Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  George Ball had submitted a new memorandum: ‘Politically SV is a lost cause. The country is bled white from twenty years of war and the people are sick of it. The Viet Cong – as is shown by the RAND Corporation Motivation and Morale Study – are deeply committed. Hanoi has a government and a purpose and a discipline … The “government” in Saigon is a travesty … South Vietnam is a country with an army and no government.’ Ball asserted that Gen. Matthew Ridgway’s arguments against a 1954 intervention remained equally valid a decade later. Yet McGeorge Bundy absolutely rejected the assertion that America was assuming the same unworthy role as the old colonial power, himself writing, ‘The US in 1965 is responding to the call of a people under Communist assault.’ Yet where was the evidence of such a call from any popular faction within South Vietnam?

  On 21 July, Ball was among the participants at a White House summit, supposedly to discuss all options. Yet those present knew that they had been summoned to confirm commitments already stone-set in the only place that mattered: the mind of Lyndon Johnson. The diffidence and humility displayed in the first weeks of his presidency had long since vanished. Special counsel Harry McPherson wrote him a private note, warning that his personality was so overpowering that the public, if it considered his advisers at all, ‘thinks of docile calves hustling around at the will of a singular bull’. Yet it remained important to Johnson to ensure that the herd was with him before he embarked upon what would prove the most momentous ride of his presidency. On 21 July one of the ‘docile calves’, Carl Rowan, head of USIA, expressed fears about the debility of the Saigon regime: ‘Unless we put the screws on the Ky government, 175,000 men will do us no good.’ Henry Cabot Lodge riposted: ‘I don’t think we ought to take this government seriously. There is simply no one who can do anything. We have to do what we think we ought to do regardless … As we move ahead on a new phase, we have the right and the duty to do certain things with or without the government’s approval.’

  These were awesomely arrogant words, reflecting a mindset at the heart of the catastrophe that befell policy-making. Ky claimed once to have told the Americans: ‘What Vietnam needs is a man like Ho Chi Minh for the North Vietnamese, a true leader for the South Vietnamese, not an American man. But that they never understand.’ Christopher Thorne, author of a classic study of the World War II experience of the Western allies in Asia, observed that a generation later in Indochina the US followed the same wrong path it had earlier taken in China, ‘relying on assumptions that were based to a considerable extent on a projection of American values, experiences and self-image, this being coupled with a failure to appreciate the nature of the very different civilization and political culture … on the far side of the Pacific’.

  At the 21 July meeting George Ball reasserted his own conviction that American soldiers would not prevail in an Asian jungle war. Earle Wheeler probably felt that he owed it to his boys to refute this slight, staunchly assuring the president that Westmoreland’s proposed ‘search and destroy’ strategy would see off the VC. Ball then declared that he would be much less troubled if there was a realistic prospect of victory within a year, but that if the struggle persisted longer, as he feared it would, both domestic and international opinion would become problematic. Lodge threw at the under-secretary a familiar but embarrassingly cheap jibe: a comparison with the British and French leaders who rolled over before Hitler at Munich in 1938.

  World opinion was almost uniformly sceptical about the US commitment, as reflected in cartoons by Osbert Lancaster which appeared on the front page of the London Daily Express, respectively in the spring and summer of 1965.

  The president himself challenged Ball: ‘But George, wouldn’t all these countries say that Uncle Sam was a paper tiger, wouldn’t we lose credibility breaking the word of three presidents, if we did as you have proposed? It would seem to be an irresponsible blow.’

  Ball: ‘No sir. The worse blow would be that the mightiest power on earth is unable to defeat a handful of guerrillas.’

  President: ‘But I believe the Vietnamese are trying to fight.’

  Ball: ‘Thieu … the other day … said the communists would win [an] election.’

  President: ‘I don’t believe that. Does anyone believe that?’ [All expressed contrary views to Ball.]

  The under-secretary then threw down his hand on the table, saying, ‘Mr President … If the decision is to go ahead, I am committed … I have had my day in court.’ Though Ball had displayed wisdom and courage in speaking truth to power, his appetite for office proved too great to allow him to make the principled sacrifice of a resignation. One of his favourite sayings was ‘Nothing pinks like propinquity,’ by which he meant that there was no substitute for the elixir of intimacy with power. The president, with his brilliant instinct for men’s vulnerabilities, indulged Ball because he was confident he would not break ranks. Johnson said later of his vice-president, ‘I’ve got Hubert’s balls right there in my pocket, and that’s where they’re going to stay.’ The same was true of the under-secretary of state.

  Next day, Johnson met the Joint Chiefs, who urged going for broke both with bombing and troop numbers. The Marines’ Wallace Greene said: ‘Five years, plus 500,000 troops. I think the American people would back you.’ Johnson said, echoing McNamara weeks earlier: ‘The least desirable alternative is getting out. The second least is doing what we are doing. The best alternative is to get in and get the job done.’ None doubted that the war would be long, the cost immense. Quite unlike – for instance – the 2002 decision to invade Iraq, in 1965 every hazard was anticipated. In the midst of Johnson’s discussion with the Chiefs, he suddenly broke off and mused aloud, ‘But remember, they are going to write stories about this like they did in the Bay of Pigs. Stories about me and my advisors.’

  The president asked all the right sceptical questions; he merely declined to heed the answers. His refusal to call up the Reserves, to avert a huge domestic debate, is sometimes cited as an important mistake. Some insiders thought McNamara would resign when Johnson rejected his recommendation to adopt this course; instead, the defense secretary took the snub on the chin. While refusal to mobilise certainly contributed to the precipitous decline in the US Army’s performance at the end of the decade, and especially to the collapse of its NCO corps, it seems quite mistaken to regard this as a major cause of defeat. The entire strategy was founded on false premises, both about the domino theory and the nature of Asian communism. Many of the decision-makers remained haunted by the ‘loss’ of China. The historian Michael Howard identifies parallels with delusions that beset Europe’s leaders in 1914:

  The mixture of apprehension, national arrogance, misperception and misguided military expertise … Like the German and Austrian statesmen of the earlier era, American statesmen saw how a minor and local shift in the balance of power might produce a major and sinister transformation of the whole world order. [They believed that] Hanoi could do as much damage as Belgrade threatened in 1912–14 (or, for that matter, Egypt in 1956); so she had to be checked and chastised before matters got totally out of hand. Further, there was in the US … an enormous self-confidence and pride not unlike that of the Germans before 1914; a consciousness of national greatness seeking an outlet, a searching for an appropriate challenge to their powers, a refusal to believe that any problem was beyond their capacity to solve. Statesmen who might themselves have doubts were conscious of a great groundswell of public opinion bearing them on.

  Experience in two world wars cured most European politicians of a belief in the serviceability of conflict as a mere instrument of policy. For Washington’s 1965 decision-makers, however, when no nuclear threat overhung a battlefield, the mere notion of engaging in combat held few terrors. Failing to define objectives, Lyndon Johnson merely mandated his generals to ‘kill more Vietcong’. Adm. David McDonald, 1963–65 chief of naval operations, wrote a decade later: ‘Maybe we military men were all weak. Maybe we should have stood up and pounded the table … I was p
art of it and I’m sort of ashamed of myself too. At times I wonder, “Why did I go along with this kind of stuff?”’

  At a private Camp David meeting in July, the president’s veteran political adviser Clark Clifford warned Johnson, ‘This could be a quagmire … I can’t see anything but catastrophe for my country.’ McGeorge Bundy, hitherto an unyielding hawk, recoiled from McNamara’s proposals for a massive ground commitment. On 23 July Bundy warned, ‘our troops are completely untested in the kind of warfare projected … This program is rash to the point of folly’; McNamara ‘omits examination of the upper limit of US liability’. Senators Mike Mansfield and Richard Russell also urged the president against sending further troops. Outgoing ambassador Max Taylor yet again changed his own mind, now opposing reinforcements. All were swept aside: the cost of pulling back was deemed greater than that of plunging deeper.

  At a news conference on 28 July, Johnson announced the dispatch of fresh troops that would increase total American numbers to 175,000. Bizarrely, he presented this as a decision not to go to war. Dean Rusk said: ‘We never made any effort to create a war psychology … We felt that in a nuclear world it is just too dangerous for an entire people to get too angry and we deliberately played this down. We tried to do in cold blood perhaps what can only be done in hot blood.’ It is striking to contrast Johnson’s essay in low-key war-making, designed to preserve the American people’s peace of mind, with the strident appeals to patriotism, socialism, sacrifice and national unity that dominated the lives of every North Vietnamese for the next decade.

  Conservative columnist Joseph Alsop wrote in the Washington Post on 29 July: ‘There is a genuine element of pathos (and pray God, the pathos does not turn into tragedy) in the spectacle of this extraordinary man in the White House wrestling with the Vietnamese problem, which is so distasteful to him, and all the while visibly longing to go back to the domestic miracle-working he so much enjoys.’ Once the first ground forces were committed, American lives and prestige staked on a vast scale, politicians, warriors and citizens alike faced enormous pressure to ‘get on the team’; to stifle dissent, support this commitment made in the name of the American people, though without their understanding or consent. Even George Ball urged Walter Lippmann and other sceptics to mute their criticism, on the grounds that anti-war agitation encouraged Hanoi. William Small, boss of CBS’s news division, found himself confronted at a Washington cocktail party by Dean Rusk, who poked him in the chest and said fiercely, ‘All American journalists want to win Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting, but some day they’re going to ask what side are you on; and I don’t know how you fellas will answer.’

  The president resented critics even more bitterly. Having enjoyed a honeymoon with the press through his first year of office, there had since been a big falling-out: Johnson persuaded himself that those who failed to accept him at his own valuation were on the payroll of Bobby Kennedy. When Sen. Frank Church became a vocal critic of Vietnam policy, Johnson observed sourly, ‘Next time ol’ Frank wants a dam over there in Idaho, he can go ask Walter Lippmann for it!’

  Military operations generate their own momentum. In April 1965 Johnson had committed US Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division to prevent a communist takeover of the Dominican Republic. In a climate of crisis, the impulse to ‘support our boys’ enabled the president to secure in short order from Congress a $700 million appropriation for operations in the Caribbean … and Vietnam.

  From 22 November 1963 onward, did Lyndon Johnson ever really vacillate about escalation, or merely pretend to do so, for instance in anguished telephone conversations with Sen. Richard Russell and others? There is a good argument that, for all the hours he devoted to debate with military and civilian advisers, it was never plausible that he would adopt a course that might cause his fellow-countrymen to accuse him of weakness, of acquiescing in defeat. Moreover, Korea had set an important precedent, fostering a belief that a military outcome short of victory could nonetheless produce an acceptable compromise peace.

  Who deserves the blame? H.R. McMaster has written: ‘The Chiefs … failed to confront the President with their objections to McNamara’s approach to the war. Instead they attempted to work within that strategy in order to remove over time the limitations to further action. They did not recommend the total force they believed would ultimately be required in Vietnam.’ Lt. Gen. Bruce Palmer was another military man who indicted the JCS for failure to tell the nation’s leader that his incremental escalation was almost certainly doomed: ‘They could not bring themselves to make such a negative statement or to appear to be disloyal.’ Yet uniformed leaders face an oft-repeated dilemma: it is their duty to fulfil the purposes of their political masters, and they also need to justify the vastly expensive existence of the armed forces. If US troops were incapable of defeating a ragtag guerrilla force, then wherein lay their utility? For all Westmoreland’s limitations, he should not rightfully receive blame for the decision to commit a vast American army merely because he asked for one. To paraphrase Tennyson: his not to reason why, his but to send men to do and die. Johnson and McNamara made the vital decisions. Adm. Sharp, C-in-C Pacific, complained that all meetings attended by the defense secretary ended up reaching the conclusion that he wanted: McNamara conducted his office far more in the manner of a field commander than that of a political manager.

  As for Lyndon Johnson, not for nothing does the president of the United States bear the title of commander-in-chief. What was the choice before him in 1964–65? Some modern critics of the decision to escalate decline to acknowledge that to concede victory to the communists was to condemn the Vietnamese people to an ice-age future under Le Duan’s collectivist tyranny, such as eventually became their lot after 1975. Frances Fitzgerald wrote: ‘There was no “other side” in this war … We were not only on the wrong side, we created the wrong side … It was not the Vietnamese that began the violence, it was ourselves by going in there … In Vietnam what we were doing was trying to stop a local government from coming to power.’ This ignores the profoundly undemocratic, inhumane character of the North Vietnamese regime. Much wiser seems the view of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who said long afterwards: ‘The moral issue as I saw it finally got down to the question of was there any proportion between the destruction and what possible good would come out of it? … You started with the judgment … about people in South Vietnam wanting to have a free society. But the price of getting it was the destruction practically of a total community. You make a pragmatic judgment … you don’t pursue it to all-out destruction.’

  While today the failure of collectivisation is apparent in every society where it has been tried, in the twentieth century it was probably historically inescapable that impoverished rural societies, China and Vietnam notable among them, should attempt implementation of the theories of Marx and Lenin, in order to discover for themselves their unworkability. The human cost was appalling – but so was that of the American attempt to prevent such an experiment by force of arms. Doug Ramsey suggested that communism offered Vietnamese, with their strongly structured relationships between the individual and the family, the family and society, a more plausible vision than did Western liberal individualism. In 1965 many could scarcely be blamed for judging that peace at any price was preferable to a continuation of their murderous struggle. The fatal error of the US was to make an almost unlimited commitment to South Vietnam, where its real strategic interest was minuscule, when the North – the enemy – was content to stake all, and faced no requirement to secure or renew popular consent. Moreover, the 1964–65 American takeover of the South, which is what took place, legitimised Vietnamese communism.

  The basis for a historical indictment of Lyndon Johnson’s decision is that he made his choices with a view to his own interests and those of his country, rather than those of the Vietnamese people; he showed himself blind to proportionality, as defined by Eugene McCarthy; he failed to heed wise and insistent counsellors who urged that his war-making would almost
certainly fail; and finally, he deceived the American people. Daniel Ellsberg, assistant to John McNaughton at the Pentagon in 1965–66, said bitterly later, after his own conversion: ‘Everything we did was secret from the public, all the lies, the illegal actions that were being prepared, the aggressive actions against North Vietnam.’ On 27 July 1965, Sen. Mike Mansfield reported back to the president on a meeting he had held that afternoon with Fulbright, Russell and other senior members of the Foreign Relations Committee: ‘There was a general sense of reassurance that your objective was not to get in deeply, and that you intended to do only what was necessary in the military line until January, while [UN ambassador Arthur] Goldberg and Rusk were concentrating on attempting to get us out.’

  Dean Rusk acknowledged the almost surreptitious shipment of forces: ‘We didn’t want to present Moscow and Hanoi with a dramatic new situation.’ Thus, in terms of numbers of troops moving towards Vietnam, ‘one week wasn’t much different from the last’. The administration was careful to eschew the drama of parades, regiments marching through city streets to the dock or planeside. Robert McNamara was getting ready to send more soldiers. Like many apparently masterful men, the defense secretary was susceptible to dictation from an even stronger one, such as Lyndon Johnson was. If the president called and invited him over as he cooked burgers for the family at Sunday lunchtime, McNamara would douse the barbecue and climb into his car, though the summons was merely whimsical and social.

  Posterity has chained the two men to the war in tandem, yet they had little in common: the fastidious McNamara hated the vulgarity of Johnson’s language and behaviour. He was nonetheless in awe of the president’s power and strength of will. Meanwhile his boss valued McNamara’s intelligence, ruthlessness and above all loyalty. Some months earlier, when it was already plain that the war was turning bad, friends urged the defense secretary to quit office. He responded that he must stay and ‘see the Vietnam thing through’. In truth, he could not bring himself to walk away. It was an unpleasant contradiction that he understood better than most the probably irredeemable weakness of the South Vietnamese regime, yet he became increasingly vicious in his attitude to critics such as George Ball. Here was a decision-maker who prided himself on his rationality, but from mid-1965 became an obsessive, some of whose decisions verged upon madness. No man paid a higher reputational price for engagement with the war than did the defense secretary.