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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Contesting the Past
- Sprache: Englisch
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 20th 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
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title page
Preface
1 From the Streets to the Books: The Origins of an Enduring Debate
Debating the War, 1965–1968: The Power–Morality Issue
The Battle of the Books: Doves and Hawks
Revisionism: The “Noble Cause” and “If-Only” History
The Orthodox School: A “Mistaken Commitment” and an “Unwinnable War”
Approaching the Problem: Seven Key Issues
Summary
2 A Necessary War ora Mistaken War?
Origins of Commitment: Regional and Global Contexts
The Revisionist Case for the “Necessary War”
The Orthodox Case for the “Mistaken War”
Summary
3 “Kennedy Exceptionalism,” “Missed Opportunity for Peace,” or “Lost Victory?”: The Movement toward War, 1961–1965
The Orthodox Narrative
The “Quagmire” Interpretation: Leaders Caught in Tragedy
“Kennedy Exceptionalism”: Disengagement as An Alternative to War?
The Critique of “Kennedy Exceptionalism”: JFK as the Cold Warrior
Johnson and Negotiations: A Viable Alternative to War?
Johnson as an Ineffective Leader
The Revisionist Argument: The First “Lost Victory”
Assessments of Diem’s Leadership and North Vietnam’s Belligerency
Summary
4 The Revisionist Critique of the “Strategy for Defeat”: The Clausewitzian Alternative
Westmoreland: The “General Who Lost The War” or “Good General, Bad War?”
The Ground War in South Vietnam: The Limits of Search-and-Destroy
The Air War against North Vietnam: The Limits of Rolling Thunder
The Revisionist Position: The Strategy for Victory
The Response to Revisionism: Ill-Founded and Risky “If-Only” History
Summary
5 The Revisionist Critique of the “Other War”: The “Hearts-and-Minds” Prescription for Victory
Wartime Proponents of the “Other War”
The Arguments for the Hearts-and-Minds Strategy
Critique of Hearts-and-Minds: The Limits of American Influence
Summary
6 The Media and the War: Irresponsible or Balanced Journalism?
Wartime Leaders’ Criticism of the Media
The Revisionist Denunciation of Irresponsible Journalism
The Response: Supportive and Balanced Reporting
Summary
7 The Tet Offensive: Decisive American Victory or Devastating Loss?
Revisionism: The Failure to Exploit a Military Advantage
Orthodoxy: A Crippling Loss
Summary
8 Nixon–Kissinger and the Ending of the War: A “Lost Victory” or “Neither Peace nor Honor?”
Nixon, Kissinger, and the Origins of Revisionism
The Revisionist Case for the “Lost Victory”
The Orthodox “Neither Peace nor Honor” Interpretation
Summary
9 Conclusion: The War’s “Lessons”
The Weinberger– Powell Doctrine
Petraeus and Counter-Insurgency Doctrine
Historians and the War’s Lessons
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 04
Table 4.1 Operation “Rolling Thunder.”
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Contesting the Past
The volumes in this series select some of the most controversial episodes in history and consider their divergent, even starkly incompatible representations. The aim is not merely to demonstrate that history is ‘argument without end’, but to show that study even of contradictory conceptions can be fruitful: that the jettisoning of one thesis or presentation leaves behind something of value.
Published
Contesting the CrusadesNorman Housley
Contesting the German Empire 1871–1918Matthew Jefferies
Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War, Second EditionGary R. Hess
Contesting the French RevolutionPaul Hanson
The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Contested HistoriesNeil Caplan
Contesting the RenaissanceWilliam Caferro
Contesting the ReformationC. Scott Dixon
Vietnam
Explaining America’s Lost War
Second Edition
Gary R. Hess
This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Edition History: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 2009)
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Cover image: Vietnamese woman and child under sniper fire as U.S. Marines storm the village of My Son, near Da Nang, searching for Viet Cong insurgents in April 1964. © Eddie Adams/AP/Press Association
For Madeline and Grayson
Preface
The year 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Americanization of the war in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement in July 1965 of an open-ended military commitment ended uncertainty about whether measures taken earlier that year – the bombing of North Vietnam, the introduction of the first American ground forces and their expanding military mission – would be sufficient to save South Vietnam from coming under communist control. By the time of Johnson’s decision for war, the escalating American role in Vietnam was already dividing the country. In late March 1965, the first Vietnam “teach-in” took place at the University of Michigan. At other campuses around the country, students and faculty soon followed by holding similar forums that debated the issues confronting the United States in Vietnam. Most participants questioned, if they were not outright opposed to, the escalating US involvement. Bowling Green State University, where I was in my first year of teaching, was the scene of a modest teach-in in May 1965. Although I knew little about Vietnam, I agreed to participate and tried to present a balanced appraisal of how America had become involved there.
Few of us at that time conceived of the momentous events that were to follow: that within three years more than 500,000 American troops would be stationed in Vietnam fighting an indecisive war that would divide Americans more deeply than any event of the twentieth century. That early uneasiness, however, foreshadowed the turbulent times that lay ahead. For two decades Americans had uncritically supported the nation’s Cold War policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union. From the beginning, Vietnam was a different kind of problem: a war against ruthless insurgents in the jungles of Asia to salvage a politically and militarily unstable ally. The challenge of securing a non-communist South Vietnam was far more foreboding than earlier Cold War crises. The ensuing war, which cost 58,000 American and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives and which ended in humiliating defeat, underlined the appropriateness of pausing in 1965 to think through where the nation was heading.
This book is an effort to come to terms with a substantial portion of the literature on the Vietnam War. The differences between “hawks” and “doves” of the war years have continued in the contentious debate among scholars, journalists, and participants over the war’s retrospective “meaning” and its “lessons.” At the heart of the 50 years’ debate has been the issue of explaining failure. Wartime hawks feared that limitations on military operations and domestic opposition were undermining a war that had to be waged in the name of anti-communism: if America failed, they were convinced, it would be a self-inflicted defeat. On the other side, the doves believed that failure was inherent in a misguided intervention on behalf of a weak government against a communist movement that enjoyed nationalist legitimacy: US power could not change the political situation in Vietnam, a country, moreover, of marginal significance in terms of American security. Those contemporary debates have essentially continued in the retrospective writing, with revisionists carrying forward the hawkish “winnable” war argument and orthodox writers following in the dovish “unwinnable” war tradition.
To help make sense of this debate, I have divided it into seven topics:
The basic question – was Vietnam a “necessary” or “mistaken” war?
The decisions for war from 1961 to 1965 – could war have been avoided (did Kennedy plan to withdraw from Vietnam and did Johnson miss opportunities for a peaceful settlement?) or did policymakers subvert a “lost victory?”
Military strategy – was the United States engaged in a conventional war, not a guerrilla war, and victory achievable by all-out use of US power?
As an alternative to reliance on military power – would pacification and an emphasis on winning “hearts-and-minds” have brought victory?
The media – was coverage of the war irresponsible or balanced?
The Tet Offensive – was the outcome of the battles of 1968 a decisive American victory or devastating loss?
The Nixon–Kissinger policy – did Vietnamization bring a “lost victory” or “neither peace nor honor?”
My objective is to provide a guide to a debate of scholarly as well as contemporary importance, for the “lessons” of Vietnam continue to inform public discourse on foreign policy questions. The identification of the principal issues reflects, in my judgment, the points where the debate is now focused. I have sought to present both sides of the debates on these issues in a comprehensive and even-handed manner. In assessing the merits of the points of contention, I have endeavored to draw principally on scholarly works, although some memoirs and partisan histories contribute significantly to the debate. Since the issues follow both chronological and topical lines and since I endeavor to make each chapter stand on its own, there is some overlap; in particular, the history of Vietnamese nationalism and political developments in South Vietnam have to be discussed in the context of the necessity of war, the decisions for war, and the hearts-and-minds alternative. Also, I have had to make some arbitrary decisions on where to deal with some topics and where to “fit” certain books. For instance, the chapter on the media and the war does not include the controversy about coverage of the Tet Offensive; instead that issue is incorporated into the chapter on Tet itself, since the media’s role is fundamental to assessing the debate on which side “won” that battle. Likewise, the chapter on the hearts-and-minds alternative strategy covers the full course of the war, since the issues involved in pacification were persistent, regardless of the extent to which it was prioritized. The danger in this approach is that it might detract from a full evaluation of the Nixon administration’s emphasis on pacification as part of Vietnamization.
My views were shaped during the early months of the war when I became convinced that the US had become involved in a hopeless enterprise. From what I read at the time especially on the history of Vietnamese nationalism, it seemed to me that America was defying the forces of Vietnamese history; having lived in India and having traveled through other parts of Asia (not including Indochina) shortly before the war was Americanized, I had been impressed by the strength of nationalism everywhere and the determination of Asians to free themselves from anything resembling Western domination. Later research on US policy in Southeast Asia confirmed my early reactions to the war, although I came to appreciate the complexities of Vietnamese politics and the interests of the major powers in Indochina.
This identity with the dovish-orthodox tradition does not, I hope, preclude me from giving a fair assessment of the debate. I have learned a great deal from the revisionists, and have come to respect much of their work, especially as it has become more scholarly. I have also come to appreciate the determination of participants in the war to see a purpose in their effort and sacrifice and to suggest ways that the war might have been more successful. While I am not a convert to revisionism, I have made every effort to give its arguments a complete and fair hearing.
Since the publication of the first edition of this book in 2008, much scholarship has incorporated Vietnamese sources and has drawn greater attention to international aspects of the war, cultural influences, and the politics within both North Vietnam and South Vietnam. My definition of the issues remains American-centered, which continues to represent the preponderance of the writing on the war, as is appropriate for it was US intervention that initiated the Vietnam War, or, as it often labeled, the Second Indochina War. Recent scholarship on the political struggles in southern Vietnam during the French period, the complex interplay of nationalism and colonialism in Indochina during the 1940s and 1950s, the response of allies to US intervention, and North Vietnamese decision-making and strategy has greatly enhanced our understanding of the complexities and dynamics of the war.
I continue to benefit from those who have guided my thinking since I began working on the first edition of the book. Three reviewers of the preliminary proposal stressed the need for a broader focus than I had initially envisioned. Later, four reviewers’ instructive criticism strengthened my draft manuscript.
Recently, in preparing for the revised edition, I was helped immensely by the comments of 19 instructors of Vietnam War courses who commented on the first edition. While their suggestions influenced the rewriting of several chapters, they are most fully represented in the entirely rewritten conclusion, which now focuses on the “lessons” of the war.
For this extensive guidance from colleagues on both the 2008 and 2015 editions, I am indebted to Peter Coveney, Wiley Blackwell’s Senior Commissioning Editor. Peter is a superb editor in every respect. It has been a privilege to work with him. I owe gratitude as well to his first-rate staff – including Purushothaman Saravanan, Project Manager; Georgina Coleby, former Project Editor; Ashley McPhee, former Editorial Assistant in US and Latin American History; as well as to Lynette Woodward, Freelance Copyeditor.
My wife, Rose, as always, has been a sympathetic and sturdy supporter of my writing. Previous books have been dedicated to my parents John and Dorothy Hess, to Rose, and to our son Ryan. This book is dedicated to the next generation: our grandchildren Madeline and Grayson Hess.
Gary R. Hess
1From 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 enthusiasm in Washington or for that matter, in South Vietnam; as one American official said, the pair “seemed to all of us the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel.”5 The historian David Levy writes that,
. . .throughout the Vietnam controversy, those Americans who opposed the war had no more effective allies than the string of corrupt, ineffective, arrogant, stubborn leaders of South Vietnam who paraded across the stage like so many figures from some comic opera.”6
Questions about the legality of American policy in Vietnam further undermined the morality of the war. Critics claimed that the US violated the Geneva Accords of 1954 that provided for the end of French rule in Indochina and for the reunification of Vietnam after a two-year “temporary” division into northern and southern “zones.” Instead through its cultivation of South Vietnam as an independent state, the US had perpetuated the division of Vietnam. In the early 1960s, it had sent military advisers to South Vietnam that far exceeded the number permitted in the Geneva agreements. And some critics asserted that President Johnson lacked constitutional authority to wage war, notwithstanding the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed by Congress in August 1964.
The most emotional and powerful questioning of the war’s morality dealt with the lethal nature of US warfare. Coverage of the war included print and visual depictions of the widespread use of firepower on which American strategy depended. A range of weapons, made more deadly by technology, took warfare into virtually all areas of Vietnam. No aspect of the military campaign was more criticized than the bombing of North Vietnam and of communist positions in South Vietnam. In addition, American planes dropped chemical and biological defoliants that destroyed forests and crops throughout rural South Vietnam. The widespread use of napalm, with its capacity to inflict instant death or disfigurement on its victims, triggered still greater moral indignation. The fact that the US was inflicting such widespread destruction on a largely defenseless peasant society, inevitably killing and maiming thousands of civilians, removed – in the view of many Americans and foreign critics of the war – any claim to America’s moral authority.
Central to the counter-argument of the war’s defenders was that the morality–power link prevailed. Hence, from the President and other spokesmen for the war, both inside and outside official circles, came the persistent claim that the war had a clear moral imperative. Besides responding to the claims of an illegal war, hawks stressed how Vietnam was another Cold War “test.” Adlai Stevenson, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, stated in 1964: “the point in Vietnam is the same as it was in Greece in 1947 and in Korea in 1950.”7 Failure to uphold the “commitment” to South Vietnam would embolden communist advances elsewhere in Asia. In a major speech on Vietnam in April 1965, President Johnson told Americans:
Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Vietnam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next.8
American objectives were altruistic; in that same speech, Johnson said: “We want nothing for ourselves, only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.”9 And four years later, President Richard Nixon stated “everything is negotiable except the right of the people of South Vietnam to determine their own future.”10 So to defenders of the war, the moral purpose was embodied in the imperative to resist communist aggression, to stand by an ally, and to uphold international order.
As US involvement escalated, Vietnam became the issue in American politics. Beginning in 1966 and continuing until 1972, Americans in public opinion polls consistently identified “Vietnam” as the nation’s major problem. No one in 1965 recognized the prolonged ordeal that lay ahead. In 1965 when the US undertook a direct combat role in Vietnam and the debate over Johnson’s actions began, few Americans anticipated that the US was just beginning its longest war. Not until 1973 would an agreement end US involvement and bring home the last US combat troops. In the meantime, at its peak in 1967–1968 the American military presence would reach 535,000 and would be costing the US $30 billion a year (over $210 billion annually in 2014 dollars). As escalation failed to bring victory, the debate intensified and became increasingly acrimonious. Civility gave way to self-righteousness, moral indignation, and intolerance. Doves were often labeled communist-sympathizers, appeasers, naïve, and disloyal, while hawks found themselves being characterized as war mongers, baby-killers, arrogant, and immoral. Escalation and indecision in a war fought halfway around the globe had come to divide the country more deeply than any event since the American Civil War a century earlier.
Polls of public opinion during that period showed the extent to which the war divided Americans. The war produced various, and in some ways, contradictory reactions. On one level, there was a general, if uneven, trend toward more and more Americans considering the war a “mistake.” This can be traced in their responses to the question – “In view of developments since we entered the fighting, do you think the US made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” – which was used in several polls of public opinion beginning in 1965. Between 1965 and late 1967, the percentage of Americans saying it was a “mistake” increased from roughly one-fourth (24 percent) to nearly one-half (46 percent), while the “not a mistake” responses decreased from 60 percent to 44 percent. This mounting dissatisfaction seemed to support the antiwar contention that the US should disengage, yet Americans mostly identified themselves as “hawks” not “doves.” This ambiguity is underscored in opinion polls showing that while Americans supported the doves’ calls for negotiations, they were hawkish in rejecting a settlement that might lead to communist domination of Vietnam. This led many Americans to favor further escalation of the war as the only means of ending the war satisfactorily. The polling data thus suggest that although Americans were increasingly dissatisfied with the direction the war had taken and believed it had been a mistaken undertaking, they were determined that it not end in defeat.11
As that response to the war indicated, the prospect of “failure” was always prominent – in some ways, central – to the debate over Vietnam. “Failure” was always anticipated: to critics, it was inherent in the decision to go to war; to supporters, it was foreseeable if Americans were irresolute and if the nation’s power was used ineffectively.
To doves, the war was futile from the outset: America was engaged in a “fool’s errand” in which the political objective of an independent non-communist South Vietnam could not be attained by military means, or at least by means that did not risk war with the major communist powers. Critics emphasized what they considered insurmountable political obstacles: the weakness and irresolution of the South Vietnamese government, the greater legitimacy and determination of North Vietnam and the communist insurgency in South Vietnam, the capacity of North Vietnam to draw on the resources of the Soviet Union and China, and the unwillingness of those powers to accept the defeat of their comrades in Vietnam. Hans Morgenthau, a renowned scholar of international relations, spoke of the futility of American involvement, asking how the US could gain prestige “by being involved in a civil war on the mainland of Asia and being unable to win it.” Impending failure, Morgenthau went on, necessitated rethinking the enterprise: “Does not a great power gain prestige by mustering the wisdom and courage necessary to liquidate a losing enterprise?”12
On the other side, supporters of the war stressed the importance of South Vietnam’s survival in terms of upholding America’s position and prestige in the world. It was a war the US had to “win” – to force North Vietnam’s acceptance of a divided country. While doves focused on political obstacles to American objectives, hawks stressed American military potential. US power, properly applied, would force North Vietnam from the battlefield. What bothered the hawks was what they considered to be growing evidence of American irresolution on two levels: misapplication of military power and divisions over the war within the country. Critical of the strategy the US adopted from 1965 to 1968, many supporters of the war saw it as a “strategy for defeat.” Hawks constantly complained about limits placed on military operations, and their frustration was summed up early in the war when one Congressman told Johnson: “win or get out.”13 By the summer of 1967, high-ranking military officers had become increasingly critical of what they considered unwarranted civilian limitations on military operations. Hearings conducted by a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee under the leadership of Democratic Senator John Stennis of Mississippi provided an opportunity for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to detail their criticism of Johnson’s restrictions of the air war, claiming that unless the air force could bomb all potential targets, it would be impossible to win the war.14 The hawks also believed that the prospects for remedying strategic deficiencies were undermined by the divisiveness at home, which not only was corrosive to national morale but aided the enemy. In his landmark speech of November 3, 1969, President Richard Nixon appealed for the support of “the great silent majority” in his effort to achieve “peace with honor.” Dismissing antiwar critics as taking the “easy way” to end the war, he warned that failure in Vietnam could be prevented only if the “American people have the moral stamina and courage” to support South Vietnam. Should America fail – “the first defeat in our nation’s history” – the result would be disastrous: the undermining of confidence in America’s leadership and the very “survival of peace and freedom. . .throughout the world.”15 “Failure” would be too costly to contemplate.
The war’s critics dominated the contemporary debate. The antiwar protesters first took the issue to the public and to a large extent defined the terms of the debate. It was this remarkable dissent – unprecedented in the Cold War – of mostly liberal political leaders, journalists, and academicians that attracted the greatest attention. For 20 years, the foreign policy elite had endorsed unequivocally the containment of communism, and now it was divided, as many establishment figures were challenging a war being waged in the name of containment.
The Battle of the Books: Doves and Hawks
The predominant view of the war as a mistake was reflected in a number of contemporary books. The titles of several such works convey the sense of a misguided mission; the range of backgrounds of the authors speaks to the breadth of the war’s critics. The Making of a Quagmire was written by David Halberstam, who had received a Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his reporting as a New York Times correspondent in Saigon; in his best-selling book, Halberstam concluded that there was no satisfactory outcome for the US. Washington Plans An Aggressive War was co-authored by Richard J. Barnet, who had worked for the State Department during the Kennedy administration before co-founding the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a leftist think tank in 1963, Marcus Raskin, who had worked on the National Security Council staff before joining Barnet in establishing the IPS, and Ralph Stavins, an IPS fellow. Intervention and Revolution, a broad-ranging critique of US opposition to leftist movements, was also written by Barnet. The Abuse of Power was the work of Theodore Draper, a longtime independent historian-journalist and authority on communist movements in America and overseas. In a similar book, The Arrogance of Power, the influential senator J. William Fulbright, who was renowned as a leading authority on foreign policy and had emerged as a leading critic of the war, saw the US acting the same ways that other powers had throughout history by overextending commitments and resources and leading to their eventual decline. Both The Bitter Heritage by Arthur M. Schlesinger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and former assistant to President John F. Kennedy, and The Lost Crusade by Chester Cooper, a former State Department official, traced a misguided policy – a misapplication of the containment doctrine – that led to tragic and mistaken war.16Vietnam and the United States, a book with a more prosaic title by the aforementioned scholar Hans Morgenthau, who, writing from a “realist” perspective, made much the same point: that the pursuit of global containment in a region of negligible strategic significance both wasted and overextended resources: “periphery military containment is counterproductive” resulting in a “senseless, hopeless, and brutalizing war.”17
Supplementing these works, which dealt mostly with developments of the 1950s and 1960s, was a number of scholarly accounts that criticized US actions within the broader framework of Vietnamese history and culture. These included: The United States in Vietnam by two leading Southeast Asian experts, George McT. Kahin and John W. Lewis, who saw American engaged in a misguided effort to undermine nationalism; Vietnam: A Political History by Joseph Buttinger, a German-born political activist and historian, who had supported the Diem government and had helped establish the American Friends of Vietnam, which lobbied for support of South Vietnam, but who believed that American military intervention was doomed to fail.18 Among the more scholarly writers, the best-known and widely-respected was Bernard Fall, a French-born, American-educated journalist-scholar who wrote extensively on Vietnam beginning in the 1950s. Living in Vietnam during much of that time, Fall’s first-hand observations and interviews of figures on all sides of the political struggle made him the most influential, and most-cited contemporary authority. His several books – which included Hell in a Very Small Place, Street without Joy, and The Two Viet-Nams – reflected an open-minded attempt to understand the political change and conflict in a troubled Vietnam. Although Fall was strongly anticommunist and identified with the objective of preserving South Vietnam as an independent country, he viewed the US reliance on military means as devastating to Vietnamese society and leading to resentment and hatred of Americans. Fall was killed in Vietnam in February 1967, the victim of a sniper’s bullet; his last articles were published posthumously as Last Reflections on a War. In that book, he wrote of American warfare as “technological counterinsurgency. . .depersonalized. . .dehumanized and brutal” that might yield a superficial military victory, but also would alienate Vietnamese and thus defeat the realization of the political objectives.19
As US involvement was approaching its end in 1972, the contemporary critique was given its fullest expression in two comprehensive and widely praised books: David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake. Together these books extended, from different perspectives, the conventional criticism of the war. Halberstam focused on Washington: in particular, the men whose decisions pulled the US into the “quagmire” that had been the subject of his earlier book. His devastating portraits of the key members of President Kennedy’s national security team – the “best and the brightest” – suggested an American policy driven by arrogance and the “historical sense of inevitable victory.” FitzGerald focused on Vietnam – its political culture, society, and tradition. She argued that the US was engaged in a futile war that was attempting to resist the resiliency of Vietnamese nationalism. All of the military power of the US, while bringing enormous destruction and disrupting society, was irrelevant when viewed within the context of Vietnamese culture and history, which were moving inexorably toward the eventual triumph of the communist revolution.20
As the different approaches of the Halberstam and FitzGerald books underscore, the contemporary criticism of the war varied considerably in terms of focus and emphases. In some cases, Johnson and other policymakers were the subject of strident indictments, while in others they were treated more sympathetically, as misguided or misinformed, rather than as war mongers. In some cases, the Vietnamese, both America’s ally and enemy, were given sparse or superficial treatment while in others an effort was made to understand the conflict from their perspective and within the context of their nation’s history and culture. Whatever the disparities in the prevalent works of the era, the message of a flawed and doomed war comes through: America had lost its moral purpose and failure was inevitable.
Opposing this predominant viewpoint were books and essays by supporters of US intervention, who argued that the war was necessary in terms of American security and that the objective of an independent South Vietnam was attainable. Important books defending the Johnson administration’s policy included: Why Vietnam? by Frank Trager; Vietnam: The Roots of Conflict by Chester Bain; South Vietnam: Nation under Stress by Robert Scigliano. All three were associated with official US policy. Trager, a political scientist specializing in Southeast Asia, taught at New York University and worked on government economic assistance programs in Asia. Bain, a former professor of East Asian history, was an officer in the US Information Agency when he wrote his book. Scigliano, a political scientist at Michigan State University (MSU), served from 1957 to 1959 in that university’s Vietnam Advisory Group, which was an important agent of the US government’s effort to strengthen the administrative system and internal security forces of the South Vietnamese government. Closely associated with Scigliano was Wesley Fishel, who directed the MSU group and was a confidante of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, Fishel contributed an early pamphlet,
