No More Vietnams

...Young Buddhists from the provinces were fed atrocity stories about how Diem's government was burning pagodas and disemboweling monks, and were encouraged to immolate themselves in protest...

...Within two years the balance of power swung decisively in Hanoi's favor...

...While this is not as severe an indictment of Congress as Mr...

...In presenting his case for a different military strategy, however, Nixon subtly shifts the grounds of his argument...

...In fact, the reductions made a Communist victory inevitable, thereby setting the stage for the tragedy which subsequently engulfed the people of Indochina...

...If it did not exactly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, it did make defeat inevitable...

...Antiwar senators and congressmen apparently believed that reducing our level of aid to Saigon would help bring the war to an end...

...He realized that in permitting North Vietnam to maintain its forces in South Vietnam, the agreement enabled Hanoi to use the cease-fire to build up its forces in the south, prior to a renewed offensive...

...Nixon is uniquely qualified to write it also goes without saying...

...If the Vietnam war taught us nothing else, it surely demonstrated that this distinction is a valid one...

...Though he expresses regret over his failure to bomb North Vietnam and mine its harbors in 1970, rather than in 1972, by and large he is proud of the way his Administration handled the war...

...What would North Vietnam have done to circumvent our attacks...

...Nixon presents, surely it is severe enough...

...The gradual withdrawal of American troops, the "Vietnamiza-tion" of the fighting, and the "pacification" of the countryside were all interrelated elements in a grand strategy designed to secure "peace with honor...

...Angola in 1976...

...While the human rights record of the South Vietnamese government was far from ideal, no serious observer today contests the view that the human rights situation in Vietnam has drastically worsened in the aftermath of Hanoi's conquest...

...And what of the Soviets and the Chinese...

...But if no one can say that the Vietnam accords guaranteed South Vietnam's survival, neither can anyone say that they ensured its destruction...

...Surely it doesn't take a Clausewitz to understand that political and military Joseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.C measures complement one another, that-to put it bluntly-nothing less than the prospect of getting clobbered will convince an aggressor to negotiate, or deter a would-be aggressor from violating whatever agreements he has nominally entered into...

...Tragically, by impairing the power of the presidency, the Watergate crisis deprived the political system of its "energy...

...Finally, consider what may well be the single most shameful episode in our Vietnam involvement: the drastic cuts in aid to South Vietnam imposed by Congress after our withdrawal...

...The reason Mr...

...Given the increasingly frantic level of domestic opposition to the war, this was no small achievement...

...It provided volunteers with gasoline-soaked robes, wrote letters of protest in the volunteers' names to be distributed to the press, and drove the volunteers to locations in Saigon that were certain to attract maximum publicity, being careful, of course, to choose routes that avoided any of the city's unharmed, perfectly intact pagodas...

...Shit, man," he told a journalist, "he's the only boy we got out there...

...Regular units of the North Vietnamese Army were sent into the south, guerrillas inundated the countryside, and the military situation in South Vietnam began rapidly to unravel...

...If the President is rendered incapable of providing a firm lead, there will be no firm lead at all...

...The first in what became a series of fateful American blunders occurred in 1954, when President Eisenhower turned down an urgent French request to help relieve the Viet Minh's siege of Dien Bien Phu...

...As one examines the level of discourse on foreign affairs in this country during the decade that has elapsed since the fall of Saigon, it is hard not to agree with the pessimists...

...But, as Mr...

...Does he really believe, however, that Congress, convinced by the iron logic of his argument, will surrender its newly acquired power voluntarily...

...In other words, the accords did leave South Vietnam with at least the possibility of maintaining its existence...

...BOOK REVIEWS NO MORE VIETNAMS Richard Nixon/Arbor House/$14.95 Joseph Shattan Like just about everyone else, historians naturally tend to divide into optimists and pessimists...

...He tried to fight the war "on the cheap," so to speak, with as little publicity and public debate as possible...

...As Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, "In war the most deeply considered plans have no significance...

...Nixon points out, this was a serious misreading of the situation...

...correcting it is something else again...

...Perhaps the most important lessons to be learned from the final phase of the Vietnam war are that congressional government cannot substitute for executive leadership, and that American foreign policy cannot function effectively in the absence of a strong presidency...

...Those who began and escalated the war in the 1960s," Mr...

...The result was that American foreign policy seemed strangely passive, overcome by lassitude, as, throughout the Third World, the dominoes fell: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Mozambique in 1975...

...An order to avert a Communist victory, President Johnson increased American combat forces in Vietnam from 16,000 to 550,000 over a five-year period...

...It is as though Vietnam never happened...

...The logic of the system requires the President to act, subject to evaluation and criticism by an independent Congress...

...Now, to keep the peace, we had to take whatever actions were necessary to prevent a third Vietnam War...

...Johnson's famous characterization of second marriages as "the triumph of hope over experience" applies to Richard Nixon's latest book as well...

...Yet he felt that these drawbacks could be overcome: "I issued two guarantees to [South Vietnam's President] Thieu: We would continue to send enough military aid to maintain the balance of power, and we would respond swiftly to North Vietnamese attempts to subvert the terms of the agreement...

...Though he understood the strategic importance of Vietnam, and though the military situation at Dien Bien Phu was ideal for the use of American air power, Eisenhower refused to involve the United States in what he saw as a colonial war...

...It was as though many of the Administration's critics felt that to acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster which had befallen the people of Indochina was somehow immoral, a concession to reactionary anti-Communism...

...The offensive against Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1970, and the mining of North Vietnam's ports in 1972, were acts of considerable political bravery which, by reducing the military pressure on South Vietnam, enabled both "Vietnamization" and our withdrawal to proceed more rapidly...

...Then it undercut South Vietnam's ability to defend itself by drastically reducing our military aid...

...During the next two years, in its provinces and villages as well as on the national level, South Vietnam lacked a viable government of any sort...

...In response, President Kennedy sent 16,000 combat "advisers" to that country...

...instead, it is vainly pursuing a "military solution...

...The pessimists believe that the only lesson we learn from history is that no one ever learns anything from history...

...Once our troops were out of Vietnam, Congress initiated a total retreat from our commitments to the South Vietnamese people...

...Again, consider the criticism that is most frequently leveled against the Administration's policy in Central America...

...Now we would reap a bitter harvest...

...The complex system will spin its wheels in the air-which is precisely what has been happening ever since 1972...

...For in fact, "Diem stabilized South Vietnam as a keystone holds up a dome...

...An obsessive fear of associating with European colonial powers blinded successive American administrations to a very simple fact: Communism, not colonialism, was the principal cause of the war in Indochina...

...The United States, it is said, ought to be pursuing a "political solution" to the problems of the region...

...Once again, it's a little hard to be optimistic...

...As Nixon rightly observes, "It was the greatest political error this master politician ever made...

...The optimists are convinced that while those who don't study history are condemned to repeat it, those who do study history can avoid the follies and errors of the past...

...Though it is true that the media's coverage of the war was often inaccurate and unfair, and that the antiwar movement-"a brotherhood of the misguided, the mistaken, the well-meaning, and the malevolent'-was a factor in our defeat, neither played a decisive role...

...That Mr...

...Nixon has done in No More Vietnams is to analyze the political and military errors which various administrations, as well as Congress, committed in Vietnam, in the hope of averting similar failures in the future...

...At the same time, his aides persuaded him that the alleged persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam's President Diem made Diem a political liability...

...Western journalists in Saigon proved all too willing to fall in with this deception...

...However, "the outcry over Watergate and the backlash against Vietnam in Congress" weakened the presidency and enabled Congress to override Nixon's assurances to Thieu: Congress proceeded to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory...

...We had redeemed our pledge to keep South Vietnam free...

...All depends on the way the unexpected movements of the enemy-that cannot be foreseen-are met, and on how and by whom the whole matter is handled...

...First, it destroyed our ability to enforce the peace agreement, through legislation prohibiting the use of American military power in Indochina...

...Ethiopia in 1977...

...The problem with Mr...

...The Kennedy Administration sowed the seeds of intrigue that led to the overthrow and murder of Diem," writes Nixon...

...Even if Congress had given Presidents Nixon and Ford greater leeway in dealing with North Vietnamese aggression, and even if it had supplied South Vietnam with the military assistance it required, we simply don't know what the outcome of the conflict would have been...

...So many variables are involved here that any hard-and-fast predictions seem out of place...

...Nixon is therefore fully entitled to engage in some self-congratulation...

...According to him, Johnson could have ended our participation in the war by the time he left office had he pursued a different strategy-one which emphasized cutting North Vietnam's key supply route through Laos and Cambodia (the "Ho Chi Minh Trail"), training South Vietnamese forces to take over the fighting, and making greater use of such specialized units as the Green Berets and the Combined Action Platoons...

...We also know now that many of the accusations against Diem were not only false, but were contrived by radical Buddhists in league with the Communist-controlled NLF...

...Not all of Kennedy's advisers favored a coup against Diem...

...Nixon's account of the lessons of Vietnam performs a very important service...

...By standing aside as an ally went down to defeat, the United States lost its last chance to stop the expansion of communism in Indochina at little cost to itself...

...But would "the least we could do for our ally" have been sufficient to ensure its survival...

...Yet this is precisely what Congress has done to the freedom fighters in Nicaragua...

...Yet the very people who warn against our becoming involved in a "second Vietnam" seem oblivious to one of its most elementary lessons...

...Not surprisingly, Mr...

...Nixon believes that the so-called "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring the Peace in Vietnam" constituted an American victory is that he is convinced that for all its faults, "it was adequate to ensure the survival of South Vietnam-so long as the United States stood ready to enforce its terms...

...The United States could either let South Vietnam fall, or intervene directly...

...On January 27, 1973," he writes, "almost twenty years after the French had lost the first Vietnam War, we had won the second Vietnam War...

...That such a book is vitally needed goes without saying...

...Nixon's analysis is that it takes too much for granted...

...And it was only after Congress imposed a bombing cutoff in 1973 that Hanoi ordered its commanders to resume the offensive against South Vietnam...

...By the time President Kennedy came into office, Communist guerrillas were already wreaking havoc on South Vietnam...

...An organization called "the suicide-promotion group" took care of all the arrangements...

...We signed the peace agreement that ended the war in a way that won the peace...

...As he later put it, "If I left the woman I really loved-the Great Society-in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home...

...Instead of arguing that the Johnson Administration failed in Vietnam because it refused to choose between guns and butter, he now seems to suggest that it really didn't have to choose, that we might have enjoyed both guns and butter had the Johnson Administration only known how to use its guns more effectively...

...He refused to mobilize American public opinion on the war's behalf, fearing that "all those conservatives in Congress would use [the war] against the Great Society...

...But understanding the danger is one thing...

...That his book will actually have an impact on the way we think about Vietnam is, alas, far from certain...

...This was the least we could do for our ally...

...At the same time, Johnson was determined not to let the war undermine his plans for the Great Society...

...Nixon did not expect the North Vietnamese to observe the agreement...

...Congress imposed all sorts of restrictions on the Executive Branch, especially in the areas of foreign policy and intelligence gathering...

...Energy in the Executive," declared the Federalist Papers, "is a leading character in the definition of good government...

...By acting as it did, Congress deprived South Vietnam of this possibility...

...Had Congress not intervened, the nation once known as South Vietnam, in his view, would still exist today...

...When the North Vietnamese Army was poised to launch its final offensive, South Vietnam's army was in its weakest condition in over five years, reeling from the effects of Congressional budget cuts that had strapped it with severe fuel and ammunition shortages...

...Nicaragua in 1979...

...South Yemen in 1978...

...Nixon wisely begins his analysis by cautioning against blaming either the antiwar movement or the media for our defeat in Vietnam...

...Nixon writes, "did not give the American people victories and did not effectively explain the justice of what we were fighting for...

...Kennedy approved a military coup that resulted in Diem's assassination-a terrible blunder, according to Nixon...

...Yet when spokesmen for the Reagan Administration pointed out that totalitarian regimes tend to be more repressive than authoritarian regimes and less amenable to reform, it caused an uproar...

...The whole history of our involvement in Vietnam, however, demonstrates that if diplomacy is to be effective, it must be backed up by military force...

...Nixon goes on to indict the Johnson Administration for ignoring "one of the iron laws of war: Never go in without knowing how you are going to get out...

...Nixon goes on to assert that his Administration did know how to use its guns effectively...

...For what Mr...

...By focusing our attention on the disastrous consequences of a weakened executive, Mr...

...An American President therefore must never commit his troops to battle without getting the people to commit themselves to the war...

...American leaders cannot wage war without the solid support of public opinion, and the American people will go to war only if they are convinced that it is in a just cause...

...He did not cut back social programs or try to put the economy on a wartime footing...

...We know now that the Communists shared LBJ's assessment, with one of them going so far as to characterize the American-sponsored coup as "a gift from heaven...

...Thus, it was only after American and South Vietnamese forces defeated North Vietnam's spring offensive in 1972 that Hanoi consented to begin serious negotiations...

...With Diem dead and South Vietnam in chaos, North Vietnam decided that this was the opportunity it had been waiting for...

...Nixon believes that it would have been...

...In view of this widespread disinclination to learn the lessons of Vietnam, perhaps Dr...

...How would the South Vietnamese army have measured up...

...In the Vietnam accords which the United States and North Vietnam finally initialed in January 1973, we obtained the release of our prisoners and successfully resisted North Vietnam's demand that we turn over the government of South Vietnam to its surrogates before leaving...

...As Professor Bernard Brown wrote in 1980, "The American political system functions poorly when the executive is weak...

...Vice President Johnson, for example, was deeply opposed to it...

...Nixon gets a bit carried away...

...Instead of simply conceding that he made the best of a bad situation, Nixon makes the rather startling assertion that by 1973 he had actually won the war in Vietnam...

...More important by far were the errors committed by our political leaders...

...He decided to pursue a policy of more guns and more butter, giving his Great Society programs priority over the war...

...Like almost all American Presidents (Richard Nixon is perhaps an exception), LBJ felt more strongly about domestic affairs than foreign policy...

...Nixon concludes his study by urging the President and the Congress to join together in an effort to remove such "self-defeating restrictions" as the War Powers Act from the law books...

...One might have thought that Congress, having learned something from this experience, would be extremely reluctant to impose an aid cutoff on another American ally confronting a well-armed, well-trained Communist force...

...Unfortunately, in extolling his Administration's achievements, Mr...

...South Vietnam would handle minor violations of the cease-fire, and the United States would retaliate against major ones...

...In the resulting political vacuum, the antiwar movement took center stage and held it until the curtain fell on one of the saddest endings in modern history...

...Consider, for example, the bitter debate over the propriety of the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes...