'The Ooze of Generalities'

...Cooper resembles MacGeorge Bundy with the Buddhist leader, he has the same trouble cutting "through the ooze of generalities " Internally, the Vietnamese Communists declare the purpose of peace talks is to "open another from" By this, they mean open another arena of conflict where they can maneuver for advantage and, m combination with military actions, apply added pressure against the US to hasten the day when it will throw in its hand So far, this strategy has worked more or less as the Communists expected, although final victory still eludes them They have held firm, demanding what amount", to capitulation Meanwhile, pressure has mounted on the President as the cost of the war has become increasingly unacceptable and as apathy and weariness have consumed most Americans The only obstacle thwarting the drv is that given our lack of previous experience with losing, no President can afford the political price of accepting defeat Our political system and traditions provide no formula or rationale whereby a President can at least make this palatable, as de Gaulle did in handling the French loss of Algeria Another shortcoming of Cooper's account is that it is written from the vantage point of the Washington policy-maker The description and interpretation of events m Vietnam lacks depth, particularly where they involve Communist organization, tactics and techniques, which have so bewildered the U S military Cooper does not consider the Mao/Giap approach to revolutionary war, with its emphasis on "protracted war " According to this concept, once you have started fighting, you never really stop, while a setback may be followed by a pause to regroup, to assess one's failures and devise new moves, the battle must always be resumed again A peace settlement" is an acceptable pause, but only if it does not place your future in the enemy's hands, if it does not entail trusting him to protect your rights The other side examines all offers of compromise in this light That is why any suggestion of elections--one favorite "compromise" solution -- quickly becomes a debate over whose forces will control the cities and countryside of Vietnam while the people vote By ignoring Communist strategy and tactics, Cooper also lets the military off lightly Perhaps his unwillingness to examine the military command's mistakes reflects the policy-maker's tendency to leave military questions to the soldiers The result, we now know to our sorrow, was an Army that paid hp-service to the political nature of the conflict as it held grimly to the view that firepower was the name of the game Can a huge, expensive machine designed to manufacture only one product--Body Count--be turned to other purposes in the field9 Certainly not by the commanders who designed, trained, and managed it to produce Body Count The civilian leadership suffered a critical blind spot in failing to recognize this Today, when the U S command seems finally to have absorbed this lesson, foreswearing search-and-destroy in favor of population protection (pacification), Vietnamization and--at long last--withdrawal, we can glimpse what might have been if civilian leaders had forced the soldiers to innovate new tactics These flaws in The Lost Crusade are probably inevitable, given the perspective from which it is written Cooper disarms the reader at the beginning by modestly stating that he merely wants to share his experiences and conclusions with us after 25 years' involvement in the Far East Yet he provides much more than simply a personal memoir His solid and gracefully written history is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how U S policy went awry in Southeast Asia And that makes it all the more regrettable that he has not given us an even more definitive and illuminating work...

...The Ooze of Generalities' The Lost Crusade By Chester L Coopei Dodd, Mead 544 pp $12 00 Reviewed by Douglas S. Blaufarb Former Foreign Service Officer, recently retired after 25 years spent mostly m Southeast Asia In February 1964, faced with the enigma in Southeast Asia that he had inherited from John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson sent a high-level inspection team to Vietnam headed by MacGeorge Bundy As Chester Cooper tells the story, Bundy spent several hours talking with a leading member of the Buddhist hierarchy and came away reeling from the experience "His razor-sharp mind," says Cooper, "just couldn't cut through the ooze of generalities Two cultures and two educational backgrounds did not directly conflict but rather slid past one another " That vignette reflects the underlying theme and final conclusions of this well-knit history of America's 16-year trauma in Vietnam Cooper shares the now widely held view that the U S ventured hastily into an area and a problem it did not fully grasp and hence was illequipped to cope with He contrasts the cautious, unillusioned approach we have taken in Europe since World War II with our behavior m Asia, "where Americans have moved quickly to provide military help to governments and nations we hardly knew " And he attributes 'this impulsiveness to a complex of outdated habit patterns--the "Open Door" policy toward China, the historic movement westward toward a receding frontier, and a missionary zeal toward the "little brown brother " "Thus,' he concludes, "our approach to Laos, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and China itself has all too often been emotion-laden, naive and impetuous--especially when compared with the prudence we have exercised elsewhere " Despite its critical stance The Lost Crusade dispassionately narrates the facts, unraveling in the process several important episodes that have been unclear up to now One valuable chapter details Franklin Roosevelt's undeveloped thoughts about turning French Indochina over to an international trusteeship--thoughts he kept from the State Department because he did not trust the diplomats there to carry them out A thorough researcher, Cooper is the first to pull this material together in one cohesive account and to show how FDR's gropings toward a new deal for Indochina died with him Another chapter discusses Ngo Dinh Diem's emergence as Prime Minister of South Vietnam after years in obscurity Cooper lays to rest the conspiracy theorists' claim that Diem was a U S choice thrust upon the unsuspecting French and Emperor Bao Dai Such a theory, he demonstrates, contradicts the political realities of that now distant era when the U S was both uninterested in and ignorant of the internal affairs of the remote country known to most people as Annam Woven into the history are Cooper's own experiences m a variety of assignments involving Indochina and the Far East He was a member of the U S delegation at three of the major international conferences responsible for the present shape of the Far East--the Geneva Conferences of 1954 and 1962 and the 1954 Manila Conference that launched seato He served for a while on the White House staff under MacGeorge Bundy, then was deputy to Avenll Harnman when he became Johnson's Ambassador-at-Large for peace negotiations Cooper traveled the world, both with Harnman and alone, probing for openings that might lead to peace talks The best-known of these efforts, recounted with a frankness that will put future historians in his debt, was Prime Minister Harold Wilson's ill-fated attempt to have Premier Aleksei Kosygin act as an intermediary to Hanoi No one can say whether the plan would have succeeded even had it received whole-hearted support from Washington, but Cooper leaves no doubt that the slow, grudging, halt-hearted reaction of the White House assured its failure Writing with commendable detachment and forthrightness, Cooper is careful throughout to distinguish judgments of hindsight from his position when an event took place He acknowledges, for example, that he shared the mood and urgencies of the post-Korean War period For those who may have forgotten or who were too young to remember, he further explains that at the time liberals and conservatives alike not only agreed this country had been right to intervene in Korea, but most Americans saw Russia and China as a united, expanding threat and so considered the rescue operation in South Vietnam a clear responsibility Discussing one turning point m that operation, the decision to ignore the provision of the 1954 Geneva Agreement calling for a nationwide election in Vietnam in 1956, Cooper quotes a New York Times editorial of the day "The coolness of the South toward the election plan is understandable If the vote is a straight numerical one the South can expect to be swamped and the so-called 'Geneva settlement' will simply mean the sentencing of 10,000,000 to life under the Communist yoke We must not be trapped into a fictitious legalism that can condemn 10,000, 000 potentially free persons into slavery " The United States and South Vietnam were not bound by the Geneva Agreement, since neither government had signed it, with very little opposition, they allowed the election deadline to slip by Today, 01 course, critics of our Vietnam involvement point to this as a crucial opportunity lost and an unconscionable evasion of a legal and moral commitment Cooper wastes little time on this false issue As the narrative progresses and the crises occur more frequently, though, he begins to express growing doubt about the course taken While recognizing the powerful forces pushing us deeper into the morass, he nevertheless identifies several junctures where he believes we could have heeded the dangers and called a halt Cooper finally parted company with our Vietnam policy when American troops were committed and regular bombings began He left the White House but soon found himself back in government, trying to arrange peace negotiations His estimate of Johnson's Vietnam performance, while sympathetic--a fallible human being caught in an impasse not of his own making--is nonetheless sharply critical The Johnson who emerges was governed by his emotions, compulsive and vain to a degree that interfered with both the effective management of the war and the search for peace "In the last analysis," he says, "Americans became confused by an administration that was itself uncertain about objectives, about progress, about where we were, where we came from and where we were going The Johnson Administration became lost m its own maze " That is a harsh yet merited judgment At this point, however, we also sense Cooper's wish becoming father to his conclusions on achieving peace One looks in vain for the analysis of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's attitude toward negotiations one would expect from an historian who on two occasions sat opposite the North Vietnamese at the green baize table in Pans The difficulty is that confronting the drv...