Decade of Disaster

...The official pronouncements today about Vietcong popularity are only too similar to those of the French a dozen years ago...

...No one is surprised that a General Navarre or a Colonel de Castries, once committed to a strategy, is henceforth not only subjectively incapable of evaluating the progress of his own policy, but almost totally unreliable as a reporter, especially to his superiors...

...Although the conditions and the setting differ, there is much to be learned from the French failure at Dienbienphu...

...the failure of the strategic hamlets...

...It takes two to escalate: not only is there the enemy response, but so also must the policy-maker beware entrapment, by reason of a failure, into increased effort...

...That it might be a U. S. war fought in our own self-interest is a question never raised...

...This latter indifference may prove the more serious weakness...

...it never had the emotional quality that characterizes the American anti-Communist crusade...

...Although French Premier Joseph Laniel had written off the Indo-China venture, General Navarre shrewdly knew that once confronted by the actual fact of defeat the Prime Minister would have to respond by an even larger commitment...

...In neither case did the relationship achieve desired reforms...

...the failure to gain South Vietnamese popular support for the war against the Vietcong...

...Halberstam's reports to The New York Times became one of the few sources with which interested observers could balance the incredible flow of misinformation from official Washington and Saigon...

...Nevertheless, imminence of disaster at Dienbienphu did cause Paris to reverse itself, with two pressures at work...

...At the policy level the difference between 1954 and 1965 is clear...

...It is because we are crusadingly doctrinaire against Communism anywhere and under any circumstances that we seemingly fail to learn from the experience of Vietnam...

...Perhaps at this moment we are gaining the knowledge necessary to deal with a situation...

...that the strife is not a civil war, that "it is, of course, a Vietnamese war...

...Furthermore, the Administration is indifferent both to criticism and to its loss of credibility with the press and the public...

...For the French the hopelessness of the situation was apparent, and General Henri Navarre was permitted his valley entrenchment at Dienbienphu with the clear understanding that he would receive no further support...

...personnel concerned with Vietnam policy...

...David Halberstam tells us nothing different about the credibility of high-level U.S...

...Reviewed by Stanley K. Sheinbaum Concurrent with the timely flurry of books on Vietnam it is fortuitous that we also have Jules Roy's The Battle of Dienbienphu, a day-by-day reconstruction of the 1954 French disaster in Indo-China...

...As Halberstam demonstrates, the quagmire is of our making...

...Laniel was indeed sucked in, but it was too late...

...It is noteworthy, Roy reports, that conventional weapons were not considered sufficient to save Navarre...

...Strategically, Navarre had picked the Dienbienphu valley because he assumed that the Vietminh neither could obtain the necessary artillery nor dare fire it from the observable side of the surrounding ranges...

...It is no wonder that the Administration, especially the State Department, is facing an increasingly skeptical press...

...Intelligence was grossly inaccurate at the Yalu River and the Bay of Pigs...

...He merely challenges its effectiveness...

...One knows that henceforth he will have difficulties in gaining the confidence of U. S. senior personnel abroad...

...and on and on...

...From David Halberstam's The Making of a Quagmire, we unfortunately gain no confidence that U. S. officialdom learns from its own experience, let alone the French...

...Fortunately, frustrated officials with private criticism will continue to turn to him...

...Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered atomic support to prevent an intolerable cold war loss...

...For the French the Indo-China war had been a last gasp attempt to salvage a colonial empire...

...What happens when "those boys" are American...

...and enemy troops...

...The Making of a Quagmire draws a frightening picture of Administration denials of reality: the failure of Diem to win popular support, especially among the peasantry...

...He accepts the notion that Vietnam is the key to Southeast Asia...

...The second pressure on Paris provides an interesting insight into the dynamics of escalation...

...Can we be confident with the intelligence provided us about Vietcong potential...

...And equally bad was Saigon's interference with correspondents in its efforts to determine that the American public would hear only the party line...

...In The Battle of Dienbienphu Roy reminds us of another failing of men in high positions...

...Halberstam's skill and honesty make for a major contribution to a better understanding of U. S. involvement in Vietnam...

...It would have been valuable to have so perceptive and so persistent a journalist question the wisdom of U. S. policy itself...

...He will face the task of discriminating between the irresponsible dissidents and the serious critics...

...Nevertheless, to evaluate Halberstam correctly it is necessary to make clear that he never questions overall U. S. policy in Vietnam...

...The only other fault is the treatment—or lack thereof—of the role of the Central Intelligence Agency...

...Not only were U. S. and Saigon officials not heeding their advisers out in the field, but their own reports back to Washington were questionable...

...Unhappily, Halberstam is wrong on both counts...

...In no case—despite the defense of cold-war "personal diplomacy"—should U. S. officials become so linked to host country officials...

...But this President Eisenhower would not provide the French...

...It is relevant because there is shaping up in South Vietnam the first major confrontation between U.S...

...Today with Da Nang as the probable battleground the United States is assuming that the enemy will be unable to marshal the necessary air power for victory...

...Not only is there a crisis in foreign policy, but even more serious is the crisis in the making of foreign policy...

...Do we know the answer to the vital question: What will Peking and Moscow do...

...The French underestimated the popular support of the Vietminh, and, according to Roy, the superhuman efforts which the peasants would make in their behalf...

...Navarre was wrong, and atomic weaponry became his only answer...

...Santo Domingo has made that clear...

...Bad enough is the natural bureaucratic tendency to report what one thinks Washington wants to hear—that which supports or justifies current policy and programs...

...the failure to recognize the nature and extent of the Buddhist threat...

...Foreign policy is now made by disturbingly few men—none of whom is in the legislative branch of government...

...the failure to stop the Vietcong in the Ca Mau delta...

...For some reason Halberstam rationalizes CIA chief Jack Richardson's intimacy with Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem's brother, as being necessary to maintain relations with him, while berating Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting for a similar tactic with Diem...

...in a small republic in South America," he writes, and two pages later he adds, "We are not doctrinaire...

...Worse is Washington's fanatic resistance, as documented by Halberstam, to hearing-out the field men like Colonel Vann and Rufus Phillips who had quite different stories to tell...

...the failure of the South Vietnamese military to perform their role in the war...

...The first was predictable and came from the Americans who had financed eighty per cent of the French effort in the first place...