Norman Podhoretz and the Vietnam War

...Although George has plainly explained that he is late, both Jane and Robert refuse to accept that as the cause of George's irritability...

...The strategic impact of our defeat in Vietnam was enormous, pervasive, and lasting...

...T h i s is the essence of the analysis that Podhoretz painstakingly sketches, and it is eminently sensible...

...The United States is no longer a major factor in the regional affairs of Southeast Asia...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 American public, and thereby abandoned the moral field to the antiwar critics...

...The moral results of defeat were not " i n c o n c l u s i v e . " Every American President who justified our commitment to Indochina, indeed our whole foreign policy, in terms of the brutality of the Communist system was proved, in the end, correct...

...Noam Chomsky and the New York Review of Books were frequently chastised...

...I also think he overrates the d e g r e e of Nixon's reliance on Russia and China to contain North Vietnam...

...Judging by the response to Podhoretz's book, I am not optimistic...

...If the strategic rationale for entry into Vietnam was faulty, there can no longer be doubt of the strategic disaster--once America was committed--of an outcome that was an unambiguous American defeat...

...At this point, Robert demurs, offering a third explanation: George has barked because there is t o o Andy Stark is Cambridge editor o f The American Spectator...

...Robert's account wins over George and Jane, a decaffeinated coffee is quickly substituted for the villain, Robert comes by the next day to check in, George does not evince nausea upon Robert's arrival or at any other time...

...thus the annual Christmas lamentations by Anthony Lewis commemorating the 1972 Christmas bombing...

...And Richard Nixon, inheriting the war (and 550,000 American troops in Vietnam) in January 1969, had to struggle for a strategy of withdrawal that both ended the American involvement and p r e s e r v e d South Vietnam's chances of survival...

...I have enough confidence in the American public to believe that they never accepted the canard of American immorality...

...The debate over the morality of Vietnam is therefore not a debate over America's past but over America's future...

...In the end, the Congress cut off all possibility of American reintervention and cut back the American program of economic and military aid...

...From the Angola debate in 1975 to the Central America debate of 1981-82, the cry of "another Vietnam" has stifled serious public discourse, paralyzing the American response and proving these predictions devastatingly correct...

...Nixon resorted to '+Viemamization" of the war--building up South Vietnamese military capacities--and an effort to negotiate a compromise settlement in secret talks between national security a d v i s e r Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Polttburo strategist l+e Duc Tho...

...There were debates within the Kennedy Administration, to be sure, about whether to give g r e a t e r or l e s s e r emphasis to political reform as part of the military effort--the "political" course implying, as Podhoretz points out, a far more extensive form of intervention and involvement in South Vietnam's affairs--but the willingness to abandon Vietnam to the Communists was not as a p p a r e n t in the Kennedy White House as Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Sorensen, and others would later claim...

...In an era of American nuclear superiority, the new danger was limited wars and revolutionary insurgenc-ies...

...It was n e i t h e r inadvertence nor a case of being pushed into the "quagmire" by a deceitful Pentagon, as some theories have it...

...Within a few years, moreover, heavy-handed Soviet military pressures against China forced China to call off its revolutionary militance and turn, in some d e s p e r a t i o n , t o the West...

...Podhoretz faults Johnson for t h e r e b y relinquishing the field of debate to the steadily growing legion of antiwar critics whose charges that the war was unjust were not answered by a sustained moral case for th.e American intervention...

...Podhoretz's defenders point out that his 1979 memoir, Breaking Ranks, is an acknowledgment and account of his shift from the mainstream Left to neoconservatism, marked to a great extent by renunciation of his e a r l i e r views on Vietnam...

...Podhoretz feels that Tet 1968 only ignited a disaffection that was already latent...

...This strategic case for the war, hindsight suggests, was seriously wrong...

...Those who attacked the war for its gross criminality, and still maintain this view, are not happy with the book at all...

...We were trying to save the peoples of Indochina from a tyranny which they rightly abhorred and which we had every right to help them r e s i s t . Podhoretz indeed criticizes most of the American administrations that conducted the war for not making the moral case forcefully enough...

...The common characteristics of the four epochs, as well as their historical reoccurrence, lead Huntington to speculate that the process of reform in American politics is a historical dynamic, not a rational response to the corruption, depredation, and abuse which arise willy-nilly in political "H arvard University Press, $15.00...

...One of the more seductive arguments of the war's critics, particularly in the last few years before the final debacle, was that to cease support for the non-Communist governments and let the war end was the most humane thing we could possibly do for the peoples of Indochina...

...Soon after President Johnson's major escalation of American involvement in 1965, China found itself convulsed for nearly a decade in the internal chaos of the Cultural Revolution...

...Podhoretz concludes: If...

...Theodore Draper, for example, has denounced the book viciously as an attempt to propagate a stab-in-the-back theory, a McCarthyite scapegoating of the antiwar movement...

...Lee, a friend of this country, tried to make the point positively, hoping against hope that the damage could be repaired: No better service can be done to non-Communist governments the world over than to restore confidence that the American Government can and will act swiftly and in tandem between the Administration and Congress in any case of open aggression . . . . If the President and Congress can speak in one voice on basic issues of foreign policy and in clear and unmistakable terms, then friends and allies will know where they stand . . . . Thus do the strategic and the moral dimensions of Vietnam come together...

...it was an attempt, says Podhoretz, to "accomplish a very large objective . . . on the cheap...

...If America is ever to recover its world position, one crucial first step will be to come to terms with the moral truth about Vietnam...

...the role of some who served in administrations that got us into Vietnam who then applied their ingenuity to shift responsibility elsewhere...

...Podhoretz's is a serious and thoughtful effort...

...In J u l y 1970 he denounced the "wanton American involvement in Vietnam" and in May 1971 he found himself"unhappily moving to the side of those who would p r e f e r . . . an American defeat...

...But it is absurd to think the reviewers would have altered their attack in any other significant respect...

...He quotes extensively from the more outrageous u t t e r a n c e s of radical c r i t i c s - - erroneous charges of war crimes, naive praise for North Vietnamese humanitarianism, tendentious attacks not only on the war e f f o r t but on the foundations of American society and political freedom...

...This turned out to be totally, disastrously, sickeningly wrong...

...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982...

...it was a set of beliefs shared by both political parties...

...Thus for a time there was a cessation of debate, a kind of brooding quietude and desire to f o r g e t , which in the circumstances was probably healthy...

...they relied instead, he feels, on s t r a t e g i c or geopolitical arguments which were less compelling to the "Simon and Schuster, $13.50...

...As George rarely barks, Jane and Robert, concerned, immediately come toward him, and a curious thing then happens...

...There may be lessons to be learned from failure, but there need not be shame...

...In spite of what one might conclude from some of the savage attacks on it, the book is not a polemic at all...

...Do we still care about the fate of freedom in the world...

...Bereft of the calmness of methodical program, beset by the zeal of idealism, individuals leapt during such times from cause to cause, from petitions against flogging in the Navy (a pet peeve of Herman Melville's) to women's suffrage, without seeing any one through to the end...

...He has missed the point profoundly...

...It was an expression of the classic postwar American idealism and sense of world responsibility...

...and each reform was suffused with an anti-governmental spirit...

...the bombing campaign over North Vietnam was decided upon only in early 1965, and was undertaken in the hope that it would preclude the need for a major commitment of American combat troops...

...policy...

...Podhoretz, editor of the neoconservative journal Commentary, draws skillfully on the key sources: the Pentagon Papers, memoirs of central figures, and some of the best of the growing body of research and interpretation (Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, Guenter Lewy, " C i n c i n n a t u s , " P e t e r Braestrup, Martin Herz, and others...

...This uncharacteristic modesty has enabled some of his reviewers to attack him on the ad hominem ground that his moral strictures against antiwar agitation must apply also to his own...

...authority, hierarchy, and specialization were traduced and questioned...

...Even on the local level, T h a i l a n d ' s survival is probably more a result of Chinese policy: China (as well as the U.S...

...The reliability of the American response is the first casualty of Vietnam, and particularly of the end game there...

...Whether this was a geopolitical menace justifying a massive military intervention by the United States must be seriously doubted...

...The desperate need on the Left to salvage the purity of the "socialist" idea and deny its perversions...

...The s t r a t e g i c rationale for American involvement in Indochina was, at bottom, containment of what was seen as a new form of Communist military challenge...

...The Eisenhower Administration extended military and economic a i d - - a s well as p r e s s u r e s on Ngo Dinh Diem for internal reform...

...Even Lin Biao's manifesto of September 1965 on "people's war," with its menacing pronouncements on global guerrilla warfare, told the North Vietnamese essentially that China would give them moral but not significant material support...

...For the American people to accept that the effort there had a morally defensible purpose is to preserve their faith in the continuing validity of their country's role as defender of democracy and opponent of Communist tyranny...

...He traces our entry into Vietnam to the philosophy of containment of global Communism, memories of Munich, the belief that America had a duty to defend freedom against tyranny, and the conviction that aggression against a small country could not be allowed to succeed...

...In our higher intellectual circles, however, the struggle to suppress, or salvage, America's sense of honor is still continuing...

...Lyndon Johnson inherited the Kennedy commitment and the Kennedy dilemma...

...In each eruption, Huntington notices, discontent and moral indignation were unhesitatingly expressed...

...It is the structural similarity of future challenges, as perceived by the American people and their representatives, that will be likely to evoke the same responses or obstructions, hence the same ultimately effective constraints on American power...

...The judgment was not wrong...

...inconclusive in result, all optimistic visions of how well we were doing were shattered by the 1968 Tet offensive...

...Thus the egregious William Shawcross...

...Many of us are by now familiar with the following vignette of American life--a man, let us call him George, and his wife, say, Jane, are drinking coffee and chatting amiably about the little things which make up their daily existence...

...The Vietnam war, in retrospect, can be judged on three levels: the strategic, the practical, and the moral...

...Why did we withdraw...

...The Left has fought back with its customary sense of fair play, assigning as book reviewers such stalwarts as Arthur Schlesinger (Harper's) and Theodore Draper (New Republic) who are to one degree or another t a r g e t s of Podhoretz's criticism...

...He does not believe the war could have been won...

...And neatly enough, Huntington's four periods are spaced at sixty-year intervals...

...The most important domino that fell, said Ravenal, was the American domestic system...

...These are the questions with which Podhoretz begins his analysis...

...Ravenal, a dove, accepted this outcome because he favored a significant retrenchment of the American role...

...Indeed, this may have been one reason why the more radical elements of the antiwar movement pressed for a tota/debacle in Indochina, even after the Paris Agreement: If the enterprise were totally discredited, if the American people could salvage no shred of pride or achievement from the ordeal, then American policy would be paralyzed for a generation...

...Too many people seem to have a stake in the thesis that it was all the doing of a handful of evil American leaders...

...Why did we go in...

...Not only were the American military forced to o p e r a t e under unprecedented political THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 9 r e s t r a i n t s , but the d e b a t e at home was increasingly driven by radicals who undermined the p u b l i c ' s sense of the w a r ' s legitimacy...

...Podhoretz points out that evidence in the Pentagon Papers clears Johnson of the charges of deceiving the American public both at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and at the time of his campaign promises not to send American boys to fight in Asian wars...

...Kennedy's problem was that he wanted to avoid both the loss of Vietnam and a major land war in Asia...

...Or do we accept that American power is the source of evil and American paralysis the last best hope of mankind...

...it avoids the need for thought and relieves everyone else of any r e s p o n s i b i l i t y at every stage...

...Intercepts show that the North Vietnamese gunboat attacks in the Tonkin Gulf were genuine and unprovoked...

...at Tet, the American public seems to have reached the same conclusion...

...But these are subordinate issues...

...even had major decisions been made differently, he is convinced the effort was beyond the physical, intellectual, and psychological capacity of the United States to sustain...

...And, as in the case of Podhoretz, the Left has banded together in response to g r e e t them all with the scholarly objectivity of a gang rape...

...he did not want to stir up a war fever or undercut his Great Society economic and social programs...

...nor was there gloating on the Left, once the atrocity stories started pouring out of all the countries of Indochina almost immediately...

...Podhoretz feels that the Tet offensive had an impact only because radical critics had already succeeded in d e - l e g i t i m a t i n g the war...

...The irony that the war is perhaps most defensible on precisely the flank most viciously attacked is the main theme of Norman Podhoretz's new book, Why We Were in Vietnam...

...Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew made the same point in an eloquent toast at a White House dinner in May 1975...

...Why did we stay in...

...Johnson chose not to calt up reserves or increase the draft or go on a war footing or declare a state of emergency...

...A few pages in the new book acknowledging his earlier opposition to the war would have been prudent and would l0 TIlE AMERICAN SPECTATOR IUIY 1'J82 probably have enhanced the credibility of his arguments...

...indeed the antiwar movement's denial of its own role in forcing American withdrawal and thereby its own share of responsibility for the consequences of the outcome--these various phenomena of our recent cultural life are dissected with what is for Podhoretz admirable restraint...

...The great irony of Vietnam is that the one level on which the doomed e f f o r t seems vindicated by events is the moral one--the very level on which the war was so virulently attacked by the intellectuals, journalists, and political leaders of the antiwar movement...

...Therefore, foreign leaders would draw the obvious--and accurate--conclusion that American commitments now lacked c r e d i b i l i t y . The United States would be less of a factor anywhere...

...The North Vietnamese assault on the South turns out, in r e t r o s p e c t , to have been mainly the reflection of H a n o i ' s 30-year drive for regional hegemony, not a Soviet or Chinese global campaign...

...At the very moment the old fellow enters the room, a look of strain washes over George's face...

...Harassed by an antiwar Congress and media (and by virulent public demonstrations whenever some sporadic forceful military action was taken over the four-year period of gradual troop withdrawals), Nixon and Kissinger eventually bargained the North Vietnamese down to a precarious compromise that withdrew American forces but left the South Vietnamese government intact...

...The charge is ludicrous...

...Only gradually have advocates of a contrary position come forward attempting to shed a different light on our r e c e n t history...

...Commentary was indeed a vocal and insistent critic of the war, and Podhoretz in his signed editorial columns reached some emotional heights of stridency especially in 1970 and 1971, a f t e r Cambodia...

...Thailand did not fall...

...Nevertheless, it was a shock to Americans and deeply disillusioning...

...The greatest proof of the domino theory, however, is not in Southeast Asia but at home...

...It is perhaps the best short account of the main events and decisions that engaged us in Vietnam and one of the most lucid short analyses of the whole enterprise...

...The consequences of defeat were brilliantly d e s c r i b e d in the J u l y 1975 Foreign Affairs by, ironically, antiwar foreign policy analyst Earl C. Ravenal, a stalwart of the Institute for Policy Studies and other counterculture think tanks...

...he compromised, sending 16,000 American combat advisers...

...This has political and moral c o n s e q u e n c e s - - e v i d e n t , for example, in the marginal chances for survival of the Son Sann "third force" in Cambodia, the only democratic alternative to the Vietnamese occupiers, the erratic SihaTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 I l and Ford Administrations were willing to disengage American forces and negotiate a settlement but foresaw profound psychological consequences from a total American capitulation or collapse...

...hypocrisy, insincerity, and power were exposed and scorned...

...Suddenly, there is a knock on the door...

...much caffeine in his coffee...

...His essay on Robert Nozick appears in the Spring 1982 issue of the Antioch Review...

...Vietnam was considered a test case of Communist--particularly Chinese Communist--theories of revolutionary guerrilla warfare which had global implications and had to be blocked if aggression was not to be encouraged...

...thus the more recent attempts by Sydney Schanberg in the New York Times to savage Thomas Enders, once deputy chief of mission in Phnom Penh and now a chief architect of our policies in Central America...

...The Nixon The issue, of course, is not just personal reputations or an abstract academic debate over the past...

...The Johnson Administration was absolutely correct that the offensive was a military disaster for the Viet Cong...

...The real moral premise of the radical antiwar position is that the crime would have been greater if we had succeeded...

...One of the striking things about the Vietnam debacle was the complete absence of the bitter right-wing recriminations that many had p r e d i c t e d as the inevitable consequence of an American humiliation...

...then, Kennedy tried to apply cbntainment in Vietnam on the military cheap, and .Johnson t r i e d to make it work on t h e p o l i t i c a l c h e a p , Nixon tried to salvage it on the strategic cheap...

...To acknowledge the strategic and practical errors of Vietnam is only to begin the process of historical assessment...

...Thus in 1968, the platforms of both political p a r t i e s pledged efforts for a negotiated s e t t l e m e n t of the war...

...It was the Left that first reopened the debate over Vietnam, by a kind of preemptive strike to deflect elsewhere the responsibility for the horrors more evident every day in the lands we had left behind...

...Breaking Ranks indeed traces this conversion, but it is r a t h e r less explicit in describing the earlier, renounced positions than it is in describing how the world looks from the new enlightened vantage point of the convert...

...Vietnam was to be a "proving ground for democracy in Asia," stated Senator John F. Kennedy in a rousing pro-Diem speech on J u n e 1, 1956, a speech which some of Kennedy's liberal colleagues do not go out of their way to call attention to, these days...

...There is room for disagreement on points here and there...

...What other dominoes fell, he asks, aside from the two neighboring countries of Indochina...

...On the practical level, the Vietnam war was also found wanting...

...As I have suggested earlier, l would put more weight on the shattering of optimistic expectations and growing doubts about the practical efficacy of U.S...

...Thus, the "revelation" of Podhoretz's own antiwar position is a mere debating point...

...Podhoretz is a great believer in the power of ideas, but it is not self-evident that greater exertion on the ideological plane would have eased Johnson's problems, or Nixon's...

...more reliance was placed on adequate military and economic aid to South Vietnam and the t h r e a t of American bombing to deter major North Vietnamese violations of the Paris Agreement...

...has given Thailand some military assistance and the Chinese have counterbalanced Vietnamese power by their assault in 1979 to "teach Vietnam a lesson...

...Podhoretz himself considers the war unwinnable...

...This would be inevitably reflected in the behavior of all other nations, friend and foe, weakening the balance of power globally...

...cynics cannot help but associate George's sudden nausea with the contemporaneous arrival of the old man, but George quickly gives the lie to that diagnosis, barking with inappropriate irritability that he is late for the theater...

...In any case, in fairness to Podhoretz, Commentary's antiwar writing during the period was always tempered by an explicit rejection of the rabid antiAmericanism of the radical fringe...

...if such an assault could be mounted a f t e r three years of American sacrifice, we did not seem to be close to succeeding in our objectives...

...Arthur Schlesinger in his review of Podhoretz continues to dismiss this concern as "dumb...

...it was indeed the caffeine...

...Samuel P. Huntington has recently published a stimulating and original volume, American Politics: The Politics of Disharmony," in which he essentially takes Robert's position, though on a different subject matter...

...No wonder Podhoretz's book has struck a raw nerve in some quarters...

...Jane answers it, and in strides Robert, a sunnily comported older man and a figure held in obvious regard by George and Jane, come to check Oh the state of their domesticity...

...It is an intriguing point indicative of the fresh thinking that Podhoretz offers and that is clearly needed...

...Podhoretz writes: Johnson, then, was trying to save Vietnam on the political cheap--going in politically slow and s m a l l - - j u s t as Kennedy had done in trying to save it on the military cheap . . . . [W]hereas Kennedy had mainly failed to take the measure of the obstacles within Vietnam to a successful i n t e r v e n t i o n , J o h n s o n f a i l e d to see t h a t t h e conditions for a successful prosecution of the war were lacking in the United States...

...There is no reason to think that, after Vietnam, these factors will cease to operate...

...After three years of exertion, Peter W. Rodman served on the National Security Council s t a f f in the Nixon and Ford Administrations...

...Huntington's subject matter is the kinetics of American reform...

...The "re-education" camps of the Indochinese Gulag, the boat people, the Khmer Rouge genocide, the lethal chemical warfare against Lao tribesmen and Cambodian villagers--they leave no room for ambiguity on this score...

...Watergate doomed not only Nixon but also his hopes of keeping South Vietnam alive...

...Whether one agrees with this or not (I am not sure I do), it ought to lend some credibility to his position: He is a skeptic on the war, who opposed it while it was going on, but he is determined to lay to rest the malign lie that it was evidence of the gross immorality of United States foreign policy...

...This in my view was its undoing in the American domestic context...

...Bug he ridiculed those other liberal doves who salved their consciences by pretending that the American defeat had no consequences...

...nouk, and the despicable Khmer Rouge...

...Backed by continuing American military and economic aid, and by the t h r e a t of possible American reintervention with air power, the South Vietnamese were left either t o neutralize the North Vietnamese army or to reach some political compromise...

...The administration in office was stuck with a failed policy on its hands, and conservatives were confused and demoralized...

...the o t h e r dominoes of Southeast Asia still stand...

...a book review in the July 1969 Commentary took Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag to task for damaging the antiwar cause by seeming not only to oppose the war but to support North Vietnamese Communism...

...The new t r i a n g u l a r diplomacy among the superpowers--the U.S., USSR, and China--was another element in the hopeful strategy...

...This, of course, is an intellectual cop-out...

...Podhoretz made a tactical e r r o r in neglecting to acknowledge his own role during the period...

...Podhoretz is not afraid to take them on...

...Thus, it is not Vietnam directly that will inhibit American responses in the future...

...Nor is it a mindless defense of the war (as some reviewers have charged): Podhoretz is critical of almost every administration from Eisenhower to Nixon for military and political misjudgments regarding the war...

...agitation, commotion, and excitement were aroused...

...Andy Stark CAFFEINE IN THE AMERICAN BLOODSTREAM: THE POLITICS OF DISHARMONY Samuel P. Huntington on America's recurring moods...

...Kennedy as President did not question the s t r a t e g i c or moral importance of preventing a North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam...

...The American public, he wrote, was so deeply traumatized by the Vietnam failure that it would shun all f u t u r e commitments out of fear of repeating the discredited Vietnam adventure: What frustrated the American effort at home was the eventual resistance of Congress, and behind Congress, the public, to prolonging sacrifices and risks of lives and resources in situations that were not immediately compelling or clear...

...in particular the four most noteworthy reform periods in American history: the Revolution, the Jacksonian era, the Progressive era, and the 1960s...

...Jane declares that George's outburst is only accountable by other factors--his workload at the office and mortgage payments coming due...

...After a decade, the Vietnam experience is still a topic of discourse dominated all too much by a bizarre combination of amnesia, cliches, smoldering emotions, and vested interest on the part of the legion of antiwar intellectuals who have a large personal stake in the notion that they performed a moral duty in helping drive America out of Indochina...