In 1964, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the number of military advisers grew to 23,000, and Congress voted to authorize the president to use military force as he saw fit in Southeast Asia. The vote came after U.S. destroyers, operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, twice within three days reported coming under attack from North Vietnamese patrol boats. Many senior Democrats—including the entire Senate leadership on foreign policy—expressed misgivings about a deepening American involvement in the war, but they were not about to defy their president in an election year and with U.S. troops in harm’s way. Despite a lack of evidence that the second attack had occurred, Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes against selected North Vietnamese patrol boat bases and an oil depot.8
The aid and advisers helped, but not enough to achieve American purposes. Political turmoil was endemic in Saigon, no less after Diem’s ouster than before. The string of governments that followed his fall continued to suffer from infighting and lack of broad popular support. Militarily too, the Viet Cong scored steady gains, despite the inferiority of their weaponry and training. A pattern repeated itself. The Viet Cong, like their Viet Minh forerunners, liked to operate at night and in the bush; the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), with its formidable U.S.-supplied firepower, was afraid of the darkness and the jungle, just as the French Union forces had been. At twilight, the enemy took over. Virtually no ARVN officers had fought on the side of the Viet Minh in the earlier struggle; most, indeed, had served under the French. A clear majority were from privileged backgrounds, well-to-do, urban, disdainful of the peasantry that still made up the vast bulk of the Vietnamese populace.
Journalist Theodore White offered a sobering assessment in a letter to his friend John F. Kennedy, describing a scene eerily reminiscent of that which pertained during JFK’s visit a decade earlier: “The situation gets steadily worse almost week by week.… Guerrillas now control almost all the Southern delta—so much that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy.… What perplexes the hell out of me is that the Commies, on their side, seem able to find people willing to die for their cause.”9
For true believers on the American side, the problems were all surmountable, and there could be no thought of turning back. Edward Lansdale, whose role in U.S. policy making on Vietnam had dwindled in the second half of the 1950s, reemerged early in the Kennedy years to argue for a robust prosecution of the war and for the need to be sensitive to local Vietnamese needs and mores. His faith in the precepts of counterinsurgency was undiminished and uncomplicated, never mind that previous attempts at such warfare—including by the French, in this very place—had yielded meager results. “Just remember this,” he told a group of U.S. military officers in 1962, with perfect matter-of-fact simplicity. “Communist guerrillas hide among the people. If you win the people over to your side, the Communist guerrillas have no place to hide, and you can find them. Then, as military men, fix them … finish them!”10
For Lansdale and others of like mind, the French experience was largely irrelevant to America’s concerns. France, after all, had been fighting a colonial war; the United States would be fighting one of popular opposition to Communism. She would represent the Third Force, neither Communist nor colonialist. Furthermore, the French had lacked military strength and sophistication, shackled as they were by their humiliating defeat in 1940 and their dependence on African colonial units and the German-dominated Foreign Legion, devious and narrow of vision. The United States, on the other hand, was honest and selfless and massively powerful, not least in political terms. Untainted by colonialism, possessor of the mightiest arsenal the world had ever seen, she was the champion of freedom, the engine in the global drive to stamp out rapacious Communist expansion. On the human side, the French experience with the cupidity and the fence-sitting attentisme of their Vietnamese collaborators would not repeat itself, Lansdale willed himself to believe (the evidence from the late 1950s might have given him pause), because this time the Vietnamese truly had something to fight for.
And besides, hadn’t the British shown in Malaya that Communist insurgencies could be defeated? The so-called Emergency, which had been proclaimed in 1948 and was declared finished in 1960, when the British defeated the Communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), seemed to offer lessons that could be applied to the revolutionary situation in Vietnam. Or so it appeared—when pressed, Lansdale had to concede the particular advantages the British enjoyed in Malaya, beginning with the fact that the guerrillas were almost all ethnic Chinese, isolated from the bulk of the population; few Malays joined the movement. They also faced chronic and debilitating food shortages and, unlike the Viet Minh and now the Viet Cong, they did not have the benefit of neighboring sanctuaries or powerful outside patrons. Finally, the MNLA always had to cope with a colossal inferiority in numbers—perhaps as high as 35 to 1 (300,000 men under arms versus 8,000 guerrillas), as compared to a ratio of no better than 1.5 to 1 during the Franco–Viet Minh War.11
Other observers, seeing the parallels between the French war and this new American one, and sensing the dangers of innocence in a difficult and complex society such as Vietnam, found themselves thinking more and more of that fictional Lansdale, Alden Pyle. “We used to sit in the small French cafés [in Saigon] and talk about Greene’s book,” journalist David Halberstam—whose captivating, sprawling The Best and the Brightest remains an essential source on America’s war—later recalled of himself and other reporters covering the early 1960s buildup. “It seemed at that time … the best novel about Vietnam. There was little disagreement about his fine sense of the tropics, his knowledge of the war, his intuition of the Vietnamese toughness and resilience, particularly of the peasant and the enemy.” Only one element, Halberstam went on, raised reservations: “It was only his portrait of the sinister innocence of the American that caused some doubt, that made us a little uneasy.” The public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy, Halberstam added, was particularly bitter about Greene’s novel: “He called it an evil book, made worse, he said, because it was so effective, so slick.”12
The “innocence” notion should not be exaggerated. By the early months of 1963, if not before, a bleak realism permeated much U.S. official analysis about the war’s prospects, at least behind closed doors. In the intelligence community, pessimism was now the order of the day, and apprehension was also growing in Congress, even on the part of former Diem stalwarts such as Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield. Kennedy too grew increasingly wary, hinting to aides in the final months of his life that he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam following his reelection in 1964.13 Johnson, for his part, in 1964 began to question the long-term prospects in the struggle, even with major American escalation, and to wonder about the war’s ultimate importance to U.S. national security. In September, for example, he said of the hapless Saigon leaders: “I mean, if they can’t protect themselves, if you have a government that can’t protect itself from kids in the streets, what the hell can you do about an invading army?” A few months after that, LBJ dejectedly noted that “a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam, there’s not a bit.”14
But like his predecessor, Johnson was careful to articulate these sentiments only privately and even then only to a select few. In public, he and his top advisers—all of them holdovers from Kennedy—stuck close to the received wisdom, insisting that the outcome in Southeast Asia was critically important to American interests and that they were committed to defending their Saigon ally against aggression “imposed from the outside.” Whatever problems might be hampering the war effort would be overcome in due course. And whatever the price of victory, the cost of defeat would be far greater. The sentiments, sometimes the very rhetoric, echoed that of their Paris counterparts a decade before. And by using such unambiguous language in public, U.S. leaders found—again like the French before them—that backing away could b
e extremely difficult. Hawks, they knew, stood ready to remind them of their stark words should they so much as hint at a change in course. By their categorical public pronouncements, that is to say, as well as by their escalatory actions, both American presidents painted themselves into a corner.
It mattered here that Kennedy’s and Johnson’s freedom of maneuver was already constrained by the choices of their predecessors—by Truman’s tacit acknowledgment in 1945–46 that France had a right to return to Indochina; by his administration’s decision in 1950 to actively aid the French war effort; and by the Eisenhower team’s move in 1954 to intervene directly in southern Vietnam, displacing France as the major external power. LBJ had the added burden of Kennedy’s expansion of U.S. involvement in 1961–63. For more than a dozen years, the United States had committed herself to preserving a non-Communist toehold in Vietnam, and both men feared that to alter course now, even under the cover of a fig-leaf negotiated settlement, could be harmful in terms of “credibility”—their country’s, their party’s, their own. They weren’t willing to risk it. If this stance speaks poorly for their political courage, it also had political logic behind it. Then again, so did the skeptics’ reply: that the credibility would suffer much more if America got sucked into a bloody and drawn-out slugfest—as seemed all too possible—in a conflict of peripheral strategic import in forbidding terrain seven thousand miles from the coast of California.
The skeptics had been there all along, since before the shooting started. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt was their champion, and it’s not fanciful to believe that had he lived beyond 1945, FDR would have tried to keep France from forcibly reclaiming control of Indochina, and might well have succeeded, thereby changing the flow of history. But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years. American leaders in this era always had real choices about which way to go in the anti–Ho Chi Minh struggle, choices evident not only in retrospect but also at the time, yet the policy always moved in the direction of deeper U.S. involvement. Successive administrations could have shifted course, but they never did. Hence the danger in focusing exclusively on contingency: It can blind us to the continuities that permeate the entire American experience in Vietnam. And hence the vital importance, if we are to understand the U.S. war, of reckoning seriously with the earlier era.15
Ultimately, Kennedy and Johnson found what their predecessors in the White House as well as a long line of leaders in the French Fourth Republic had found: that in Vietnam, the path of least immediate resistance, especially in domestic political terms, was to stand firm, to maintain the commitment, and to press on, in the hope that somehow things would turn out fine (or at least be bequeathed to a successor). As Democrats, JFK and LBJ felt the need to contend with the ghosts of McCarthy and the charge that they were “soft on Communism.” Truman too, as we have seen, acted partly with this concern in mind, as indeed did Eisenhower—his monumentally important decisions of 1953–54 cannot be understood apart from the charged domestic political atmosphere in which they were made. But the perceived power of this political imperative was even greater in the early 1960s, as the two presidents, feeling the vulnerability that all Democrats felt in the period, sought to avoid a repeat of the “Who lost China?” debate, this time over Vietnam. This concern was seldom discussed in the major magazine and newspaper articles that examined decision making on Vietnam, and it is hardly mentioned in the vast documentary record. It was so self-evident that it hardly, or rarely, needed to be voiced.16
In North Vietnam as well, policy makers affirmed their determination to achieve victory in the conflict, through escalation if necessary. Already in December 1963, in the aftermath of the Diem coup, Hanoi leaders decided to step up the fighting in the south, in the hopes that further deterioration would either cause the Americans to give up the fight and go home or leave them insufficient time to embark on a major escalation of their own. Ho Chi Minh, whose role in the party hierarchy had shifted in recent years away from day-to-day policy maker to that of elder statesman, urged his colleagues to seize on the “disorder” in South Vietnam and expand military as well as political pressure on the Saigon regime. Even if the United States should step up her role tenfold, Ho asserted, “we shall still be victorious.”17
Yet having made this decision, North Vietnamese officials moved warily. General Vo Nguyen Giap, mastermind of the bruising victory over France and a figure of immense prestige in the leadership, warned his colleagues that the United States represented a military test of monumental proportions; he urged caution until the People’s Army of Vietnam had been properly trained and equipped with modern weapons. Not everyone in the Politburo embraced this message, but they also had to contend with the counsels of restraint emanating from Moscow and, to a lesser extent, Beijing. Neither Communist patron was keen to see an Americanized war in Vietnam, one that could confront them with difficult choices and potentially bring them into direct contact with the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Their own bilateral relationship deeply fractious, each sought to keep the other from gaining too much influence in Hanoi. The Soviet Union in particular pressured North Vietnam to go slowly and to avoid provoking Washington. The North Vietnamese obliged, even as they used the final weeks of 1964 to step up the infiltration of men and matériel into the south. Said Premier Pham Van Dong, during a meeting with Mao Zedong in October 1964: “If the United States dares to start a [larger] war, we will fight it, and we will win it. But it would be better if it did not come to that.”18
But come to that it did. In early December, after Johnson won a landslide election victory to become president in his own right (his refrain in the campaign: He sought no wider war and would not send American boys to fight a war that Asian boys should fight for themselves), he and his aides agreed on a two-phase escalation of the fighting. The first involved “armed reconnaissance strikes” against the Ho Chi Minh Trail infiltration routes in Laos, as well as retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam in the event of a major Viet Cong attack. The second phase anticipated “graduated military pressure” against the north, in the form of aerial bombing, and almost certainly the dispatch of U.S. ground troops to the south. Phase one would begin as soon as possible; phase two would come later, after thirty days or more.
In February 1965, following Viet Cong attacks on American installations in South Vietnam that killed thirty-two Americans, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing program planned the previous fall that continued, more or less uninterrupted, until October 1968. Then, on March 8, the first U.S. combat battalions came ashore near Da Nang. The North Vietnamese met the challenge. They hid in shelters and rebuilt roads and bridges with a tenaciousness that frustrated and awed American officials. They also increased infiltration into the south. Ho Chi Minh, convinced that Washington had committed too much prestige to Vietnam to back down, predicted to associates that Lyndon Johnson would come in with guns blazing but that it would not be enough. Like the French, the Americans would taste defeat in the end.19
Perhaps, for Ho, it had to come to this. He had always seen the United States as a principal player in Vietnam’s drama, after all, ever since that June day in 1919 when he donned his rented morning coat and tried in vain to gain an audience with Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. Later, in the dizzying summer of 1945, Ho had again pleaded for U.S. backing, to no avail, a pattern that would repeat itself in 1946 and 1947, after the serious fighting began. Ultimately, his Democratic Republic of Vietnam had triumphed over France, but the price of victory had been immense, as Washington massively bolstered the enemy’s war-making machine, enhancing its destructive capacity exponentially (as did the Chinese aid for the DRV, though to a lesser degree). Then at the moment of glorious success in 1954, the Americans, determined to maintain a non-Communist bastion in southern Vietnam, helped deny the Viet Minh the full fruits of victory as they set about creating and building up the Republic of [South] Vietnam.
�
�It will be a war between an elephant and a tiger,” Ho had said back in 1946, of the war then about to commence. “If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges only at night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death.”20
This time the elephant would be even bigger. But the outcome, Ho vowed, would be the same.
In Paris, leaders reacted to these developments with shudders of recognition and a sense of déjà vu. They knew this script by heart. On March 18, 1965, President Charles de Gaulle, whose unwavering determination to reclaim Indochina for France at the end of World War II had done so much to start the bloodshed, and who had been summoned back to power in 1958 as his country struggled to defeat another insurgency, this one in Algeria, told his cabinet that major war was now inevitable. The Americans had failed to learn from France’s example, he said, and the fighting “will last a long, long, long time.” The following month de Gaulle offered a more precise estimate: Unless the Johnson administration moved to halt the war immediately, the struggle would go on for ten years and would completely dishonor the United States. When U.S. ambassador Charles Bohlen called on de Gaulle in early May, he found the French leader in a philosophical mood, accepting the wholesale escalation of the fighting with “oriental fatalism.”21
Another Frenchman, long since transplanted to the United States, felt a gripping sense of foreboding as 1965 progressed. Bernard Fall, over the previous decade, had become America’s most respected expert on the First Indochina War (as it was now called), the author of numerous books and articles notable for their informed and dispassionate analysis. (Many a U.S. officer got his first real appreciation of the complexity of the Vietnam struggle by reading Fall’s Street Without Joy: Indochina at War 1946–1954, published in 1961.) Fall was less categorical than de Gaulle about America’s prospects in Vietnam, and he rejected as “facile” (a favorite adjective) the casual way some critics of U.S. involvement invoked the French analogy. The United States in 1965, after all, was immensely more powerful than her Western ally had ever been, especially in the air. “Before Dien Bien Phu,” Fall wrote late that year, “the French Air Force had for all of Indochina (i.e., Cambodia, Laos, and North and South Vietnam) a total of 112 fighters and 68 bombers. On Sept. 24, 1965, the United States flew 167 bombers against North Vietnamese targets alone, dropping 235 tons of bombs and simultaneously flew 317 bomber sorties ‘in country’ [South Vietnam], dropping 270 tons of bombs.”22
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Page 82