Coming to Grips with Failure
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Coming to Grips with Failure Lyndon Johnson's War By Larry Berman Norton. 254 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Willam L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers; author, "A Better World: The Great...
...To obtain these men Johnson would have to call up the Reserves, a politically damaging step...
...Accordingly, progress was measured not in terms of ground gained but by estimating enemy strength...
...McNamara, whose capacity to support a war he did not believe in had been exhausted, announced his resignation...
...The domino theory, which held that a defeat in Vietnam would lead to the Communization of Southeast Asia, has also been disproves Today what used to be French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) lags far behind its prosperous nonCommunist neighbors...
...As Berman explains, "Enemy forces initiated over 90 per cent of the company-sized fire fights...
...Lyndon Johnson's War continues the story through 1968, when the President admitted failure and made plans to extricate the United States from its Southeast Asian misadventure...
...In losing the United States won, albeit at a terrible cost...
...Before their efforts had a chance to pay off, Westmoreland forced the Marines to join his doomed war of attrition...
...It was easy for Hanoi to add soldiers as needed to match U.S...
...buildups...
...By 1967 there were half a million U.S...
...That the Communists had been able to launch a major attack undetected, and survive defeat, gave the lie to Administration claims that the war was progressing favorably...
...On March 31, the incumbent President announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection and curtailed the bombing of North Vietnam...
...that was a function not of the size of American forces, but of their own operations...
...By the spring of 1967, though, it was becoming clear that the enemy, not the United States, controlled the scale of its losses...
...Increasing the number of American troops, Westmoreland's answer to every setback, was therefore both futile and expensive...
...Once the casualty rate inflicted on enemy forces exceeded the number of enemy replacements a "crossover point" would be reached, and after that the war would gradually fade away—or so it was argued...
...To prevent the war from expanding, however, theU.S...
...The population did not rise in support of it...
...It further divided the Democratic Party, strengthened Eugene McCarthy's Presidential campaign and, less directly, brought Robert F. Kennedy into the race...
...The argument that North Vietnam was a surrogate for China, feeble even at the time, has been refuted by events—including actual warfare between these former allies...
...The result was, as the Army pointed out, a major defeat for the Vietcong...
...As one Pentagon official told the New York Times, "We know now that we constantly underestimated the enemy's capacity and his will to fight, and overestimated our progress...
...By employing official documents, some not previously declassified, Berman is able to identify the stages the President passed through before his dramatic change of course...
...The more Clifford reviewed the facts, the clearer it became that the Army was strategically bankrupt...
...In November 1967, knowing things were going poorly, the Administration launched a public relations campaign to mislead the American public...
...now a majority, joined even by the fire-eating Acheson, favored disengagement...
...The regional balance of power is more favorable to the United States than it was before the war...
...Rostow, the Joint Chiefs— though in varying degrees—and, surprisingly, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, were intractableto the last...
...Clark Clifford, an old friend of the President and a Vietnam hawk, was named successor to the Defense post...
...While the United States paid lip service to the idea of building a viable south Vietnam, most efforts were directed at winning a war of attrition against the Vietcong and its Northern supporters...
...This is a small, sharply-focused book that chronicles the debate over American intervention as it took place at the highest levels of government...
...author, "A Better World: The Great Schism—Stalinism and the American Intellectuals" In a previous study, Planning a Tragedy, Larry Berman dealt with President Johnson's 196 5 decision to Americanize the war in Vietnam...
...Fortunately for everyone, their counsel was not heeded...
...commanders wereforbidden to invade the North and achieve victory in the usual way by occupying the enemy's homeland...
...Clifford realized that anegotiated withdrawal, not victory, was the only way out of Vietnam...
...Much energy was spent attempting to identifythe crossover point, withthe Army and the CIA taking opposite stands...
...The actual conduct of the fighting is largely ignored, except as it affected White House deliberations...
...McGeorge Bundy, no longer in government but still an important adviser, concurred...
...over 80 per cent began withawellorganized enemy attack...
...The Communists, in other words, determined their own casualty rate...
...Having committed itself in Vietnam, the Administration naturally wished to believe the Army was right, and grasped at any and all straws that minimized Communist strength...
...troops in Vietnam, and, as McNamara had predicted, the Army was sustaining very high casualties in pursuit of an ever-receding objective...
...In his 1967 State of the Union address Johnson was guardedly optimistic about the progress of his war, although even then Central Intelligence Agency analyses were turning up evidence that General Westmoreland's textbook strategy was failing...
...American generals were used to that kind of war, and they insisted on having it regardless of fighting conditions...
...There was no deception, he says, but rather an argument over whether or not Communist irregular forces should be part of the count...
...As to the recent dispute over whether Westmoreland deceived Washington by concealing the true size of enemy forces, Berman sides with the General...
...In December 1965, when the United States had 175,000men in Vietnam, Secretary of Defense McNamara told Johnson that "even with the recommended deployments, we will be faced in early 1967 with a military standoff at amuch higher level...
...The Army acknowledged that its defeat of the Vietcong meant little by asking for another 200,000 troops, withno assurance that this escalation would result in victory...
...If they were included, as by the CIA, then the attrition strategy was failing...
...Nevertheless, the Tet offensive was the decisive event of the war...
...Half the attacking forces were lost, and the Vietcong was dealt a blow from which it never entirely recovered...
...Johnson convened a panel of elder statesmen, the Senior Advisory Group, on March 25, 1968...
...its government was corrupt, incompetent and lacking in popular support...
...But more clearly than anyone else to date, Berman establishes who was right and who was wrong in 1968...
...There is little here on events before 1967 or after 1968...
...There probably never was much chance of saving South Vietnam...
...While Washington's disinformation effort was still under way, the enemy struck...
...On January31,1968—Tet, the Vietnamese New Year—80,000 Communists attacked Saigon, 35 of 44 provincial capitals, and numerous other targets...
...Such hopes as there were rested on the success of pacification, never attempted seriously except by the Marine Corps...
...By focusing on the President's personal ordeal, it generates some sympathy for Johnson, though this is possible only because the agony in Vietnam remains outside the picture...
...But if only main force units were designated as the enemy's Order of Battle, and if some facts were stretched and others were ignored, a weak case could be patched together in support of the Army's program...
...These "wise men" included Dean Acheson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, George W. Ball (who had always opposed the war), and Cyrus T. Vance...
...Moreover, intensive bombing of North Vietnam and its lines of communication to the South—the famous "Ho Chi Minh Trail," actually an elaborate road network—was also failing to strengthen the position of the United States...
...Previously the wise men had supported him...
...Within this narrow compass, far from the killing ground in Vietnam—and the burning ghettos at home—Johnson wrestles with the monster he has created...
...Clifford, Bundy and most of the wise men helped Johnson come to terms with failure...
...We know now that all we thought we had constructed was built on sand...
...If much is lost in this view from the top, what remains is still of value...
...Though the military refused to budge, most of the civilians Johnson had depended on were abandoning their old positions...
...Berman does not reflect on the larger issues, but they may be penciled in...
...The geopolitical justifications given for trying to save South Vietnam were flawed too...
...Lyndon B. Johnson is at the center of Berman's narrative, with characters like Robert S. McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow, and Generals Earle G. Wheeler and William C. Westmoreland playing supporting roles...
...Most of all, Tet forced Lyndon Johnson to admit he had been mistaken to believe that a military victory could be gained in Vietnam at a reasonable cost...
...Lyndon Johnson's War offers no comfort to the military or to those who maintain that more resolve at home, or a different strategy, or whatever, would have produced better results...
Vol. 72 • July 1989 • No. 11
