Vietnam: The American Farewell

...But at any point prior to March 18, 1975, Washington could have honored its commitment and saved South Vietnam...

...I thought we were winning the war.'' So much for Cronkite's percep-tiveness...

...Why do journalists like Wicker wish to forget the few instances of real prophecy in their careers...

...Hanoi could sit back and plan the invasion southward...

...At the time, the media simply refused to believe that Tet had been an allied victory...

...It is all too great to be suppressed indefinitely...

...Lewy wishes his audience to be sensible, but presumably expects that, for the most part, it will not be...

...The growing realization that the United States has a "military problem" (the euphemism for telling ourselves that we have become number two militarily and that the Russians, consequently, are having their way with us all over the world) comes just as the news from Southeast Asia is forcing us to reconsider our role in the struggle for mastery of Indochina...

...Vyne thing that happened, the 1968 Tet offensive of the North Vietnamese army and their Vietcong allies, is hard to forget-it changed the course of American war policy...

...But he made a hurried tour of Vietnam in February 1968 and returned to make a largely tendentious, though devastatingly effective, half-hour broadcast on the war...

...We've put it all behind us," was the armed forces' proud boast in the Pentagon in 1975, after the fall of South Vietnam...

...Boat people" leave Vietnam today at a rate not equaled since 1975, and some Americans are wondering openly why Indochinese refugees in 1955, 1968, and steadily since 1975 have run in one direction only -away from Communist rule...

...or how all the media save Time managed to avoid investigating Hanoi's mass executions in Hue...

...We sent in the evacuation helicopters, pulled out our own people and a fraction of our Vietnamese agents, and then military strategists turned hopefully to new tasks, including, one would guess, the planning of future evacuations and retreats from remaining Western outposts and strongholds...

...The public willingly supported the war from sometime in 1965 until Tet, in early 1968-not much over two years...

...The term "genocide" is now widely and acceptably used to describe the Kampuchean experience, and Senator McGovern even proposed an intervention in Cambodia (a suggestion which 14 Vietnamese divisions took seriously...

...It is one inherent in the task Lewy set himself of straightening out the myths about the war so that future studies could proceed from a basis of fact and reason...

...when great care must be taken to make comprehensible the environment of warfare-in which American soldiers misbehaved before the ever-present television cameras...

...It turns out that there are some reporters and scholars who did understand what the war was about and who haven't had their say, Or at least until now, they have not been heard...

...As his penance, Harold Brown acquiesces in the decisions to cast off weapons systems he knows are needed...

...Senator Fulbright, as late as four years after the Tonkin Gulf resolution, did not think that Secretary McNamara had tried to "deceive" the Senate...

...For example, there is now sufficient evidence that our style of bombing-"gradualism"-did precisely what the Joint Chiefs said it would: namely, grant the enemy "time to shore up his air defenses, disperse his military targets, and mobilize his labor force...

...One suspects that it will not just be the revelations of Indo-chinese Gulags that will stimulate revisionism in America concerning our role in the war...

...As Lewy quotes the Pentagon Papers, " 'Domestic resource constraints with all of their political and social repercussions, not strategic or tactical military considerations in Vietnam, were to dictate American war policy from that time on...

...And for Cyrus Vance, Foggy Bottom was worth a heartfelt apology to the Senate for his part in the war...

...A Washington Post writer could cite ARVN looting, governmental chaos, and indiscriminate government arrests-and a " 'former government official' was mentioned as saying 'the communists were relatively selective in their arrests and executions.' ") I had little sympathy for Dean Rusk at the time, but his quoted lament-that "There gets to be a point when the question is, 'whose side are you on?' -sums up rather well the ultimate question that Braestrup's book poses...

...Braestrup understands what happened: The North Vietnamese lost Tet and won the war...

...His book leaves little doubt about the media's role in tying these two phenomena together...

...These, make no mistake, bore W. Scott Thompson is associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacyy Tufts University...

...It was not inevitable, nor does the Rand study, as a work of analysis, suggest that it was...

...Eight years later, when I happened to have the chance to present him with some of the evidence that Tet in fact had been an allied military victory (turned into, and termed, a "defeat" by the media), he refused to budge...

...It is not surprising that the book sometimes reads like an over-argued special pleading...

...But from the start, military considerations did not, primarily, drive American strategy...

...In which case, Lewy is wrong...

...The military facts about the Tet offensive were clear at the time and became clearer as the data were analyzed...

...we and our allies won the battle but lost the war...

...Lewy, citing doctrinal writings of the North Vietnamese, gently affirms this seemingly obvious truth, but there is also hard intelligence in the Pentagon files that the North Vietnamese saw from the beginning precisely how to play the bombing against us, and survive, owing to the gradual character of the policy...

...Doubtless we will not resolve our national dilemma, over what role we ought to play in the world, until we come to grips with our experience in Vietnam-until we at least understand what happened...

...The reception accorded "The Fall of South Vietnam," a Rand report containing the views of 27 senior Vietnamese military and civilian leaders on the collapse of their country, provides evidence anew of the "media problem...

...Washington's intervention, he conclusively demonstrates, came after Hanoi's Politburo had decided to "take the offensive," and even to put it in those terms "diverts attention from the larger pattern of North Vietnamese intervention, which...goes back at least to 1959...

...See also my article, "The Indochina Debacle and the United States," Orbis, Fall 1975...

...If The book itself is a * Anchor Press, $8.95...

...Reputations and great fortunes have been made through misinterpretation of the lessons of Vietnam...

...That Lewy does not take his conclusions as far as his evidence might warrant is the unavoidable flaw of America in Vietnam...

...As for the senior officials within the government, there is an almost perfect correlation-Walt Rostow being an important exception-between getting aboard the policy early on and getting off early too...

...If Thieu's second-rate statecraft made defeat inevitable, then how to account for the survival of Marshal Idi Amin...

...What else could be expected when it is necessary * * * See Donaldson D. Frizzell and W. Scott Thompson, eds., The Lessons of Vietnam, p. 105: "Their rear bases [at the end of 1972] were really under attack and the South Vietnamese rear base, at the same time, was in good shape...

...But how did the media play publication of this study today...

...Or a host of Middle Eastern incompetents...

...But note that the military dimension was no more critical than the others: "With regard to that perceived abandonment, the persons interviewed stressed that the physical side of it-the withdrawal of troops, the loss of U.S...

...Almost without exception, they stressed the fatalism many respondents betrayed, often as an afterthought, in saying that "the war was lost from its inception...

...So, when the whole U.S...

...Because of Vietnam we did fall far behind Moscow in nuclear force planning, as we starved desperately needed strategic programs to provide more and more money for the war there...

...The end of the buildup more or less coincided with the decline of public support for the war, and with the beginning of defections from the Johnson administration...

...Stephen T. Hosmer, Konrad Kellen, Brian M. Jenkins...

...sobering assessment: If there is one thing that every respondent emphasized, it is the effect of the American withdrawal, at all its psychological, economic, and of course military levels...

...There was so much blindness in the way the war was reported and studied, in the way the soldiers were blamed, and in the way the lessons were learned...

...Consider Walter Cronkite, whom Braestrup quotes as saying, when the Tet offensive began, "what the hell is going on...

...They and their whole rear base at that point were at your mercy...

...and once the buildup had been completed, President Johnson's decision not to call up the reserves determined much...

...Lewy also may miss the point about the role of bombing in arriving at a "final settlement" in 1973...

...they had none left, and what would come in overland from China would be a mere trickle...

...Yet what outcome was ever inevitable...

...Later, of course, many reputable Americans were to be taken in by Communist propaganda...

...McGeorge Bundy has sat atop the Ford Foundation pushing ideas like minimum deterrence and granting, as conscience money, huge sums to "arms control" centers that press our side to disarm...

...Indeed, Lewy might well have come down harder on those who conducted the war, had he delved even further into the critical policy issues...

...A report prepared for Historian, Department of Defense...

...Peter Braestrup has written a massive study, Big Story, analyzing the media's systematic misreporting of Tet...

...In 1974, U.S...

...military machine and were just part of that structure...

...More importantly, Lewy places crucial issues in perspective...

...He shrewdly observes that the argument that air power forced Hanoi to parley is hardly persuasive, for in that case one would "have to be convinced that North Vietnam, in signing the Paris agreements, put itself at a serious disadvantage, and the evidence for this assumption is lacking"-given the fact that North Vietnam went on to win the war...

...Is there a connection...

...They would have taken any terms...

...Next to Hanoi, our foreign-policy makers of the sixties have come out best of all from the war, dodging their responsibility for fatal mistakes and riding the earlier, anti-war revisionism...

...After 1973, in the absence of an American willingness to honor its commitment to hit Hanoi back if it invaded the South, all Saigon could do was to hold ground...

...It took a long time for a war-tired administration to realize that for the Communists the negotiations were "just another front in the war and did not derive from a genuine desire for a settlement...

...Political scientist Guenter Lewy has written a comprehensive history, America in Vietnam, that is the result of years of labor, and is the first wide-ranging study of the war based in large measure on various archives of the Department of Defense and the armed forces...

...Even President Carter, after a year and a half of lecturing about the 153 political prisoners in South Korea (two-thirds of whom were released recently), finally criticized the Cambodian Communists for suppressing human rights...

...airpower, declining aid-was no more disastrous than the concomitant psychological effects of no longer being regarded by the United States as worth saving...

...In my view on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area, you had won the war...

...After the policy was canted, the "peace talks" began...

...So, while it is hardly novel to suggest a connection between media doubts, the country's change of heart, and the fateful change of American military tactics, it is necessary to have a very fat book indeed-documenting, for example, how Newsweek's writers transformed reporting from the field into politically acceptable verbiage...

...Alas for Father Drinan's credibility, the masks came off in 1975, after the North Vietnamese army had won, and Chan Tin turned out to be a member of the Vietcong underground...

...Oxford University Press, $19.95...

...He reminds us of much that is useful to remember about American views of the war...

...armed forces got out, the Vietnamese forces could not really sustain themselves against a hard blow...

...The same is true of the bombing of North Vietnam, at least up until the highly successful Christmas bombing (Linebacker II) of 1972: "The bombing of North Vietnam during the years 1965 to 1968, which on the surface looked like a carefully thought-out program of slowly escalating pressures, to the end remained a compromise between rival politics and pressures...

...Yet is it all so black and white-was it indeed certain that the North Vietnamese would eventually win...

...As as early 1974, General Haig, then White House Chief of Staff, was looking into the possibility of massive reprisals against persistent treaty violations by Hanoi...

...South Vietnam's defeat in 1975 was a combination of very bad luck, atrociously stupid decisions (though understandable in the prevailing psychological climate), and the fatalism already widespread thanks to the (correctly) perceived abandonment by the United States...

...out the claims of the military command: that Tet had been a disastrous loss for the enemy and that the South Vietnamese army had shown remarkable-or unsuspected-mettle in defeating the attacks...

...As news filters out from Vietnam, our collective conscience is beginning to be bothered about human rights there too, not to mention Hanoi's military intentions towards its neighbors...

...and the idea that it had been an allied "disaster" quickly gained public acceptance...

...Sir Robert Thompson believes that, in fact, we could have imposed any terms we wished 2X that point, had we had the perspicacity and the will...

...Thus, Congressman Drinan accepted at face value the estimate of a "priest," Chan Tin, that Saigon held over Rand Corporation, "The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders...

...Tom Wicker, writing in 1967, thought the domino theory had much truth to it, and saw-then-how a Communist victory would "greatly encourage the use of the same technique for attempted conquest elsewhere in the world...

...In a less trivial sense, "Vietnam" has not been put behind us- and it is beginning to be with us in a new way...

...Of Ne Win...

...In a technical sense, the statement was and remains true...

...How much attention have the media given to the American responsibility for the war's outcome-moral responsibility, not just bad military tactics...

...The right lessons of the war may yet be learned soon enough to embarrass those who learned the wrong ones-though too late to reconstruct American foreign policy...

...In his view, we had won the war...

...aid commitments dropped from an original $1.6 billion to $400 million, while Soviet aid to Hanoi doubled and redoubled within the same period, curiously enough...

...The Rand study demonstrates, if anything, how central was America's abandonment...

...It was overt They had fired 1,242 SAMs...

...to explain to an American audience that its own side was fighting within a context of legality, however relevant that ever is with respect to warfare...

...Having played its part in bringing victory to the conquerors, the American anti-war movement was not to be given even a fig-leaf to cover up what had been-to be excessively charitable-its own gullibility...

...And had Nixon remained as a strong president through his second term, it is inconceivable that North Vietnamese attacks on the South would have gone unpunished...

...McGeorge Bundy got out in 1967, Robert McNamara in early 1968, whereupon lesser figures began dissociating themselves in droves from a policy that had become an orphan...

...Less evidently, we lost the will to protect our interests around the world as a result of the war...

...What Lewy's evidence makes compel-lingly clear-but what he stops short of concluding himself-is that a strong American commitment to win in Vietnam lasted a very short time indeed...

...But such had ceased to be politically possible...

...and when so many pages must be devoted to unravelling the mythologies on "atrocities," "war crimes," terrorism, and the "Law of War...

...The Christmas bombing of 1972, the only effective bombing campaign waged in the long war, almost instantly broke the deadlock so that America could get what it wanted-an exit from the war on at least fig-leaf terms...

...He referred to Tet as a "defeat," compensating for his earlier inperspicacity by making the new dogma a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...How well did America understand, when "Vietnamization" began, that, as one responding colonel put it, the Vietnamese forces "were totally integrated in the whole U.S...

...Lewy says little of this, but his carefully organized argument makes these figures seem lesser men...

...I was there," he said, which was true, but trivial...

...Lewy is generous in not faulting the negotiators more than he does...

...200,000 political prisoners-which was about a 700 percent inflation of reality...