The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

In March 1991, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush boasted: “By God, we have kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”¹ Ten years later, after a terrorist attack brought down the landmark twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and did substantial damage at the Pentagon, a resilient Vietnam syndrome again appeared dead. Within less than two years, however, when President George W. Bush’s war against Iraq, after a deceptively easy military victory over Saddam Hussein, bogged down in a costly and seemingly interminable struggle with Iraqi insurgents, the Vietnam War again became a reference point for Americans. Thus more than three decades after the end of that war and despite repeated claims to the contrary, memories of Vietnam continued to haunt Americans and to influence their responses to events abroad. This essay analyzes the origins of the so-called Vietnam syndrome, the reasons for its remarkable staying power, and its impact on American foreign policy.

The term “Vietnam syndrome” came into parlance in the United States in the late 1970s. It was first used in 1971 before the war ended to describe symptoms that afflicted veterans recently returned from Vietnam.² But its more common and more enduring political meaning—“an unwillingness to commit [U.S. troops] to an unwinnable conflict”—first appeared in 1978. William Safire’s Political Dictionary attributes the initial use to Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who proposed legislation permitting the president to mobilize 50,000 reserves for ninety days without requiring a declaration of national emergency. The Cold War was reheating. Such legislation was needed, Nunn insisted, to “counter a ‘post-Vietnam syndrome’ that might otherwise paralyze Congress in times of crisis.”³

The deep-seated popular emotions that gave rise to the Vietnam syndrome developed from the peculiar conditions of that war. Vietnam was America’s longest war, lasting from 1965 to 1973. It was an extremely difficult war for the United States to fight, waged in a climate and on a terrain that were singularly inhospitable to outsiders. At least in its early stages, it was a people’s war, where people rather than territory were the primary objectives. But Americans could never really bridge the huge cultural gap that separated them from all Vietnamese, at times making it difficult even to distinguish friend from foe. It was a war without distinct battle lines or fixed objectives, where traditional concepts of victory and defeat were blurred, “a formless war against a formless enemy,” marine lieutenant Philip Caputo later recalled.⁴ It was a limited war, limited in both ends and means, and that brought special frustrations for many of the Americans who fought it, especially those who could not shoot unless fired upon first, who often felt as though they were fighting with one hand behind their back.

Dissent in war is a long-established American tradition, but the Vietnam War tore the nation apart as nothing had since the country’s own civil war one hundred years earlier. It divided neighbors, colleagues, and churches. It divided class against class, father against son, even in the families of top policymakers such as President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. The war spurred various kinds of group and individual protest, including by 1967 widespread and sometimes violent street demonstrations and civil disobedience. As it dragged on seemingly without end and the divisions within American society deepened, the internal turmoil contributed to a pervasive and deep-seated war weariness that fed a desire, even among some Americans who approved the purposes of the war, to get out regardless of the consequences.

The outcome was far and away the most traumatic of all the wars in which the United States has participated. For a nation accustomed to and even spoiled by success, the ignominious departure of the last helicopter from Saigon on April 30, 1975, a glaring symbol of failure, came especially hard. There was no popular support for rescuing South Vietnam in the face of a massive North Vietnamese invasion, but there was remorse that the United States had not kept its promises and anger that it stood by helplessly while an ally of twenty years was vanquished. “I grieved as though I had lost a member of my own family,” a Kentucky army officer later recalled.⁵ And for those who had lost children in the war, the sight was especially painful. “Now it has all gone down the drain and it hurts. What did he die for?” a Pennsylvanian asked. “The high hopes and wishful idealism with which the American nation had been born had not been destroyed,” Newsweek observed on the eve of the national bicentennial celebrations, “but they had been chastened by the failure of America to work its will there.”⁶

The Vietnam War, as perhaps nothing else in U.S. history, caused Americans to confront a set of beliefs that formed a basic part of the national character: the idea that in their dealings with other peoples they had generally acted nobly and benevolently and the belief that they could do anything they set their minds to. Thus, journalist Arnold Isaacs has written, “the national argument on Vietnam was really about America’s vision of itself: about conflicting ideas on who we are as a people and what we value and believe. That explains why the country’s deep divisions lingered in a cultural clash that still reverberates a full generation” after the war ended.⁷ Years later, Americans remained deeply divided about the questions they had debated at the time. Was it a good war or a bad war, a noble cause or essentially immoral? Was it necessary in terms of the national security or basically needless and senseless, the wrong war at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy? Was it a good war waged poorly? Was it a war that could and indeed should have been won, a war lost only by the timidity and stupidity of those who waged it? Or was it a war that could not have been won at a price we were willing to pay? Americans continued to debate these questions long after the fall of Saigon, thus perpetuating the memory and influence of the war.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the Vietnam War produced a set of attitudes and emotions that would endure into the next century. The nation came out of the war and Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandals with a profound distrust of government and in some quarters a rampant antimilitarism. But the central and essential element of the Vietnam syndrome was a deep and abiding anxiety about military intervention abroad. Even before April 30, 1975, the experience of Vietnam, combined with an apparent improvement of relations with the Soviet Union and China and a growing preoccupation with increasingly urgent domestic problems, produced a drastic reordering of national priorities. From the late 1940s to the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War consensus, foreign policy had consistently headed the list of national concerns, and Americans had willingly, if somewhat reluctantly, accepted the necessity of various military commitments abroad. By the mid-1970s, foreign policy placed well down the priority list, and there was powerful opposition to intervention even in support of the nation’s oldest and staunchest allies. Polls taken shortly before the fall of Saigon indicated that only 36 percent of Americans felt that the United States should make and keep commitments to other nations. Only 34 percent expressed a willingness to send troops should the Soviets threaten West Berlin. A majority of Americans endorsed military intervention only in defense of Canada! “Vietnam has left a rancid aftertaste that clings to almost every mention of direct military intervention,” columnist David Broder observed.⁸

Signs of a Vietnam syndrome appeared before the war ended and became blatantly obvious in its aftermath. Faced with a growing leftist insurgency in Thailand, U.S. officials as early as 1966 carefully limited their commitment in order to stay off the “slippery slope” that might lead to another Vietnam next door.⁹ Concerned about Soviet and Cuban involvement in newly independent and war-torn Angola in southern Africa and eager to demonstrate that the United States, despite Vietnam, could still influence world events, President Gerald Ford and his top foreign-policy adviser Henry A. Kissinger, without informing Congress, approved $32 million in July 1975 for a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert operation to head off a victory by the Soviet-backed faction. When a rebellious Congress learned of the initiative, it warned, in an early example of the Vietnam syndrome in action, that involvement in Angola could lead to a Vietnam-like quagmire. In December 1975, Congress terminated U.S. involvement in Angola.

The Vietnam syndrome became an integral and essential part of the nation’s foreign-policy debate in the 1980s. For most Americans, the war remained so close, its memories so fresh and painful, that there was abiding reluctance even to contemplate military intervention abroad, especially in Third World countries that remotely resembled Vietnam. Liberals and radicals vehemently opposed such intervention. In their view, the Vietnam War had been at best unnecessary, at worst immoral, in any event unwinnable, and they believed that similar interventions in similar situations would produce similar results. “No more Vietnams!” was the rallying cry of many Americans in the aftermath of Vietnam.

Among conservative and neoconservative politicians and intellectuals, a very different view emerged, and they were primarily responsible for establishing the phrase “Vietnam syndrome” negatively as a part of the nation’s political discourse. They employed the word “syndrome” in its literal dictionary definition: “a group of signs or symptoms that collectively indicate or characterize a disease, a psychological disorder, or other abnormal condition.” Increasingly alarmed in the late 1970s by the renewed adventurism of the Soviet Union and its clients, they deplored the sickness that afflicted the American body politic in the aftermath of the failed war in Vietnam. Conservatives warned ominously that the United States might lose the Cold War. An emerging group of neoconservatives—many of them former liberals and at one time Democrats—railed against America’s abject moral capitulation to the evils of Communism. Both conservatives and neoconservatives agreed that in a menacing world the United States must cure the Vietnam syndrome, actively combat the Communist threat, and reassert global leadership.

In the late 1970s, the two groups began to construct a revisionist history of Vietnam as the basis for a muscular, globalist foreign policy. During the 1980 presidential campaign, to the shock of some listeners, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan proclaimed that the Vietnam War was “in truth a noble cause,” an altruistic effort on the part of the United States to help a “small country newly free from colonial rule” to defend itself against a “totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest.”¹⁰ Other conservatives expanded on and embellished Reagan’s message to reclaim the moral high ground for the United States. Political scientist Guenter Lewy devoted much of his 1978 book America in Vietnam to demonstrating that the United States had not been guilty of war crimes, as many critics had charged. Intellectuals such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz pointed to the imprisonment of South Vietnamese in “reeducation” camps—“Vietnamese gulags”—and the tragic flight of the boat people from Vietnam to show how brutal victors had cynically and deceitfully subverted genuine Vietnamese nationalism to impose a Communist dictatorship on the entire nation. Lyndon Johnson had been right about Hanoi “before the boat people proved his point,” Newsweek columnist George Will chortled.¹¹

Arguing that America’s defeat had been largely self-inflicted, conservative revisionists also insisted that the war could have been won. For some former participants, of course, rewriting history was a means of self-exculpation. For most, the aim was to free the United States from the crippling constraints imposed by bitter memories of Vietnam. Former generals and admirals blamed President Johnson’s “ill-considered” strategy of gradual escalation, arguing that if the United States had employed its vast military power decisively and without limit, the war could have been won. Others contended that instead of trying to fight World War II in Vietnam, the military should have adapted to the unconventional war in which it found itself and shaped an appropriate counterinsurgency strategy. Most revisionists found the real villains at home in the form of a hostile media and a near treacherous antiwar movement, the “brotherhood of the misguided, the mistaken, the well-meaning and the malevolent,” in former president Richard M. Nixon’s alliterative phrase.¹² Together, these elements of society had turned the American people against the war, forcing Presidents Johnson and Nixon to de-escalate when victory was within grasp. Television was singled out for special criticism for having exposed the American public night after night to the horrors of war. For the “first time in modern history,” journalist Robert Elegant charged, “the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen.”¹³

The results, according to revisionists, had been disastrous. Using medical imagery to diagnose the Vietnam syndrome, they deplored the “neutered internationalism” of President Jimmy Carter and charged that what Podhoretz called the “malevolent legacy” of Vietnam had undermined America’s self-respect and self-confidence, reducing the nation to a state of near impotence in a menacing world. It had cut the base from the policy of global containment at a time when the Soviet Union posed a greater threat than ever before. What Will called the “paralyzing, thought-killing slogan ‘No More Vietnams’” crippled America’s willingness to intervene in the Third World, the revisionists charged.¹⁴ “We must purge ourselves of the paralyzing sickness of the Vietnam Syndrome,” Nixon proclaimed on the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon.¹⁵

Rewriting history was supplemented in the Reagan years by more assertive policies designed to put on display American military power and demonstrate that the United States could influence events, especially in Third World battlegrounds. Shortly after Reagan took office, his secretary of state and self-styled foreign-policy “vicar,” former army general and Nixon aide Alexander M. Haig Jr., targeted for the president tiny, impoverished El Salvador, where a conservative government confronted a leftist insurgency, as “one you can win.”¹⁶ The invasion of Grenada in the eastern Caribbean in the fall of 1983 was designed in part to restore U.S. military credibility. Steadfast U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contra insurgency against the leftist Sandinista government was also intended in part to prove that the United States could win.

In his two terms, Reagan rebuilt America’s military arsenal and restored the nation’s optimism, but he could not “heal” the Vietnam syndrome. Revisionist history simply did not take. A 1982 poll revealed that 72 percent of Americans viewed the Vietnam War as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” and attitudes changed very little in subsequent polls.¹⁷ Throughout the decade, the public firmly opposed military intervention in Central America. In 1983, 75 percent of Americans believed that the war in El Salvador would lead to another Vietnam. When Congress considered Central American issues, one legislator conceded that Vietnam was a “ghostly presence; it’s there in every committee room, at every meeting.”¹⁸ A nervous Congress put numerous roadblocks in the way of expanded aid to the Contras, to which zealots on the National Security Council responded by resorting to various illegal measures that were exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987, momentarily crippling the Reagan presidency. Despite various snafus and woeful interservice coordination, the administration’s splendid little war in Grenada toppled the leftist government and freed American students on the island, providing some cheer to Americans. But a near-simultaneous disaster earlier in Lebanon in which 241 marines were killed in a Beirut car-bombing incident stood as a painful and sorrowful reminder of the perils of Third World intervention. Even a relatively small U.S. military involvement in the drug war in Latin America late in the decade evoked concerns about another Vietnam. For one journalist, the sight of U.S. soldiers building bases in remote reaches of the Andes, training Latin American troops, and employing helicopters to destroy crops or interdict the drug trade at its source bore “an unsettling visual resemblance to another war fought and lost half a world away.”¹⁹

The 1983 tragedy in Lebanon led many top U.S. military officials to embrace a form of the Vietnam syndrome. By the mid-1980s, the military had begun to repair much of the enormous institutional damage done by Vietnam, but fears of a rerun of that war continued to haunt its leaders. Nowhere in American society was there greater reluctance to employ force than in the military itself. Deeply alienated military leaders came away from Vietnam bitterly resentful of the civilians they claimed had denied them the means to win and the American public for its lack of support and appreciation. They staunchly opposed the application of “small doses of force in messy waters for obscure political purposes.”²⁰ They protested the committing of troops to vaguely defined peacekeeping missions such as Lebanon, worried about sending anything more than small advisory groups to the conflicts in Central America, and feared that even these actions might put the United States on the path to full-scale intervention.

Their fears were articulated in a set of guidelines drafted in late 1984 by army colonel Colin Powell and publicly articulated by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger—what later came to be known as the Powell Doctrine. According to these guidelines, troops should be committed only as a last resort and only in defense of vital national interests. Objectives must be clearly defined and attainable. Public support must be ensured. Overwhelming force must be used to achieve complete and decisive victory.²¹ Critics denounced Weinberger’s rules as the “Capgun Doctrine,” and Secretary of State George Shultz later labeled them the “Vietnam Syndrome in spades.”²² They were never given official sanction, but top military officers, such as future Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman Powell, accepted them in principle. They became the rules under which the next war was fought.

Indeed, the Persian Gulf War of 1991 seemed at times for Americans as much about Vietnam as about oil, Kuwait, and Iraq. From the moment Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and President George H. W. Bush’s tough response raised the possibility of war, the frame of reference for discussion was Vietnam. Those Americans who opposed war to liberate Kuwait screamed “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam!” and with mixed imagery warned of a quagmire in the Arabian desert. “I feel like Alice staring into the looking glass,” said Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic as U.S. troops were departing for the Persian Gulf in the fall of 1990, “seeing the same horror and nightmare about to repeat itself.”²³ In the same vein, a cartoonist portrayed an American GI seeing a desert mirage: Asian peasants in conical-shaped hats working alongside water buffaloes in a rice field. In its cover story of December 10, 1990, Newsweek reported that on the eve of another war, Vietnam hung “in the collective [American] subconscious like a bad dream, a psychotic wound that leaves the patient forever neurotic. It hovers over politicians and policymakers, the past that will not die.”²⁴

For the Bush administration, Arnold Isaacs has written, “laying the Vietnam Syndrome to rest was a major … goal, perhaps even equal in importance to defeating Iraq.” The president and his advisers made abundantly clear their determination not to refight the last war. At one December 1990 press conference, Bush repeated three times in seven sentences what had become his mantra: “This will not be another Vietnam.”²⁵ GIs would not fight with one hand tied behind their back. General Colin Powell, now chairman of the JCS, dragged his feet for months until the United States had sufficient troops in staging areas in Saudi Arabia to meet the major test of overwhelming force laid out in the Powell Doctrine. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told troops during a January 1991 visit to the gulf that “the only acceptable outcome is absolute, total victory.”²⁶ Certain that a hostile media had contributed to failure in Vietnam and concluding that war was too important to be left to the journalists, the military muzzled the press. Access to the battlefield was strictly limited. To hide from the public the cost of the war, U.S. officials even restricted coverage of the return to the United States of the bodies of those killed in action.

The stunningly easy, hundred-hour victory on the ground in the Persian Gulf War seemed for many Americans, military and civilian, to be a long-awaited vindication. A New York Times analysis summarized the views of several scholars: “After the ambiguity and humiliation of Vietnam, the gulf war seems a model of clarity and success, a war portrayed as being fought with the most efficient of weapons and greatest resolve against the vilest of villains.”²⁷ “We’ve closed the door on Vietnam,” one officer proclaimed. “We’ve done it. The circle is complete.”²⁸ President Bush went further, boasting that Vietnam’s ghosts had been buried beneath the Arabian desert.

The president’s eulogy for the Vietnam syndrome turned out to be the first of several such premature declarations. To be sure, success in the Gulf War helped restore the nation’s confidence in its military institutions and weakened inhibitions against military intervention abroad. Its effects on popular attitudes were remarkably short-lived, however, and it did not expunge deeply encrusted and still painful memories of an earlier and very different war. The president’s own actions made this quite clear. In refusing to have the army drive forward to Baghdad in the spring of 1991 and seek total victory over Saddam Hussein, Bush himself heeded fears of the Vietnam-like political entanglements and possible military quagmire that might result from involvement in an alien and hostile area. The administration refused even to intervene to stop Saddam from brutally crushing a revolt among Iraq’s Shiites, even though the United States had encouraged that revolt. “Therein lay Vietnam, as far as we were concerned,” CIA director Robert Gates later conceded.²⁹

The contours of world politics changed dramatically in the post–Cold War era of the 1990s, and the major issues for U.S. foreign policy changed with them. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the primary enemy and made irrelevant containment of Communism, the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy for nearly a half century. But the end of the Cold War did not bring peace to the world. Rather, it unleashed fierce and widespread ethnic and nationalist conflicts, a prime example in the former Yugoslavia, where Serbians sought to impose their will on rival Croatians and Bosnian Muslims. The question now before the United States was whether to use military force in “humanitarian interventions” to prevent the extermination of ethnic minorities through what the Serbs euphemistically called “ethnic cleansing.” A communications revolution brought the atrocities inflicted on innocent people into American living rooms through worldwide, twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news broadcasts, creating concern and pressures to do something—the so-called CNN effect.

The first case—Bosnia—made clear that, despite the Gulf War, the Vietnam syndrome remained very much alive among U.S. military leaders and the general public. When the possibility first arose in 1992 of sending U.S. troops to protect Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs, JCS chairman Powell took the quite extraordinary step of opposing it publicly. In a New York Times op-ed piece, he argued against intervention on the grounds that military victory was not attainable. “You bet I get nervous when so-called experts suggest that all we need is a little surgical bombing or a limited attack,” he said. “When the desired result isn’t obtained, a new set of experts then comes forward with talk of a little escalation.”³⁰ Many Americans shared Powell’s anxiety. Surveying opinion in the heartland in May 1993, one journalist found “an abiding fear that the Balkans are another Vietnam, a deep-seated angst that tends to outweigh concern that another holocaust is in the making.”³¹ President Bill Clinton had protested the Vietnam War. His national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and secretary of state, Warren Christopher, had seen firsthand from positions in government the havoc it had wreaked on U.S. foreign policy. In part because of such memories, Clinton and his advisers kept a safe distance from the Bosnian conflict during their first year in office.

A debacle in Somalia in October 1993 reinforced anti-interventionist tendencies from Vietnam. Americans expressed little opposition when Bush had first sent troops into war-torn Somalia in late 1992 to deliver food to starving civilians. The following year, however, in a classic case of what would be called “mission creep,” the number of troops was increased, their mission was expanded, and they became increasingly entangled in Somalia’s tribal politics. On October 3, 1993, while pursuing a hostile warlord, American GIs were ambushed in the capital, Mogadishu. On that bloody Sunday afternoon, eighteen Americans were killed. Television viewers were treated to the horrific spectacle of a fallen GI’s body being dragged through the streets.

The specter of Vietnam again rose like a storm cloud over the nation. Calling Somalia a “true child of Vietnam,” liberal columnist Anna Quindlen warned that there, as in Vietnam, the United States had underestimated local nationalism, and American soldiers were once again caught in an alien political culture expecting appreciation for their good works and getting shot at instead. Conservative Cal Thomas agreed with Quindlen’s conclusions, if not her premises. Vietnam’s lessons, he observed, included the “realization that the United States cannot be the policeman of the world.”³² A rising popular fear that Somalia could become another Vietnam forced Clinton to scale back the U.S. role there and promise an alarmed public and Congress that all troops would be withdrawn in six months. Diplomat Richard Holbrooke later coined the phrase “Vietmalia syndrome,” another sign that the ghosts Bush claimed to have buried in the Persian Gulf War still haunted the nation.³³

Not surprisingly, the Clinton administration—and the rest of the world—looked the other way in 1994 when ethnic rivalries in Rwanda in Central Africa produced the “fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.”³⁴ While the world did nothing, the revenge-bent Hutu tribe murdered an estimated 800,000 rival Tutsis, in some cases with machetes. Even a relatively small intervention might have helped, but the United States, paralyzed by memories of Vietnam and Somalia, did not even consider intervention. As if to insulate themselves from responsibility and guilt, U.S. officials refused even to use the “g word,” resorting instead to the euphemistic phrase “acts of genocide” to describe the slaughter. Their main concern was to get Americans out of Rwanda as quickly as possible.

The Clinton administration shifted gears in the fall of 1994. Liberals, many of them one-time opponents of the Vietnam War, began to push for the use of military force to prevent human suffering. Action-oriented analogies drawn from Munich and the Holocaust began to compete with the restrictive Vietnam analogy to influence policy decisions. After months of soul searching, sanctions that hurt victims more than oppressors, and warnings that were ignored, the United States used the threat of a full-scale invasion of Haiti to remove a brutal military dictatorship and restore to power the erratic—but elected—president Jean Bertrand-Aristide.

After years of inaction, the United States finally made its weight felt in the former Yugoslavia in the summer of 1995. The Serb massacre of a Bosnian Muslim enclave in the village of Srebrenica after three years of shelling with artillery aroused worldwide outrage. In the United States, a new coalition of morally outraged liberals and neoconservatives pushed for intervention. Humiliated by Somalia, three years of caution in the Balkans, and Serb leader Slobodan Miloševib’s blatant defiance, Clinton himself was moved to exclaim: “The United States cannot be a punching bag in the world anymore.”³⁵

In August 1995, with full U.S. backing, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began intensive bombing of Serb positions. This decisive action forced the warring parties to the conference table in Dayton, Ohio. Clinton subsequently sent troops to participate in a peacekeeping operation. Even then, U.S. military leaders were still obsessed with “mission security,” and the avoidance of casualties dictated the terms of intervention. The military’s Vietnam-generated paranoia about a “fuzzy mission” led to rules of engagement that sharply restricted the use of American forces, preventing them from pursuing war criminals or assisting the relocation of refugees and thus limiting their ability to implement the Dayton Accords. Their insistence on an “exit strategy” led to the imposition of an unrealistic—and later scrapped—twelve-month deadline for the removal of U.S. troops.

Another war in the Balkans—this time in Kosovo in 1999—made clear the continuing vitality of the Vietnam syndrome. Different historical analogies competed for attention during the run-up to that war. Memories of the appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938 and the horrors of World War II’s Holocaust provided compelling arguments to stop Serbian “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo. But if World War II helped push Clinton and his advisers toward war, the more recent and for most of them personally more searing experience of Vietnam dictated how they would fight.

Kosovo was the first war waged by the Vietnam generation, and as such it attracted much attention from analysts. Clinton and his top aides had seen the Vietnam War’s effects on the body politic, the damage it inflicted on two presidencies, and its near destruction of the Democratic Party. They were haunted by memories of it and especially by fears of getting bogged down in confusing and intractable political entanglements in strange and distant lands. Memories of Vietnam, reinforced by that horrible Sunday afternoon in Somalia, fed convictions that with the first casualties the public would demand that the troops be brought home. Thus, to reassure a presumably anxious public and minimize the risks to an administration already embattled by impeachment proceedings, Clinton relied exclusively on airpower. Ground forces would not be used. Indeed, to the dismay of some commentators, the president at the start of the war in March 1999 announced that he would not send ground troops to Kosovo. Casualty avoidance—“force protection” in Pentagon jargon—was elevated above mission accomplishment as a guiding principle of the war.

The looming presence of Vietnam was manifest in other places in other ways. “They are going to come home in body bags, and they will be killed in a war that Congress has not declared,” warned a Republican senator in a not-so-veiled allusion to Vietnam. Other critics pointed to the dangers of gradual escalation and entrapment in a quagmire, the latter word a frequently used code word for Vietnam. “If any clear lesson emerges from Vietnam,” the Nation cautioned, “it is that it makes no sense to compound a mistake by digging oneself more deeply into a strategic morass.”³⁶ Critics from the political Left and Right agreed that bombing alone would not achieve NATO’s goals. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner of war in the notorious Hanoi Hilton during Vietnam, spoke for many critics when he denounced the folly of half-measures. “You don’t get into a conflict unless you are willing to exercise all means necessary to winning it,” he insisted. He condemned the administration’s gradual escalation of the bombing and its refusal to employ ground troops—mistakes made, he claimed, in “almost willful ignorance of every lesson we learned in Vietnam.”³⁷ Numerous military officers reinvoked the Powell Doctrine, warning that when a nation goes to war, it must mobilize all available resources in pursuit of a quick and decisive victory.

The war in Kosovo confirmed some fascinating role reversals and strange new bedfellows, suggesting the extent to which, as a new century approached, old positions were changing. Some changes could be explained by partisanship, of course: the Democrats were now the interventionists; Republicans, the opponents. But something deeper was at work. Liberal “doves” who had opposed the Vietnam War on moral grounds now demanded that American power be used to promote good and combat evil in the world. These so-called compassionate warriors or liberal hawks joined neoconservative crusaders such as William Kristol, who had long advocated an American-imposed “benevolent hegemony.” They supported military intervention in the Balkans and chafed at the Clinton administration’s caution. With the end of the Cold War, in contrast, conservative “hawks” who had supported America’s global crusade against Communism had little enthusiasm for intervention in places where the nation did not appear to have vital interests, thus putting them in the same camp with left-wing noninterventionists and Vietnam antiwar warriors such as historian Howard Zinn and Students for a Democratic Society founder Tom Hayden.

The use of American military power in Kosovo neither reinforced nor undermined the Vietnam syndrome. To be sure, NATO’s sustained bombing operations produced in less than three months a Serbian capitulation with virtually no U.S. casualties. The United States thus avoided a Vietnam-like quagmire and maintained public acquiescence, if not enthusiastic support. Some analysts hailed the new decisiveness of airpower, and, indeed, the bombing did help get the Serbs out of Kosovo and permitted the eventual return of the ethnic Albanians. But the cost of the war was estimated at some $2.3 billion, not the sort of price tag even a superpower could afford on a regular basis. The bombing did not prevent the expulsion of the Albanians at the start of the war or the murder of thousands of Kosovars, and the reliance on airpower may have contributed to these results. Thus NATO’s casualty-free war turned the principle of just war on its head, putting civilians at risk to keep warriors out of harm’s way. The bombing did minimal damage to the Serb army, and it does not seem to have been decisive in Miloševib’s decision to negotiate. The threat of a NATO ground war and Russian abandonment of the Serbs, as much as the pounding from the air, led to a peace agreement. At the end of the war, Miloševib remained in power. The qualified success in the war seems to have had little effect on American attitudes toward the use of force. A true paradigm change awaited some cataclysmic event.

That event came on September 11, 2001. Terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, causing enormous destruction and the loss of close to 3,000 lives, in one stroke appeared to mark the end of an era in U.S. history. For the first time since 1814, the continental United States had come under attack, and much of the intellectual and emotional baggage from Vietnam seemed swept aside in a surge of grief, anger, and fear. Patriotism was fashionable again. In its shock, a nation that had been chronically suspicious of government turned to government to avenge the loss of life, repair the damage, heal an ailing economy, and provide security against future attacks. Just as Pearl Harbor had wiped away the bitter memories of World War I that had been the basis for isolationism in the 1930s, so also the terrorist attacks on September 11 appeared to sweep aside memories of America’s failure in Vietnam and inhibitions against the use of military force. In the anxious days that followed, the “V word” was conspicuous by its absence from the national discourse. Speaking with a single voice for one of the few times since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Congress granted President George W. Bush blank-check authority to use American military forces in a new war against international terrorism. “America is at the moment a weird inside-out image of the Vietnam era,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd observed shortly after September 11. “The CIA and ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] are chic on elite campuses, where flags hang from dorm rooms. Police have gone from ‘pigs’ to heroes. And many of those who complained about America’s escalation in Southeast Asia are now complaining about America’s hesitation in Central Asia.”³⁸

Changes in attitudes are never total and definitive, of course, and during the first stages of the Bush administration’s attack on al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban supporters in Afghanistan, faint echoes could still be heard from an earlier time. Some “experts” reminded Americans that Afghanistan was an especially difficult place to fight, a Vietnam with snow. Like Vietnam, it had a long history of humiliating great powers foolish enough to get involved there, most recently the Soviet Union. When the war in Afghanistan bogged down briefly in late October 2001, the ghosts of Vietnam stirred again. Conservatives complained that the war was being fought too much like Vietnam, with half-measures, and protested that the United States was again relying too heavily on airpower. From the political Left, there was again talk of a quagmire. “Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past,” opined New York Times columnist R. W. Apple on Halloween Day, “the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.” Apple had gained notoriety and Lyndon Johnson’s undying enmity in August 1967 by writing a front-page piece proclaiming the Vietnam War a stalemate. Now, he asked, thirty-four years later: “Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world?”³⁹ “Bush has bungled the challenge,” a Los Angeles Times columnist observed. “The Vietnam Syndrome has gained a new virulence.”⁴⁰

In early November, to the shock of some observers and the delight of others, the war in Afghanistan turned suddenly and dramatically for the better. Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban Party was quickly routed, and if al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was still at large, his organization in Afghanistan was in shambles. All this was accomplished largely without ground forces. Only one American, a CIA operative, died from enemy gunfire. Now it was time for the gloaters to detach Afghanistan from Vietnam. “The Vietnam War was a half-proxy war between great powers,” journalist Michael Kelly wrote. “There is only one great power in this conflict, and that is the United States.” “As ‘quagmires’ go,” the Wall Street Journal clucked in late November, “the one in Afghanistan is looking pretty good.” “War Works After All” screamed the headline of another article.⁴¹ The first phase of an anticipated long, twilight struggle against terrorism appeared to have ended with remarkable—and for many unexpected—success. Bush the Younger seemed finally to have put to rest the syndrome his father claimed to have buried a decade earlier.

That conclusion seemed reaffirmed in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Taliban. New high-technological modes of warfare raised the possibility of war without pain or sacrifice, at least to Americans, and seemed to eliminate the possibility of Vietnam-like quagmires. Polls taken in 2002 showed substantial popular support for military action against Iraq and Iran, dispatching military advisers to the Philippines to fight Muslim insurgents, and even sending troops there to work with the Philippine army in actual combat situations. Fifty percent of those polled expressed willingness to use U.S. military power to fight terrorist organizations that did not directly threaten the United States. The Vietnam syndrome appeared to be a relic of history.

In this context, the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters set out to eliminate the last vestiges of the syndrome to clear the way for implementing a new national security agenda. Neoconservative intellectuals saw the chance to use America’s military preeminence to eliminate regimes who threatened the United States and through America’s “benevolent hegemony” to reform the Middle East and indeed other parts of the world along democratic-capitalist lines. Neocon writers produced books directly challenging Vietnam’s most sacred conventional wisdoms. Journalist Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power claimed that the United States, throughout its history, had “routinely violated” the Powell Doctrine by fighting small wars and “had done so with great success.” The risk of another Vietnam was “relatively small.”⁴² Political scientist Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command, closely read by President Bush, argued from historical case studies that war was too important to be left to generals such as Colin Powell who refused to use their armies in battle.⁴³ Civilian leaders must make the key decisions. Intellectuals such as William Kristol of the Weekly Standard pushed war against Iraq as the first step in reforming the Middle East. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Department consultant Richard Perle promoted the neocon agenda within the government. Assertive nationalists such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney urged aggressive action to eliminate or neutralize potential threats such as the so-called Axis of Evil: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Rumsfeld in his typically brash manner set out to reform the armed services and in doing so to eliminate the remnants of the Powell Doctrine among Vietnam-era senior military officers. In September 2002, the administration unveiled a new national security doctrine proclaiming that the policy of containment, which had worked against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, would not do against terrorists in a world of nuclear weapons. Instead, preemptive war against potential threats would be essential to ensure American safety.

A second war against Iraq became the centerpiece of the administration’s new strategic doctrine and its global war against terrorism. Historians will long debate the reasons Bush and his advisers chose this war. It is certain that they were intent on combating the terrorist threat, although direct connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had not been and never were established. They spoke of eliminating the menace of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but the evidence of such weapons was shaky and turned out not to exist. Some U.S. officials saw the toppling of Saddam Hussein as the first step in advancing democracy in the Middle East. It also seems clear, however, that many of those who pushed for war against Iraq hoped that the anticipated easy victory would eliminate once and for all the Vietnam syndrome and the Powell Doctrine, freeing the administration to pursue its broader national security agenda.

In its purely military phase, the war launched in March 2003 worked out much as its proponents had hoped. As with the Afghan War, U.S. forces briefly bogged down at the outset, as much from the weather as anything else. But this phase ended quickly when Iraqi resistance crumbled, Baghdad fell without major resistance, and the statue of Saddam was ceremoniously toppled.

History has a way of confounding those who presume to control it, however, and the one thing that is predictable about war is its unpredictability. Epitaphs for the Vietnam syndrome proved premature once again. After the easy military success in Iraq in the spring of 2003, a woefully unprepared and undermanned U.S. invading force confronted the daunting and often deadly politicomilitary task of rebuilding a shattered nation and uniting a divided people. Iraqis did not welcome their American “liberators” in the “cakewalk” that top Bush administration officials had foolishly predicted. Guerrilla-like resistance to the U.S. occupation rose immediately out of military defeat. American casualties in the “postwar” period quickly exceeded those in actual combat. By June 2003, the word “quagmire” had once again become a part of the political vocabulary.

From the summer of 2003 on, the Vietnam analogy was employed more and more in reference to the ongoing struggle in postwar Iraq. Talk of winning Iraqi hearts and minds revived a favorite catchphrase from the Vietnam era. Images of heavily armed U.S. soldiers seeking to locate elusive and deadly insurgents among people whose language and culture they did not comprehend were eerily reminiscent of Vietnam. Bush’s belated appeal for $87 billion to wage a war whose financing he had hoped to finesse drew comparisons with fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson. Mounting evidence that the administration’s case for war had been less than forthright and was far less than persuasive opened a credibility gap that brought further reminders of LBJ. A once-invulnerable Rumsfeld came under fierce attack for bungling the war, drawing comparisons with another arrogant, “slicked-back” secretary of defense who had casually dismissed military advice, just about the time Robert McNamara resurfaced in the Oscar-winning documentary Fog of War. “We thought we had escaped Vietnam in 1975,” Newsweek’s Howard Fineman wrote in the fall of 2003. “It turns out we never left.”⁴⁴

Commentary on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon confirmed this view. Much of the discussion of the ongoing war in Iraq harkened back to Vietnam; commemoration of the anniversary looked forward to Iraq. Vietnam was a “gift that keeps on giving,” veteran and former assistant secretary of state Richard Armitage observed. “I don’t think the wounds will heal completely until those of us who fought in that time pass on,” Senator John McCain added.⁴⁵

As the Iraq War dragged into its third year, with costs in blood and treasure mounting and no end in sight, the comparisons with Vietnam seemed ever more apt and compelling. Nation building in Iraq proved as daunting and progress as elusive as in Vietnam four decades earlier. Efforts to build an Iraqi army to assume the burden of defending the fledgling government bore a marked resemblance to the Vietnamization policies of the Nixon years. A prolonged war strained America’s volunteer armed forces to the breaking point, especially the army and the National Guard, and growing morale problems, if not yet as severe, began to resemble those in Vietnam in the early 1970s. As in Vietnam, the optimistic statements from the White House contrasted with negative reports from the scene in Iraq. In a pattern and with a timetable almost identical to Vietnam, public support for the war and the president’s handling of it plummeted in the spring of 2005. According to polls taken in the summer, four out of ten Americans now believed that the Iraq War would end like Vietnam, presumably in failure for the United States. Bush’s increasingly anxious pleas to stay the course, his insistence that the United States had to finish the job to honor those GIs who had given their lives in Iraq, sounded like earlier statements by Johnson and Nixon. As the poll numbers continued to drop, Vietnam War policymaker Henry Kissinger expressed concern that the collapse of public support on Iraq, as in Vietnam, would make it “impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made.”⁴⁶ A war that had been launched in part to eradicate the Vietnam syndrome seemed by the fall of 2005 to have revivified it.

Thus, remarkably, the Vietnam syndrome—despite repeated efforts to dispose of it, frequent proclamations of its demise, numerous military interventions that did not produce quagmires, and the horrific shock of September 11—remains more than thirty years after the end of the war a prominent part of the American political landscape. Many Americans still vividly remember that war. They do not want to repeat it. They remain wary of committing troops abroad; they get anxious when they confront situations that seem to resemble Vietnam.

All this should not be surprising. The Vietnam War was the defining event for an entire generation of Americans—the Baby Boomers, the Vietnam Generation, they have been called. Whether they fought in the war, evaded it, avoided it, or protested against it, they were profoundly affected by it. This generation now holds political power. It remains deeply divided by the war. As McCain pointed out, it will likely go to its grave debating Vietnam, and the war will continue to haunt the nation until this generation passes from the scene. Given this reality, partisans have naturally sought to exploit the war for political purposes. “Vietnam is a way of … peddling a particular vision of America,” historian Harvard Sitkoff has observed, “and people use it to get across their vision of what they would like to see the United States be today…. The wounds of the Vietnam era are very hard to heal because many people keep picking at the scabs and don’t want it to die.”⁴⁷

But the Vietnam syndrome is much more than a “sickness” plaguing “elites in journalism, politics, and the bureaucracy,” as some conservatives have charged.⁴⁸ What critics have identified as an illness or a paralysis may also be viewed as proper caution and good common sense. Polls taken over the past twenty years make clear that popular concern about military intervention abroad is neither knee-jerk, all-encompassing, or mindless. Americans have been willing to put troops in harm’s way, but they want to be certain that the nation’s vital interests are at stake, that it is properly prepared for war, that its leaders will not embark on a fool’s errand, and that the war will be conducted according to American values. Such views are deeply rooted in the American tradition and have provided a firm foundation for the Vietnam syndrome. They seem likely to be reinforced by the experience in Iraq. They will last beyond the Vietnam generation and the Vietnam syndrome.

NOTES

1. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1991 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), 196–97.

2. Ralph Blumenthal, “‘Syndrome’ Found in Returned G.I.’s,” New York Times, June 7, 1971.

3. Quoted in William Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1993), 844.

4. Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt, 1977), 95.

5. Colonel Arthur Kelly, interviewed by the author, Frankfort, Kentucky, April 16, 1985.

6. Pennsylvanian quoted in Associated Press, “The Mood of a Nation,” May 5, 1975; “An Irony of History,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975, 17.

7. Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 48.

8. David Broder, “Isolationist Sentiment Not Blind to Reality,” Washington Post, March 22, 1975.

9. Robert James Flynn, “Preserving the Hub: U.S.–Thai Relations During the Vietnam War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2001), 211–15, 247–48.

10. Quoted in Howell Raines, “Reagan Calls Arms Race Essential to Avoid a ‘Surrender’ or ‘Defeat,’” New York Times, August 19, 1980.

11. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 200–201; George Will, “Commentary on ‘Agony of the Boat People,’” Newsweek, July 2, 1979, 89.

12. Richard M. Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 15.

13. Robert Elegant, “How to Lose a War: The Press and Vietnam,” Encounter 57, no. 2 (1981): 73–74.

14. Norman Podhoretz, quoted in David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 164; George Will, “No More ‘No More Vietnams,’” Newsweek, March 19, 1979, 104.

15. Nixon, No More Vietnams, 212.

16. Quoted in William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 81–82.

17. Robert J. McMahon, “Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 2 (2002): 175.

18. Quoted in “El Salvador and the Ghost of Vietnam,” Lexington Herald-Leader, May 1, 1983.

19. Frank Greve, “The New Vietnam? U.S. Anti-drug Presence in Peru Reminds Some of Lost War,” Lexington Herald-Leader, September 24, 1989.

20. George C. Herring, “Preparing Not to Refight the Last War: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the U.S. Military,” in After Vietnam: Legacies of a Lost War, edited by Charles Neu (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 74.

21. Caspar W. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner Books, 1990), 159.

22. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993), 649–51.

23. Quoted in USA Today, August 19, 1990.

24. “No Vietnam,” Newsweek, December 10, 1990, 24.

25. Quoted in Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows, 76.

26. Quoted in Michael R. Gordon, “Cracking the Whip,” New York Times Magazine, January 27, 1991, 34.

27. Peter Applebome, “Sense of Pride Outweighs Fears of War,” New York Times, February 24, 1991.

28. Quoted in Al Santoli, Leading the Way: How Vietnam Veterans Rebuilt the U.S. Military: An Oral History (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 421.

29. Quoted in John Robert Greene, The Presidency of George Bush (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 138.

30. Colin L. Powell, “Why Generals Get Nervous,” New York Times, October 8, 1992. Historian Russell Weigley argues that with this op-ed piece, Powell overstepped his bounds, blatantly intruding in the political process and advancing a political position that was not properly his to take. See Russell Weigley, “The American Military and the Principle of Civilian Control from McClellan to Powell,” Journal of Military History 57, no. 5 (1993): 27–29.

31. B. Drummond Ayres Jr., “In American Voices, a Sense of Concern over Bosnia Role,” New York Times, May 2, 1993.

32. Quindlen and Thomas quoted in George C. Herring, “Angola to Kosovo: The Vietnam Analogy and the Uses of History,” Douglas Southall Freeman Historical Review, spring 2001, 35.

33. Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998), 217.

34. Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2001, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200109/power-genocide.

35. Quoted in David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 331.

36. Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, “The Case Against Intervention in Kosovo,” Nation, April 19, 1999, 11.

37. Quoted in Alison Mitchell, “McCain Keeps Pressing Case for Troops,” New York Times, April 4, 1999.

38. Maureen Dowd, “These Spooky Times,” New York Times, October 31, 2001.

39. R. W. Apple Jr., “A Military Quagmire Remembered,” New York Times, October 31, 2001, quoted in John Leo, “Quagmire, Schmagmire,” U.S. News & World Report, November 26, 2001, 52.

40. Jacob Heilbrunn, “Pinpricks Still Won’t Work,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2001.

41. Michael Kelly, “Myths of the Month,” Washington Post, October 31, 2001; Wall Street Journal, quoted in Leo, “Quagmire, Schmagmire,” 52; Eric Schmitt, “War Works After All,” New York Times, November 18, 2001.

42. Max Boot, “Everything You Think You Know About the American Way of War Is Wrong,” Foreign Policy Research Institute e-mail, September 12, 2002. See also Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 318–35.

43. Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).

44. Howard Fineman, October 30, 2003, quoted at http://elemming2.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_archive.html.

45. Armitage and McCain quoted in Michael Tackett and Tim Jones, “Vietnam: Long Time Passing,” Chicago Tribune, April 24, 2005.

46. Henry Kissinger, August 15, 2005, quoted at http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/08/15/U.S.iraq/index.html.

47. Quoted in Adam D. Krauss, “Vietnam Scars Remain After 30 Years,” April 30, 2005, available at http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050430/NEWS05/50430055.

48. Robert L. Bartley, “Whose ‘Vietnam Syndrome’?” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2003.