Vietnam Survey
Vietnam Survey: Given the present state of the war in Vietnam, and the apparent stalemate in Paris, if you were in the President's chair, would you have taken the action he took on May 8 ? If...
...What understandings were reached which led the U.S...
...This could lead to their accepting something like the coalition government we have offered, leaving the future of South Vietnam open...
...and China through Hanoi's offensive...
...The simple fact is that Nixon's Vietnamization policy has failed and he lacks the courage to say so...
...This would be similar to France's acceptance of Algeria's terms...
...The U.S...
...Ideologues may give such polar answers, but serious scholars cannot...
...Dankwart A. Rustow (Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York) No...
...This time, I would like to think, we will be more sensible in our response...
...In his speech he proposed an internationally supervised cease-fire and a withdrawal of all U.S...
...We might give South Vietnam some aid, but would not be directly involved in the fighting or responsible for its outcome...
...The President's action is also in part a political countermaneuver, designed to force the Soviet Union either to challenge the U.S...
...I would have negotiated on terms offered by the North Vietnamese in their proposal of July 1, 1971, and as subsequently amended by them...
...I would set a deadline and get out...
...President Johnson refused to consider this package and so has President Nixon...
...A complete response depends on an estimate of how fast Hanoi's divisions can go, how far they intend to go, and what answer the North would give to alternative signals for a political settlement...
...In view of our responsibilities, we should give refuge in the United States to a few hundred thousand South Vietnamese...
...Nixon could have made that proposal as a straightforward act of negotiation, without the gun to make his offer seem a threat...
...Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...There has already been, God knows, a continuing bloodbath, righteously wrought by the United States...
...for support against the threat of Soviet encirclement and attack...
...Morton Halperin (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution) No...
...All political issues would be left to the Vietnamese to settle among themselves...
...Ronald Steel (Author of Pax Americana and Imperialists and Other Heroes) No...
...3. We could simply accept North Vietnam's terms...
...Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York) No...
...A. Marshall (Military historian...
...Hans J. Morgenthau (Leonard Davis Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York) No...
...but there seem substantial reasons why the Hanoi regime would not wish to destroy future relations with the non-Communist world by staging a new bloodbath of its own...
...and, if we have learned anything in the last decade, we must surely have learned that national interest is more potent than ideology...
...But I have one vote, and under our system majority rule is the name of the game...
...Second, this action will inform Moscow that we intend to link cooperative arrangements such as SALT with their stoppage of assistance to those opposing us, as in Vietnam...
...President Nixon's new terms for a negotiated settlement come very close to what I believe is acceptable to Hanoi??namely a ceasefire with no promises of North Vietnamese withdrawals and no guarantees about South Vietnam, and our promise of complete withdrawal within four months...
...Today, with 500,000 U.S...
...The blockade can be maintained indefinitely and as such provides the U.S...
...that most Asian "dominoes" are still standing and our relations with Peking are improving...
...By this weird logic America could have intervened with impunity in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union withdrew missiles from Cuba...
...Nixon should finally have done what would better have been done anytime in the past seven years ??withdrawn all American Armed Forces...
...I said that if Nixon did not negotiate more vigorously the Communist side would launch an offensive in the spring of 1972...
...Eugene V. Rostow (Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs, Yale) Yes...
...Nathan Glazer (Professor of Education and Social Structure, Harvard) No...
...has abandoned insistence on free choice for the South Vietnamese people and should prepare for "defeat with honor...
...Under the circumstances, the President's action measures the vital American interest in achieving a stable balance of world power, maintained by reciprocal respect for each nation's national commitments, and for the rules of the UN charter regarding the use of force in international politics...
...S.L...
...In sum, I believe the blockade to be mainly a diplomatic device that undoubtedly places the Soviet Union in an awkward position and at the same time might help protect Washington's prestige in the event of military disaster...
...But Hanoi has enormous leverage on us??the POWs??that might force us to take the third option in any event...
...If the fighting goes reasonably well, and the North does not change its demands, I would take the second option...
...But I think we have to face the fact that in this war we have missed one bus after another...
...Yes or No answers to complex questions reflect a dangerous political polarization...
...forces from Indochina...
...1. If the current strategy of the Administration succeeds??in other words, if the present offensive is blunted and the blockade is successful??North Vietnam would be forced to change its terms...
...troops gone and the South Vietnamese doing the job, the enemy, despite his heaviest attacks of the war??whether he takes Hue or not??occupies only difficult outskirt areas...
...If so, his response has been appallingly extravagant...
...After the war, they may well make the same overtures that Ho Chi Minn and Mao Tse-tung, seeking to avoid such dependence, made to us a quarter century ago...
...There was the confidence that one more step of escalation would have a decisive effect...
...I suppose that the end of a civil war is likely to be accompanied by the paying off of local scores...
...John P. Roche (Morris Hillquit Professor of Politics, Brandeis) No...
...Leo Cheme (Chairman, Executive Committee, Freedom House) I don't know...
...But Nixon cannot single-handedly defend our honor...
...By that decision John Kennedy nailed the Stars and Stripes to the Saigon flagpole...
...These are "tactical" questions, and on these I have no grounds for making a judgment...
...A person who has no access to classified information cannot reasonably be expected to say what he would do if he had such information...
...If the American people want to run, I would consider it disgraceful and dishonorable...
...Brigadier General, U.S.A., ret...
...I would accompany this move with the following statement: "We have for many years done everything in our power to make the government of South Vietnam self-sufficient, politically and militarily...
...Unless the South Vietnamese collapse, or Chinese policy changes again, I foresee Soviet acceptance of detente in this sense, perhaps after a further test of strength in the Middle East or elsewhere...
...My impression is that the blockade does not have primarily military ends, although military means are being employed...
...would still try to prop up Thieu for political competition during a cease-fire, and remained secure in its intransigence...
...I would announce a date certain in four or five months for complete withdrawal of all U.S...
...invaded Cambodia, invaded Laos, renewed the bombing of North Vietnam, and now mined its harbors...
...CIA and defense intelligence agency studies have shown that a total blockade of the North Vietnamese coast would not be effective...
...My reading of the transcript of Henry Kissinger's briefing following the President's announcement leads me to believe the Administration, in its secret talks in Paris, was telling Hanoi that it was willing to get out of Vietnam but did not want to be humiliated, and that if Hanoi would wait Saigon would fall of its own ineptitude in a year or so...
...Paul Seabury (Professor of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley) Yes...
...Roger Fisher (Professor of Law, Harvard Law School) No...
...The arbitrament of war has shown that we have failed...
...For four years Harriman and others have attempted, without success, to persuade this Administration to give the plan serious consideration...
...If No??taking into consideration (1) the fate of the POWs, (2) the North Vietnamese invasion,and (3) the likely domestic reaction??what would you have done in his place...
...So is Vietnami-zation and the associated withdrawal of American combat troops...
...Once again Nixon has turned his back on a negotiated settlement??the only way that the war can truly be ended and the prisoners returned home...
...It is to some extent a face-saving device, concealing the fact that the U.S...
...Roger Hilsman (Professor of Government, Columbia) No...
...Announcing this alone, without the very hazardous mining of the ports, would have been Nixon's best action under the present circumstances...
...I don't have enough information to say what I would do in the President's place...
...If that information revealed that the President's decision entailed grave risks of enlarging Soviet or Chinese involvement, I would be critical of his actions...
...Indefensibly, we expected Soviet restraint in Vietnam, and therefore reduced our forces much too rapidly...
...Not because I disapprove in principle of a military response to the massive invasion of the Republic of South Vietnam, but rather because I do not believe the President of the United States can continue to fight this war in a legislative vacuum...
...But having done what we have been committed to do, we could serve no useful purpose by continuing an intervention doomed to failure...
...John Kenneth Galbraith (Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, Harvard) No...
...I would have done four years ago what Averell Harriman and Clark Clifford had urged the Johnson Administration in vain to do...
...to return to the Paris negotiations, and why were the expectations from the secret conversation with Le Due Tho not realized...
...If we are concerned with the containment of China, a Hanoi government would resist Chinese pressures far more effectively than any of the shoddy regimes we have sponsored in Saigon...
...An intensification of Soviet or Chinese military engagement cannot be discounted, but now there is much greater likelihood of their pressuring Hanoi to accept the greatly watered down United States proposals...
...President Nixon said, "An American defeat in Vietnam . . . would encourage agression all over the world...
...The President had no other military option, given both the pace and force of the enormous Soviet-equipped invasion...
...Ithiel de Sola Pool (Professor of Political Science, MIT) I don't know...
...The President is offering to surrender to the North Vietnamese if they will safeguard his political position until after the election...
...There is, however, the larger political??and moral??question...
...What would one have done in his place...
...Certainly its effect upon supplies will come too late to have a decisive impact on the present battle...
...A negotiated withdrawal would of course free the prisoners of war...
...China has turned to the U.S...
...Because he incredibly decided that the preservation of General Thieu was a vital interest of the United States, he has progressively abolished limitations that even President Johnson placed on the conduct of the war and has done the things that President Johnson declined to do...
...It means that world peace now depends upon the restraint and sense of responsibility of the Communists, and is bound to affect other matters, such as the summit conference and the SALT talks...
...Unhappily, that prediction has come through...
...today American survival is not endangered nor is any vital American interest...
...Above all, there was the idea that Vietnam is of planetary importance as a test of American will...
...even under bombing the road and rail network from China can sustain a flow of 8,500 tons per day...
...The turning point in our situation in Vietnam was the Presidential election there last year...
...Diplomatic prospects have been interwoven with an uncertain battle...
...that anyhow our vital interests are in Europe, the Mideast and disarmament...
...That is to say, I would continue the withdrawal of our ground troops and abstain from air and naval bombardment...
...And in an age of Communist poly-centrism, can anyone suppose that the Communization of Vietnam would be a threat to our security...
...There is great hope for detente in this change of Chinese policy, but it cannot be realized without firm and strenuous efforts by China, the U.S...
...Communist countries have done so in the past...
...Edwin O. Reischauer (University Professor, Harvard) No...
...If I were in the President's chair right now, I would wait and see what happens on the battlefield...
...Will there be a bloodbath...
...He should go to Congress and force the legislature to answer the question, Do we fight or do we run...
...Much as I might like to rewrite history, I am convinced that our honor is at stake as a consequence of events in Vietnam over the past decade??notably the American-inspired coup in 1963, which resulted in the murder of an authentic, non-Communist Vietnamese nationalist, President Diem...
...in the Mideast, in Europe, and other areas...
...They are Communists, but they are also fervent nationalists...
...First, I believe it will help restore the morale of the South Vietnamese forces as they regroup for the defense of Hue...
...Four years ago enemy forces were all over the populated heart of South Vietnam, and it required over 500,000 U.S...
...I would at once halt American operations throughout Indochina, withdraw all troops by June 30, exile Thieu, agree to elections under a Buddhist-Vietcong coalition (thereby freeing our prisoners), and arrange 100,000 U.S...
...In the summer of 1968 Averell Harriman worked out with the Communist side a package agreement for a negotiated settlement that most Americans would find acceptable...
...Blockading North Vietnamese harbors is such a tactic...
...Hanoi was either not disposed to wait for victory or feared that the U.S...
...there was the whining implication that it is somehow unfair for the North Vietnamese to fight back and unfair for the Russians to give them one-hundredth as much aid as we are giving our Vietnamese...
...Nixon apparently saw this as a humiliation of the United States, and it would seem to be the basis of his reiterated use of the word "honor" in his May 8 announcement...
...The problem with pursuing a policy of Vietnamization is that it makes a compromise almost impossible, for it commits us to supporting the very government the other side finds objectionable...
...I would withdraw American military forces...
...I would have continued as much effective air support as public opinion would allow...
...I would also negotiate for an amnesty for the people we leave behind...
...If anything should be clear, it is that the North Vietnamese have not been going through a generation of war so that the Chinese or the Russians will move in and take over their country...
...What our President is saying is that because we will not fight to the end in a part of the world in which we have no direct and vital interests, other nations will conclude that we will not fight at all in parts of the world where we do have direct and vital interests...
...and others...
...Thus we are now faced with three possibilities...
...But I don't see this happening...
...I think the President's decision is rash and dangerous, ineffective and unnecessary...
...Leslie Gelb (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution) No...
...2. We could leave and let the North and South fight it out...
...If Hanoi succeeds, the promise of China's new policy will fade...
...If in the face of all this progress the killing continues, it is largely because dissidents in the United States continue to give the totalitarian regime in Hanoi the hope that in the end it will be allowed to impose its tyranny upon the South...
...I would not have followed the line of action taken by President Nixon...
...Because of his own mistakes, the President found himself on May 8 in a dilemma to which his response, as the British said, was inevitable...
...Had we not supported Thieu, I think we might have succeeded in establishing a "government of accommodation" in Saigon that would have come closer to meeting North Vietnamese demands and perhaps made some compromise solution possible...
...Morton Kaplan (Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago) No...
...We naturally regret this outcome...
...has in effect given up its previous insistence on a withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnamese territory, and setting the stage for a possible collapse of the Saigon government...
...I would expect North Vietnam to release our prisoners eventually in return for some consideration...
...The impasse at Paris would be resolved by allowing the Vietnamese to work out their own political settlement...
...James Thompson (Assistant Professor of History, Harvard) No...
...The Nixon Administration must come to this point sooner or later...
...Moreover, the May 8 action was unnecessary because a much better alternative for ending the war is and has been available...
...troops from Vietnam in four months if the prisoners of war were then released...
...Shifting defense savings to massive programs in education, housing and transport, I would look forward to a landslide reelection in November...
...A central Hanoi concern will be to avoid a situation of dependence on Peking or Moscow...
...The Soviets have now answered the U.S...
...visas for the South Vietnamese in mortal political danger...
...On these terms we probably would be able to get the return of our prisoners...
...Without knowing what passed between Kissinger and Brezhnev, no observer can evaluate thoroughly the risks the President took...
...In the April 27, 1970, issue of The New Leader ("The Way Out of Vietnam"), for example, I argued that Nixon's Vietnamization plan would not work and that the only way to end the war was through the kind of agreement Harriman had negotiated...
...To do this, the North Vietnamese must have relations with the United States??on the same balance-of-power principle that leads Peking and Moscow to seek improved relations with Washington...
...George McT...
...that is, to stand aside from the Saigon regime and negotiate an American withdrawal...
...directly, with all that this implies, or else lose prestige and influence with Hanoi...
...Unlike the ordinary citizen, the President has at his disposal facts concerning the strategic implications of the closing of North Vietnamese ports and the probable reactions of China and the Soviet Union...
...President Nixon's May 8 speech seemed to me to reproduce in a single document all the fallacy and folly of a decade of error in Indochina...
...I would also expect the usual Communist reprisals and atrocities...
...We are not going to free them any other way...
...I would withdraw all the troops within six weeks, the only conditions being the release of the POWs and assurance against attacks upon the withdrawing American forces...
...author, Vietnam Primer and West to Cambodia) I don't know...
...there are even hints that the hidden message of the May 8 speech is that Nixon is at last prepared to dump General Thieu...
...We must accustom ourselves to the agonizing effects of witnessing the immense toll of human lives in South Vietnam which this kind of peace will surely bring...
...Stanley Hoffmann (Professor of Government, Harvard) No...
...I cannot responsibly assess the President's decision without knowing what was discussed between Henry Kissinger and Leonid Brezhnev...
...And this military action is accompanied by such inflated rhetoric as the designation of the North Vietnamese as "international outlaws...
...From every indication the mining and bombing can have no immediate effect and therefore are largely punitive...
...Daniel Bell (Professor of Sociology, Harvard) No...
...I would announce a date certain for total withdrawal of all American forces in Indochina, contingent upon Hanoi's guarantee of the release of the American POWs...
...troops to block them...
...If he had done this four years ago, many people, Americans and Vietnamese, who are now dead would be alive...
...Richard Pipes (Professor of History, Harvard) I don't know...
...On moral grounds I have opposed bombing and shelling of populated areas throughout this war, and I continue to do so...
...Our commitment should never have been understood to require us to defend a nation incapable of organizing an effective government, or to destroy that nation in the course of defending it...
...It brings about a confrontation with the Soviet Union for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis...
...As for the domestic reaction, I have no question that most Americans would welcome an end to a war whose continuation (and, for many, whose initiation) makes no sense...
...William Kintner (Director, Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania) Yes...
...Had the same decision been made four years ago, I would have been unqualifiedly for it...
...I would not continue the intervention in Vietnam...
...There are less violent alternative strategies of resistance to Communist aggression...
...There is only one course of action??admit the mistake and negotiate for the POWs in return for a fixed departure date...
...It is hard to suppose that even President Nixon could believe that...
...Vietnam Survey: Given the present state of the war in Vietnam, and the apparent stalemate in Paris, if you were in the President's chair, would you have taken the action he took on May 8 ? If Yes??what do you see happening as a result of his action...
...Kahin (Visiting Fellow, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions) No...
...there was the preening nonsense about our "generosity" in making negotiating offers which, with their insistence on the survival of the Saigon regime, Hanoi by definition will not accept...
...All of this the North Vietnamese have indicated to be possible...
...Nixon's decision is an admission that his Vietnamization policy is a failure...
...He should have announced that we have done all??indeed much more??than our commitment called for, and it was insufficient to prevent Communist rule in South Vietnam...
...Back home, I would proclaim that American bombs cannot win jungle wars or propagate democracy...
...with a certain amount of leverage...
...Technologically, however, the blockade we are attempting seems more likely to fail than to succeed...
...I was involved in the decisions made at that time, and the situation was quite different: Nuclear missiles were then pointed at the heartland of the United States...
Vol. 55 • May 1972 • No. 11
