COMMENTARY -SESSION 1
Comments on HOW WE GOT IN
by Steve Sherman

Three very distinguished professors discuss how we got into the Vietnam War. Their answer: it wasn't their guy's fault.

In addition to speculating on contrary-to-fact hypotheticals about what could or should have happened before the Vietnam war began, I think it is useful to re-examine the most likely scenarios of what, in fact, did happen during that period.  This is my version of it: President Roosevelt declined to make decisions on the post-war status of Indochina.[1] and died before revising that position. Truman's foreign policy was realistically focused on winning the Cold War against the USSR in Europe, rather than on enforcing American anti-colonial idealism in SE Asia.  The political orientation of Ho Chi Minh, as evidenced by his flag [2], was always doctrinaire Communist: pro-USSR since the 1920's and pro-China after 1949. Eisenhower increased US aid to the French, but refused to become unilaterally involved in the First Indochina War.  It ended in 1954 after (but not primarily because of) the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.  France's withdrawal from Indochina was mainly due to the political power of the huge French Communist Party at that time and its overt "internationalist" support of the Vietnamese Communists.    At the Geneva Conference later in 1954 the Emperor, Bao Dai, appointed Ngo Dinh Diem (who was never a puppet) as Prime Minister of Vietnam, perhaps in revenge [3] for some real or imagined slight. Neither the South Vietnamese nor the US delegation ever signed the Geneva agreements, and Diem understandably recognized no obligation under those agreements to hold general elections. Two years later, Diem refused even to go through the motions to prepare for what he viewed as a rigged contest and the U.S. declined to expend the effort here to press the point. Instead, Diem orchestrated a referendum that deposed Bao Dai and confirmed himself as the head of state. 

The Eisenhower Administration agonized over every aspect of holding ground in the Cold War while avoiding a Nuclear War. You can find in the records discussions predicting almost everything that did occur over the next quarter century. Despite the dismal prospects, real diplomats and real politicians did their best. They organized SEATO to cover any actions needed in the future with multilateralism; they formulated and expressed a very valid theory as to the impact further Communist expansion would have in Asia, especially renascent Japan (the famed Domino theory); they agonized over stretching the authorized TERM mission into an advisory element, stretching the letter of the Geneva Agreement beyond its point of elasticity; they watched with amazement as Diem overcame obstacles long after they had written him off; Diem defeated his rival Hinh, the Sects and even conduced a referendum which ousted Bao Dai. With South Vietnam apparently stabilized, Laos became the focus of US strategic interests in SE Asia.  This tiny, landlocked land of Lotus eaters, whose residents would rather plot than fight, took its effect on foreigners. The French went native and wouldn't train, fight nor refrain from treachery. The Americans factionalized, with the CIA, PEO, and various elements of the State Department conducting covert warfare against the other. As the Eisenhower Administration comes to an end, the North Vietnamese army had begun the construction of the clandestine network of supply trails from North Vietnam through the Laotian Panhandle into South Vietnam. At the same time they are threatening to overrun Laos, threatening Thailand and Cambodia in doing so.    

In one of the least recognized turning points of Vietnam War history, Kennedy steals the 1960 election from Richard Nixon. The players change. Feuding agencies in Laos are brought to heel only after making a bad situation worse. After Nam Tha, Kennedy writes off the Lao's and gives Averill Harriman free rein to negotiate such a disastrous agreement that Sihanouk gives up on U.S. protection and Thailand is prevented from doing so (because there was a more competent ambassador in Bangkok than in Phnom Penh). Henry Cabot Lodge II provides Republican cover as Kennedy's Ambassador/ProConsul in Saigon. That appointment alone should have been enough to send Diem into the arms of the Communists. Lodge executes Hilsman's coup d'etat; Diem is assassinated. Two Patricians have given the President-Patrician manque two more crises for his autobiography, but Kennedy, in turn, is assassinated in one of histories ironic twists. Lyndon Johnson comes in to office, fully aware of the mess he's been handed. (You have just killed off the only two people who could have told us to get out of Vietnam. [4]). Retaining all of Kennedy's advisors in order to share the legacy of blame, he takes the final steps of bombing North Vietnam and sending combat troops. Johnson retained his top advisors and accepts McNamara's overtly no-win policy of gradual military escalation in North and South Vietnam.  

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Let me address some specific statements made by Professor Young. First, let me say that my respect for Aaron Bank is as great as Dan Rather's for Walter Cronkite. But Colonel Bank's outstanding record permits him at least one human error. Colonel, then Captain, Bank, was told by Ho Chi Minh he "needed a copy of your [American] Declaration of Independence. . . . I want to base my government on those noble documents."[5] Every American who had contact with Ho Chi Minh in the 1940's was given the same request or knew someone who had been asked. Ho Chi Minh undoubtedly had a closet full of copies of the American Declaration of Independence. He was a master propagandist who knew the value of a photograph or a document or a word at the right time and place. Propaganda was the best weapon in his arsenal. I'm sure Professor Young is aware of these facts. The question for her would be, did Ho Chi Minh establish a government deriving "just Powers from the Consent of the Governed" or "the Establishment of an Absolute Tyranny?" That is the contradiction between Communism and Nationalism and that is why Professor Young should care, even if Ho Chi Minh didn't draw a distinction. [6]

The second item upon which I would like to take issue with Professor Young is her statement that "the central mechanism of the US policy in the 1940s, as today, the pivot around which all the rest rotates, is the conviction that the particular national interests of the United States are identical with the transcendent, universal interests of humanity. The increasingly evident falsehood of this claim produces what Che Guevara once hoped for, “two, three, many Vietnams.” If the mechanical metaphors "central mechanism" and "pivot" and the vague term "the national interests" are intended to mean "the primary strategic objective" of US foreign policy since 1940, and if the metaphysical phrase "the transcendent, universal interests of humanity" is intended to mean "the primary strategic objectives of other nations", the assertion that the makers of US foreign policy have the conviction that the former is identical to the latter is empirically false.  The primary strategic objective of US foreign policy at all times is US national security, not identification with the "transcendent, universal interests of humanity" (whatever personal meaning, if any, that term may have for its author).  The ideological fantasies of Che Guevara (and the author?) about the Vietnam War and US foreign policy are functionally irrelevant both to the factual history of that war and to the making of that policy.   

I actually have little or no argument with what Professor Herring had to say, although I am still laboring under a grudge because, long ago, he forced me to confront the appellation of "revisionist" even though I maintained that I hadn't changed my mind about the war since I went to Vietnam in 1967. As for his uncertainty whether Eisenhower "was so skillful in covering his tracks or he didn’t know," I suspect that Eisenhower took actions to keep his options open, not moving precipitously in Vietnam and waiting for a moment where an opportunity afforded itself for either a master stroke or an unavoidable response. That moment never came during his administration perhaps because his movements were almost infinitesimally small. My reading of the minutes of the National Security Council meetings during the Eisenhower administration gave me the impression that his senior staff was very competent and properly understood the issues and the risks of each option.  They made cogent arguments, critiqued previous arguments objectively, and stopped debating when the President made his decision.  Several levels below them were a few semi-independent quasi-rogue operators, premiere of which was Edward Landsdale, supported by Randolph Kidder and Kenneth Young, especially at that critical moment at the Y Bridge when the word had already gone out to ditch Diem. It also appears that Phillip Bonsal and an anonymous CIA operative in Laos each, separately, appeared to have private games working at different periods.

I have already given my views on the Kennedy and Johnson period, above. I don't care what JFK might have done, since what he did do was already sufficiently disastrous. The only place I consider myself to be "revisionist" in the study of the Vietnam War is that I have drastically lowered my level of adoration for JFK. I am slowly concluding that while he had and still has great PR, he made some really egregious foreign policy mistakes during his short tenure. Their origin was in his ignorance and inexperience or as a direct result of his hubristic leadership; their military and political significance for the course and final outcome of the war have not been properly acknowledged and examined by historians.  

A particularly interesting point brought up by Professor Schulzinger is that "there was nothing in the period 1941 to 1965 that prepared planners to believe that war in Vietnam would tear American society apart the way it did." What happened in an eight year cycle that started with the optimism of Kennedy's inaugural address and ended with riots at the Chicago Convention with several assassinations between as punctuation? There was something in the air world-wide, from the civil rights and anti-war movements in the United States to the anarchic revolutionaries in Europe to the Cultural Revolution in China. How much might be attributed to a failure by JFK to live up to the words of his inaugural or because it created a revolution of rising expectations? This is a topic far wider than I can get my hands around here, but it is an interesting idea flowing out of this conference. And certainly the domestic turmoil had a major effect on the outcome of the war.

It is highly significant that none of the panelists recognized John Stuart Mill's quotation on war, because that statement is one of the symbols of the Great Cultural Divide in America that began during the US phase of the Second Indochina War.  To this day it continues to echo in that divide.

[1] Document 1, January 1, 1946, Truman FRUS Volume VI, French Indochina 1945, RADIX Press, CD ROM Edition [footnotes deleted]:
"I still do not want to get mixed up in any Indochina decision. It is a matter for post-war.
By the same token, I do not want to get mixed up in any military effort toward the liberation of Indochina from the Japanese.
You can tell Halifax that I made this very clear to Mr. Churchill. From both the military and civil point of view, action at this time is premature. F[RANKLIN] D. R[OOSEVELT]"

[2] Document 161, October 9, 1946, Truman FRUS Volume VIII, French Indochina 1946, RADIX Press, CD ROM Edition
". . . Department would appreciate information on the origins and significance of the use of a gold star in the center of a red field as the Vietnam flag. The flag of the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Union forces in Malaya (an organization undisguisedly controlled by Chinese Communists) was red with three gold stars in the upper right corner. Three stars were used to symbolize the three races in Malaya. Although the MPAJU has been disbanded, the Communist movement in Malaya is still known as the three-star movement.
The official Vietnam explanation of the Vietnam flag would be especially interesting in view of Ho Chi Minh's denial of Communist orientation on the part of his government, since the Vietnam Government must, certainly realize that the use of a gold star on a red field will inevitably lead nationals of other countries to form conclusions which the Vietnam Government would apparently not wish them to form. ACHESON"

[3] Document 1355, May 22, 1954, Eisenhower FRUS Volume XVI, Geneva 1954, RADIX Press, CD ROM Edition
"Tezenas du Montcel . . . .said that it was his impression there was no love lost between Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem and that in the past when Bao Dai had spoken of the possibility of giving Ngo Dinh Diem the post of Prime Minister, it had been with the idea of breaking Ngo Dinh Diem's back ('pour lui casser les reins')."

[4] Cite to be provided

[5] Colonel Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets, Pocket Books, 1987, p. 132

[6] Another reason that Dr. Young declines to draw a distinction is her apparently neo-Marxist view of the principal cause of the Vietnam War: "the necessities of maintaining a global capitalist system." [Teaching the Vietnam War, an essay from Unwinding the Vietnam War, Real Comet Press, 1987, pg. 356-362.] Neo-Marxism is one of the ideological foundations of the academic cult to which she and most US historians are now required to belong.  Its principal dogma is that America is at least as evil as its worst opponent and far more evil than most of its opponents, who are actually its victims.  She and her academic comrades, the victorious veterans of a "Great March Through the Institutions" after the failure of their New Left student cults in the 1960's and 70's, fiercely guard their hierarchic monopoly on most academic positions for the transmission of historical knowledge to captive audiences of ignorant, gullible students. 

"To paraphrase George Orwell, 
some ideas are so stupid that one can only learn about them from professors."
----- Front Page Magazine