, on metal and oil, which would be withdrawn only if Japan withdrew from Indochina. Japan considered expansion into Southeast Asia, as well as the Western shipments, as a matter of national security, and, for its internal reasons, chose war as a means of achieving its resource goals.

1945-1954

Following World War II, there were many issues, worldwide, with colonial states. In general, the U.S. did not support the restoral of colonial rule, but it was also developing a containment policy toward Communism. In 1945, China was in civil war, and some of the Vietnamese politicians in exile were in China. An Office of Strategic Services team, commanded by MAJ Archimedes Patti, had been in China with the Vietnamese, and moved south with them.

The formal containment policy would not emerge until 1947, but Washington was already uncomfortable with relations with any Communist organization, internal or external.

1954-1959

While some U.S. leaders, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford had recommended U.S. military intervention to help the French hold Dien Bien Phu, this idea gained very little momentum, and was firmly rejected by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the focus of U.S. interest moved to the Geneva conference on the future of Indochina. Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was vigorously opposed to any relations with Communist parties.

After the Geneva Conference, all the governments involved in the Accords, with one significant exception, anticipated that France would remain in Vietnam. An exception was the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), under a symbolic head of state, former emperor Bao Dai. Its actual leader, Premier, Ngo Dinh Diem, was a nationalist, although personally autocratic in a Confucian context. At first, the U.S. sought a three-way partnership with France and the RVN.

SEATO

While the RVN was not in full-fledged guerilla war, the strong U.S. commitment to containment caused it to regard a strong military presence, balancing the Communist north and its potential Chinese and Soviet sponsors. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was formed in 1954, although due to French protest, Cambodia, Laos, and the RVN were not allowed to join. Its members were:

• Australia
• France
• New Zealand
• Pakistan
• Philippines
• Thailand
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Republic of Korea (South Korea)

It was never a strong alliance. Pakistan withdrew on November 7, 1973. and France withdrew on June 30, 1974. The organization was dissolved on June 30, 1977.

Since France, beset by domestic politics and the Algerian War, had no clear policy, the U.S. directly communicated its support to Diem. France did not accept U.S. military dominance, nor was there unanimity within the U.S. government.

U.S. government internal controversy

Even though military considerations were paramount at the civilian level, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were, at first, opposed to a greater U.S. role in training what was called the "Vietnamese National Army".

1959-1961

In the late Eisenhower administration, the U.S. was quietly concerned with the expansion of North Vietnam. Although it is somewhat unclear when the U.S. firmly knew of the North Vietnamese decision to take control of the south, it is now known that the key decision was made in May 1959, the date commemorated in the name of the 559th Transportation Group, established to build what was to become the Ho Chi Minh trail. Additional transportation groups were created for maritime supply to the South: Group 759 ran sea-based operations, while Group 959 supplied the Pathet Lao by land routes.

It was the Pathet Lao that most concerned the Eisenhower Administration. In 1959, clandestine military advisors were sent to Laos, under a program originally called Operation HOTFOOT. Brigadier General John Heintges, headed the "Program Evaluation Office", the cover name for the program.

According to Robert McNamara, the "domino theory" drove the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Administrations. He said that Southeast Asia was the topic most fully discussed between Eisenhower and Kennedy; see a CIA statement in 1964.

The concern that a Communist takeover of a Southeast Asian nation, althoguh initially assuming Laos rather than South Vietnam, continued into the first years of the Kennedy Administration. The Kennedy and Diem families had had a relationship going back to the mid-fifties. The National Security Agency set up a 24-hour monitoring watch on Laos and Thailand.

John F. Kennedy, however, also became concerned with South Vietnam, and started to send overt advisers. This appealed to strongly anticommunist parts of the U.S. political system, but was not widely publicized. Compared with organized Eastern European and Cuban exiles in the U.S., there was little widespread constituency in the U.S. for any of Southeast Asia.

Gradual U.S. commitment in the South

In the early sixties, the U.S. continued to provide advisors and supplies. The U.S. established signals intelligence facilities in the South, and the first American fatality was a member of an intelligence unit. While the South Vietnamese were taught some basic signals intelligence techniques, the more sensitive collection and analysis techniques were not shared, only the conclusions.

U.S. military involvement began to increase in 1964 and 1965, the Gulf of Tonkin incident indicated a new level of intensity, when North Vietnam explicitly became part of active operations. There remained a concern with the domino theory, and its implications to U.S. positions: as in a a 1964 CIA estimate:

We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of other states of Southeast Asia. Instead of a shock wave passing from one to the next, there would be a simultaneous, direct effect on all Far Eastern countries. With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation of the area would quickly succumb to communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam. Further, a spread of communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread that would happen would take time — time in which the situation might change in any of a number of ways unfavorable to the Communist cause....The loss of South Vietnam and Laos to the Communists would be profoundly damaging to the US position in the Far East, most especially because the US has committed itself persistently, emphatically, and publicly to preventing Communist takeover of the two countries.

Ideology vs. Strategic/operational understanding

Misinformation abounds on the topic — many have the idea that the United States Army was defeated in combat by a Viet Cong guerrilla force. Under the Vietnamization doctrine, United States military forces left the Republic of Vietnam under the civilian control of the military, and at the orders of a U.S. government that recognized American public opinion did not regard the survival of South Vietnam as a critical issue.

Desperate people, clinging to helicopters during the 1975 fall of South Vietnam, were not American military forces. While some combat troops briefly reentered South Vietnam to provide security for the evacuation of U.S. personnel, Operation FREQUENT WIND, the 1975 collapse of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South), under conventional attack by the People's Army of Vietnam (North) did not involve the U.S. military. It had been quite public, since 1972, that the South Vietnamese were on their own. While moral issues have been raised about whether they should have supported, the reality was that there was no popular or Congressional support for intervention, and Kissinger and Nixon reflected Machiavelli's view that politics were amoral.

Several other factors were important in the formation of public opinion. This was the first war to have near-real-time battle footage televised to the American public.

While the United States lost none of the battles, it lost the war because it did not define reachable political goals. From 1945 to 1964, people with expertise in the area, but with no special ornithological definition, argued about the proper role of the United States in the region, and about the viability of the Republic of Vietnam. From 1964 to 1972 debate raged between "doves" (who wanted the US to disengage, for a variety of reasons) and "hawks" (who wanted to win, for some definition of "win").

Analysis of objectives, of civil-military relations

Speaking of wars in general,

Nothing is more divisive for a government than having to make peace at the price of major concessions. The proces of ending a war almost inevitably invokes an intense internal struggle if it means abandoning an ally or giving up popularly accepted objectives...the power structure of a government is not made of one piece — even in dictatorships. Political factions contend for influence, government agencies and military service maintain their own separate loyalties and pursue partisan objectives, and popular support keeps shifting. — Fred Charles Iklé, pp. 59-60

Many believe victory, although the criteria for "victory" were never clearly defined, was thrown away because, as General Hamilton H. Howze said when Saigon finally fell to the Communists in 1975, "America itself lost much of its will to fight and the politicians and the press began their program of vilification." Howze's rhetoric says more about the military's role in society and its own battered self image than it does about Vietnam. Much of the intensity of the debate during the 1960s sprang not from what was happening in Asia, but what was happening on the home front.

A comment from one mid-level soldier, to become an apparently victorious commander in a later war, may be illustrative. A lieutenant colonel hospitalized for back surgery at the time, wrote (his emphasis)

I hated what Vietnam was doing to the United States and I hated what it was doing to the Army. It was a nightmare that the American public had withdrawn its support: our troops in World War I and World War II had never had to doubt for one minute that the people on the home front were fully behind them. We in the military hadn't chosen the enemy or written the orders — our elected leaders had. Nevertheless, we were taking much of the blame. — H Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., , p. 181

COL (ret.) Harry Summers, a strategic analyst and author, observed that the protest movement was directed not at the civilian makers of policy, but at the uniformed executors of policy. Other soldiers, however, have described the U.S. involvement as essentially in support of U.S. domestic political agendas, starting from a reflexive, Eisenhower-Dulles militant anticommunism.

Political strategy in the Johnson Administration

Johnson was driven by several factors, but he was fundamentally focused on domestic affairs, where Nixon's chief interest was the reverse. Johnson's personality, however, was as important as his political emphasis. As opposed to Kennedy, he was personally insecure, and hated dissent — which he often avoided by avoiding advisors with strong independent opinions. According to his Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, McGeorge Bundy, "he both hates and craves good advice...until you knew him well you couldn't always tell what detail was missing in something that you were proposing or you were trying to get him to decide. In particular, he distrusted military advisers, but had a quick rapport with Robert McNamara, whose structured, quantitative personality was the antithesis of Johnson's. Nevertheless, Johnson liked and respected McNamara, for saving money for domestic programs, dominating the uniformed military, and being extremely responsive to the President. McNamara wrote that Johnson was "tortured" about Vietnam.

Given Johnson's domestic priorities, George Ball, who believed the U.S. should be focused on Europe rather than Vietnam, thought Lyndon Johnson would have great domestic problems had he disengaged immediately, which would have seemed a rejection of Kennedy. "What concerned me then as it did much more intensely even later was that the more forces we committed, the more men we committed to Vietnam, the more grandiloquent our verbal encouragement of the South Vietnamese was, the more costly was any disengagement."

Bundy said "the fact that the President had not had formal diplomatic experience to any great extent was no true measure of the degree of his exposure to major questions in foreign affairs...there was certainly a gap in his experience in the sense that he was not widely and easily acquainted with the people concerned with the conduct and management of international affairs both in the United States and outside the United States.

Johnson saw the war in terms of its effects on domestic politics, and made decisions based on domestic considerations. He did not want to be known as the Democrat who "lost Vietnam." As a believer in the "domino theory," he worried that other countries in Southeast would fall to Communism if the line was not held.

The only alternative to containment, he believed, was rollback as advocated by Barry Goldwater. "Why Not Victory?" Goldwater asked; because it means nuclear war, Johnson retorted, as he used the rollback issue to overwhelm Goldwater in the 1964 election. To be consistent with Johnson's policies, the Air Force revised its manual of air doctrine, to state that "total victory in some situations would be an unreasonable goal."

Equally important to Johnson than what happened in Asia was what was happening at home, especially in the minds of the voters. To Johnson, Vietnam was a "political war" only in the sense of U.S. domestic politics, not a political settlement for the Vietnamese. Having been a Democratic Senate leader in the early 1950s who had to defend against Republican charges that the Democrats had "lost" China and failed in Korea, Johnson did not want to have to defend against similar charges.

"I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went," he vowed.

He tried several different strategies, but running through them all was a policy of controlling popular perceptions. The American people were never to become alarmed at the magnitude of the problem; White House policy was to keep reassuring the nation that everything was going fine in Vietnam, and that LBJ could be trusted to handle the situation in his own way.

Johnson's deep commitment was deeply committed to containment: "The central lesson of our time," Johnson told a John Hopkins audience in April 1965, "is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next." He continued, We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.'" Privately he felt that if he lost Vietnam to the communists, everything he wanted to work for at home--civil rights, the War on Poverty, and his Great Society--would also be lost.

"I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression," he explained years later, and "there would follow in this country an endless national debate--a mean and destructive debate--that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy."

He was concerned about what was called the "falling domino" effect; he thought the fall of neighboring states would be rapid, but others looked for great damage in slow motion, as in a a 1964 CIA estimate:

We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of other states of Southeast Asia. Instead of a shock wave passing from one to the next, there would be a simultaneous, direct effect on all Far Eastern countries. With the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation of the area would quickly succumb to communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam. Further, a spread of communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread that would happen would take time — time in which the situation might change in any of a number of ways unfavorable to the Communist cause....The loss of South Vietnam and Laos to the Communists would be profoundly damaging to the US position in the Far East, most especially because the US has committed itself persistently, emphatically, and publicly to preventing Communist takeover of the two countries.

Congress

Johnson kept Congress out of the policy making process, and Congress did not assert its authority over the making of war. McNamara said that two key senators, Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, who, respectively, were for and against escalation, advised Johnson to keep Westmoreland's June 1965 requests for more troops out of Congress. They believed that the debate, whatever the result of the debate, would hurt the war effort. "That was the answer Johnson wanted to hear, but it was the wrong answer. There is no 'right' moment to obtain popular consent for military action through a vote of congress...The fact is that it must be done &mdash even if a divisive vote risks giving aid and comfort to our adversary."

More of a political threat were "hawks" like GOP Senator Barry Goldwater, articulate spokesman for the nascent conservative movement, and Democratic Senator John Stennis, the chair of the powerful Armed Services Committee.

Johnson feared that if Congress had a voice it would push for a more aggressive, expensive war that would sabotage his high-spending low-tax "Great Society" domestic program. Even worse, Congress might reject his forced-negotiations strategy and insist upon a roll-back strategy aiming at the defeat and conquest of North Vietnam.

Vietnam as an issue in the 1964 elections

In the election Johnson battled Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, warning vehemently that Goldwater's "Why Not Victory" rollback strategy would produce a nuclear war with the Soviets. Surprisingly little discussion of Vietnam took place. Virtually all the information and advice that reached Johnson and McNamara in 1963-65 was deeply pessimistic: the consensus was that the South Vietnam government was too corrupt, and its army was too inefficient, to withstand the Communists. The only chance for containment--a slim one--was to have American soldiers take command of the war and defeat the Viet Cong forces on the ground, while hurting North Vietnam just enough to convince them to negotiate.

Johnson was sensitive to the cycle of getting legislation passed, as well as frequent public opinion polling; he and McNamara apparently believed that the enemy thought on a similar time scale.

Johnson decides not to run for re-election

U.S. morale and discipline

The more the regular American soldiers worked in the hamlets, the more they came to despise the corruption, inefficiency and even cowardice of GVN and ARVN. The basic problem was that despite the decline of the NLF, the GVN still failed to pick up popular support. Most peasants, refugees and city people remained alienated and skeptical. The superior motivation of the enemy troubled the Americans (especially in contrast with South Koreans, who fought fiercely for their independence.) "Why can't our Vietnamese do as well as Ho's?" Soldiers resented the peasants (ridiculing them as "gooks") who seemed sullen, unappreciative, unpatriotic and untrustworthy. The Viet Cong resorted more and more to booby-traps that (during the whole war) killed about 4,000 Americans and injured perhaps 30,000 (and killed or injured many thousands of peasants.)

It became more and more likely that after an ambush or boobytrap angry GIs would take out their frustrations against the nearest Vietnamese. In March 1968, just after the Tet offensive, one Army company massacred several hundred women and children at the hamlet of My Lai. High ranking American officers wre not charged, but the company captain was tried and acquitted. Platoon commander Lt. William Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment by a 1971 court martial. His sentence was reduced and he was released in 1975. The case became a focus of national guilt and self-doubt, with antiwar leaders alleging there were many atrocities that had been successfully covered up.

Other factors contributed to reduced U.S. discipline and efficiency. Recreational drugs were readily available; this may not have been critical in rear areas, but a combat patrol cannot afford any reduction of its situational awareness. General social changes, including racial tension, also challenged authority. Fragging, or killing one's leader with a fragmentation grenade, sometimes was a response to a crackdown on rebellion, but, in some cases, it was a way to remove a thoroughly incompetent leader that could get his men killed.

Nixon Administration

Worldwide opposition to the war increased after 1968. The media emphasized the lack of progress; hawks were frustrated by Nixon's abandonment of victory as a goal. Democrats who kept their peace while Johnson, a fellow Democrat, was in the White House now tried to weaken a Republican president.

Nixon had not personalized the conflict as much as Johnson, who seemed to want personally to dominate Ho. Johnson was focused on domestic politics, and indeed, had it not been for the war, might have seen much more of his Great Society come to fruition. Nixon, instead, was most interested in world affairs, and saw detente with China and the Soviet Union as an alternative to containment.

Nixon did not see withdrawing from Vietnam, a matter essentially peripheral to the interactions of the great powers, as "losing" it. Arguably, Nixon never believed the U.S. "had" Vietnam, and it was properly in an Asian sphere of interest. Nevertheless, he came from an anti-Communist background and hesitated to withdraw immediately. Just as he was later able to go to China, in 1972, and have it regarded as a triumph while a Democrat would probably have been attacked for weakness, Nixon might well have been able to withdraw from Vietnam shortly after re-election. His drawing the war out another four years did not save the Republic of Vietnam, or the lives of 20,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese.

He did, however, gain political capital by ending the unpopular draft and being perceived as moderate, through his "peace with honor" policy. That policy had three parts, two overt and one initially kept secret from the U.S. public:

1. The Paris Peace Talks, pressuring South as well as North Vietnam
2. Ending the draft and publicly "strengthening an ally"
3. Bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail in Cambodia, and eventually overtly attacking it, with the side effect of destablilizing Prince Norodom Sihanouk so that Lon Nol could eventually overthow him &mdash and eventually be replaced by the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.