The Case for the Vietnam War
by Walt W. Rostow [Times Literary Supplement (London, 9
June 1995); Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly
(Winter 1996-97)]
For seven years, Robert McNamara and I were colleagues in the
Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. It is difficult to describe
the ties that were formed as a result of our facing together the
series of crises that confronted the United States in the 1960s.
On occasion, my advice to the President differed from McNamara's,
most notably on Vietnam and on policy toward Southeast Asia. Such
differences among colleagues were inevitable and proper, however,
and now, thirty years after we worked together, I continue to
hold McNamara's devoted service in high regard.
McNamara's recent book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons
of Vietnam, begins with a dozen or so interesting but terse
pages on the author's background; his schooling; his meeting, and
marriage to, Margaret McKinstry Craig, to whose memory the book
is dedicated; his wartime service as an air corps statistical
control officer; and his postwar service with the Ford Motor
Company. He had been president of that company for only seven
weeks when John Kennedy made him Secretary of Defense in 1961.
The problems of Vietnam from 1961 to early 1968 occupy virtually
the rest of the book. Although the war lasted some eight more
years, the story ends with McNamara's transition to the World
Bank in 1968, as the Tet offensive begins.
In the period 1965-67, Robert McNamara came to believe that
Vietnam was "a problem with no solution." This is the theme of
his book. His frustration arose because the war was fought under
five rules, which, as he saw it, proved incompatible with
victory. These rules were: (1) that Southeast Asia as a whole
must be kept from communist control; (2) that US troops should
not be sent outside the borders of South Vietnam; (3) that the
South Vietnamese should achieve political stability and –
with US tutelage and military aid – learn to defend
themselves; (4) that the United States under no circumstances
should initiate the use of nuclear weapons; and (5) that the
enemy operated under the assumption that it could win "a long
inconclusive war." In the face of these rules, McNamara came to
believe that the United States should withdraw from Vietnam,
because Rule 3 proved impossible of attainment, and the costs of
withdrawal (Rule 1) would be tolerable. To a degree impossible to
determine, his conclusion, by his own account, was influenced
also by the anti-war sentiment in the country which extended to
his immediate family.
As far as the South Vietnamese were concerned, McNamara found
President Ngo Dinh Diem inscrutable; was much disturbed by the
assassination of Diem and his brother and close collaborator, Ngo
Diem Nhu; was rendered almost hopeless by the subsequent period,
when one impotent government followed another; and quoted with
approval a characterization by an American official that
President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky were
"the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel."
On the tolerability of pulling out American forces from Vietnam,
McNamara relies heavily in arguing his conclusion, already
arrived at, on a private memorandum to the President of 12
September 1967, from Richard Helms. This memorandum was recently
declassified and released. Written by "an experienced
intelligence analyst" in the CIA, it addressed the question,
"Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam." The general
conclusion of a 33-page analysis was that the risks of withdrawal
"are probably more limited and controllable than most previous
argument has indicated." The specific conclusion about Southeast
Asia was that "the most direct and immediate [implications] would
be in the region of Southeast Asia itself." The key country would
prove to be Thailand, where the situation would be "perilous and
complicated."
On the US domestic scene, the memorandum said:
The worst potential damage would be of the self-inflicted kind:
internal dissension which would limit our future ability to use
our power and resources wisely and to full effect, and lead to a
loss of confidence by others in the American capacity for
leadership.
Having concluded, then, that the South Vietnamese would be unable
to defend themselves in any time that would not overstretch the
patience of American public opinion, and that the costs of
pulling out were tolerable, McNamara in retrospect feels we ought
to have withdrawn our forces "either in late 1963 amid the
turmoil following Diem's assassination or in late 1964 or early
1965 in the face of increasing political weakness in South
Vietnam." He adds three other dates when a pull-out would have
been possible and desirable: July 1965, December 1965, and
December 1967.
At the end of the book McNamara offers a list of eleven major
failures in Vietnam policy, which follow closely his point of
view in hindsight. There are also eight pages of reflection on
post-Cold War military policy, and a final word on Vietnam, the
heart of which is:
Although we sought to do the right thing – and believed we
were doing the right thing – in my judgment, hindsight
proves us wrong. We both overestimated the effect of South
Vietnam's loss on the security of the West and failed to adhere
to the fundamental principle that, in the final analysis, if the
South Vietnamese were to be saved, they had to win the war
themselves.
This is as accurate a statement as I can muster of the author's
present position.
McNamara's argument depends heavily on his view of the importance
of Asia to the United States, and the extent to which withdrawal
from Vietnam would affect the balance of power in Asia. At one
point, referring to the human and material costs of the war, he
asks:
Were such high costs justified?
Dean Rusk, Walter Rostow, Lee Kwan Yew, and many other
geopoliticians across the globe to this day answer yes. They
conclude that without US intervention in Vietnam, communist
hegemony – both Soviet and Chinese – would have
spread farther through South and East Asia to include control of
Indonesia, Thailand, and possibly India. Some would go further
and say that the USSR would have been led to take greater risks
to extend its influence elsewhere in the world, particularly in
the Middle East, where it might well have sought control of the
oil-producing nations. They might be correct, but I seriously
question such judgments.
What these "geopoliticians" thought did not matter to the
outcome. What Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson
thought did matter. Each, from a different experience and
perspective, had thought deeply about Asia; and they had arrived
at similar conclusions about the balance of power in that
continent.
Eisenhower had served in the Philippines on General MacArthur's
staff. His job required him to think about the strategic shape of
Asia. It was he who founded in 1954 the South-East Asia Treaty
Organization (SEATO) as a bipartisan effort in the wake of the
Korean War, designed to hold the balance of power in Southeast
Asia as it was held in Northeast Asia by the outcome of the
Korean War. It was he who first applied the phrase "domino
theory" to the American engagement in what was French Indo-China.
The day before Kennedy's Inaugural, he laid before the new
President and his major aides (Rusk, McNamara, and Dillon) the
two serious problems he most wished them to understand: the
balance of payments issue and Laos. Although there are several
versions of what Eisenhower said about Laos, the evidence, on
balance, is that he thought it likely that Kennedy would have to
invoke the SEATO Treaty and put troops into Laos – if
possible, with others, if necessary, alone. Eisenhower, from 1961
to 1968, gave unfailing support to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson
on Southeast Asia.
Kennedy's experience of Asia was quite different, although it
brought him to similar conclusions. As a member of Congress, in
the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, he was focused
on the Soviet threat in Europe, and a repetition by Stalin of
Hitler's attack on Western Europe. He did not vote for Truman's
Point Four technical assistance program for the developing
countries.
In 1951, when it was clear that the communist attack in Korea was
not a feint for an attack on Western Europe, and the truce
negotiations had begun at Panmunjom, Kennedy went with members of
his family on a tour of the Middle East, India, and the Far East,
including Vietnam. He returned convinced that the communist
threat would come mainly in the underdeveloped regions. He told
his colleagues in the House of Representatives that he had been
wrong on Point Four and subsequently supported it. And, in time,
he believed China would succeed the Soviet Union as the main
threat. He led support in the Senate during 1958 for India's
Second Five-Year Plan with Senator John Sherman Cooper, a
Republican Senator from Kentucky, who had also been Ambassador in
India. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he created a
special team to work in support of India over the concurrent
clash in Ladakh, saying that in the long run this conflict might
well be more important than the confrontation with the Soviet
Union in the Caribbean.
All this background bears on the much-debated question of whether
or not Kennedy would have ended US military involvement in
Vietnam. He was clearly frustrated by the political performance
of Diem and Nhu. On the other hand, he was against American
encouragement of a coup, and was appalled when Diem and Nhu were
killed in the coup that took place. That the two were killed in
an American-made armored troop-carrier added to his unhappiness.
McNamara writes that it is "highly probable" that Kennedy would
have pulled US forces out of Vietnam. But in the autumn of 1963,
Kennedy said this to Walter Cronkite, harking back to his Asian
trip of 1951:
Our best judgment is that he [Diem] can't be successful on this
basis. We hope that he comes to see that, but in the final
analysis it is the people and the government [of South Vietnam]
itself who have to win or lose this struggle. All we can do is
help, and we are making it very clear, but I don't agree with
those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake.
I know people don't like Americans to be engaged in this kind of
an effort. Forty-seven Americans have been killed in combat with
the enemy, but this is a very important struggle even though it
is far away.
We ... made this effort to defend Europe. Now Europe is quite
secure. We also have to participate – we may not like it
– in the defense of Asia.
A week later, in a similar interview with David Brinkley, he was
asked:
"Mr. President, have you had any reason to doubt this so-called
domino theory, that if South Vietnam falls, the rest of
Southeast Asia will go behind it?"
"No, I believe it. I believe it. I think that the struggle is
close enough. China is so large, looms so high just beyond the
frontiers, that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give
them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on
Malaya, but would also give the impression that the wave of the
future in Southeast Asia was China and the communists. So I
believe it."
The main weight of the war fell, of course, on President Johnson.
His view of Asia came out of a quite different background. He had
been briefly in Australia during the Second World War, and this
experience led to a life-long sympathy and affection for that
country. In the late 1950s, his view of Asia as a whole
crystallized. The turning point was the question of statehood for
Hawaii. Johnson spoke of this matter during a speech at the
East-West Center in Honolulu on 18 October 1966:
My forebears came from Britain, Ireland, and Germany. People in
my section of the country regarded Asia as totally alien in
spirit as well as nationality .... We therefore looked away from
the Pacific, away from its hopes as well as away from its great
crises. Even the wars that many of us fought here were often
[fought] with leftovers of preparedness, and they did not heal
our blindness .... One consequence of that blindness was that
Hawaii was denied its rightful part in our Union of States for
many, many years. Frankly, for two decades I opposed its
admission as a State, until at last the undeniable evidence of
history, as well as the irresistible persuasiveness of Jack Burns
[the non-voting Hawaiian delegate to the Congress], removed the
scales from my eyes. Then I began to work and fight for Hawaiian
statehood. And I hold that to be one of the proudest achievements
of my twenty-five years in Congress.
Later in the speech, he referred to Hawaii as "a model of how men
and women of different races and different cultures can come and
live and work together; to respect each other in freedom and in
hope." The period of an intense and ultimately successful
struggle for Hawaiian statehood (achieved in 1959) coincided with
the emergence of Johnson as an effective civil rights leader in
the Senate – with his critical role in the message of the
1957 legislation, the first formal civil rights action by the
Congress since the Civil War. The link in his mind between his
positions in civil rights and on Asia remained throughout his
life.
In May 1961, Johnson, as Vice President, was plunged still more
deeply into the Asian Scene. At Kennedy's request, he visited
South Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, India, and
Pakistan. Johnson's recommendation to Kennedy was to create an
organization of the free nations of the Pacific and Asia which
would not only deal with defense issues but issues of social
justice, housing, land reform: "The greatest danger Southeast
Asia offers to nations like the United States is not the
momentary threat of communism itself, rather that danger stems
from hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease." It was this line
of thought which led Johnson as President to deliver on 7 April
1965 his speech at John Hopkins University, from which the Asian
Development Bank arose.
But a great deal was going on in Asia in 1964-65 which McNamara
does not detail. Sukarno left the United Nations on 8 January
1965, and allied with Hanoi and Peking. Within Indonesia, he
worked closely with Aidit, head of that country's communist
party. He launched the confrontation with Malaysia just as the
first North Vietnamese regulars infiltrated South Vietnam. Some
80 ships of the British Commonwealth were mobilized to defend
Malaysia. As McNamara said in a joint memorandum to the President
with McGeorge Bundy on 27 January 1965: "The underlying
difficulties in Saigon arise from the spreading conviction that
the future is without hope for anti-communists." From one end of
Asia to the other, the local people knew that a dangerous crisis
was taking place in 1965 which could go one way or the other.
This was the setting in which McNamara and Bundy wrote their
famous "Fork in the Road" memorandum at the end of January 1965.
This memorandum told President Johnson that he had to choose
between sending more troops to Vietnam or "negotiations aimed at
salvaging what little can be preserved with no further addition
to our present military risk." Both favored the first course. The
memorandum played a significant role in President Johnson's
reluctant decision in early 1965 to commit a substantial number
of American troops to South Vietnam. It was a late and painful
decision to match the escalating activity of the North Vietnamese
regulars and Sukarno, an escalation which was, in turn, an
opportunistic but understandable response to the disarray of
South Vietnamese politics in the wake of the assassination of
Diem and Nhu.
Is it credible that the United States would have withdrawn in the
aftermath of a coup and assassination which were seen by the
world to have been carried out with its acquiescence? Is it
credible that any US President would not respond to the communist
"nutcracker" of 1965: the simultaneous entrance of North
Vietnamese regulars into South Vietnam and the enterprise of
Sukarno in joining the supposed communist wave of the future is
Asia? I think not.
And so in Vietnam, General Westmoreland set about the slow work
of building up an adequate logistical base, dealing with the
communist forces as he found them and as they were introduced and
supplied via the Ho Chi Minh trails in Laos. By the end of 1965,
he had achieved a stalemate; about a million men, women, and
children in 1966 were added to those under the protection of the
Vietnamese government. And this positive trend continued for most
of 1967. The plan for the Tet offensive of 1968, hatched in the
summer months of 1967, was Hanoi's reaction to the slowly eroding
position in the South.
On 29 September 1967, President Johnson replied in San Antonio
both to McNamara and to the "experienced intelligence analyst"
who had written the memorandum sent to him a few weeks earlier by
Richard Helms, the memorandum whose latter-day release made such
a profound impression on McNamara:
I cannot tell you tonight as your President – with
certainty – that a communist conquest of South Vietnam
would be followed by a communist conquest of Southeast Asia. But
I do know there are North Vietnamese troops in Laos. I do know
that there are North Vietnamese trained guerrillas tonight in
Northeast Thailand. I do know that there are communist-supported
guerrilla forces operating in Burma. And a communist coup was
barely averted in Indonesia, the fifth largest nation in the
world.
So your American President cannot tell you with certainty that a
Southeast Asia dominated by communist power would bring a third
world war much closer to terrible reality. One could hope that
this would not be so.
But all that we have learned in this tragic century strongly
suggests to me that it would be so. As President of the United
States, I am not prepared to gamble on the chance that it is not
so. I am not prepared to risk the security – indeed, the
survival – of this American Nation on mere hope and wishful
thinking. I am convinced that by seeing this struggle through
now, we are greatly reducing the chances of a much larger war
– perhaps a nuclear war. I would rather stand in Vietnam,
in our time, and by meeting this danger now, and facing up to it,
thereby reduce the danger for our children and for our
grandchildren.
There is no doubt President Johnson was frustrated by his
inability to bring the war to a quick conclusion. But he was
heartened by the progress of the rest of Asia behind the barrier
created by South Vietnam and her allies who were "holding
aggression at bay."
From the beginning to the end of his time as President, Johnson
was governed by the conclusion he had reached in the late 1950s;
namely that Asia – all of Asia – mattered greatly to
the future of America and was worth fighting for and nurturing.
When he went through Asia for three weeks at the end of 1966, he
spoke at least 90 percent of the time about the need for Asia to
unite and organize, not about the struggle in Vietnam.
In the end, Johnson left for his successor a good post-Tet
situation in the field, both military and political, but a
difficult political situation at home. He met Thieu in Honolulu
after he had announced, on 31 March, that he would not run in
1968. He refused Thieu's offer to put in the joint
communiqué that American forces would be reduced over the
next year. He chose to leave that decision to his successor.
The Malaysian foreign minister, speaking retrospectively in
Boston on 11 November 1981, first recalled the early days of the
Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) between 1968 and
1975:
They were very useful years to further bind the member countries
together .... In 1975 North Vietnamese tanks rolled past Danang,
Cam Ranh Bay, and Tan Son Nhut into Saigon. The United States
withdrew their last soldiers from Vietnam, and the worst of
ASEAN's fears which underscored the Bangkok Declaration of 1967
came to pass. But ASEAN by then had seven solid years of living
in neighborly cooperation. Call it foresight, or what you will,
the fact remains that with ASEAN solidarity there were no falling
dominoes in Southeast Asia following the fall of Saigon to the
communists, and the United States withdrawal from Southeast Asia.
Both the NICs (New Industrial Countries) and the ASEAN members
roughly quadrupled their real GNP between 1960 and 1981. They
were, socially and politically as well as economically, quite
different countries than they had been when Southeast Asia went
through the crisis of 1965. McNamara does not deal with the
importance of Southeast Asia or its dynamics in these critical
years.
Another weakness of McNamara's book is his failure to discuss
systematically the gift of sanctuary which rendered the war
inevitably "long and inconclusive." There have been no examples
in which a guerrilla war (or a war dependent on external supply)
has been won in which one side was granted sanctuary by the
other. The guerrilla wars in the Philippines under Magsaysay and
the British effort in Malaysia were successful because one was a
group of islands, while the other had a narrow neck of land to
the north and sea supply for the guerrillas in Malaysia was
denied. On the other hand, Napoleon met his first setback in the
Peninsular War when the British helped the guerrillas; the
guerrillas in Algeria were helped through Morocco and Tunisia;
and the United States and others helped the Afghan defenders
against the Russians through Pakistan.
South Vietnam was explicitly protected, by the Laos Accords of
1962, from the North Vietnamese transiting of Laos and Cambodia,
via the Ho Chi Minh Trails and the Cambodian ports. This was not
an understanding whispered in the corridors of the Palais des
Nations, but a formal agreement between Ambassador Pushkin of the
Soviet Union and Averell Harriman, who negotiated the treaty. It
called for the Soviet Union to guarantee that no third party be
transited by Hanoi in supply to the guerrillas in the South.
The North Vietnamese did not obey the Laos Accords for a single
day after they came into force in early October 1962, nor did the
Soviet government ever act on its freely taken responsibilities.
October 1962 was the month of the Cuban missile crisis; and it
led to a visit to Washington by Anastas Mikoyan, fresh from a
rather miserable experience in Havana. There were those who urged
President Kennedy to confront the Soviet Union immediately over
its failure to act on its Laos Treaty commitments. They were
turned down. It was not difficult to explain President Kennedy's
reluctance to act in the wake of the traumatic confrontation in
the Caribbean; but the alternative put to President Kennedy was
to act decisively now or face a crisis "in a waning situation."
General Maxwell Taylor had all this in mind when he sent a long
cable at the end of 1964 that included this passage:
[Hanoi] enjoys the priceless asset of a protected logistic
sanctuary in the DRV and in Laos. I do not recall in history a
successful anti-guerrilla campaign with less than a 10 to 1
numerical superiority over the guerrillas and without the
elimination of assistance from outside the country.
Senator John Stennis echoed this point in August 1967: "The
question is growing in the Congress as to whether it is wise to
send more men if we are going to just leave them at the mercy of
the guerrilla war without trying to cut off the enemy's supplies
more effectively."
And McNamara himself quotes General DuPuy, General Westmoreland's
planner, in a 1986 interview: "It turned out that [search and
destroy] was a faulty concept, given the sanctuaries, given the
fact that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was never closed. It was a losing
concept of operation." Thus, the sanctuary granted Hanoi was
historically incompatible with American and South Vietnamese
victory in a time-span consistent with American patience as a
nation; and the bombing of the supply trails or other devices to
reduce the flow from North Vietnam were demonstrably inadequate.
Those who advocated blocking the trails on the ground believed
that action would force a concentration of North Vietnamese
troops to keep the trails open, and two or three reinforced US
divisions together with air supremacy could deal with them. This
happened, incidentally, at Khe Sanh, where Hanoi concentrated
during the Tet offensive several divisions (some think five)
which were defeated by some 6000 US and Vietnamese forces plus
air power intelligently directed by General Momyer. This reversed
at Khe Sanh the normal proportions of guerrillas versus the
defending force.
This proposal was definitively turned down on 27 April 1967 by
President Johnson and Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, presumably
on the grounds that any movement of American troops to block
infiltration on the trails would bring the Russians and Chinese
into the war.
On this matter General William Westmoreland (whom McNamara
quotes) may have the last word:
The geographic restraints on the ground war were very real, and
understandable.
Yet if you'll look at the situation as it's turned out, we
basically attained our strategic objectives. We stopped the flow
of communism .... I conclude that by strength, awkwardness, and
good luck, most of our strategic objectives have been reached. I
also say that we have to give President Johnson credit for not
allowing the war to expand geographically ... he was quite
fearful that this was going to escalate into a world war. One of
his main strategic objectives was to confine the war. He did not
want it to spread .... Having said that, that's not the way I
felt at the time. I felt that our hands were tied.
Historians will have to decide in the light of President
Johnson's conclusion at San Antonio whether that price was worth
paying. Clearly, if the alternative might have been a larger war
or the risk of nuclear war, it was worth paying. In any case,
Johnson was following the rules governing the policy of
containment: block the extension of communist rule while
minimizing the likelihood of nuclear war. McNamara refers to, but
does not discuss, this central issue.
Considering that he is writing in the 1990s, McNamara's view of
the Vietnamese is remarkably static. It stops in early 1968, if
not earlier. In fact, the whole period 1954-75 was highly dynamic
in South Vietnam. Vietnam was an underdeveloped, post-colonial
country. Like Syngman Rhee in Korea, its first nationalist ruler
earned his legitimacy by having nothing to do with the occupying
power. Diem was also a mandarin to whom the sharing of power
outside the family was extremely awkward. Each president was
followed by a series of weak rulers, and then their countries
found relative stability with men of the next generation –
in Korea under Park, in Vietnam under Thieu and Ky from 1965.
Starting in September 1966, a political process was started. A
Constituent Assembly was elected to draft a constitution. Despite
communist intimidation, 81 percent of the population voted, out
of 5.3 million registered. On 3 September 1967, a well-inspected
presidential election was held. The Thieu-Ky ticket won with 34.8
percent of the votes. Typical of an underdeveloped country, there
were ten civilian candidates. Registration had increased 11
percent since the vote of the previous year. Fifty-seven percent
of the population of the country of voting age took part.
Ambassador Dobrynin of the Soviet Union was almost precisely
accurate when he said before the election that the Popular Front
candidate commended by the communists would get 16 percent of the
vote. The rest were explicitly anti-communist.
The Tet offensive is not dealt with in McNamara's book, except
for one reference at the end to the attack on the US Embassy
compound. Thieu was in the Delta when the Tet offensive struck
late in January 1968; but Ky and Robert Komer, Westmoreland's
deputy for civilian affairs, led in the cleanup of Saigon where
many refugees congregated. American and Vietnamese marines
cleared Hue, where the North Vietnamese had established a
foothold in the Citadel. And most remarkable of all, it was the
local police and militia that picked up the communist forces
which attacked 34 of the 44 provincial capitals, five of the six
autonomous cities, 71 of 242 district capitals, and 50 hamlets.
Thus the communists failed to produce the uprising they expected.
Thieu mobilized an additional 122,000 men for the armed forces in
the first half of 1968. The South Vietnamese remained steady. Tet
was an utter military and political defeat for the communists in
Vietnam, yet a political disaster in the United States. The
conventional American view was that the South Vietnamese
government's military, economic, and social program was set back
by some years.
This program had resulted in a revolution in education, where
school enrollment increased massively, for example, from 410,000
to 2.7 million in primary education, starting in 1954. There were
similar advances made over the same period in agriculture, trade,
and industry. The South Vietnam of 1969 was not the same country
it was in 1954, 1961, or even 1967. I have no doubt that it would
have followed the development path of South Korea if it had not
been caught up in a difficult war and then communist rule.
As for the military, it is important to understand that neither
North nor South Vietnam produced any armaments at all.
Essentially, the war was fought with weapons imported into
Vietnam by their respective allies. As time passed, the average
skill of the Vietnamese divisions improved, although they
continued to vary greatly according to their commanding officers.
This uneven but improving force, under General Abrams' tutelage,
was tested in battle with the North Vietnamese in 1972. American
ground forces had been withdrawn, leaving only air and naval
units still in support of the South Vietnamese. The North
Vietnamese were generously supported by Soviet tanks and
artillery superior to those available to the South Vietnamese, as
well as many anti-aircraft guns. It was in the context of this
battle that President Nixon used B-52s against Hanoi, mined the
harbor at Haiphong, and attacked the railway lines leading to
China from Hanoi. The upshot was a military victory on the ground
for the South Vietnamese.
In 1973, an accord was negotiated between North and South
Vietnam. The North licked its wounds, paved the supply trails
through Laos, and watched the American air and naval units
withdraw on President Nixon's promise of $2.2 billion dollars in
military aid to complete the process of Vietnamization of the
South Vietnam military.
Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore was a kind of Greek chorus for the
Asians throughout this period. In 1965, when all of Southeast
Asia was menaced, he had remarked that "We may all go through the
mincing machine." In 1966, he said to a group of students after
noting that the Americans were buying time for a united Asia to
emerge: "If we just sit down and believe people are going to buy
time forever after for us, then we deserve to perish." In 1967,
ASEAN was founded. In April 1973, at the National Press Club, Lee
Kwan Yew laid out the alternatives in the following terms:
At the risk of being proved wrong, there are three scenarios I
envisage as a result of the Paris agreement. First ... the
provisions are in the main honored .... In this case, the contest
will become primarily political. The South Vietnamese government
stands a very fair chance in such a contest. Second, an all-out
offensive by both the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong as soon
as they believe they are strong enough to overwhelm the armed
forces of the South Vietnamese government .... Third, the North
Vietnamese, to avoid unnecessary risks, ostensibly honor the
Paris agreement. However, they will leave it to the Vietcong,
with North Vietnamese infiltrators and fresh military supplies to
augment their strength, to make a bid for power in the South ....
But, if the worst does happen, and the Vietcong, with the help of
the North Vietnamese, do gain control over the South in the
middle 1970s, it does not necessarily follow that the rest of
Southeast Asia will go communist. The morale of the other peoples
of Southeast Asia is now very different from what it was after
Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Thais are now more prepared
psychologically to face up to such a situation .... A crucial
factor is whether they believe they can depend on American
military and economic aid, as spelled out under the Guam
doctrine.
For reasons which no one could have predicted in the spring of
1973, before Watergate had progressively undermined Nixon's
authority and legitimacy, it was Lee's second scenario that came
to pass in the mid-1970s. The simple fact is that, as of April
1975, the American public, with the China détente
established, was prepared to end its involvement with Vietnam;
and Southeast Asia was prepared to stand on its own feet. Second,
the South Vietnamese did all that could be expected of them in
the post-Diem period; and as time passes, they will deserve
better of history than McNamara allows.
One returns to the wild card in this story: the manner in which
the United States, including McNamara's own family, was driven
into painful controversy over the war. And that is a part of the
equation that all Americans must weigh for themselves. In fact,
only McNamara can weigh all the factors which have driven him
into the position that, whatever the cost, the United States
should have withdrawn its troops from Vietnam.
With the exception of the Second World War, every conflict in
which Americans have been engaged has involved public
controversy. And this is to their credit, for who wants war? In
the Revolutionary War, perhaps one-third of the people wanted
independence; one third were pro-British; and one-third were
simply out to make a fast buck by selling supplies to the
Continental Army. In the war of 1812, the New England states,
after the Hartford Convention, passed a resolution calling for
withdrawal from the union rather than joining in the war against
Canada. The Mexican War stirred great controversy in the United
States. The Civil War split the nation from top to bottom. The
Spanish-American War was followed by the unpopular conflict with
the Philippine guerrillas. The First World War, like the Civil
War, touched off draft riots. The Korean War left Truman more
unpopular than either Nixon at the nadir of his fortunes, or
Lyndon Johnson at his lowest point in the polls.
No one has promised that American independence itself, or
America's role as a bastion for those who believe deeply in
democracy, could be achieved without pain or loss or controversy.
The pain, loss, and controversy resulting from Vietnam were
accepted for ten years by the American people. That acceptance
held the line so that a free Asia could survive and grow; for, in
the end, the war and the treaty which led to it were about who
would control the balance of power in Asia, an issue which was
evidently at stake in the Asian crisis of 1965 and thereafter.
Those who died or were wounded in Vietnam or are veterans of that
conflict were not involved in a pointless war.
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