For Rostow, the economic development of capitalism was a virtual law of history, and it would eventually work its wonders everywhere, regardless of differences in population, politics, history, culture, or religion. One size fits all. If it works in the United States, it will work in Peru; if it’s good for Peru, it’s good for Vietnam. Detailed analysis of individual countries was, for Rostow, really not essential. The pattern could be applied anywhere.
But the United States should not wait for the magic of capitalism to unfold. That would be morally inexcusable and strategically dangerous. By promoting capitalist development, America could inoculate underdeveloped countries threatened by the virus of Communism. For Rostow, traditional societies moving toward economic takeoff were especially susceptible to the lies and coercions of Communism. He believed Communism was merely a “crude act of international vandalism,” not an appealing revolutionary ideology, but it had to be defeated in order for economic progress to proceed along its “natural” path.
The Stages of Economic Growth offered a full-throated endorsement of global anti-Communism and foreign aid to promote capitalism. John Kennedy included Rostow among his campaign advisers in the 1960 presidential race. Indeed, it was Rostow who coined Kennedy’s two major campaign slogans (“Let’s get this country moving again” and the “New Frontier”). That gift for brevity was apparently short-lived, since once in Washington, JFK was soon complaining about Rostow’s wordy memos. “Walt writes faster than I can read.”
JFK hired Rostow to work on foreign policy, and LBJ eventually promoted him to national security adviser. He proved to be the most hawkish member of either administration. For all his talk of economic development and nation building, he was perhaps most notable as an advocate of military escalation. As a wartime adviser he seemed much more enthusiastic about bombing than well digging or school construction.
Even the centerpiece of the nation-building program—viewed by policymakers as the hallmark of “constructive counterinsurgency”—was a coercive plan that forced rural villagers off their land and relocated them in armed camps. Launched in 1961, it was called the Strategic Hamlet Program. The program’s primary goal was to deprive the Viet Cong guerrillas of the villagers they depended on for support. Strategic hamlet advocates liked to quote China’s Chairman Mao, comparing guerrillas to fish that swim in an ocean of people. If you took away the “ocean” of people, they claimed, the guerrilla “fish” would die. What they did not take into account is how the villagers might feel about being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and stuck in fortified compounds behind barbed wire and moats filled with bamboo spikes, overseen by guard towers. Residents were required to carry identification passes to prove their loyalty to the government and had to honor nighttime curfews designed to keep them inside the hamlets, allowing the military to assume that anyone outside the barbed wire was a guerrilla target. The U.S. Information Agency gave everyone in the strategic hamlets a little pamphlet called Toward the Good Life, spelling out the advantages of modern medicine, hygiene, and agriculture.
Most villagers never believed strategic hamlets promised a better life, but they had no choice about the move. And once they were relocated, their alienation deepened. Instead of leading rural civilians to embrace the South Vietnamese government, the program mostly helped the Viet Cong recruit the residents of what were essentially concentration camps. Within a few years, most strategic hamlets were ghost towns. The residents had fled back to their former villages even though they often had to start from scratch, since the government had burned down many of the original hamlets. By the end of 1963 the program was in shambles. Years later, one of its principal advocates, Roger Hilsman, conceded that it was “useless—worse than useless.” The program limped along into the mid-1960s under a more appealing name—New Life Hamlets—but it was no more successful in building support for the government or isolating the people from the insurgency.
The U.S. military then moved on to cruder forms of relocation that did not include even the promise of modernizing alternative villages. Trucks and helicopters simply arrived by the score to cart villagers off to refugee camps while giant Rome plows leveled their homes. Or villages would be burned or bombed and the villagers would be left to fend for themselves. They would move in with relatives in another village, or cobble together a shelter in a shantytown next to a large U.S. base, or join the millions who fled to the cities.
American policymakers were not deterred by the obvious fact that forced relocation enraged and alienated the Vietnamese. Walt Rostow believed the use of force enhanced the government’s credibility with peasants. Counterinsurgency programs, he wrote, “have depended for their success on a mixture of attractive political and economic programs in the underdeveloped areas and a ruthless projection to the peasantry that the central government intends to be the wave of the future.”
Few colleagues shared Rostow’s confidence in the progress of the war. One of the internal dissenters, James Thomson, left the government in 1966 and wrote a wickedly hilarious satire of Rostow that appeared in Atlantic magazine. His parody imagines a White House meeting in which some national security advisers discuss the shocking news that Saigon has fallen to the Viet Cong. The Walt Whitman Rostow character (Herman Melville Breslau) insists that the horrible news is actually quite good. “In general, he felt, the events of the previous day were a wholesome and not unexpected phase in South Vietnam’s growth toward political maturity and economic viability.” The “enemy was now confronted with a challenge of unprecedented proportions for which it was totally unprepared: the administration of a major city. If we could dump rice and airlift pigs at Hue and Danang, he was pretty sure that the other side would soon cave.”
The humor rides not just on Rostow’s impervious optimism in the face of dire news, but his habit of twisting the meaning of events in favor of his views and proposing bizarre new tactics that would somehow allow the United States to prevail. Men like Thomson came to see Rostow’s advocacy as nearly lunatic in its extreme denial of concrete reality. Most other officials reserved their positive spinning to public statements. Any satire of Robert McNamara, for example, would focus on the stark contrast between his private pessimism and his public reassurances. Rostow, at least, had the distinction of being publicly and privately consistent in his adherence to a sunny view of the war. Indeed, even long after 1975 (when Saigon actually did fall), Rostow argued that the war not only had been morally right to fight, but had actually accomplished a great deal. The silver linings he identifies might have been lifted directly from Thomson’s spoof:
We and the Southeast Asians used those ten years [1965–1975] so well that there wasn’t the panic [when Saigon fell] that there would have been if we had failed to intervene. Since 1975 there has been a general expansion of trade by the other countries of that region with Japan and the West. In Thailand we have seen the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs. Malaysia and Singapore have become countries of diverse manufactured exports. We can see the emergence of a much thicker layer of technocrats in Indonesia.
For Rostow, the astonishing carnage and failure of the Vietnam War was neither a tragedy nor a crime. It was an excellent use of time. Somehow Asian neighbors found it all reassuring, Rostow suggests. In any case, they were able to get on with their profit making. Modernization was back on track.
Another American social scientist who defended “ruthless projections” of military power to advance capitalism and smash Communism was Harvard government professor Samuel Huntington. Huntington had quibbles with Rostow, but agreed that modernization was crucial to success in Vietnam. His most famous work on the subject was a 1968 article that appeared in Foreign Affairs, the house organ of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Huntington argued that modernization in South Vietnam was working because of the war’s destruction. The United States was succeeding because its military policies were forcing millions of people out of the countryside and into the cit
ies. This “American-sponsored urban revolution” was effectively undercutting a “Maoist-inspired rural revolution.” The forced relocation of peasants effectively eliminated a key source of support for the insurgency and introduced the rural population to the attractions and opportunities of modern urban life. For Huntington, nation-building projects to win the hearts and minds of peasants were merely “gimmicks” and largely “irrelevant.” Gaining political support was not crucial. All that mattered was control. “The war in Vietnam is a war for the control of population.” Huntington basically conceded the rural countryside to the Viet Cong. It was simply too tough to establish control out in the boonies. But Huntington believed you could control the peasants once you got them in the cities. America was bombing the countryside “on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city.” Huntington called the approach “forced-draft urbanization.”
The effective response [to “wars of national liberation”] lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines and gimmicks of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power.
Air force general Curtis LeMay once recommended that the United States bomb Vietnam “into the Stone Age.” Huntington recommended that the U.S. bomb Vietnam into the future. He made it sound almost bloodless and even appealing. Yes, he concedes, “the social costs of this change have been dramatic and often heartrending.” But “the urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of life.” Like Rostow, Huntington went to his death defending his position on the Vietnam War. In a 2001 interview, he went even further than he had in 1968 to extol the blessings that came to Vietnamese who were forced off their land by the United States. “You could very easily become incredibly well off in the cities [of South Vietnam]. There were all these wonderful jobs that had been produced by this overpowering American presence. So you had to be pretty stupid to stay out in the countryside and not move into the cities.”
Wonderful jobs? A clue to how grossly Huntington distorts reality can be found in a wartime survey conducted among a group of relatively privileged Vietnamese who were training to become teachers:
When students at Saigon’s teacher training college were asked to list 15 occupations in an English examination, almost every student included launderer, car washer, bar-girl, shoeshine boy, soldier, interpreter, and journalist. Almost none of the students thought to write down doctor, engineer, industrial administrator, farm manager, or even their own chosen profession, teacher. The economy has become oriented toward services catering to the foreign soldiers.
Some other common jobs the students might have added include prostitute, pimp, black marketeer, and dope peddler. The entire economy had been distorted and corrupted by the United States, and made increasingly dependent on continued U.S. support. Urban inequalities widened and the most vital sector of the economy—agriculture—was devastated by the war. South Vietnam had once produced a surplus of rice for export. By the mid-1960s, it had to import its major crop.
Nation building looked like a sick joke alongside the wreckage caused by American weapons. But even as the military was doubling and redoubling its bombing attacks and search-and-destroy missions, President Johnson was still prattling on to his advisers about building schools and dams. “I want to leave the footprints of America in Vietnam. I want them to say when the Americans come, this is what they leave—schools, not long cigars. We’re going to turn the Mekong into a Tennessee Valley.” At one point the president began pushing to get “cheap TV sets” into Vietnam for the “purposes of education and indoctrination.” Perhaps they could come from Japan, he said. Of course, most of the rural countryside had no electricity.
LBJ’s vision of an Americanized Vietnam failed except for one obvious exception—those American “footprints.” The United States did not do much nation building for the Vietnamese, but it practically built an entire nation for itself. To garrison, arm, and feed its military force of half a million, it embarked on one of the greatest logistical and construction projects in history. The most advanced and technologically sophisticated military in the world was to sustain itself eight thousand miles from California in a poor, agricultural nation.
Great mountains of lumber, steel, concrete mix, and food, rivers of oil and jet fuel, a constant flow of trucks, jeeps, plows, tanks, howitzers, helicopters, and planes, and every imaginable consumer product were shipped to Vietnam day after day, year after year. Simply to unload all that cargo, deepwater ports had to be dredged and equipped. These “Ports a-Go-Go” were outfitted with prefabricated piers constructed in the Philippines and towed hundreds of miles to Vietnam. Eventually, the United States completed seven deep-draft ports. When dock space was still limited, hundreds of supply ships had to wait offshore to unload, sometimes up to a month. And before some fourteen million square feet of warehousing was constructed, supplies were simply stacked in the open. In December 1965, for example, nine million cans of beer and soft drinks were piled on Saigon wharves. Theft and corruption were so rampant that an estimated 40 percent of all supplies disappeared whether they were warehoused or not.
Then there were the dozens of inland bases carved out of the jungles, plateaus, and wetlands—environments utterly transformed into military cities. In the Mekong Delta, for example, the United States built a base for the Ninth Infantry Division at Dong Tam on top of riverfront wetlands. To build the six-hundred-acre base, engineers had to raise the ground level by up to ten feet. To do it, they dredged more than two million cubic yards of fill from the river. When the project was completed, the base housed ten thousand troops and included the largest combat heliport in the world.
To accommodate its vast array of warplanes, the U.S. constructed 115 airfields. Fifteen of them had the giant two-mile-long runways required by the bigger American jets. That’s just in South Vietnam. In Thailand, eight other major air bases were constructed or expanded for U.S. bombing strikes against Laos and North Vietnam. Between the airports, roads, and bases, the United States put down some eleven million tons of asphalt in South Vietnam, as if it were literally carrying out the prescription of Ronald Reagan’s famous 1965 quip as California governor: “We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.”
In the early 1970s, the navy commissioned a book about military construction in Vietnam written by Richard Tregaskis. It was a surprisingly dull subject to be taken up by the once famous author. In 1943, at age twenty-six, the six-foot-seven Harvard graduate had published one of the best-selling combat narratives of World War II, Guadalcanal Diary (1943). An overnight sensation, the book was made into a film within a year of publication. Guadalcanal Diary is a classic of what we would now call embedded combat reporting, offering an eyewitness account of the first six weeks of the famous battle through the lives and experiences of U.S. Marines, focusing largely on how green infantrymen overcame their initial fears and uncertainties and developed the “cool, quiet fortitude that comes with battle experience.” Along with the details of small-unit jungle warfare, the book is full of the rah-rah partisanship we associate with the “Good War”: “Down the beach one of the Japs had jumped up and was running for the jungle. ‘There he goes!’ went the shout. ‘Riddle the son-of-a-bitch!’ And riddled he was.”
Tregaskis went on to try something similar in the early years of the Vietnam War—Vietnam Diary (1963)—but it did not create the same sensation. The World War II combat narratives just didn’t work in Vietnam. By 1973, when Tregaskis died while swimming near his home in Hawaii, he was finishing a book called Southeast Asia: Building the Bases. It may have seemed like the only triumphant story to tell about the current war. The heroes were not marine riflemen; they
were engineers. Published by the Government Printing Office, it was practically designed to sit unread and gather dust. Yet you can still hear the voice of a once popular writer doing his best to attract an audience:
Never before in history has so much building been crammed into such a small area: a tiny, tropical Asian country the size of the State of Washington. . . . Flying over Vietnam, one sees whole mountains gouged into bases and new cities, with row on row of metal-topped, silvery buildings; wide airbase complexes clustered around the concrete ribbons of runways and taxiways. They were built to defend Vietnam with air power. But they also had the interesting collateral effect of preparing her way for a catapult-style launching into the modern age.
We can also hear the echoes of Walt Rostow and Samuel Huntington as Tregaskis assures us that the vast U.S. military presence in Vietnam will trigger an economic takeoff into the glories of modernity. Even during the war, this bottom-line, last-ditch defense of American policy appeared in the press. As early as 1966, Time magazine was already preparing readers for the possibility that the war itself might not go well, but everyone could at least celebrate America’s physical buildup throughout the region:
Whatever the outcome of the war, the most significant consequence of the U.S. buildup is that, for the first time in history, the U.S. in 1965 established bastions across the nerve centers of Southeast Asia. From formidable new enclaves in South Viet Nam to a far flung network of airfields, supply depots and naval facilities . . . the U.S. will soon be able to rush aid to any threatened ally in Asia. . . . The huge new ports that are being scooped out along the coasts of Viet Nam and Thailand should permanently boost the economies of both nations.
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 14
