by Conrad Black
2. VIETNAM, THE GROWING CRISIS
As Johnson entered office, there were 16,000 American “advisers” in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army had received a good deal of equipment and training from the Americans and had some respectable fighting units, but the victorious Viet Minh army that had won at Dien Bien Phu had been pouring through Laos and into South Vietnam in heavy numbers and were fully supplied by the Russians and the Chinese, since Eisenhower recognized the permanence of South Vietnam in 1956, and particularly since Kennedy accepted the “neutrality” of Laos in 1962. South Vietnam could not, on its own, resist the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (essentially the Viet Minh from the South) without either massive American military assistance or a vast program of conscripting, training, and equipping an autonomous anti-communist army.
Eisenhower drew the line for the start of the dominoes at the 38th parallel, but did not do the necessary to equip Diem as quickly as possible. Kennedy poured in more advisers, but saw that the war was being lost. Under the mistaken advice of Lodge, Kennedy had imagined that getting rid of Diem would enable a more democratic and popular leader to conduct resistance to the communists. It only made the Americans appear treacherous and brought on an era of acute instability in Saigon, as the communist forces vacuumed up large areas of the interior. If this country was going to be defended, something would have to be done soon, and it would have to go far beyond pep talks, arms shipments, building schools, and social work.
The dominoes weren’t obviously going to fall in all directions from Saigon. Thailand seemed to be stable; the Switzerland of the East, it had been bullied by Japan into declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, but accompanied its war message with the assurance that it would commit no warlike acts, and did not. The British and their local allies had largely won the civil war in Malaya. Taiwan, with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Formosa Strait, was secure and prospering, as were Japan and South Korea. The Philippines was adequately stable, though no model of civic management, and of course, Australia and New Zealand were flourishing Commonwealth democracies. Burma was almost incomprehensible, a hermit country of gentle people but uncertain governance.
The wild card was the potentially biggest domino of all, Indonesia. Oil rich and with thousands of islands and 100 million people, Indonesia had been governed since Dutch rule by the dissolute international posturer Kusno Sukarno, whom Nixon so disapproved when he visited him in 1953. Sukarno’s system of “Guided Democracy” was a tenuous balance of the Indonesian Communist Party, led by D.N. Aidit; the military, led by Defense Minister General Abdul Haris Nasution; Suharto, his chief of staff; and politically active elements of the Islamic hierarchy. While Lyndon Johnson considered what to do in South Vietnam, having been elected in his own right, promising to prevent South Vietnam from falling to the communists, but also to avoid having “American boys doing what Asian boys should be doing,” the political fabric of Sukarno’s corrupt and economically backward 20-year rule was tearing apart, as the three factions began scrapping and assaulting each other. Most of the senior staff of the armed forces were kidnapped and murdered, and General Nasution only narrowly escaped a communist hit team (by jumping over the back wall of his house, breaking his leg). This was the point of no return; General Suharto raised his standard against the Communists, and the military joined forces with political Islam.
A gentle and cheerful people, the Indonesians, famously, run amok occasionally and become wantonly and brutally violent. This was what happened for about a year after May 1965. Sukarno remained as a figurehead as the Communist Party was declared a national enemy and became a subject of a very determined extermination effort. Approximately 600,000 people were murdered, most of them allegedly Communists, including Aidit, seized and summarily executed while trying to escape on a motorcycle. The Communists were massacred and disbanded, and more than 1.5 million people were arrested. Sukarno was stripped of power, deposed in 1967, and put under house arrest, and he died in 1970. Suharto became president in 1966 and joined with the Sultan of Jogjakarta as Islamic leader, and set the country on a new course of pro-Western foreign policy and an economic program of growth and spreading prosperity, largely devised by capitalist American economists from the University of California. Indonesia was politically reliable by mid-1966, but the American buildup in Vietnam, which may well have emboldened military resistance against Sukarno and the Communists for whom he was then fronting, was still in its early stages.
President Johnson had revoked President Kennedy’s order to reduce the number of American advisers in Vietnam by 1,000, just four days after taking office. He had always been something of a conventional hawk, having floor-managed the Formosa Resolution giving the president a military blank check; urged upon Eisenhower support of the British and the French against Nasser in 1956; and urged strong action against Cuba in 1960; and he now soon expressed concern that if “we don’t stop the Commies in Vietnam, tomorrow they’ll be in Honolulu, and next week in San Francisco.”196 This was the Red Scare combined with the Yellow Peril.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964 gave Johnson the authority to deploy such force as he considered necessary “to repel armed attack,” a slightly more explicit formulation than the Formosa Resolution. The origins of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution remain controversial. On August 2, 1964, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, and three torpedoes and some machine-gun fire were ineffectually aimed at the Maddox. An American fighter plane from the carrier Ticonderoga sank one of the torpedo boats and Johnson issued a severe warning. On August 3, in heavy weather, the Maddox and the destroyer C. Turner Joy (named after the chief Pan Mun Jon, Korean War peace negotiator) were patrolling in about the same place as the previous day’s incident. They believed they had been attacked, though they were not certain, and reported the incident, and Johnson was doubtless in good faith when he solicited the very broad resolution from the Congress. He bombed North Vietnamese coastal and air facilities. Whether the American ships had been attacked or not, it was a very slender legal basis for the eventual American war effort in Vietnam.
Vietnam was the strangest and most unsatisfactory war in American history. By 1965, when Johnson had finally to decide what to do about it, Indochina had attracted the attention of five consecutive presidents. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were determined not to assist France back into colonial rule; Roosevelt had proposed a United Nations trusteeship until it and other colonial territories were ready for self-government, though he told Stalin that in the case of Indochina, that could take decades. (Stalin thought his timetable would need acceleration.197 Truman largely ignored it, though American diplomats and agents, and the French, warned him of communist advances there. Eisenhower found the French so pig-headed in their suicidal battle for retention of their doomed empire, he couldn’t do much until they had been defeated and expelled from the country. But then he drew the line in the jungle and proclaimed the inviolability of the state whose legitimacy he championed, in contradiction of the Geneva Accord, where the United States was not bound, but which had been approved by its principal allies.
Kennedy just did the necessary to prevent a collapse without making any effort to turn the tide, whose direction was clear to all. The Laos Neutrality Accord, as has been mentioned, facilitated the communist invasion of the South. The best guess is that Kennedy was not prepared to intervene with heavy force to keep Vietnam divided, but he and his successor agreed to address the issue after the 1964 election. Johnson’s reaction to the developing Indochinese crisis bore from the start the stigmata of catastrophe.
As someone who had watched with much admiration how Roosevelt had gone deeper and deeper into war while professing only to maintain peace, he seemed to have taken away the message that as president he could pursue his domestic agenda, expensive though it was, while conducting an ever-growing war. The conditions were incomparable: Roosevelt was maneuvering into war on his own schedule, after arming his countr
y to the teeth after the principal adversary and most doubtful ally (Germany and Russia) had enervated each other, and after the British and their Canadian affiliates had fought heroically for over two years; the entry to be triggered by a monstrous provocation that would unite the nation and enlist it until an absolute victory had been won.
With Johnson and Vietnam, there was never a declaration even of the existence of a state of war, only an escalation of force levels; never a stated determination to achieve victory, just a lot of ever more ungalvanizing official waffle about “a limited war by limited means, for a limited objective.” Washington was achieving independence; Lincoln was suppressing insurrection and later emancipating the slaves; Wilson and Roosevelt were making the world safe for democracy, and, in an international framework and a regional context, Truman was also. And all were responding to overwhelming provocation and all were determined to persevere until their military objectives were achieved, and all did so, though Truman’s Korean objectives fluctuated upwards for a few weeks, before settling back down to the status quo ante in response to the direct Chinese intervention.
Polk was expanding slavery with the Mexican War while skillfully avoiding a rending crisis between slave and free states by wrapping it in the manifest destiny of the Stars and Stripes. And McKinley had a private sector-confected accidental provocation and a humanitarian mission to administer an effortless thrashing to the hapless Spanish.
With Johnson and Vietnam, America was sleepwalking into its fourth deadliest war without a casus belli, with only a gradual increase in belligerency, and no clarity of objective. From 15 to 25 percent of the country was doubtful of the moral justification, or at least the human costs of the war, and more than half, once war was afoot, wanted to pursue it single-mindedly to a defined victory. Lyndon Johnson never really made it clear that he wanted to win enough to do what would be necessary to win. Lyndon Johnson, so immensely accomplished in the congressional arts, fell victim to the overconfidence of the strategic advisers he inherited from Kennedy, and their cocksure conviction that they had the key to precise, calibrated problem-solving. And he and his entourage and the nation fell victim to the glib promise of the confident morn of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, that any price, any burden, would be borne and any foe opposed, in freedom’s name.
3. AMERICA AT WAR IN ASIA
Johnson raised the number of American military personnel in Vietnam from 16,000 to 184,000, from the beginning to the end of 1965, and to 385,000 in 1966, 486,000 in 1967, and 536,000 in 1968. He privately called it “a bitch of a war” and was haunted by the casualties, which got to 400 dead a week, spiking at the worst of the combat to twice that. It was the first war in history that was on television in the living rooms of the world every day. A vigorous debate arose in the United States over choosing between “guns and butter.” The administration solemnly asserted its ability to do both. Casualties rose with force levels and the theater commander, General William Westmoreland, compounded other problems by sending increasing numbers of men, as they arrived, on search-and-destroy missions, assuming that the more of the enemy could be lured into the South and killed, the more quickly the war would end. This was probably the greatest blunder of U.S. military history. Generals MacArthur (who died in 1984) and Eisenhower warned against ground war in Indochina, but both stressed that if such a war must be fought, the flow of men and supplies from the North had to be stopped by closing the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the 17th parallel and extending that through Laos, whatever the terms of the 1962 Neutrality Agreement (completely ignored by the North, which was hardly a surprise to Kennedy and Rusk, the American authors of the agreement.)
Unlike the practice in previous wars, draft calls were for a defined period, and combat duty tours were 6 months for the officers and 12 months for the lower ranks, not a great morale booster, and when a tour was over, the beneficiary of the elapsed time gratefully departed, even if he was exchanging fire with the enemy. Because of the immense lengths to which the American government went to make the lives of the Expeditionary Force in Vietnam as comfortable as possible, there was an unusually high percentage of support forces to combat forces, or “trigger-pullers.” Johnson himself exploded about “Ban Deodorant and Coca-Cola squads,” as there were not 200,000 combat troops and airmen even when there were over 500,000 Americans in country.
None of these command errors must take away from the great effort and many battlefield successes of the United States and its allies (the South Vietnamese became steadily stronger, the 50,000 South Koreans were very tough troops, and the Thais, Filipinos, and Australians provided modest numbers of competent forces). The full level of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong casualties will probably never be known, but must certainly have exceeded a million dead. But Ho Chi Minh and his chief collaborators were not interested in casualties. Contrary to Westmoreland’s calculations, there were no such pressures on North Vietnamese society from these horrifying casualties as would have afflicted any Western society. Similarly, though the United States bombed the North, Johnson had the mistaken idea that he was always on the verge of applying more pressure than the enemy could endure. U.S. intelligence had no concept of how fanatically trained and determined North Vietnam was after more than 15 years of Ho Chi Minh’s people’s paradise.
In the aerial bombing of an enemy it is quite in order to rule out certain targets for humanitarian reasons, but the air defenses and resupply routes and sources have to be destroyed and the infrastructure of the enemy reduced to rubble and maintained in that state. The Soviet Union provided the North with sophisticated antiaircraft defenses and the United States kept applying and reducing bombing pressure, which had the sole effect of emboldening the enemy, facilitating the resupply and redeployment of antiaircraft missiles, and unnecessarily deflating the morale of American airmen, who were superbly professional and about whose safety the president cared deeply (to the point of frequent insomnia). In addition, there were 300,000 Chinese support personnel in North Vietnam, liberating an equal number of North Vietnamese to serve as cannon fodder in the war in the South. Especially after the uproar over MacArthur’s suggestion of using Nationalist Chinese in Korea, there was not a thought to utilizing them here, even for the equivalent purpose of freeing up more South Vietnamese to fight the enemy.
As the war continued, draft calls increased, and Johnson moved to cancel university deferments, so it was not just the working classes and black ghettoes that were furnishing the involuntary soldiers but the middle class and upper-income groups as well; discontent with the war began to ripple very audibly. As the body bags returning the dead came back in increasing numbers and optimistic reports from the Pentagon and the high command in Saigon continued to pour forth, what became known as a “credibility gap” developed and seriously compromised the moral authority of the administration and the president. President Johnson had had less experience of direct military involvement than any holder of his office since Coolidge. Even Hoover (who died in 1964, aged 90 and a respected elder statesman, the Depression long forgotten), though a civilian, had seen a great deal of World War I in Europe. Lyndon Johnson was a congressman at the outbreak of World War II and served briefly in the armed forces, and was in combat, in that he was in a noncombat position on an aircraft that did come under Japanese fire. President Roosevelt ordered all members of the Congress to depart the armed forces (unless they cared to resign as legislators, which was also not particularly encouraged, and FDR had a high opinion of the young LBJ), and the theater commander, General MacArthur, did not miss the opportunity to award a silver star for combat bravery to the returning congressman. (It is not for contemporaries to asperse Johnson’s war service or MacArthur’s motives; the congressman volunteered, served, was in harm’s way, and was demobilized by the commander-in-chief, but some thought it a slightly slender pretext for the third-highest combat decoration.)
Whatever the reasons, Lyndon Johnson, a vehement and strenuous man, highly intelligent and anything but co
mplacent, and in some respects an outstandingly capable president, was a poor war leader. He was always wobbling between more and less war and lost the support of both the hawks and the doves, of all but those prepared to give their president a blank check. In October 1966, when his polls had slipped badly and the midterm elections threatened to sweep out a great many of the crop of Democrats carried in on the landslide of two years before, Johnson met in Manila with the new president of South Vietnam, the capable General Nguyen Van Thieu. They agreed on the formula of the withdrawal from the South of all nonindigenous forces. This was the confession, instantly noted by all close observers, including those in Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow (and Saigon and Washington), that Johnson was throwing in the towel. If all Ho Chi Minh had wanted was to win the war, he would have taken the deal, withdrawn, waited for six months after the American withdrawal, and then launched all his forces in a direct invasion of the South, with no possibility that the United States would again set a toe in that scalding cauldron of Oriental blood and tears.
Ho Chi Minh, born in 1890, an early communist, who had lived in New York, Boston, London (where he supposedly worked for the renowned chef Escoffier), and Paris, and for prolonged stages in Moscow and various parts of China and Thailand, had been one of the eminent figures of international communism at least since he took the leadership of the nascent Vietnamese communists in about 1943. He had led a life of frequent hardship, danger, and illness, and was a fervent believer in communism as the vehicle and carrier of the forces of history. He had petitioned Wilson for Indochinese independence at Paris in 1919 but did not receive a hearing, and he concluded that it had fallen to him to turn world history decisively. He would not accept merely the reunification of Vietnam. He would press on and decisively defeat the United States of America, the world’s leading capitalist power, and establish the inevitability of the communist triumph over all mankind. There is no other conceivable explanation for his rejection of Johnson’s offer of victory with a face-saving exit for the United States (in time for LBJ to be reelected, get back to the Great Society, and become the longest-serving president of the U.S. except FDR, a modestly more dignified exit than Mendès-France had arranged at Geneva in 1954 as the U.S. had certainly not been defeated as France had). Johnson had set forth to prevent the communist takeover of South Vietnam, and was now facing catastrophe on such a scale that he had neither the mind nor the stomach to win, had been let down by his inherited Kennedy-appointed advisers, had been misled by his generals, and had an opponent who wanted to throw the Americans into the South China Sea and didn’t care if he had to sacrifice illimitable quantities (for the North Vietnamese soldiers were a commodity) of men to do it.
