The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  At home, Nixon’s plan failed to recognize that something more than distress at casualties was active in the dissent; that many people felt a sense of wrong in the war, a violation of the way they felt about their country; that although protest would subside for a while with the return of troops, the deeper feeling was a corollary of the war itself and would grow stronger with continued belligerence.

  In its assured belief that the Americans, like the French, would lose the war at home, Hanoi remained intransigent. In anger and frustration, the United States turned to “negative reinforcement.” Plans for a “savage blow” or a “decisive blow” or the “November option,” as it was variously called, were drawn. Blockade would be established, harbors, rivers and coastal waters mined, dikes broken, Hanoi carpet-bombed. “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Kissinger said in the course of the planning. He was correct in that everything has a breaking point; the test is the degree of force required. Faced by the objections of civilian analysts who argued that the proposed measures would not significantly reduce the North’s capacity to fight in the South, and by fear of awakening what Kissinger called the “dormant beast of public protest,” the November option was called off.

  Frenzied Vietnamization was pursued with ARVN doubled in numbers and gorged with arms, ships, planes, helicopters, more than a million M-16 rifles, 40,000 grenade launchers, 2000 heavy mortars and howitzers. Even with 10,000 ARVN officers, pilots, mechanics and intelligence analysts sent abroad for training in advanced skills, it was late in the day. Through the process, a stronger hold was gained for a while in South Vietnam, mainly because the Viet-Cong had never recovered from their losses in the Tet offensive, but with 150,000 American troops scheduled to leave in 1970 and more to follow, it looked like a race between Vietnamization and the withdrawals.

  Protest, far from dormant, did not fade. An organized Vietnam Moratorium Day to demand “peace now” was marked in October 1969 by demonstrations across the country, with 100,000 rallying on Boston Common to hear Senator Edward Kennedy call for withdrawal of all ground forces within a year and all air and support units within three years, by the end of 1972. A sign carried by a demonstrator in San Francisco read, “Lose the war in Vietnam—Bring the boys home.” In a planned reply to the Moratorium, the President appealed in a national address to the “silent majority” that he said supported him, promising to complete the withdrawals according to a scheduled though unspecified timetable, and to “end the war in a way we could win the peace.”

  If there was a majority of the silent, it was mainly from indifference, whereas protest was active and vocal and unfortunately a focus for people Nixon, in an unguarded if justified response to campus bombings, called “bums.” A second Vietnam Moratorium Day, in November, mobilized 250,000 demonstrators in Washington. Watching from a balcony, Attorney-General John Mitchell, Nixon’s former law partner, thought “It looked like the Russian Revolution.” In that comment, the anti-war movement took its place in the eyes of the government, not as citizens’ rightful dissent against a policy that large numbers wanted their country to renounce, but as the malice and threat of subversion. It was this view that produced the “enemies list.”

  Because the dissent was voiced by the press and shared by prominent figures of the establishment, Nixon perceived it as a conspiracy against his political existence by the “liberals” who he believed had “sought to destroy him since the Alger Hiss case.” Kissinger, disturbed and often angered, as his memoirs attest, regarded the protest as interference with the conduct of foreign affairs, a necessary nuisance of democracy that had to be endured but should not be allowed to influence a serious statesman. It did, not tell him anything, even when voiced by a delegation of colleagues from the Harvard faculty. It did not tell the President anything he thought worth listening to about the constituency in whose name he acted. Neither man heard anything valid in the dissent. Like the clamor for reform that assailed the ears of the Renaissance Popes, it conveyed no notice of an urgent need, in the rulers’ own interest, for a positive response.

  Negotiations, whether in secret meetings between Kissinger and Hanoi’s emissary Le Duc Tho or in the four-party talks in Paris, could make no progress because each side still insisted on conditions unacceptable to the other. North Vietnam demanded the ouster of the Thieu-Ky government and its replacement by a nominal “coalition” to include the NLF. As this would amount to abandonment of its client, it was obviously rejected by the United States, which in turn demanded the withdrawal of all Northern forces from the Southern zone. As violating their right to be in any part of what they never ceased to consider one country, this was adamantly rejected by the North Vietnamese. Although their concept was the same as Abraham Lincoln’s insistence on the immutability of union, the Americans gave it no credit or else believed that Hanoi must be brought by force to give up.

  “To end the war in a way we could win the peace,” that is, by preserving a non-Communist South Vietnam, was the ball and chain of American negotiations. It was equated with credibility, now called “peace with honor,” as endlessly asserted by Nixon and Kissinger. “Peace with honor” had become the “terrible encumbrance” of America in Vietnam. “Show the thing you contend for to be reason,” Burke had said, “show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please.” Instead, what the United States was contending for was a “hopeless enterprise,” as Jean Sainteny, from his long French experience in Vietnam, told Henry Kissinger. If Kissinger had read more Burke than Talleyrand, the course of his policy might have been different.

  The alternatives were either to batter North Vietnam into defeat by a degree of force the United States was unwilling to use, or else to relinquish American conditions, leaving South Vietnam, when sufficiently strengthened by Vietnamization, to defend itself and, as envisaged by Kissinger himself, “end our involvement without agreement with Hanoi.” The major obstacle was the American prisoners of war, whom Hanoi refused to surrender unless its conditions were met, but a promised deadline for withdrawal of all combat air and ground forces could have bought their release. This alternative, for the sake of a quick end and the health of the American nation, was feasible, and there were those who called for it. It was disallowed because of assumed damage to America’s reputation. That cutting losses and getting back to the proper business of the nation might have aided rather than harmed America’s reputation was not weighed in the balance of policy-making. As between battering and relinquishing, Nixon and Kissinger chose the so-far-sterile middle way of trying by graduated force to make “continuation of the war seem less attractive to Hanoi than a settlement.” That program had been around for years.

  It now took the form of intensified bombing directed not at North Vietnam’s own territory but at its supply lines, bases and sanctuaries in Cambodia. The sorties were systematically falsified in military records for convoluted reasons having to do with Cambodia’s neutrality, but since an excuse was at hand in the fact of the enemy’s having long violated that neutrality, the secrecy probably had more to do with concealing extension of the war from the American public. Given the anti-war sentiments of the press and of many government officials, the supposition that the raids could be kept secret was one of the curious delusions of high office. A Pentagon correspondent of the New York Times picked up evidence and reported the strikes. Although the story excited no public attention, it started the process that was to make Cambodia Nixon’s nemesis. Enraged at what he believed were “leaks” on the secret bombing, he called in the FBI, which under Kissinger’s direction established the first of the wire-taps on a member of his own staff, Morton Halperin, who had access to classified reports. A long sequence that was to end in the first resignation of a President in the history of the Republic was begun.

  Nixon’s secret operations were still in the dark, but in April 1970, furor erupted when A
merican ground forces together with ARVN invaded Cambodia. To widen the war to another, nominally neutral, country when the cry in America was to reduce rather than extend belligerence was—like Rehoboam’s summoning the overseer of forced labor to quell the Israelites—the most provocative choice possible in the circumstances. An act perfectly designed to bring down trouble upon the perpetrator, it was the kind of folly to which governments seem irresistibly drawn as if pulled by a mischievous fate to make the gods laugh.

  Military reasons for the invasion were seemingly cogent: to preempt an expected offensive by North Vietnam supposedly intended to gain control of Cambodia and place the enemy in a position of serious threat to South Vietnam during the period of American withdrawals; to buy time for Vietnamization; to cut off a major supply line from the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville; and to support a new and friendlier regime in Phnom Penh that had ousted the left-leaning Prince Sihanouk. Yet if it were in Nixon’s and America’s interest to end the war, wisdom in government could have counseled equally cogent reasons against the operation.

  Nixon supposed that his previously announced schedule of withdrawing 150,000 troops in 1970 would cancel protest or, if “those liberal bastards” were going to make trouble anyway, that he might as well be hanged for a wolf as a sheep. He announced the campaign in a combative speech as a response to North Vietnamese “aggression,” with familiar references to not being a President who would preside over American defeat. An objective of the invasion was said to be destruction of an alleged enemy headquarters, or “nerve center,” labeled COSVN (Central Office of South Vietnam). Tactically the invasion succeeded in capturing significant quantities of North Vietnamese arms, destroying bunkers and sanctuaries, adding 200 to the body count and causing the enemy enough damage to set back the purported offensive by a year, even if the mysterious “nerve center” was never discovered, despite its majestic acronym. The overall result was negative: a weakened government in Phnom Penh left in need of protection, land and villages wrecked, a third of the population made homeless refugees, and the pro-Communist Khmer Rouge greatly augmented by recruits. The North Vietnamese soon returned to overrun large areas, arm and train the insurgents and lay the ground for the ultimate tragic suffering of another nation of Indochina.

  Reaction in America to the invasion was explosive, antagonizing both political extremes, impassioning debate, kindling the hate of dissenters for the government and vice versa. While polls often showed spurts of support for Nixon’s more aggressive actions, anti-war sentiment was louder and the press outspokenly hostile. The New York Times called Nixon’s reasons for the invasion “Military Hallucination—Again” and affirmed that “Time and bitter experience have exhausted the credulity of the American people.” Revelation a few months previously of the Mylai massacre, in which American soldiers in a burst of crazy brutality had killed over 200 unarmed villagers, including old men, women and helpless crying children, had already horrified the public. The shock was greater when, following Cambodia, Americans killed Americans. On 4 May, at Kent State University in Ohio, the National Guard, called out by the Governor to contain what appeared to him dangerous campus violence, opened fire on the demonstrators, killing four students. The picture of the girl student kneeling in agonized unbelief over the body of a dead companion became a memorial more familiar than any picture since the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. The war had indeed blown back upon America.

  Protest blazed after Kent State. Student strikes, marches, bonfires caught up the campuses. An angry crowd of close to 100,000 massed in the park across from White House grounds, where a ring of sixty buses with police was drawn up like a wagon circle against Indians. At the Capitol, Vietnam veterans staged a rally marked by each man tossing away his medals. At the State Department, 250 staff members signed a statement of objection to the extended war. All this was denounced as aiding the enemy by encouraging them to hold out, which was true, and as unpatriotic, which was also true, for the saddest consequence was loss of a valuable feeling by the young, who laughed at patriotism.

  Protest had its lunatic fringe in idiocy of rhetoric and in lawless destruction, and this outraged the righteous, not necessarily because they were hawks, but because they considered such actions an offense against respectability and law and order. The antagonism was epitomized in physical clash when construction workers in hard hats attacked a march of student protesters in Wall Street, beating them with whatever they had at hand for use as weapons. It reached a peak in October at San Jose, where Nixon came to speak in the mid-term election campaign of 1970. He was greeted by a mob screaming oaths and obscenities and, when he left the hall, throwing eggs and rocks, one just grazing him. It was the first mob assault on a President in American history. “We could see the hate in their faces … hear the hate in their voices,” he said afterward in a statement denouncing the rioters as “violent thugs” representative of “the worst in America.”

  The clouds of criticism of his Cambodian action infuriated the President even before the San Jose incident and sharpened his always active sense of persecution. “A siege mentality” pervaded the White House, according to Charles Colson of the staff. “It was now ‘us’ against ‘them.’ ” The palace guard, according to another observer, “genuinely believed that a left-wing revolution was a distinct possibility.” The resort to secret surveillance of “enemies,” undercover methods of harassment and espionage, breaking and entering, wiretapping without warrants became a full-fledged operation. A White House staff member assigned to watch radical terrorist groups drew up a plan for unleashed police power and unauthorized entry as a tool of law enforcement. Signed by the President, the program existed as policy for five days until the FBI, perhaps jealous of its own prerogatives, advised its abandonment. The search for the source of leaks on the secret bombing expanded until it reached seventeen wire-taps on members of the National Security Council and on several newspapermen. As with the elusive COSVN, no leaks were discovered; the stories proved to be the ordinary enterprise of the press.

  Right of dissent is an absolute of the American political system. The readiness to attempt its suppression by and on behalf of the Chief of State and to undertake and tolerate illegal procedures laid the lines to Watergate. With continued frustration in negotiations, and prolonging of the war into another year, these procedures increased and grew to excess on publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. A collected record of mostly classified government documents originally authorized by McNamara in an effort to uncover the roots of American involvement, the Papers were purloined by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official now an ideologue of anti-war convictions, and made available to the press and certain members of the House and Senate. Although the record did not go beyond 1968, the sensitivity to leaks of the Nixon-Kissinger team was extreme, especially so because they were working in secret to bring off the re-opening of relations with China and a summit meeting with Moscow and did not wish Washington to be regarded as incapable of confidential relations. A “plumbers” group to locate leaks was established in a basement office next door to the White House, and orders came “right out of the Oval Office” (according to later testimony) to get something on Ellsberg. The result was the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office with the object of framing him as a Soviet agent, an enterprise of doubtful utility for, if successful, it could well have spiked Nixon’s intensely desired summit with the Russians. Fortunately for their employer, the plumbers came away empty-handed, but no matter what they might have discovered about Ellsberg it could not in any case have discredited fourteen volumes of photocopied government documents. Folly at the top was clearly seeping down. Here too, in the absence of scruple against lawbreaking, the morality of the Renaissance Popes re-appears.

  Signals of trouble were rising from Congress, which had been content so far to be hardly more than a spectator of the affair tormenting the nation. Congress, said a member, “is a body of followers not leaders.” Since it may be presumed to foll
ow what it senses to be the trend of public opinion, its torpor is evidence that until Cambodia the silent majority probably was a majority. When Nixon’s first six months in office brought no cease-fire as his campaign had promised, the anti-war Senators, Mansfield, Kennedy, Gaylord Nelson, Charles Goodell and others, began to call publicly for measures to end the war. Invasion of Cambodia without Congressional authority galvanized efforts in the Senate to reassert the prerogatives vis-à-vis the Executive it had allowed to lapse in self-enfeeblement. One thing the Pentagon Papers had revealed was the conspicuous absence in any of the discussions or documents of concern about the share of Congress in determining defense and foreign policy. After the invasion of Cambodia was a fact, Nixon offered assurances to a selected group from both Houses that American troops would not penetrate deeper than 30 to 35 miles without Congressional approval being sought—he did not say obtained—and that all troops would be withdrawn within three to seven weeks.

  Senators were not reassured. Amendments to appropriation bills, to cut off funds, to curb or put time limits on military involvement in one way or another, were introduced, approved in committee, debated by an aroused chamber and adopted by ample majorities. In each case, under the autocratic management of super-hawk committee chairmen of the lower House, they were emasculated or thrown out in conference or stifled by parliamentary tactics to cut off debate. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was finally repealed, but only when the Administration, outfoxing opponents, itself sponsored repeal on the ground that authority for war lay in the constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief. That ground was muddy—for was he in fact Commander-in-Chief without a declared state of war?—but the Supreme Court, confronted by several tests, walked carefully around it.