The prevailing popular interpreter of Nixon’s policies is Lewis Sorley, author of A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. Sorley can make Nixon’s case without Nixon’s baggage. A Better War tiptoes right to the edge and stops just short of saying that Nixon led America to victory in Vietnam: “There came a time when the war was won. The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won.”1 It’s an oddly passive way to declare victory, but Sorley has a bad habit of skirting the subjects of his own sentences:
Not only was the internal war against subversion and the guerrilla threat won, so was that against the external conventional threat—in the terms specified by the United States. Those terms were that South Vietnam should, without help from U.S. ground forces, be capable of resisting aggression so long as America continued to provide logistical and financial support, and—of crucial importance later, once a cease-fire agreement had been negotiated—renewed application of U.S. air and naval power should North Vietnam violate the terms of that agreement.2
When Sorley writes of “the terms specified by the United States,” he doesn’t identify either the man who did the specifying or the essential context. The terms were Nixon’s. Publicly, Nixon claimed that Saigon could survive without American ground troops, provided it had American aid and airpower (and offshore naval bombardment of the North). Privately, he didn’t count on it—not when he decided to keep American troops in Vietnam until his reelection was safe, not when he had Kissinger negotiate a “decent interval,” and not when he offered to let Congress tie his hands. Nixon’s real terms were quite different from his public ones.
Referring to Nixon as “the United States” allows Sorley to slide past one of the problems with his thesis: the subject of his book, Gen. Creighton Abrams, was on the record saying that South Vietnam could not survive without American ground troops. So were the CIA, Pentagon, Joint Chiefs, and all the other participants in NSSM-1. Given the consensus of American officialdom on this point, for Sorley to refer to Nixon’s public terms as “the terms specified by the United States” distorts the views of the Nixon administration’s top officials—including the topmost two, Nixon and Kissinger. Sorley doesn’t even mention NSSM-1, although he does acknowledge in passing that the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV, the command Abrams led) had reached the “conclusion in the autumn of 1969 that ‘unless North Vietnamese forces return to North Vietnam, there is little chance that any improvement in RVNAF [the Republic of South Vietnam’s Armed Forces] or any degree of progress in pacification, no matter how significant, could justify significant reductions in U.S. forces from their present level.’ ”
“In other words,” Sorley writes, “their assessment was that, despite the gains being made by South Vietnam’s forces, their situation would become untenable if the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] were permitted to remain in the South while U.S. forces withdrew. That conclusion was, of course, going to vanish in the wind of domestic pressures for withdrawal.”3 Facts vanish in the wind of Sorley’s metaphor.
Once more, passive phrasing (“if the NVA were permitted to remain in the South”) provides Sorley with a verbal escape route from a big problem with both his thesis and the war itself: Abrams never came up with a way to drive and keep the North Vietnamese out of the South. Neither did Nixon or any of his military and civilian advisers. This is another way of saying that no one ever came up with a way to win the war. Sorley stated the problem well in his earlier book, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times:
[Saigon] was asked to sign on to an agreement that would sanction the continuing presence in the South of hundreds of thousands of invading troops. Agonizing as it was, their ouster had proven too difficult to attain, no less so in Paris than on the battlefield.
Thieu sensed—correctly—that a ceasefire in place foreshadowed the eventual downfall of an independent South Vietnam. Henry Kissinger maintained—perhaps also correctly—that he got the best agreement possible under the circumstances. In that gap between what was necessary and what was attainable lay the essential tragedy of the war in Vietnam.4
It’s hard to argue with the logic: If (1) South Vietnam needed American troops backing it up in order to withstand attack by North Vietnamese troops, and (2) no one found a military or diplomatic way to get and keep North Vietnamese troops out of the South, then (3) the war was unwinnable. Nixon’s choice was either to keep American ground forces fighting and dying in Saigon’s defense, or to leave and lose. How odd that the man who became famous for the argument that the war was won came up with the simplest, clearest way to state that the war was unwinnable.
How much odder that fans of A Better War didn’t notice. Sorley didn’t abandon his earlier conclusion so much as downplay it to the point of near-invisibility:
The key element in the outcome of the war was the continued presence of North Vietnamese armed forces in South Vietnam. The Paris Agreement was silent on that point, thus allowing the NVA to maintain in place the forces they had always denied were in South Vietnam. This silence constituted a fatal flaw, at least from the South Vietnamese perspective, even if it was also an inevitable acceptance of the battlefield realities. “That ceasefire agreement,” wrote Sir Robert Thompson, “restored complete security to the [enemy] rear bases in North Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, and in the parts of South Vietnam that it held. It subjected the South Vietnamese rear base again to being absolutely open to military attack. That is what the cease-fire agreement actually achieved.”5
A Better War brought great public attention to the shift in American strategy from “search and destroy” under Gen. William Westmoreland to “clear and hold” under Gen. Creighton Abrams. To put it simply, “clear and hold” is the name for tactics aimed at securing a population by clearing enemy troops out of an area and holding it with American troops (to be replaced by local forces) so the enemy cannot return. In Vietnam, “clear and hold” tactics produced results attested to by many Americans who remarked at their ability to travel safely through parts of South Vietnam that previously had been dangerous. To the unwary, “clear and hold” might sound exactly like a solution to the problem of how to drive and keep the North Vietnamese Army out of the South. Compare the situation on the ground before and after Abrams implemented “clear and hold.” In 1968, the year Abrams took command, American intelligence estimated the total number of soldiers the North Vietnamese had sent into the South since the first of the year at 150,000.6 In December 1972, the month before the signing of the Paris Accords, after four years of “clear and hold” tactics, American intelligence estimated the total number of North Vietnamese soldiers in the South at 150,000.7 “Clear and hold” may have been a better tactic, but it was not a strategy that could win the war.
If Sorley’s readers had only realized that Nixon- and Abrams-era tactics had merely lost Vietnam less conspicuously, they might not have been so eager to adopt the same tactics for Iraq in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2009.8