Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  That death was, possibly, the decisive event. During his tenure of office Kennedy had shown himself all too ready to act as leader of the ‘Free World’ against the communist crusade – he despised his predecessor’s comparative inactivity – and he showed little scepticism about Cold War orthodoxies. On the other hand, his three years as President had seasoned him, and his cool intelligence was not one to be content with shibboleths. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson was not only inexperienced in foreign affairs, but distracted by the demands of the job into which he had been so suddenly dropped. He could never shake off a feeling that he had to act as the executor of the dead President’s will, so to speak; he dared not seem to betray his memory by abandoning policies (such as the defence of South Vietnam) to which Kennedy seemed to have been committed; besides, he himself believed firmly in the cause, and he could not forget how the Republicans had abused Truman for ‘losing’ China. So it seemed right to him to assure Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, a leading Republican, even before Kennedy was buried, that ‘I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.’ He stuck to this simple view of the business throughout his term of office. Yet he did not at first give Vietnam all his attention. He had to get himself elected President in his own right, and the way to do that, in 1964, was by concentrating on domestic issues. When at last he felt free, in the winter of 1964–5, to turn seriously to Vietnamese affairs, time had run out. The communists were on the verge of total victory over their enemies, and the American government could no longer evade a radical choice: to increase the stakes or give up the game.

  Not that the little group of men round the President saw it in quite that way. Their individual choices had been made long before. All their training made it certain that the majority of them would see the decision before them in the most conventional Cold War terms. Dean Rusk, for example, the Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Truman administration, had been a strong believer in the Stalinist conspiracy as an explanation of the invasion of South Korea and as a justification of America’s resistance to it. He applied the same reasoning to the Vietnamese case and came up with the same answer. Others may have been more influenced by the memory of McCarthyism: like Lyndon Johnson, they did not want to be persecuted for acquiescing in a Red victory. And they all accepted the blend of rationalizations, commitments and beliefs which made up American global policy. They were staunch anti-communists, sincerely wishing to save the Vietnamese from a fate worse than death. They were uncritically convinced that if America were seen to retreat in Indo-China all faith in her will and power would be shattered everywhere else, even in Europe: some no doubt still dreaded a return to isolationism, the bugbear of their youth, others may have taken note of General de Gaulle’s earnest efforts to undermine faith in the American commitment to European defence (the General was back at the head of French affairs and proving as obstructive to American designs as ever). All were sure that the Russians would seize the opportunity presented to them by such American weakness to make gains all over the place. Then there was the so-called ‘domino theory’ – the belief that if Indo-China fell to communism, so would every other independent state in the East, beginning with Thailand and Malaysia. Finally, there was the question of America’s inescapable commitments in the western Pacific: Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan. Would any of these be safe if the communists drove the United States and its allies off the mainland? Would not success in Saigon lead them on to attack Manila, or Chiang Kai-shek? Victory might make the Reds reckless: a forward defence was best. So all aid should be offered to the Saigon government, just as it had been to Syngman Rhee of South Korea. American military might was now so overwhelming (thanks to the enlightened reforms of Secretary McNamara) that victory ought not to take very long.

  President Johnson listened to all these points, and indeed could have made most of them himself: he too was a product of Cold War Washington. They necessarily seemed very persuasive. But as President he was inevitably aware of countervailing pressures; he could not conceal from himself that there was still a choice to be made, by him. His advisers could take comfort in their own righteousness and consistency: he could not. If America were to go to war yet again, her people would demand success. Could he be sure of attaining it?

  To unprejudiced bystanders with any knowledge of the reasons for the dismantling of the British Empire and the destruction of the French, the answer, by 1965, was, clearly, No. Essentially, the old imperial relationship between Europe and the rest of the world had failed, not because Europe was impoverished and weakened by war, though that helped, nor, emphatically, because of the rise of Russia and the United States to pre-eminence, but because the subject peoples had rejected their status. They could make it agonizingly expensive, in lives, credit and treasure, for any power which tried to keep them in subjection. The British, more by luck than good management, had perceived this truth in time and retired from the business of empire with comparative ease and dignity. The Dutch had been constrained to follow the British example. The French had defied it, and the result had been two long and cruel wars, in Indo-China and Algeria, both of which had ended in total defeat and one of which (the war in Algeria) had nearly destroyed the French state. During the sixties the same process was at work in the Portuguese Empire – a process which not only brought down that empire at last, but also broke the dictatorship long before set up in Portugal herself by Antonio Salazar. The strength of guerrilla and resistance movements did not lie in their knowledge of the tactics of Mao Tse-tung or in the power of their foreign friends, but in the fact that, so long as they had any weapons (and weapons are shockingly easy to acquire in the late twentieth century), they could make life unbearable for the imperial power. Empire, as had long before been pointed out, in vain, to George III, had to rest, in the last resort, on the consent of the governed; and that consent had been withdrawn. The white man’s mission was obsolete. Happy was the United States, which had never taken it up, or rather had never done so in a big way, and retired early from the game (the Philippines had been given full independence on 4 July 1946).

  Whatever Washington chose to think, in 1965 it was in reality proposing to assume the imperial role in Indo-China which the French had abandoned. Put in those terms, the proposal to make war on the Vietnamese communist nationalists was plainly ridiculous. There was no reason to think that American public opinion would prove more patient under the loss of blood and money than the French had. The tragedy of the American policy-makers was that they would not see it in those terms. They were conditioned, in part, by a certain chauvinism. They had no respect for the French, or, for that matter, for the Vietnamese (who would soon be known by the unlovely name of ‘gooks’), and the United States was bigger and stronger than either France or Vietnam. D. W. Brogan remarked at the time that what they wanted was a respectable word for imperialism; if they could have found it no doubt they would have accepted the reality of their enterprise, though it would still have failed. As it was, they insisted that they were simply playing the hero’s part in the great anti-communist crusade, and rebuked their European allies for failing to support them; and they made much of the story that the legitimate government of South Vietnam was the victim of wanton aggression by a foreign power and ought to be resisted in the name of the basic principles of the United Nations. This was a dubious thesis: it was highly doubtful if the Saigon government was in any sense legitimate, especially after the murder in 1963 of President Diem and his replacement with a succession of military dictators; it was quite certain that North Vietnam was not, in the normal sense, a foreign power; what was happening was essentially an interior matter, a civil war; and the United Nations charter explicitly forbade interference in the internal affairs of member states. To all this the American answer was simple: the war was not a civil war and the North and South Vietnamese were truly different peoples. Attempts were made to bend the facts of history
and geography to back up this nonsense.

  From the foregoing it should be plain that Lyndon Johnson was almost bound to decide matters the way he did. He did not reflect that Kennedy’s most popular deed had been not his handling of the missile crisis (let alone his Vietnamese involvement) but his negotiation of the nuclear test-ban treaty; or that he himself had won the 1964 election by a landslide because the voters thought he was the peace candidate (or, to use the terms made popular by Robert Kennedy, the dove against Barry Goldwater’s hawk). Instead he took comfort that in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident in the summer of 1964, when it appeared (erroneously) that the North Vietnamese had mounted an unprovoked attack on ships of the US navy, Congress had passed resolutions conferring on the President sweeping powers to do whatever he thought fit in Vietnam. In the spring of 1965 he thought fit to send American soldiers and American bombers to the aid of Saigon. Five thousand US Marines went ashore in March; and the point of no return was passed.

  What followed was tragically predictable. At first the Americans seemed to sweep all before them; and indeed the South Vietnamese state which they came to prop up lasted another ten years. But what they wanted was to end the challenge of the communist guerrillas for ever; and it soon became plain to observers that this was beyond their power. Merely to keep the National Liberation Front at bay would be an exhausting and, worst of all, an endless undertaking.

  For though the United States was strong, it could not use all its strength. The lesson of the Yalu river had sunk in deep. To invade North Vietnam would be as bad a mistake as it had been to invade North Korea: President Johnson, and President Nixon after him, dared not risk drawing in Chinese or Russian forces. Besides, America was still pursuing the hope of a reconciliation with the Soviet Union, many voices were beginning to urge that it try and make friends with China, and these possibilities were too precious to be sacrificed to the Vietnamese War. It was astonishing enough that Russia and China were so patient with America’s activities in the South (perhaps they were glad to see the Yankee wearing himself out and learning an expensive lesson); it would be too much to gamble on their tolerating a move northwards. Anyway, even if they did, such a move might not end the war: the enemy could simply take refuge in China and continue his wearing-down operations from that base. America would have gained nothing. She would simply have shortened her enemy’s lines of communication while lengthening her own. And that would be unwise, for China was not the only communist sanctuary. West and south-west of Vietnam were Laos and Cambodia; the NLF (‘Viet Cong’ to the Americans) had long ago begun to build hidden refuges in the jungles and mountains of the border. American commanders longed to carry out what they called ‘hot pursuit’ into these areas; but an overt move into Laos would upset the fragile balance of forces there, and Cambodia was a neutral state whose ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, obstinately refused to collaborate with the Americans. His little country was too weak to resist the incursions of the Vietnamese communists; nevertheless Sihanouk was determined to keep as far out of the war as might be. He knew that it would be a first-class calamity if Cambodia got involved, and for a long time he managed to keep her at peace, an amazing feat which deserved more credit than it ever received. The Americans despised Sihanouk, regarding him as corrupt and treacherous; but for the time being they left him alone.

  The Viet Cong, then, could not be uprooted and destroyed, and the condition of South Vietnam itself meant that they could not be defeated. Vietnam had suffered atrociously from war ever since the Japanese conquest; by 1965 it was a society lapsing into incoherence. Catholics were at odds with Buddhists, communists with capitalists, civilians with military; the traditional order had largely disappeared. The drift of population from the countryside to the cities, which has characterized so many societies since 1945, had been greatly accelerated by the disruptions of war and had inevitably bred deep hostility between rulers and ruled, between town and country. Now the Americans swamped the economy. The immense inflow of men and equipment; the tidal wave of dollars; the load placed on all the social services of a comparatively undeveloped country by the needs of a highly mechanized, well-paid and pampered army; the opportunities that opened for black marketing and profiteering: all this spelt ruin. The intensification of the war brought with it the cumulative destruction of agriculture, Vietnam’s most important source of income, so that it changed from a rice-exporting to a rice-importing nation. Worse, if anything, was the devastation wrought on town life by the surge of wartime inflation. The middle class was largely destroyed; girls were driven into prostitution, boys into crime. The government kept going by bribery, corruption and tyranny. It became harder and harder to see what good the Americans were achieving in Vietnam, and very easy to see the evil. Certainly they were not helping to establish a stable society with manageable problems, one which could resist the communists successfully by its own strength. Critics constantly clamoured for a political solution rather than a military one; the truth was that there was no such solution. The elements of civil society had been destroyed in South Vietnam, and even the victorious communists were to find, in the seventies, that they did not know how to restore them. Still less did the Americans. Military action was all they had to offer: literally a poisonous gift. For a favourite tactic was to spray the jungle with defoliant, destroying the communists’ cover, no doubt, but also thereby destroying the natural cover of the soil. The result was massive erosion, a terrible waste of Vietnam’s most important asset. Tactics were devised to suit the personal comfort and technological faith of the American fighting man rather than the terrain and the people. The Green Berets were never given a chance. Instead, William Westmoreland, the worst American commander since John Pope (who was beaten at Second Bull Run), wasted his forces on ‘search-and-destroy’ missions in the jungle. This suited the communists wonderfully, for they knew, and never forgot, that the war would be won or lost in the densely populated areas in the east and south. Consequently they were happy to build up their guerrilla networks among the paddy-fields while the Americans blundered about up-country, ‘zapping the Cong’, enduring heavy losses of men and material, and alienating the people they were supposed to be helping by their free-fire zones, their forced resettlements, the large numbers of refugees they created, and by their massively destructive weaponry. They hunted guerrillas from the air in helicopters; success was measured in terms of the ‘body-count’, and if the bodies were all too often those of non-guerrillas, well, as Sherman had said, war is hell. American officers were often poorly trained: this was the fundamental cause of the My Lai massacre in 1968, where some 200 Vietnamese civilians were killed by a force under the unintelligent and inexperienced Lieutenant William Calley. He and his men were acting on the principle that one dead gook was as good as another – they all looked alike in their black pyjamas.

  6. South-East Asia, 1954–75

  The war had a corrupting effect on the American army. Every effort was made to conceal the My Lai crime: Calley’s superior officers, from Westmoreland down, were skilful and successful in evading punishment, and Calley himself was released from prison after only three years, thanks to President Nixon. The army was largely composed of black enlisted men, who had joined up to escape poverty and prejudice, and now felt, with some justice, that their white officers gave them most of the nastiest and most dangerous work to do. Hostility spread: by the end of the war the practice of ‘fragging’1 was fairly widespread – the murder of officers by their men. Hard and soft drugs were plentiful in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam: addiction became a major problem. Violence, venereal disease, theft and petty crime were commonplace. Morale and discipline came near to collapse, in large part because many of the men could see no sense in the war and were disgusted by its cruelty. It was plausibly estimated that it would take a generation for the US army to recover from Vietnam, if it ever did. Even the ending of the draft in the Nixon Presidency did not bring back the old professional innocence: cadets at West Point and Ann
apolis were regularly caught cheating in their exams. Relations between men and officers remained poor; notions of how to fight remained rigid. One senior officer, explaining his refusal to change his tactics, commented, ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the United States Army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.’ This was hardly the spirit of Ulysses S. Grant or George Marshall.

  On top of all this, American casualties rose rapidly. By the end of Johnson’s Presidency 222,351 servicemen had been either killed or wounded. It is not surprising that the war soon became even more unpopular than the Korean War had been. Other factors intensified the anger and disillusionment that would have been felt in any case.

  Lyndon Johnson had timed his war unluckily. For one thing, the television age was now full-fledged, and the screens were filled with images of horror. Americans were shown the devastation of the country, the sufferings of the people, the sufferings of their own soldiers. Furthermore, there was no censorship of news dispatches. Perhaps, had the war started suddenly, a censorship could have been imposed, as during the Second World War and Korea, though circumstances were so different that I must doubt it; as it was, the war crept up on America, and by the time the troops got there in force the reporters were already well established. Most of them were ready to take the administration’s view of the conflict, but an increasing number were not; and it was these last who gradually came to dominate the presentation of the news, both in print and on television (by contrast, a gung-ho movie, The Green Berets, starring John Wayne, was a dismal flop). The impact of all this reportage, both inside and outside America, was devastating, and the reaction of other nations, especially in Europe, reinforced it. Never had the United States been so universally condemned. It was not just a matter of the usual Leftist hostility. Many old and tried friends of America were appalled by what they saw; and even those who supported Johnson’s aims were amazed at his blunders over means. The constant stress on the point that unless the United States stood firm in Vietnam its allies would lose faith in it was misguided: before very long the allied governments were asking how they could trust a country that was so reckless, so unreasonable, so incompetent; dared they retain their links to one that was so unpopular?