Let's Be Honest About Vietnam

...Perhaps the most unfortunate line, propounded by Willenson and also some people in his book, is that the United States actually came out ahead by losing in Vietnam...

...strategy was fundamentally flawed up to 1968, so long as MACV Commander General William Westmoreland insisted the war be fought along conventional lines he knew from World War II...

...And he adds, tion was not...

...One, cherished by people who think of themselves as liberals, emphasizes the mendacity of the U.S...

...agenda had been reduced to the bare bones: return of prisonersof-war and a basic recognition by Hanoi of the South Vietnamese government—that, and some promises to respect the integrity and independence of its neighbor, promises that could be regarded as little more than cosmetic...

...And in some of those [countries], we are making the wrong choice...

...military strategy always envisioned the ARVN playing a subsidiary role...

...some did and some didn't...

...This placed upon Washington the peculiar burden of giving South Vietnam a government that was marginally respectable by Western standards—something which, in fact, it had never had...

...You know we would have preferred a military victory," Kissinger told Bui Diem in November 1972, "but we just could not do it...

...The Communists used that to push the people to say and demand more...

...unfortunately, it proved a brief punctuation mark between the authoritarian Ngo Dinh Diem and various power-hungry colonels and crazy "flyboys...

...At worst, but this is not merely a matter of an antiestablishment bias, but of downright we're snatch-and-grabbit guys...

...I have never seen a more on...

...Moreover, the U.S...

...I later learned that he did not support it, and neither did Mr...

...It would appear, then, that given the strategy President Johnson chose to follow, the presence of American troops in South Vietnam was essential in preventing the military defeat of the Saigon government, even, perhaps, in motivating its troops to fight...

...But—to put no great gloss on the matter—if the permanent presence of 500,000 Americans in South Vietnam, exposed daily to peril of life and limb, or at least the credible threat of their reintroduction, once withdrawn, was the sine qua non of that country's survival as an independent nation, then it is hard to see how it could have avoided the fate that befell it...

...LBJ pan- were a lot of little massacres and assasicked...

...Since conservatives tend to rest so much of their case on these agreements, it is worth recounting just how expensive the package was...

...to have avoided a direct combat role altogether, confining ourselves to providing heavy logistical support to the South Vietnamese army...

...Contrast that with the memory of Bobby Muller, a former Marine lieutenant now confined to a wheelchair: "The ARVN didn't want to hear about fighting...

...He quotes approvingly Ambassador William Sullivan to the effect that "the supreme irony is, aren't we lucky we didn't [win], because now we've got an equilibrium in the Pacific which is probably the best that has prevailed there since the sixteenth century...

...But this is asking Lewy to accomplish something he did not set out to do...

...Paradoxically, the war cry of the left ("No more Vietnams...

...If the former, then—by a perverted twist of logic—the hawks must have been right after all, merely wrong about the proper date of withdrawal...

...forces required to defeat the enemy depended entirely on the enemy's response to the U.S...

...Westmoreland, both oblivious to historical and political context and hellbent on their own agendas...

...the war, in effect, became one of attrition, 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 in which thousands of young American men were sacrificed to no evident territorial or military end...

...You're asking us to do an impossible thing...

...After spending over 200 pages making Nixon's case, even Sulzberger expresses serious doubts...

...Though short-lived and little remembered, Quat's administration represented the best of non-Communist Vietnam...

...We didn't really realize the extent of the subversion...

...Thus, former Senator Gary Hart declares thatin many parts of the world today we have a choice—either to side with the indigenous democratic forces, or to sit back and watch a bloody slide into repression...

...Our decision [instead] was to let them come down to us...

...Readers should be forewarned that Willenson uninhibitedly brandishes all of the conventional prejudices of a Newsweek-Washington Post journalist, almost to the point of caricature...

...You'd see those bodies stacked up and you'd see prisoners who stayed in the jungle after they were jaundice yellow...

...I nam in the event of its victory...

...There mean, Washington panicked...

...During the entire period," Colby ruefully recalls, "I don't remember one sensible discussion as to who would succeed him...

...Nixon of the unique, rare opportunity to render a great service by declaring that we were going to get out of Vietnam...

...In contrast to the 'living room war' image of the South Vietnamese soldier as cowardly and bum34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 bling, ARVN paid dearly—nearly 200,000 dead, plus half a million wounded...

...The single most demoralizing event for us," journalist Mai Pham recalls, "was Kissinger's 'peace is at hand' remark...

...The best that can be said at this point is that the evidence is mixed...

...America—the American press has been As Peter Braestrup puts it in The prone to assume the worst of its own Bad War, the press knew that "there government, and to give its enemies at was something wrong on the surface," least the benefit of the doubt...

...When General Creighton Abrams replaced Westmoreland in 1968, the U.S...

...As AID official Charles Benoit put it, "[The South Vietnamese] believed the United States 'As Ambassador Bui Diem puts it, while the coup itself was home-grown, "it would never have gone forward without American approval," both tacit and explicit...

...Instead, Nixon decided to transfer gradually the bulk of the fighting to the ARVN, and slowly withdraw as much of the American force as possible, while simultaneously negotiating in Paris with the Hanoi regime...

...If the Viet Cong escaped, the ARVN was blamed for letting them get away...

...General Johnson's proposal was scotched by General Westmoreland, who had no taste for such defensive measures...

...By focusing the controversy on Tet, American journalism, one which Wilsome critics of the press may actually lenson passes over entirely—namely, have misdirected their energies, for the absorption of the fourth estate in-there are plenty of other areas where to the adversary culture...

...Just because the Sino-American rapprochement happened later, he writes, does not mean it could have happened in the mid-1960s, when the international context was entirely different...

...military presence at points of maximum advantage, free the South Vietnamese army to do combat in the field, and even minimize the political fallout at home, since it was not anticipated that the American troops would engage in counterinsurgency operations except in their own local defense...

...the atrocities committed by American troops in the field...

...Our people Elegant's views are even harsher, and are discouraged and our support is his conclusions overdrawn ("For the limited...

...They did not trust their own chain of command...

...We [in Viet- was selective terrorism...

...Then if we don't believe what we hear, hostile gathering of the press corps we fish around for a critique...

...If poor Ambassador Martin keeps repeating this, maybe even he will come to believe it...

...The Tet offensive seemed to many people to prove that there was no way that the war was about to be won, that the end of the tunnel was in sight...

...Conservatives will have to accept the fact that there is such a thing as "the wrong war in the wrong place," and to persist in such enterprises is dangerously to overdraw the moral resources necessary to meet other, more central strategic challenges...

...And you can't tell your possible opponents what you're not going to do...

...Baez's former husband, David Harris, takes pride in the fact that the "Vietnam mentality" has placed limitations on U.S...

...things would over...

...Almost nothing about the war, including the shape of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial on the Mall in Washington, is free of controversy...

...The Vietnamese could not put out their orders the way we would...

...Lemley Investments Asset Management The Lemley Letter 208 S. LaSalle Street Suite 500 Chicago, Illinois 60604 Ralph Lemley, Lemley, Kathleen Pinto, Don Yarling .& Ronald Burr Member: NASD, SIPC (312) 372-2422 Registered Investment Advisor (800) 654-9865 (IL) (800) 624-8964 For information about who we are and what we do please write or call...

...Given the terms upon which we had determined to fight the war, the price would have had to exceed...

...In effect, in exchange for the Paris accords, the government of North Vietnam agreed to exempt the United States from further humiliation while it prepared to take advantage of the most opportune moment to administer the coup de grace...

...That was withnam] didn't panic, mainly because we in the rules of the game, and corrupwere too goddamn busy...

...Had President Eisenhower persisted in the same policies as President Truman, rather than signing what was in effect a compromise truce, he might have experienced some of the same unpleasantries that marked the presidency of Richard Nixon...

...perceptions of the war...

...But they also say, 'Well, we're never going to get into a limited war.' So you say, 'Well, God, it better be a limited war like Vietnam than to be in an unlimited war.' It's a leap of logic, but that's sort of the implication of it...

...The Americans built a politically confused situation in South Vietnam...

...Diem reminds us, too, that there were many small, undramatic victories—military and political—that went unnoticed in the United States, both by critics of the war whose only interest was in finding a rationale for abandonment, and by gung-ho hawks, whose "take charge" attitude tended to push Diem's countrymen onto the sidelines, rather than encourage their independence...

...If it was a mistake, was it wrong because it was immoral in its purposes, or merely in execution...

...Setting up ICCS commissions to observe the cease-fire violations when you couldn't get the Communist members of ICCS to go out was absurd...

...ground troops in South Vietnam...

...war crimes...

...This is not history, but the raw data of history, which can be used for many different purposes, not merely the one the editor intends...

...The strategy of fighting defensively in South Vietnam and putting pressure on the North instead of physically cutting off their route of infiltration," General Bruce Palmer told Willenson, "would have taken all of the armies in the world...

...We are, for example, providing military hardware for the contras, and that I think is going to come back to haunt us...

...It is rambling, discursive, repetitious—and unpersuasive...

...The war became a protracted war of attrition...

...and hiding behind the Paris Peace Accords...

...But in their heart of hearts, every man-jack of them knew or thought, 'We cannot do it alone.' . . . They did not run out of ammunition...

...But there is no cost-free foreign policy...

...The war also encouraged too many people to invest heavily in the notion of America's wickedness—so heavily, in fact, that they cannot afford to abandon it now...

...If the original purposes of American intervention were sound, when did conditions make those purposes unacceptable...

...By insisting upon Vietnam as the test case of our willingness to meet Communist aggression, and then failing to resolve it successfully, the "hawks" of yesterday have made it too easy for "doves" of today to say that no place in the world is worth our time or effort...

...and whether, even if Abrams (or some other field commander) had been in charge from 1965-68, the U.S...

...That is in practice a formula for saying that we're never going in anyplace...

...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987...

...aid to the Nicaraguan resistance...

...Indeed, they often sharply contradict them...

...Tet was the shock that it was because of the chain of events which had begun months before...

...government and military authorities, in both the inception and continuing conduct of the war...

...T he U.S.-Vietnamese relationship 1 was a very complicated one, and not merely at the military level...

...If this is the case, then there is really no reason to have armed forces, and it would be far better to devote the resources currently appropriated to defense to balancing our budget deficits...

...forces could gain and maintain the tactical initiative in South Vietnam through their great mobility and firepower, but the enemy always maintained the strategic initiative by his ability and willingness to increase his commitment of forces, via the Ho Chi Minh trail, to the struggle...

...involvement in Vietnam changed the most were those least reliant on television...

...Not only is a big war unthinkable ("nuclear winter"), and a small one ("another Vietnam")also unthinkable, but even mere strategic military assistance to a beleaguered Third World ally like El Salvador, or naval protection of Gulf oil shipments, are also unthinkable...

...It was symptomatic of a qualitative change in alliance: before Quat knew what was happening, there were 200,000 American troops wreaking havoc in the countryside, dislocating the economy, and above all, relieving the South Vietnamese government and its army of any sense of responsibility for their own destiny...

...One worthy first attempt was made nearly ten years ago by Guenter Lewy in his pathbreaking study America in Vietnam.' According to Lewy, the U.S...

...And what is perhaps more significant, in contrast to the Chinese Nationalists (1945-49), few ARVN individuals and no organized units went over to the enemy...

...It is unfortunate that none of the politicians who play uponour fears of another Vietnam—in Central America or elsewhere—are willing to say explicitly what they are implying, namely, that the United States should dismantle a costly military establishment which it is never going to use...

...As readers of the Pentagon Papers know, the CIA was eventually overruled by the State Department and the National Security Council, and Diem, along with several of his closest collaborators —some of whom happened, characteristically, to be his relatives—were murdered in a coup that at a minimum went forward with the wholehearted approval of the U.S...

...On one hand, the United States took direct responsibility for the political as well as military direction of the South Vietnamese state—or, at any rate, was perceived to have done so...

...To me, the fall of Saigon was never an if, it was a when...

...Thus today nobody questions Lewy's finding that the North Vietnamese decided as early as December 1963 to escalate by sending regular units into South Vietnam, and thanks to his careful investigation of some of the more sensational atrocity charges, liberal critics have even retreated from some of the more extravagant charges of U.S...

...Thus the South Vietnamese government, which was advertised to the world as "requesting" U.S...

...For him, then, Vietnam is above all a historical metaphor to be used to prevent the United States from opposing Communism anywhere in the Third World, even places uncomfortably close to home...

...the more than 50,000 lives and the $300 billion that were expended...

...To be effective over the long run, this would conceivably require a succession of American administrations committed to the same solution, and willing to pay the same price—surely a highly problematic prospect even had there been no Watergate...

...It was difficult for Americans to understand that kind of thinking...

...As Thomas Polgar, Colby's successor as CIA station chief puts it, South Vietnam was "a handicapped child, and once you have a handicapped child, no matter what you do, it ain't going to be normal...

...I was with three different battalions, and the storyand their families...

...Since he never explicitly identifies who these "revisionist hawks" are, much less presents their arguments, the debate is curiously one-sided...

...Above all, Bui Diem provides an almost unprecedented view of the U.S.- Vietnamese relationship...

...combat troops, learned about the first landings at Da Nang in 1965 after the event...

...recrudescence of the same kind of "re-More importantly, evidence shows that source centers" on Central America those sectors of the public whose opinions that once existed with regard to Indoof US...

...Now is the time to settle before we cannot do any more...

...Presidential Salvadoran guerrillas have cultivated appearances to speak about Vietnam tend- the American media, and note also the ed to enhance the chief executive's support...

...Embassy (including Ambassador Maxwell Taylor), all keenly sensitive to the French experience in Indochina, emphatically opposed the introduction of U.S...

...expeditionary force finally began to fight the kind of war that guerrilla tactics and the local situation required, and successfully so...

...It seems not, the battlefield, but on the printed page, even if, as Elegant reminds us, Hanoi and above all, on the television is perfectly willing to give the Western screen"), but his arguments cannot media a large share of the credit for its simply be waved aside as right-wing victory...

...The fact is that South Vietnam and the United States lost their will together...

...that task, immense as it is, must be left to other historians...

...Liberals feel uncomfortable with this point because once conceded, the case for noninvolvement (or withdrawal) must then be made on pragmatic rather than moral grounds, where it is far more difficult to determine what course should have been taken, and when...

...These sentiments reached their most graphic expression in a newspaper cartoon by Oliphant the week Saigon fell...

...III p resident Lyndon Johnson's decision to make the war an American conflict was based on his conviction that there were but two choices left him by early 1965—to escalate or to withdraw altogether and allow the South Vietnamese government to collapse...

...He cannot forbear, however, from mentioning the immensely negative impact of the American Way of War on his own country's armed forces—the twin curse of a heavy logistical tail and massive firepower...

...You couldn't help but admire their courage...

...All unattributed quotes that subsequently appear are from this book...

...If this is so, then all of the controversy over the failure of Congress to appropriate adequate resources to South Vietnam's survival in 1974-75 may be sadly irrelevant...

...Apparently this so troubled General Johnson that he told Palmer before he died that "his real regret .. . was that he hadn't turned in his commission...

...It was a moral equivalence kind never be the same...

...When in the summer of 1965 it became clear that Johnson was sacrificing military strategy to the exigencies—as he understood them—of domestic politics, Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, backed by Ambassador Taylor, recommended an "enclave strategy," in which US...

...We are not a pro-Communist society, but why the hell can't you Americans give us a decent leader...

...To the press, Braestrup "But after the first day we knew we recalls, "the corrupt Thieu-Ky regime were back on top...

...It was a style to which [the South Vietnamese Army] would become habituated in a short time, and that would prove disastrous to [it] when the Americans eventually withdrew their support...

...And we were going to pull this out because we couldn't afford to lose...

...government over whether President Ngo Dinh Diem was unpopular and therefore should go, or whether, with all his faults, he was—as CIA Station Chief William Colby maintained --1`provid[ing] a better government than anyone else would offer...

...As a result, the skill of junior officers and the courage of common soldiers were too often wasted, as were their lives, at the hands of unable or dishonest generals...

...nonetheless, the debate would be more useful if liberals would not refuse to engage with it...

...Although technically a military victory for the United States and the South Vietnamese—the enemy failed to capture and hold a single city, and suffered enormous losses—it was a psychological blow of devastating proportions, culminating in Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race...

...And as long as that condition persists, the United Mark Falcoff is a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations...

...Perhaps the most balanced assessment comes from Navy veteran Richard Armitage, now assistant secretary of defense, who "ended up feeling that some Vietnamese tried quite hard and gave the ultimate sacrifice, and others spent their time trying to get rich...

...foreign policy.--1`there are a lot of young Americans and even more young Angolans or you name it, who are alive today because of that...

...In the end, however, they were simply overruled by the Pentagon and General 'By Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter, Harper & Row, $22.95...

...We really fertilized the ground for more violence," she declares in The Bad War, as if politics and ideology had nothing whatever to do with the character and conduct of the enemy, even long after the withdrawal of the United States and the collapse of South Vietnam...

...It is just possible—although, really, no more than that—that a strategy of total mobilization, hot pursuit, and perhaps even a land invasion of North Vietnam would have worked, assuming that it did not pro-rather than the possibilities of one that might have succeeded...

...As Colonel Schandler has written, Under Westmoreland's plan of action, U.S...

...Well, we were dancing to their tune...

...This explains the "incrementalist" approach to escalation—the assumption being that, at some unknown point, the North Vietnamese would recognize they were paying too great a price for their aggression in the South and would either sue for peace or, in the counterinsurgency language then in vogue, simply "fade away...

...late in early 1965, the other was Nix36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 on's decision in early 1969 to stay the course, at least until a settlement satisfactory to the United States could be obtained...

...Every, every, every, every firefight we got into, the ARVN broke, the ARVN f- ---- g ran...

...Lewy's is a history without heroes or villains—except possibly Westmoreland...

...policy had turned something of a corner somewhere between 1968 and 1973, but that Congress, the media, and the American public abandoned their government and thus, in the lapidary phrase of Richard Nixon, "seized defeat from the jaws of victory...

...Or never fought at all...

...Though deeply affected by the tragedy of his country, Ambassador Bui Diem does not sentimentalize: indeed, he better than anyone provides a vivid picture of an inchoate society rent with contradictions and corruption, though far less pernicious than its critics in the United States and elsewhere would have it...

...And the political order that Hanoi has imposed not only on Vietnam but on Cambodia—where one-fourth of the population was liquidated—raises serious doubts whether "our side" was really as "bad" as often represented during years of direct American involvement...

...Henry Kissinger adds, "If you can avoid force, you should avoid force...

...The best answer—and one that illuminates LBJ's devious personality—is that he really didn't choose at all...

...While these complicated arrangements were being put into place over a six-year period, another 27,000 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen died—the most expensive gamble in our history...

...Yet by the time the United States finally did withdraw from Southeast Asia, America's contempt for its erstwhile ally there far exceeded any emotions we might have harbored toward the enemy—if anything, the sympathies ran in the other direction...

...Witness the way Vietnam as History, this medium is very the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the much a double-edged sword...

...I thought I had persuaded him and Mr...

...This is undoubtedly true as far as it goes...

...2After all, even the Korean War, which seems in retrospect to have been far less divisive at home, was nonetheless intensely unpopular in the United States by early 1953...

...The press looks like the contrary argument...

...In fact, the perception of the press was fully shared by the highest circles of the U.S...

...We thus end up debating the virtues of a strategy that failed, never changed...

...If a victory ensued, the Americans received the credit...

...Bus Wheeler, Chairman of the sinations, but we tended to believe it Joint Chiefs, panicked...

...The Bad War is also a deeply personal book—an angry counter-salvo against what Willenson calls the "revisionist hawks" whom he somehow 'Prentice-Hall, $18.95...

...As normally practiced by academic historians, it is a harmless shell game for the delectation of specialists...

...He is, in fact, what one might call an unreconstructed dove, using the Vietnam experience to support, broadly speaking, a leftist-pacifist view of American foreign policy, a kind of homegrown version of nonalignment...

...If anybody had said a million Secretary Clark Clifford told Ambas- boat people, no one would ever have sador Bui Diem a few days after Tet, believed it...

...Embassy...

...They wouldn't tell the troop commanders where they were going until the last minute...

...If the answer is 'no,' we will gradually be pushed back into fortress America, by definition...

...It is perhaps a bit much to call the latter "schools" of historical interpretation—they are, rather, notions of what happened in Vietnam, falling rather conveniently into two large and variegated boxes...

...Kennedy and Johnson were wrong in stepping irrevocably into the inferno, but they were not necessarily wrong in estimating that failing Ur do so could produce a bitter reaction...

...Ambassador Bui Diem reminds us that the substance of these discussions—indeed, for most of the time even their very existence—was largely unknown by the Saigon government until the United States had completed them, and the peace agreement itself was presented to it as a virtual fait accompli...

...Of course, it is also possible that Bui Diem is right, and that it would have been best for the U.S...

...Instead, it continues to be one of the most explosive themes in the national debate over foreign policy and, also, over the country's basic nature and purposes...

...Vietnam is one of them...

...If he were willing to pay the price, the enemy could keep American forces tied up indefinitely...

...So much that they're still using it in Cambodia...

...Willenson's view, as expressed through Walter Cronkite, is that to claim that Tet was really an American victory masked by biased journalism is "an excessive rewrite of history...

...For the United States, it was necessary to kill the enemy even faster than he could supply replacements via the sanctuaries...

...They eventually would have . . . but the fact is that they had six billion dollars' worth of hardware left...

...Unfortunately, conservatives weaken their own brief to the extent that they continue to rest their case on the feasibility of the Paris Peace Accords...

...If this is not what they mean, it would be nice if they would tell us which wars it is acceptable to prepare for...

...troops would secure South Vietnam's key coastal cities and ports...

...conversely, that anyone who seeks alignment with us must of necessity be morally flawed...

...By God," declares Graham Martin, former Ambassador to Vietnam, in The Bad War, "we should have done what we said we would do, and I am convinced that if we had done so, that place today would be viable and operating on its own...

...This finding must be contrasted, however, not only against Bobby Muller's testimony, but against Bui Diem's own admission that in the South Vietnamese military President Thieu "sought loyalty above ability...

...This is certainly not from lack of material: it is simply that the vast outpouring of scholarship has been largely ignored by both liberals and conservatives, who continue to use the war for their own purposes...

...It does not attempt to deal with a number of other issues, such as whether Southeast Asia was worth the strategic costs the U.S...

...After Vietnam, answer this question: Is there anything in this world other than an attack on the United States that we will resist by force...

...and they would say, "Mine Haiphong, bomb Hanoi, invade Laos, invade Cambodia, and mobilize the reserves...

...So the policy was never translated into strategy...

...What the American presence—even as it numbered half a million men—could not do was move beyond costly stalemate...

...The Willenson volume is far more interesting, precisely because it is not a standard narrative but rather an "oral history," that is a collection of interviews he and a team of Newsweek journalists conducted for a special issue of the magazine on the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon...

...Thus he somewhat gratuitously concludes the introduction by insisting that current U.S...

...could have sustained sufficient support at home to carry the enterprise to its successful completion...

...Kissinger's objective was to forge a strategic equilibrium of the sort that, at least in appearance, would freeze more or less indefinitely the political and military status quo...

...II ry he term "historiography" applies to the particular interpretations scholars bring to bear in their recounting of past events...

...And finally, what are the lessons to be learned from the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War...

...It seemed to me the Vietnamese could switch sides so easily...

...and the decadence of the South Vietnamese government and people, who, in spite of the vast resources transferred to them over many years, collapsed within a few days in the early spring of 1975...

...The dogs hostility to one's own country and its have to bark for us to know what's going institutions...

...people who were least - f one crucial turning point in Viet likely to say that television was their most nam was Johnson's decision to escaimportant source of news...

...was initially willing to face...

...Presumably some sort of synthesis might eventually be possible...

...build-up and his willingness to increase his commitment to the struggle...

...INT as the Vietnam war a crime, a mistake, or—as President Reagan has said 'a noble cause...

...But, of course, Eisenhower had the advantage of inheriting a war of territory, where it was possible to conclude an enforceable division of Korea into Communist and non-Communist sectors...

...penchant for involving itself so deeply in the internal affairs of the South Vietnamese state inevitably created a dependency mentality, characterized by the remark of a policeman to AID official Lionel Rosenblatt, "We could win this war...

...Or if I were the Joint Chiefs, I'd come to the President and say, "We can't do it...

...Even the role of television in media-bashing...

...This approach, too, has its problems, since those who take it must demonstrate that at some point the war was "winnable," at any rate at a price the American people could reasonably be expected to pay...

...Thus even the ghoulish conduct of the victors in both Vietnam and Cambodia must somehow be laid at our door...

...The murder of Diem was a turning point in the bilateral relationship in two ways...

...Exactly where these are on the map will always remain a matter of debate, but surely they cannot be everywhere...

...The size of U.S...

...We to see the United States lose, and they missed that in Vietnam, often...

...first time in modern history, the outDid the press, then, "lose" the war come of a war was determined not on for the United States...

...Warmed-over sixties radicals have yet to confront the fact that by withdrawing from the U.S...

...And the President would say, "We're not going to do that, but within these constraints, how can we achieve greater success...

...So many "ifs" leap off the page that one has to draw a very deep breath before seriously considering the hypothesis...

...VII rr he enduring tragedy of Vietnam above and beyond the appalling human cost to us and our defeated ally—is that the failure to prevail there has been translated from a practical or strategic question to a moral one...

...Thus, ironically, the entire Nixon policy, which looked so "hawkish" at home, was seen in many quarters in Vietnam as a sign of American weakness...

...imagines are in the ascendancy these days, and need to be beaten back with the testimony of "people who actually participated in the event...

...As Cronkite puts it, the problem was not "misreporting...

...In considerable detail turning the American people against he recounts outright media fabrications the war may have been vastly over- of events that never occurred, distorstated.° A more important question is tion of context, rigorously enforced whether the press, and very specifical- journalistic "group-think," and the ly the American press, did a creditable creation of journalistic "fronts" (Disand accurate job of reporting...

...Even more pernicious is the notion that international morality is served not by the outcome of any particular conflict, but merely the absence of U.S...

...Rather than put the country on serious war footing, which would require sacrifice of his cherished Great Society programs, and, also, run the risk of Chinese intervention, Johnson opted to pretend that Vietnam could be managed at a relatively low level of commitment...

...No doubt Johnson expected that this would come fairly early on...

...By Bui Diem with David Chanoff, Houghton Mifflin, $18.95...

...The withdrawal was very traumatic for our society...

...Thus in spite of the incalculable price that America paid for the loss of its international innocence, our Vietnam experience is still not terribly useful to us...

...Above all, it was based on assumptions about North Vietnamese motivations that had been proved wrong time and again...

...The possibility that no price could be too high for the North Vietnamese did not occur to him, for the obvious reason that the alternative—ignominious withdrawal—was, to him, frankly unthinkable...

...As Richard Betts points out in Vietnam as History, there are limits to hindsight...

...But, he concludes, U.S...

...came to have an abiding respect for the VC and the North Vietnamese," journalist Leon Daniel recalls...

...So far this task has eluded all commentators, including, obviously, Nixon himself, but also his co-architect of the policy, Henry Kissinger...

...From a purely military point of view, Allen E. Goodman contends in the Braestrup collection, many South Vietnamese units were good fighters, as proved in the aftermaths of the 1968 Tet and 1972 Easter offensives...

...was invincible...

...Thus the pace and level of the fighting would be dictated by Hanoi, using the Laos and Cambodian sanctuaries, and not by the United States and the Republic of Vietnam...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 37 The decision of Congress steadily to reduce aid to South Vietnam`such," according to Schlesinger, "that we were putting in one-third of the resources we had pledged to put in'!---was probably less important in the end than the sense it conveyed that we were in the process of divesting ourselves of our erstwhile allies, as indeed we certainly were...

...If the latter, would this have happened if the United States had never been there in the first place...

...Fortunately, the interviews themselves by no means always underpin Willenson's views...

...Evidently, the South Vietnamese leadership itself never had much faith in this solution, which explains why President Thieu raised so many objections to the Paris accords...

...The gradual decline of support for the war occurred mostly among the young, well- VI educated people who could be categorized as 'managers,' college graduates, and `strong Republicans...

...If the United States erred in Vietnam, when precisely did it cross the line that sent it down "the slippery slope...

...Thus with Tet an apparent disjunction between fact and perception had far-reaching consequences...

...were frustrated and disappointed...

...That is patch News Service) to disseminate disfar less apparent than Willenson would information...

...Maybe, he adds, "he will never be a professor or a senator, but you are plenty happy if he can make a living as a counterman...

...You Americans came," General Tran Van Dong complains, "and told the Vietnamese that it was legal in the country to be against the policy of the government, that you can be in the opposition...

...Such arguments amount to pernicious nonsense...

...Most of the book consists of materials for which there was no space in the magazine—remarks of dozens of people who participated in the war at every level and in a variety of venues, including that of the Viet Cong, often running several pages in length, and punctuated by sharp and carefully focused questions...

...The same is true of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, and perhaps before long, it will be as true for Nicaragua...

...Of course, no one can know for certain exactly what would have happened if the Joint Chiefs' advice had been followed in 1965...

...we are sick to death...

...IV D uring the months and years that the war dominated public debate in the United States, both Presidents Johnson and Nixon continually warned the American people that in Vietnam their credibility as an ally was at stake—that they could not abandon the people of South Vietnam without undermining America's relationship with its friends around the world...

...If that was so—and if Bui Diem is right, it may not have been—we are still left to ask why, given those premises, Johnson chose as he did...

...We're getting "both sides" of the story...

...policy in Central America "sound[s] distressingly like many of the same foolish errors that bedeviled us in Indochina," and he takes the Congress to task for "refusing to commit [itself] to putting a final end to the effort" there—referring to U.S...

...Perhaps so, but the was no better than the guys who'd take damage had been done...

...Look," Defense of thing...

...The conservative approach emphasizes the basic decency of American purposes, but also the fundamental soundness of our strategy...

...But there room over there, half those people, or may be more than one contrary argument, at least half the vocal ones, were eager and there may be something that isn't being said at all that's fundamental...

...Johnson's "strategy" ran directly counter to all of the best advice he received from his service chiefs, who opposed his incrementalist approach from the very start...

...Johnson's Defense Secretary, Clark Clifford, who had "reached the absolute deep conviction that we weren't going to win the war, and [therefore] the thing for us to do was to get out, and get out as quickly as we could," had three long meetings with Henry Kissinger during the transition between the two administrations in late 1968...

...Elections for president, vice-president, and a national assembly were eventually held, and in its own rickety fashion the country managed to limp toward something vaguely resembling representative democracy, at the same time, naturally, giving fuller expression to the forces of dissensus...

...But Nixon's decision to "Vietnamize" the war—a euphemism for gradual American withdrawal—was psychologically devastating...

...T wo recent books, C. L. Sulzber- I gees The World and Richard Nixon' and Kim Willenson's The Bad War, 4 illustrate the distance we have yet 'The Lewy book, which was regarded at the time of its publication as excessively "revisionist," nonetheless shows signs of percolating into the mainstream interpretation...

...On the American side, it bred condescension...

...have it, and at a minimum, it must have Even in the unlikely event that all of had some effect on American percep- Elegant's claims turned out to be false, tions of the war, however much or lit- the war still had an important effect on tle...

...Often argued in the white heat of righteous indignation, this interpretation loses much of its moral grandeur in the light of events in Southeast Asia since the war—the Viet Cong turned out to be just what the Johnson and Nixon administrations always said they were, namely, puppets of the North Vietnamese...

...And they'd say, "Give the Air Force more targets, and give the Army some more men, and the Marines some more, and the Navy a little more, and everything will be all right...

...china, often run by the same people...

...She adds, "we were so used to having somebody there...

...Sulzberger's book is essentially an apologia for the statesmanship of Richard Nixon, restating what the former President and Kissinger have said themselves in their own memoirs, or told the author in private interviews...

...The appearance of two new books by Vietnamese authors—The Palace Files and In the Jaws of History'--adds to the discussion by reminding us of the context in which U.S...

...It meant the Americans were out, [because] as long as you didn't have Americans there, you didn't have anything...

...In effect, it reverses the liberal argument—instead of the government being at fault, the failure lies with the American people and its representatives...

...As a result, the fourth estate can be called to ever since—but particularly in Central account...

...By that one means, were they unworthy—by their conduct on the battlefield and elsewhere—of the sacrifice made on their behalf by more than 50,000 Americans Thus the South Vietnamese government, which was advertised to the world as "requesting" U.S...

...We know more now, but we do not know how a disastrous war could have been avoided except at the possible price that was foreseen at the time—acceptance of a disastrous defeat...

...It wasn't a case of saying the Vietnamese did or didn't try hard enough...

...When we're get- than that evening of the Mayaguez ting hosed down by the Administration on rescue," former Defense Secretary something, we're very sensitive to what James Schlesinger recalls...

...policy was enacted—in a foreign country with its own traditions and special problems, however little Americans were disposed to take notice of them...

...In the latter, Goodman writes, "the tide of battle on the ground turned almost entirely on the action of the Vietnamese soldiers...

...The Tet offensive, Ambassador Robert Komer THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 35 recalls, "fatally weakened us at the hint of what life might be like in Viet-center of our political structure...

...He found "bizarre . . . the setting up of zones where the Communists had control, and the naive acceptance by some people that the Communists would obey the same rules we did...

...the horrendous impact of the war upon those who fought it...

...has become, willy-nilly, that of the right as well, at least in Defense Secretary Weinberger's recent pronouncements on the requirements that must be satisfied before our military will get into another conflict...

...As it turned out, Hanoi was able and willing to pay a very high price.yoke Chinese intervention, and also that public support for the war fought under such circumstances could be sustained long enough to achieve our purposes...

...V ne of the few points upon which all students of the war agree is that the turning point for the United States came with the 1968 Tet offensive...

...In the more than ten years since the fall of Saigon, hundreds of books and articles—and an apparently endless succession of motion pictures—dealing with various aspects of the war have appeared, and there is no sign that public curiosity (or passion) has been abated...

...Is the lesson, then, that the war should have been fought to be lost...

...sphere of influence—or rather, by being deliberately placed outside the U.S...

...George S. Patton III, Walt Rostow and James Schlesinger, and disabled veterans like Ken Berez and Bobby Muller...

...New American Library/Newsweek Books, $27.95...

...when it did not, he had no choice but to increase the number of men in the field, hoping each time that the latest installment would prove the last...

...Some additional material in support of both sides appears in The Bad War...

...Vietnam was not, however, a conventional war of defined boundaries like Korea, so that people like Richard Armitage were "appalled by the discussions in Paris...

...In view of all that South Vietnam has suffered since its fall, the question seems distasteful, and yet no serious discussion can really avoid it...

...Unfortunately, any truly dispassionate evaluation of the policy suggests that it was too complicated and too risky to succeed...

...States will not possess the moral resources to pursue a foreign policy, in Central America, the Persian Gulf, or anywhere else...

...From the beginning of the Kennedy Administration there was considerable dispute about the quality of the leadership in Saigon, and throughout the summer of 1963 there was a running battle within the U.S...

...And he adds, "now, as then, major Communist advances cannot be contained or ignored without running risks, and what we know about the follies of Vietnam cannot tell today's leaders how to make painless choices...

...another was an article in Encounter in August 1981, by Robert S. Elegant, entitled "Viet Nam: How to Lose a War...

...In fact, General Bruce Palmer reveals in The Bad War that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were "very close to resigning en masse" in the fall of 1967, and were talked out of it only by the entreaties of General Earle Wheeler, then JCS chairman...

...was there...

...Matters have gone even further than that...

...This is California narcissism in its most luxuriant expression: while American intervention in Angola conceivably would have exacted an intolerable price from us, its absence has not prevented the thousands of young Angolans, as well as 30,000 young Cubans, from dying there, often under unspeakable circumstances...

...By then the U.S...

...Polgar maintains that in 1972 ARVN morale was good "and they fought well and successfully because they knew the Americans were in it...

...In the Jaws of History is of particular interest because its author, Bui Diem, not only served as South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington from 1966 to 1972, but had been, as a veteran democratic nationalist, chef de cabinet in the government of Phan Huy Quat (1964-65...

...In fact, until we address its central questions, it is unlikely to become so...

...Unfortunately, as a topic the war continues to generate more heat than light...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 33 This led to a situation, as Colonel Herbert Schandler has recalled in Vietnam as History (1984), a collection edited by Peter Braestrup, whereby every six months the President would go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ask, "How can we make greater progress in Vietnam...

...combat troops, learned about the first landings at Da Nang in 1965 after the event...

...It was LaLa land...

...government...

...After four or five reiterations of this, if I were the President, I'd say, "Listen, guys, you don't get the message...

...One important landmark in the discussion was Peter Braestrup's Big Story (1983), which dealt with news coverage of the Tet offensive itself...

...There was, Secretary Schlesinger remarks, an "erroneous belief that getting shut out of Vietnam would be a victory for the United States," a syndrome that later inspired the notion that the United States was on the "wrong side" of history and that the test of authenticity for any leadership in the Third World was its hostility to this country...

...But in the case of Vietnam, it refers not merely to the particular way that specialists construe their materials, but to deeply held convictions by members of the political, academic, and media elites who shape our attitudes and also, eventually, our policies...

...strategic reach—other countries do not necessarily enter the progressive kingdom of heaven, and there are many peoples who can attest from their own experience to precisely the opposite...

...to travel to reach historiographical consensus...

...The fact that Nixon and Kissinger were (unjustly) vilified by many people whom conservatives and others (rightly) regard as scurrilous does not make the policy more realistic, and to pretend it does is to do a profound disservice to the truth...

...Moreover, as was revealed later, in a secret additional protocol Nixon promised the North Vietnamesenearly $5 billion in aid ("reparations," in their view) to observe the agreements, a bribe that, in the event, proved unpersuasive...

...What are the lessons to be learned from the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War...

...While Joan Baez sincerely deplores the post-war events in both countries, she still thinks everything is the fault of the United States...

...2 Nor does it examine the alternative strategies that were never tried...

...whether the South Vietnamese government and army were capable of using the massive aid they received...

...Nixon...

...While the proximate importance of Braestrup also believes that insuffi- media may have been exaggerated in cient attention was paid to "the other the particular case of Vietnam, the side," whose conduct could offer some enemies of the United States do not discount the potential of its evident 'As Lawrence W. Lichty has pointed out in cultural disaffection...

...He shares all the received liberal notions about the war, remarkably unrevised by the revelations and scholarship of recent years...

...At the time many South Vietnamese told Douglas Pike, a leading academic analyst who spent several years in the country, that they could go it alone after 1974...

...In its purest form, it argues that U.S...

...this would guarantee that the enemy could never fully overrun the country, cluster the U.S...

...But by then the White House had spent whatever political capital remained for its objectives in Southeast Asia, leaving it with no possibility of staying the course long enough to be effective...

...In other words, the context was more important than the event, and the press cannot be faulted for operating within the same mind-set as the American public...

...Not surprisingly, Eugene McCarthy has the best, final word: They say we'll never get in another war like Vietnam, and I guess we never will...

...it showed a group of former Vietnamese collaborators filing past the Statue of Liberty—represented entirely as dope dealers or prostitutes, declaring "Everything free in America...

...The Lewy book did, in fact, seriously damage the credibility of many "peace" organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, journalists like Harrison Salisbury, and academics like Richard Falk, by taking seriously their charges and carefully investigating them in the light of fullest evidence, often declassified under the Freedom of Information Act...

...After March 1968, the issue was not whether the United States should persist, but when it would leave...

...He reveals, for example, that he, Quat, their colleagues, as well as the U.S...

...Did the South Vietnamese get in the end what they deserved...

...It consisted of not merely sustained, indefinite military aid to the South Vietnamese, but the promise that in- the event of violation of the accords, the United States would resume bombing of the North, and perhaps even reintroduce American combat troops under certain circumstances...

...participation in it...

...General Bruce Palmer, for his part, points to the deep infiltration of the South Vietnamese command at all levels: It was disheartening to me to realize that the whole country had been penetrated, from the palace down to the platoons...

...Oddly enough, the relationship seems to have worked well enough for limited military purposes—as long as the U.S...

...The reason is simple: we hear not only from Joan Baez and George Ball, Eugene McCarthy and William Fulbright, Gary Hart and Walter Cronkite, but also from Les Aspin and William Colby, Nguyen Cao Ky and Maj...

...Weinberger, says Schlesinger, "seems to want an advance guarantee that it's going to be a popular winnable war, that the consensus is going to remain in support of the forces...

...It would have been less costly to us in lives, treasure, and self-respect, and even if it had failed, it would have produced a result no worse than the one that finally obtained...

...These inevitably unleashed a nasty controversy over the role of the press in Vietnam, and particularly the electronic media, in the shaping (or misshaping) of U.S...

...If it was an effort of which Americans can be proud, then why is it that we did not prevail, or in the end, even wish to...