Soon, though, the war began reentering national consciousness, in part through films that captured its horror through the eyes of soldiers, like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The Veterans Memorial opened the floodgates of discussion, recognition, and reconciliation. It did so by narrowing the focus of hindsight around the experience of American troops. A largely unstated consensus emerged that the war had been a mistake. Avoiding discussion of just what the mistake had been allowed a superficial unity in the recognition of the sacrifices and suffering of the troops who had fought the war. In the process, many things got elided: the Vietnamese experience of the conflict; the horrors inflicted by American warriors, as opposed to those they suffered; why the country fought the war; and what it said about American history and society. Even a decade after it ended, the Vietnam War remained too divisive, too painful, and too central to the course of U.S. history to look at it full-faced.
The war in Vietnam ended the post–World War II epoch of seemingly unlimited American power and wealth. The defeat of the United States, militarily and politically, by a communist-led nationalist movement in a small, undeveloped country brought into question the solidity and future of American society. The war occurred at a moment of heightened political mobilization and social conflict over other issues, which amplified its impact. Though other wars had been bloodier, few had greater long-term effect on the trajectory of the country, on the way it looked, felt, and acted, on who had power and how they used it. Vietnam sapped the country’s economic and ideological power, shattered the hegemony of liberalism, and undermined national belief in ideas and institutions ascendant since the Second World War.
The war quickened the process by which an ever-growing number of constituencies and interest groups became self-conscious, pressing for recognition and social change and challenging authority. Conflicts of all kinds became sharper and more heated. Across the country, institutions, communities, and intimate relationships fractured. Growing violence within the United States seemed to echo the violence in Vietnam. An air of approaching apocalypse settled over the country, which encouraged extremes of political and personal behavior. To many, the country seemed to be coming apart at its seams. As the war ground on toward the ultimate American defeat, the economic, cultural, and constitutional bases of postwar life seemed in dire danger.
Going to War
American leaders conceived of the Vietnam struggle as a limited war, a test of the ability of the United States to win wars very different from the all-out, industrialized, global conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. To their surprise, it turned out to be an epic contest, one of the great military and political clashes of modern history. The war constituted one phase of the campaign led by the Vietnamese Communist Party to create a united, independent Vietnam, freed from rule by colonial powers and elites allied with them. Initiated during the 1930s and not concluded until 1975, it was the longest, most sustained revolutionary effort since the idea of revolution emerged in its modern form with the English and French revolutions. U.S. troops fought in Indochina for longer than in World War I and World War II combined.
The United States pursued the Vietnam War with extraordinary intensity. At the height of its engagement, it had over half a million troops in South Vietnam, an area less than half the size of California, the equivalent of one soldier for every forty South Vietnamese. Its concentration of armament surpassed anything seen anywhere in the past. On water, the United States used everything from aircraft carriers and recommissioned World War II battleships to small river patrol boats. In the air, it had a fleet that ranged from massive B-52 bombers and advanced jet fighters to helicopters of all kinds and specialized propeller-driven planes, including one nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, capable of firing twenty thousand rounds a minute through its open door. The United States dropped over Indochina three times the bomb tonnage it dropped in all theaters during World War II. In South Vietnam, it exploded the equivalent of a thousand pounds of explosives for every person. It also made extensive use of air-dropped chemicals, including napalm and defoliants that killed off forests and crops, destroying hiding places, shelter, and food (and causing long-term health problems to those exposed to them). Though no accurate count exists, upwards of two million people died during the war. U.S. combat deaths exceeded those in all past conflicts except the Civil War and the two world wars.
For the Vietnamese, the war was about specific geography. The communists and their allies fought to win independence and autonomy for a particular territory that they thought of as their nation. In a conflict that had a large component of guerrilla warfare, they often fought near their homes. Vietnamese anticommunists also conceived of the struggle in geographic terms, about the future of South Vietnam as a sovereign territory and control over specific villages, neighborhoods, and properties. For the United States, the war was largely the opposite, a conflict unconnected to a particular territorial imperative, arbitrary in its location. In and of itself, the country of Vietnam had at most modest value to the United States in the eyes of American policymakers. The United States had very few economic or other interests in Vietnam before the war, little knowledge of it, and no particular expectation that a victory would bring deep or profitable engagement. American policymakers acted primarily out of ideology and a strategic outlook that saw any shift of control or power away from the United States, no matter where it occurred, as threatening its interests and security everywhere. A specific chain of historical developments and decisions brought the United States to battle in Vietnam, but the logic and motives behind its actions had little to do with Vietnam per se, having been applied to many other places before and during the Indochinese conflict.
The United States initially involved itself in Vietnam in support of France. During the nineteenth century, the French had established colonial rule over Indochina (the modern countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). During World War II, the Japanese captured the area. When the war ended, Vietnamese nationalists hoped to create an independent nation, while the French sought to reassert their control. The United States, though opposed in theory to colonialism, deferred to France, hoping to win its backing for postwar arrangements in Europe. American policymakers also feared that Vietnam might ally with the communist bloc if it became independent, a distinct possibility given the leading role of communists in the Viet Minh independence movement.
The 1949 communist victory in China and the Korean War heightened American concern about Vietnam, where a war had broken out between the Viet Minh and the French. American leaders feared that a Viet Minh victory would threaten adjacent colonies and countries, which supplied food and raw materials to Japan and Western Europe. U.S. officials had envisioned China as the major trading partner for a revived Japan, but with the communists in control they sought an alternative in Southeast Asia, fretting that Japan otherwise might drift into the communist camp. The American worries did not grow out of much knowledge about Southeast Asia but rather out of a general belief that a communist victory in any country would inevitably threaten others, raising the possibility of cascading defeats for anticommunist regimes. This idea, which Truman put forth in his plea for aid to Greece and Turkey, downplayed the importance of indigenous conditions, portraying revolutions as largely externally imposed (a disastrous misreading of the situation in Indochina). With these concerns in mind, in early 1950 the United States began funding the French military effort in Vietnam. By the time Truman left office, it was paying 40 percent of the bill.
Eisenhower subscribed to the basic assumptions about Indochina of his predecessor. Responding to a press conference question, he put forth the “‘falling domino’ principle”: “You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” Eisenhower greatly increased aid to the French, eventually covering t
hree-quarters of the cost of their Indochinese campaign. When in 1954 the French faced defeat at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu, he considered direct military intervention, possibly using atomic weapons. However, Britain declined to join a united effort and France refused to pledge complete independence for its colonies, leading the United States to back off. With French public support for the war eroded, France accepted defeat.
At a conference in Geneva, France, China, and the Viet Minh, with support from the Soviet Union and Great Britain, hammered out an agreement to end the Indochina War. It called for a cease-fire and the temporary division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel, with the communists in control of the north and an anticommunist regime, installed by the French with American backing, in control of the south. Elections were to be held in 1956 to choose a government to rule over a united, independent Vietnam, with separate arrangements for setting up elected governments in Laos and Cambodia. No foreign troops or arms were to be introduced into the region.
Neither the Vietnamese communists nor the United States liked the Geneva Accords. The Vietnamese, who felt they were conceding too much, went along under pressure from their communist allies. The United States refused to sign.
The 1956 election and reunification never took place. With U.S. backing, the regime in the southern half of Vietnam, led by Ngo Dinh Diem, a onetime administrator under the French, refused to hold the vote, which most observers agreed would have been won by the head of the northern regime, the longtime nationalist and communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Instead, Diem moved to consolidate his power, defeating challenges from armed religious sects and from within his own army.
Diem lacked a broad class or social base for his regime. Instead, he relied on patronage and repression. Though Catholics made up only about 10 percent of the South Vietnamese population, Diem, a devout Catholic, gave them a disproportionately large share of government posts, alienating many non-Christians. He won the loyalty of the military by picking officers on the basis of personal connections rather than competence and allowing them to enrich themselves through corruption. The United States paid two-thirds of the cost of his government and sent hundreds of military advisers and secret operatives to Vietnam. But Diem often refused to follow American advice, spurning significant land reform and building up a large state-owned economic sector.
At the time of the Geneva Accords, the communists controlled most of the countryside in southern Vietnam—a largely agricultural region—and had a big popular following. Once Diem had firm command over his government, he launched a campaign of arrests and executions that decimated them. He was aided by a decision of the Vietnamese Communist Party to refrain from military action in the south in order to concentrate on consolidating its power in the north. In 1959, the northern-headquartered party gave in to pleas from the south to begin guerrilla warfare against Diem. The following year, the communists established the National Liberation Front (NLF) as an umbrella for anti-Diem forces seeking the reunification of the country.
When Kennedy took office, Vietnam was but one of many areas in the developing world of concern to American policymakers. Kennedy shared his predecessors’ belief that a communist takeover in South Vietnam would lead to communist domination under Chinese leadership of all of Southeast Asia. Overlaid on this geographically specific fear was a conviction that American actions in every world hot spot impacted the overall position of the country in relation to all of its adversaries and allies. Kennedy did not believe the United States had to take a hard line everywhere. But after the Bay of Pigs, the widely held view that he had been outmatched by Khrushchev at the 1961 Vienna summit, and the construction of the Berlin Wall, he felt it important to make a strong stand somewhere to demonstrate American resolve.
Kennedy had briefly visited Vietnam in 1951, coming away critical of French imperialism and convinced that the United States needed to win support in emerging nations through ideas, not military might. Apparently, even as president, he realized that a war perceived in Vietnam as between nationalism and foreign control could not be won by outsiders. In the fall of 1961, he rejected the advice of most of his top military and civilian officials to send thousands of ground troops to Vietnam to support the Diem regime, whose position was beginning to deteriorate in the face of the new communist campaign. But he still hoped to block a communist victory and avoid criticism at home for failing to act. So he took a middle course, sending in ever more U.S. advisers who in theory were not directly engaged in combat, though in reality some were.
The Kennedy administration, with its technocratic caste and firm belief in its own abilities, saw Vietnam as an opportunity to try out new ways of fighting limited war, from social science theories about managing third world modernization to military counterinsurgency strategies and deployment of the Green Berets. Because it became an arena to demonstrate American resolve and capability, Vietnam took on symbolic importance far beyond any specific U.S. interests in the region. Vietnam would prove that with money, expertise, and good intentions the United States could defeat left-wing third world insurgencies while building democratic, pro-Western states.
It did not work. As more American money and men poured into Vietnam, Diem got weaker, not stronger. The Communist Party—which linked its drive for reunification with a promise of land redistribution and attacks on large landowners—won growing support in the countryside. To counter it, Diem began a program of forced population movement to “strategic hamlets,” further alienating the peasantry. American guns and ammunition, given to the South Vietnamese military, ended up arming the communist forces instead, which captured them or bought them from corrupt officials. In the cities, heavy-handed repression brought escalating protests led by Buddhist monks.
Faced with a deteriorating situation, Kennedy, shortly before his death, sent out mixed signals. His approval of the coup against Diem enlarged the American role in trying to create a functioning state and nation in southern Vietnam. At the same time, he had it leaked that he intended to begin reducing the number of U.S. advisers.
Escalation
Lyndon Johnson turned what had been a limited, largely guerrilla conflict into an all-out war. Except in scale, the effort was consistent with the general thrust of American Cold War policy in the developing world. As nationalist and anticapitalist movements became more powerful, sometimes with political and material support from the Soviet Union, China, or Cuba, U.S. policymakers came to see all revolutions as unacceptable—unpredictable and uncontrollable eruptions that might threaten American interests. The United States preferred autocratic governments and brutal military dictatorships to the possibility of another socialist or communist regime in the developing world. Leading American officials, imprisoned by their anticommunism, indifferent to the daily realities in distant lands, and overconfident about their ability to ultimately shape acceptable outcomes, rarely thought much about the long-term consequences.
In Africa, as progress toward independence spread across the continent, the United States worked to counter radical movements and keep the European powers from maintaining closed economic relationships with their former colonies. Mostly it used diplomacy and foreign aid, but sometimes, as in the Congo, it resorted to military force in the form of CIA-led mercenaries. At the same time, it declined to support the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, valuing the ruling regime as an anticommunist bastion. In the Middle East, the United States accepted the lack of democracy in allies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, praising them for moderation in their foreign policy and portraying them as sources of regional stability.
In Latin America, the reformist impulses expressed in Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress aid program were eclipsed by heavy-handed opposition to political radicalism and to regimes whose development strategies would limit imports of American products. In 1964, the CIA spent millions of dollars to keep left-wing parties from winning elections in British Guiana and Chile. In Guatemala and Brazil
, the United States supported military coups that brutally suppressed their opponents, training police and military forces to fight guerrilla groups. In the Dominican Republic, when in 1965 an uprising broke out against a conservative, U.S.-backed regime, which had overthrown the elected government of left-wing president Juan Bosch, Johnson sent in twenty-three thousand American troops, having convinced himself, falsely, that communists and Castroites were leading the revolutionary movement.
Committed to counterrevolution in the name of liberalism, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations decided that the United States would make its stand in Vietnam. Presidential adviser Walt Rostow bluntly proclaimed, “It is on this spot that we have to break the liberation war—Chinese type. If we don’t break it here we shall have to face it again in Thailand, Venezuela, elsewhere. Vietnam is a clear testing ground for our policy in the world.”
After becoming president, Johnson privately expressed foreboding about the consequences of deeper American involvement in Vietnam, fearing that he would be blamed for an unpopular war. Nonetheless, determined to prevent a communist victory, by mid-1964 his administration began planning for an expanded military role. Johnson waited until after the 1964 election before moving. But months earlier he had won open-ended congressional approval for any military action he might want to take, remembering the criticism Truman faced for sending troops to Korea on his own authority.
The occasion for congressional action was an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. The U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries had been conducting a clandestine program of raids against North Vietnam in an effort to undermine its support for the war in the south and to test its air and coastal defenses. In August 1964, in response to one such raid, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked an American destroyer sitting off its coast. For a while Navy officers believed that a second attack had occurred as well, though evidence soon mounted that they were mistaken. Johnson seized on the incident to launch air raids against North Vietnam and to seek congressional approval for possible future action. Failing to reveal doubts about the second attack and lying about the American role in the raids against the north, Johnson and his top officials won passage of a congressional resolution authorizing the president “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force” in response to any request for assistance from South Vietnam. No one in the House voted against the measure, and only two senators, Democrats Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, opposed it.
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