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 else- where. 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 bureau- crats 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 sit- uation 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 under- taking 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 inter- pretation 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.

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