Vietnam, war, and the United States

Template:TOC-right Interactions among Vietnam, war, and the United States go back much farther than many realize, including having a direct influence on the Japanese attack at the Battle of Pearl Harbor. In early 1941, the U.S. had troubled relations with Vichy France, which controlled what was then French Indochina.

1941-1945

The U.S. gave two conditional embargoes to Japan, on metal and oil, which would be withdrawn only if Japan withdrew from Indochina. Japan considered expansion into Southeast Asia, as well as the Western shipments, as a matter of national security, and, for its internal reasons, chose war as a means of achieving its resource goals.

1945-1954

Following World War II, there were many issues, worldwide, with colonial states. In general, the U.S. did not support the restoral of colonial rule, but it was also developing a containment policy toward Communism. In 1945, China was in civil war, and some of the Vietnamese politicians in exile were in China. An Office of Strategic Services team, commanded by MAJ Archimedes Patti, had been in China with the Vietnamese, and moved south with them.

The formal containment policy would not emerge until 1947, but Washington was already uncomfortable with relations with any Communist organization, internal or external.

1954-1959

While some U.S. leaders, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford had recommended U.S. military intervention to help the French hold Dien Bien Phu, this idea gained very little momentum, and was firmly rejected by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the focus of U.S. interest moved to the Geneva conference on the future of Indochina. Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was vigorously opposed to any relations with Communist parties.

By the end of French rule in 1954, however, the U.S. had a clear policy of containment (see X Article). When the former Indochina was partitioned into North and South, the U.S. priority was supporting whoever would best limit Northern Communist expansion. Self-determination, true democracy, and other high values for the people of South Vietnam were simply not serious considerations, especially with some of the more politically influential supporters of the strongly anticommunist Catholic leaders in the south. These leaders centered around Ngo Dinh Diem and, indirectly, his family; the supporters included Francis Cardinal Spellman and the Kennedy family.

1959-1961

In the late Eisenhower administration, the U.S. was quietly concerned with the expansion of North Vietnam. Although it is somewhat unclear when the U.S. firmly knew of the North Vietnamese decision to take control of the south, it is now known that the key decision was made in May 1959, the date commemorated in the name of the 559th Transportation Group, established to build what was to become the Ho Chi Minh trail. Additional transportation groups were created for maritime supply to the South: Group 759 ran sea-based operations, while Group 959 supplied the Pathet Lao by land routes.

It was the Pathet Lao that most concerned the Eisenhower Administration. In 1959, clandestine military advisors were sent to Laos, under a program originally called Operation Hotfoot. Brigadier General John Heintges, headed the "Program Evaluation Office", the cover name for the program.

This concern, with Laos rather than South Vietnam, continued into the first years of the Kennedy Administration. The Kennedy and Diem families had had a relationship going back to the mid-fifties. The National Security Agency set up a 24-hour monitoring watch on Laos and Thailand.

John F. Kennedy, however, also became concerned with South Vietnam, and started to send advisors. This appealed to strongly anticommunist parts of the U.S. political system, but was not widely publicized. Compared with organized Eastern European and Cuban exiles in the U.S., there was little widespread constituency in the U.S. for any of Southeast Asia.

Gradual U.S. commitment

In the early sixties, the U.S. continued to provide advisors and supplies. The U.S. established signals intelligence facilities in the South, and the first American fatality was a member of an intelligence unit. While the South Vietnamese were taught some basic signals intelligence techniques, the more sensitive collection and analysis techniques were not shared, only the conclusions.

Major U.S. involvement begins

U.S. military involvement began to increase in 1964 and 1965, the Gulf of Tonkin incident indicated a new level of intensity, when North Vietnam explicitly became part of active operations.

Ideology vs. Strategic/operational understanding

Misinformation abounds on the topic — many have the idea that the United States Army was defeated in combat by a Viet Cong guerrilla force &mdash. United States military forces left the Republic of Vietnam under the civilian control of the military, and at the orders of a U.S. government that recognized American public opinion did not regard the survival of South Vietnam as a critical issue.

Desperate people, clinging to helicopters in 1975, were not American military forces. While some combat troops briefly reentered South Vietnam to provide security for the evacuation of U.S. personnel, the 1975 collapse of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South), under conventional attack by the People's Army of Vietnam (North) did not involve the U.S. military. It had been quite public, since 1972, that the South Vietnamese were on their own. While moral issues have been raised about whether they should have supported, the reality was that there was no popular or Congressional support for intervention, and Kissinger and Nixon reflected Machiavelli's view that politics were amoral.

Several other factors were important in the formation of public opinion. This was the first war to have near-real-time battle footage televised to the American public.

While the United States lost none of the battles, it lost the war because it did not define reachable political goals. From 1945 to 1964, people with expertise in the area, but with no special ornithological definition, argued about the proper role of the United States in the region, and about the viability of the Republic of Vietnam. From 1964 to 1972 debate raged between "doves" (who wanted the US to disengage, for a variety of reasons) and "hawks" (who wanted to win, for some definition of "win").

Analysis of objectives, of civil-military relations

Speaking of wars in general,

Nothing is more divisive for a government than having to make peace at the price of major concessions. The proces of ending a war almost inevitably invokes an intense internal struggle if it means abandoning an ally or giving up popularly accepted objectives...the power structure of a government is not made of one piece — even in dictatorships. Political factions contend for influence, government agencies and military service maintain their own separate loyalties and pursue partisan objectives, and popular support keeps shifting. — Fred Charles Iklé, pp. 59-60

Many believe victory, although the criteria for "victory" were never clearly defined, was thrown away because, as General Hamilton H. Howze said when Saigon finally fell to the Communists in 1975, "America itself lost much of its will to fight and the politicians and the press began their program of vilification." Howze's rhetoric says more about the military's role in society and its own battered self image than it does about Vietnam. Much of the intensity of the debate during the 1960s sprang not from what was happening in Asia, but what was happening on the home front.

A comment from one mid-level soldier, to become an apparently victorious commander in a later war, may be illustrative. A lieutenant colonel hospitalized for back surgery at the time, wrote (his emphasis)

I hated what Vietnam was doing to the United States and I hated what it was doing to the Army. It was a nightmare that the American public had withdrawn its support: our troops in World War I and World War II had never had to doubt for one minute that the people on the home front were fully behind them. We in the military hadn't chosen the enemy or written the orders — our elected leaders had. Nevertheless, we were taking much of the blame. — H Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., , p. 181

COL (ret.) Harry Summers, a strategic analyst and author, observed that the protest movement was directed not at the civilian makers of policy, but at the uniformed executors of policy. Other soldiers, however, have described the U.S. involvement as essentially in support of U.S. domestic political agendas, starting from a reflexive, Eisenhower-Dulles militant anticommunism. McMaster, H.R. (1998), Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, Harper</ref>

Political strategy in the Johnson Administration

Johnson saw the war in terms of its effects on domestic politics, and made decisions based on domestic considerations. He did not wantto be known as the Democrat who "lost Vietnam." As a believer in the "domino theory," he worried that other countries in Southeast would fall to Communism if the line was not held.

The only alternative to containment, he believed, was rollback as advocated by Barry Goldwater. "Why Not Victory?" Goldwater asked; because it means nuclear war, Johnson retorted, as he used the rollback issue to overwhelm Goldwater in the 1964 election. (Whereupon the Air Force revised its manual of air doctrine, to state that "total victory in some situations would be an unreasonable goal."

Equally important to Johnson than what happened in Asia was what was happening at home, especially in the minds of the voters. To Johnson, Vietnam was a "political war" only in the sense of U.S. domestic politics, not a political settlement for the Vietnamese. Having been a Democratic Senate leader in the early 1950s who had to defend against Republican charges that the Democrats had "lost" China and failed in Korea, Johnson was determined that a similar political disaster had to be avoided at all costs.

"I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went," he vowed.

He tried several different strategies, but running through them all was a policy of controlling popular perceptions. The American people were never to become alarmed at the magnitude of the problem; White House policy was to keep reassuring the nation that everything was going fine in Vietnam, and that LBJ could be trusted to handle the situation in his own way.

On the other hand, allowing the Communists to take over a U.S. client was unacceptable to Johnson; as shown in the McNaughton Memo, the key position was avoiding a decisive blow to Johnson's deep commitment to containment. "The central lesson of our time," Johnson told a John Hopkins audience in April 1965, "is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next." He continued, We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.'" Privately he felt that if he lost Vietnam to the communists, everything he wanted to work for at home--civil rights, the War on Poverty, and his Great Society--would also be lost.

"I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression," he explained years later, and "there would follow in this country an endless national debate--a mean and destructive debate--that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy."

Congress

Johnson kept Congress out of the policy making process, and Congress did not assert its authority over the making of war. . More of a political threat were "hawks" like GOP Senator Barry Goldwater, articulate spokesman for the nascent conservative movement, and Democratic Senator John Stennis, the chair of the powerful Armed Services Committee.

Johnson feared that if Congress had a voice it would push for a more aggressive, expensive war that would sabotage his high-spending low-tax "Great Society" domestic program. Even worse, Congress might reject his forced-negotiations strategy and insist upon a roll-back strategy aiming at the defeat and conquest of North Vietnam.

Vietnam as an issue in the 1964 elections

In the election Johnson battled Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, warning vehemently that Goldwater's "Why Not Victory" rollback strategy would produce a nuclear war with the Soviets. Surprisingly little discussion of Vietnam took place. Virtually all the information and advice that reached Johnson and McNamara in 1963-65 was deeply pessimistic: the consensus was that the South Vietnam government was too corrupt, and its army was too inefficient, to withstand the Communists. The only chance for containment--a slim one--was to have American soldiers take command of the war and defeat the Viet Cong forces on the ground, while hurting North Vietnam just enough to convince them to negotiate.

Johnson was sensitive to the cycle of getting legislation passed, as well as frequent public opinion polling; he and McNamara apparently believed that the enemy thought on a similar time scale.