Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  The result was a controversial movie that faithfully presents the administration’s position. The focus of the film is the awakening of a “liberal” journalist—played by David Janssen—to the real nature of American involvement. At first the journalist is skeptical; he doubts the domino theory, the threat of communism, and the viability of the government in South Vietnam. But after following the activities of the Green Beret lieutenant colonel Michael Kirby—played by John Wayne—he reverses his earlier opinions. Nevertheless, even the journalist realizes that the liberal bias of the American press will make it difficult to tell the true story of the war in Vietnam.” If I say what I feel,” he informs Kirby, “I may be out of a job.” In the end the film suggests that the biggest fight will be against not the North Vietnamese but the liberal establishment. In most respects The Green Berets was a typical John Wayne war movie. It could have been set in the Pacific during World War II or in the West during the Indian wars. The Vietnamese in the film even speak the pidgin English of the Indians in early Hollywood westerns. At one point a South Vietnamese tells Kirby, “We build many camps, clobber many V.C.”

  Unfortunately for Wayne, by the time the film was released in the summer of 1968 most Americans no longer believed the official administration line. Critics received The Green Berets in the spirit of disillusion Renata Adler expressed in the New York Times:

  The Green Berets is a film so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false . . . that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything and becomes an invitation to grieve, not for our soldiers in Vietnam or for Vietnam (the film could not be more false or do a greater disservice to either of them) but for what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus… Simplicities of the right, simplicities of the left, but this one is beyond the possible. It is vile and insane.

  Even trade journals criticized the film. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a cliché-ridden throwback to the battlefield potboilers of World War II, its artifice readily exposed by the nightly actuality of TV news coverage.”

  At the end of 1968 there were 536,000 American troops in Vietnam, along with another 65,000 military from South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. ARVN troops totaled 850,000. More than 30,000 Americans were dead. Fear, misery, dislocation, and death inflicted by both sides to the conflict were making a wreckage of Vietnamese society. The communists, convinced that they would always enjoy the tactical initiative and could decide when and where to engage American troops, were waiting for the American people to tire of the war. Time for Richard Nixon to deliver.

  9

  The Beginning of the End, 1969–1970

  We have to stop it with victory, or it will start all over again in a few years.

  —Richard Nixon, 1968

  As a congressman and as vice president, Richard Nixon took pride in his reputation for being the fastest dresser in the capital. It took him two and one-half minutes to put on a regular suit; formal wear took eight minutes. He was fast because there was so much to do. Other politicians doubtless were brighter than Nixon. Some certainly were better educated, better connected, and better liked. But few were better organized or willing to work as hard. For most of Nixon's career he carried a list of things to do in his suit pocket. And with an eye for the smallest detail, he did what was on the list. It was his saving grace, making up for the other graces he lacked. Unlike establishment politicians whom he hated, Nixon lacked a sense of humor, smooth social skills, and a glib style. But they lacked his drive, his willingness to do whatever it took to get the job done.

  Given his background, Nixon's rise to power was swift. Born in Yorba Linda, California, in 1913, he had been raised in a poor family that, if not the embodiment of the American Dream, believed in it. His parents were hard-working, outspoken supporters of common people and critics of big business. When Nixon was nine, his father moved the family to Whittier and bought a small grocery store. He devoted his life to the small business and eventually made a success of it. Nixon also worked— in school and after school. During the early 1930s he attended Whittier College on an academic scholarship. But he continued to work at the store—waking at 4 a.m., driving into Los Angeles to pick up vegetables, setting up displays, attending classes, and studying until way past midnight. Nixon also kept the books for the store and at Whittier played football, served as president of his class and several other organizations, worked as a reporter for the school newspaper, starred in school plays, and excelled on the debating team. In a letter of recommendation for Nixon to Duke Law School, Whittier's president Walter Dexter wrote,“I cannot recommend him too highly because I believe that Nixon will become one of America's important, if not great leaders.”

  Yet beneath the driven young achiever lay a dark and unhappy side. As his latest biographer says: “He was sympathetic and solicitous to [a] woman who was stealing from the family store, but outraged and eager to punish those who spoke against the Constitution. He knew everyone... but had no real friends. He was a student leader... but shy around people." In every respect Nixon was a young man of action and shadows.

  From Whittier College, Nixon went to Duke Law School, where he received outstanding grades but no invitations to join prestigious eastern law firms. He returned to Whittier, practiced law, married, enlisted in the navy after Pearl Harbor, and served with distinction. In 1945 a leading Republican banker in Whittier asked Nixon whether he would be interested in opposing the Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis in the 1946 congressional elections. Nixon was. True to form, he ran a hard race, working long hours and always planning. Aided by the conservative mood of the country—and exploiting that mood by accusing Voorhis of having communist support—Nixon won the election and then walked smack into history. A first-term congressman, he was appointed to the high-profile House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC took its investigations on the road, conducting sensational sessions in Hollywood and other media centers seeking out communists and their hidden collaborators, and gaining a reputation for being a bit eagerly broad in its definition of subversion. Nixon's picture appeared frequently in the press. Within eighteen months he was known as a hard-working, careful congressman.

  Then came the Hiss-Chambers case. The Henry Luce journalist Whit- taker Chambers—overweight, rumpled, outspoken ex-communist—testified before HUAC that Alger Hiss was a communist. Hiss was a Democrat of impeccable breeding—Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, clerk for Oliver Wendell Holmes, counsel for the Senate investigation of the arms industry, a member of the Yalta Conference team, a leader in the organization of the United Nations, and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. To accuse such a man of being a communist agent was difficult even for the conservative anti-New Dealers on HUAC to stomach. If Chambers was lying, HUAC would be embarrassed. It was Nixon who sensed that Hiss was the liar. It was Nixon who would not allow the case to die. And in the end, it was Nixon who was right and received the fame for uncovering the“New Deal ” spy.

  After the Hiss case, Nixon moved rapidly up. In his successful bid for the Senate against the New Deal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, he employed vicious red-baiting that contrasted to his caution in the Hiss episode. In 1952 he was elected vice president of the United States. Yet for all his success, he was widely hated, among journalists and among liberals. He was thought to be sullen, abrasive, and far to the right. That in fact he was, and would remain to some extent, in the liberal wing of the Republican party went unnoticed: It was apparently beyond the imagination of his observers that anyone who radiated such brooding hostility could be a politically and socially responsible moderate. And there was the continuing memory of his nasty senatorial campaign of 1950. In 1960 Nixon ran for president, and his political luck crashed. He faced another wealthy, Ivy League, handsome easterner— John Kennedy. Nixon had more experience than Kennedy, and on paper he appeared better qualified. But Kennedy had something that could not be measured and Nixon could not duplicate. He had confidence— a deep
ly rooted, intrinsic confidence. Nixon's campaign went badly. He banged his kneecap into an automobile door in Greensboro, North Carolina, and when the injury became infected he spent several weeks in Walter Reed Hospital—his leg in traction, his head on a pillow, and the nation speeding toward an election. Ater he checked out of Walter Reed, he caught a bad chest cold. Then—tired, worried, and looking both—he had to debate a fresh, tanned Kennedy in Chicago before television cameras. Whether on the merits he lost the debate (listeners as opposed to viewers thought he had won), he looked like the loser. He also lost the election. It was a crushing defeat.

  As Nixon would later truthfully say, he was no quitter. One lost election did not end a political career. In 1962 he ran for governor of California. Again he lost. Angry, frustrated, and most of all hurt, he told the press,“As I leave you I want you to just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference. ” At the end of the meeting Nixon exited, as one reporter commented,“snarling. ” It appeared that his political career was over.

  Of course it was not. Nixon traversed the country, speaking out on the important issues and cultivating political contacts. And as the war in Vietnam destroyed the Johnson administration, Nixon set his sights on 1968. Soon there was talk of a“new ” Nixon, a more mature, more secure, more confident Nixon. But as Tom Wicker had written in 1962:“He is, if anything, more reserved and inward, as difficult as ever to know, driven still by deep inner compulsion toward power and personal vindication, painfully conscious of slights and failures, a man who had imposed upon himself a self-control so rigid as to be all but visible. ” In 1968 the public need to reject Lyndon Johnson was so great that it ushered Richard Nixon into the White House.

  Henry Kissinger, Nixon's selection for national security adviser, had a rotund body and a craggy face that were a cartoonist's delight. Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in 1923 in Fürth, Germany, to a Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution in 1938 and settled in New York City. Drafted into the army in 1943, Kissinger ended up in Germany serving as an interpreter. After the war he became one of Harvard's most brilliant undergraduates and then went on to earn his Ph.D. in 1954. By that time he was widely acknowledged, by students and professors, as a leading intellect on the campus. He joined the faculty, taking over the international relations course McGeorge Bundy had taught. Kissinger was a consultant to both the Kennedy and the Johnson administration and a foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller between 1964 and 1968. Stanley Kubrick's dark comedy film Dr. Strangelove, which was released in 1964, uses him as the model for the megalomaniac with a German accent and a spasmodic Nazi salute.

  Kissinger possessed several powerful convictions about international politics. His doctoral dissertation, a study of the Congress of Vienna of 1815, argues that diplomacy is a complicated, interrelated balancing act among the major powers. Any significant event in the life of one power automatically affects every other major power. The achievement of absolute superiority by one power imposes absolute insecurity on every other power and destabilizes international politics. Every nation on earth has the right to legitimacy and security. Kissinger's study Nuclear War and Foreign Policy, published in 1957, advocates the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a total defense strategy. Kissinger disdained the intrusion of moral issues into foreign policy. Woodrow Wilson's diplomacy, he believed, had undermined the Treaty of Versailles and indirectly contributed to World War II. Kissinger was equally contemptuous of the McCarthyite form of anticommunism. Moralistic considerations, whether an idealistic anticommunism or an impassioned Marxism, prevented the United States, the Soviet Union, and China from dealing successfully with one another. Weaker nations, weaker movements could be dealt with according to the needs of the mighty, an arrangement that Kissinger believed to promote stability and therefore the well-being of the human race in general. Thus he was willing to arrange a coup replacing a leftist government in Chile with a brutal military regime. That China and the USSR professed to communism meant nothing to him; both were to be respected because they were powerful. But an upstart socialist movement in a small country in the same hemisphere as the United States: That was an impermissible insolence.

  Kissinger's view of Vietnam followed logically from his more general convictions. Indochina was tangential to American national security. A conscience-driven determination to preserve freedom from communism had drawn Washington into an untenable situation. A military victory in South Vietnam was out of the question unless the United States was willing to increase its combat strength to as many as 1.3 million men, which Tet had made politically impossible. For Kissinger, the United States had no choice but disengagement. How to do that was the question. Just before Nixon's inauguration, Kissinger wrote that the United States was“so powerful that Hanoi is simply unable to defeat us militarily.... It must negotiate about it. Unfortunately our military strength has no political corollary; we have been unable so far to create a political structure that could survive military opposition from Hanoi. ” Yet it was too late to withdraw without making Washington seem unworthy of being trusted.“The commitment of 500,000 Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam. For what is involved now is the confidence of American promises. ”

  Secretary of State Dean Rusk returned to the University of Georgia to teach, and Nixon appointed William P. Rogers to replace him. Upon graduation from Colgate and the Cornell University Law School, Rogers had enjoyed a distinguished career. He joined Richard Nixon's staff working on the Alger Hiss case in 1950, and in 1957 President Eisenhower appointed him attorney general. In 1969 President Nixon named him secretary of state. Nixon distrusted the university alumni at the State Department whose roots were deep in the eastern establishment. He viewed Rogers as one of them. And Kissinger, propelled by a giant ego and convinced that the State Department bureaucracy was inherently sluggish, insisted on making foreign policy at the White House. William Rogers was forced to explain and defend policies before Congress and the press that Nixon and Kissinger had formulated with little or no contribution from the State Department.

  To replace Clark Clifford as secretary of defense, Nixon turned to Melvin R. Laird of Wisconsin. Laird had served in the House of Representatives since 1953, earning a reputation for being a tough but fair leader, a socially moderate though fiscally conservative Republican. He was a big man, an imposing figure with a bald head and piercing eyes. Nixon selected Laird for the Pentagon for the respect he had won from Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress.

  Laird was eager to end the war. His opposition to further escalation was based more on political reality than on strong strategic or personal opinions. Laird knew the Congress; Nixon's honeymoon would be shortlived. Opposition to the war was endemic on Capitol Hill, by right- wingers for its restrictive rules of engagement and more recently by liberals for continuing at all. Before the inauguration Nixon had confessed to Laird his conclusion“that there's no way to win the war. But we can't say that, of course. ” Laird believed that if Nixon hesitated, what little political capital he had in Congress would disappear overnight. Within the administration, Laird became the voice for de-escalation.

  As Nixon prepared for his inauguration in January 1969, W. Averell Harriman packed up and left the Paris hotel suite where he had spent six months arguing about the shape of the negotiating table and trying in vain to get friends in the Soviet Union to put pressure on Ho Chi Minh. Harriman returned to New York tired and disgusted. Nixon replaced him with Henry Cabot Lodge, who had seen enough of Vietnam to know that Ho Chi Minh could not be bullied.

  In Saigon, General Creighton ("Fighting Abe") Abrams had replaced William Westmoreland back in 1968. At fifty-three, Abrams was everything Westmoreland was not. Shorter, rounder, and coarser, and able to curse with the lowliest private, Abrams was a hard-drinking, cigar- chomping former tank commander, one of the great combat officers of World War II with George Patton's 3rd Army. Time
claimed that Abrams could“inspire aggression from a begonia. ” Yet there was complexity in this devotee of classical music who liked to retreat into the solitude of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concertos and sonatas. He admitted that Tet had been a psychological and political and therefore strategic disaster for the United States. Abrams understood that he was working under new strategic assumptions. In 1968, 14,589 Americans died in South Vietnam. Similar casualty levels were out of the question. Abrams would not get any more troops, except for the 12,000 already scheduled to arrive. Westmoreland had tried to win the war; Abrams knew that his mission was to reduce American casualties, keep the Vietcong and North Vietnamese off guard, and get out of the country with some hope that South Vietnam was prepared to defend itself. But he did want“to kill as many of the bastards as he could. ”

  During the last half of 1968 Abrams developed a tactical approach to fit the new strategic reality. Instead of continuing with Westmoreland's broad search-and-destroy missions, Abrams advocated smaller unit action on a more continuous basis. He liked musical analogies:“Sometimes you need to play the 1812 Overture and now and then you have to let the violins play. ” It was time for the violins. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese usually found out about large-unit actions before they were even launched.“We work in small patrols, ” Abrams explained to a group of journalists, “because that's how the enemy moves—in groups of four or five. When he fights in squad size, so do we. When he cuts to half squad, so do we. ” Between May 1967 and May 1968, Westmoreland had launched more than 1,200 operations of battalion size. In 1969 Abrams reduced that number to about 700.