Vietnam

Explaining America's Lost War

Gary R. Hess

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118949016
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Now available in a completely revised and updated second edition, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War is an award-winning historiography of one of the 20 th century's seminal conflicts.

• Looks at many facets of Vietnam War, examining central arguments of scholars, journalists, and participants and providing evidence on both sides of controversies around this event
• Addresses key debates about the Vietnam War, asking whether the war was necessary for US security; whether President Kennedy would have avoided the war had he lived beyond November 1963; whether negotiation would have been a feasible alternative to war; and more
• Assesses the lessons learned from this war, and how these lessons have affected American national security policy since
• Written by a well-respected scholar in the field in an accessible style for students and scholars

1
From the Streets to the Books: The Origins of an Enduring Debate

From its beginning, the Vietnam War divided Americans. In the summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson made an open-ended military commitment to the defense of South Vietnam. It came after several months of a mounting crisis that left the beleaguered South Vietnamese government and its army on the verge of collapse in the face of a communist insurgency. Limited application of American military power had failed to halt the political-military deterioration. Earlier in 1965, Johnson had launched a bombing campaign against North Vietnam, which supported the Viet Cong insurgents and had sent American combat troops, beginning with some 3,500 marines. Despite the acceleration of the bombing and an increase of troops to 40,000 men, American officials recognized by July, 1965 that a much larger military commitment was the only means of saving South Vietnam from a communist takeover. Despite Johnson’s effort to downplay the magnitude of his decision, Americans recognized that it meant that tens of thousands of additional troops soon would be sent to Vietnam and that indeed the nation was at war.

While most Americans supported Johnson’s decision, going to war in Vietnam was met with less enthusiasm than other wars. About 60 percent of the public thought the military commitment was correct, but one-fourth of them thought it was a “mistake,” while the remainder of people were uncertain. In another opinion poll in which Americans were asked which course of action should be followed – hold the line, negotiate and get out, carry the war to North Vietnam – not even a majority, only 48 percent, favored the first alternative that reflected the position of Johnson, while 31 percent supported “negotiations and get out” (barely 17 percent favored the more aggressive third alternative, and 4 percent were undecided). This hesitancy on the part of Americans contrasted sharply with their attitudes toward other recent wars: when Harry S. Truman sent US troops to fight in Korea in 1950, when George H. W. Bush launched war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, and when George W. Bush began the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003, at least three-fourths of the public in each case approved of their decisions.¹

The public debate over US policy in Vietnam had indeed begun months earlier when Johnson authorized the earliest steps of American military involvement. On the night of March 24–25, 1965 – barely two weeks after the first small contingent of US combat troops landed in Vietnam – a “teach-in” at the University of Michigan marked the beginning of formal protest. As speakers criticized the movement toward war, Johnson’s supporters carried banners proclaiming “all the way with LBJ.” Within the next two months, teach-ins were held at campuses across the US. Teach-ins typically involved lectures, debates, and discussions; and although all points of view were welcomed, critics of US involvement dominated the discourse. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which was to become a leading voice of opposition to the war, organized the first national rally; it was held at the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital on April 17 and drew some 25,000 young people. A month later – on May 15 – a throng of over 100,000, mostly college students, descended on Washington in response to a call for a national teach-in.

The organizers of the national teach-in offered equal time to officials of the Johnson administration. Although the administration declined that opportunity, it soon sent “truth squads” around the country to respond to its critics. The Department of State published Aggression from the North, which contended that the USA was obliged to defend its ally, South Vietnam, against communist North Vietnam’s “aggression.” Through the movement of troops and supplies, North Vietnam supported the Viet Cong, the communist insurgency that for several years had been engaging in a campaign of attacks and terrorism against the South Vietnamese government. Aggression from the North concluded that the major communist powers – the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic – stood behind North Vietnam. Throughout the Cold War, US policy had been based on the principle of “containment” of communism; like Greece, Berlin, and Korea earlier, Vietnam was seen as the latest “test” of American resolve to stand by allies threatened by communism.

Critics of the administration’s case for war, led by the longtime iconoclastic journalist I. F. Stone whose I. F. Stone’s Weekly became a widely-read among antiwar advocates, argued that the State Department rationale was based on a misunderstanding of Vietnamese history and ignored the legitimate grievances of the South Vietnamese people against their authoritarian and repressive government, which the US had been supporting for a decade. The US, Stone, and other critics argued, was intervening in a Vietnamese civil war.

Debating the War, 1965–1968: The Power–Morality Issue

From these beginnings in early 1965 and accelerating as involvement in Vietnam steadily escalated over the next three years, a debate between “doves” and “hawks” enveloped the American public. Notably, both sides claimed the moral high ground. Through demonstrations, marches, speeches, and other forms of nonviolent protest – including defiance of the selective service system that drafted young men into military service – opponents of the war carried their message that America was fighting an immoral war. To doves, the US needed to disengage, through withdrawal or negotiated settlement, from an untenable position. The protesters were challenged by pro-war groups who engaged in counter-demonstrations and marches to make their point that the war was necessary to defend freedom and to halt the spread of communism. To them, the war had the high moral purpose of upholding the freedom of the South Vietnamese.

The debate seemed chaotic. The antiwar side attracted a diverse range of individuals and organizations. While many men and women were drawn to political action for the first time, others had been involved in pacifist, anti-nuclear, feminist, and civil rights movements. Protest often lacked coordination and planning. The principal scholars of the antiwar movement write: “there were many antiwar movements in America. Protest had many masks, so different that some observers contended that there was no such thing as an antiwar movement.” That confusing diversity however, also reflected strength: “the spasmodic, haphazard, frustrated, fatigued, and incoherent [protest] reflect[ed] the character of the peace and antiwar movement rather than a denial of its existence.”² So it was a “movement of movements” that became the center of a national debate of unprecedented dimensions.

Paralleling the public confrontations in the streets, on campus, and other forms was an elite debate, waged in Congress, in prominent journals and in a number of books. Hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AK) who became disillusioned by Johnson’s war policy, emerged as a forum for criticism of the war. As early as February 1966, Fulbright took the unprecedented step of conducting hearings on the necessity of a war that the country was then waging. Among his many witnesses, none made a greater impact than George Kennan, who enjoyed enormous respect as a major architect of the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union. Kennan undercut the administration’s argument, stating bluntly that communist control of South Vietnam “would not. . .present dangers great enough to justify our direct military intervention.”³

This sharp division over the war was unanticipated, because for the previous quarter century Americans had strongly supported the nation’s foreign policy. Most wars in earlier US history – dating back to the Revolution against England and continuing into the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and World War I – had been controversial, with significant numbers of Americans challenging the necessity of the conflicts. The Union cause during the Civil War was always opposed by large numbers of Northerners, which was especially manifest in riots opposing conscription. World War II was the conspicuous exception; mobilized by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and by the morality of the Allied cause, Americans had no doubt of the necessity to defeat the Axis powers. The Cold War quickly followed and it seemed to Americans that the Soviet Union was following the kind of piecemeal aggression that the Germans, Japanese, and Italians had engaged in prior to World War II; the US, it seemed, had no choice but to halt aggression in its early stages, so the “containment” strategy was embraced as necessary for national security. When the Cold War got “hot” as the United Nations fought a “limited war” in Korea between 1950 and 1953, it triggered some disagreement among Americans; that controversy, however, was not so much over the necessity of resisting communist aggression, as it was over the means of waging the war.

Americans of the World War II–Cold War generation had become accustomed to linking the nation’s power with a moral cause.⁴ As that power became greater, it had accentuated the belief that the use of military force against totalitarianism that threatened democratic values – whether in the guise of fascism or communism – was justified and indeed necessary. To many Americans, the intervention in Vietnam lacked that power–morality link. What they saw and learned about Vietnam left them skeptical of the righteousness of their nation’s cause. Over the two years prior to the Americanization of the war in the summer of 1965, Americans had seen South Vietnam torn apart by opposition from the Buddhist leadership. This opposition included the widely-publicized self-immolation of priests protesting against the American-supported government of Ngo Dinh Diem. Then came the overthrow of the Diem government in November 1963 and the brutal murders of Diem and his brother, which was followed by a confusing series of coups and counter-coups among military and civilian cliques. Meanwhile, the Viet Cong was stepping up its attacks. The situation in South Vietnam left many wondering: Was this divided South Vietnamese state worthy of American support? How could the US “save” a people who lacked unity and resolve in fighting communism? When, in the summer of 1965, the US insisted on stability in the Saigon government, the two military leaders who took charge – Nguyen van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky – enlisted little enthusia...