The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.
—ROBERT MCNAMARA
JOHN KENNEDY WAS A VERY INSPIRING PRESIDENT FOR many people. He advanced the civil rights movement and other reforms at home while drawing a very hard line against Soviet expansionism. The Kennedy approach to the Soviets came out in the debates in which Kennedy accused the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of allowing a “missile gap” between the USSR and the United States. After Kennedy won the election, Eisenhower was sufficiently worried about escalating military commitments overseas and a spiraling defense budget that in his January 1960 farewell address, he emphasized the threat of a growing “military-industrial complex” controlling the US government.
After Kennedy took office, the USSR tested him by putting missiles in Cuba in October 1962. Kennedy stood down the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he remained determined to counteract Soviet expansionism and meddling in foreign politics anywhere on the globe.
One of those places was Vietnam.
The tragedy of the Kennedy administration and the subsequent Lyndon Johnson administration was Vietnam.
The war began toward the end of World War II when Japan occupied the French colony of Indochina. Ho Chi Minh, a communist leader, took control of much of Vietnam in August 1945. The French then sought to reclaim the colony, and the two sides fought until 1954, when Minh defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French left Vietnam, but Vietnamese who did not want to live under Soviet-style communism formed a government in the south.
The United States had become involved to stop the spread of communism. Most of the American foreign policy and defense establishment from the 1940s on believed in the domino theory, which posited that if one country fell to Soviet-style communism, the countries surrounding it would also fall. The long-standing Soviet practice of meddling in other countries’ politics (continued by post-Soviet Russia to the present day) made this prospect even more fearsome.
The fall of China to communist rule had been an enormous blow in 1949. Then came the Korean War. Americans were vigilant—in hindsight too vigilant—in Southeast Asia as well.
As early as 1950, the US military had sent advisors and money to the French to take over the forces trying to stop Ho Chi Minh, and then in 1956 the Eisenhower administration sent advisors to train the army of South Vietnam.
The Geneva accords signed in July 1954 were supposed to separate North Vietnam and South Vietnam forces for two years. South Vietnam, led by Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, was established with US help to be a free and independent democracy. Sabotaging his efforts were thousands of communist subversives from the north. In 1954, a coup by the army against Diem was thwarted with help from the CIA.
South Vietnam was bankrupt and without leadership, and Diem began filling important government posts with relatives and friends. Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who had known fascist sympathies, oversaw the creation of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which at its peak became the fourth-largest army in the world.
By 1956 it was clear that the Diem regime was antidemocratic and corrupt. Elections were rigged. Freedom of the press was curtailed. Thousands of suspected communists were arrested and jailed. A decree was passed allowing the execution of anyone who belonged to the Viet Minh, the North Vietnamese independence faction. The Diem regime, however, was the enemy of the communists in the north. For a United States fearful of the spread of communism, the enemy of our enemy was our “friend.”
In 1959 the Diem government in Saigon began a program of massive resettlement, similar to Soviet farm collectivism. Thousands of South Vietnamese citizens—mostly peasants—were displaced. By 1961 the CIA was helping Diem with his resettlement program. Peasants were supposed to be compensated, but the corruption was so great that most money ended up in the hands of government officials. Meanwhile, the United States bolstered South Vietnam’s military with over $1 billion in military aid.
On December 11, 1961, President Kennedy sent aid, money, weapons, and supplies to Diem. An aircraft carrier with thirty-three helicopters and four hundred crewmen arrived in Saigon. The first American died ten days later. When Americans began dying in action in Vietnam, a critically important question arose: At what point would the rule of law require the informed consent of Congress to proceed?
Eisenhower didn’t need permission from Congress to send advisors to South Vietnam, but as we began to send more and more troops, the rule of law should have required that Congress consent to further US involvement.
In Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution, which is often referred to as the war powers clause, Congress is vested with the power to declare war. The exact wording is: [The Congress shall have Power … ] “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”
President Kennedy never went to Congress to get any war powers in Vietnam. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, did not go to Congress about Vietnam until 1964. Moreover, Congress was lied to, making any “consent” it gave morally, if not legally and constitutionally, invalid.
In 1963 Diem went after the Buddhists, accusing them of harboring NLF (National Liberation Front, what we knew as the Viet Cong) guerrillas. On June 11 a Buddhist monk set himself on fire for the world to see, but that didn’t stop Diem, who sent his forces to arrest and murder hundreds of Buddhists. Diem was hardly the type of foreign leader the United States wanted to support to counter Soviet expansionism.
By August 1963 President Kennedy was discussing ways to remove Diem. In late October, Kennedy was informed that members of the army were planning a coup against Diem, and he signaled he would not interfere. On November 1, Diem and his brother Nhu were seized by special forces. The generals promised them safe conduct, but Diem and Nhu were brutally murdered.
By early November 1963 it appears that President Kennedy began to have second thoughts and believed that getting involved in Vietnam was a bad idea. He pulled out one thousand American troops, and he then signed an order that contemplated withdrawing the rest by 1965.
Then on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated.
US military intervention that had begun on Kennedy’s watch would plague the administration of his successor Lyndon Johnson to the very end. We will never know whether Kennedy would have reversed course and extracted the US from Vietnam.
On August 4, 1964, while cruising in heavy weather in the Gulf of Tonkin, American warships received radar, radio, and sonar reports that signaled a North Vietnamese attack. Taking evasive action, they fired on numerous radar targets. But, after the incident, the captain was not sure whether his ships had been attacked.
Subsequent research and declassified documents have shown that the information the Defense Department gave about this incident in the Gulf of Tonkin wasn’t accurate. Thus began a pattern of misinformation that would continue throughout the long, drawn-out war as General William Westmore-land and other government officials who knew what was really happening evaded the truth.
In retaliation for the “attack,” President Johnson ordered air strikes on the Viet Cong. He addressed the nation about the Gulf of Tonkin attack.
He asked that Congress pass the Southeast Asia (Gulf of Tonkin) Resolution giving him the power to use military force in the region without requiring a declaration of war.
Johnson promised he would not seek a “wider war,” but that he would “continue to protect national interests.”
The resolution was approved on August 10, 1964, and Johnson rapidly escalated American involvement in the Vietnam War.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Congress passed with overwhelming support from both houses on August 14, 1964, was based on untruths—faulty intelligence reports distorted into sound bites of fake news. It authorized the president to take any necessary measures to repel attacks and prevent aggression against US forces in Vietnam.
Without a formal declaration of war, with a congressional resolution based on misinformation, and with subsequent military action exceeding authorization, warfare in Vietnam became an ever-more serious breach of the rule of law.
Only years later did we learn that Secretary of Defense McNamara apparently misled LBJ by failing to mention critical information about the Gulf of Tonkin attack. By deliberately withholding information, McNamara usurped President Johnson’s constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.
Johnson suspected that he was being misled by overly hawkish foreign-policy and military leaders. For months he refused to bomb North Vietnam, despite calls to do so from both the CIA and the military. McNamara pushed for commando raids near the North Vietnamese coast, hoping another incident would persuade Johnson to act. When it looked like Johnson was getting ready to pull out of Vietnam, McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, wrote Johnson a letter in late January 1965 making it clear that responsibility for US “humiliation” in South Vietnam would rest squarely on his shoulders if he continued his “passivity.”
After LBJ’s top advisors—McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, and Dean Rusk—recommended escalating the war, Johnson, afraid that his critics and the public would blame him for the loss of South Vietnam, began bombing North Vietnam.
By 1969, more than 500,000 US military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisors into the north, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the south.
The Vietnam War destroyed Johnson’s presidency, and by 1968 he had declared his intention not to seek reelection. Bobby F. Kennedy, a fierce opponent of the war that had started on his brother’s watch, ran for president on an antiwar platform but was assassinated in June 1968. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who out of loyalty to LBJ—or conviction—expressed support for most of Johnson’s Vietnam policy, won the Democratic nomination in 1968. He was beaten by Republican Richard Nixon whose “dirty tricks” (see Chapter 11) included encouraging the South Vietnamese not to enter a peace agreement being pursued by the Johnson-Humphrey administration during the 1968 presidential campaign.
The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and US combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the north.
Before the Vietnam War was over, official statistics put the number of American military personnel who died in or as a direct result of the war at 58,307. Millions of Vietnamese were killed and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were wounded or suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (In 2019 a survey showed that 67,000 former soldiers who fought in Vietnam were homeless.)
The Vietnam War itself was a breakdown in the rule of law. Congress should have been consulted and provided accurate information, and the military operations should only have gone to the extent authorized by Congress. On top of this, the United States confronted serious questions about whether the conduct of the Vietnam War conformed to international law and the terms of the UN charter. (The UN had authorized intervention in the Korean War but never authorized any country to intervene in Vietnam.)
What followed at home was a different breakdown in the rule of law. Many Americans—both Republicans and Democrats—also opposed the war, and some participated in public demonstrations. Most demonstrators were peaceful, including those led by clergy who believed the killing in Vietnam violated a higher law. But backlash against the war was sometimes violent. One group, SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, vehemently protested the war. Some campuses had riots. And violent demonstrations led to violent police responses.
After President Johnson escalated the war, University of Wisconsin students protested against recruiters from Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, in the fall of 1967. SDS and other antiwar groups coordinated a series of demonstrations against the draft. On October 21, 1967, more than a hundred thousand marched on the Pentagon.
The SDS began nighttime raids on draft offices to destroy records. A million students boycotted classes on April 26, after the SDS organized “Ten Days of Resistance” on college campuses.
By 1969 the organization had split into several factions, and the protest movement in some places focused on issues besides the war. The most notorious of these was the Weathermen, or the Weather Underground, which employed terrorist tactics. The group embraced violent revolutionary force. FBI investigations and criminal prosecutions followed.
Another divide brought on by the Vietnam War was far less violent but far more important. The war caused a rupture among religious groups—some opposing the war and others supporting it.
In May 1968 five men, including a Presbyterian minister and the Yale University chaplain, William Sloane Coffin Jr., were charged with conspiracy for encouraging Americans to evade the draft.
Some of Coffin’s followers were motivated by moral outrage at the war, others by the mounting evidence that despite what our political leaders said, the United States appeared to be losing.
Younger ministers and divinity school students returned their draft cards. Other students soon followed. Some publicly burned their draft cards, incensing even more public outrage.
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, religious progressives in the vein of Martin Luther King Jr. and William Sloan Coffin appeared to have formidable influences on American democracy, injecting concepts of higher law into political discourse. Their causes included civil rights, fighting poverty, and opposing the war in Vietnam.
Conservative evangelical Protestant clergy and their parishioners, who had supported the war throughout, were horrified by their more liberal counterparts. They looked for a way to bring their own religion into politics. They were ready to take to the streets for their own cause. Photos of Vietnamese children running down the street covered with burning napalm did not move them. But photos of fetuses inside the womb did.
Finally, for young men called to war, there was a moral dilemma. Their three main options:
1. Protest the war and refuse to serve, risking jail and loss of future employment
2. Feign an illness to avoid serving, enjoy life, and remain silent while other men serve
3. Serve
Reverend William Sloan Coffin encouraged young men at Yale and others to choose the first option.
Donald Trump chose the second. Diagnosed with “bone spurs” by a foot doctor who happened to lease space from Trump’s father, he stayed in Manhattan. Two decades later he brought up Vietnam in a 1997 radio interview with Howard Stern when asked how he avoided contracting STDs when having sex:
“It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it,” he said. “I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
Robert Mueller and his St. Paul’s School hockey teammate John Kerry went to Vietnam.
Navy pilot John McCain went to Vietnam and was captured, imprisoned for six years, and tortured. When McCain returned on crutches, President Nixon greeted him as he deplaned. Forty years later in 2016, Donald Trump said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Several hundred thousand young Americans went to Vietnam. Over fifty thousand of them never returned.