The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  Reciprocal violence added to the spiral. Viet-Cong terrorism by means of rockets, shelling of villages, booby traps, kidnappings and massacres was indiscriminate and deliberate, designed to instill insecurity and demonstrate the lack of protection by the Saigon authorities. While American armed intervention had prevented the insurgents’ victory, it had not brought closer their defeat. Progress was deceptive. When the balance wavered, Russia and China sent in more supplies to the North, refreshing its strength. The low morale deduced from prisoners was a misinterpretation of the stoicism and fatalism of the East. In the American forces, short-term one-year tours of duty, intended to avoid discontent, prevented adaptation to irregular jungle warfare, thereby increasing casualties since the rate was always highest in the early months of duty. Adaptation never matched circumstances. American fighting tactics were designed in terms of large troop formations making use of mobility, and in terms of industrial targets for the exercise of air power. Once in motion the American military machine could not readjust to a warfare in which these elements did not exist. The American mentality counted on superior might, but a tank cannot disperse wasps.

  Needs other than military absorbed equal concern. The “pacification” program was a strenuous American effort to strengthen the social and political fabric of South Vietnam in the interests of democracy. It was supposed to build confidence in Saigon and stabilize its footing. But the successive governments of Generals Khanh, Ky and Thieu, all of whom resented the patronage they depended upon, were not helpful collaborators. Nor were the white men’s forces in their massive material presence the agents to “win hearts and minds.” That program, known as WHAM to Americans in the field, failed of its object despite all the energy Washington invested in it and in some sectors turned sentiment against Saigon and the United States. Opposition to the generals’ regime grew overt, with demands being made for civilian rule and a constitution. The Buddhist anti-government movement revived and again clashed in open struggle with Saigon’s troops. At Hue, the ancient capital, demonstrators sacked and burned the American consulate and the cultural center.

  Sentiment in the United States was also turning, with a noticeable rise in anti-war feeling when bombing resumed after the Christmas halt. Members of Congress, whom Maxwell Taylor had found, when briefing them on his return as Ambassador, “surprisingly patient and uncritical,” were forming pockets of dissent. During the bombing pause, 77 members of the House, mostly Democrats, urged the President to extend the pause and submit the conflict to the UN. When the bombing resumed, fifteen Senators, all Democrats, made public a letter to the President, opposing the renewal. When Senator Morse proposed repeal of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as an amendment to an appropriations bill for Vietnam, three Senators—Fulbright, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Stephen Young of Ohio—joined the un-deviating Morse and Gruening in its favor. It was defeated 92 to 5.

  While not very bold, these were signals of opposition to the President from within his own party. They were the beginnings of a peace bloc that would split the Democratic Party over Vietnam, but they had no convinced and determined leadership in either House or Senate that was ready to oppose the majority.

  Disaffection was deeper than the meager votes indicated. Congress continued to vote obediently for appropriations because most members could not bring themselves to reject Administration policy when the alternative meant admission of American failure. Further, they were in large part willing captives of the giant identified by Eisenhower as the military-industrial complex. Defense contracts were its currency, manipulated by more than 300 lobbyists maintained by the Pentagon on the Hill. The military provided V.I.P. tours, dinners, films, speakers, planes, sporting weekends and other perquisites, especially to senior committee chairmen in both Houses. A quarter of the membership of Congress held reserve commissions. Criticism of military procurements made a Congressman vulnerable to the charge of undermining national security. At the convening of the 89th Congress in 1965, that bold leader Vice-President Hubert Humphrey advised new members, “If you feel an urge to stand up and make a speech attacking Vietnamese policy, don’t make it.” After a second or third term, he said, they could afford to be independent, “but if you want to come back in ’67 don’t do it now.”

  Fulbright’s vote on the Morse amendment signified an open break with Johnson. He felt betrayed by the move into active combat, contrary to Johnson’s assurances, and was one day to confess that he regretted his role in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution more than anything else he had ever done. He now organized, in January-February 1966, in six days of televised hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the first serious public discussion at an official level of the American intervention in Vietnam. More than was appreciated at the time, basic issues emerged—alleged “commitment,” national interest, disproportion of effort to interest and the nascent recognition of American self-betrayal. Secretary Rusk and General Taylor made the case for the Administration; Ambassador George Kennan, General James M. Gavin, Fulbright himself and several colleagues spoke for the dissent.

  Secretary Rusk insisted as always that the United States had “a clear and direct commitment” to secure South Vietnam against “external attack” deriving from the SEATO Treaty and Eisenhower’s letter to Diem, and that this imposed an “obligation” to intervene. With the inventive rhetoric characteristic of true believers, he asserted that “the integrity of our commitments is absolutely essential to the preservation of peace right around the globe.” When the supposed commitment was punctured by Senator Morse, who cited a recent denial by Eisenhower that he had “ever given a unilateral commitment to the government of South Vietnam,” Rusk retreated to the position that the United States was “entitled” by the SEATO Treaty to intervene and that the commitment derived from policy statements by successive Presidents and from the appropriations voted by Congress itself. General Taylor acknowledged under questioning that insofar as the use of our combat ground forces was concerned, the commitment “took place of course only in the spring of 1965.”

  With regard to national interest, Taylor claimed that the United States had a “vital stake” in the war without defining what it was. He said that Communist leaders, in their drive to conquer South Vietnam, expected to undermine the position of the United States in Asia and prove the efficacy of wars of national liberation, which it was incumbent on the United States to show were “doomed to failure.” Senator Fulbright was moved to ask if the American Revolution was not a “war of national liberation.”

  General Gavin questioned whether Vietnam was worth the investment in view of all other American commitments abroad. He believed we were being “mesmerized” by the endeavor, and that the contemplated troop strength of half a million, reducing our capacity everywhere else, suggested that the Administration had lost all sense of proportion. South Vietnam was simply not that important.

  The charge that public opposition to the war represented “weakness” and failure of will (today being revived by the revisionists of the 1980s) was briefly touched by General Taylor in describing the French public’s repudiation of the war as demonstrating “weakness.” Senator Morse replied that it would not be “too long before the American people repudiate our war in Southeast Asia,” as the French had theirs, and when they did, would that be “weakness”?

  In sober words Ambassador Kennan brought out the question of self-betrayal. Success in the war would be hollow even if achievable, he said, because of the harm being done by the spectacle of America inflicting “grievous damage on the lives of a poor and helpless people, particularly on a people of different race and color.… This spectacle produces reactions among millions of people throughout the world profoundly detrimental to the image we would like them to hold of this country.” More respect could be won by “a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions” than by their stubborn pursuit. He quoted John Quincy Adams’ dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, “there will b
e America’s heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Pursuing monsters meant endless wars in which “the fundamental maxim of [American] policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” No harder truth was spoken at the hearings.

  For all their truths, the Fulbright hearings were not a prelude to action in the only way that could count, a vote against appropriations, so much as an intellectual exercise in examination of American policy. The issue of longest consequence, Executive war, was not formulated until after the hearings, in Fulbright’s preface to a published version. Acquiescence in Executive war, he wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn “not upon available facts but upon judgment,” with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge “whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve their overall interests as a nation.”

  Though he could bring out the major issues, Fulbright was a teacher, not a leader, unready himself to put his vote where it counted. When a month after the hearings the Senate authorized $4.8 billion in emergency funds for the war in Vietnam, the bill passed against only the two faithful negatives of Morse and Gruening. Fulbright voted with the majority.

  The belief that government knows best was voiced just at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing, “We ought all to support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against.” This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. “Foreign policy decisions,” concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study, “are in general much more influenced by irrational motives” than are domestic ones.

  After World War II a Strategic Bombing Survey by scientists, economists and other specialists had concluded that strategic bombing in the European theater (as distinct from tactical bombing in conjunction with ground action) had not achieved the desired or expected results. It had not significantly reduced Germany’s physical fighting capacity or induced an earlier readiness to come to terms. The survey discovered extraordinary rapidity of repairs and no diminution of morale; in fact, bombing could raise morale. In March 1966, when the three allotted months of ROLLING THUNDER had extended to more than a year without noticeable “will-breaking,” a group of prominent scientists at MIT and Harvard, including some who had served on the earlier survey, proposed a similar hard look at bombing results in Vietnam. Commissioned by the Institute of Defense Analysis under the code name JASON, a body of 47 specialists in various disciplines went through ten days of briefings by Defense, State, CIA and White House, followed by two months of technical studies. The group concluded that effects on North Vietnam’s will to fight and on Hanoi’s appraisal of the cost of continuing to fight “have not shown themselves in any tangible way.” Bombing had not created serious difficulties in transportation, the economy or morale. The surveyors found no basis for concluding that “indirect punitive effects of the bombing will prove decisive in these respects.”

  The main reason, JASON stated, for the relative ineffectiveness of the air offensive was “unrewarding targets.” The study concluded that a “direct frontal attack on a society” tended to strengthen the fabric, increase popular determination- and stimulate protective devices and capacity for repair. This social effect was not unpredictable; it was the same as had been found in Germany, and indeed in Britain, where heightening of morale and hardening of determination as a result of the German terror bombing of 1940–41 was well known.

  As an alternative to bombing, JASON recommended construction of an “anti-infiltration” barrier across Vietnam and Laos for a distance of about 160 miles. Fully presented in the study with detailed technical plans, it was to consist of minefields, walls, ditches and strong points strung with electronic barbed wire and flanked by defoliated strips on either side, at an estimated cost of $800 million. Whether it might have worked cannot be known. Ridiculed by Air Force commanders at CINCPAC who could not allow an alternative to their function, it was never tried.

  Like every other “dissonant” advice, JASON bumped against a stone wall. Strategy remained unchanged because the Air Force, in concern for its own future role, could not admit that air power could be ineffective. CINCPAC continued to raise the punitive level of the bombing on a basis of calculated pain according to a calculated “stress theory” of human behavior: Hanoi should respond to “stress” by ceasing the actions that produced it. “We anticipated that they would respond like reasonable people,” an official of the Defense Department said afterward. By the end of 1966 the bombs dropped reached an annual rate of 500,000 tons, higher than the rate used against Japan in World War II. Instead of rationally, Hanoi reacted humanly in anger and defiance, as the British had done under the German blitz, as no doubt Americans would have done if bombed. Instead of bringing the enemy chastened to the negotiating table, the air offensive made them more adamant: they now insisted on cessation of bombing as a fixed precondition of negotiation.

  Overtures continued through Chester Ronning of Canada and other intermediaries, because by now all parties would have welcomed an end to the war, each on its own terms, which remained irreconcilable. When Washington learned from visitors to Hanoi of finding readiness to talk if the bombing was stopped, the conclusion derived by the United States was that the bombing was hurting and should therefore be augmented to achieve the desired result. The result of course was a hardening of Hanoi’s intransigence.

  JASON penetrated one significant spot in the stone wall. It confirmed doubts beginning to concern Secretary McNamara. His own Systems Analysis at the Department of Defense concluded that military benefits were not worth the economic cost. Though he gave no public indication, he seemed in private remarks to show a dawning recognition of futility. Believing, as he wrote to the President, that the prognosis for a “satisfactory solution” was not good, he declared in favor of the anti-infiltration barrier as a substitute for bombing and for further increase of ground forces. He failed to carry his point.

  Elsewhere in government the sense of futility had spread, causing departures. Few resigned; most were eased out by skillful maneuvers of the President, who whatever his own misgivings did not welcome those of others, outspoken or even unspoken. Hilsman was eased out of the State Department in 1964, Forrestal from the White House staff in 1965, McGeorge Bundy from the NSC early in 1966, followed by the voluntary departures of George Ball and Bill Moyers in September and December 1966. Without exception, all went quietly, silent Laocoons who did not voice, much less shout, their warnings or disagreements at the time.

  Silent departure of its members is an important property of government. To speak out even after leaving is to go into the wilderness; by exhibiting disloyalty to bar return within the circle. The same reasons account for reluctance to resign. The official can always convince himself that he can exercise more restraining influence inside, and he then remains acquiescent lest his connection with power be terminated. The effect of the American Presidency with its power of appointment in the Executive branch is overbearing. Advisers find it hard to say no to the President or to dispute policy because they know that their status, their invitation to the next White House meeting, depends on staying in line. If they are Cabinet officers, they have in the American system no parliamentary seat to return to from which they may retain a voice in government.

  Rusk remained the rock. If he had doubts, he was able as the classic civil servant to convince himself that American policy was right and to reiterate that regardless of all other considerations the original goal of preserving a non-Communist South Vietnam must be maintained. In tribute to his steadfastness, someone in his own department scrawled inside a telephone booth, “Dean Rusk is a recorded announcement.” Replacing Bundy, Walt Rostow, who
had been predicting the imminent collapse of Viet-Cong insurgency since 1965, remained an enthusiast. At the top, Johnson was less so. Asked once how long the war might last, he answered, “Who knows how long, how much? The important thing is, are we right or wrong?” To pursue the killing and devastation of war with that question in doubt was unwise in relation to the public, to his own presidency and to history.

  Through the draft, required by repeated escalations, the war was now affecting the general public directly. In mid-1966, the Pentagon announced that the troop level in Vietnam would reach 375,000 by the end of the year, with 50,000 more to follow in the next six months. By mid-1967, the level reached 463,000, with Westmoreland asking for 70,000 more for a total over 525,000 as a “minimum essential force” and Johnson announcing that the Commander’s needs and requests “will be supplied.” To the young answerable to the draft, this war made no appeal, especially not to those who saw it as mean and inglorious. Everyone who could took advantage of the draft extension allowed during the pursuit of higher education, while the less advantaged classes entered uniform. The inequitable draft, first sin of the Vietnam war on the home front, and intended to reduce cause for disaffection in the social sector, dug a cleavage in American society in addition to the cleavage in opinion.