The Longest Battle

...Instead, demoralized and let down by his military and intelligence advisers, and reviled by the liberal constituency for which he had done so much, he abdicated...

...It was an act of military insanity to commit over half a million men of whom, because of a top-heavy organization, fewer than 30 percent were combat forces, trigger-pullers, to a campaign of search-anddestroy against guerrilla units in the quagmire of South Vietnam...

...This is a useful, readable, and timely book...

...This book reminds us of the treachery, hypocrisy, or, at best, unfathomable naiveté of almost all the American opponents of the Vietnam involvement except those who only objected that it was not strategically worth the effort...

...He could also have brought forward a lottery-draft, as he eventually did, and given incentives to volunteers...

...Vietnam became a metaphor for national political self-hate, the supreme badge of the great liberal death wish...

...President Johnson undoubtedly felt it a legacy from his predecessor to resist the North Vietnamese...

...This would leave the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in the south without supplies, other than what they could ship through Cambodia, which Prince Sihanouk would have thanked the Americans forinterdicting (and did, when Nixon attacked the so-called sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1970...

...Nixon could then have stated that if the effort were approved, he would use American combat forces to prevent further infiltration of South Vietnam, attack broadly defined military targets in North Vietnam, and "Vietnamize" the civil war in the south as quickly as possible...

...The United States would not have been victorious if it had waged the World Wars in this way...

...Nixon had always been controversial and many of his critics failed to put the country, the health of its political system, and the institution of the presidency ahead of their dislike of the president...

...He also had an opportunity to conduct the war differently...

...President Johnson should have seized on the technical victory of the defeated Tet offensive in early 1968, proclaimed Vietnamization, and begun withdrawals and imposition of the Eisenhower solution—closing the Ho Chi Minh Trail...

...The correct course, as stated by Eisenhower, was finally given a half-hearted try by the South Vietnamese in 1971: defend the DMZ and attack directly to the west of it, across Laos, cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail...

...Nor could he have foreseen that executive authority would evaporate in the Watergate shambles...

...Neither Nixon nor Kissinger has ever explained, in writing or in conversations with this supportive reviewer, why the incoming administration did not present the issue squarely to the Congress before it could become Nixon's war...

...Kissinger is completely believable when he writes that he could not imagine, having come this far, that the United States would withhold aid from the Saigon government as it fended for itself and fought for its life after the Paris Peace Accord...

...He would have been re-elected and would have saved South Vietnam...

...The West won the Cold War, and most Americans who were militantly critical of their government's Vietnam policy know that that policy, while mistaken in many respects, was not discreditable and that America's enemy was an odious regime...

...The price paid by the South Vietnamese for their geographic position, the virulence of local Communism, and the inconsistencies of their great ally was horrible...

...Geopolitically, it hasn't much mattered...

...He convincingly defends himself and Nixon from the charge of having gone through four years of war to no effect and of having bought only the proverbial decent interval...

...He and Kissinger negotiated what was on its face a reasonable peace agreement in 1973...

...national security...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW THE LONGEST BATTLE Ending the Vietnam War A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War BY HENRY A. KISSINGER Simon & Schuster/640 pages/S18.00 Reviewed by Conrad Black T his book is essentially an anthology of the author's own previous writings on the subject, well organized, well written, and updated...

...The country then failed the military by giving it inadequate support...

...It was not a constitutional procedure that committed the Congress to the opinion of successive presidents that Vietnam was a matter of high American national interest...

...Nixon mobilized the "silent majority" of Americans, built up the strength of the South Vietnamese, and responded with great force to the massive North Vietnamese offensive of April 1972...

...He ultimately made the greatest comeback of all and crowned his astonishing career in a state of general esteem...

...President Johnson overstretched the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a legal basis for committing 545,000 American military personnel to Vietnam...

...The foray into Laos in 1971, conducted late, was entrusted to the South Vietnamese whose orders were to stop when they had taken 3,000 casualties...

...It seems to have been somewhat confected as an incident of North Vietnamese aggression...

...This is a matter of much comfort in the world, despite the disconcertion of some of America's supposed allies during the Iraq War, even if it is too late for the Vietnamese...

...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...

...Instead of following this advice, Kennedy placed great importance on the arrangements that had been negotiated for the neutrality of Laos, which North Vietnam contemptuously violated from the outset...

...Overconfident and sometimes disingenuous military briefings alienated the media, but much of the American press effectively colluded with the nation's enemies...

...When Saigon fell, the expected dominoes did not fall, but the author is probably right that it had something to do with the Cuban involvement in Angola, the fall of the Shah, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...After the descent of the Iron Curtain and the Communist takeover of China, and the Communist aggression in Korea, this was a reasonable position...

...It also reminds us that the nation's leaders—Johnson, Nixon, Ford—were, where the national interest was involved, well intentioned, honorable, and brave men, whatever their other limitations...

...Everyone has twenty-twenty hindsight...

...Eisenhower gave the correct military analysis that the place to stop the North Vietnamese aggression was in Laos, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail snaked through dense jungles and permitted massive North Vietnamese infiltration of the South...

...The fall of Vietnam—certainly not American policy—led straight to the horrifying debacle in Cambodia...

...Unfortunately, the president's own complexities of personality caused him to cooperate with his enemies...

...But Eisenhower declined to intervene militarily, even after France had promised to grant independence to the constituent parts of Indochina...

...Although Kissinger doesn't get into this, it was also insane to send officers and men to Vietnam for tours of difLord Black is chairman and chief executive officer of Hollinger International, Inc...

...Nor, as Kissinger points out, was the warconducted very efficiently...

...The greatest lesson of Vietnam is that when the cause is sensibly explained and proper constitutional procedures are followed, most Americans are now prepared to support the just use of force...

...But it was hypocrisy for senators and congressmen later to claim that Johnson had no authority from the Congress to wage war since the Congress voted the funds for it every year...

...This was because, as successive North Vietnamese leaders said, more Vietnamese were prepared to die to unify Vietnam than were Americans to prevent it...

...At this point, the mistakes began to accumulate, though the full, horrible price of them would only be paid much later...

...President Kennedy broadened the Eisenhower position and made it clear that he was prepared to go a good deal further than Eisenhower had been to prevent a Communist conquest of South Vietnam and Laos, which emerged as entities after the Geneva Conference in 1955...

...While many of the passages are familiar to devotees of Henry Kissinger's work, this volume is a very successful résumé of the subject...

...They, too, will slough off Communism eventually, but only indirectly due to the great but discoordinated efforts of the United States...

...Kissinger makes the point that the Vietnam effort probably saved Indonesia from Communism...

...wars and enlistments, whether voluntary or not, are for the duration...

...The entire American high command failed the country and the armed forces by implementing and tenaciously clinging to such an unpromising war plan...

...Everything that could go wrong did...

...What Nixon and Kissinger attempted was noble in purpose, frequently ingenious, and courageously pursued...

...It took many months for Nixon and Kissinger to conclude that negotiations with the North Vietnamese were useless, that after domestic American discord had hounded Johnson from office, Hanoi saw no reason to pursue anything less than American withdrawal and the complete surrender of Saigon...

...ferent lengths...

...The author resists the temptation to launch a full-scale assault on his most outspoken critics, confining himself to a relatively unexceptionable, elegantly worded recitation of facts, and leaving it to future, disinterested historians to judge the many protagonists in this protracted tragedy...

...Domestic political bitterness would have been substantially alleviated...

...Sending draftees to the ends of the earth to risk their lives—and in the case of 57,000 Americans, give up their lives—for a goal defined as less than victory in a war, the relevance of which the American national interest had not been declared by Congress or comprehensibly affirmed by the president, should have been seen as extremely hazardous...

...The war in Vietnam also temporarily blinded the world to the fact, now glaringly obvious to everyone, of the overwhelming, unprecedented power and influence of the United States...

...This need not have been the litmus test...

...This made it easier for the Congress to flake off from the Johnson and Nixon administrations when the going got tough...

...It was a fiasco...

...72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 Much of the American press effectively colluded with the nation's enemies...

...When Richard Nixon entered office, he had, as Kissinger writes, a choice between escalation, abandonment (since it wasn't his war), and Vietnamization...

...It will always remain a moot point how far President Kennedy would have gone in Vietnam, had he lived...

...Congress should have been forced to accept and proclaim a satisfactory result in Vietnam to be a matter of urgent national interest—as the previous presidents believed and the Democratic Congress, albeit with growing unease, had implicitly ratified...

...Or alternatively, the Congress—specifically its Democratic majorities—would haveto accept the responsibility for the consequences of American withdrawal, which Nixon would then have effected...

...President Truman and President Eisenhower concluded that avoidance of a Communist takeover of Indochina was vital to U.S...