The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Worse than the war were political developments in England. Fueled by the American revolt, the movement for political reform spread through the country with demands for annual Parliaments, manhood suffrage, elimination of rotten boroughs, abolition of sinecures and contracts awarded to members of Parliament. The election of 1779 created bitter feeling between parties. Government majorities shrank. Protest reached a climax in the Yorkshire Petition of February 1780, which demanded a halt in appropriations and pensions until reforms were enacted. Petitions like Yorkshire’s flooded Westminster from 28 other counties and many cities. Permanent reform associations were formed. The King was seen, as he had been since the days of Bute, as the promoter of absolutism. Dunning’s bold resolution on the power of the Crown, that it “has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished,” was actually carried by a narrow majority with many country members among the ayes. In June, in response to the repeal of certain penal laws against the Catholics and the mad agitation of Lord George Gordon, the mobs gathered and burst in frightening riot. To cries of “No Popery!” and demands for repeal of the Quebec Act, they attacked ministers, tore their wigs, raided and robbed their houses, burned Catholic chapels, rushed the Bank of England and for three days held the city in terror until the troops gained control.

  The unpopularity of the Government and the war grew with these events while other troubles mounted. Spain declared war on Britain, Holland was helping the rebels, Russia was disputing the British blockade of the colonies and the war in America itself was dragging along vainly.

  In May 1781, Lord Cornwallis, commander in the south, set out to consolidate his front by abandoning South Carolina for Virginia, where he established a base at Yorktown on the coast at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. From here he could maintain contact by sea with Clinton’s forces in New York. Reinforced by other British troops in the area, his strength was 7500. Washington, stationed on the Hudson at this time, was joined by the Comte de Rochambeau with French troops from Rhode Island for a planned attack on New York. At this moment a communication from Admiral de Grasse in the West Indies informed them that he was sailing with 3000 French troops for Chesapeake Bay and could reach there by the end of August. Washington and Rochambeau turned and marched for Virginia, which they reached early in September, hemming in Cornwallis by land.

  In the meantime, a British fleet met de Grasse in action off Chesapeake Bay and after some mutual damage returned to New York for repairs, leaving the French in command of the waters off Yorktown. Cornwallis was now blocked by land and sea. A desperate effort to break out in rowboats across the York River was frustrated by a storm. His only hope was return of the British fleet with help from New York. The fleet did not come. The allied army of some 9000 Americans and nearly 8000 French moved forward against the York-town redcoats. Waiting for rescue, Cornwallis progressively drew in his lines while the besiegers advanced theirs. After three weeks the British situation was hopeless. On 17 October 1781, four years to the day after Saratoga, Cornwallis opened parley for surrender and two days later, in a historic ceremony, his army laid down its arms while the band played, as everybody knows, a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” The fleet bringing Clinton’s forces from New York arrived five days later, when it was too late.

  “Oh God, it is all over!” cried Lord North when the news was brought to him on 25 November. Doubtless it was a cry of relief. That it was all over was not realized everywhere at once, but weariness of a losing struggle and the demand to make an end of it began to lap at the King. A barrage of motions by the opposition to terminate hostilities slowly gained votes as the country gentlemen, fearing more and more taxes, deserted the Government. In December a motion against the war gained 178 votes. In February 1782 the issue was brought to finality by the independent-minded Generàl Conway. As he had been the first at the time of the Stamp Act to foresee “fatal consequences” lying in wait for the Government along the path it was taking, so he was now to sound their knell. He moved “That the war on the continent of North America might no longer be pursued for the impracticable purpose of reducing the inhabitants of that country to obedience.” In a supporting speech as eloquent and effective as any heard in the House within living memory, he roused members to a fervor that swept them to within one vote of the majority: the tally was 194 to 193. The opposition, uniting at last behind the powerful scent of office, threw itself against the Government’s fingerhold. Votes of censure followed one upon another, but after the peak reached by Conway’s motion, the Government recovered just enough to hold on.

  When Lord North, still held in office by the King, asked Parliament for a further large war loan, the House finally balked, the Government’s majority broke and the King in his misery drafted, though he did not deliver, a message of abdication. In it he said that the change in sentiment in the Commons incapacitated him from conducting the war effectively and from making a peace that was not destructive “to the commerce as well as the essential rights of the British nation.” At the same time he expressed his fidelity to the constitution, overlooking the fact that unless he abdicated, the constitution required him to obey the opinion of Parliament.

  In March, the Government’s fingerhold was pried loose. A bill authorizing the Crown to make peace passed on 4 March without a division. On 8 March the Government survived a vote of censure by only ten votes. On 15 March, on a motion expressing no confidence in ministers who had spent £100,000,000 to lose thirteen colonies, the margin was reduced to nine. Notice was given of two more motions of no confidence to follow. Earlier, Lord North had at last informed the King resolutely and definitively that he must go, and on 20 March, forestalling another test of confidence, his resignation and that of his Cabinet took effect. On 27 March a new government, headed by Rockingham, took office, with Shelburne and Fox as Secretaries of State, Camden, Richmond, Grafton, Dunning and Admiral Keppel in other posts, General Conway as Commander-in-Chief, and Burke and Barré as Paymasters of the Army and Navy, respectively.

  Even with such partisans of America—as they had been when in opposition—now in office, Britain’s acknowledgment of the nationhood of her former colonies was ungracious in the extreme. No minister, peer or even M.P. or Under-Secretary was named to conduct the peace negotiations. The single envoy sent to open preliminary talks with Franklin in Paris was a successful merchant and contractor for the British Army named Richard Oswald. A friend of Adam Smith, who had recommended him to Shelburne, he was to remain, unsupported by any formal delegation, the lone negotiator throughout.

  Rockingham died suddenly in July 1782, to be succeeded as First Minister by Shelburne, who shrank from irrevocably and explicitly recognizing independence. He thought now of federation, but it was too late for statesmanship that Britain might earlier have used. The Americans insisted that their independent status was the sine qua non to be recognized in the preamble, and so it had to be. With some stalling, formal negotiations with Franklin, Adams, Laurens and John Jay began in September and the Treaty of Paris was concluded in November, to take effect in January 1783. The King’s final comment gained nothing in graciousness. He felt less unhappy, he wrote to Lord Shelburne, about the “dismemberment of America from this Empire,” in the knowledge “that knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not be in the end an evil that they become aliens to this Kingdom.”

  In summary, Britain’s follies were not so perverse as the Popes’. Ministers were not deaf to rising discontent, because they had no chance to be; expressed by their equals, it rang in their ears in every debate and rudely impinged on them in the action of riots and mobs. They remained unresponsive by virtue of their majority in Parliament, but they worried about losing it, worked hard and spent heavily to hold it and could not enjoy the popes’ illusion of invulnerability. Nor was private avarice their besetting sin although they were as subject as most men to the stings of ambition. Being accustomed to wealth, property and privilege and most of them born to it, they
were not so driven by desire for gain as to make it a primary obsession.

  Given the intention to retain sovereignty, insistence on the right to tax was justifiable per se; but it was insistence on a right “you know you cannot exert,” and in the face of evidence that the attempt would be fatal to the voluntary allegiance of the colonies, that was folly. Furthermore, method rather than motivation was at fault. Implementation of policy grew progressively more inept, ineffective and profoundly provocative. Finally, it came down to attitude.

  The attitude was a sense of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable. A feeling of this kind leads to ignorance of the world and of others because it suppresses curiosity. The Grenville, Rockingham, Chatham-Grafton and North ministries went through a full decade of mounting conflict with the colonies without any of them sending a representative, much less a minister, across the Atlantic to make acquaintance, to discuss, to find out what was spoiling, even endangering, the relationship and how it might be better managed. They were not interested in the Americans because they considered them rabble or at best children whom it was inconceivable to treat—or even fight—as equals. In all their communications, the British could not bring themselves to refer to the opposite Commander-in-Chief as General Washington but only as Mister. In his wistful regret that “our rulers” had not toured America instead of Europe to finish their education, William Eden was supposing that a view of the magnificence of the country would have made them more anxious to retain it, but nothing suggests that it would have improved their dealings with the people.

  Americans were the settlers and colonizers of a territory deemed so essential that its loss would spell ruin, but the British wall of superiority precluded knowledge and promoted fatal underestimation. Meeting it during the peace negotiations, John Adams wrote, “The pride and vanity of that nation is a disease; it is a delirium; it has been flattered and inflamed so long by themselves and others that it perverts everything.”

  Unsuitability for government, while an unwilled folly, was a folly of the system, which was peculiarly vulnerable to the lack of an effective head. At his dynamic best, Pitt had engineered England’s triumph in the Seven Years’ War, and his son was to hold the controls effectively against Napoleon. In between, a hapless government shuffled and blundered. Dukes and noble lords in the reign of George III did not take well to official responsibility. Grafton, in his reluctance and sense of unfitness and once-a-week attendance, Townshend in his recklessness, Hillsborough in his arrogant obtuseness, Sandwich, Northington, Weymouth and others in their gambling and drinking, Germain in his haughty incapacity, Richmond and Rockingham in their moods of aloofness and devotion to their country pursuits, poor Lord North in his intense dislike of his job, made a mess of a situation that would have been difficult even for the wisest. One cannot escape the impression that the level of British intelligence and competence in both civil and military positions in the period 1763–83 was, on the whole, though not in every case, low. Whether that was bad luck or was owing to the almost exclusive hold of the ultraprivileged on decisionmaking positions is not clear beyond question. The underprivileged and the middle class often do no better. What is clear is that when incapacity is joined by complacency, the result is the worst possible combination.

  Finally there is the “terrible encumbrance” of dignity and honor; of putting false value on these and mistaking them for self-interest; of sacrificing the possible to principle, when the principle represents “a right you know you cannot exert.” If Lord Chesterfield could remark this in 1765 and Burke and others repeatedly plead for expediency rather than token display of authority, the government’s refusal to see it for themselves must be designated folly. They persisted in first pursuing, then fighting for an aim whose result would be harmful whether they won or lost. Self-interest lay in retaining the colonies in goodwill, and if this was considered the hinge of British prosperity and yet incompatible with legislative supremacy, then supremacy should have remained, as so many advised, unexercised. Conciliation, Rockingham once said, could be brought about by “tacit compact” and much remaining “unascertained.”

  Although the war and the humiliation poisoned Anglo-American relations for a long time, Britain learned from the experience. Fifty years later, after a period of troubled relations with Canada, Commonwealth status began to emerge from the Durham Report, which resulted from England’s recognition that any other course would lead to a repetition of the American rebellion. The haunting question that remains is whether, if the ministers of George III had been other than they were, some such status or form of union between Britain and America might have been attainable and in that case might have created a preponderance of trans-Atlantic power that would have deterred challengers and perhaps spared the world the Great War of 1914–18 and its unending sequels.

  It has been said that if the protagonists of Hamlet and Othello were reversed, there would have been no tragedy: Hamlet would have seen through Iago in no time and Othello would not have hesitated to kill King Claudius. If the British actors before and after 1775 had been other than they were, there might have been statesmanship instead of folly, with a train of altered consequences reaching to the present. The hypothetical has charm, but the actuality of government makes history.

  * It has been suggested that the merchants’ objections were muted because at that stage the leading colonial agent, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, kept in mind that his position as Deputy Postmaster General in America and his son’s as Governor of New Jersey were held at the pleasure of the Crown.

  * Much has been written on whether this was or was not an early manifestation of the King’s later insanity. Since no other attack occurred until the definite onset of his mental illness in 1788, more than twenty years later, the King may be taken as sane throughout the period of the American conflict.

  * This is an unhistorical term not then in use, but because it carries an exact connotation to the modern reader that no other word equals, I have decided with an uneasy conscience to use it.

  * The discrepancy between this figure and the three million of Chatham’s speech of January 1766 may reflect inexact knowledge of the facts or inexact parliamentary reporting, both of which were features of the time. The actual population is estimated to have been approximately 2.5 million.

  * St. Stephen’s represents the Houses of Parliament.

  * The surname Germain was adopted in 1770 upon an inheritance from a family- friend by that name.

  Chapter Five

  AMERICA BETRAYS HERSELF IN VIETNAM

  1. In Embryo: 1945–46

  Ignorance was not a factor in the American endeavor in Vietnam pursued through five successive presidencies, although it was to become an excuse. Ignorance of country and culture there may have been, but not ignorance of the contra-indications, even the barriers, to achieving the objectives of American policy. All the conditions and reasons precluding a successful outcome were recognized or foreseen at one time or another during the thirty years of our involvement. American intervention was not a progress sucked step by step into an unsuspected quagmire. At no time were policy-makers unaware of the hazards, obstacles and negative developments. American intelligence was adequate, informed observation flowed steadily from the field to the capital, special investigative missions were repeatedly sent out, independent reportage to balance professional optimism—when that prevailed—was never lacking. The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.

  The question raised is why did the policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter-productive. The “why” of this refusal and this addiction may disclose itself in the course of retr
acing the tale of American policy-making in Vietnam.

  The beginning lay in the reversal during the last months of World War II of President Roosevelt’s previous determination not to allow, and certainly not to assist, the restoration of French colonial rule in Indochina. The engine of reversal was the belief, in response to strident French demand and damaged French pride resulting from the German occupation, that it was essential to strengthen France as the linchpin in Western Europe against Soviet expansion, which, as victory approached, had become the dominant concern in Washington. Until this time Roosevelt’s disgust with colonialism and his intention to see it eliminated in Asia had been firm (and a cause of basic dispute with Britain). He believed French misrule of Indochina represented colonialism in its worst form. Indochina “should not go back to France,” he told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in January 1943; “the case is perfectly clear. France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants—for nearly a hundred years and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. [They] are entitled to something better than that.”