System the Solution? 1 a Review Essay

System the Solution? 1 A Review Essay

Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979) 374 pp.

R. N.: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) 1090 pp.

William Shawcross, Sideshow (New York, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1979) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 467 pp. The task of putting the United States’ involvement in Vietnam in perspective is an enormous one. While no definitive work on the subject is likely to appear for many years, individual books can make important contributions to our understand- ing of specific aspects of the conflict, and several that do so have recently appeared. The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, by Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, focuses mainly on the Kennedy and Johnson Administra- tions; it views the war as the logical outcome of American foreign policy principles and procedures during the 1950s and 1960s. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon has received less attention than it deserves; it shows why the war continued from 1969 through 1973. Sideshow, by William Shawcross, deals brilliantly with the new front which Nixon and Henry Kissinger opened in Cambodia. Added to earlier works, these books help to form a coherent picture of the origins and consequences of the American involvement in Indochina. Leslie Gelb views Vietnam from a unique perspective. A Defense Depart- ment official under Robert McNamara, he also directed the Pentagon Papers study which McNamara commissioned shortly before leaving office. His book has been long awaited; his thesis, which he summarized in an article in 1971,’ is provocative and helpful. On the surface, as the authors admit from the outset, their thesis that ”the system worked” seems ridiculous; the American involvement was “obviously a failure.” The book is not a book about a failure because it is not exactly a book about the American involvement in Vietnam. It is, in fact, a book about the system-the American government and its views and decisions on Vietnam from the Roosevelt through the Johnson Administrations. By concentrating on Washington rather than

1. Leslie Gelb, ”Vietnam: The System Worked”, Foreign Policy, (Summer 1971), pp. 140-173.

David E. Kaiser is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University.

199 International Security I 200

Vietnam, the authors can argue that the system did, in some sense, work. By this they mean two different things: first, that the various decisions which took America into Vietnam were made consciously, by the highest authority, on the basis of relatively accurate information about the chances for victory, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 and with due regard for existing political constraints; and second, that “the decision-making system . . . did achieve its stated purpose of preventing a communist victory in Vietnam until the domestic balance of opinion shifted and Congress decided to reduce support to Saigon in 1974-75” (The Irony of Vietnam, p. 24). The first of these propositions is useful, but oversimplified; the second is much more questionable, and an analysis of it suggests various ways in which the system did not work. In arguing that the system worked, Gelb and Betts make clear that they are arguing against various other simplistic explanations of America’s involvement in Vietnam. These include the idea that the presidents involved merely wished to avoid the responsibility of losing South Vietnam, the belief that a series of small steps led the United States into a quagmire, and the idea that military and civilian bureaucracies dragged presidents into the war by lying. Here Gelb and Betts have performed a service; these are rationali- zations which many Americans have found it comforting to believe. When the enormity of what we had done became apparent in the late 1960s, many concluded that the nation as a whole could not have consented to such a catastrophe. But it did consent; the ideas that led to U.S. involvement had originated decades earlier. In taking the United States into Vietnam during the 1960s, the system acted according to generally shared principles of Amer- ican foreign policy. In this sense, Gelb and Betts are right to deny it a crucial, autonomous role. The road that led America into Vietnam began with the Truman Doctrine; the specific precedent for such a commitment was the Korean War. Truman’s decision to intervene there did not reflect the strategic significance of South Korea; indeed, the American military had discounted any such significance in previous studies.2 It reflected instead a decision to regard the entire world as a battleground between communism and the free world, in which any communist challenge had to be met to prevent further deterioration elsewhere. McCarthyism and the general domestic political climate rapidly turned these views into an overwhelming consensus. Thus in early 1955 the

2. See Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past (New York, 1973), op. 52-87. Was the System the Solution? I 201

Formosa Resolution, committing the United States to defend Chiang Kai- shek, passed the Senate with only three dissenting votes. One of these dissenters, Wayne Morse, cast one of the two dissenting votes against the

Tonkin Gulf resolution nine years later. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 By 1954, then, when the United States first became directly involved in Indochina, almost the entire political and national security leadership agreed on the need to prevent the loss of further territory to communism. Such views prevailed until the late 1960s, when the war in Vietnam showed where they could lead. Gelb and Betts are right to stress the prevalence of these views in their chapter, ”National Security Goals and Stakes”; it is clear from their presentation that officials from the Truman through the Johnson Administrations felt that the fall of South Vietnam to communism would have serious consequences, principally through the realization of the domino theory. They did not act deviously or insincerely; they felt that what they were doing was right. Involvement in Vietnam was a logical, if not perhaps inevitable consequence of these beliefs. Congress and the press generally backed American support of South Viet- nam beginning in 1954, and according to polls, the American people shared these views. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson worried that the ”loss” of South Vietnam would seriously weaken their presidencies, and they were probably right. Even Eisenhower, as Gelb and Betts pointed out, seems to have been influenced in 1954 by fears of seeming to sell out North Vietnam to communism. Gelb and Betts, then, stress that prevailing political attitudes combined with the real views of presidents, cabinet members, and bureaucrats to favor involvement in Vietnam. Here, however, the first major problem with their thesis emerges. Political pressures on different presidents varied for very specific reasons; Gelb and Betts’ model, which tends to view the period 1954-68 as a unit, inevitably obscures some of these differences. More importantly, the role of domestic politics was always more complicated than they suggest. Presidents from 1954 on knew that the loss of South Vietnam would be a major political debit, but they also knew that involvement in a long land war in Asia could also have serious consequences. Putting these additional aspects of the situation together and re-examining some of the most important decisions of the war, one begins to ask whether involvement was in fact so inevitable after all. In particular, there is, of course, one dramatic episode in Vietnam in which the United States did not intervene: in early 1954, when the French were International Security I 202

threatened with defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower refrained from undertaking military action despite some pressure fro’m within his administration. When Admiral Radford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recom- mended air strikes to bail the French out of Dien Bien Phu, Eisenhower Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 brought Dulles and Radford together with Congressional leaders-including Democrats, who it is worth noting, did not control Congress at that time- to discuss the proposal. At the meeting, Radford had to admit that General Ridgeway, the Army Chief of Staff, opposed intervention; the consensus which emerged made American intervention contingent on help from Amer- ica’s allies, including Britain. Such help was not forthcoming, and the administration shelved its plans for intervention. It subsequently took advantage of the Geneva Peace accords to build up a friendly government in South Vietnam. As Gelb and Betts admit, the whole episode can be viewed in different ways. The ambiguity of Eisenhower’s behavior is characteristic of his whole brilliant political career. But the impression they leave is that he did not really shrink from intervention, and that he was truly restrained by British hesitation and the lukewarm attitude of Congress. Obviously another interpretation is possible: that Ike, well aware of the serious domestic consequences of intervention, knowingly accepted limitations on American action which inevitably precluded it. The emphasis on British support is hardly characteristic of American policy in Asia. Eisenhower had been elected less than two years earlier largely because of dissatisfaction with the Korean war, and he had made good on his pledge to end that conflict in the previous summer. Another war was the last thing he needed, and he did not get it. While Gelb and Betts recognize that this interpretation is possible, their analysis does not favor it. Certainly their statement that Eisenhower’s policy from March through July 1954 “held lessons that were to be remembered by the generation of political leaders to come,” is hard to understand. (The Irony of Vietnam, p. 56). By the time John Kennedy took office in 1961, on the other hand, the political climate was far different. The Korean War had faded from memory; Castro’s takeover in Cuba was news. Kennedy had made the question of resistance to communism around the world the major issue of the 1960 campaign; once in office, he was eager to find a new strategy to defeat guerilla warfare. While the Bay of Pigs made him more skeptical about certain forms of intervention, it did not alter his goals. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which emphasizes these factors and shows how those with Was the System the Solution? 1 203

alternative views, such as Chester Bowles, quickly lost favor under Kennedy, does much more to explain the decision to increase the American commitment to 10,000 advisers in late 1961 than Gelb and Betts do. Johnson, too, faced the decision to bomb North Vietnam and introduce ground troops in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 1965 from a particular perspective: determined to pass the most sweeping legislative program since FDR, he thought-perhaps rightly-that the loss of South Vietnam would cripple him in Congress. Even though prevalent foreign policy thinking and domestic politics both favored support of South Vietnam in principle throughout the 1950s and 1960s, closer analyses of various key decisions suggests that much more specific factors influenced decisions for or against intervention. Such oversimplification is a flaw in Gelb and Batts’ presentation but it does not necessarily contradict the thrust of their argument. The system, one might argue, consistently favored an American commitment to Vietnam; while Eisenhower outmaneuvered the system with laudable skill, Kennedy and Johnson swam with the tide. The real failings of Gelb and Betts’ book lie elsewhere. To say that “the system worked” does, as they admit in their opening sentence, strike any intelligent reader as ridiculous, and they nail their own coffin shut in the next sentence by conceding, ”America’s war in Vietnam was obviously a failure.” (The Zrony of Vietnam, p. 1).What they mean by saying that the system worked is merely that it functioned in the manner in which it was designed to work. To paraphrase them, U.S. leaders did what they wanted to do, they realized what they were doing, they understood what was happening, and they told Congress and the American people the truth. But all this is only partially true, and above all, it ignores the most basic manner in which the system failed to work. It never succeeded in recognizing the contradiction between America’s aims and the reality of Vietnam. The United States did not fail to establish a stable, non-communist South Vietnam because it lacked the will to do so; it failed because this goal was impossible to achieve. America’s huge commitment of men, money, and materiel wreaked enormous damage all over Indochina, but did not prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. This was not altogether the fault of the system; a widely held view of America’s role in the world was largely responsible. But it is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of the system than its failure ever to recognize and act upon this fact. It is not enough to say, as Gelb and Betts do, that American policy succeeded until 1975 because South Vietnam remained out of communist hands. No president could commit America to an endless war; the United States International Security I 204

had to achieve a stable settlement of the conflict on its terms, analogous at the very least to the truce in Korea in 1953. Within this framework, America’s objectives in Vietnam went through several phases. In 1954, the United States decided to build up a friendly government in South Vietnam under Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. In late 1963, when Diem had obviously proved incapable of this task, the U.S. orchestrated his overthrow. Two years later, with South Vietnam clearly on the point of collapse, Washington decided on a long-term military commitment designed either to defeat the communist forces in South Vietnam or to force them to negotiate a settlement that would leave a non-communist government in control. America’s commitment to this goal wavered in the spring of 1968, but one year later, a new administration decided to withdraw ground forces slowly while making the Thieu regime strong enough to defend itself. None of these strategies could work; each failed in turn. The crucial question is why American policymakers never recognized and acted upon these facts. After the Geneva conference of 1954 recognized Ho Chi Minh’s control of North Vietnam while scheduling elections for the South, the American government, led by John Foster Dulles, decided to build a pro-American regime on the bones of the old French puppet government led by the Emperor Bao Dai. Ngo Dinh Diem, who had become Prime Minister of that government during the Geneva conference and who was already known to various American officials, became the center of America’s hopes; within a few years, he was eulogized by American politicians as a miracle worker who had saved South Vietnam for freedom. But from the beginning, control of South Viet- nam essentially meant two things-control of Saigon and control of the South Vietnamese army. Diem’s reign began as it ended, with a year of Byzantine maneuverings among sects and private armies. This time he emerged vic- torious, but the process was aptly characterized by Chester Cooper’s 1970 book, The Lost Crusade, as the “birth of a non-nation.” Diem reserved virtually all power for his family and alienated most of the potential ruling class of South Vietnam. He did virtually nothing to stop the growth of communist support in the countryside. Suddenly, in the fall of 1961, President Kennedy discovered that South Vietnam was near collapse. Resisting recommenda- tions for the immediate introduction of American combat troops, he sent 10,000 advisors instead. It took Kennedy over a year to realize that Diem was unable to deal with the political and military problems he faced. The system was partly responsible; Halberstam has detailed how the American military and the American Was the System the Solution? I 205

Embassy in Saigon systematically lied about the progress of the war during 1962 and 1963. By the fall of 1963, however, reality was intruding upon deliberations in Washington. America had proclaimed the defense of South Vietnam to be important to the defense of the free world, yet South Vietnam Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 was collapsing. Such was the strength of the cold war world view, however, that there was no re-evaluation of basic American objectives; debate centered on the relative importance of the political and military aspects of the war, and on Diem’s ability to.do the job. In retrospect, the opportunity to use Diem’s incompetence as an excuse to disengage seems appealing; Diem, in fact, had even begun contacts with Hanoi. Kennedy did not take this opportunity. While stating suggestively in September 1963 that “in the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it,” he allowed the coup that overthrew Diem to take place. Although he did not live to see it, this step vastly increased direct American responsibility in Vietnam. There is evidence, developed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in his recent biography of Robert Kennedy, and also cited by Gelb and Betts, that Kennedy was seriously considering withdrawal from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. Perhaps he was; perhaps, too, he could have structured his election campaign so as to secure the endorsement of the American people for such a step. Had he withdrawn in early 1965, however, it might well have crippled his Presidency. By drawing on press accounts and other sources, Schlesinger shows how unprepared the United States was for this move in 1964.3 Had John F. Kennedy lived, reality might have induced him to abandon Vietnam. With his death, the benefits of his expensive education were lost. By the summer of 1965, Lyndon Johnson had to deal with the impending collapse of South Vietnam. He was not misled as to the difficulty of the task before him. In July 1965, Gelb and Betts write, the Defense Department estimated what would be necessary to win the war in Vietnam. This exercise, they mistakenly write, was ”unique” during the war; as we shall see, the Nixon Administration did something quite similar in early 1969. They regard this as “one of the few points that effectively challenges our thesis that the system worked” (The Zrony of Vietnam, p. 125). The study has not been released, but General Wheeler of the JCS apparently told Johnson that actual military victory would take 700,000 men and seven years. The military knew the United States was getting on a treadmill; because North Vietnam could

3. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (Boston, 1978) pp. 701-723. Znternatiunal Security I 206

continually draw on its vast reservoir of manpower, America could increase its forces again and again without ever gaining a decisive advantage. Wheeler’s estimate faced Johnson with an impossible choice. Johnson fre- quently remarked that the fall of China had crippled Truman in Congress; Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 he should have given more thought to the effects of the Korean War. Wheeler was warning him that the new commitment would be much larger and much longer than the Korean one. It might be a commitment that America would accept; it certainly would doom Johnson’s domestic reform plans. At some level, LBJ must have known that he would have to bring the war to a successful conclusion by 1968 at the latest, and the JCS forecast held out no hope that he could do so. Either defeat or war would ruin him; to his everlasting discredit, he chose war. Furthermore, while he did not explicitly tie himself down to unrealistically low force levels or restricted time periods in his statements to the American people, he also refrained from testing their willingness to undertake the necessary commitment by passing Wheeler’s estimates along. Instead, he tried to de-emphasize the significance of the commitment by refusing to call up reserves, impose economic controls, or even raise taxes. In the meantime, he hoped that the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese would be bluffed by smaller displays of American power into negotiating a settlement on American terms. In no sense did this policy work; it failed either to win the war or to save Johnson’s Presidency. The American troop commitment climbed to 525,000 by early 1968; the Tet Offensive then exposed the insecurity of the battlefield situation. Concur- rently, Eugene McCarthy’s showing in the New Hampshire primary sug- gested that the country was turning against the war. In the wake of Tet, the Joint Chiefs asked for another 206,000 men. Here, for the first time, reality finally impinged upon policy. When Clark Clifford, the new Secretary of Defense, failed to get any timetable from the Joint Chiefs as to when the war could be won even if this request were met, he turned against current policy and persuaded Johnson to go along. The request was denied, and Johnson decided not to seek another term.4 With this decision, Gelb and Betts bring their narrative to a close. In so

4. Since the end of the war, some supporters of it have begun to claim that the Vietcon and the North Vietnamese suffered a disastrous military defeat during the Tet offensive, an2 that only the concurrent failure of American will prevented the United States from achieving military victory. This argument cannot be squared with a February 27, 1968 report to the President by General Earle G. Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, printed as document #132 in the New York Times edition of the Pentagon Papers (New York Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 615-621. This report, which included the request for over 206,OOO new troops, indicated that Was the System the Solution? I 207

doing, they leave the quite mistaken impression that the war went into decline beginning with that date. In fact the United States had suffered less

than half of its 50,000 battlefield deaths when Johnson made his momentous Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 announcement. They then discuss various aspects of the American involvement in a series of analytical chapters, one of which asks whether the United States could have won the war militarily. It is typical of Gelb and Betts’ approach that their book takes no clear position on this point. Once again, they discuss the workings of the system within its own framework, rather than concentrating on Vietnam itself. They lay out four winning strategies: two, the ”dramatic gesture” and the ”lever- age” strategy, designed respectively to galvanize or force the South Vietnam- ese into more effective action, and two, the ”dramatic threat’’ or “crush” strategy, designed either to intimidate or actually to force Hanoi into giving up the war. (The crush strategy included all-out bombing and invasion of Communist sanctuaries.) Rather than attempt to measure what any of these strategies would have accomplished, they merely argue that various constraints prevented presidents from undertaking any of them. Certainly this suggests a contradiction: a system which sets a goal but imposes limits on activity that precludes its achievement is hardly working. Later, however, they do make a more specific and more revealing attempt to answer this question. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that some combination of the following actions would have produced a communist defeat in the sense of deterring further support of the Vietcong by Hanoi and of reducing the Vietcong to a negligible threat that could be managed by Saigon: using nuclear weapons, dispatching a million men to fight, removing all sanctuaries and bombing restrictions, running a nearly perfect pacification program with 1,000 men the caliber of John Paul Vann, and demanding and receiving a range of fundamental political reforms. But none of these actions was ever sanctioned by any president for reasons discussed in previous chapters. Presidents never bought the maximum proposals advanced by their advisers. (The Irony of Vietnam, p. 330) Thus, they argue, ”the roots of stalemate lay buried in Washington, not Vietnam, and led back to a succession of presidents who perceived and

while the enemy had suffered he had by no means been crippled or defeated; while the enemy had “been hurt badly in the populated lowlands,” it was “practically intact” elsewhere. The report left no doubt that the enemy had dramatically improved its position, and stated specifically that current American force levels were inadequate to restore security throughout the country and regain the initiative. lnternational Security I 208

arranged policy imperatives and constraints in such a way as to avoid the costs and risks of both winning and losing.” (Bid.)But their own list of what might have produced victory is the most effective possible demonstration that victory was not possible. America would never have sent a million men Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 to Vietnam (even assuming the logistical problems involved could have been dealt with); the use of nuclear weapons was politically impossible; and 1,000 men like John Paul Vann did not exist. Presidents could not win, but refused to lose. In early 1968, Lyndon Johnson decided to leave office rather than continue the war or make peace. Richard Nixon refused to accept the lessons of his predecessors’ experience, and continued the war for four more years.

Nixon and the Wider War

When Richard Nixon became president in 1969, the American public and the foreign policy establishment generally expected him to terminate the Amer- ican involvement in Vietnam relatively quickly. Although Nixon had refused to discuss Vietnam during his campaign, he had spoken of moving from an era of confrontation to one of cooperation, and public dissatisfaction with the war was evident. American opinion leaders responded to Nixon’s silence by projecting their own new-found dovishness upon him. His memoirs show that they were wrong. Nixon no longer feels any need to mollify his enemies, and RN reveals his true feelings about the war and those who opposed it. He abandoned none of America’s traditional goals in Vietnam; instead, he spent four years looking for new ways to achieve them. Immediately after taking office, Nixon, acting through Henry Kissinger, commissioned a thorough study of the situation in Vietnam. This remarkable document, entitled NSSM-1, was released by Congressman Ronald Dellums in 1972; it confirms the futility of the American military effort. The various agencies who contributed to the study-the Department of State, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the Saigon Embassy, and the United States military command in Vietnam-all agreed that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong could replace their losses, even at the high levels of 1968, for at least several more years. Furthermore, all these agencies agreed that the enemy generally controlled the level of battlefield activity on the ground. The United States, in other words, could do nothing to increase North Vietnamese and Vietcong losses if the communists decided to slow down the fighting. And, while the Department of State and the CIA felt that the South Vietnamese Army could deal with the Vietcong Was the System the Solution? I 209

alone, should both American and North Vietnamese troops withdraw, no one felt Saigon could deal with the North Vietnamese as well. ”All agencies,” NSSM-1 states, ”agree that RVNAF could not, either now or even when fully modernized, handle both the VC and a sizable level of NVA forces Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 without U.S. combat support in the form of air, helicopters, artillery, logistic, and some ground forces.” No one, in short, could put forward any strategy that would either give the United States a military victory or allow America to withdraw and leave the South Vietnamese in a position to defend themselves. Richard Nixon’s memoirs, RN, clearly show that he nonetheless committed himself to victory in Vietnam. Nixon had advocated the use of American ground forces in Indochina as early as 1954; until his self-imposed silence in early 1968, he had consistently criticized the Johnson Administration for not fighting hard enough. Now, as his memoirs show, he knew that he could not escalate the fighting on the ground, and that he had to seek a negotiated settlement. From the beginning, however, he was determined to leave Ngu- yen van Thieu at the head of a friendly government in South Vietnam. Nixon did not seek merely to arrange for terms that would disguise an American pullout or leave a ”decent interval” between our withdrawal and an eventual communist victory. He believed in the need to preserve South Vietnam. During his first term, many commentators noted the apparent contradiction between his approaches to China and the Soviet Union and his continuation of the war. In Nixon’s eyes there was no contradiction; only by being tough could he face Moscow and Peking. ”TO abandon South Vietnam to the communists [in 19691,” he writes, ”would cost us inestimably in our search for a stable, structured and lasting peace” (RN,p. 349). In the first year of his presidency, Nixon secretly planned escalation while publicly talking peace. He withdrew 60,000 troops from South Vietnam and announced the Nixon Doctrine, under which United States ground forces would no longer fight in Asian land wars. Nonetheless, fighting in Vietnam continued at a very high level-American casualties in 1969, it is somewhat surprising to note, included almost 10,OOO men killed, a higher figure than in any other year of the war with the exception of 1968. In March, Nixon began the secret bombing of Cambodian border sanctuaries. And during the summer and early fall, Nixon threatened North Vietnam with drastic escalation if concessions at the peace talks were not forthcoming. Setting a

5. The text of NSSM-1 is printed in the Congressional Record, May 10, 1972, pp. 4975-5066. International Security I 210

deadline of November 1, he apparently planned massive new bombing at- tacks and the mining of Haiphong harbor-steps he eventually took in 1972. The fall of 1969 was also the occasion of two huge war protests in Washing- ton, and of Nixon’s remarks that he would not be affected by them. Given Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 his contemporary statements, it is ironic to find that he abandoned his plans for dramatic escalation in October of 1968 largely because of these very protests (RN,pp. 394414). The full-scale unrestricted bombing of the North and the mining of Hai- phong were among the steps which Johnson, seeking to pursue a supposedly moderate course, had refused the military. Nixon now decided to make another move that Johnson had rejected: the invasion of North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. The invasion-undertaken in May 1970-briefly destroyed the illusion of a President working for peace. It opened up a new front in the war and led to the destruction of another country. And, as William Shawcross demonstrates in Sideshow, his remarkable survey of the Cambodia war, it showed, through the speech in which Nixon announced the invasion, that Nixon, supported only by Hedry Kissinger among his senior advisers, still believed deeply in the cold war world view and in its relevance to Indochina. In many areas of the world, Nixon said, ”only the power of the United States deters aggression. . . . If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” Thinking as he did, Nixon had no difficulty continuing a hopeless war. He ignored evidence that the bombing and the ground forces invasion of the Cambodian sanctuaries had not in the long run reduced enemy capabilities; he still insists that both steps were justified by their results. The actual effectiveness of these steps was less important to him than their role as a demonstration of American will. The United States, he believed, must play the world role he had marked out for it in spite of opposition among the media and intellec- tuals. In his eyes it was crucial to show his willingness to seize any available military option; the effectiveness of such options seems to have been a secondary consideration. The strength of Shawcross’ study of Cambodia is his analysis of how Nixon and Kissinger, far more than Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, tailored reality to suit their purposes. While Shawcross has found no evidence that the United States arranged or encouraged Prince Sihanouk‘s overthrow by Lon No1 in early 1970, he shows that Nixon and Kissinger immediately seized upon the new regime as an ally which could open a new front in the war. Was the System the Solution? I 211

They were not dissuaded by evidence that Lon No1 could not play this role. When Alexander Haig, dispatched to Phnom Penh to explain American policy after the invasion of Cambodia, explained to Lon No1 that American troops would withdraw from Cambodia after dealing with the sanctuaries, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Lon No1 began to cry. Cambodia could not defend itself; American policy could only lead to catastrophe. The Nixon Administration was not dissuaded, and for five years, Nixon and Ford tried to build up a Cambodian Army. They found, as Kennedy had discovered in Vietnam, that this could not be done; nonetheless they continued the policy. While some lower-level military and civilian officials noted the futility of America’s efforts, Washington consistently ignored their views. A comparison of Nixon’s and Johnson’s Indochina policies reveals signif- icant differences between the two men. In choosing among various military options, Johnson liked to throw out extreme courses of action and pursue a middle ground; Nixon consistently picked the most radical option available. He complains in his memoirs that the Air Force was too pusillanimous in choosing bombing targets; at one point during the war, he insisted on the dispatch of more B-52s to bomb Indochina against the advice of the military. Both men, having embarked upon unrealistic courses of action, began living in their own worlds; both became totally irrational and paranoid in their response to dissent. Here Nixon went one step further than Johnson, evolv- ing his ”madman theory.” He did not care if some of his acts seemed irrational; the threat of further mad acts, he believed, was a useful asset both in coercing the North Vietnamese and in dealing with Moscow and Peking. (Sideshow, pp. 90-91, 260) He also tried to avoid some of the mistakes, as he viewed them, of Kennedy and Johnson. In Cambodia, the press was prevented from learning the truth of the situation, including the advisory role played by the American military in flat violation of the Cooper-Church Amendment. Nixon consistently stressed the need for “decisive” military action, by which he generally meant massive bombing, rather than Johnson’s gradual escalation. Lastly, Nixon and Kissinger were determined to avoid what Nixon clearly regarded as a mistake and a betrayal on Kennedy’s part: the overthrow of Diem. From the beginning, Lon No1 proved incompetent; he eventually had a stroke; by the time he left Cambodia in 1975, a few weeks before its fall, he had clearly lost touch with reality. Kissinger and Nixon, however, steadfastly resisted suggestions for a change of rkgime, even when this might have been done through election, in 1972, or might have led to peace on terms more favorable than a Khmer Rouge victory. In a letter in the September 8-14/1979 Economist, Kissinger attacked Shaw- International Security I 212

cross’ analysis, stating that the ”basic point” of Shawcross’ book is that American bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and ground actions in 1970 ”explain or jushfy the Khmer Rouge massacres of two to three million Cambodians in 1975.” This is not what Shawcross says. He argues rather that these Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 American actions and, more importantly, the decision to involve the Lon No1 government in the war and to bomb Cambodia massively through mid-1973 wreaked havoc in Cambodian society and created a situation-perhaps the only situation-in which the Khmer Rouge could eventually take power. Kissinger justifies American violations of Cambodian neutrality by pointing to North Vietnamese violations, rather than discussing whether the American intervention could or did have any lasting, beneficial effects on Cambodia or South Vietnam. To him, the goal of trying to save South Vietnam from communism apparently justified any action taken to achieve it. In refusing to judge his own policies on the basis of what they achieved, or even on the basis of what they could have been logically expected to achieve, he repeats the fundamental error behind America’s Vietnam involvement: the refusal to take account of the reality with which the United States had to deal. In the meantime, Vietnam peace talks continued without result from 1969 through 1971. While available accounts of these negotiations, including Nixon’s own and others given to Tad Szulc for his book, The Illusion of Peace, are vague and sometimes contradictory, both sides seem to have stuck to irreconciliable demands. The North Vietnamese insisted that Thieu step down as President; Washington offered to settle South Vietnam’s future through an election and subsequently to withdraw American troops. Nixon and Kissinger apparently insisted until April 1972 that North Vietnamese troops must withdraw from South Vietnam.6 Both sides seem to have envi- sioned a long war rather than a quick peace. The North Vietnamese withdrew many troops from South Vietnam during 1970 and 1971 and undertook no major offensives, while the Nixon Administration anticipated that the war would continue for at least several more years. Thus Shawcross notes that while Washington planned to withdraw all American ground forces from South Vietnam by the 1972 election, Melvin Laird stated privately in 1971 that American bombing would continue at least until 1974. Laird apparently

6. Szulc, whose books seems to be based largely on talks either with Kissinger or with his aids, first states (p. 391) that Kissinger told the North Vietnamese that Washington would not insist that they withdraw their troops in May 1971. Later, however, (pp. 54445), discussing Kissinger‘s April 1972 visit to Moscow, he states that the United States had never before explicitly made this concession. Was the System the Solution? I 213

accepted NSSM-1’s contention that the South Vietnamese would always need American air support-a contention ultimately borne out in 1975. Until the spring of 1972, Nixon could believe that Vietnamization was succeeding. On April 1 of that year, however, a new North Vietnamese Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 offensive began, and South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse within a few weeks. Nixon’s contemporary comments-recorded on dictabelts and reproduced in RN-show that the initial communist successes split him and Kissinger. Both Kissinger and H. R. Haldemann thought that the United States could live with defeat in Vietnam. Kissinger was more interested in making the forthcoming Moscow summit a success. Nixon remarked in his diary that “no negotiation in Moscow is possible unless we come out right in Vietnam,” and that “the U.S. will not have a credible foreign policy if we fail” (RN, p. 589). He immediately ordered heavy bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong; he sent Kissinger to Moscow in April with instructions to refuse to discuss the summit if Brezhnev did not promise to take steps to halt the North Vietnamese offensive and end the war. Kissinger disobeyed these instructions, moving on to other topics after Brezhnev-probably quite truth- fully-denied that he could halt the war. According to Szulc, Kissinger also told Brezhnev that the United States would not insist on total withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam in a peace agreement; Nixon does not mention this proposal. While shocked by the threatened South Vietnamese collapse, Nixon continued to believe that the United States had the capacity to bring the North Vietnamese to heel. In a remarkable memo- randum to Kissinger in early May, he complained that the Air Force was failing to produce sufficiently drastic bombing programs: We have the power to destroy (the enemy‘s) war-making capability. The only question is whether we have the will to use that power. What distin- guishes me from Johnson is that I have the will in spades. If we fail now it is because the bureaucrats and the bureaucracy and particularly those in the Defense Department, who will of course be vigorously assisted by their allies in State, will find ways to erode the strong, decisive action that I have indicated we are going to take. (RN, p. 607) Once again, determination triumphed over reality. Nixon ordered heavier bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong and the mining of Haiphong harbor. In the speech announcing this step, however, he did drop any demand for North Vietnamese withdrawal as part of a peace agreement. The intense use of American air power prevented total South Vietnamese collapse, but a September intelligence estimate indicated that the enemy was lntemational Security I 214

not beaten and that it had strengthened its position in some areas in the South.’ American policy seemed divided between Nixon’s desire to fight to the finish and Kissinger’s wish for a settlement. Thus, Kissinger continued negotiations-apparently wishing to finish them off before the election, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 which would give Nixon more freedom of action-while he and Thieu also discussed a possible invasion of North Vietnam by South Vietnamese troops. Then, in late September, Kissinger reached agreement with the North Viet- namese in Paris, in talks which Nixon specifically confirms were not reported to him as they took place. The agreement that Kissinger brought home in early October, and which hardly differed from the eventual peace agreement of January 1973, included major concessions from both sides. Astonishingly, the United States officially abandoned its longstanding goal of an independent, sovereign South Viet- nam, recognizing instead ”the independence, sovereignty, unity and terri- torial integrity of Vietnam, as recognized by the 1954 Geneva agreements on Vietnam.” In return, the North Vietnamese allowed Thieu to remain in power, although the agreement committed him to negotiate a new political arrangement within a tripartite council including neutralists and communists. But while the United States, in exchange for return of its prisoners, agreed to withdraw all military forces from and cease all military action in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese undertook no obligation to withdraw any of their troops from the South at all. The resulting situation was the one that Amer- ican intelligence estimates had always regarded as disastrous: the South Vietnamese Army, alone, would be left to face the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, without American artillery or air support. Would Nixon, whose dedication to victory had never wavered, accept these terms? In his memoirs, he puts the best possible light on them. A requirement for unanimity within the three-member council, he notes, would preserve Thieu’s freedom of action. Refe-g to the North Vietnamese troops in the South, he argues optimistically that restrictions on their resupply would prevent them from maintaining themselves there. The enemy, he states, “were accepting a settlement on our terms.” (RN,pp. 691-92). But Nixon also betrays some irritation at Kissinger’s eagerness for a settlement, and he eventually decided to make one more military effort to improve the

7. Tad Szulc, The Zllusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years (New York: Viking Press, 1978) pp. 618-619. Was the System the Solution? I 215

agreement. He must have realized that the October agreement stopped far short of what he wanted, and he never reconciled himself to the idea that he could not ultimately control events in South Vietnam.

The movement towards peace slowed in October 1972, when Thieu, real- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 izing that the agreement would leave him in a vastly weaker position, refused to sign until North Vietnam agreed to withdraw its troops from the South. Hanoi now made the text of the agreed terms public, and on October 26, less than two weeks before the election, Kissinger virtually committed the United States to an agreement by stating, ”Peace is at hand,” and adding that only minor points remained to be settled. In RN, Nixon implies that he had never cleared this statement, and complains that it had eroded “our bargaining position with the North Vietnamese” (RN, p. 705). After the election, Nixon sent Kissinger back to Paris to press for partial North Viet- namese troop withdrawals from the South and respect for the demilitarized zone. Not surprisingly, the North Vietnamese refused and countered with demands of their own. Rather than go back to the original October agreement, Nixon allowed the talks to break off on December 13 and ordered B-52 bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. ”I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one,” he told Admiral Moorer of the JCS. ”This is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.” (RN, p. 734) The Christmas bombing began on December 17. Nixon later referred to the Christmas bombing as the toughest decision of his presidency, and his supporters credited it with ending the war. His memoirs show that it did nothing of the sort. The negative public reaction surprised him; he now knew that the public wanted out of the war. As Kissinger left for Paris in January, Nixon told him, “even if we could go back to the October 8 agreement. . . we should take it, having in mind the fact that there will be a lot of details that will have been ironed out so that we can claim some improvement over that agreement” (RN, p. 743). This was exactly what Kissinger did. The Christmas bombing was one last, futile attempt to impose American goals on Vietnam. It failed, and the agreement signed on January 23 set the stage for further failure. The settlement, of course, was not a real peace agreement; it merely provided for the continuation of the war under new ground rules. Thieu refused to give any of his power away in three-power negotiations, and Washington supported him. Instead, Nixon, as he freely admits, planned to International Security I 216

resume bombing if the North Vietnamese scored any new military successes, while Kissinger hoped that offers of American reconstruction aid and the moderating influence of Moscow and Peking would deter Hanoi from further military action. After South Vietnam had fallen, Nixon told David Frost that Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 he had planned to resume American bombing if North Vietnam undertook a new offensive.8 The reasons that the war finally ended as it did in April 1975 are still controversial; neither Nixon nor Gelb and Betts do much to illuminate them. Both suggest that Congress’ cuts in aid to South Vietnam led to the South Vietnamese defeat-Nixon in order to portray the defeat as a failure of American will, and Gelb and Betts to suggest that the system continued to work until Congress abandoned its objectives. A somewhat different picture emerges from the 1977 book, Decent Interval, written by former C.I.A. agent Frank Snepp. The level of aid for South Vietnam was a major issue in the weeks before Thieu’s collapse, but once again, its importance seems to have lain more within the political situation in Washington than the military situation in Vietnam. Those committed to maintaining South Vietnam-including Kissinger, President Ford, and Ambassador Graham Martin-still viewed the future of South Vietnam as a test of American will. Even Martin, who as Snepp notes isolated himself within the Saigon Embassy, viewed the struggle between American hawks and doves as more crucial than the battle between the North and South Vietnamese. Snepp makes clear that it is impossible to judge the actual importance of the military aid in question. Because of corruption and sloppy accounting, America could never be sure how many arms the South Vietnamese had. His account suggests instead that the South Vietnamese Army still depended on massive air and artillery support-support it had never learned to provide for itself. Thieu apparently had insufficient forces to counter the 1975 North Vietnamese offensive, and his sudden decision to withdraw from large sections of the country precipi- tated a collapse. To the very end, American policymakers were more con- cerned with blaming opponents of the war for the final catastrophe than with finding an interim solution that would halt the communists. The United States government never officially faced reality, preferring to maintain the fiction that it could have controlled events.

8. David Frost, “I Gave Them a Sword:” Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews (New York, 1978), pp. 135-36, 139. Was the System the Solution? I 217

Perspectives on American Intervention

No one can write about Vietnam without attempting to draw some lessons

from the experience. Gelb and Betts, following up their original theme, stress Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 that changes within the decision-making structure should not be counted on to prevent future Vietnams; Nixon argues that the defeat merely represented a failure of American will. Shawcross makes the most valuable contribution in this respect, arguing that policies must be judged on the basis of what they actually accomplish, and that it is a crime merely to regard intervention within a specific country as an element in a strategic grand design while ignoring local realities. This, at least, is a starting point in an attempt to put the war within a broader context. Certainly, too, it is wrong, as Shawcross notes, to regard Vietnam merely as a ”trauma” or ”tragedy” which is safely behind us. Vietnam was but one episode in a historical process that will continue for decades, and whose end cannot possibly be foretold. It was part of the legacy of decolonization-a process spurred by the United States after the Second World War, leading to the creation of a host of new independent states. Many of these states are politically unstable; many are vulnerable to leftist revolution. In the early 1960s, Americans believed that any communist victory meant an American defeat. Vietnam was one result. While most Americans would now agree that our intervention there was unnecessary and misguided, other, similar situations are bound to arise: quite possibly in reasons of greater strategic or economic significance. The question of how the United States should protect its interests remains to be answered. The issue of America’s response to leftist revolutions first arose after the Bolshevik revolution. A famous American, serving as an advisor to President Wilson, made a remarkable statement of the general problems involved in March 1919. Perhaps because the United States was not yet accustomed to view itself as the world’s leading power, he saw the matter in a clearer light than many later policymakers. . . . The American people cannot say that we are going to insist that any given population must work out its internal social problems according to our own particular conception of democracy. In any event, I have the most serious doubt that outside forces entering upon such an enterprise can do other than infinite harm, for any great wave of emotion must ferment and spread under repression. In the swin of the social pendulum from the extreme left back toward the right, it wi8 find the point of stabilization based on racial instincts that could never be established by outside intervention. International Security I 218

I think we have also to contemplate what would actually happen if we undertook military intervention in, say, a case like Hungary. We should probably be involved in years of police duty, and our first act would probably

in the nature of things make us a party to reestablishing the reactionary Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-pdf/4/4/199/690341/isec.4.4.199.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 classes in their economic domination over the lower classes. This is against our fundamental national spirit, and I doubt whether our soldiers under these circumstances could resist infection with Bolshevik ideas. It also re- quires consideration as to whether our people at home, on gradual enlight- enment as to the social wrongs of the lower classes in these countries, would stand for our providing power by which such reactionaries held their position, and we would perchance be thrown into an attempt as governors to work out some social reorganization of these countries.9 Thus did Herbert Hoover, whose own devotion to fundamental American values can hardly be questioned, assess the problem of intervention in 1919. Subsequent history has confirmed his analysis. Future attempts to establish or maintain weak friendly regimes on foreign soil by force will inevitably encounter these same difficulties. Nor will the American people willingly support new foreign military adventures; as Hoover noted, they are likely to differ on the rights and wrongs of foreign political conflicts. Their impatience with indecisive foreign wars-a constraint which Lyndon Johnson chose to ignore-reflects, in part, a healthy skepticism that American lives should be sacrificed to resolve such conflicts. Presidents who persist in intervention despite domestic opposition are likely once again to become so personally committed to their policies that they ignore the realities involved. We are fated to live in a time of rapid, continual change; much of the world is bound to remain highly unstable for many decades. Forcible attempts to impose a vision upon an unwilling reality have been the curse of the twentieth century. The United States must avoid any more of them if its foreign policy is to remain effective.

9. Quoted in Am0 Mayer, The Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York, 1967), p. 26