The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

Despite the existence of extensive historical scholarship on the misunderstood origins, frustrating course, and failed outcomes of the U.S. war in Vietnam, American forces were deployed to Iraq in 2003 in a large-scale military conflict that quickly assumed an eerie resemblance to the previous American military intervention in Indochina. The war in Iraq was not a precise replay of the war in Vietnam any more than World War II exactly replicated World War I. That the United States could become embroiled in a costly, protracted, and ambiguous war in two succeeding generations demonstrates, however, the critical importance of accurate knowledge and careful interpretation of historical experience. The history of the American war in Vietnam is not a remote academic subject. It is, or it should be, a continuing and real part of policymaking and public discourse on the role of American power and ideals throughout the world.¹

Washington’s top policymakers on the Iraq War were not historians of the Vietnam War and were even disdainful of the history of that previous war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responded dismissively when asked in July 2003 if Iraq presented a parallel to Vietnam: “It’s a different era. It’s a different place.”² In several respects, he was correct that the Iraq War was not the Vietnam War. The U.S. troop levels in Iraq did not reach 500,000, with about half of that number being draftees, as in Vietnam. As a consequence, the number of American casualties suffered in Iraq was far less than in Vietnam. In Iraq, there was no Ho Chi Minh—that is, no heroic leader of a national revolution backed by a superpower rival of the United States leading the fight against a U.S.-supported government. In Iraq, the American involvement went from a conventional invasion to counterinsurgency warfare, and in Vietnam it was the reverse: American advice and support of the South Vietnamese government against insurgents escalated into more of a conventional ground and air war with North Vietnam. American air power was used in both wars, albeit in different ways.

Despite these differences, there are many striking parallels between the two wars that require understanding. The officially proclaimed purposes for both wars became discredited, and Washington’s exit strategy became focused on the ability of a pro-American regime to survive on its own without U.S. troops. In both cases, it became clear, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to understand in Vietnam, that “military force—especially when yielded by an outside power—just cannot bring order in a country that cannot govern itself.”³ Public unrest with American involvement emerged, no definition of victory appeared tenable, there was little allied support for the United States, and costs grew far beyond initial expectations. In defiance of these realities, Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush stubbornly persisted with the interventions they had ordered. Indeed, the Iraq War became an exaggerated reprise of Vietnam in many ways. For example, it took the Iraq War only four years to reach the level of economic cost to the United States (in inflation-adjusted dollars) caused by the Vietnam War in twenty years.⁴

A well-documented, logically argued, and widely accepted historical analysis of the American war in Vietnam had emerged long before President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The general outlines of this analysis of Washington’s approach to Southeast Asia anticipated in many ways what has come to pass in the Persian Gulf region. This prevailing or orthodox interpretation of the causes, course, outcome, and lessons of the Vietnam War characterizes the U.S. involvement in Vietnamese politics and the ultimate decision to wage war in Vietnam as tragic and monumental errors in judgment by American policymakers. It is a so-called liberal-realist analysis derived from study of the containment strategy that shaped U.S. foreign policy for forty years after World War II. In the early twenty-first century, the paradigm of containment persists in Washington’s reaction to a perceived global network of doctrinaire terrorists committed to the destruction of the United States.

Historian George Herring succinctly summarizes the consistent agreement among many scholars that “containment was misapplied in Vietnam.”⁵ The realist portion of this “flawed-containment” critique makes the point that containment began after World War II as a prudent response to a Soviet political and military presence in Eastern Europe that posed real or potential danger to U.S. interest in the stability and well-being of Western Europe. Some of the presumed early successes of containment in deterring Moscow’s ambitions, such as the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), encouraged acceptance among U.S. leaders of several sweeping assumptions about containment. They reached a so-called Cold War consensus that the United States alone among the major nations had the power and moral standing to create a secure international order, that U.S. security interests were necessarily global, and that Soviet-inspired subversion was the greatest threat to world peace.⁶ Such thinking led to eventual U.S. military intervention in Vietnam in an effort to prevent Communist-led North Vietnam from exercising power over the whole country. The realist analysis emphasizes that Moscow’s Red Army was not in Southeast Asia, that the strategic value of the region to the United States was low compared with the importance of other areas, and that costs of protecting limited American interest there were very high. The liberal critique adds that although it is true that the leaders of North Vietnam derived their intellectual and revolutionary dogma from Marx and Lenin, they were striving for self-determination and social justice, goals that were not unlike America’s own core values. The liberal-realist scholars find from their examination of the origins of and rationale for the U.S. war in Vietnam that American military intervention in Vietnam was a flawed application of containment and based on a misinterpretation of the realities of Vietnamese history and identity.

Although this thesis is widely accepted, there is considerable debate among scholars over why the containment strategy came to be misdirected. Employing a Marxist or neo-Marxist analysis, radical historians contend that the United States, as a Western capitalist nation, was essentially predetermined to seek access to and control over markets and resources of Southeast Asia. They argue that the United States, as a politically and economically powerful nation in the 1950s and 1960s, was engaged in a neocolonial war that defined U.S. material interests as global in scope. Other historians maintain that there was an earnest concern among American leaders about the global spread of Stalinist-type tyranny and find that U.S. policy was well intentioned, but they also find that U.S. actions were grounded in ignorance and naïveté about the history of Vietnam and the extent to which the United States could influence the course of that history. In Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s phrase, the American war in Vietnam was “a tragedy without villains.”⁷ Sometimes labeled the “quagmire thesis,” this view maintains that the United States became gradually entrapped in a commitment of its resources and prestige without a specific strategic plan to measure and achieve success. A more morally outraged analysis, the “stalemate thesis,” contends that U.S. leaders knew that they had erred in Vietnam but escalated American military intervention—with the concomitant killing of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans—rather than admit that they were wrong and risk losing their political power. There is considerable variety in the liberal-realist interpretations offered by different writers, but all of them question why the United States chose to fight in Vietnam and for so long.

A less prevalent but nonetheless cogent counterargument to the flawed-containment thesis comes from some historians who concentrate their work not on why the United States fought in Vietnam, but on how. In this group are found a variety of opinions about how the war was fought, but these scholars basically accept the assumptions of the Cold War consensus that produced the official containment rationale for the war. To them, containment was not a flawed concept in Southeast Asia; they defend the universal applicability of the ideals of freedom and democracy that inspired the containment policy in Europe. What was good for a divided Germany in Europe was good for a divided Vietnam in Asia. Because the liberal-realist scholars question the basic assumptions and goals that caused the United States to intervene in Vietnam, they doubt that success—that is, the survival of a pro-American government in South Vietnam independent of North Vietnam—was attainable without incurring costs to the United States that would endanger other vital American interests. In contrast, scholars of the opposing view accept the purposes of the United States in Vietnam as unassailable and view the American intervention as unavoidable. To them, the tragedy was not fighting the war, but losing it, and they devote their efforts to discerning how the United States could have won the war.

In the 1980s, one of the most influential of these revisionists, so called because they challenge the orthodoxy of the liberal-realist analysis, was Colonel Harry Summers. A veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars and a professor at the Army War College, Summers forcefully advanced an argument derived from the military theories of Carl von Clausewitz—that a negotiated settlement similar to the partitioning of Korea was available to the United States in Vietnam if the American military effort had taken a “strategic defensive posture.” He contended that a conventional strategy of deploying U.S. forces to cordon off South Vietnam to prevent infiltration and invasion from the North, instead of sending American troops chasing about the South hunting for guerrillas, would have enabled South Vietnam to survive and develop. What weakens Summers’s might-have-been scenario from an analytical perspective is the scant attention he gives to the cause of the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. He later wrote in his widely read book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War that “the forces that besieged Dien Bien Phu [during the French war in Indochina] grew out of the guerrilla movement; the forces that captured Saigon did not grow out of the Vietcong but were the regular armed forces of North Vietnam. This critical difference validates the official U.S. government position that the Vietnam war was caused by aggression from the North.”⁸ Summers seriously oversimplified the end of the war, however. Long before Hanoi ordered the final, conventional assault on Saigon, the political war within Vietnam had been lost. Despite a few isolated exceptions, such as the heroic but futile stand by troops at Xuan Loc on April 9–11, 1975, the South Vietnamese armed forces in the end showed little willingness to defend their capital.⁹

The war in Vietnam that the United States ultimately entered was not a simple case of aggression by the North against the South. In 1954, when the delegates to the Geneva Conference temporarily divided Vietnam, the new government of North Vietnam achieved international recognition of its authority north of the seventeenth parallel. The leadership in Hanoi did not control the hearts and minds of all Vietnamese, and the U.S. government, in refusing to sanction the Geneva settlement, set out to ensure that it would not. The day after the conference adjourned, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared to the National Security Council: “The remaining free areas of Indochina must be built up if the dike against Communism is to be held.”¹⁰ From the outset of the Eisenhower administration’s strategic planning in Vietnam, containment was the stated policy objective of the United States. Dulles knew that the task at hand was to create a South Vietnamese state where none existed. Summers later wrote that “the root in the Vietnam war was North Vietnam” and specifically its decisions in December 1963 and the summer of 1964 “to intervene directly both with military assistance and guerrilla cadres” and to send “regular North Vietnamese Army forces south.”¹¹ His characterization of the cause of the war as North Vietnamese aggression against South Vietnam in 1963 and 1964 assumes without further examination that the Eisenhower administration’s decision to contain Hanoi’s political influence was valid and that the previous ten years of U.S. nation building in the South had been successful.

Many historians do not agree that Saigon was the capital of a politically viable state by 1963.¹² Some scholars, such as Phillip Catton, give South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, credit for attempting nation building, but Catton concludes that “the Diem regime could not compete either ideologically or organizationally with its communist opponents.”¹³ Some commentators, such as Norman Podhoretz and Michael Lind, argue that containment of Communist aggression against South Vietnam was an appropriate, even compelling, reason for U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. They disagree, however, with the revisionists who insist that the war was winnable for the United States. Such arguments try to draw a contradictory lesson that the United States was right to get into the Vietnam War but also right to get out. Such “legitimists,” as Gary Hess has termed them, try to have the best of both sides of the historical debate.¹⁴

Several writers with military experience in Vietnam, such as Summers and Bruce Palmer, believe that American principles compelled the United States to oppose Communism in Vietnam.¹⁵ They maintain that the greater applications of American power on the ground and in the air in a conventional military strategy would have forced Hanoi to negotiate terms providing for the recognition of South Vietnam. Other military writers disagree with the contention that this conflict was a conventional war, but they also envision a winning scenario. They argue that the U.S. military should have followed an unconventional strategy of pacification to provide security for the South Vietnamese and to give the population confidence in the Saigon government. In their view, U.S. commanders flailed about in “search-and-destroy” operations that did not defeat the enemy but politically destabilized the South as much as did the insurgency. These “win theorists,” whether advocates for conventional or pacification tactics, provide a dissent to the majority opinion among historians that U.S. military intervention in the war was a mistake in its origins as well as in its conduct.

In his book Triumph Forsaken, historian Mark Moyar has defended the revisionist thesis.¹⁶ He maintains that the “domino theory,” the potential of states throughout Southeast Asia to fall under Communist control, represented a real threat to U.S. security and that the U.S. military intervention in defense of Diem’s regime was necessary. As the book’s title suggests, Moyar argues that triumph was possible for the United States in Vietnam if U.S. leaders had not given up on what he views as a successful Diem regime and if Washington had been willing to carry its military operations directly into North Vietnam and not been deterred by the possibility of Chinese military retaliation. The majority of scholars familiar with the defects of the Saigon government and with Washington’s reasons for keeping the U.S. war limited find his evidence unconvincing.¹⁷ The intellectual debate that orthodox and revisionist arguments have generated, however, underscores the importance of accurate understanding of the past for the making of policy in the present. Neither side in this debate will ever be able to prove its thesis that the war was winnable or unwinnable because the outcome of untried strategies is forever unknowable. What is clear from the Vietnam experience, however, is that policymakers now and in the future should carefully consider how the United States originally formulated its purposes in Vietnam and how—by what means—American goals were to be achieved.¹⁸

Among policymakers in the George W. Bush administration, in contrast to the majority of scholars, the win thesis had resonance and acceptance. The minority view among historians became the majority interpretation among policymakers. Officials who made or influenced national security decisions on Iraq largely dismissed any considerations of the origins of the American military intervention in Vietnam or of the internal conflict there and wanted only to discuss what they saw as failings in the way the Vietnam War was conducted. In an interview in February 2004, President Bush was asked if he had been in favor of the Vietnam War. He responded: “I supported my government. I did.” He was presumably saying that he agreed, as did many others, with the official containment rationale for the war. He added, however, that “the essential lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War” were that “we had politicians making military decisions, and it is lessons that any president must learn, and that is to set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective.”¹⁹ He did not reflect on any lessons in the goal setting itself or on what responsibility elected officials might have for setting goals attainable in terms of reasonable military and other means appropriate to those ends.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Bush spokespersons adhered to the president’s narrow concept of the essential lesson learned from Vietnam-era experiences. White House chief of staff Andrew Card Jr. declared: “The people who are governing learned from what wasn’t done well in Vietnam—starting with political leadership making tactical decisions of war.” Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, remarked that the United States had “moved” beyond those scholars and journalists who still nursed “an open wound about Vietnam.”²⁰ Herself a scholar of international affairs, Rice was aware of the flawed-containment argument. In an interview with Charlie Rose for the Council on Foreign Relations, she cautioned: “I think we would want to be very, very careful in transporting or making analogous what we might do in some other part of the world to what we were able to do in NATO…. Now we have to be warned, the last time we took a European strategy and tried to export it was when we took containment and thought that it worked in a place called Vietnam.”²¹ Despite this insight, she overlooked the principal thrust of the liberal-realist argument. As Herring has pointed out about the Vietnam experience, “by wrongly attributing the conflict to external sources”—that is, expansionist Soviet and Chinese Communism in Vietnam, and in Iraq what the Bush administration saw as global al-Qaeda terrorism—“the United States drastically misjudged its internal dynamics.” The cautionary conclusion, according to Herring, is that “by intervening in what was essentially a local struggle,” the United States “placed itself at the mercy of local forces, a weak client, and a determined adversary.”²² Many Iraqis welcomed the United States, but many others hated the American presence from the start and opposed the American-backed government with an ardor reminiscent of the insurgents who rejected the government in Saigon. As military journalist Joseph Galloway has written, “If we learned nothing else from the bitter history of Vietnam it should be that there are places and people who won’t accept change and won’t quit fighting until even the most powerful nation and army in the world wearies of the killing and dying.”²³

LEARNING FROM THE VIETNAM WAR

Drawing lessons for the present from events in the past is always difficult, and that is especially true with an emotional and controversial event such as the Vietnam War. There are even arguments over what the war should be called—the Vietnam War, the Second Indochina War, or the American War in Vietnam, among other variations. “Vietnam War” is the name most Americans use to denote the conflict that involved the United States in Indochina from about 1950 to 1975. Like the name, the dates are approximate. The French war in Indochina, or the First Indochina War, as it is also called, began at the end of World War II and continued until a cease-fire was arranged at the Geneva Conference of 1954. The Second Indochina War, or what the Vietnamese term “the American war,” began around 1960 and continued until the last American civil and military officials departed Saigon in April 1975. Direct U.S. involvement in the Indochina wars stretched from Washington’s decision to aid France in its war in Vietnam until the last evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as advancing North Vietnamese forces entered the city.

For Americans, the Vietnam War was long, costly, and divisive. It was even longer and costlier for the Vietnamese, but that fact made the war only more controversial for Americans. As American casualties mounted and ultimately totaled more than 58,000 killed and missing, citizens went beyond simply asking why the United States was in Vietnam to demanding some justification for such sacrifices. As the level of U.S. destruction of the Vietnamese also grew into the hundreds of thousands, some Americans questioned what such ruthlessness revealed about their country’s values. World War II had been long and destructive, but it had united Americans. In sharp contrast, the Vietnam War polarized them. Some citizens accepted the losses and the violence of the war as necessary and justified. Others felt that their own grievous losses were without purpose and that the American military intervention in Vietnam was excessive and unjust. These differing perceptions have been filtered through ideological and cultural lenses. Hence, the events have taken on different appearances and different meanings, creating the ambiguity that still clouds understanding of the Vietnam War.

Regardless of whether Americans viewed the war as just or unjust, the overwhelming majority of those polled in various surveys in the years after the war labeled it a mistake. Without question, this negative assessment was an acknowledgment that the United States had lost the war. Despite enormous effort and sacrifice, the U.S. military had not been able to preserve the independence of South Vietnam and sustain it as a non-Communist bastion against Asian Communism, which had been the stated objectives of U.S. policy. Although it is not surprising that Americans understood that mistakes and failures had occurred, the same opinion polls revealed that most respondents could not specifically identify the errors. They did not know whether the United States had done too much or too little. They could not identify specific policies, and, in fact, many could not correctly identify the opposing sides or which side the United States supported.

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and that adage troubled many Americans as they followed the course of the U.S. intervention in Iraq. The memory of Vietnam was painful for Americans and not one that society wished to recall in its entirety, if at all. The tension of that era went beyond the war itself and included generational, racial, and ideological confrontations. When the fighting ended in the 1970s and U.S. troops left Vietnam, the internal American trauma began to recede. There was, at first, an unwillingness to examine carefully what Vietnam had done to America. In the 1980s, often through the efforts of anguished veterans who needed to resolve their own personal torment, the Vietnam War eventually began to be reexamined. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“the Wall”) in Washington, D.C., poetry and fiction by veterans, movies, memoirs, and historical research started to dress the wound. This process continued into the 1990s, as more information became known about what had been secret wartime decision making, carefully kept from a public that had suffered under the impact of these decisions. With more knowledge and more open dialogue, some understanding began to develop about how a great nation such as the United States could go so wrong. At the same time, however, the process was more like picking at the scab rather than healing the wound. Cynicism and distrust of leaders still abounded. In early 1991, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush led the United States into war against Iraq with broad popular support. Although Bush proclaimed that the Gulf War had put the ghost of Vietnam finally to rest, his own eagerness to end the war quickly and to avoid a protracted and costly engagement demonstrated how intimidating the memory of Vietnam still remained.

As the Gulf War of 1991 was recalling old images of Vietnam, the Cold War, which had provided much of the rationale for the original U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, was coming to an end. The Soviet Union and its ruling Communist Party Central Committee formally dissolved on December 25, 1991. This historic turn of events, like Bush’s bravura pronouncements about the Gulf War, seemed to have made Vietnam less relevant to the present. In fact, the opposite was the case. The Vietnam debacle had so disrupted the fiber of American life that the public was skeptical of the national leadership’s declarations of purpose and calls for sacrifice. Without the Soviet threat and with the bitter memories of Vietnam, the role of the United States, as the world’s lone superpower, was difficult to define in genocidal regional conflicts in the Balkans and in Africa in the 1990s.

As with any major historical event, the Vietnam War did not provide a precise blueprint for present and future actions. Iraq in 1991 and 2003 or Serbia in 1995 was not Vietnam in 1965, any more than Vietnam in 1965 was Czechoslovakia in 1938 or Korea in 1950. The meaningful application of history in contemporary life requires a disciplined study of the past with the twin goals of a faithful rendering of past events and a judicious use of analytical principles that transcend time and place. Were there any redeeming features of the Vietnam War for the United States? What had Americans failed to understand about the war from Vietnam’s perspective? What did the Vietnam War reveal about American culture, history, and values, and what effect did the war have on them? Given the war’s especially contentious nature, what can be said about its relevance or irrelevance today?

VIETNAM: THE COUNTRY AND ITS EARLY HISTORY

For most Americans, the word “Vietnam” refers to a war, but Vietnam was a country with a distinctive history long before it was a war. A Chinese chronicle from 208 B.C.E. provided the first recorded reference to a non-Chinese people living to the south, in a kingdom called Nam Viet (or Nan Yue in Chinese). From that date, 2,000 years of recorded history led up to the tumultuous wars in twentieth-century Vietnam. In chapter 1, Mark Philip Bradley analyzes how that long history shaped the Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism that clashed first with French colonialism and then with American nation building.

Two historical characteristics of the Vietnamese people emerged from their past. One was a sense of separate ethnic identity and resistance to outside domination derived from a millennium of resistance to control by their powerful Chinese neighbors. The other was a repeated inability to achieve lasting unity among themselves. These two powerful patterns of struggle against external threat and for internal cohesion were clearly visible throughout Vietnam’s history—into and including the wars with the French and the Americans in the second half of the twentieth century. The Vietnamese have fought many times for home rule and over who will rule at home.

In 111 B.C.E., China’s powerful Han dynasty extended political control over the Vietnamese people, then centered in the Red River Delta. Although China’s ability to manage its southern province ebbed and flowed over the centuries, it was not until a decisive naval engagement in 938 C.E. that the Vietnamese fully regained political independence. Although Vietnam’s leaders had always preserved considerable political autonomy from China, Vietnamese culture became heavily sinicized by the influence of the vigorous Han and Tang dynasties. Chinese language, arts, and Confucian philosophy shaped Vietnam’s culture. In fact, the Vietnamese ability to adopt China’s bureaucratic system of administration may have been what helped the always recalcitrant province ultimately to grow strong enough to break China’s grasp. In some ways, Vietnam became a defiant replica of China—a smaller version of China’s large dragon.

The end of Chinese authority did not mean that a unified Vietnamese state then existed, and for the next thousand years the Vietnamese faced the challenge of establishing a stable political structure in their own country. Power in Vietnam was hereditary, and the right to rule was contested by various families. After a century of internal conflict following the victory over the Chinese, the Ly dynasty emerged to establish a stable central government that administered the country in the Chinese style through gentry officials chosen by examinations on the Chinese classics. In the thirteenth century, due to the lack of a male heir, the Ly gave way to the Tran family in a peaceful transition, and internal order continued under the gentry (or what Westerners later called the “mandarin”) system. This stability was undermined, however, by continued external threats to Vietnam.

In several major military engagements, the Vietnamese repulsed Mongol forces from the north in the 1280s and then in the fourteenth century fought a series of successful campaigns against invaders from Champa, the area that is now central Vietnam. The military leader of the victory over the Chams then overthrew the Tran dynasty and set off turmoil in Vietnam that tempted the strong Ming dynasty of China once again to attempt to reclaim the former Chinese province. In 1428, however, Le Loi, a great hero of Vietnamese history and founder of the Le dynasty, forced China to recognize Vietnam’s autonomy.

With the northern border secure, the Le dynasty began what is known as the March to the South in 1471. Aimed initially at removing the remaining vestiges of threat from Champa, this southern expansion continued for three hundred years until the Vietnamese claimed all the territory along the Southeast Asian coast down to the tip of the Cau Mau Peninsula. This geographic expansion brought with it a breakdown of the Le dynasty’s central authority and led to a regional division of power among three rival families. A number of bloody wars finally eliminated the Mac family and brought a stalemate between the Trinh and Nguyen families. The line of demarcation between their areas of control was a wall built by the Nguyens. Located north of Hue, the wall was very near the line drawn at the Geneva Conference in 1954 to divide Vietnam into two parts.

As the rival families fought to consolidate power and form a unified Vietnamese nation, strong forces of regionalism and rebellion against the central authority persisted. The geography of Vietnam was a major obstacle to national unity. The area populated by the Vietnamese consisted of a strip of fertile land hugging the coast of the South China Sea, from the agriculturally rich Red River Delta in the north to the similarly productive Mekong River Delta in the south. Mountains to the west confined the population to the coast, and ridges from this mountain range extended to the shore, effectively isolating the country’s disparate regions. Distance and topography hampered central authority and gave protection to rebels.

In the settlements scattered along Vietnam’s 1,000-mile length and economically based on paddy rice cultivation, the local village, not the courts of emperors or powerful families, became the locus of authority. The villagers shared a Confucian culture but retained their autonomy over their own affairs in a deeply rooted pattern of family, property, and tradition. This fragmentation of political authority was one reason why the Trinh and Nguyen families had not been able to break their stalemate. The villages were also fertile ground for the emergence of rebel movements to challenge regional and central authority. It was, in fact, a village-based rebellion erupting in the 1770s, in Nguyen territory near Hue, that broke the stalemate and produced the unity that the Vietnamese had been struggling for centuries to achieve.

This Tay Son Rebellion took its name from the village of its leaders, three brothers. Directed at first against local corruption, the rebellion spread to ignite a series of battles that ended with defeat of both the Nguyen and Trinh families. It was not the Tay Son rebels who emerged victorious, however. With fighting concentrated in the north against the Trinh, a surviving Nguyen heir, Nguyen Anh, seized the Mekong Delta with military aid provided by a French priest, Pierre Joseph Pigneau de Béhaine. To protect French missionaries, whose predecessors had first come to the region in the seventeenth century, Pigneau arranged for French merchants to pay European mercenaries and arm them with modern weapons. With this help, Nguyen Anh’s forces moved north and took the Tay Son strongholds. In 1802, Nguyen Anh proclaimed himself Emperor Gia Long over a united Vietnam that stretched from the border with China to the Gulf of Siam. Although regional authorities throughout the country agreed to recognize Gia Long as emperor, much real power still remained in the hands of village and regional leaders.

FRENCH COLONIALISM

The Nguyen dynasty that Gia Long founded, with its capital at Hue, was Vietnam’s last dynasty. The traditional Confucian political and social structure that it represented collapsed under the colonial rule of the French, who rose to dominate Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An empty shell of the monarchy remained until both it and French colonialism fell victim to revolutionary changes in the 1950s.

Gia Long, because of Pigneau’s help and because he was aware of Western power, tolerated the presence of French missionaries in his country, but he and especially his successors were hostile to Christianity. Increasing persecution of missionaries and the West’s growing appetite for markets and resources in the nineteenth century caused France to send a naval force to Tourane (Danang) in 1858. From then until 1897, in a piecemeal fashion, France used military force to create what it called the Indochina Union, headed by a French governor-general in Hanoi. French Indochina consisted of five parts. In 1862, Emperor Tu Duc ceded Cochinchina, the area around Saigon, to France as a colony. Annam (central Vietnam around Hue) and Tonkin (northern Vietnam around Hanoi) became French protectorates in 1883. Paris also established protectorates in Cambodia in 1862 and Laos in 1893.

French colonial rule in Vietnam was incredibly illiberal, narrow-minded, and destructive. The partitioning of Vietnam into three pays (countries), as the French called Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, reversed centuries of Vietnamese efforts to create national unity. The Nguyen emperors had themselves administered their elongated country through three ky (regions) that were roughly analogous to the pays, but where the emperors sought to use this structure to promote unity, the French desired division. The colonial authorities even outlawed the use of the name “Vietnam.” This colonial-enforced regionalism magnified cultural differences that had already existed from the March to the South, which brought Chams, Khmers, and others within Vietnam’s borders. Vietnam’s historical difficulty in achieving internal unity in the face of external threats was once again manifest.

The French governors sought to protect their authority by depriving the country of its native leadership. Giving their program the high-sounding name mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission), they sought to replace not only Vietnam’s political leadership, but also its literature, thought, and culture. They decapitated the local social order. The mandarin class was either compromised by collaboration with the French or isolated in hopeless efforts to revive Confucianism as an antidote to Western wealth and power. Colonial bureaucracy took over much of the administrative role of the village gentry and chiefs, thereby removing the villages’ legal autonomy and debilitating the Vietnamese social system. Vietnamese attempts to organize modern alternatives, such as political parties or labor organizations, were stamped out by police control over travel, mail, and publications that effectively repressed any type of indigenous movement for collective action.

French colonialism aimed to make a mercantilist profit out of what was largely a subsistence economy. Economic exploitation of Indochina gave no opportunity for a broad- based system of capitalism to develop among the Vietnamese. In fact, capitalism had a very bad image in Vietnam. French taxes and low wages in the Red River Delta added to the poverty and insecurity that already existed in that overcrowded area. In the Mekong River Delta, where open land had been available for landless peasants, a plantation economy put that land in the hands of an elite minority of Vietnamese collaborators. Economic conditions worsened for peasants, while plantation owners, exporters, the Banque de l’Indochine, money lenders, and rice traders got rich. Colonialism was breeding revolutionary attitudes among the people.²⁴

THE RISE OF VIETNAMESE NATIONALISM

The harsh French colonial policies violently uprooted Vietnamese society, but they did not extinguish the centuries-old passion for independence and national unity. From the outset of French conquest, the Vietnamese resisted in various ways. Because of its indecision and miscalculation, the imperial court failed to provide leadership, and thus the Vietnamese gentry was on its own in deciding how to respond. Some collaborated with the colonialists; some simply dropped out of public life; and others openly fought back, only to be soundly defeated by superior force. By the 1890s, however, some Vietnamese were examining how other Asian peoples were responding to Western imperialism. Out of that examination came a modern sense of Vietnamese nationalism. How best to combat the powerful intruders remained much debated, however.

The representative figure of this Vietnamese resistance to colonialism was Phan Boi Chau. Educated in both Confucian and Western thought, he looked for lessons from China’s self-strengthening movement against Western influence, Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and Sun Yat-sen’s republican revolution in China. Strongly anti-French, Chau and his Modernization Society advocated at first a constitutional monarchy and then, inspired by China’s Revolution of 1911, a Vietnamese republic. An organizer and propagandist who often lived outside Vietnam, he was seized by French agents in China in 1925. Sentenced to death for sedition, he was paroled to home confinement in Hue and died in obscurity in 1940. His work represented a significant shift in the anti-French activists’ goals, away from efforts to restore the monarchy and toward a focus on the Vietnamese nation and a government representative of people of all social classes. His ambiguous combination of tradition and modernization as well as disagreements among his adherents over confrontation versus cooperation with the French masters, however, made Chau’s nationalist program too moderate to contest French power. By the time of his death, he was an anachronism.

Other moderate nationalists fared no better. Urban intellectuals made several attempts to create political parties to challenge the colonial government. One of the most significant was the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD), or Vietnam Nationalist Party. Created in 1927, it sought to emulate China’s Guomindang, or Nationalist Party. Because the French governors had outlawed all Vietnamese political parties (except for the nonthreatening Constitutionalist Party of the Francophile elite), the VNQDD functioned secretly. Its membership included students, soldiers, low-level bureaucrats, women, and small-business owners. It had no rural or broad popular base. In 1930, the VNQDD attempted to spark an armed rebellion, which the authorities quickly and ruthlessly smashed. Hundreds of party members were arrested, and many were executed (some leaders were beheaded) or sentenced to harsh imprisonment and forced labor. For Vietnamese patriots to hope to break French control of the country, they were going to have to enlist a broad segment of the population in a more disciplined effort.

THE ORIGINS OF VIETNAMESE COMMUNISM

What was the relationship between nationalism and Communism in Vietnam? This question is central to the twentieth-century history of Vietnam. Revolution seemed to be the only answer to the economic exploitation, political repression, and cultural arrogance of French colonialism, and in 1925 an embryonic revolutionary party formed. Nguyen Ai Quoc organized a secret group in southern China called the Vietnam Thanh Nien Cach Menh Hoi, or Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League. Its goals were simply stated as national independence and social equality for Vietnamese. In 1930, the Thanh Nien became the basis for the creation of the Dang Cong San Dong Duong, or Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).²⁵ In the 1940s, Nguyen Ai Quoc changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, and this singular individual remained the leader of the Vietnamese Communist movement until his death in 1969. He was a Vietnamese nationalist who became a Communist and who then combined both identities in his own charismatic leadership and in the movement that he not only headed but symbolized.

Ho’s father was a mandarin who had to struggle to provide for his family after losing his government post for refusing to enforce French colonial laws. His father was also a friend of Phan Boi Chau. From an early age, Ho was filled with a sense of the injustice and hardship caused by French rule and of the lessons imparted by Chau of the importance of political organization to counter European dominance. Under the colonial education system, he learned French and was exposed to Western literature and ideas. He was, in fact, a student in France during World War I and tried unsuccessfully to present a petition for Vietnamese independence to the Versailles Peace Conference. The Western powers’ rebuff at Versailles starkly contradicted Woodrow Wilson’s self-determination rhetoric and had a formative impact on the young Nguyen Ai Quoc. Born Nguyen Sinh Cung sometime between 1890 and 1894, he had taken the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc, meaning “Nguyen the Patriot.” He had also discovered the writings of Vladimir Lenin, which to him explained the theory behind the successful Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and provided a blueprint for successful social and political revolution for victims of imperialism such as the Vietnamese.

In 1920, Ho became a founding member of the French Communist Party and embarked on a career as a Communist Party organizer. He lived in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere outside Vietnam but was always committed to Vietnamese independence through the vehicle of Marxist-Leninist revolution. The Vietnamese Communists embraced ideals of national self-determination, revolutionary class struggle, and party dictatorship similar to those that also shaped the Chinese Communist Party, which was founded in 1921. Asian Marxists such as Ho and China’s Mao Zedong understood that there was no proletariat and bourgeoisie of sufficient size in their countries to fit the model of industrialized Europe. The masses were predominantly peasant farmers whose social and economic security had been uprooted by Western imperialism. The Vietnamese Communists considered Marxism to be a new form of social community that would replace the old village community in the peasant mind. For further discussion of the Vietnamese revolution as a social process, see Robert K. Brigham’s analysis in chapter 10.

Shortly after the creation of the ICP, a major peasant revolt against the local authorities broke out in Nghe-Tinh Province in Annam. Near-starvation conditions in the region sparked the outbreak, and Communist organizers tried to help the peasants form “soviets” to take control, reduce rents, and even break up some large land holdings. By the spring of 1931, however, the French governors had restored order and had arrested and executed hundreds of Communist cadres. Ho reflected that these events demonstrated not only the peasants’ revolutionary potential, but also the importance of proper preparation and broad national support before any attempt at direct action could be made.

Although forced to lie low in Vietnam and to operate largely from China and Thailand, the party leadership survived the crackdown. British police arrested Ho in Hong Kong for suspicious activities. Released from jail in 1933, he went to Moscow on orders from the Comintern, which had concerns about his nationalist inclinations and his variant, agrarian interpretation of Marxist doctrine. With the appearance of the ideological and military threat represented by Nazi German expansion in Europe and Japanese aggression in China, the Comintern directed Asian Communists to undertake united front strategies with bourgeois and progressive opponents of fascism. Ho had favored patriotic fronts since his creation of the Revolutionary Youth League. France itself formed a Popular Front government in 1936 and legalized such groups in its colonies. Without revealing their Communist identities, ICP members established the Indochina Democratic Front in Tonkin. The ICP’s Central Committee sent two of the front’s young and talented members, Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap, to China in the spring of 1940 to assist Ho, who had left Moscow and was working with the Chinese Communist Party. In September 1940, Japanese forces, with the acquiescence of the Vichy French government, which was collaborating with Germany, took over bases in Indochina for the war against China. Ho and his comrades began immediately to try to forge alliances with all Vietnamese nationalists who opposed the French and the Japanese. World War II engulfed Southeast Asia and started a process that would end French colonialism.

In May 1941, at its Eighth Plenum, the ICP authorized the creation of the Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or League for the Independence of Vietnam—better known as the Vietminh. By mid-1942, Japan’s military controlled French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, the American Philippines, Thailand, and the British colonies of Hong Kong, Burma, and Malaya. The broad sweep of Tokyo’s forces spelled doom for Western colonialism, as the once seemingly invincible oppressors fell before an Asian onslaught. In contrast to the British, Dutch, and American commanders who resisted before eventually yielding to Japan’s assault, the French governors in Indochina gave Tokyo access to resources and military base facilities in return for allowing the French to continue to administer their colony. Ho Chi Minh and the ICP organized the Vietminh as a patriotic front welcoming any Vietnamese determined to free their country from both the old European masters and the new Asian aggressors. By collaborating with the Japanese, French colonial officials isolated themselves from the Western governments and held their position at Japan’s mercy. Conversely, Ho Chi Minh actively sought contact with American intelligence officers in southern China and proposed cooperation in a common fight against the Japanese. Because Ho and his organization were virtually unknown to the world, they received little response at first. In 1945, however, as the Japanese retreated in the Pacific before advancing U.S. forces, the chance for Vietnamese independence, for which Ho had long been preparing, emerged.

THE AUGUST REVOLUTION

By the spring of 1945, Tokyo knew that collaboration with French colonialism in Vietnam had outlived its usefulness. On March 9, Japanese troops suddenly attacked and eliminated French troops and officials in Indochina. With France already liberated from German occupation and with U.S. military power within striking distance of Japan, the surprise move in Indochina was part of a new Japanese effort to protect its interests there. Tokyo immediately recognized an independent Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai, the heir of the Nguyen dynasty. There had been no real royal government for almost a century, but Bao Dai went through the motions of setting up a cabinet in the old capital of Hue. This government had no chance of survival without Japanese support, but on August 14 Japan surrendered to the Allies. Vietnam became a political vacuum into which the Vietminh rushed.

Using the name Nguyen Ai Quoc for the last time, Ho Chi Minh called on the people of Vietnam to rise up and take control of the country. From their base areas near the Chinese border, Vietminh cadres quickly orchestrated the seizure of power in villages and towns in north and central Vietnam. Under this pressure, Bao Dai abdicated his impotent throne. This August Revolution took only a few days, and on September 2, 1945, in an emotional public ceremony in Hanoi, Ho declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).

Journalist David Halberstam describes Ho, whom Vietnamese often called “Uncle Ho,” as “part Gandhi, part Lenin, all Vietnamese.”²⁶ This succinct portrait captures well the assets Ho possessed when he stood before the cheering crowd that welcomed his declaration of Vietnamese independence. In the fashion of the great Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, he appealed to his oppressed compatriots to seek the independence and social justice that colonial rule had denied them. Like Lenin, he was a theorist who developed a ruthless and disciplined plan for successful revolution inspired by Marx’s concept of class struggle. There is no question that he shrewdly donned simple clothes and sandals and muted the Marxist ideology behind his strategies in order to appeal to the masses of Vietnamese. His personal charisma and the attraction of his Vietminh front, however, clearly derived from their tangible and deeply rooted Vietnamese identity. For more discussion of the origins of the Vietnamese revolution, see Bradley’s analysis in chapter 1.

Despite its bold claims of national leadership, the Vietminh had real limitations. Its core of ICP members numbered only about 5,000 in a country of 24 million people. Most of its operatives were in Tonkin and Annam, and there was only a small network in Cochinchina. Although most other political parties were weak, some, such as remnants of the VNQDD, had potential support from the Republic of China, whose troops came into Tonkin to accept the surrender of Japanese forces. British troops played a similar role in the South. In early 1946, the Vietminh used a combination of political bargains, staged elections, and carefully targeted assassinations to erect a tenuous government in Hanoi.

THE FRENCH WAR IN VIETNAM

While the Vietminh hurried to strengthen its position, France began to land troops in the south with the cooperation of British occupation forces. Well aware of strong sentiment in Paris to reclaim French Indochina, Ho Chi Minh negotiated a compromise agreement with French envoy Jean Sainteny that would have created a free Vietnam within an Indochina Federation of the French Union. This agreement was never ratified, however, because in May 1946 the French high commissioner in Saigon declared the Republic of Cochinchina to be a separate state. Both sides then initiated a continuing series of violent incidents throughout Vietnam. Finally, major armed clashes in Haiphong and Hanoi in November and December 1946 marked the beginning of what historians label the First Indochina War.

The war was divided along urban–rural lines, with French forces controlling the cities and the Vietminh fighters taking refuge in country villages and in the mountains. Major French military operations in 1947 that included aerial bombing with napalm failed to crush the enemy, but they inflicted heavy damage on civilians. The Europeans had difficulty in even finding the Vietminh, but the French forces’ destructiveness helped increase the credibility of Ho’s followers among the people. The Vietnamese Communists followed the example of people’s war as developed by Mao Zedong in China. This strategy began with the establishment of remote base areas to avoid direct confrontation with the enemy’s superior technology. It then relied on the development of clandestine political organizations among the people and the draining of French military strength through military tactics of feint and deception. The Vietminh goal was to develop gradually a power equilibrium that would make possible a general offensive.

To counter the Vietminh’s claims to represent the Vietnamese nation, in 1949 France tried to create an alternative through the Elysée Agreement with Bao Dai. Paris agreed to dissolve the Republic of Cochinchina and to recognize a single State of Vietnam with Bao Dai as its head. The former emperor sincerely wanted peace and unity for his country, but he was no match for either the French or Ho Chi Minh. Ho had immense prestige as a patriot. Many Vietnamese who were traditionalists, moderates, or outright French collaborators, however, feared the Vietminh and cast their lot with the State of Vietnam. Other Vietnamese tried to avoid association with either side. Often absent from his country and inclined to a playboy lifestyle, Bao Dai had no personal political base or effective way to recruit one. The French, however, bore primary responsibility for the weakness of the so-called Bao Dai solution because they never conceded to his regime the sine qua non for all Vietnamese—absolute independence.

In 1949, the Franco-Vietminh war was at a stalemate. The French Expeditionary Corps (FEC) had more firepower than the Vietminh but could not maneuver its elusive enemy into full battle. Ho’s forces were surviving but were not able to drive the French out of the country. The Vietminh appealed politically to many Vietnamese but did not attract all groups in the factional and regional complexity of Vietnamese society. Immediately across Vietnam’s northern border, however, a momentous historical change reached a climax that altered the Vietnamese equilibrium. The Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army pushed into southern China and forced the Chinese Nationalist regime to flee to Taiwan. Not only did China now have a Communist government, but its leaders announced support for the Vietminh. Ho had a long association with the Chinese Communist Party, and, despite his instinctive Vietnamese distrust of China, he accepted military aid and advice from Beijing.

HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF U.S. STRATEGIC INTEREST IN VIETNAM

The expanding international dimension of the conflict in Vietnam quickly became an issue for America’s international security strategy. Historical patterns and traditions of U.S. involvement in world affairs lay behind the U.S. immersion in Vietnam after World War II. Despite the glow of victory, the end of the war did not bring peace and security for the United States and the rest of the world. As the war drew to a close and in the months immediately following, suspicion and hostility led eventually to armed confrontations, frequently on the brink of war, between the United States and the Soviet Union. The origins of the Soviet–American Cold War are complex, but the result was a division of the world into separate spheres of influence around one or the other of these nations, with other areas outside these spheres being contested by both. It was in the context of the Cold War and the longer legacy of Western interaction with Asia that American history intersected with Vietnamese history.

At the end of the nineteenth century, as France’s control over Indochina tightened, the United States had forced Spain to give political independence to Cuba, had taken the Philippine Islands from Spain, and had advocated an Open Door Policy in China. The interest of the United States in Cuban sugar, trade with China, and possession of the Philippines as a base for that trade revealed that Americans were not immune to the temptations of empire. At the same time, American leaders rationalized these actions as being in the long-term best interests of Cuba, China, and the Philippines. Historians such as the scholar-diplomat George Kennan have argued that the Open Door Policy, as these actions became collectively known, was not based on a realistic pursuit of U.S. interest, but on confused and idealistic clichés about protecting China’s sovereignty and tutoring the Filipinos. These abstract concepts did not provide clear guidance for U.S. policy. Conversely, William Appleman Williams and other historians have characterized the Open Door Policy as a rational attempt to preserve and use the strength of the U.S. economy.²⁷ Williams terms it a tragedy, however, that this defense of U.S. material interests then and later led U.S. leaders to violate basic American ideals, such as a people’s right to self-determination. Most historians today accept the idea of an American empire, but debate continues over how it compares with the imperialism of other Western nations.

Forays into Cuba, China, and the Philippines during the McKinley administration had been relatively painless for the United States and had generated a false complacency about inherent risks in the Open Door Policy. It appeared to be within America’s power to advance liberal democratic ideals in the world, such as Cuban independence from Spain, and to protect U.S. security and material interests, such as access to markets in Asia for American manufactured products. Indeed, American leaders conceived of the two objectives of this Open Door Policy as mutually reinforcing. What was good for America was good for the world, and vice versa.

In leading the United States into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson articulated an appealing national vision that equated American ideals and self-interest with the goal of a world free of power politics and aggression. At first reluctant to enter the conflict, Wilson eventually declared that the United States would join the fray “to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples.”²⁸ Although World War I failed to resolve forever all international conflict, Wilson’s stirring rhetoric continued to shape the objectives of U.S. foreign policy in World War II and on into the Cold War that followed.

In his statement of war aims—his Fourteen Points, which included proposals for respecting the interests of colonial populations and for a league of nations—Wilson condemned aggression and argued that collective security was possible through the common interest in peace that all peoples shared.²⁹ This idealistic view of world order fell victim to the ambitions of Italy, Germany, and Japan in the 1930s, as those states revealed their willingness to choose aggression to gain national objectives. The symbol of the impotence of paper pledges of mutual respect was the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which British and French leaders agreed to German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia in return for Adolf Hitler’s promise of no additional aggression. Six months later, Hitler demanded the rest of Czechoslovakia, and the Munich Agreement forever became the example of the futility of appeasement. Two more years passed before the United States entered World War II as a belligerent, but the dictators’ challenge led Franklin D. Roosevelt to renew the appeal to Wilson’s ideals.

In the tradition of Wilson, Roosevelt defined the overall U.S. war aim in World War II as the defense of freedom—the freedom of people to choose their own government, to be secure in their own territory, and to trade openly in a world without economic barriers.³⁰ Unlike Wilson, who was a reluctant war leader, Roosevelt accepted the reality that American power had to be a balance to the forces of aggression. The failure of appeasement at Munich provided evidence that military defeat was the only message aggressors understood. For this reason, among others, Roosevelt rejected the Wilsonian hope for a war without victors and called for “absolute victory” in his famous address to Congress the day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

When World War II ended in 1945, the United States was not only victorious, but also the most powerful nation in the world. America’s wartime allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, shared in the triumph over fascism, but both countries were themselves heavily damaged by the war. The losers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—were prostrate, and other major nations, such as France and China, were burdened by the weight of war, occupation, and their own internal divisions. In contrast, the United States stood triumphant, with its fields and factories unscathed, its productivity—geared up for war—at an all-time high, and its military and technological dominance—symbolized by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan—well beyond any potential rival. At that moment, the United States was the strongest nation the world had ever known.

The nation’s demonstrated might blended in American thought with an assumption of righteousness. The cultural myth of American exceptionalism—of the goodness of America vanquishing the evils of autocracy, dictatorship, and militarism—seemed to have been realized. Even during the war and before victory was ensured, Hollywood movies, government pronouncements, and public expressions of patriotism painted heroic images of the United States and its past. America cast itself in the role of the world’s rescuer.

In the Open Door Policy, World War I, and World War II, American self-image portrayed the nation as the defender of its own as well as others’ rights. The offenders were monarchists, imperialists, militarists, and fascists. As the annexation of the Philippines revealed, however, the line between altruism and acquisitiveness could be easily blurred. The Open Door Policy used the rhetoric of freedom to try to discourage economic barriers that worked against U.S. interests. Wilson and Roosevelt’s condemnations of aggression were defenses of a status quo that, at the time, favored the United States and not dissatisfied nations such as Germany and Japan. At the end of World War II, the American vision of the postwar world was not universally accepted. The Soviet Union had suffered greatly from Nazi aggression, had been an essential counterforce to German power in Europe, and expected to benefit from Germany’s defeat.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin insisted that, regardless of what the United States considered fair, his government would use its power to protect its vital interests in areas such as Poland. In the American view, Poland had the right to free elections to choose its own government, but from Moscow’s perspective the USSR’s security required the Poles to choose a regime friendly to Russia. Stalin’s demands (backed by the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe) for influence over Poland made him appear to be an aggressor like Hitler, and the lesson of Munich suggested that Soviet control over Poland should be countered by force if necessary. Further evidence of aggression could be found in the historic ambition of Russian leaders to possess Poland. Stalin’s Communist ideology also made Soviet power threatening. Stalin asserted that the capitalist West was intent on the conquest of his country and economically vulnerable areas such as Poland. Thus American leaders used history, ideology, and Stalin’s reputation for ruthlessness to cast the USSR as aggressive and U.S. political, economic, and military opposition to Moscow as defensive.

The United States had a tremendous advantage in economic and military power over the Soviet Union in 1945, however, that tempted Washington to be more assertive and interventionist in areas that were of less interest to it than to Moscow. The United States had never had any historic interest in Poland comparable to that of Russia. Stalin’s charge of capitalist imperialism in Eastern Europe was ideologically inspired but also logical from his perspective. Was the United States seeking an open door in Eastern Europe to defend self-determination or to keep open a market for Western European and American exploitation?

Since both U.S. and Soviet leaders universalized their rationales for their mutual distrust, the Cold War spread throughout Europe and the world. Tension mounted with belligerent talk from both sides. In 1947, to gain an appropriation from Congress for aid to Greek and Turkish governments facing Communist insurgencies, President Harry Truman enunciated his Truman Doctrine, which pledged U.S. help to any government in the world facing such a threat. This speech initiated the containment policy, which remained the basic U.S. strategic doctrine for four decades and ultimately produced U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. When the president declared the Truman Doctrine, his concern was Europe, not Asia, but he provided no such qualification of his statements. In Southeast Asia, the war between French colonialists and Vietnamese Communists was already under way. The legacies of the Open Door Policy, Wilsonian internationalism, appeasement at Munich, victory in World War II, and the Truman Doctrine directly influenced U.S. assessments of the strategic importance of the conflict in Vietnam to the United States.

U.S. SUPPORT OF FRANCE IN INDOCHINA

The French war in Vietnam was a point of international instability that attracted American concern from the outset. Before World War II, the United States paid little official notice to French Indochina. Japan’s occupation increased awareness of the area’s strategic value, but more important was the anticolonial momentum generated by the Japanese actions. The prospect of the end of colonialism in Asia, including independence for the U.S. Philippines, brought the United States closer to its ideal of self-determination for oppressed peoples and also complemented the open-door concept of free trade. Franklin Roosevelt left no doubt that he opposed a French return to Indochina and vaguely suggested an international trusteeship for the region. No specific postwar plan emerged before Roosevelt’s death, however, because of British resistance to the idea of dismantling colonial empires and Washington policymakers’ desire to avoid alienating Paris, whose cooperation was needed on European issues. After Japan’s surrender, Truman tried at first to continue his predecessor’s example of neither condoning nor confronting French designs in Indochina. As Bradley points out in chapter 1, however, American strategists then and later shared some Western colonialist attitudes about Vietnamese inferiority that limited Washington’s ability to accept the revolutionary nationalism of France’s principal Vietnamese adversary, the Vietminh.

As tensions escalated into war between France and the Vietminh, the United States was unable to remain indifferent to the outcome and moved toward support of the French. American leaders never approved of the goal of recolonizing Indochina and repeatedly urged Paris to grant Vietnam its independence. Aware of Washington’s view, Ho had made a point of seeking contact with the United States during the war against Japan, and in his September 1945 declaration of Vietnam’s independence, he quoted from the American Declaration of Independence as an example of the principles for which he and his followers struggled. Despite these appeals to American ideals, officials in Washington fastened on three reasons why French success over the Vietminh was in America’s interest. Basically, Americans frowned on colonialism but feared Communism.

Washington’s first reason for favoring France was that Europe, not Southeast Asia, was America’s front line of defense in the emerging Cold War. American strategists believed that the Soviet Union posed a political, economic, and military threat to Europe that required unity among the United States, Britain, and France. This presumption lay behind the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment of Soviet power, which was the foundation of U.S. foreign policy after World War II. The United States might criticize France for its behavior in Indochina, but it would not risk a rupture with Paris for the sake of the Vietnamese—especially not for a Vietnamese political movement headed by a man with a history of collaboration with Moscow and the Comintern. Indeed, by setting up the Bao Dai government, Paris tried to appeal not only to Vietnamese tradition, but also to American officials by offering a non-Communist regime that would provide a rationalization for U.S. support of the French military in Indochina.

Asian geopolitics was a second reason to favor France. The victory of the Communist Party in China and the Vietminh’s ideological and military closeness to the new rulers in Beijing raised the specter of a “Red Menace” in Asia, similar to what Soviet Communism represented to Europe. Just as the idea of containment in Europe symbolized a desire to avoid appeasement, such as had occurred at the Munich Conference, and meant the drawing of a line against aggression, so too did this idea apply to Asia. With the formation of the State of Vietnam, French officials frequently characterized their military effort as an anti-Communist fight, not a colonial war.

Economic calculations provided the third reason why it mattered to the United States who won in Vietnam. Americans had no significant investment in Indochina, but they did have a large stake in the economic health of major U.S. allies. The open-door principle viewed a strong and open world economy as a vital American interest. Southeast Asia’s natural resources—such as rice, rubber, and tin—and the region’s markets had long been vital to France and Britain. Japan had sought unsuccessfully to gain these benefits by force and still needed access to them for its recovery from the war. With China now considered hostile, American strategists began to think more about the welfare of their former Japanese enemy. If France, Britain, and Japan were to be effective political and economic allies of the United States, French interests in Southeast Asia were worth preserving as part of an American economic trading block.

For these reasons, in February 1950 the Truman administration extended diplomatic recognition to the State of Vietnam and in May committed $10 million in military assistance to the French-backed regime. At the time, these actions seemed to be small and prudent steps, but they marked the beginning of what would be a twenty-five-year involvement in Vietnam that would ultimately cost billions of dollars and thousands of American lives. In the short run, however, the intent was not to embark on an American war in Vietnam, but to encourage France to continue to carry the containment burden in Indochina and to cooperate with U.S. defense plans in Europe.

These American decisions on Indochina preceded the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 and Truman’s prompt deployment of U.S. troops to defend South Korea against attack from Communist North Korea. The fighting in Korea confirmed the belief in Washington that Asian Communist movements—Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese—posed an aggressive military threat that must be countered by armed force. With U.S. soldiers fighting against North Korean and, after November 1950, Chinese troops and obligated to defend Europe through NATO, which was created in 1949, it was imperative that France keep up the fight in Vietnam. To ensure that Paris did not waver, especially after the FEC suffered heavy losses from 1950 to 1952, the Truman administration steadily increased the level of U.S. aid. By late 1952, U.S. funds were paying for more than one-third of the French war costs.

DIENBIENPHU AND THE GENEVA CONFERENCE

The French war in Vietnam came to an end in 1954 with a major battle at Dienbienphu and a cease-fire agreement between France and the Vietminh negotiated at Geneva, Switzerland. The United States played a key role in both of these decisive developments largely by deciding not to play a key role. For three years, the Truman administration had worked to sustain the French. Upon entering the White House in January 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisers continued and, in fact, dramatically increased U.S. aid. When General Henri Navarre, the new FEC commander, presented a bold plan for offensive operations, the American subsidy jumped to 80 percent of the French costs. When the Navarre Plan produced a French disaster at Dienbienphu, however, the Eisenhower administration let events take their own course, which led to the agreements in Geneva that ended the war and that recognized the DRV’s control of North Vietnam.

Navarre’s aggressive tactics led him to construct a large French combat base in a remote valley in northwestern Vietnam near the village of Dienbienphu. His purpose was not entirely clear. He may have sought to block Vietminh access to nearby Laos or to position his forces for future operations. Whatever the case, he seriously underestimated his enemy’s ability and placed too much faith in his planes, tanks, and other technological resources. Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietminh commander, occupied the high ground around Dienbienphu in March 1954 with a force twice the size of the French garrison. Giap’s artillery rendered useless the French airstrip in the village. Some of France’s best troops were isolated, besieged, and facing a humiliating defeat.

Dienbienphu presented the Eisenhower administration with a dilemma. A surrender there would not end France’s ability to fight in Vietnam but could well end its will to fight. French opinion had turned against this “dirty war,” and French leaders had already agreed to put the conflict on the agenda of an international conference to convene soon in Geneva. The level of U.S. financial aid indicated, however, that Washington placed a higher value on Vietnam than did Paris. On April 5, 1954, with Dienbienphu under siege, Eisenhower made his famous public remark about the domino principle, which became a U.S. description of the strategic importance of Vietnam for years to come. The president asserted that if Indochina came under Communist control, the result would be that Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and even Australia and New Zealand would fall, one by one, like dominos.³¹

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles publicly called for “united action” by several countries to protect Southeast Asia from Communist-led movements, while Eisenhower and his advisers privately weighed the possibility of a U.S. air strike to relieve the French fighters at Dienbienphu. On May 7, however, the Vietminh forced the surrender of the last French defenders, so that in the end the United States did not have to take any meaningful military or diplomatic action. As Richard H. Immerman discusses in chapter 2, Eisenhower received considerable credit from scholars for a statesmanlike caution that seemed in sharp contrast to his successors’ approval of American military intervention in Vietnam. Eisenhower did not question the designation of Indochina as a vital strategic area worth defending, however. The disaster at Dienbienphu only confirmed that relying on France to carry the burden of that defense was not working. Some other approach would have to be found.

The talks at Geneva provided a way for France to extricate itself from the war. The governments of Great Britain and the Soviet Union convened the Geneva Conference, which included representatives from France, the United States, the People’s Republic of China, Laos, Cambodia, the State of Vietnam, and the DRV (that is, the Vietminh delegation). The U.S. envoys stayed out of the substantive talks. The French and Vietminh delegations negotiated and signed a cease-fire agreement in July 1954 that temporarily divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. The DRV would control North Vietnam. The State of Vietnam would have administrative authority in South Vietnam, but because French officials and not representatives of the State of Vietnam signed this document, the fate of the Bao Dai government was undefined. Separate agreements provided for Laotian and Cambodian governments in those countries. Kenton Clymer details the course of events in these countries in chapter 12. Finally, an unsigned declaration, released at the end of the conference, called for elections to be held throughout Vietnam in 1956 to decide the country’s political future. The diplomats at Geneva had found a formula for ending the Franco-Vietminh war, but not a plan for the unification of Vietnam under one government.

The U.S. delegation at Geneva issued a statement acknowledging the results of the conference but not endorsing them. Washington was not pleased that a Vietminh government in Hanoi, headed by Ho Chi Minh, now controlled North Vietnam. American leaders also recognized that they still had to deal with the State of Vietnam through French intermediaries. American planners were already at work, however, on how to fashion their own solution for Vietnam that would keep the domino of North Vietnam from toppling South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and other neighboring states.

Soon after the Geneva Conference, Secretary Dulles took the first steps in this direction by brokering a vaguely phrased defense pact composed of the United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan. Designed to protect the status quo, this September 1954 treaty created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), with a separate protocol listing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia not as members, but as part of the SEATO security area. On paper, at least, Dulles had an arrangement for united action, such as he had proposed during the Dienbienphu crisis. In the years to come, including during the massive U.S. military deployment of the 1960s, American officials would often cite the SEATO pact as their basis for action in Indochina.

THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION AND “WHOLEHEARTED” SUPPORT OF NGO DINH DIEM

Although intended to be temporary, the north–south division of Vietnam fashioned at the Geneva Conference endured for two decades until DRV troops occupied the southern capital of Saigon in 1975. For most of the first ten years of the separation between the two Vietnams, Ngo Dinh Diem headed the southern regime and appeared to the United States, at least for a time, as the best Vietnamese alternative to Ho Chi Minh and to a Communist-led unification of Vietnam. The United States made clear immediately after the Geneva Conference that it sought a way to counter the DRV, and the Eisenhower administration provided steadily increasing support to Diem for that purpose. The American hope for a successful government in South Vietnam did not by itself ensure that Diem’s regime would survive, but it did cause the Vietnamese to associate Washington and Saigon so closely that they often referred to the southern government as the “My–Diem” regime, combining the Vietnamese word for “America” with Diem’s name.

Diem’s political base was weak, and the initial U.S. reaction to the prospect of a Vietnamese government under his leadership was cautious. Why Bao Dai named Diem prime minister of the State of Vietnam in June 1954 has never been entirely clear. From a mandarin family, Diem had served briefly in Bao Dai’s powerless cabinet in the 1930s. The playboy emperor, who lived much of the time on the French Riviera, did not like Diem, who was intensely anti-French, was a devout and celibate Roman Catholic, and lived an ascetic and almost monkish life. With French power waning in Indochina, however, Diem had some genuine assets. He had a reputation for refusing to collaborate with either the French colonialists or the Vietminh. The latter was probably responsible for his oldest brother’s murder in 1945. Moreover, Diem had lived for a while in the United States and had met some prominent Americans. Although these contacts may not have been significant, it is likely that Bao Dai selected Diem in hopes of cultivating U.S. support for his government against the DRV.

Although top U.S. policymakers, such as President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, knew little about Diem and took a wait-and-see attitude, they fairly quickly decided that he and his government deserved wholehearted American support. Diem himself was a very private person with none of Ho’s charisma, and he had no political organization to rival the Dang Lao Dong Viet Nam, or Vietnamese Workers Party (the formal name of the Communist Party in Vietnam from 1951 to 1976). He relied heavily on his four surviving brothers, especially Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was essentially his chief of staff. Because Vietnam is primarily a country of Buddhists, the Ngo family’s religion set them apart and led them to develop a network of Catholic minions, many of whom had fled from the North to the South after the Geneva-arranged cease-fire. French officials remaining in the South opposed Diem because they knew he was hostile to their aims to preserve what French influence they could in their former colony. Faced with lack of support or outright resistance from French officials, many Buddhists, admirers of Ho, and the Communist cadres, Diem needed U.S. help to have any chance of establishing a government.

Eisenhower sent General J. Lawton Collins to Saigon in November 1954 to evaluate Diem’s potential and to try to get the French to cooperate with American efforts to strengthen South Vietnam. Collins concluded that a separate South Vietnamese state was possible, but he bluntly informed the White House that he did not believe that Diem was qualified to lead it. At the same time, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allan, head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sent Colonel Edward G. Lansdale to work secretly to advise Diem, and Lansdale recommended strong U.S. support for the South Vietnamese prime minister. These conflicting assessments came to a head in April 1955, when an odd alignment of religious sects and gangsters made a move to seize authority from Diem. The prime minister subdued the uprising with some help from Lansdale. Rather than risk further instability that might give Hanoi a political opening to exploit, Washington decided to give “wholehearted” support to Diem.³² Secretary Dulles informed Paris of the U.S. determination to help Diem, and the French government responded by withdrawing its last military advisers in the South and leaving all future assistance to Saigon in American hands.

With the U.S. decision to try to build a nation in the South around Diem, the prime minister boldly announced a referendum to depose Bao Dai and convert the State of Vietnam into the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). American officials were caught by surprise and thought the step was premature, but Diem and his brothers carried off a sham election in October 1955 that went overwhelmingly against the emperor. Some districts reported more votes for Diem to be head of state than there were voters. This “election” revealed the Ngos to be more clever than many had thought, but it also gave evidence of a problem that was to plague the RVN until its demise in 1975. The United States felt compelled to shore up an ally that had questionable political support. At the same time, the Saigon politicians, despite their dependence on U.S. aid, did not hesitate to act as they pleased and assumed that the United States had no choice but to go along.

THE NONELECTION OF 1956

The question of whether the United States was shaping or simply responding to events in Southeast Asia is apparent in the issue of an all-Vietnam election to decide on reunification. The diplomats at the Geneva Conference had called for a “free general election” in 1956 to determine the political will of the Vietnamese. The U.S. delegation at Geneva and the State of Vietnam’s representatives never agreed to an election, however, and Washington was not inclined to help arrange a free-ballot competition between the almost legendary Ho Chi Minh, who had forced the French colonialists to capitulate, and Ngo Dinh Diem, who was struggling just to keep afloat politically. No election occurred in 1956, and the circumstantial evidence suggests that Washington blocked a peaceful resolution to Vietnam’s internal political discord.

In truth, free elections throughout Vietnam had very little chance of being implemented from the day they were first proposed. The Geneva conferees had provided no specific mechanism for such elections. Neither the conveners of the conference—Britain and the Soviet Union—nor any of the other major powers wanted to take responsibility for supervising an election. No officials in Hanoi or Saigon had any experience in conducting free elections and likely would not have tolerated outside monitoring in areas under their control. Only the DRV kept up public calls for an election because it presumed its heroic defiance of France gave it the overwhelming popularity to carry it to a victory, whether the election was open or manipulated. Diem largely avoided any reference to an election. He eventually announced that he favored an election but said he would not agree to one as long as the North denied its citizens democratic liberty. Spokesmen in Washington endorsed this statement, but the election was already a dead issue.

When the summer of 1956 passed with no all-Vietnam election held or even being discussed, Washington grew more optimistic, with each month the Diem government continued to function, that South Vietnam might actually hold the containment line against the North and thus against Communist expansion in Asia. A nonpartisan advocacy group calling itself the American Friends of Vietnam was applauding Diem’s accomplishments, and the Eisenhower administration issued self-congratulatory statements about how well U.S. assistance was working in Vietnam. In May 1957, Diem made a state visit to the United States during which he was repeatedly dubbed a “miracle man” for his regime’s ability to take root despite the threat it faced from the North.

THE ILLUSION OF NATION BUILDING

Despite the confident rhetoric out of Washington and Saigon, the RVN was not a self-sufficient nation and required life-sustaining support from the United States. The French had created for the State of Vietnam an army of 150,000 soldiers and a civil bureaucracy, but neither of these organizations had been given any independent authority. Both had been expected simply to carry out orders and hence had not developed their own leadership. Conspiratorial by nature, Diem and his brothers filled this leadership void by creating a government in the South that rested largely on personal loyalty to them. From this narrow political base, Diem endeavored, with American help, to build a nation in the South to contest the DRV in the North.

Diem’s regime presented American officials with a debilitating dilemma. The Saigon government needed to build trust and loyalty among the South Vietnamese population but was well aware that it faced many internal enemies who could be ruthless in their opposition. With an instinct for survival, the Ngo family often resorted to dictatorial methods to intimidate or remove threats to its authority. Diem’s brothers Ngo Dinh Nhu and Ngo Dinh Can operated a largely secret party, the Can Lao, that ruled through bribery, arrests, imprisonment, and executions of alleged Vietminh suspects believed to be disloyal to the RVN government. In one of its most extreme moves, the regime abolished elected village councils and placed its own appointees (usually Catholics who had fled from the North) in charge of local affairs. Such actions increased the Ngos’ isolation from the people and concerned American advisers, who hoped that the RVN would show greater respect for democratic principles.

Although urging Diem to reform his methods, Washington felt compelled to give him financial assistance or otherwise risk the collapse of his fragile nation. Americans reasoned that improved economic conditions among the peasants would help build support for the RVN, and they advanced plans for land reform, rent control, and agricultural development. American officials also set up a system to subsidize commercial imports to boost the urban economy. These efforts translated into few actual changes in the agricultural and commercial economy of South Vietnam. In part due to the regime’s resistance to social innovation, this lack of economic change occurred primarily because 80 percent of U.S. aid went directly to the South Vietnamese armed forces.

Many American strategists envisioned a threat of an outright assault by North Vietnam on South Vietnam after the model of the North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950. Whether Diem shared this concern regarding external aggression or simply recognized the value of a strong military for defense against his internal foes, he often reiterated his need for military aid. The Eisenhower administration never had more than 740 uniformed U.S. soldiers in Vietnam for training and advising the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), but 85 percent of the money for paying, equipping, and maintaining the southern military forces came from the United States. Some U.S. diplomats in Saigon questioned providing significant military assistance to such a politically unstable regime, but basic U.S. policy was that military security took precedence in Vietnam over economic and political reform.

THE NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT AND THE RISE OF THE SOUTHERN INSURGENCY

In December 1960, Vietnamese Communists in South Vietnam created the National Liberation Front (NLF), an organization that also included non-Communists, with the goals of overthrowing the Diem government, seeking an end of U.S. military aid to the RVN, and forcing the creation of a coalition government that would seek reunification with the North. The appearance of the NLF followed months of increasingly violent incidents aimed at the ARVN, district chiefs, and other representatives of the RVN. American and Vietnamese officials in Washington and Saigon referred to these antigovernment rebels as “Vietcong” or “Vietnamese Communists,” whether they were Communists or not.

Although an all-Vietnam election was not held in 1956, the DRV Politburo continued to hold out for a political reunification of the country without renewed warfare. Leaders in Hanoi were still struggling to consolidate their authority in the North and to convert agriculture and commerce to a socialist economy. They were not eager to launch any new military campaigns, especially if such attacks might provoke an American armed response. The DRV advised Communist Party cadres in the South to be patient.

The southern cadres informed Hanoi that they could not wait. With U.S. help, Diem’s regime was managing to stay in power, and its policy of arrests, harsh punishments, and even executions of its opponents was decimating the Communist Party. Some party workers began to assassinate local RVN officials and to strike back in other ways. Finally, in 1959, the Politburo signaled approval of acts of self-defense, and an armed insurgency quickly emerged. A diverse coalition of Communists, former Vietminh, Buddhists, and even some Catholics threatened by Diem’s suppression tactics began to coordinate resistance activities. They attacked ARVN outposts and government offices and claimed to have “liberated” scores of villages from government control. The momentum of the southern insurgency finally led Hanoi, in September 1960, to declare a two-part program of socialist revolution in the North and liberation of the South from the Americans and their Vietnamese henchmen. With that approval, the southern Communists quickly formalized the organization of the dissatisfied southern elements into the NLF. The NLF’s strategy was to stage military actions in areas remote from government control, use political methods in the cities, and combine military and political means in other areas.

As this new phase began in the struggle for control of South Vietnam, a crisis of international proportions was erupting in neighboring Laos. The Geneva Conference of 1954 had recognized an independent Royal Lao Government. The United States gave considerable assistance to this government because of Laos’s strategic proximity to North Vietnam and the existence of the Communist Pathet Lao, who worked with Hanoi against the royal government. In 1959 and 1960, a series of coups and other political maneuvers led to a very dangerous environment in which the United States and the Soviet Union were providing supplies to opposing factions in a tension-filled situation. As described by Clymer in chapter 12, neither Washington nor Moscow desired a direct clash over Laos, but the two superpowers’ connections to the contending parties in Vietnam had dragged them into this conflict. When John F. Kennedy met with Eisenhower in January 1961, on the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration as president, the discussion of Southeast Asian issues concentrated on Laos, not on Vietnam.

Compared with the presidents who followed him, Eisenhower’s commitment of U.S. resources to the survival of South Vietnam appeared limited. The number of U.S. forces in the country was only a few hundred engaged in training and advice, and no U.S. air or land forces had participated in combat in Vietnam. Yet, as Eisenhower’s “domino” statement in 1954 had proclaimed and his concern for Laos in 1961 revealed, his administration had defined Southeast Asia and the containment of Communist expansion there to be of global strategic interest to the United States. To protect that interest, Washington bankrolled and applauded the political survival of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Despite and because of U.S. assistance, the Saigon government found itself by the late 1950s facing danger not only from the North, but from an armed insurrection in the South. With the latter rapidly expanding against the Saigon government, the level of American support was likely going to have to increase. When Eisenhower left office in 1961, there were serious questions as to whether the My–Diem government needed a greater commitment from the United States and whether American interests justified such a commitment. The decision whether to continue wholehearted support of Diem and how much more assistance to give South Vietnam was left, however, for Kennedy to make.

THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION CHOOSES COUNTERINSURGENCY WARFARE

Almost immediately upon entering the White House, John F. Kennedy received a disturbing briefing from General Edward Lansdale, who had just returned from an observation trip to Southeast Asia. The general reported that widespread guerrilla warfare and other subversive activities in South Vietnam would soon bring down Ngo Dinh Diem’s government if an effective counterinsurgency program did not begin at once. When campaigning for president, Kennedy had criticized Eisenhower for being indecisive in foreign policy and had further claimed that America’s own survival required an assertive U.S. defense of “free” nations against Communist aggression. It was especially important, the youthful Kennedy maintained, that the United States pay closer attention to the internal politics of the developing nations that were vulnerable to Soviet-sponsored wars of national liberation. For the new president, the prospect of the defeat of the U.S.-backed Saigon regime carried global consequences dangerous to American interests. He moved quickly to increase U.S. support of South Vietnam and continued thereafter to expand that assistance. He eventually lost confidence in Ngo Dinh Diem and inquired about U.S. options in Vietnam, but, as Immerman concludes in chapter 2, by the time of his assassination in 1963 Kennedy had not reached a definitive decision on the strategic value of South Vietnam to the United States.

Despite his partisan criticisms of his predecessor’s conduct of foreign policy, Kennedy agreed with the basic tenets of the containment strategy initiated by Truman and continued by Eisenhower. The basic assumption of that strategy was that the Soviet Union, with its hostile ideology and nuclear warfare capability, was the principal threat to the United States. Therefore, any country allied with the USSR, such as the People’s Republic of China or the DRV, was the enemy of the United States. Not only did Kennedy consider containment a prudent policy, but he also believed that the United States had international commitments, whether formal as with NATO or implied as with SEATO, to oppose Communist expansion and that failure to uphold these commitments would have damaging consequences for the credibility of U.S. policy and the security of the world.

Despite Kennedy’s desire to demonstrate American determination, however, his initial months in office conveyed a different message. In April 1961, Cuban exiles suffered a disastrous failure when they attempted an invasion at the Bay of Pigs in an effort to unseat Fidel Castro’s government. The thinly veiled U.S. hand in the assault on Cuba made the new administration appear reckless and inept. Unwilling to commit U.S. troops to the Cuban operation, Kennedy was even more wary of American forces going into the conflict in Laos. Only days after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he consequently decided that the United States would participate in negotiations for a compromise political settlement in Laos. At a June summit meeting in Vienna, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sought to intimidate the inexperienced Kennedy, and soon afterward Moscow began construction of the Berlin Wall.

These apparent setbacks for U.S. foreign policy in Cuba, Laos, and Berlin led the Kennedy administration to pay increasing attention to Vietnam. Washington believed that it could not afford another sign of weakness and had to stand firm somewhere. Kennedy had criticized Eisenhower for excessive reliance on nuclear deterrence as a diplomatic instrument. The new president advocated a strategy termed “flexible response”—that is, the notion that different types of aggression, such as guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, required different defenses, such as counterinsurgency warfare. Although Kennedy’s initial efforts in 1961 to improve assistance to the Diem government contained psychological and economic elements, much of the help was in the form of military aid and advice. His administration increased U.S. funding to allow for a 200,000-man South Vietnamese armed force, and Washington deployed 400 U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) advisers to provide training in antiguerrilla tactics. These moves did not deter the Vietcong, however, which actually increased its attacks, and infiltration of military reinforcements from North Vietnam doubled.

With Diem’s government on more precarious footing than ever, two of Kennedy’s top aides, Walt Rostow and Maxwell Taylor, traveled to Vietnam in October 1961 and returned with a recommendation that the United States send 8,000 troops to inject some confidence into the Saigon regime. Other Kennedy aides suggested negotiations with the DRV to arrange a political compromise, such as had been done in Laos. Kennedy rejected both deployment of a U.S. combat force and negotiations, but during 1962 he significantly escalated the level of military aid. By the end of the year, there were 9,000 U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam, and the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), had been created to direct the expanding American effort. The ARVN received modern military hardware, such as helicopters, tactical aircraft, and armored personnel carriers. To try to counter guerrilla attacks and Vietcong political organizing in rural areas, MACV helped the Diem government construct “strategic hamlets,” or fortified villages. These activities gave the appearance that the RVN was becoming more secure. In January 1963, however, a Vietcong unit routed an ARVN force that was ten times larger and equipped with modern U.S. arms, including aircraft. The ARVN soldiers’ lack of will to fight in this battle at Ap Bac symbolized a fundamental absence of allegiance to the Diem government that military equipment and training alone could not remedy.

THE BUDDHIST CRISIS

Low morale in ARVN units and disaffection among peasants in the strategic hamlets, into which many families had been forced after having to give up their ancestral homes, revealed widespread discontent with the Saigon leadership, but the most visible challenge to Diem came from some members of the Buddhist clergy. Although they usually avoided politics, monks began to criticize government oppression, especially prohibitions against public Buddhist observances even though Catholic festivals were allowed. In June 1963, an elderly monk attracted worldwide attention to these complaints when he burned himself to death in a Saigon intersection, with news reporters watching and taking photographs. Other acts of self-immolation followed. The particular target of these dramatic protests was Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who headed the government’s police and security forces. Nhu reacted callously to the priests’ flaming sacrifices and in August even launched a massive military raid on major pagodas throughout the country. The Buddhist peace movement was a clear call for public resistance to the government, and the Ngos were not going to tolerate any opposition.

The Buddhist crisis brought to a head the long-running question regarding Diem’s ability to govern South Vietnam. Eighty percent of the population was Buddhist, and his government’s actions further alienated a population already feeling unserved and oppressed by Saigon. American officials at all levels, from Saigon to Washington, were at the end of their patience with Diem. They tried to get him to remove or discipline his brother Nhu, but Ngo family cohesion was too strong. With Vietnamese and American sentiment against Diem readily apparent, members of South Vietnam’s military began to plot against the government. Because U.S. policy since the mid-1950s had been to give Diem wholehearted support, disgruntled military and civil leaders in South Vietnam had been reluctant to threaten him. If these dissidents could be assured of American support for a new regime, however, they would be emboldened to act.

THE DIEM ASSASSINATION

On November 2, 1963, South Vietnamese soldiers sent to arrest Diem and Nhu during a military coup murdered the two brothers. As with the Buddhists’ suicides, a violent act had once again punctuated events in South Vietnam. Although there is no evidence that U.S. officials desired or even anticipated that Diem would be killed, his death marked a major turning point in the history of South Vietnam and of the U.S. policy of non-Communist nation building there.

In August that year, after the raids on the pagodas, State Department officials in Washington had indicated to U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon that he could pressure Diem for Nhu’s removal, and if Nhu remained, he could provide assurances to military leaders that the United States would not interfere with a coup. Despite this so-called green light, no move against Diem occurred in September, and the South Vietnamese president seemed as determined as ever to resist U.S. pressure for reform. After an inspection trip to Saigon, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) General Maxwell Taylor recommended that the United States cut back on the aid to the RVN and even on the number of military advisers as a further attempt to push Diem into less-repressive policies. Although Kennedy expressed doubt about how to proceed, he approved the McNamara–Taylor report’s finding in favor of increased pressure.³³ As U.S. displeasure with Diem grew more evident than ever, plotting against Diem resumed within the military. American intelligence agents knew of this activity, but the U.S. Embassy in Saigon did not warn Diem. On November 1, 1963, military forces took control of RVN government offices, and Diem and Nhu fled and took refuge in a Catholic church. The generals sent soldiers to retrieve them, and the assassinations occurred while the brothers were being transported to custody.

WHAT IF KENNEDY HAD LIVED?

Three weeks after the coup in Saigon, an assassin murdered John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. The president’s death at this critical juncture in the Vietnam War has led to speculation about what might have occurred differently if Kennedy had lived. In chapter 3, Gary R. Hess examines what he terms the idea of “Kennedy exceptionalism” and whether the sudden transition from Kennedy to Johnson marked a “turning point” toward deepened U.S. military engagement in Vietnam.

Many of Kennedy’s associates and admirers have claimed that after his reelection in 1964, he would have removed U.S. forces from Vietnam. For evidence, they point to, among other things, Kennedy’s approval of the McNamara–Taylor recommendation to reduce the number of U.S. advisers in Vietnam. In the context of the report, however, that proposal was part of a plan to pressure Diem and not the product of a reassessment of South Vietnam’s strategic value to the United States. There is no question that Kennedy had doubts about U.S. military intervention in Indochina. In addition, after the world had stared into the face of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, he wanted to reduce international tensions. Kennedy’s actual record in office from 1961 to 1963, however, documents his role in the growing militarization of U.S. assistance to the RVN. He never challenged the proposition that the fate of South Vietnam was vital to U.S. security. In a television interview in mid-September 1963, he reaffirmed his belief in the domino theory and stated flatly that the United States should stay in Vietnam and influence the outcome of the struggle there in the most effective way it could.³⁴ By the time of his death, he had placed 16,000 American military advisers in Vietnam, and more than 100 of them had been killed in action. These figures are low compared with the staggering statistics generated later, but they represented a significant leap from the number of advisers deployed in the Eisenhower years.

Some historians note that it was Kennedy who injected excessive vigor, idealism, and overconfidence into U.S. policy in Vietnam. He had come into office in 1961, proclaiming in his inaugural address that the United States would “bear any burden” in the defense of liberty. By 1963, the burden that he had taken up for America in Vietnam was larger than when he began his term. With removal of Diem, which Kennedy had countenanced, a morass of political instability emerged in South Vietnam that added to the challenge for Washington. History is not able to record if Kennedy would have responded with more or less U.S. activism in Vietnam in the face of worsening conditions for the Saigon government. Those conditions and the consequences of almost a decade of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia became the sudden and unwanted responsibility of Lyndon B. Johnson.

THE AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM: ESCALATION

Between November 1963 and July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a series of decisions that ultimately led to a large-scale American war in Vietnam. After the death of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s political viability continued to decline. In part, this weakness was the result of tension within the South between those who sought a political settlement with Hanoi and others who wanted an invigorated military defense of South Vietnam. Aware that a major source of political support for the NLF had been the anti-Diem sentiment in South Vietnam, Hanoi decided to increase its infiltration of men and supplies into the South to bolster the NLF. Fearful that southern leaders might agree with Hanoi to create a neutral Vietnam, strategists in Washington urged Saigon to strengthen its military defense and not to be lured into a compromise. In the weeks after Diem’s murder, then, the tension within Vietnam began to reach crisis proportions, and the ten-year U.S. effort to build an independent nation in South Vietnam appeared to be at great risk.

Many journalists, historians, and other observers have labeled the American war in Vietnam as “Johnson’s War” because of his decisions to undertake an air war against North Vietnam and a major ground war in South Vietnam. Although Johnson’s responsibility for the American combat escalation is undeniable, it is also apparent that he was engulfed in a political and strategic situation that he did not create and did not relish. Johnson felt compelled to maintain the U.S. defense of South Vietnam because of the tenets of the containment policy and the commitments that his predecessors had made to the RVN. As a leader in the U.S. Senate in the 1950s and as vice president, he had always endorsed Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s judgment that Southeast Asia was an area of importance to U.S. security. Only four days after becoming president, he approved National Security Action Memorandum 273 (NSAM 273), which was originally drafted for Kennedy.³⁵ It affirmed that the United States would continue to aid South Vietnam against what it termed outside Communist aggression (referring to North Vietnam). In signing this document, Johnson was not only pledging to continue Kennedy’s policies, but renewing the 1947 Truman Doctrine’s promise to assist any free people threatened by external pressure or internal subversion. In the months afterward, as Johnson made military decisions consistent with this pledge, he was in many respects implementing what could also be termed “Truman’s War,” “Eisenhower’s War,” or “Kennedy’s War.”

Johnson did not want a war in Vietnam and did not want to be a war president. He had spent his entire political career as a champion of domestic reform in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Kennedy had left an unfulfilled domestic program at the time of his death—the New Frontier, aimed at such problems as poverty, the environment, and racial discrimination. Johnson preferred to put his efforts into getting congressional action in these areas and not into grappling with the upheaval in Southeast Asia. The new president harbored even grander designs for a sweeping program of social benefits, which would later be labeled the “Great Society.” As a veteran of Capitol Hill, however, Johnson understood that the credibility he needed as a leader to achieve the bold Kennedy–Johnson domestic agenda required him to demonstrate that he could protect U.S. interests abroad. He did not want to give conservatives, who would likely oppose his reform program, a political weapon against him if he were to “lose” Vietnam. He recalled how the right wing had attacked Truman for the “loss” of China. Hence, because of his belief that the survival of South Vietnam was a test of his ability to sustain America’s global containment policy and in order to safeguard his domestic plans, he concluded that his administration could not tolerate defeat or even compromise in Vietnam. As Hess points out in chapter 3, Johnson’s decisions merged the “Cold War imperative” with his particular style of presidential leadership.

Although unwilling to accept U.S. failure in Vietnam, Johnson did not want a large war that would divert resources and public attention from his domestic programs. Aware that the NLF continued to control many rural areas of the South and that the military government in Saigon had only a narrow base of political support, the president searched for solutions. Johnson sent General William C. Westmoreland, one of the most accomplished officers in the U.S. military, to head MACV and authorized an increase of U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam from 16,000 to more than 23,000. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and other top aides advised the president, however, that the real enemy of Saigon was Hanoi and not the southern guerrillas. They urged that he find a way to put greater pressure on the North.

THE GULF OF TONKIN INCIDENT

Although the Pentagon had developed contingency plans for air strikes against the DRV, such attacks on North Vietnamese territory without provocation were not possible. Other forms of harassment were tried. Through a secret program code-named OPLAN 34A, U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin provided electronic intelligence to support South Vietnamese commando raids along North Vietnam’s coast. On August 2, 1964, the U.S. Navy destroyer Maddox was engaged in one of these espionage patrols when it was approached by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. A brief exchange of hostile fire occurred. American carrier-based aircraft joined in the fight, and one of the North Vietnamese boats was severely damaged. Washington ordered no further retaliation but declared its right to sail the open sea. It sent the destroyer C. Turner Joy to join the Maddox to continue the patrols.

On the night of August 4, in poor weather conditions, the two destroyers radioed that they were under attack. As soon as these first reports arrived in Washington, the instinctive response among the JCS and other senior presidential aides was to strike back with air attacks against North Vietnamese naval facilities. New messages quickly followed, cautioning that the attack was not confirmed and that the initial radar and sonar reports may have been mistakes. Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who was in charge of all U.S. Pacific forces, cabled from Honolulu, however, that he was convinced there had been an attack. Relying on that judgment, Washington ordered retaliatory air raids. The best historical evidence available now suggests that there was no attack on U.S. ships on August 4, but it also shows that the Pentagon did not know with certainty what had occurred and did not willfully misrepresent the situation to the president. The decision makers in Washington wanted a pretext to send a forceful message to Hanoi not to defy the United States, and many of them believed that on August 4 they had the provocation they sought.

The president used this Gulf of Tonkin incident as an opportunity to obtain from Congress the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed him to use U.S. forces to repel aggression in Southeast Asia.³⁶ Johnson did not seek this authorization because he contemplated widening the war. He still wanted to limit the U.S. military role in Vietnam. He sought a show of support from Congress for his firm but restrained approach in Indochina that would help him in his impending election against Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), who advocated greater use of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Johnson got the political result he desired and won the election, but the way he obtained the congressional resolution created future problems for him. He misled congressional leaders by not divulging the secret patrols that had placed the destroyers in the gulf, and this deception created a basis for mistrust later. Also, having bombed the North and obtained congressional acquiescence, the president now faced less institutional restraint against future military escalation.

ROLLING THUNDER

Until Johnson was safely elected in November, he sought to preserve his image as a firm but restrained leader and authorized no additional attacks on North Vietnam, despite other incidents, including a guerrilla raid at Bien Hoa that killed Americans. Political instability in the Saigon leadership also prompted caution before the United States assumed any further risks. The continued lack of effective government in the RVN and the unrelenting pressure of the NLF’s armed insurgency, supported by men and materiel from the North, made South Vietnam’s survival perilous. Most of Johnson’s staff concluded that the United States had no choice but to begin some type of air campaign against North Vietnam and the infiltration routes into the South along the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos. The notable exception among Johnson’s inner circle was Undersecretary of State George Ball, who cautioned that bombing would be the start of a long and violent conflict, that it would not reverse Saigon’s political decline, and that it risked confrontation with Hanoi’s powerful Soviet and Chinese allies. Advocates of bombing responded that it would slow infiltration into the South, boost morale in Saigon, and send a message to Moscow and Beijing of the seriousness of U.S. intent in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the world.³⁷

On February 6, 1965, an NLF unit killed nine U.S. servicemen in an attack on an American barracks in Pleiku. The president ordered retaliatory air strikes on military installations in the North. Following another guerrilla assault on Americans at Qui Nhon on February 10, the administration began Operation Rolling Thunder, a campaign of continuing and gradually mounting bombardment. Johnson shared many of Ball’s misgivings about escalating the air war, but the president remained determined to avoid defeat in South Vietnam. Ball’s warnings provided no action plan. The JCS were not guaranteeing success, but doing something appeared better to Johnson than doing nothing. Lloyd C. Gardner argues in chapter 4 that Johnson’s 1965 bombing decision was a decisive step in the American war.

JOHNSON DECIDES ON A LAND WAR IN ASIA

Having crossed the threshold of an air war against the North, the administration now faced the decision of inserting U.S. ground combat forces into the hostilities in Vietnam. No matter how terrifying or destructive, bombing alone could not control territory or provide population security. The beleaguered ARVN could not even protect the air bases from which the bombers flew their missions. At Westmoreland’s request, Washington provided two battalions of U.S. marines in March 1965 to help defend the Danang air base. In the southern capital, political turmoil also hampered the launching of operations against the enemy. There had been five governments in Saigon since the death of Diem, and the current regime—headed by a pair of military officers, Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky—inspired little confidence among Americans. Westmoreland and the JCS believed that the time had arrived for the United States to take over the ground war. They requested 150,000 troops be sent to South Vietnam to seek out and destroy enemy forces. Johnson knew that this decision was momentous and weighed it for several days.

As Johnson pondered the decision on ground troops, he listened to McNamara, Rusk, Ball, Taylor (now the U.S. ambassador in Saigon), McGeorge Bundy (national security adviser), and others. The president’s relationship with his top advisers is of critical importance in historical assessments of how the United States took over conduct of the war from the South Vietnamese. His blustering and overbearing personality has been well documented. Both as Senate majority leader and later as president, he was known in Washington for the so-called Johnson treatment. He was a large man who could physically and verbally intimidate his subordinates. He was also a master of flattery and could charm and manipulate others. His advisers knew that he demanded personal loyalty and did not readily invite criticism. As is often the case with such strong personalities, he harbored a great deal of hidden insecurity about his ability. He was especially aware of his lack of experience and expertise in military and diplomatic affairs.

With the exception of Ball and Clark Clifford (a confidant whom Johnson often consulted), Johnson’s senior aides either urged or accepted the deployment of U.S. forces. McNamara expressed the prevailing view that the United States should act quickly or risk total collapse in Saigon. The introduction of U.S. troops would make later withdrawal difficult, he acknowledged, but the use of American combat units was the best hope for gaining an acceptable outcome in the conflict.³⁸ On the one hand, it may be that these advisers were simply telling their formidable leader what he wanted to hear. On the other hand, these men were experienced, established, and successful individuals who understood the magnitude of the decision they all faced. They presumably believed what they were saying and shared an outlook with the president on the strategic importance of South Vietnam.

The president himself remained fairly consistent in his Vietnam policy position from the time he took office up to the July deliberations on ground troops. His thinking was driven by the containment notion that South Vietnam was an outpost on the front line of the global Cold War and by his political sense that this frustrating war was a real danger to his domestic agenda. By the spring of 1965, Johnson was in the midst of bringing his Great Society programs—such as Medicare, civil rights protections, and the war on poverty—to passage in Congress. In a characteristically political move, he approved the sending of 50,000 troops, with another 100,000 to follow, while he publicly downplayed the action as signaling no significant change in policy. In fact, a major decision had been made, but one that he did not want to derail his legislative momentum. As with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson sought to bolster Saigon while protecting his domestic political position. In the long run, however, it would become clear that he had Americanized the Vietnam War, had greatly increased the human and financial costs to the United States, and had not been honest with the American public in the process.

Johnson has to bear responsibility for the escalation of the American commitment to Vietnam in 1965, but a long history had defined the policy environment and options that he had inherited. As with most major historical events, the American war in Vietnam had multiple causes. How the war came to be and what kind of war it was remain the subject of debate, but by the summer of 1965 the United States had decided for its own purposes to take over the fighting from the South Vietnamese. Major ground operations against units of the Vietcong and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN)—or North Vietnamese Army (NVA) as Americans usually termed it—were now conducted by American combat units, with the ARVN providing local security and support functions. A large-scale American air war was also in progress against targets in both North and South Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Johnson had not wanted the role, but he was now a war president.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR IN VIETNAM

All wars have much in common, but in many respects the conflict in Vietnam was a different kind of war than Americans expected. National leaders, the general public, and the soldiers, sailors, and marines who went to Vietnam possessed images of war gained from the actual events of World War II and the Korean War and from the fictionalized versions of those conflicts in movies with such popular stars as John Wayne and Audie Murphy. World War II was the great example of American power and heroism coming to the rescue of oppressed peoples. The Korean War was a limited engagement that ended in stalemate and was more ambiguous, but it had sustained the noble image of Americans rushing to the aid of a nation threatened by aggression. Moreover, both World War II and the Korean War had been contests for territory with progress marked by lines on a map. The Vietnam War turned out to be unlike these other experiences. The geographical and political environment proved less responsive to American power. Determining who among the Vietnamese were friends and who were enemies was difficult in a guerrilla war with no fixed battles lines and a Vietcong enemy often wearing the same black peasant garb as the farmers whom American soldiers were supposedly defending. The Vietnam War became a tremendous military, political, and diplomatic frustration to the United States.

THE DRAFT

For the sake of his Great Society plans, Johnson wanted to keep the war at a low profile and to avoid full military mobilization. This political choice had a variety of consequences. His rejection of Robert McNamara’s recommendation for a war tax to help finance the buildup, for example, contributed to more deficit spending and put inflationary pressure on the U.S. economy. To maintain worldwide U.S. military manpower levels during the Vietnam troop deployment, the Pentagon wanted to activate reservists, but the president again said no because such action would involve Congress. To meet the need for additional personnel, the military had to rely on an increase in the draft.

Even though U.S. troop levels in Vietnam leaped to almost 200,000 by the end of 1965 and that figure more than doubled in the following two years, not all young men in America were needed in the military. Throughout the Cold War era, the Selective Service System had functioned much as it was designed to do during the massive mobilization of World War II. Under a concept known as channeling, young men older than eighteen were either subject to military conscription or exempted from that obligation by a complex set of classifications intended to place people where the nation most needed them. Hence, men who were in college or in certain professions or had certain medical conditions could avoid service in many cases. After the Korean War and into the early 1960s, draft calls were low because of adequate voluntary enlistment and the reduced need for ground forces in an era of airpower. With the escalation in Vietnam, draft calls went from 106,000 in 1965 to 339,000 in 1966. More than half of the draftees went to fill the ranks in Vietnam. Selective Service had always been a system designed to decide who would serve when all are not needed, but the fairness of the selection came under scrutiny as the risk of exposure to combat and death in Vietnam became very real.³⁹

About two and a half million American men served in Vietnam, representing 10 percent of the males of the generation that reached age eighteen during the war. The draft exempted more men than it inducted into the service. Those who went to Vietnam were, as a group, poorer and less educated than the average of young Americans at the time. During the first year of the U.S. buildup, 20 percent of U.S. casualties were African Americans, although that group comprised only 13 percent of military personnel. The first units that went to Vietnam were composed primarily of regular army troops, not draftees. Because the military represented a career opportunity for African Americans, the percentage of blacks was high in Vietnam at first. The casualty rates for African Americans eventually dropped to more representative levels. Nevertheless, it appeared that because of class and race, some groups of Americans were more likely to serve in combat in Vietnam than were others. A survey in 1964 indicated that 44 percent of Americans had white-collar jobs, but only 20 percent of U.S. soldiers came from white-collar families. For most of the war, statistics for income, education, and parents’ occupations show that about 80 percent of soldiers were from poor or working-class families.⁴⁰

ATTRITION STRATEGY AND BODY COUNT

The Johnson administration chose a gradually increasing bombing campaign and an incremental deployment of U.S. troops to Indochina because the American objective in Vietnam was limited. The purpose was not to conquer North Vietnam or even to threaten its survival to a point that might risk a Chinese or Soviet military reaction. The intent was to sustain South Vietnam’s political survival long enough and put enough pressure on North Vietnam to gain Hanoi’s recognition of the RVN. Although the United States had tremendous power at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, the strategic assumption in Washington was that the full extent of U.S. force was not merited or needed in Vietnam.

Given these conditions, General Westmoreland devised an attrition strategy. In chapter 7, John Prados analyzes in detail the reasons for this strategy and some of the problems that it presented. Westmoreland’s plan relied on America’s advanced technology and vast material resources to limit U.S. casualties while inflicting so much damage on Vietcong and NVA forces in the South and military targets in the North that Hanoi would yield. The belief was that the air campaign, the ability to move U.S. troops easily by helicopter, modern weapons, and the other material advantages the United States had over the DRV in this technowar would ultimately exhaust the enemy’s will and ability to fight.⁴¹

Progress in the war of attrition could not be measured on a map because the possession of territory was not the objective. Instead, the Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense McNamara, devised a host of statistical measurements, such as the number of aircraft sorties flown and amount of munitions expended. The most controversial yardstick was body count—the estimated number of enemy killed. If the primary objective was to wear down the opponent, a tally of his losses was logical, but this grim tabulation was an unreliable index. It was easily falsified because unit commanders reported their own totals. Even worse, any dead Vietnamese might be counted, including noncombatants, which in effect encouraged indiscriminate targeting of people, especially villagers in rural areas. As the war progressed, U.S. air and ground warfare often resulted in the deaths of the very people U.S. policy claimed to be defending. This village war made victims of a large number of women, but, as Helen E. Anderson details in chapter 9, it also made fighters of so many women that their numbers helped defeat the attrition strategy.

Westmoreland intended American military operations to search for and destroy enemy military units to weaken the enemy’s ability to wage war. From the battle of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 through Operations Cedar Falls and Junction City in 1967, he mounted large unit sweeps of thousands of men to find and eliminate the Vietcong and NVA. MACV tactics, as Brigham notes in chapter 10, intentionally forced rural peasants into urban centers, with devastating social consequences. Some areas were designated as “free-fire zones” in which U.S. arms, including B-52 bombers delivering tons of high explosives, could attack at will. These means did not go unchallenged in military circles. Some U.S. Marine commanders and civilian strategists concluded that pacification was a better approach. This alternate strategy, detailed by Eric Bergerud in chapter 8, called for smaller unit operations and more cooperation with villagers in order to build political capital for Saigon and weaken NLF influence among the people. Although some U.S. units engaged in pacification efforts, Westmoreland devoted most of his forces, which by the end of 1967 totaled 485,000, to search-and-destroy missions. Late in 1967, the general declared that a crossover point had been reached in which U.S. forces were inflicting more losses on the Vietcong and NVA than the enemy could replace. The political viability of the Thieu–Ky government in Saigon, however, remained in doubt.

HUMPIN’ IT: THE AMERICAN SOLDIER

Because of the heavy reliance on the draft and on voluntary enlistments induced by the draft, the average age of American enlisted men in the Vietnam War was between nineteen and twenty—six or seven years younger than the World War II average and signifying what was probably the youngest foreign combat force in U.S. history. Without activation of reserves, there was also a shortage of junior officers and experienced noncommissioned officers to lead these young troops in an unconventional war in an Asian setting that was often unfathomable to Westerners. Added to these conditions were the vague political and military objectives of the struggle, which were usually translated to the soldiers through the brutal shorthand of body count. As a result, many soldiers found themselves immersed in seemingly aimless violence in which their own survival and that of their buddies became the only discernible goal.

No one description typifies the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam. Early in the war, morale was fairly high as soldiers accepted the validity of the Cold War purposes announced by their leaders. Later, however, as controversy and doubt about America’s role in Vietnam grew, morale declined. Where a soldier was stationed in Vietnam also made a great difference. Marines in the mountains near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam were at times in trenchlike warfare reminiscent of World War I, whereas army troops in the marshes of the Mekong Delta far to the south often had to contend with elusive guerrillas. Because there were no actual battle lines, even the notion of forward and rear areas was imprecise.

In all wars, combat places the warrior in some of the most extreme and stressful of situations, and the Vietnam War was no exception. Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy strategy and the emphasis on body count put American soldiers at tremendous physical and moral risk. Although true that U.S. artillery, helicopter gunships, and tactical aircraft could devastate enemy forces, the difficulty was often in finding those forces. As a consequence, the “grunts,” or foot soldiers, went on long patrols through difficult terrain—marches that they referred to as “humpin’ it”—in order to flush out the Vietcong and NVA. Many soldiers believed that they were the bait for the high-tech trap. If an enemy force was found, then the great firepower at the unit commander’s disposal via radio could be unleashed. During these patrols, American soldiers experienced a significant number of deaths and maiming injuries from mines, booby traps, and hidden snipers. Over time, U.S. casualties mounted, and so did the desire for revenge, or “payback,” against the often invisible foe. Fear, anger, and the incentive of promotion or commendation for a high body count could lead to an overapplication of U.S. weaponry that bordered on or even constituted atrocities. Individual Vietnamese and sometimes even entire villages could be “wasted” because they were suspected of being the enemy or simply got in the way. The largest single American atrocity in the ground war was the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, in which a U.S. infantry company killed 504 unresisting men, women, and children in a hamlet in Quang Ngai Province. Although the officers in charge initially covered up the incident, it eventually came under investigation. The lack of evidence and the inherent difficulties in distinguishing between civilians and combatants among the rural population, however, led to the criminal conviction of only one member of the company, a junior officer. Reporting on an attack on a different village, an American television crew recorded an officer’s comment that it was necessary to destroy the village to save it. The tragic irony of that comment revealed much about the attrition strategy.⁴²

THE AIR WAR

Nowhere during the Vietnam War was American technological superiority over its enemy more apparent than in the air. The United States had helicopters for troop transportation, medical evacuation, command and control, and close tactical fire support. It had fixed-wing propeller aircraft for transporting troops and supplies, provisioning remote bases, giving fire support, and observing and marking targets for artillery and bombing. It had high-performance jet fighters and fighter-bombers for tactical and strategic bombing as well as B-52 heavy bombers for delivering hundreds of tons of explosives on troop concentrations, supply lines, and other military targets. The United States spent more than $100 billion on these air operations. From 1962 to 1973, the total amount of explosives dropped on Indochina was more than 8 million tons: 1 million tons on North Vietnam, nearly 500,000 on Cambodia, about 3 million on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and 4 million on South Vietnam. The level of bombing on the RVN in support of U.S. and ARVN ground operations made America’s ally the most bombed country in history.

The air war did not force Hanoi to recognize the Saigon government or to stop infiltration of men and supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It did not make the Saigon regime more popular in South Vietnam. In fact, the bombing stiffened the DRV resistance and helped solidify the perception in Vietnam of the RVN’s dependence on the United States and its lack of regard for the Vietnamese people. Air cover was often vital to American ground forces’ survival and success, but in a primarily agricultural country such as Vietnam there were few militarily valuable targets. Strategic bombing of North Vietnam and of supply lines into South Vietnam was not effective in hastening an end to the fighting and was in fact often counterproductive.

Washington persisted in bombing month after month and year after year for several reasons. Despite evidence from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam itself that strategic bombing did not force an enemy to capitulate, airpower advocates continued to argue that bombing could produce victory. Civilian leaders liked air operations because they produced fewer American casualties than ground combat and thus generated less political opposition at home. In addition, the Johnson administration felt compelled to take some form of firm action to prevent the collapse of Saigon even though it had no clear-cut plan for victory. The airpower option was available and possessed the enticing allure of apparently being a simple solution to a complex problem. The temptation to use it was irresistible.

DIPLOMACY

Johnson did not want a U.S. war in Southeast Asia and claimed that the United States was willing to negotiate with the DRV. In Laos in 1962, a diplomatic settlement had eased the risk of major power confrontation. Kennedy and later Johnson resisted applying the Laotian model of a coalition government to Vietnam because they judged that it would lead to a Communist government there. Advocates of diplomacy, such as France’s president Charles de Gaulle and United Nations secretary-general U Thant, argued that the problems in Southeast Asia were political, not military, and that to resort to arms led only to violence, not solutions. Sensitive to such criticisms, the Johnson administration proclaimed it was open to talks even as it turned to military escalation.

As the war grew in intensity from 1965 to 1967, both Hanoi and Washington remained more willing to endure the costs of hostilities than to make concessions. Various sources offered scores of private and public peace proposals. In April 1965, in a highly publicized speech at Johns Hopkins University, Johnson expressed an interest in “unconditional discussions” with Hanoi and offered $1 billion in U.S. economic development funds for Southeast Asia as a sign of U.S. goodwill.⁴³ In fact, however, Washington was not prepared to yield at all on its demand that Hanoi recognize the RVN’s legitimacy. For its part, North Vietnam continued to resist talks and insisted that U.S. forces would first have to withdraw from Vietnam and that Washington would have to terminate its support of its puppet regime in Saigon. During 1966 and 1967, both sides made a few modest proposals about their troop deployments, and U.S. spokesmen offered some restrictions of the bombing campaign, but neither side would retreat from its basic position on the fate of South Vietnam. In November 1967, McNamara privately advised Johnson that bombing had not achieved its desired effect and that steps toward a negotiated settlement should be taken. As Gardner concludes in chapter 4, the president continued to pin his hopes for success on the force of U.S. arms and rejected the advice. As 1967 ended, each side, the United States and the DRV, remained determined to compel its opponent to accept its terms.

THE RESILIENT ENEMY

Just as Washington had settled on an attrition strategy to try to wear down the Vietnamese Communists, Hanoi had its own plan for victory in its doctrine of protracted war. Used successfully in the war against the French, this strategy sought to avoid large, fixed battles and tried instead, through piecemeal attacks and guerrilla harassment, to weaken the enemy’s will to fight.⁴⁴ Regular PAVN units that infiltrated from the North and Vietcong military formations—organized into the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF)—conducted this armed struggle. The NLF and party cadres from the North also engaged in political struggle to recruit peasants and workers in South Vietnam for an anticipated general uprising against the ARVN. These plans constituted a reasonable way for the Vietnamese Communists to use their patriotic and social appeal to the Vietnamese people to counter the technological superiority of the American forces and the U.S.-supplied ARVN. Nevertheless, Westmoreland’s technowar against the North and South inflicted heavy losses on the PLAF and PAVN, and the longer the fighting continued, the higher the costs became for the RVN’s enemies.

The Communist commanders who led the struggle against the RVN and the United States were not infallible supermen. They argued among themselves and made mistakes, but they had certain advantages and did some things right. For an analysis of their integrated political and military strategy, see Bergerud’s description of the village war in chapter 8. Hanoi’s adherents were able to tap into the historical Vietnamese resistance to outside domination and to continue the nationalistic momentum gained by the Vietminh’s defeat of the French colonialists. Conversely, southern leaders such as Ngo Dinh Diem, Nguyen Van Thieu, and Nguyen Cao Ky suffered from the taint of collaboration with and dependence on the Americans. The Communists also had a more disciplined and effective political party organization than did their Vietnamese opponents. Anderson argues in chapter 9 that they were notably better at attracting women as partisans than was the RVN and that the “long-haired warriors” made a significant contribution to the NLF and DRV’s military strength. The charismatic leadership of Ho Chi Minh, who remained the DRV president until his death in 1969, provided further legitimacy to his side. In their commitment to their goal of national liberation, the NLF and DRV leaders could also be ruthless with their opponents and sacrificed the lives of a large number of their own followers. In addition, assistance received from the People’s Republic of China and the USSR helped North Vietnam recoup losses suffered from U.S. bomb attacks and to keep war materiel flowing into the South. At no time did U.S. strategists believe American interests in Indochina were worth the risk of war with China and the Soviet Union or the cost of an invasion of North Vietnam. The United States fought a limited war, and the DRV conducted what for it was a total war. After three years of heavy fighting, neither side was close to a military victory.

THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN POWER IN VIETNAM

At the end of January 1968, Vietcong assault forces began coordinated attacks on urban areas, provincial capitals, U.S. and ARVN military installations, and RVN government offices throughout all of South Vietnam. Dubbed the “Tet Offensive” because it coincided with the Vietnamese New Year’s holiday, Tet, this all-out attack was a turning point in the war. As Robert J. McMahon details in chapter 5, the weeks preceding and the months following the initial Tet fighting constituted the pivotal period when the escalation of the American ground war ended and the active search for an American exit from the war began. The surprise offensive caused the Johnson administration, after three years of steady escalation of the U.S. commitment, to reevaluate the strategic importance of Vietnam against the known and potential costs to the United States. It set off a critical reaction to the war within the American media and gave greater credence to arguments against the war that a vocal protest movement had been voicing for some time. This public debate over the war became part of the presidential election campaign of 1968. In the year after Tet, the people of the United States and their leaders began looking for a way out of the Vietnam quagmire.

THE TET OFFENSIVE

Most historians of the war characterize the Tet Offensive as a strategic success for Hanoi because of its psychological impact on the U.S. side. At a time when administration spokesmen were claiming that the U.S. military campaign was weakening the enemy, the Vietcong demonstrated surprising strength and morale in making this bold strike. Even though U.S. and ARVN troops withstood and repulsed the assaults, the official confidence in and the general public acceptance of U.S. purposes that had sustained the American intervention began to erode significantly. Why and how this change occurred have remained the subject of some debate.

Why the leaders in Hanoi decided to launch a broad offensive at this particular juncture is not entirely clear. They knew that the Saigon regime remained politically alienated from much of the South Vietnamese population, and they also had to be concerned about the heavy losses their forces were taking from the American ground and air operations. Vietnamese Communist military doctrine since the French war had called for a protracted struggle until a point was reached at which a general offensive would set off a popular uprising against the outside power and its Vietnamese puppets. In view of that doctrine and the battlefield stalemate at the end of 1967, the Tet Offensive can be seen both as an act of survival to initiate a general offensive before U.S. arms further weakened the PLAF and PAVN and as an act of political faith that the people of the South would turn on the RVN and the United States.

Regardless of which line of reasoning carried the day in Hanoi, the general offensive did not lead to a popular uprising and instead exposed the Communist forces to enormous losses that they could not afford. At first, their plan for the offensive went well. Between October 1967 and January 1968, the Vietcong and the NVA attacked military targets in remote areas and laid siege to the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh near the demilitarized zone. These feints drew U.S. forces away from the cities while the NLF moved men and supplies secretly into position to attack populated areas. Although U.S. intelligence detected some of these urban-directed movements, Westmoreland and his staff remained convinced that the fighting elsewhere, especially at Khe Sanh, was the principal enemy threat. When the offensive itself began in Saigon, Hue, three other cities, thirty-six provincial capitals, and sixty-four district capitals, the surprise was almost total. Within a few days, however, the mobility and firepower of U.S. forces and a surprising show of resilience by ARVN units reversed what gains the attackers had achieved. Thousands of Vietcong troops were killed or captured. In one notable exception, Hue became the scene of savage fighting that raged for three weeks over control of the old imperial capital. The American and ARVN troops prevailed, but much of the city was in ruins, thousands of civilians had died (some executed by the Vietcong), and 100,000 people were homeless.

In terms of both conventional and revolutionary warfare, the Tet Offensive was a tactical failure. The people of South Vietnam did not rise up behind the NLF’s revolutionary banner, and the NLF’s fighting forces were decimated, as Bergerud notes in chapter 8. In other ways, however, Tet had significant positive implications for Hanoi. It revealed that the massive U.S. military presence had not been able to stop NVA infiltration into the South. That same flow of men and supplies could and did continue after Tet. American deaths in the Tet fighting were significant, about 1,100 killed in action, which brought the total U.S. deaths in the war to about 17,000 at that time. The fighting in early 1968 also produced some 2,300 ARVN dead and an enormous number of civilian casualties and refugees. This strain on the ARVN and the dislocation of the population severely handicapped pacification efforts. The Tet Offensive came as a shock and surprise to the American people and confronted them and their leaders with the prospect that much more time and money and many more lives would be required if the United States was to continue to defend South Vietnam.

THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT AND THE MEDIA

Some Americans had always opposed U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, and that number had been growing even before Tet. In 1965, after the first U.S. combat troops went to Vietnam, organized protests began. In the spring of 1965, there were “teach-ins” on college campuses and a demonstration in Washington organized by the Students for a Democratic Society. Initially involving only a few thousand protesters, the antiwar movement grew significantly during 1966 and 1967 and involved a wide range of activities: petitions, political campaigns, lobbying, street demonstrations, draft resistance, and even acts of violence. Although many protesters were students, peace activists also included ministers, mothers, traditional pacifists, conscientious objectors, and even some veterans embittered and disillusioned by their military experience in Vietnam. A group of these former soldiers formed an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Most members of Congress voted for the funds and authorizations needed to conduct the war, but some prominent legislative leaders, such as Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), held hearings on the war or raised individual objections to the Americanization of the conflict. In the spring of 1967, an estimated 300,000 citizens (including civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr.) gathered in New York City to protest the war, and in November some 30,000 to 50,000 demonstrators held an antiwar rally at the Pentagon.⁴⁵

Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon and their advisers were convinced that the existence of a large and public antiwar movement hurt the U.S. war effort by encouraging the enemy. Both administrations insisted that their own policies were not affected by protests, but their criticisms of the antiwar movement made plain that they believed it prolonged the conflict. Government authorities tried in various ways to harass and quiet the critics. Public-opinion polls also showed that a growing number of Americans shared the same doubts about the war that the demonstrators expressed, even if the public disliked the image and methods of the generally young and often unkempt activists.

In a democracy such as America, war, especially a limited war, has a significant domestic impact, and Melvin Small details that dimension of the Vietnam War in chapter 11. In trying to disguise the magnitude of the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam, Johnson had not rallied the people in support of the war. As the size and costs of the conflict became apparent over the months, the vague official pronouncements on U.S. purposes in Vietnam generated demands for political accountability. In late 1967, Johnson compounded his earlier mistake with a public-relations campaign to convey the idea that America was winning the war of attrition. The pressure that he felt indicated that the antiwar movement was having an impact.

Against the backdrop of official affirmations of progress, the surprise and extent of the Tet fighting deepened public doubt. Although true that U.S. and ARVN forces survived the attacks, the enemy’s continuing ability to strike so forcefully damaged the credibility of official explanations of the course of the war. American newspaper and television reporting of the Tet Offensive quickly noted the discrepancy between government assurances and actual events in the field. In the opinion of General Westmoreland and some other military leaders, this American news reporting of the Tet Offensive was wrong, biased, and defeatist. Sometimes called the “stab-in-the-back” thesis, this view holds that the enemy took a desperate gamble, was soundly beaten back, and was extremely vulnerable to counterattack, but that distortions in the media caused civilian leaders in Washington to hesitate and to reassess Vietnam policy and thereby to miss the opportunity to strike a fatal blow to Vietcong and NVA military capability.

This interpretation greatly exaggerates the media’s effect. Until Tet, most of the major commercial media in the United States had accepted the official rationale for the war and the government reports of progress. A few intrepid reporters, such as David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, had been asking hard questions, but the government version had been getting out through the media. Hence, there was genuine dismay within news circles at the beginning of Tet. Television networks, newspapers, and magazines carried dramatic pictures of Vietcong soldiers in the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon and on the streets of major cities. These real scenes left their own impression on the public. In the days that followed, respected journalists, such as the popular CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite, declared that they could not see in all of this fighting any quick end to the burden of this war.⁴⁶

The professional media correspondents basically did their job and reported the dramatic turn of events as it was happening. Top-secret assessments of the fighting by the JCS and by others within the government that are now available to historians reveal, however, the same questions and doubts about U.S. strategy and prospects in Vietnam that reporters such as Cronkite were voicing. For both the U.S. public and the Johnson administration, the heavy fighting in early 1968 brought with it a demand for reexamination of American policies.

JOHNSON DECIDES TO STOP ESCALATION

Johnson was not a leader who would accept failure, and he did not interpret the enemy’s Tet onslaught as a U.S. defeat. Always a reluctant warrior, however, the president had determined even before the surprise offensive that the size of the American military effort in Vietnam had about reached its reasonable limit. In a “memorandum for the file” (one of Johnson’s few private, personal comments on the war in his vast archives), he recorded on December 18, 1967: “At the moment I see no basis for increasing U.S. forces above the current approved level.”⁴⁷ As a consequence, when JCS chairman General Earle Wheeler endorsed a proposal from Westmoreland for 206,000 more troops, Johnson ordered his new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, to conduct a thorough policy review. Quickly leaked to the press, Westmoreland’s request generated a burst of open opposition to the idea. Such public sentiments were clearly a significant consideration, especially in a presidential election year, but additional influences were also at work within the administration.

Although Clifford had supported the war, he put detailed questions about future scenarios to the military brass, civilian strategists in the Pentagon, and a group of elder statesmen called the “Wise Men,” whom Johnson had consulted on other occasions. Wheeler painted a bleak picture of prospects without the additional troops, but he was purposefully vague on how the troops would be used. There was strong debate at the highest levels over whether to continue the attrition strategy or to focus more on pacification and population security. Before former secretary of defense McNamara left the Pentagon, he had come to believe that simply applying more force was not the answer, and his top aides remained in the department and continued to argue that point. Clifford found that members of America’s business elite were concerned about the economic drag that the war was putting on the United States. Finally, a majority of the Wise Men, including former secretary of state Dean Acheson, who had helped to establish the global containment strategy, advised that America begin to disengage from the war.

After weighing these opinions, Johnson addressed the nation via television on March 31, 1968. The president had decided to reject Westmoreland’s troop request and to authorize only an additional 13,500 U.S. forces. He announced that the United States would limit its bombing of North Vietnam to supply and staging areas just across the demilitarized zone from the South and that he welcomed direct negotiations with Hanoi. Although the DRV quickly agreed to talks in Paris, no substantive diplomatic breakthrough followed. Indeed, some of the heaviest fighting of the war occurred in the remaining months of 1968. In his March 31 speech, the president also shocked the nation when he withdrew himself as a candidate for reelection. The American war in Vietnam was far from over, but it was now going to be a different war under new U.S. leadership.⁴⁸

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1968

The Vietnam War was not the only national political issue in the United States in 1968. The civil rights revolution, urban violence, continuing debate over Johnson’s social welfare agenda, an international trade deficit, and other issues also faced the nation’s leaders. With more than 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam and 400 of them dying each week during the first half of 1968, however, the serious contenders for the presidency had to take and defend a clear position on the war. Especially once Johnson bowed out of the race, there seemed to be an opportunity for the voters to have a direct voice in foreign policy.

Despite the controversy surrounding U.S. policy in Vietnam, it had been difficult at first to challenge Johnson politically. Potential candidates from his own Democratic Party and from the Republican opposition did not want to appear disloyal to the president during wartime or unwilling to support American soldiers exposed to the dangers of combat. One candidate who did come forward to contest the president on the war was Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.). He came close to upsetting the president in the New Hampshire primary on March 12. Senator Robert Kennedy of New York was a much stronger contender for the Democratic nomination and also opposed the president on the war. After the largely unknown McCarthy demonstrated Johnson’s political vulnerability, John Kennedy’s younger brother stepped forward as a candidate on March 16.

Without Johnson in the race after March 31, the charismatic Kennedy appeared to be the likely Democratic nominee. His stock rose higher on April 4 when he made a heartfelt plea for national harmony upon learning of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. In an unbelievably tragic sequence of events, however, Kennedy himself was murdered on June 5. McCarthy remained as an outspoken peace candidate, but the party organization turned its support to Johnson’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey. Because of his role in the administration, Humphrey had the image of being prowar, and his candidacy sparked little enthusiasm among many Democrats.

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, the war was the divisive issue inside and outside the meeting hall. On the convention floor, delegates loyal to McCarthy, Kennedy, and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota (another peace candidate) tried unsuccessfully to get the party platform to repudiate Johnson’s conduct of the war. Humphrey then formally received the nomination, but dramatic events outside in the streets overshadowed the voting. Thousands of youths converged on the convention site, condemning the war and taunting Chicago policemen massed to control them. On orders from Mayor Richard J. Daley, the officers brutally subdued and dispersed the crowds in full view of the national and international media assembled to cover the convention. It was a riveting and disturbing scene. In a much more orderly fashion, the Republican Party nominated Richard M. Nixon, who had served for eight years as Eisenhower’s vice president and had lost narrowly to John Kennedy in 1960. Nixon had supported the decisions made by Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson to back South Vietnam and had an image as an ardent anti-Communist. As a presidential candidate, he suggested that he had a plan to end the war. His speeches contained no explicit proposals, and listeners were left to interpret for themselves how he meant to extricate the United States. Nevertheless, the public was becoming so sour on the war that many were prepared to accept his assurances that he had a solution.

As election day approached, the voters had three choices. Humphrey was tainted by his association with Johnson and the upheaval in Chicago, and Nixon had a reputation for political opportunism dating back throughout his political career. George Wallace, governor of Alabama, had broken with the Johnson administration over civil rights legislation and was running as a third-party candidate. On the war issue, however, Wallace’s running mate, retired air force general Curtis LeMay, had made reckless and frightening statements about destroying North Vietnam with airpower. The contest between Nixon and Humphrey was very close. Shortly before the voting, Humphrey came out unequivocally in favor of an end to U.S. bombing as a step toward negotiations, and many wavering Democrats who had long despised Nixon decided to back their party’s choice.

Nixon won the election with a scant margin of only 510,000 in the popular vote, gaining only 43.6 percent of the total vote. Nixon’s vague platform and narrow victory would seem to have provided little indication of popular will. All the candidates had assailed Johnson’s conduct of the war, however. The voters had spoken their desire to be rid of the burden of the war, and the responsibility for finding that exit had been entrusted to Richard Nixon.

THE AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM: DE-ESCALATION

Despite all the frustration and agony that the United States had experienced in Vietnam, Richard Nixon entered the White House confident that he could end the American war with the credibility of U.S. power intact. Working closely with Henry A. Kissinger, his principal foreign-policy adviser, the president rejected the notion of a unilateral American withdrawal as an admission of failure that would burden U.S. relations with friends and foes alike. Instead, Nixon and Kissinger believed that the United States could coerce Hanoi into a settlement while simultaneously satisfying the American public’s desire to cut U.S. losses in the war. As Jeffrey P. Kimball argues in chapter 6, Nixon paradoxically escalated the violence of the war while withdrawing U.S. troops and, in the end, left the Vietnamese to engage in their own final, bloody test of wills.

Just as Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson had discovered, Nixon soon learned that finding an American solution for the conflict among the Vietnamese was not so readily accomplished. It took four more years of fighting, destruction, negotiating, and ultimately compromising before a formal agreement ended the American war in Vietnam in 1973. Two years later, Hanoi’s quest, begun in 1945, to bring an independent and united Vietnam under its control was completed when North Vietnam’s troops entered Saigon. On April 29 and 30, 1975, only hours before arrival of the enemy forces, U.S. Marine Corps helicopters evacuated the last remaining Americans and a few South Vietnamese from the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon. Three decades of American policy in Vietnam had failed.

VIETNAMIZATION AND MORE BOMBING

During its first year, the Nixon administration pursued a two-part approach to the war. After the divisiveness of 1968, Nixon saw the need to try to maintain unity on the home front to gain the time he needed to deal with Hanoi. For the other part, he tried to bring new pressures and threats to bear on North Vietnam to force a diplomatic settlement that would allow the United States to leave South Vietnam with the Saigon government in place.

In June 1969, Nixon announced that the United States was withdrawing 25,000 combat troops from Vietnam. Fewer U.S. soldiers in Vietnam meant fewer American casualties and less need for the draft, both of which he knew would be popular at home. The move demonstrated his serious intention to end American involvement in the war. The president also proclaimed what became known as the Nixon Doctrine, which indicated that the United States would continue to back allies with aid and advice but would expect them to make more use of their own troops in their own defense. In Indochina, this policy was called “Vietnamization,” as U.S. troops would be slowly withdrawn to be replaced by a larger and better-equipped ARVN. Although two nationally coordinated moratorium demonstrations protested the slow pace of U.S. disengagement from Vietnam, Nixon countered these criticisms with a speech in which he asserted that a “silent majority” of Americans favored his firm and gradual strategy. Whether such a majority existed or not, Nixon promoted the possibility of an honorable settlement of the war at limited additional costs for Americans.⁴⁹

Vietnamization was not a new concept. Eisenhower and Kennedy had tried to help Saigon help itself, but the prospect of political collapse in the South had forced Johnson to insert U.S. ground troops and begin sustained bombing. After Tet, Johnson had denied Westmoreland’s request for more soldiers and then replaced Westmoreland with General Creighton Abrams, who began to shift more operational responsibility to the ARVN and to place greater emphasis on pacification. Vietnamization had already been in effect for a year when Nixon proclaimed it as a new plan, and, speaking from his initial experience with it, Abrams cautioned against moving too quickly in that direction. South Vietnamese leaders also protested that the plan was a cynical White House move to ease political pressure in America with the greater expenditure of ARVN lives. The program proceeded, however, and the South Vietnamese armed forces grew to more than 1 million in number and were equipped with huge quantities of modern weapons, aircraft, and vehicles.

The infusion of these resources produced some improvement in the ARVN’s efforts, and some units performed well. There were signs of less Vietcong and NVA activity in a number of places, although this lull may have been attributable to decisions by commanders of the revolutionary forces to avoid fighting and wait for U.S. troop strength to decline further. Much doubt remained about the RVN’s ability to protect itself. Desertions and corruption were endemic in the South’s army. Worst of all, the Thieu government had failed to capture popular support and continued to remain almost completely dependent on U.S. financial backing.

Aware that Americans were impatient to get the war over and that the Saigon regime was, as always, a fragile house of cards, Nixon and Kissinger tried to pressure Hanoi to yield. In addition to a continuation of the heavy bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail begun under Johnson, Nixon now added Operation Menu, consisting of air warfare against so-called enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. This bombing of South Vietnam’s neutral neighbor was not revealed publicly in the United States in order to avoid an antiwar outcry, but it was meant to send a message to Hanoi that Nixon was prepared to use more force. Indeed, according to H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s White House chief of staff, the president wanted to couple such action with his reputation as a fervent anti-Communist to convince Hanoi that he was a madman capable of doing anything, even resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Despite Nixon’s threat to increase the level of destruction against the North itself, the DRV’s leaders, including Ho Chi Minh shortly before his death in September 1969, refused to make any concessions to the United States and persisted in their demand that Washington give up support of Thieu. Faced with Hanoi’s continuing recalcitrance and the mounting domestic dissatisfaction with the war, Nixon and Kissinger consciously but secretly turned, according to Kimball in chapter 6, to a “decent-interval” strategy. They would disengage U.S. forces with the Saigon government still in place but with the intent that, when the RVN came to its likely end, enough time would have passed to lessen the blame to the United States and especially to the Nixon administration.

CAMBODIA AND KENT STATE

To meet the twin challenges of containing antiwar sentiment at home and convincing North Vietnam of his determination to sustain South Vietnam, Nixon revealed plans on April 20, 1970, for the gradual removal of another 150,000 American troops from Vietnam. Although this step was meant to keep domestic critics at bay, it posed serious problems for Vietnamization. Abrams argued that the ARVN was far from ready to undertake the major burden of defense of the South. In March that year, a sudden change in the leadership of Cambodia, however, presented Nixon with the opportunity to make a big play that could alter the military balance in Vietnam. Pro-American general Lon Nol overthrew Cambodia’s neutralist leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, opening the way for American ground forces to attack North Vietnamese bases inside Cambodia with approval of the government in Phnom Penh. In chapter 12, Clymer analyzes the tragic era that this coup opened in the history of Cambodia.

On April 30, 1970, in a nationally televised address, the president explained his decision to send U.S. and ARVN troops into the “Fishhook” area across Cambodia’s border, some fifty miles north of Saigon. The administration labeled this action a temporary “incursion,” and critics called it an “invasion” of Cambodia. According to the president, the purpose was to repel North Vietnamese aggression against Cambodia, to protect Vietnamization by neutralizing enemy sanctuaries along the border, and to destroy Hanoi’s Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), which was reportedly located in the Fishhook area. Nixon ended his belligerent address with a claim that this bold stroke was an act of defense of free nations against totalitarianism and anarchy.

Nixon’s expansion of the U.S. combat role into Cambodia set off a firestorm of protest. North Vietnam’s violations of Cambodian territory were nothing new. There were doubts in official circles about the location of COSVN, and, in fact, the invading Americans did not find it. The president might have been able to withstand these criticisms, but the controversy sparked by the invasion exploded into widespread outrage on May 4 when Ohio National Guardsmen, ordered onto the campus of Kent State University to quell antiwar protests, fired on a group of students, killing four and wounding at least nine. Student and faculty strikes and boycotts at hundreds of universities followed. Some campuses shut down completely, including the entire University of California system on orders from Governor Ronald Reagan.

Nixon had entered office promising to end the war. To many citizens, however, his continued use of airpower, his actions in Cambodia, and his tough defense of his decisions suggested that he was not reversing course despite the troop reductions he had made. Although never conceding that protests swayed his policies, Nixon did remove all U.S. troops from Cambodia by the end of June 1970, and he increased secret efforts by Henry Kissinger to reach a negotiated settlement with the DRV.

NEGOTIATIONS AND THE PARIS PEACE ACCORDS

On three occasions before the invasion of Cambodia, Kissinger had met secretly in Paris with Le Duc Tho, a member of the DRV Politburo. These talks produced no agreement, but in September 1970 Kissinger resumed direct talks with North Vietnamese representatives. As a politician, Nixon well understood the need to find an exit from Vietnam before the 1972 presidential election. As Small examines in chapter 11, public-opinion polls, media commentaries, and congressional restiveness were pressing on the administration to act. In June 1971, the leak to the press of the Pentagon Papers, a secret summary and compilation of twenty years’ worth of documents, revealed the superficiality and lack of candor in the Vietnam policy process and strengthened the case for ending the American war. Shortly before the Pentagon Papers appeared, Kissinger had secretly presented a proposal in Paris that for the first time offered to accept the continued presence of North Vietnamese troops in the South after an American withdrawal if Hanoi would pledge no further infiltration. The DRV indicated some interest but first wanted a U.S. pledge to end support of Thieu. The two sides remained at odds over the political questions involving the Saigon government, but there had finally at least been some discussion of the military issues of troop withdrawals and release of American prisoners of war (POWs).

Early in 1972, Nixon and Kissinger made two dramatic diplomatic moves. Nixon went to Beijing in February. It was the first U.S.–China summit meeting since the establishment of the Chinese Communist government in 1949. Nixon’s handshake with Mao Zedong began a process of reducing Cold War tensions in Asia, but his China visit did not result in making the DRV any more flexible in its demands. Nixon also traveled to Moscow in May and made progress in nuclear arms talks with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Again, however, improvements in U.S.–Soviet relations did not translate into changes in the Washington–Hanoi stalemate. The United States still had to deal directly with the DRV.

As 1972 began, both sides were still trying to use military means to get better terms. In March, the NVA began a massive conventional assault, including tank warfare, on the northern and central provinces of South Vietnam, followed by Vietcong attacks near Saigon and in the Mekong Delta. The United States responded with force to this Easter Offensive, as it came to be called. Despite the risk of damage to Soviet ships on the eve of the Moscow summit, Washington ordered a naval blockade of North Vietnam and the mining of the North’s major port at Haiphong. In an air operation code-named Linebacker, U.S. planes conducted the largest bombing attacks up to that time against targets in North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

The intensity of Nixon’s military reaction surprised Hanoi. DRV strategists had been waiting to strike as U.S. combat force levels fell, and those had dropped to fewer than 100,000 in early 1972, with only about 6,000 being combat soldiers. The North Vietnamese were also counting on White House political calculations to restrain the United States as the presidential election approached. Instead, the heavy U.S. bombing helped reverse initial NVA and NLF gains against the ARVN and inflicted severe damage on North Vietnam and its forces in the South. Nixon’s decisive action also helped raise his approval rating in public-opinion polls, although he knew that the prevailing public sentiment still favored a peace settlement.

In late summer during the secret Paris talks, Le Duc Tho indicated for the first time that the DRV would accept the Thieu government in a coalition following a cease-fire. In October, Hanoi dropped the coalition demand and offered a settlement based only on a cease-fire in place, U.S. troop withdrawal, exchange of POWs, and continued political discussions including the RVN, the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) representing the NLF, and some neutral Vietnamese parties. Nixon and Kissinger were prepared to accept these terms, but Thieu vigorously objected to the provisions that left NVA troops in the South. Nixon won reelection in November over antiwar Democrat George McGovern, but the peace settlement remained elusive. Hanoi refused to consider Thieu’s demands for an NVA withdrawal, and negotiations broke off in mid-December.

From December 18 to December 29, 1972, in an operation designated Linebacker II by the air force and dubbed the Christmas Bombing by journalists, U.S. aircraft dropped 20,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. It was the heaviest bombing attack of the war and has been a source of controversy ever since. The Nixon administration was exasperated with both Hanoi and Saigon, and the bombing can be seen as a message to both. Washington wanted the DRV to sign the October agreement and wanted the RVN to cease being obstructionist. To both sides, Nixon was saying that the United States remained strong and willing to use forceful action even as it was showing a readiness to compromise. Airpower advocates have claimed that bombardments of this size should have been employed earlier and more often against the North because Hanoi quickly resumed talks and signed a cease-fire after the attack. Doubters of the necessity for and the effectiveness of the bombing note that the DRV had been prepared to sign even before the bombing and that it was Thieu who was the problem.

On January 27, 1973, the United States, DRV, RVN, and PRG signed an agreement in Paris to end the hostilities. The provisions were virtually identical to the October terms. There was to be a cease-fire in place, which left North Vietnamese troops in the South. The few remaining U.S. troops were to leave, and U.S. POWs would be released. Nixon privately assured Thieu that U.S. military aid to the RVN would continue, but, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the American war in Vietnam was over.⁵⁰

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM VICTORY IN 1975

The president asserted that the U.S. military was departing Vietnam with American honor intact because Thieu’s government still remained in office. In later years, Nixon wrote that the United States actually won the war because the final settlement would have been entirely reasonable and workable if the DRV had observed it. He contended, for example, that North Vietnam infiltrated 35,000 more troops into the South during 1973. In contrast, DRV historians of the war charge that the ARVN never observed the cease-fire and immediately began to attack the NLF and PAVN units.

The Paris settlement did not end the fighting in Vietnam, but it provided a means for U.S. forces to depart and for American POWs to be repatriated. Without U.S. air and land forces in the war, the ARVN was left with its vast supply of American equipment to contest alone the PAVN and the PLAF, which had demonstrated throughout the war an effective fighting ability. Moreover, Thieu’s government, which owed its political life to U.S. support, had to compete with the revolutionary legacy that Ho Chi Minh’s successors had inherited from him and his original Vietminh movement. For the Vietnamese, the war did not end in 1973 but only entered a new phase.

Nixon had promised Thieu continued U.S. military aid after January 1973, but the president underestimated the extent of the American public’s desire to leave the war behind. In 1973, Congress passed, over Nixon’s veto, a War Powers Resolution that prohibited any president from making an extended combat deployment of U.S. troops without congressional approval. Between 1973 and 1974, Congress cut the amount of money budgeted for military aid to the RVN from more than $2 billion to about $1 billion and in 1975 reduced it even further, down to $700 million. At first, Hanoi was cautious about escalating the fighting for fear that the United States might reenter the war. It soon became clear, however, that there was no base of support in Congress for such action. Also, in 1973 and 1974, the Watergate scandal began to unfold in Washington as Congress and the public learned of criminal activities connected to Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign. Fighting for his political life and finally resigning in August 1974, Nixon was in no position to pressure Congress on further help for South Vietnam. Congress had done its duty in prosecuting the Watergate charges and in publicly calling a halt to endless funding of South Vietnam. Although Nixon’s decent-interval strategy privately recognized that there was a limit to what Washington could do for Saigon, he and his sympathizers chose to blame Congress for what they disingenuously characterized as transforming Vietnamization from a success into a failure. In doing so, they laid the groundwork for a bitter debate over what might have been in Vietnam that plagued U.S. foreign-policy thinking for years.

In the spring of 1975, the war in Vietnam ended much more rapidly than anyone had expected, even PAVN strategists. In March, NVA and NLF forces quickly took over the key towns of Ban Me Thuot, Pleiku, and Kontum in the Central Highlands. When Thieu ordered an ARVN retreat, mass confusion and panic resulted, with soldiers and civilians choking the narrow roads trying to escape the fighting. The PAVN then attacked Danang and Hue, began moving down the coast, and advanced on Saigon. Congress turned down a last-minute request from President Gerald Ford for $300 million in emergency aid to the RVN. Blaming the United States for abandoning him, Thieu resigned. The Republic of Vietnam simply collapsed. The American ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, refused to evacuate the U.S. Embassy until the last possible moment. As enemy forces entered the city, the remaining Americans and what few South Vietnamese associates they could hastily take with them made a chaotic escape. It was an inglorious end to U.S. nation building in Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, the flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam flew over Saigon, which the victors renamed Ho Chi Minh City.⁵¹

THE WAR THAT WILL NOT GO AWAY

The Vietnam War was one of the major wars of the twentieth century. It lasted for thirty years in Vietnam, and for Americans it spanned twenty-five years, from the establishment of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam in 1950 to the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975. The estimate of Vietnamese deaths, military and civilian, is about 2 million, and millions more Vietnamese were wounded, missing, or rendered homeless. Villages, forests, and farms throughout the country were destroyed by high explosives, napalm, and defoliants. More than 58,000 Americans died, and 300,000 more were wounded. Direct U.S. government expenditures were about $140 billion, which added to the national debt, contributed to double-digit inflation by the 1970s, and took away resources needed for social services in the United States. Although the fighting in Vietnam ended in 1975, the high costs and long duration of the war had an enduring impact on the people and nations of Southeast Asia, on American veterans of the war, and on American politics, society, and culture. As with any major historical event, there was also the question of what lessons could be derived from all of this violence and sacrifice. Because the United States lost the war, coming to terms with its legacies and drawing conclusions from it have been difficult and divisive for Americans, and some issues remain highly contested. The American war in Iraq that began in 2003 raised again, in very real terms, a division over the meaning of the phrase “no more Vietnams.” Did the result of the American war in Vietnam mean that the United States should steer clear of direct intervention in deeply rooted local conflicts? Or should the United States never again enter into a war in which the American people and their leaders were not willing to use whatever power and take whatever time was necessary to achieve U.S. objectives?

THE POSTWAR WARS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

The Vietnam War was an internal conflict between rival Vietnamese factions, but it was always part of broader regional and international political upheavals that followed World War II. As the fighting was ending in Vietnam, it was also ending in the other former French protectorates of Laos and Cambodia. Following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords for Vietnam, the contending parties in Laos produced a similar document. The Communist Pathet Lao dominated the coalition created by this agreement and had close ties with the Vietnamese Communist Party. With Hanoi’s victory in 1975, the Pathet Lao took direct control of the government in Vientiane and began a concerted effort to kill all the Hmong minority who had fought with the CIA against the Laotian and Vietnamese Communists. Many Hmong died, but about 100,000 managed to escape to the United States.

In Cambodia, the Communist-led Khmer Rouge seized control in Phnom Penh from Lon Nol’s government on April 17, 1975, even before the DRV captured Saigon. The Khmer Rouge’s rise to power ushered in one of the most horrific chapters in the violent chronicles of Southeast Asia. American bombing of Cambodia beginning in 1969, the Lon Nol coup in 1970, and U.S. and ARVN cross-border operations had destabilized the fragile political balance that Norodom Sihanouk had maintained in Cambodia. In this turmoil, the small Khmer Rouge rebel movement attracted followers and ultimately overwhelmed the weak government forces. Unlike the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge had always resisted domination by the Vietnamese Communists. In power, they not only were determined to defy Hanoi, but also set out on a radical and ruthless program to empty the cities, exterminate all bourgeois Cambodians, and turn the country into an agrarian Communist state. In the process, under the leadership of Pol Pot, they murdered 1.5 million people in their country. The death total was so staggering that it can only be labeled a genocide conducted by a government against its own people in the name of revolution.

Despite the Cambodian holocaust, whose full reality was not immediately apparent to the outside world, the Khmer Rouge had an ally in the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Communists and the Cambodian rulers claimed a common ideological goal of building rural socialism, but they also shared a historical concern with Vietnamese expansion at their expense. Beijing ended most of its military aid to Vietnam in 1975. Between 1975 and 1978, from the perspective of the Politburo in Hanoi, the People’s Republic of China and Democratic Kampuchea, as the new regime had renamed Cambodia, appeared to be encircling Vietnam.

In 1976, the government of Vietnam renamed its country the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). Although the Hanoi regime had won the war, it confronted a host of domestic obstacles and needed international assistance. Ravaged by the war, Vietnam faced the enormous tasks of building an economic infrastructure and helping hundreds of thousands of citizens: orphans, amputees, homeless refugees, drug addicts, and other war victims. Many of these citizens were concentrated in cities in the South. In chapter 10, Brigham analyzes how forced urbanization caused by the war in the South affected Vietnamese society in ways that have often not been understood. Hanoi created economic collectives and attempted other socialist reforms, most of which met resistance in what had been the RVN. The Communist authorities placed former South Vietnamese political and military officers in “reeducation camps” and executed some of them. The government then began to place restrictions on small entrepreneurs, most of whom were ethnic Chinese. Many of those threatened began to flee Vietnam by sea and became known to the world as “boat people.”

Ironically, the SRV turned initially toward its former foe, the United States, for help in reconstruction. President Jimmy Carter had indicated that Washington would consider normalization of relations with the SRV if Hanoi provided a full accounting of all American POWs. In critical need of funds, Vietnam’s leaders insisted that the United States pay $3.25 billion in war reparations. Although the Paris Peace Accords and some statements by Nixon had referred to helping Vietnam rebuild from the war, no American political leader could agree to outright demands from the former enemy. Carter also sought to improve relations with China, which was not eager to see the SRV gain strength. As a result, the Carter administration produced no U.S.–Vietnam reconciliation. As Robert D. Schulzinger explains in chapter 13, it would be twenty years before the two nations established formal relations. Late in 1978, after being rebuffed by Washington, the proud leaders of the SRV turned reluctantly to Moscow for help and signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Carter announced soon afterward that Washington was normalizing relations with Beijing.

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and soon broke the grip of the tyrannical Pol Pot regime. Hanoi installed its own Cambodian allies in power and backed them with a large Vietnamese occupation force. China launched military attacks against the northern provinces of Vietnam to punish the SRV for expansionism. Beijing ended the campaign after about a month, having failed to deter Hanoi. Although the SRV had ended the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge, the United States and Vietnam’s Southeast Asian neighbors continued to isolate Vietnam from much needed economic markets and investments. The United States did not restore normal relations with Vietnam until 1995.

Did the repression and hostilities that emerged in Vietnam and Cambodia after 1975 suggest that U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia had been justified? The Vietnamese reeducation camps, the flight of the boat people, and the Cambodian holocaust seemed to confirm that the Indochinese Communists were the evil dictators that American leaders had insisted they were. Furthermore, Hanoi’s moves to control Laos and Cambodia also cast Vietnam as an aggressor. Yet the SRV’s efforts to seek restored relations with the United States and to maintain its independence from China and the Soviet Union conversely demonstrated that it valued its independence over its Marxist ideology. Also, many of its actions were more desperate than calculated and reflected the heavy burden of thirty years of warfare. The politics of Southeast Asia became extremely complex after the Vietnam War because the international and ideological circumstances there had always been much more multidimensional than the simple “Communist” and “anti-Communist” labels the Cold War had imposed on the region.

AMERICAN VIETNAM VETERANS

All wars leave physical and emotional scars on the soldiers who fight them; hence, one should not assume that the Vietnam War was any more traumatic than other conflicts. With that caution in mind, one should also acknowledge the fact that military veterans of the Vietnam War often experienced social alienation. Part of America’s self-image was a boast that the nation had never lost a war. In this war, however, U.S. forces failed to achieve the government’s stated objective of preserving an independent South Vietnam. The controversial nature of the war and the ultimate lack of success caused many Americans to want to avoid discussing it at all and to forget about it as quickly as possible. The American warriors were given no victory parades, and, in fact, they returned to a country that seemed pointedly disinterested in them and what they had experienced. Even worse, some citizens blamed them alone for what was, in truth, a shared national debacle.

The majority of veterans did not return from the war with severe physical and psychological problems, but all had to reintegrate into a society that largely ignored veterans as a group. Many veterans would not or could not discuss their experiences even with family and friends. Some had difficulty holding jobs or maintaining personal relationships. The men and women (primarily military nurses) who had been through a difficult ordeal were bitter because they now felt rejected and unappreciated by other Americans. In chapter 13, Schulzinger traces how America’s Vietnam veterans slowly and often through their own individual and collective efforts moved from alienation to acceptance in American society.

The plight of some veterans was extreme. Some had been exposed to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange during the war and were suffering serious health problems, such as rashes and cancers, and their children were born with birth defects. Although laboratory research indicated a link between these conditions and the chemical dioxin in Agent Orange, the Veterans Administration health system resisted recognizing these ailments as war-related disabilities. An out-of-court settlement of a class-action lawsuit was made with the chemical manufacturers in 1984, but the issue had caused much resentment.

More pervasive than dioxin poisoning was a psychiatric condition that in the 1980s came to be labeled “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD). Medicine had long recognized that combat produces psychological trauma. Known by various terms, such as “shell shock” and “battle fatigue,” this mental illness was not well understood, and, as with Agent Orange, official response to the problem after the Vietnam War was not always sympathetic. The symptoms of PTSD are severe personality changes that include agonizing grief, tormenting guilt, isolation, suicidal longings, violent outbursts, severe depression, and a sense of meaninglessness. Psychiatrists now view these patterns as normal reaction to abnormal stress, but during the first decade after the war many people, including health professionals, mistakenly assumed that such inability to readjust from the fear, rage, and guilt of war came from a dysfunctional personality prior to the war experience. Although diagnosis and treatment finally changed, much suffering had occurred.

Because Vietnam veterans often felt isolated and misunderstood, some found support in other veterans and sought ways for veterans to help one another help themselves. One of the most prominent outcomes of this process was the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is often referred to as “the Wall” because its design is a sloping black granite wall constructed in the side of a small rise in the Washington Mall in the center of the nation’s capital. On it are carved the names of the 58,000 Americans who died or remain missing in Vietnam and Indochina. A group of veterans conceived of the memorial idea, raised the funds to build it, and implemented its design and construction. It soon became the most visited site in Washington and had a remarkably positive impact on helping the veterans, the families of the dead, and the public confront together the painful legacies of the war. With its dedication in 1982, the Wall helped lift the national amnesia about the war, and healthy discussion of the conflict has ensued since the mid-1980s.

One of the biggest obstacles to postwar readjustment for veterans, the public, and the government was the issue of POWs and those missing in action (MIAs), taken on with an almost religious devotion impervious to compromise or reason. In comparison with those from other American wars or with the Vietnamese people’s own experience, the 2,300 Americans still MIA after the release of U.S. POWs in 1973 was a small number, and many of them were pilots killed in fiery crashes that left few human remains. As U.S. public opinion had turned against the war after 1968, however, the Nixon administration had seized on North Vietnam’s accountability for all American POWs and MIAs as a way to bolster American unity. Nixon helped turn the National League of Families of POWs and MIAs, who naturally wanted news of their loved ones, into a visible national lobby. Every president after Nixon felt politically compelled to reaffirm the demand that Hanoi satisfy all U.S. requests for POW/MIA information as a prerequisite for establishment of economic and diplomatic ties. This stance delayed normalization of relations, which was in effect a way to punish Vietnam for winning the war, and it prolonged official sanction of the forlorn hope that some Americans remained alive as prisoners in Indochina years after the war. For more than twenty years, numerous congressional and presidential investigations turned up no credible evidence to support this hope.

FILMS, FICTION, AND POETRY

Important indications of what the Vietnam War meant and still means to Americans are found in movies, literature, and popular music. During the war, songs played a large role in cultural expression, especially in antiwar anthems such as Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” and John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” There were also prowar songs—for example, Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”—and the popularity of the various types of songs with different groups in society underscored some of the domestic divisions that the war created. As the level of American involvement in the war increased, stories, poems, and novels about the war began to appear, many written by soldiers or journalists who experienced the conflict firsthand, and the volume of these works grew after the war. Hollywood largely avoided the subject of Vietnam during the war, although two very different films approached the subject from opposite directions. In 1968, John Wayne directed and starred in a prowar film, The Green Berets, based on a 1965 novel by Robin Moore. It conveyed the classic American self-image of rescuers, with which Wayne was well identified in numerous Westerns and war movies. At the opposite pole was M*A*S*H, a movie released in 1970 about a military medical unit during the Korean War. Employing comedy as social criticism, it was moderately antiwar but was more a satire on official authority and bureaucracy. It was both a box office and a critical success in an era of growing distrust of the political “establishment” that had produced the Vietnam War. It also inspired one of television’s longest-running (1972–1983) situation comedies, which was both highly entertaining and filled with social commentary.

After the war, movie portrayals of the conflict went through different phases and images. At first, there was a series of films in the 1970s that portrayed psychologically damaged veterans as dangerous, often psychotic characters. This genre evolved into films, such as the Billy Jack movies, that made the veteran an action hero. In the late 1970s, some serious movies, such as The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and Apocalypse Now, began to explore what the war had done to the men who had fought it. In the 1980s and concurrent with the Ronald Reagan conservative revolution in politics and its desire to restore American self-esteem, movies such as the series with the character Rambo suggested that the military could have won the war if civilian leaders had allowed it. These films also exploited the POW/MIA obsession. Plots frequently dealt with rescue of captured Americans. The 1980s also saw the appearance of weekly television dramas such as Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice, whose main characters were Vietnam veterans portrayed as attractive and heroic figures.

In the late 1980s, so-called reality films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket sought to combine an antiwar message with a grim depiction of the soldiers’ horrific experiences. Network television had a brief, three-year series at the same time, Tour of Duty, which aimed to create a sympathetic portrayal of infantrymen in Vietnam. A somewhat different series on the air from 1988 to 1991 was China Beach, created by Vietnam veteran Bill Broyles Jr. It was set in a military hospital and explored the stress and dedication of the men and women treating the wounded. In the film Forrest Gump (1994), the war was not portrayed in detail but was central to the story of the title character. Most of the Hollywood films about the war did not focus on the people of Indochina themselves. Exceptions were two survivor stories: The Killing Fields (1984) and Heaven and Earth (1993). The first was the account of how Cambodian Dith Pran, an employee of the New York Times, managed to live through and escape the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Heaven and Earth, directed and written by Oliver Stone, who also directed and wrote the award-winning Platoon and is a Vietnam combat veteran, is a screenplay based on two memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman who survived village and urban life under French, Vietcong, and American military threat. From outside Hollywood, the French-language film Indochine (1992), although primarily a love story, is a multicultural representation of French Indochina.

After the mid-1990s and with the war more than two decades in the past, the number of new Vietnam War films declined. In 2002, We Were Soldiers dramatized the battle of Ia Drang in what many veterans and critics thought was a realistic portrayal of both the horror and the honor of combat service. Based on a best-selling memoir of the battle by Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and Joseph Galloway, the movie did not discuss the politics of the war and was a generic war film about comrades in arms and respect for their enemies as adversaries. It was in theaters and the home video market at a time when U.S. forces were entering into new wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also in 2002, a new film version of Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American appeared and had a clear political message. A 1958 film treatment of the novel had starred Audie Murphy, a decorated World War II veteran turned movie star, and had depicted the title character as a champion of democracy. The movie remake followed Greene’s much more skeptical view of American officials in Southeast Asia, whose well-meaning but ill-informed and arrogant attitudes forecast tragic consequences for themselves and those they professed to help.

Some of the most probing cultural examinations of the war have come from poems and novels written by Vietnam veterans such as Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo, Larry Heinemann, W. D. Ehrhart, Yusef Komunyakaa, Wayne Karlin, John Balaban, and Basil Paquet. Many of these writers reflect on their own disillusionment with the war and how the war changed them and their country. They feel obligated to describe how old heroic myths and conventions about America died in the brutality and pointlessness of America’s application of its destructive might in a place largely unknown to most Americans and of only peripheral value to U.S. security interests. They wrote from a sense of loss and pain. In poetry and fiction, they find that they can convey the emotional stress and moral agony more clearly than in the sparse rhetoric of factual reporting. As Tim O’Brien has noted, the novelist uses invention not to describe what happened in the world, but what happened in the heart, the spirit, and the gut.⁵²

POSTMORTEMS

The question of what happened in Vietnam and especially what happened to the notion of American invincibility plagued the nation’s policymakers as it haunted artists, veterans, and families of the dead and wounded. How could a great nation have gone so wrong? Should the United States have been involved at all in Vietnam? Was Washington trying to impose an American solution on what was always a Vietnamese struggle to discover and define its own independent identity? Was American security endangered by the instability and conflict in Indochina? If the survival of an independent South Vietnam was important to U.S. interests, did American leaders pursue the wrong kind of war to gain that objective? These are not idle questions. The United States failed to achieve its goals in Vietnam, but it was not a defeated nation. Its power and interests were still global in scope, and it remained certain that its leaders would again face the decision of when, where, and how to intervene militarily in other conflicts in the world.

Policymakers looked to the Vietnam experience for guidance. A decade after the end of the war, former president Richard Nixon complained that U.S. international behavior suffered from a “Vietnam syndrome”—that is, a neo-isolationist desire to avoid all foreign involvement. In chapter 14, George C. Herring explores the origins and long-term implications of this concept. As a major goal of his foreign policy, President Ronald Reagan sought to reinstill a sense of confidence in U.S. foreign policy. He characterized the Vietnam War as a noble effort to try to defeat forces of tyranny, and he contended that lack of success in Indochina should not prevent America from seeking to help others elsewhere.⁵³ This perception of the Vietnam War led Reagan to approve American aid to the Contras, a force fighting an armed insurrection against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. A majority of members of Congress voted for legislation prohibiting the aid, however, because they drew a different lesson from Vietnam—to avoid U.S. intervention in local political struggles. These policy differences eventually led to the criminal conviction of some members of the White House staff for arranging aid to the Contras in violation of federal law.

In August 1990, when Iraq’s army invaded and occupied neighboring Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush responded with a buildup of U.S. forces in the region that reached 540,000. Unlike the conflicts in Vietnam and Nicaragua, Iraq’s aggression was a clear violation of an international boundary in an oil-rich area of strategic importance. As a result, Bush was able to align a broad coalition of nations to support the U.S. use of force against Iraq. When the U.S. attack began in January 1991, Bush declared that the Persian Gulf War was not a repeat of the Vietnam War because the United States was prepared to strike decisively with overwhelming force rather than with the incremental pressure put on North Vietnam.⁵⁴ Despite the president’s bold assertions, the shadow of Vietnam hung over his choices. Well aware that mounting U.S. casualties in Vietnam had eroded public support for that war, he ended the invasion of Iraq after only one hundred hours without a ground assault on Baghdad and before any significant number of U.S. losses could occur.

The ambiguous mixture of assertion and restraint in the American actions in Nicaragua and Iraq revealed that the Southeast Asian war had ended the Cold War consensus that had placed U.S. troops in Vietnam. Before the Vietnam War, Congress and the voters had usually accepted the executive branch’s judgment on foreign-policy goals and strategies. After the Vietnam experience, there was no visible agreement among American leaders and the public on what constituted interests or threats for which citizens were prepared to risk blood and treasure. When the Cold War itself ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the confusion over the meaning of Vietnam only increased. On a superficial level, it appeared that the United States had suffered a major defeat in Vietnam, a Cold War battleground, but had won the Cold War itself. The idea of winning the Cold War was, of course, an extreme oversimplification of a multifaceted historic change that had more to do with the will of the people in Eastern Europe and with structural weaknesses in Russia than with specific American actions. The absence of a new policy consensus on the use of U.S. military force was seen in the Bush and Clinton administrations’ hesitancy on how to respond to bloody civil conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s.

Despite continuing disagreements over Vietnam, some lessons have emerged from the enormous outpouring of works on the war. Arguments about what might have been—for example, if Westmoreland had put more effort into pacification than into the attrition strategy—are difficult to prove because the evidence available addresses what was actually done. From the historical record, it can be seen that the global containment strategy, although not irrelevant to Southeast Asia, was misapplied. The local and historical conditions in Indochina were not the same as those in Greece, divided Germany, and other areas of Europe for which containment was initially conceived. The decision to apply U.S. power to Vietnam had more to do with maintaining U.S. credibility with America’s friends and foes around the world and with the U.S. voters than it did with the political options in Saigon and Hanoi. It is also clear that, despite the vastness of American power and the strength of American principles, there were limits to that power and those ideals in the physical and cultural environment of Vietnam. Just as the terrain was not always suited for high-technology warfare, so the people were not comprehensible to American soldiers and strategists. American wealth, weapons, and goodwill did not translate into political viability for the Saigon government. Americans need to remind themselves continually that the Vietnamese—North and South, military and civilian, men and women—were principal actors in the war that engulfed their country. As questions about the causes, course, and consequences of the Vietnam War are investigated, they cannot be answered from an American perspective alone. In partial acknowledgement of that reality, President Bill Clinton formally extended U.S. diplomatic recognition to the SRV on July 11, 1995, fifty years after Ho Chi Minh had quoted the American Declaration of Independence as part of his declaration of Vietnamese independence.⁵⁵

The asking and answering of questions about the war evoke competing visions of America. Writers and readers bring their own values and experiences to the study of historical subjects. Some come bearing a heroic image of the United States and others a selfish image. Combined with these inherent biases, the elusive nature of historical facts also obscures truth. The details of history are always complex and often ambiguous, or they are difficult to retrieve accurately. Those who seek to polemicize the Vietnam War and use its conflicted facts to argue their own narrow case will always be able to do so. Others who seek to exploit the controversy, horror, and valor of the war for their personal or partisan advantage will continue to do that. For those who truly seek an explanation for the origins and outcomes of the American war in Vietnam, however, there must be an appreciation for all of its complex reality.

VIETNAM AND THE BALANCE OF ENDS AND MEANS

The American air and ground war in Vietnam ultimately demonstrated that there are limits to the use of military power as an instrument of democratization. Indeed, the application of massive military force in a country can create so much bitterness and social chaos that a culture of trust and compromise, essential for democracy to take root, can be difficult to fashion. By the 1960s, the nuclear arms race had created a nervous power equilibrium in the direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Peripheral areas of the globe, the so-called Third World, became the area of instability and big-power conflict. In Vietnam, the American strategic doctrine was a new isolationism: the unilateral application of military force and with it a predilection to rely largely on U.S. power alone without diplomatic compromise. The Republic of Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand provided some modest military support to the American war effort, but Japan, an American ally in whose security interest the United States claimed to be acting in Southeast Asia, profited from the Vietnam War by trading with both the DRV and the United States throughout the war years.⁵⁶

In 1968, the Communist Tet Offensive shocked Americans into new and sober reflection on the limits of power. The resiliency of the North Vietnamese and the NLF forces after three years of heavy U.S. military pressure was evident in their ability to launch coordinated major attacks throughout South Vietnam. The Tet attacks did not mark the United States as a defeated nation, but they demonstrated that the war had become a prolonged and costly military stalemate. American leaders had to do what they had avoided for years: they had to take a practical look at the goals and costs of their policies and then to lower the goals and thus lower the costs. This newfound realism combined with the opponent’s relentlessness to set U.S. policy on a new course toward eventual negotiations. The historical moment and what followed were similar to what the Confederacy had experienced during the American Civil War following the battle of Gettysburg. The South lacked the armed might to achieve its vision of an independent agrarian state and eventually ended its armed resistance to the North, but many Southerners never disabused themselves of their vision. The myth of the “lost cause” grew strong in the decades that followed the Civil War and gave its own meaning to the causes, course, and outcome of the conflict. With the Vietnam War, prudence similarly dictated a change in U.S. policy in 1968, but many Americans held firm to the vision of their nation as an invincible champion of democracy, refused to accept the reality of the experience, and clung to their idealized perceptions.

Even after the Johnson administration began to restrict U.S. bombing and the deployment of more American troops in the wake of the Tet Offensive, Richard Nixon came into the White House in January 1969 determined to have peace with honor. He refused to acknowledge the limits of American power to reshape local Vietnamese history, politics, culture, and beliefs to fit an American design. Even after his chief negotiator, Henry Kissinger, signed the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which left the political future of Vietnam unresolved, Nixon maintained that the United States had not failed, had not made a mistake, and was not defeated.⁵⁷ As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has recorded, Johnson similarly insisted that his policies had not failed and that he had not been forced to begin American de-escalation after the Tet Offensive. She wrote that “Johnson now claimed precisely the opposite: it was his victory at Tet that had made the bombing halt possible…. The standard at this point was not the truth, but what Johnson wanted to believe and what he thought he could persuade others to believe.”⁵⁸ President George W. Bush was often criticized for not being able to admit mistakes in Iraq, but his behavior in that regard is seemingly a presidential characteristic.

Losing the Vietnam War was a frustrating and bitter experience for American families who lost sons or, in a few cases, daughters in the war; for many soldiers and sailors who came home disillusioned by what they had seen and done; and for American officials whose reputations and that of the nation they led were diminished. Even before Kissinger traveled to Paris to sign the agreement ending the war, Nixon had his staff “out selling our line,” as his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, put it, that the president had arranged a “peace with honor” that enabled U.S. forces to depart with the Saigon government still in place.⁵⁹ Other contemporary observers saw the situation differently. Former navy lieutenant John Kerry, speaking for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, declared: “Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, ‘the first President to lose a war.’”⁶⁰

Under the terms of the Paris Accords, the last U.S. military units left Vietnam in March 1973, and in April 1975 PAVN troops and tanks entered Saigon and accepted the surrender of the RVN government. Speaking to students at Tulane University as news reports were informing Americans of the fall of Saigon, President Gerald Ford advised the people of the United States to look ahead because restoring lost pride “cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.”⁶¹ Ford’s admonition notwithstanding, refighting the war is precisely what Americans have been doing ever since. In the RVN’s final days, the arguments among Americans over responsibility for the outcome in Vietnam were under way. Ford asked Congress for $722 million in emergency aid for Saigon, with the city already encircled. The money obviously would not prevent the imminent collapse of the southern government, and members of Congress who were reconciled to that reality had managed to stall the White House’s symbolic request at the time of Saigon’s surrender. Ford and Kissinger insisted that the Nixon administration’s policy of Vietnamization—of equipping the RVN to fight its own war—had produced a viable South Vietnamese regime by 1973 and that the RVN would have survived with adequate American aid after 1973. In truth, however, the RVN was plagued with corruption, poor leadership, rampant inflation, and a war-weary population that made its survival more dependent than ever on U.S. support. Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford adopted a “deliberate policy of denial,” as Christopher Jespersen has termed it,⁶² and instead, at the time and in their memoirs, placed blame on Congress for abandoning Saigon. Some revisionist historians persist in this effort to isolate blame on some members of Congress, who were representing a public that had turned against the war, for what was a long-term strategic blunder by a generation of American leaders.⁶³

After the Vietnam War, there was a repeat of the pattern that followed World War I and World War II: denial of the analytical lessons provided by scholarly study of the wartime experience and a public discourse overtaken by idealistic interpretations. The failure to assess the causes, course, and outcomes of wars—that is, to accept what power can and cannot accomplish both by itself and through alliances and to define precise U.S. interests abroad after the world wars—contributed to the Cold War.⁶⁴ A similar lapse after the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War contributed to the Iraq War.

A key responsibility of presidents is to articulate the objectives of U.S. foreign policy at home and abroad to friends and foes, and in this role all presidents since Nixon have distorted the history of the American experience in Vietnam in various ways. As a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter complained that leaders had misled Americans about the purposes and costs of the war, but once in office his rhetoric changed. By some obscure calculus, he declared that despite a total tonnage of American munitions expended in Indochina that more than doubled the figure for World War II, the “destruction was mutual” for Vietnam and the United States and that American veterans had earned “an extra measure of heroism.” Carter’s language paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the American purpose in Vietnam was “a noble cause.” American soldiers had “fought for freedom in a place where liberty was in danger,” in Reagan’s words. Reagan also revived Nixon’s contention that the American military had won the war by 1973, only to have Congress lose it in 1975. It became relatively easy then, as U.S. tanks roared out of Kuwait and into Iraq in 1991, for George H. W. Bush to declare that “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome”—that is, the reluctance created presumably by the Vietnam experience to commit large number of U.S. troops to combat abroad. Bill Clinton completed this presidential version of history in his speech announcing the establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and Hanoi in 1995. Acknowledging that the war once divided Americans and reverting to Ford’s admonition, he insisted that “whatever divided us before let us consign to the past.”⁶⁵

In a speech at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 2007, however, George W. Bush intentionally revived the old debate over Vietnam. He likened his critics who were calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq to those members of Congress and the press in the 1970s who claimed that Indochina would be better off without Americans. They were wrong, Bush claimed, because “the price of American withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens [of Vietnam and Cambodia] whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”⁶⁶ The president’s contention that it was a mistake for the United States not to have stayed in Vietnam did not acknowledge that the long and massive U.S. military intervention in the region had itself created tremendous human costs and increased social and political instability that generated more violence.

The political manipulation of the history of the Vietnam War ignored the bulk of historical scholarship over why the United States entered the war and for what purpose and helped give credence to revisionist accounts that glossed over or simplified the origins of the war. In addition, the end of the Cold War, marked symbolically with the demolition of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, set off a wave of American triumphalist rhetoric that further clouded the lessons of Vietnam. Although the case could not be made that the 58,000 American deaths in Vietnam had contributed directly or even indirectly to the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe or the final collapse of the Communist regime in Moscow in 1991, the moral validity of the containment policy, which the Vietnam-win theorists took for granted, seemed reaffirmed. In a well-known essay, Francis Fukuyama decreed that history’s natural progress toward liberal democracy had finally arrived. A number of books also appeared declaring that Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalist vision of a world safe for democracy was a “potent definer of contemporary history.”⁶⁷

Despite renewed enthusiasm for the self-proclaimed American crusade for democracy, the need for realistic analysis remained. Ronald Steel cautioned in the mid-1990s that a foreign policy cannot be effective and retain popular support if it is quixotic or utopian: “It cannot seek impossible ends, like the democratization of the world, or the attainment of a beneficent ‘world order.’” Isolationism is not an option in the economically integrated world of today, but the United States cannot, in Steel’s words, “afford to indulge in lingering Cold War conceits of military omnipotence and unlimited global responsibilities.” America’s post–Cold War task, he maintained, is “that of recognizing our limitations, or rejecting the vanity of trying to remake the world in our image, and of preserving the promise of our own neglected image.”⁶⁸

Authoritarianism, terrorism, and intolerance are inimical to American ideals and thus to American national interests. It is not in the long-term interest of the American people’s peace and security to allow these loathsome patterns of behavior to exist. Wilson’s dream of a world of mutual human respect remains as compelling as ever. As during the Cold War, however, the question is how to respond to these dangers. In the early Cold War, the choice was framed as either containment or liberation. History suggests that social, political, and economic systems based on intimidation and lack of respect for the people contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. Containment was to provide conditions for the Soviet system’s inconsistencies and weaknesses to defeat the system itself. It was not force or power or war that ultimately defeated the Soviet Union, but its own internal dissolution.

The frustration of American power in Vietnam and some other similarly frustrating experiences, such as the holding of fifty-three Americans hostage in Iran for thirteen months in 1979 and 1980 by Islamic radicals, as well as the possibility of flexing American power presented by the collapse of the USSR provided an opportunity for a determined group of public officials to reorient American foreign policy. Some of these officials, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, had held positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and their agenda was to build up U.S. military power, regain popular support of the armed forces that controversy over Vietnam had weakened, boldly advance democratic ideals, and through these steps prepare to overwhelm any adversary America might face. During the Reagan administration in the 1980s, these neoconservatives—or “neocons,” as they were labeled by the press—began to put some of their ideas in place, but for them the end of the Cold War represented only part of their vision of how the United States, the world’s only superpower, could advance its values and ideals in the world. In the George H. W. Bush administration, the neocons—including Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Richard Armitage—held a number of key foreign-policy positions. Although this group and Rumsfeld were out of office during Bill Clinton’s two terms as president in the 1990s, the United States continued during those years to increase its global military capabilities. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the neocons returned to the top of the nation’s foreign-policy leadership. As a group, they transferred ideas developed during the Cold War into the post–Cold War world. In their opinion, the United States should employ its military strength, spread its ideals, and not accommodate other centers of power. From the end of the Vietnam War through the Bush administration, their aim was the “pursuit of unrivaled American power.”⁶⁹

After the horrific terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, Bush turned to this team for advice on how to define the threat facing the United States and how to respond to it. The attack was an act of aggression by a dangerous but stateless faction representing a militant minority position in a broad conflict engendered by the relationship of the predominantly Muslim countries to the global cultural and economic system. It did not represent the kind of danger to U.S. national survival that previous generations of Americans had faced in the German Nazi Party or the Russian Communist Party, which had controlled major nations with the material resources and military capacity able to threaten the political and economic survival of the United States. The attack of September 11 was a terrible event, but it was not in itself a strategic turning point.

In his televised address to the nation on the evening of September 11, Bush declared global war on terrorism: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”⁷⁰ In the emotion of the day, this sweeping statement appeared to be in order, but in the hands of Bush’s neocon advisers it became a policy doctrine that the United States would pursue alone if necessary. Bush declared four days after the attacks: “At some point, we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with me. We are America.”⁷¹ As historian Walter LaFeber has noted, the Bush doctrine was a formula: “American exceptionalism plus the nature of U.S. power equals the efficacy of its unilateralism.”⁷² In June 2002, Bush told the graduates at West Point that “the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom… . We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants, … and we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.”⁷³ America’s power would democratize world politics. In February 2005, almost two years after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein, and began an armed occupation of the violence-torn country, the president reaffirmed the pledge to democratize Iraq: “And the victory of freedom in Iraq will strengthen a new ally in the war on terror, inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran, bring more hope and progress to a troubled region, and thereby lift a terrible threat from the lives of our children and grandchildren.”⁷⁴ This vision was Wilsonianism on steroids.

Some broad analogies can be drawn among the rise of the dictators of the 1930s, the rise of Soviet military power after World War II, and the rise of the threat of terrorism by Islamic radicals. They all created a source of fear that, if not properly channeled, could lead to emotional or irrational thinking. They represented a threat to the global status quo because these dissatisfied nations or peoples were willing to resort to the use of force to bring about change and to view appeals to peace as maintenance of conditions that did not serve their interests or might even have threatened their interests or identities. How did the United States respond to this threat? After World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War, the choice was similar. Leaders could place their faith in the power of American ideals—freedom, self-determination, and open trade—or they could make careful and precise definitions of national security interests—economic, political, territorial, and cultural—that could be achieved and preserved by the means and resources reasonably available to the United States.⁷⁵ Noting the persistent recurrence of this choice in the history of U.S. foreign policy, Melvin Leffler has argued that for the Bush administration after September 11, 2001, “values and ideals … trumped interests.”⁷⁶

In the case of Vietnam, the United States made a number of imprecise and vague assumptions about the danger of the Vietnamese Communist movement to U.S. interests. American leaders gave little thought to what means would be required to achieve the declared objective of preserving a government and society in South Vietnam open and friendly to the United States. The United States faced a determined adversary willing to endure tremendous costs in lives and hardship to deny the objective that Washington sought. There are significant differences between the Vietnamese Communists and the Iraqi insurgents in history and organization, but the parallel remains in the type of international challenge presented to the United States. The insolvency of U.S. policy in Vietnam—that is, the gap between the poorly defined ends and the reasonable means available—produced a dilemma. The United States was capable of applying a level of force that would have totally destroyed the country and its people. The issue of how much force and destruction was too much, however, placed real limits on power. The United States was also incapable of reforming the internal society of Vietnam—of making the Saigon government popular with the Vietnamese—because external influences had little impact on locally ingrained patterns of authority, daily living, and corruption (both old and new).

The American experience in Vietnam stood as a caution to the effusive Bush administration rhetoric about democracy in Iraq and the world. In 1957, President Ngo Dinh Diem made a state visit to the United States, and American officials heralded his government in South Vietnam as a miracle of democracy and political survival. Those claims proved to be public-relations spin not grounded in Vietnamese reality.⁷⁷ The goal of U.S. policy to create a popular regime in Saigon friendly to American interests was never realized. American pacification efforts to connect Saigon to the people had some temporary success, but no lasting effect. Loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for the RVN were conspicuously absent in 1975 as the PAVN stormed into Saigon. The foreign policy of any nation, including the United States, is by its very nature the protection of its interests in the international environment, not the determination of the domestic life of other nations.

The origins of regional conflicts and how those conflicts might imperil the United States continue to matter to American policymakers. The George W. Bush administration declared Iraq to be a threat to U.S. security, just as various presidents identified North Vietnam to be a threat. It is now known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (regardless of what U.S. analysts thought originally) and that Saddam Hussein was not a supporter of the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked America, any more than Ho Chi Minh was a puppet of Moscow. Saddam would not allow al-Qaeda into areas he controlled, but Iraq became open to terrorists of all stripes after his removal.⁷⁸ Ho was wary of Soviet and Chinese intentions toward his country but was in part compelled into closer relations with them because of U.S. threats to his country. Political solutions for any internal conflict, such as Vietnam or Iraq, have to be local and regional to be lasting.

George W. Bush’s neoconservative foreign-policy advisers tried to restore the rare moment at the end of World War II when U.S. ideals and power were paramount and to hold on to the illusion of U.S. victory in the Cold War. The Iraq War put U.S. military strength to work on behalf of a vision that American values and ideals would prevail throughout the world.⁷⁹ This triumphalism, like the win thesis on the history of the Vietnam War, is politically and psychologically appealing. In fact, however, the United States is a nation among nations, with limits to its power and with national objectives that have to compete with or be reconciled with other peoples and states’ national interests. To fashion a successful foreign policy, Washington has to identify reasonably attainable goals that can be achieved by reasonably available means in a dangerously complex world. Although top American officials asserted before the Iraq War began that the United States was not engaged in nation building in Iraq, as it had attempted in South Vietnam, the difficulty of restoring civil order in Iraq actually revived the phrase “winning hearts and minds” from the Vietnam pacification efforts.⁸⁰ An even more haunting echo of the past was the credibility trap in which the Bush administration found itself—that is, how to begin to reduce the American presence in a war that was much more costly than anticipated, but without the appearance of abandoning Iraq and the region to further chaos and harm.

The U.S. decision to fight a war in Vietnam and to continue that war for as long as it did was shaped primarily by Washington’s desire to maintain the credibility of U.S. power and purpose among both friends and foes. The decision revealed little appreciation for internal historical factors in Vietnam itself. It became obvious over time that the vast military and economic power of the United States and the democratic ideals that American leaders liked to proclaim had only limited applicability in the physical and cultural environment of Vietnam. If there is one general historical lesson to be drawn from the American experience in Vietnam, it is the need for U.S. leaders to define specific U.S. interests in what are often violently contested regional issues. American policy should be derived from an analysis of the benefits and risks to the United States presented by local conditions and the alignment of American goals and ideals with local aspirations. Local influences on a conflict will shape its course and outcome in ways that extend beyond what U.S. force and ideas, no matter how great or noble, can determine.

NOTES

1. For discussion of how policymakers use historical perspectives, see Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); and Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

2. Quoted in David Elliott, “Parallel Wars? Can ‘Lessons of Vietnam’ Be Applied to Iraq?” in Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young (New York: New Press, 2007), 17.

3. Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), 261.

4. Robert K. Brigham, Iraq, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 177–82; John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 211, 214. See also Kenneth J. Campbell, A Tale of Two Quagmires: Iraq, Vietnam, and the Hard Lessons of War (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2007).

5. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 357. See also Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 329.

6. Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Nixon to Clinton, 3rd ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2000), 6–10.

7. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 32.

8. Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Dell, 1984), 122.

9. Marc Jason Gilbert, “The Cost of Losing the ‘Other War’ in Vietnam,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, edited by Marc Jason Gilbert (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 187.

10. Quoted in David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 64.

11. Summers, On Strategy, 125–26, 173.

12. See, for example, Anderson, Trapped by Success, 208–9; Herring, America’s Longest War, 132–33; George M. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Anchor Books, 1987), 165–67; Gerard J. DeGroot, A Noble Cause? America and the Vietnam War (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 84–87; and Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 271–76.

13. Philip E. Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 210. See also Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Ellen Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 (New York: Dutton, 1987); and Edward Miller, “Vision, Power, and Agency: The Ascent of Ngo Dinh Diem, 1945–1954,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (2004): 433–58.

14. Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); Michael Lind, The Necessary War (New York: Free Press, 1999); Gary R. Hess, “The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History 18, no. 2 (1994): 243–46.

15. Summers, On Strategy; Bruce Palmer Jr., The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984).

16. Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

17. See, for example, Kathryn C. Statler, “Triumph Imagined” [review of Triumph Forsaken, by Mark Moyar], Diplomatic History 32, no. 1 (2008): 153–57; Edward Miller, David Kaiser, David L. Anderson, Scott Laderman, and Mark Moyar, “A Roundtable on Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965,” Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations 38 (2007): 5–22.

18. David L. Anderson, “The Vietnam War,” in A Companion to American Foreign Relations, edited by Robert D. Schulzinger (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 309–29. For a perceptive, eyewitness commentary on U.S. ground combat operations, see Daniel H. FitzGibbon, “To Bear Any Burden”: A Hoosier Green Beret’s Letters from Vietnam (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2005).

19. George W. Bush, interview on Meet the Press, February 8, 2004, transcript available at http://www.msnbc.com/id/4179618.

20. Card and Rice, quoted in Bill Sammon, “Vietnam War ‘Fixation’ Endures,” Washington Times, May 11, 2004.

21. “Council on Foreign Relations: Condoleezza Rice on George W. Bush’s Foreign Policy,” transcript of interview by Charlie Rose, October 12, 2000, available at http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a412a156226.htm.

22. Herring, America’s Longest War, 357.

23. Joseph L. Galloway, “Vote, Declare Victory, and Come Home,” Monterey County Herald, January 16, 2005.

24. Ngô Vinh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 71–72.

25. “Declaration of the Founding of the Communist Party of Indochina,” February 18, 1930, in Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works, 4 vols. (Hanoi: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1960–1962), 2:145–48.

26. David Halberstam, Ho (New York: Knopf, 1971), 12.

27. See, for example, George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); and William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, new ed. (New York: Norton, 1972).

28. Woodrow Wilson, address to a joint session of Congress, April 2, 1917, in Selected Literary and Political Papers and Addresses of Woodrow Wilson, 3 vols., edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927), 2:244.

29. Congressional Record, 65th Cong., 2d sess., January 8, 1918, 56:680–81.

30. U.S. House of Representatives, Document No. 358, 77th Cong., 1st sess., August 14, 1941.

31. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), 332–33.

32. Dulles to Collins, April 20, 1955, box 9, Subject series, John Foster Dulles Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kans.

33. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 4, Vietnam, August–December 1963 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1991), 372–74 (series hereafter cited as FRUS, with dates and volume titles).

34. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1964), 659–60.

35. FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 4, Vietnam, August–December 1963, 638.

36. Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 2d sess., August 10, 1964, vol. 110, pt. 14:18, 132.

37. FRUS, 1964–1965, vol. 2, Vietnam, January–June 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), 181–83.

38. FRUS, 1964–1965, vol. 3, Vietnam, June–December 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), 106–8, 171–75.

39. Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970), 165–66.

40. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 6.

41. For General Maxwell Taylor’s description of the attrition strategy, see U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as Amended: Hearings on S. 2793, 89th Cong., 2d sess., January 28 and February 4, 8, 10, 17, and 18, 1966.

42. David L. Anderson, “Introduction: What Really Happened?” in Facing My Lai: Moving Beyond the Massacre, edited by David L. Anderson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 1–17.

43. Department of State Bulletin, April 26, 1965, 606–10.

44. Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War: People’s Army (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 29–30.

45. See, for example, Martin Luther King Jr., “A Time to Break Silence,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by James Melvin Washington (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 231–44.

46. For Cronkite’s views, see Peter Braestrup, Big Story, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977), 1:157–59, 2:180–89. Warren Bell, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, Ron Ridenhour, Kevin Sim, and Kathleen Turner reflect on the media’s role in Vietnam in “Reporting the Darkness: The Role of the Press in the Vietnam War,” in Anderson, ed., Facing My Lai, 53–76.

47. FRUS, 1964–1968, vol. 5, Vietnam, November–December 1967 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2002), 1120.

48. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968–1969 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970), 468–79.

49. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1969 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 901–9.

50. United States Treaties and Other International Agreements, vol. 24, pt. 1, 1973 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), 1–225.

51. Van Tien Dung, Our Great Spring Victory: An Account of the Liberation of South Vietnam, translated by John Spragens Jr. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).

52. Tim O’Brien, “The Mystery of My Lai,” in Anderson, ed., Facing My Lai, 172.

53. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1988–1989 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1991), 1495–96.

54. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1991 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), 42–44, 196–97, 206–7.

55. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1995 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1996), 1073–74.

56. Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., International Perspective on Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); George C. Herring, “Fighting Without Allies: The International Dimensions of America’s Defeat in Vietnam,” in Gilbert, ed., Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 77–95.

57. Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 368–70.

58. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Signet, 1976), 371–72.

59. Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 33.

60. John Kerry, testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971, in Vietnam and America: A Documented History, rev. and enlarged 2d ed., edited by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn B. Young, and H. Bruce Franklin (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 459.

61. Quoted in David L. Anderson, “Gerald R. Ford and the Presidents’ War in Vietnam,” in Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945–1975, edited by David L. Anderson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 197–99.

62. T. Christopher Jespersen, “Kissinger, Ford, and Congress: The Very Bitter End in Vietnam,” Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 3 (2002): 439.

63. For a scholarly assessment that contends that Vietnamization was working, see Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt, 1999). For analyses that challenge this view, see James H. Willbanks, Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); and Gary R. Hess, Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of War (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 136–38.

64. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 545–49.

65. Robert McMahon, “Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975–2001,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 2 (2002): 164–72. All the presidential quotes in this paragraph are from this article.

66. President George W. Bush, speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, August 22, 2007, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/08/20070822-3.html.

67. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18. For a discussion of this resurgence of Wilsonian internationalism, see Lloyd Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson and World War I,” in Schulzinger, ed., Companion to American Foreign Relations, 149–51.

68. Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 131, 137.

69. James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 372, see also xii–xvi, 90–91. And see H. W. Brands, “Ideas and Foreign Affairs,” in Schulzinger, ed., Companion to American Foreign Relations, 8–9; Marilyn B. Young, “Still Stuck in the Big Muddy,” in Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism, edited by Ellen Schrecker (New York: New Press, 2004), 270–71; and Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 125–40.

70. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush, 2001, for the date September 11, 2001, in The American Presidency Project (online), edited by John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters (Santa Barbara: University of California, n.d.), available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=58057.

71. Quoted in Walter LaFeber, “The Bush Doctrine,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 4 (2002): 550. See also Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 443.

72. LaFeber, “Bush Doctrine,” 549.

73. President George W. Bush, graduation speech at the United States Military Academy, June 1, 2002, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601–3.html.

74. President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, February 2, 2005, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/print/20050202–11.html. See also Edward Rhodes, “Onward Liberal Soldiers? The Crusading Logic of Bush’s Grand Strategy and What Is Wrong with It,” in The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young (New York: New Press, 2005), 228–52.

75. On the mixing of what he terms “hard” and “soft power,” see Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004).

76. Melvyn P. Leffler, “9/11 and American Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 3 (2005): 410.

77. Anderson, Trapped by Success, 160–64.

78. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 30–31, 266–70.

79. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 358; Leffler, “9/11 and American Foreign Policy,” 410.

80. Peter Maass, “Professor Nagl’s War,” New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2004, available at http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/Professor_Nagls_War.html.