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Tragedy Or Choice in Vietnam? Learning to Think Outside The Tragedy or Choice in John Garofano Vietnam? Learning to Think Outside the Archival Box A Review Essay Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins ofthe Vietnam War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. In 1965, the United States launched a major air and ground war on behalf of a weak ally against an experienced and committed enemy. Policymakers understood that domestic support would not last forever and would likely decrease as casualties mounted. War games and simulations had suggested that Washington might end up isolated internationally. Yet the nation embarked on a war that reduced U.S. power and prestige, claimed the lives of some 58,000 of its citizens, and led to a skepticism of limited war that still shapes civil-military relations and foreignTragedy or Choice in Vietnam? policy today. Given the risks and uncertainties, why did the United States go to war in Vietnam? After three decades there still is no consensus on this or any number of other basic questions regarding U.S. policy. The exchanges that followed U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s conditional apologia in 1995 demonstrated that neither a central architect nor his critics could agree on 1 whether the war was inevitable or winnable. In 2001, on the thirtieth anniver- John Garofano is a Senior Fellow in the International Security Program at the Robert and Renée Belfer Cen- ter for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the Smith Richardson Foundation and to thank Ivan Arreguín-Toft, Richard Betts, George Downs, David Edelstein, Douglas Macdonald, William Wohlforth, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this review essay. 1. Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons ofVietnam (New York: Random House, 1995). International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002), pp. 143–168 © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 143 International Security 26:4 144 sary of the release of the Pentagon Papers, two participants in that study made diametrically opposed arguments regarding what the documents revealed 2 about policy-makers’ beliefs and intentions. Collectively speaking, historians, political scientists, and policy analysts have not provided the answers sought by President John F. Kennedy when, shortly before his death, he requested a comprehensive review of how the United States got into Vietnam, what Ameri- 3 cans thought they were doing there, and how they could be most effective. The ofªcial record of U.S. thinking about the war is now nearly complete. The Lyndon Baines Johnson and other presidential libraries have declassiªed their public and private holdings, and the National Archives and Records Ad- ministration has opened most of its diplomatic and military records. The For- eign Relations ofthe United States series includes some seventy-ªve print and microªche volumes on the foreign policies of the Kennedy and Johnson ad- ministrations. The nature and abundance of this evidence make it possible to reexamine old debates and theories regarding the U.S. path to war and, by ex- tension, review two competing perspectives on the origins of war in interna- tional relations theory. One view, reºected in the overwhelming majority of literature on Vietnam, emphasizes the nonrational aspects of decisionmaking and policy. This per- spective, which has sustained several subªelds within the international rela- tions community for more than a quarter-century, emphasizes the role of cognitive limitations and psychological biases, the self-defeating behavior of small groups facing stress and uncertainty, and bureaucratic and organiza- 4 tional barriers to the provision of important information and advice. Analysts who ªnd evidence of nonrational behavior generally believe that U.S. 2. The Pentagon Papers is a compendium of documents that chronicled the making of U.S. policy toward South Vietnam from World War II to May 1968. It was the product of a study originally sanctioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara and eventually leaked to the news media. See Dan- iel Ellsberg, “Lying About Vietnam,” and Leslie H. Gelb, “Misreading the Pentagon Papers,” New York Times, June 29, 2001, p. A27. 3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifºin, 1978), p. 722. 4. See, for example, Robert Jervis, The Logic ofImages in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970); Graham Allison, Essence ofDecision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Poli- tics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); Irving L. Janis and Leon Mann, Decisionmaking: A Psychological Analysis ofConºict, Choice, and Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1977); Alexander L. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Informa- tion and Advice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1980); Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature ofInternational Crisis (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); and Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Tragedy or Choice in Vietnam? 145 policymakers in the mid-1960s faced difªcult dilemmas but made bad and 5 avoidable choices. The other view, closely identiªed though not synonymous with realism and currently enjoying resurgence in formal bargaining models, emphasizes the predictable, rational aspects of the road to war. In this view, war is best seen as a conscious, deliberate extension of politics. Analysts working from this per- spective tend to view Vietnam as a classic tragedy in which fate, in the form of structural pressures and constraints, determined policy. Three impressive studies, based on the latest trove of archival material, shed considerable light on the value of these two perspectives. Fredrik Logevall’s thesis is captured in the title of his book, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation ofWar in Vietnam. 6 In this well-written account drawing on European as well as U.S. archival material, the author argues that policy- makers had sufªcient leeway to withdraw from Vietnam after establishing a politically inclusive, “neutral” government in Saigon. The problem, Logevall believes, lay in intellectual rigidity, particularly during the Johnson adminis- tration. In his view, President Kennedy would not have escalated U.S. involve- ment had he lived to make the decisions of 1965. Notwithstanding the title, David Kaiser makes a related argument in Ameri- can Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins ofthe Vietnam War. 7 This is an am- bitious work, invoking Thucydides, modern theories of generational behavior, and the author’s experiences during the Vietnam period. Kaiser explains in great detail the roots of U.S. policy during the Eisenhower period and carries his narrative through the critical decisions of 1965. He presents a large amount of evidence to support his case that policymakers should have known that di- saster would follow escalation. Like Logevall, Kaiser concludes that U.S. policy would have been wiser and more peaceful had Kennedy lived to confront the situation facing Johnson in 1964 and 1965. Both Logevall and Kaiser stress the misperception and misunderstandings behind escalation of the war. Lawrence Freedman takes a different approach in Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam.8 In a superb example of how to integrate archival data 5. For a thorough summary of the mistakes and shortcomings in U.S. policy, see Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998). 6. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 7. David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins ofthe War in Vietnam (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 8. Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2000). International Security 26:4 146 with larger political developments, Freedman examines both the structural un- derpinnings of the Vietnam decisions and the unique contributions of individ- ual leaders and policymakers. He explains how Kennedy’s views of great power politics and limited war were refracted by the differing circumstances in the four cases. Freedman hints that Kennedy may have acted differently than Johnson, but the bulk of his analysis, resting on consensus regarding U.S. objectives in Vietnam and the perceived means of accomplishing them, sug- gests otherwise. I argue that the preponderance of evidence supports the view of Vietnam as a tragedy determined by a combination of structural pressures, entrenched mind-sets, and limited information. The personal preferences and limitations of speciªc presidents and their advisers played a secondary role, and neutral- ization was not a real policy option in any case. In the end, policymakers were driven to adopt policies that they knew were
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