THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM
McGovern, Senator George S.
the LESSONS of VIETNAM by SENATOR GEORGE S. McGOVERN /~\ur deepening involvement in Viet-^-^ nam represents the most tragic diplomatic and moral failure in our national experience. The mightiest...
...We are being pulled step by step into a jungle quicksand that may claim our sons and the sons of Asia for years to come—a fearful path which our ablest generals have warned against for decades...
...In the 1964 Presidential campaign, millions of Americans rejected Senator Goldwater's prescription for "victory" in Vietnam through bombing, jungle defoliation, and a major escalation of American forces...
...But if we can accomplish that task, we should use the Vietnam experience as a guide to future policy...
...The enormous destruction of life and property in Vietnam—both American and Vietnamese—will have served no useful purpose unless we learn well the lessons that this tragic conflict can teach us...
...Our official spokesmen have demonstrated a growing resentment toward the doubter and the dissenter...
...they do not respond readily to military force from the outside...
...Bombing the North has failed to halt or seriously check the flow of troops to the South and may, in fact, have prompted a much greater war effort by Hanoi...
...Army Chief of Staff, General Harold K. Johnson, said: "It would be foolish to expand the war and destroy North Vietnam's economic and military capabilities since this would only double the price of the war because the United States would have to ultimately rebuild what it destroyed...
...4) Our policy makers have frequently misled the American public...
...Our course has run afoul of the desire of SENATOR GEORGE S. McGOVERN, South Dakota Democrat, was the first director of the Food for Peace program...
...This was the background for the Vietcong revolt in the South, aided by Ho Chi Minh from the North...
...Before we take those fateful additional steps that may lead to Armageddon, I recommend now as I have in the past, but with a new urgency and a deeper concern, that we: 51 Stop the bombing, North and South, end the "search and destroy" offensive sweeps, and confine our military action to holding operations on the ground...
...I think not...
...President Johnson and his top Cabinet officers built a convincing case against bombing and the escalation of American ground forces in the South...
...Anyone who commits American forces to a land war in Asia," said the late General Douglas MacArthur, "ought to have his head examined...
...Yet, it is in times of national crisis and conflict that America most urgently needs men who will speak out with maximum candor...
...The improved relations with the Soviet Union that followed the sobering Cuban missile crisis of 1962 gave promise of a detente between the world's two great nuclear powers...
...He wrote "War Against Want...
...The United Nations charter commits us to seek the settlement of disputes through the international machinery of that organization...
...For example, speaking on June 12, 1966, just a few days before the first bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the U.S...
...A confirmed Marxist, he is more significantly an ardent nationalist bound less by the claims of international Communism than by Vietnamese nationalism...
...We are now pumping Federal funds into the war effort at a rate of more than $2 billion monthly...
...Ho Chi Minh, doubtless guilty of many sins, has nevertheless devoted most of his public life to winning independence for his country...
...Likewise, the fragmentation of the international Communist bloc opened the way for new U.S...
...If the war continues on its present course, our dreams of a Great Society and a peaceful world will turn to ashes...
...Its roots go back more than twenty years to embrace four Administrations as well as the Congress and the American public...
...We have no obligation to play policeman for the world and especially in Asia, which is so sensitive to heavy-handed interference by even well-meaning white men...
...For my own part, I reject the assumptions that lie behind our involvement, and I regret each new step toward a deeper involvement...
...Ignoring Vietnam's deep-seated historic opposition to China, we have assumed that since Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, he must therefore be a tool of Peking or Moscow...
...Our involvement in South Vietnam came about through a series of moves by the Executive branch—each one seemingly restrained and yet each one setting the stage for a deeper commitment...
...Many of the Senate's most influential members, including the chairmen of powerful committees, have believed for years that the United States made a serious mistake in intervening in Vietnam—first by trying to defeat the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh against imperial France, and second, by fostering a divided Vietnam leading to civil conflict after the expulsion of the French...
...Yet, the mandate for peace of 1964 has been translated into the Goldwat-er prescription on the installment plan...
...Urgent priorities, of which land reform is probably the most important, have been ignored...
...Surely, the military might of the United States can subdue little Vietnam—South and North...
...Thus, on April 27, 1965, President Johnson said: "I will talk to any government, anywhere, any time without any conditions, and if they doubt our sincerity, let them test us...
...The path to sanity and peace in Southeast Asia will not be easy...
...8) America's greatest asset in the world has been our democratic tradition, our concept of human dignity, and a humane society devoted to peace...
...The factors involved are so complex and confusing that it is beyond the capacity of an outside nation to know which group deserves support and which opposition...
...The mightiest nation in history—a nation with a glorious democratic tradition based on the dignity and brotherhood of man—is, with allegedly good motives, devastating an impoverished little state and ravishing the people whose freedom we would protect...
...At Munich, he directly threatened Czechoslovakia—a highly developed democratic state that was ready to fight for its survival with any indication of Western support...
...I have never regretted my service as a bomber pilot in World War II when we stopped the madmen Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo...
...policy...
...8) We are weakening America's moral position and beclouding American idealism...
...Third, unpopular, corrupt regimes of the kind we have been allied with in Saigon do not deserve to be saved by the blood of American boys...
...Implicit in our Vietnam involvement is an assumption that we may be ordained to play God in Asia by settling the struggles and determining the ideology of the people of that continent...
...It would be ironic, indeed, if we devote so heavy a proportion of our resources to the pacification of Vietnam that we are unable to pacify Los Angeles, Chicago, and Harlem...
...rather, we fight because of a highly questionable notion that this is the only honorable course...
...The destruction of South Vietnamese villages by American bombers and the growing occupation of city and countryside by American forces raises the unpopular specter of a Western-style occupation again and plays into the hands of Communist propagandists all over Asia...
...There is no analogy between Munich and Vietnam, and countries are not dominoes...
...3) Therefore, we have no recourse except to see it through at any cost, or force the other side to negotiate on our terms...
...For years we have been told that some new show of American strength would bring the other side to its knees or to the negotiating table...
...Hitler was a madman commanding the world's mightiest military machine ¦—a machine with the mobility, the offensive power, and the assigned mission of leaping across national frontiers until the world was conquered...
...It is still a regrettable truism that truth is the first casualty in wartime...
...Fifth, Congress must never again surrender its power under our Constitutional system by permitting an ill-advised undeclared war of this kind...
...Some of the conditions would, in effect, virtually require the prior capitulation of the other side...
...In the South, our bombs have killed or maimed countless numbers of innocent people and alienated others whose support we covet...
...3) Our diplomacy before, during, and after the Geneva conference of 1954 has been narrow and self-defeating...
...Before we take any further steps toward a larger war, or undertake any new ventures of this kind elsewhere in Asia, I would hope that we will reexamine the assumptions that have involved us in what I believe to be a painfully mistaken course...
...But as the tempo of the battle increases and the martial spirit rises, the dissenter will need to draw deeply on his courage...
...We seem to be trying to demonstrate that American power can enable unpopular, incompetent regimes in Saigon to offset a civil insurrection...
...Local governments must deal with their own guerrilla problems...
...At Munich in 1938 the Western allies failed to stand up to Hitler's demand for a piece of Czechoslovakia...
...Little wonder that the Administration is faced with a credibility gap as wide as the Grand Canyon...
...Dissent in the Congress and the nation has been sharp and frequent in the last two or three years, but it has come late in the day...
...All of these hopeful and challenging foreign policy opportunities have been threatened or thwarted by the fast-deepening U.S...
...There was no American interest, no issue of political freedom, no moral imperative that called for sending our troops and bombers into Vietnam...
...the result has been a serious loss of credibility for the U.S...
...Vietnam is degenerating into a defeat for America whether we "win" or "lose" on the battlefield...
...We should use what influence we have to encourage a more broadly-based civilian government in Saigon— a government willing to start discussions with the other side, looking toward arrangements to end the war...
...7) We bypassed the United Nations until the eleventh hour and have disregarded the opinion and the sensibilities of the international community...
...The insurrection in Vietnam grew out of local conditions which pitted one group of Vietnamese against another...
...The Vietcong control is strongest in the delta country of the South—a thousand miles from North Vietnam—-and that control is exercised by indigenous forces who enjoy the cooperation of the local peasantry...
...Congress cannot be proud of its function in the dreary history of this steadily widening war...
...Time after time, top Administration officials contended that this was basically a political struggle that could be decided in Saigon's favor only if the government there could draw together enough grassroots support to offset the guerrillas...
...We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it...
...This is a serious strain on our balance of payments, our dollar, and our fiscal health...
...Those lessons, I believe, include: First, conflicts of this kind have historical dimensions which are essentially political, economic, and psychological...
...President Eisenhower has written that in 1954, after expelling the French, Ho had the support of at least eighty per cent of the Vietnamese people, both North and South...
...A government that ignores these fundamental concerns of its people as the dictators of South Vietnam have done is headed for trouble and does not deserve to be saved— indeed, it probably cannot be saved— by American soldiers...
...Readers of The Progressive are familiar with many of the facts and arguments which substantiate these charges, so I summarize them only briefly: (1) The historical rationalization of our Vietnam intervention is based on the Munich analogy or "the domino theory...
...To assist in stimulating such a reexamination I make the following indictments of our Vietnam policy: (1) Our Vietnam policy makers have distorted history to justify our intervention in a civil conflict supposedly to defend a free nation against external aggression...
...Communism is a force hostile to American ideals, but we do not meet its challenge by forcing an American solution on a people still in search of their own national identity...
...to clean up our polluted rivers and streams...
...foreign policy interests, including a promising improvement in East-West relations...
...Such internal disputes should be fought out by the competing groups without outside interference, or be referred to the United Nations...
...Here the world sees America intervening with massive military power—napalm, artillery, and bombing—on a scale heretofore used only against Nazi Germany and Tojo's Japan in the 1940's...
...Left to his own devices, Ho Chi Minh might have united the Vietnamese as an effective buffer against Chinese penetration of Southeast Asia...
...that bombing bridges, roads, and oil depots in the North will compensate for weak government in the South...
...Even if one assumes that we are faced with a battle for power between Ho Chi Minh of the North and General Ky of the South, there is no clear issue here of black and white, or of tyranny and freedom...
...2) Our Vietnam policy makers are unwittingly advancing the cause of Communism while seeking to contain it...
...But before we make that choice, let us recall the words of Virgil: "Easy is the descent to Hell...
...policy, far from containing Peking or Moscow, is most likely to draw outside Communist power and influence into Southeast Asia...
...With the end of World War II, he resisted French efforts to regain colonial control of his people...
...but to reclimb the slope and escape to the outer air, this indeed is a task...
...Our policy planners, the Congress, and the American people are devoting so much energy and attention to one tiny corner of Southeast Asia that we tend to lose sight of the fast-changing global panorama that is unfolding before our eyes...
...For the future, members of Congress and the Administration will do well to heed the admonition of Edmund Burke, a distinguished legislator of an earlier day: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood...
...On several occasions we worked through United Nations channels to meet international crises—the Arab-Israel conflict, the Suez crisis, Korea, the Congo, Cyprus, Kashmir, and Yemen...
...Local governments that have done a good job usually have the confidence of the local citizens...
...Second, in the future the United States should avoid committing its power to internal struggles of this kind...
...Even in this instance, Prime Minister Harold Wilson has disassociated his government from our bombing of Haiphong and Hanoi...
...We were assured that our role would be limited to an advisory function—that this was a war which the Vietnamese people must win or lose...
...Even when the claims of top level officials prove to be groundless or contradictory, the pressure is on to accept the next pronouncement without question...
...It may even reunite the feuding Communist world...
...On the other hand, it is said, if we do not crush Ho, his control of Vietnam will topple such other dominoes as Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, the Philippines, and perhaps India, Pakistan, Australia, and Japan, and then on to Hawaii and San Francisco...
...But the promised elections were blocked by Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, whom we were instrumental in installing in South Vietnam...
...6) It may be that the greatest cost of our Vietnam involvement is its regrettable impact on other vital foreign policy interests of the United States...
...Our leaders talk about stopping aggression, but this was a struggle among groups of Vietnamese until we intervened...
...They ordinarily do not have a guerrilla problem and when they do, their own people are loyal enough to the government to take care of the guerrillas instead of depending on us to do that for them...
...Of equal significance, Diem cut off all trade and other relationships with North Vietnam and ruthlessly suppressed his internal opposition...
...U We should clearly state our willingness to negotiate directly with the Vietcong with some recognition that they will play a significant role in any provisional government resulting from a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement...
...f We should advocate an international presence to police a ceasefire, supervise elections, provide an umbrella for the resettlement of Vietnamese concerned about their safety, and arrange for the withdrawal of all outside forces and the conversion of military bases to peacetime uses...
...The responsibility for our present predicament in Southeast Asia cannot be placed on any one man or on any single Administration or agency of government...
...7) The United States was founded by men who declared our national independence with "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind...
...As for the falling dominoes that are said to be marked for "wars of liberation" elsewhere in Asia, it is clear that the challenge to them is not a Hitler or a Ho from the outside, but their own domestic political, economic, and social problems...
...The resulting chaos or vacuum is hardly calculated to provide a formidable barrier to Chinese penetration...
...In the North, American bombers are pounding away at the North Vietnamese economic and industrial strength...
...Ho is a Communist tyrant, but who is to say that General Ky, with his admiration for Adolf Hitler, represents the kind of ideals that American men should die for...
...5) We are wasting human and material resources needed for the revita-lization of our society...
...In eastern Europe, the so-called "Soviet satellites" have seemed to beckon for better relations with the West...
...We were repeatedly assured that American troops and bombers could not solve that problem and in fact would make it worse...
...One of the invaluable sources of national strength is the capacity to enlist the enthusiastic support of the young for essential national interests...
...indeed, the more complete our military conquest, the more tragic our real loss may become...
...But in Vietnam, we have plunged in alone with only a belated reference to the United Nations...
...When tested, however, as it has been on a number of occasions, the Administration has insisted on conditions—and pretty harsh ones at that...
...5) There are other incalculable costs to America and to the world that stem from Vietnam...
...Senators must bear a portion of the blame for the drift of our policy in Vietnam—for we have been slow to speak clearly or even to ask hard questions about obvious contradictions, poor intelligence, and false prophecies involving the highest officials of our government...
...Yet, upon this privately-admitted error a strange syllogism has been constructed: (1) The United States erred in entering and enlarging the Vietnamese struggle...
...A country that builds a government responsive to the needs of the citizenry—that faces up to the internal problems of misrule, injustice, and human misery—need have little fear of falling victim to a "war of liberation...
...The only important power publicly backing our Vietnam course is Britain, which is dependent upon American support for maintenance of the pound...
...The surveillance, the debate, and the dissent since 1965, while courageous and admirable, came too late in the day to head off the foolish course charted by our policy makers...
...This was the central fact that emerged from President Johnson's celebrated letter to Ho Chi Minh in February, a letter which far from representing a new and more moderate approach to peacemaking was, in fact, a hardening of our previous position in terms of the conditions we demanded of Hanoi...
...initiatives...
...At the Geneva conference of 1954, he agreed to end the fighting, withdraw his forces north of a temporary ceasefire line at the Seventeenth Parallel, and await an election two years hence that doubtless would have led to his election as leader of a united Vietnam...
...The impression is being created that while freedom of conscience and expression are desirable theoretical principles, they are too dangerous to practice in wartime...
...Thus, the destruction of the military power of the guerrillas and of North Vietnam would leave fundamental political and economic problems still festering to set the stage for future conflict or continued tyranny and injustice...
...The complex of Administration moves involving the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, AID, and various private interests—all of these have played a greater role than has Congress...
...Our nation, 170 years later, took the lead in establishing the United Nations to preserve the peace...
...That function has been one largely of acquiescence in little-understood Administration efforts...
...In Vietnam—so the theory goes—we are faced with another Hitler in the form of Ho Chi Minh, or perhaps Moscow or Peking working through Ho Chi Minh...
...2) To contain Communist Chinese influence and power in Asia, we have set up a series of unpopular dictators in Saigon...
...Instead, a Vietnamese civil conflict has been transformed gradually into a cruel international war...
...It is the bombing of North Vietnam that presents the greatest obstacle to a settlement and the greatest danger of involving Russia or China in the war...
...Freedom is worth fighting for, but it cannot be achieved through an alliance with unpopular forces abroad that deny freedom...
...Although marked by bloodshed and violence, it is scarcely analogous to Hitler's attempted global conquest...
...Perhaps the only positive benefit that may come from an otherwise melancholy venture is for us to see the errors of this one clearly enough to avoid being drawn into another one...
...This is a grave indictment...
...6) We are jeopardizing essential U.S...
...The ineffective and unpopular regimes of Saigon have not earned the confidence of their subjects...
...3) While orally calling for negotiations, we are practicing military escalation and diplomatic rigidity in such a fashion as to foreclose negotiations...
...Repeatedly, Administration spokesmen have explained in vigorous terms the limits of our policy and our operations in Vietnam only to have those limits abruptly exceeded before the previous words had died away...
...The reaction against heavy-handed Chinese interference in Africa, Indonesia, and elsewhere suggested further opportunities for a sensitive, flexible U.S...
...Yet, in the name of a vague international commitment we fight on in Vietnam with no backing from the United Nations, no broad SEATO support, and, indeed, little support from any source other than a few small states heavily dependent upon our favor...
...It is a confusing civil conflict with no real certainty as to the issues at stake...
...The result of this surrender was a series of aggressions leading to World War II...
...to strengthen educational, recreational, and employment opportunities in rural America...
...It represents money urgently needed to rebuild our decaying, explosive, riot-ridden city slums...
...Our policy in Vietnam has been rationalized by a crude misreading of history and a distortion of our most treasured ideals...
...We are confronted in Vietnam with an indigenous guerrilla force that has enjoyed the sympathy or the complicity of much of the local peasantry...
...Our policy makers have inadvertently placed American power in opposition to basic historical forces, including the currents of revolutionary nationalism and social ferment convulsing much of Asia...
...It would seem more reasonable, having accepted the premise of error in our involvement, to avoid further widening- of the war while devoting our most imaginative efforts to finding a way to end the killing...
...Government...
...We also fight, perhaps, to save the professional reputation of policy planners who have recommended a series of steps, each one seemingly prudent and restrained, yet each one inexorably setting in motion the next step to a larger war...
...But Vietnam presents a different view of America...
...Progress toward nuclear control was promised by the limited test ban treaty of 1963...
...But I do not believe that Vietnam is that kind of testing ground of freedom and free world security...
...We seek no wider war" was the winning slogan of 1964...
...actually, we are backing a dictatorial group in Saigon against a competing group backed by a dictatorial regime in the North...
...Having sown the wind, we shall reap the whirlwind...
...2) We are nevertheless now deeply involved in that struggle...
...When Ho Chi Minh indicated in 1964 to the Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant, that he was ready to talk about a settlement, we rejected this opportunity as we have rebuffed other peace feelers before and since...
...We fight in Vietnam, not for any enduring objective...
...This, I think, is a piece of historical nonsense...
...Actually, the most powerful force moving in Vietnam as elsewhere in Asia is nationalism—not international Communism...
...Yet, only days later, we began doing exactly what General Johnson had said it would be "foolish" to do...
...Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk's major pronouncements on the war have been marked by one consistent quality—they have all proved to be wrong...
...During World War II he stood with the United States against the Japanese and assisted American flyers shot down over Japanese-held jungle areas...
...If only Ho or his backers can be stopped in Vietnam, we will have averted another Munich and saved mankind from World War III...
...The way to a larger war is enticing and simple...
...To blunt that enthusiasm and vital faith in the reliability and fundamental honesty of our government is a grievous blow to a democratic society...
...It is a strange piece of logic, indeed, which holds that, once committed to error, we must compound the error to salvage the original mistake...
...Our power in the Pacific is in naval and air strength as a deterrent against aggression...
...It is almost as though we are fighting so intently to secure freedom in Vietnam that we are willing to sacrifice it in America...
...9) We are creating at home a climate of intimidation designed to silence dissent and meaningful discussion of policy...
...The Johnson Administration has insisted it is prepared to embark on "unconditional discussions...
...For years we made no effort to negotiate or even offer to negotiate an end to the violence...
...To challenge the soundness of our policy judgments is more and more being equated with "letting down the boys in Vietnam" or giving aid to Hanoi...
...the Vietnamese people to escape outside interference, whether French, Japanese, Chinese, or American...
...If one were to attempt a balance sheet on the costs and benefits of our Vietnam venture, high on the cost side would be the planting of doubt and resentment leading to a loss of faith in government on the part of many of our people, especially the youth...
...I do not want to see my son or other boys die in that kind of doubtful struggle...
...Secretary McNa-mara himself told a Senate committee, "I don't believe that the bombing . . . has significantly reduced [nor would reduce] the actual flow of men and materiel to the South...
...He saw no analogy between Ho and Hitler and flatly rejected the appeal of Secretary of State Dulles in the spring of 1954 that Britain and the United States should intervene against Ho on the side of the French...
...In spite of the Administration's strenuous efforts to picture the situation as a war of aggression from the North, it is essentially a civil conflict among various groups of Vietnamese...
...4) The American people have been given in the past decade a bewildering array of false assurances, contradictory interpretations, and mistaken predictions about Vietnam...
...But is this what the struggle is all about...
...night and day the gates stand open...
...The late Winston Churchill, who predicted the subsequent aggression of Hitler if he were not stopped at Munich, just as clearly warned in 1954 against any intervention in Vietnam by Britain or the United States...
...Fourth, those who believe that American military power has an important role to play in the Pacific should return to the once-accepted doctrine of our best generals that we should avoid committing American soldiers to the jungles of Asia...
...In the process we are sacrificing many of our bravest young men, wasting valuable resources, and threatening the peace of the world...
...One final note of irony in the Munich fallacy is the testimony by our ally in Saigon, General Ky, that his only political hero is Adolf Hitler...
...Mao Tse-tung may have claimed that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," but that has not been the chief source of American power in the world, and it does not answer the basic yearning of the people of Asia...
...After all the dead are counted—American and Vietnamese—¦ and the countryside is laid waste, we will have accomplished nothing...
...American actions in Vietnam, however well-intentioned, do not square with the image of America that the world has traditionally admired...
...preoccupation with the war in Vietnam...
...Our SEATO treaty commits us only to confer with the other treaty signatories on possible action...
...9) Our course in Vietnam does not square with the conscience or the judgment of many thoughtful Americans...
...After eight years of fighting, he defeated the French and emerged a national hero...
...A defensive holding action in the South, as advocated by Generals Gavin and Ridgeway, could be pursued while determined efforts are being made to negotiate a ceasefire...
Vol. 31 • May 1967 • No. 5
