The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  To convince the President once and for all of a dead end in Vietnam, Clifford proposed a conference of senior former statesmen to render a verdict. The “Wise Men,” as they were later dubbed, included three outstanding military figures, Generals Ridgway, Omar Bradley and Maxwell Taylor; former Secretary of State Acheson; former Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon; former Ambassador Lodge; John McCloy, former High Commissioner for Germany; Arthur Dean, negotiator of the Korean armistice; Robert Murphy, veteran diplomat; George Ball; Cyrus Vance; Arthur Goldberg, and his successor on the Supreme Court, Justice Abe Fortas, Johnson’s close friend. These were men of the linked power centers of law, finance and government, not dissenters or peaceniks or long-haired radicals, but persons concerned with maintaining the vested interests of the system who had wider connections in the outside world than were available to the insulated incumbent in the White House.

  Their discussions gave serious attention to the increasing economic harm being done to the United States and the bitter public sentiments that were rising. Although some continued to support the bombing, most did not, and the majority agreed that insistence on military victory had trapped the United States in a position that could only get worse and that was not compatible with the national interest. Ridgway argued that if the assumption that Vietnamese leadership could be developed was valid, such development should with American support be accomplished in the space of two years and that Saigon could be given notice of this time limit, after which “We begin a phase-down of our forces.” While not a solid consensus, the argument conveyed to the President was that a change of policy was unavoidable; the unspoken advice pointed to negotiation and disengagement.

  A nationwide television speech by the President to explain Tet had been scheduled for 31 March. Meeting with several of the “men in a dream”—Rusk, Rostow and William Bundy—and with the President’s speech writer Henry Macpherson, who shared his disillusionment, Clifford insisted that the speech must make a sharp departure from past policy. As approved so far, it would be a “disaster.” What the advisers still did not understand, he told them, was that among influential people there had been “a tremendous erosion of support, maybe in reaction to Tet, maybe from a feeling that we are in a hopeless bog. The idea of going deeper into the bog strikes them as mad.” Major groups in national life, he went on inexorably, “the business community, the press, the churches, professional groups, college presidents, students and most of the intellectual community have turned against the war.”

  For public consumption, the speech was redirected toward a serious offer of negotiated peace and a unilateral bombing halt. The intention behind it remained unmodified. Johnson had been assured by the military that because the rainy season would enforce reduced operations, a bombing pause would not cost him anything. Moreover, the White House circle and the Joint Chiefs believed that no offer of peace talks would inhibit pursuit of the goal by force of arms because Hanoi was certain to turn it down. Their thinking was made plain in a significant cable to the American ambassadors in the SEATO nations advising them on the day before the scheduled speech of the new overture. The ambassadors were instructed that when informing their host governments they should “Make it clear that Hanoi is most likely to denounce the project and then free our hand after a short period.” Clearly, Johnson and his circle were contemplating no change in conduct of the war; the problem was domestic public opinion in the context of the coming election. In the same spirit as the ambassadors were alerted, so were the commanders at CINCPAC and in Saigon. Among the factors “pertinent to the President’s decision,” General Wheeler informed them, was the fact that the support of the public and Congress since Tet “has decreased at an accelerating rate,” and if the trend continued “public support of our objectives in Southeast Asia will be too frail to sustain the effort.” But he concluded with the hope that the President’s decision to offer the bombing halt “will reverse the growing dissent.”

  As delivered, Johnson’s public address was noble and open-handed. “We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations. So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict … and doing so unilaterally and at once.” Aircraft and naval vessels had been ordered to make no attack on North Vietnam north of the 20th parallel, but only in the critical battlefield area at the DMZ, “where the continued enemy build-up directly threatens allied forward positions.” The area to be free of bombing contained 90 percent of the Northern population and the principal populated and food-producing areas. The bombing might be completely stopped “if our restraint is matched by restraint in Hanoi.” Johnson called upon Britain and the Soviet Union, as co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference, to help move the unilateral de-escalation toward “genuine peace in Asia,” and upon President Ho Chi Minh to “respond positively and favorably.” Making no mention of an assumed rejection by Hanoi or of a return to combat by the United States thereafter, he looked forward to a peace “based on the Geneva Accords of 1954,” permitting South Vietnam to be “free of any outside domination or interference from us or anybody else.” No reference was made to the requested addition of 200,000 men; the possibility of future escalation was left open.

  After a moving peroration about divisiveness and unity, Johnson came to the unexpected announcement that electrified the nation and a good part of the world: that he would not “permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year,” and accordingly, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my Party for another term as your President.”

  It was abdication, not in recognition of a dead end in the war or abandoning combat but in recognition of a political reality. Johnson was a political animal to the marrow of his bones. His unpopularity was now patent, dragging down with it the Democratic Party. As the incumbent President, Johnson was not prepared to have to struggle for and quite possibly lose re-nomination; he could not suffer such humiliation. The Wisconsin primary, in a state loud with student protest, was scheduled for 2 April, two days ahead, and field agents had telephoned blunt predictions that he would run behind Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. And so with righteous words about “divisiveness among us all tonight,” and his duty to bind up wounds, heal our history, keep the American commitment and other commendable restorative tasks, he took himself grandly and in good timing out of the contest.

  Three days later, on 3 April 1968, Hanoi astonished its opponents by announcing its readiness to make contacts with representatives of the United States with a view to determining “unconditional cessation” of the bombing and all other acts of war “so that talks might start.”

  The 22-year folly since American troopships brought the French back to Indochina was now complete—though not finished. Five more years of American effort to disengage without losing prestige were to compound it. In paucity of cause, vain perseverance and ultimate self-damage, the belligerency that Johnson’s Administration initiated and pursued was folly of an unusual kind in that absolutely no good can be said to have come of it; all results were malign—except one, the awakening of the “public ire.” Too many Americans had come to feel that the war was wrong, out of all proportion to the national interest and unsuccessful besides. Populists like to speak of the “wisdom of the people”; the American people were not so much wise as fed up, which in certain cases is a kind of wisdom. Withdrawal of public support proved the undoing of an Executive that believed it could conduct limited war without engaging the national will of a democracy.

  6. Exit: 1969–73

  Use of mustard gas in World War I had to be abandoned because it had an erratic tendency to blow back on the user. The war in Vietnam in its final period turned back upon the United States, deepening disesteem and distrust of government and, in reverse, breeding a hostility in government toward the people that was to have serious consequences. Although the lesson of Lyndon Johnson was plain, the legacy of
folly gripped his successor. No better able to make the enemy come to terms acceptable to the United States, the new Administration, like the old, could find no other way than to resort to military coercion, with the result that a war already rejected by a large portion of the American people was prolonged, with all its potential for domestic damage, throughout another presidential term.

  Johnson’s last year in office, despite the bombing halt and Hanoi’s agreement to talk, had brought the war no nearer to an end. Meetings were talks about where to hold the talks, about protocol, about participation by South Vietnam and the NLF, about seating and even the shape of the table. Keeping to their original demand for “unconditional cessation” of bombing as a pre-condition for negotiations, the North Vietnamese would not move from procedure to substance. The United States, while maintaining the bombing halt north of the 20th parallel, tripled its air strikes against infiltration routes below the line and kept search-and-destroy missions at maximum pressure in the effort to improve Saigon’s position for a settlement. Two hundred Americans a week were killed in these combats, and the total number of Americans killed in action in 1968 reached 14,000.

  The year flared into violence and hatred at home, marked by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the riots following King’s death, the anarchy and vandalism of student radicals, the vicious reaction and police savagery of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Domestic intelligence agencies expanded activity against possible subversives, opening private mail, employing agents provocateurs, compiling dossiers on citizens who through some suspect association might be considered dangers to the state.

  For the sake of progress in the Vietnam talks, the American delegates, Ambassador Harriman and Cyrus Vance, urged the President to declare a total bombing halt. Johnson refused without reciprocity by Hanoi in reducing military activity, which Hanoi in turn refused unless the bombing ceased first. At the desperate pleas of his party as election approached, Johnson declared a total bombing halt on 1 November, but progress was then frustrated by President Thieu of South Vietnam, who, expecting greater support from a Republican victory in the United States, balked, refusing to participate in the talks. When at last substantive negotiations began in January 1969, a new team under President Richard Nixon and his foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, was in command.

  In words reminiscent of Eisenhower’s electoral pledge to “go to Korea” to end an unpopular war, Nixon in his campaign for the presidency assured voters, “We will end this one and win the peace.” He did not say how, justifying reticence on the ground that he was not going to say anything that could upset Johnson’s negotiations in Paris and not “take any position that I will be bound by at a later point.” But by stressing the theme “End the war and win the peace,” he managed to give the impression that he had a plan. He appeared to take a realistic view. “If the war goes on six months after I become President,” he privately told a journalist, “it will be my war,” and he said he was determined not to “end up like LBJ, holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face in the street. I’m going to stop that war—fast.” If this determination was genuine, it indicated common sense, a faculty that has a hard time surviving in high office. Once Nixon was installed in the presidency, the promised process of stopping the war was stood on its head to become one of prolonging it. The new President was discovered to be as unwilling as his predecessor to accept non-success of the war aim and as fixed in the belief that additional force could bring the enemy to terms.

  Inheriting a bad situation that could bring them nothing but trouble, Nixon and Kissinger, whom the President had chosen to head the National Security Council, would have done well to consider their problem as if there were a sign pinned to the wall, “Do Not Repeat What Has Already Failed.” That might have suggested a glance back to Dien Bien Phu; a clear appraisal of the enemy’s stake and his will and capacity to fight for it; and a close look at the reasons for the consistent failure of all Johnson’s efforts to negotiate. Reflection thereafter might have led to the conclusion that to continue a war for the sake of consolidating a free-standing regime in South Vietnam was both vain and non-essential to American security, and that to try to gain by negotiation a result which the enemy was determined not to cede was a waste of time—short of willingness to apply unlimited force. Even if negotiation under military pressure could bring the desired result, it would contain no guarantee, as already pointed out by Reischauer in 1967, that ten or twenty years later “political rule over South Vietnam would not be more or less what it would have been if we had never got involved there.”

  The logical course was to cut losses, forgo assurance of a viable non-Communist South Vietnam and leave without negotiating with the enemy except for a one-condition agreement buying back American prisoners of war in exchange for a pledged time limit on American withdrawal. Just such an option was in fact presented as the least militant in a range of several options proposed, at the request of the Administration, by specialists of the Rand Corporation; it was eliminated from the list by Kissinger and his military advisers before the proposals were presented to the President, but it would not have appealed to him if he had seen it. From being a fiction about the security of the United States, the point of the war had now been transformed into a test of the prestige and reputation of the United States—and, as he was bound to see it, of the President personally. Nixon too had no wish to preside over defeat.

  He did have a plan and it did involve a radical reversal of Johnson’s course—up to a point. The intention was to dissolve domestic protest by ending the draft and bringing home American ground combat forces. This did not mean relinquishing the war aim. The American air war in Vietnam would be intensified and if necessary extended further against the North’s supply lines and bases in Cambodia. To compensate for American troop withdrawal, a program of vastly increased aid, arming, training and indoctrinating would enable South Vietnam’s forces to take over the war, with continued American air support. Known as “Vietnamization,” this effort was perhaps belated in what had always been supposed to be “their” war. The theory was that floods of matériel would somehow accomplish what had not been accomplished over the past 25 years—the creation of a motivated fighting force able to preserve a viable non-Communist state, at least for an “acceptable interval.”

  Besides appeasing Americans, unilateral withdrawal of American troops was designed to demonstrate to Hanoi “that we were serious in seeking a diplomatic settlement” and thus encourage the enemy to negotiate acceptable terms. If, however, the North Vietnamese proved intractable, the punitive level of the bombing would be raised until, convinced of the impossibility of victory, they would be forced to give up or let the war simply fade away. To assist in persuading Hanoi, hints were conveyed through the Soviet Union that blockade and mining and more forceful action against supply lines and sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos were in prospect. As a gesture of intent, the first secret bombing of Cambodia took place in March 1969, when Nixon had been only two months in office; a second followed in April, and the raids became regular and frequent in May.

  “Vietnamization” in effect amounted to enlarging and arming ARVN. Considering that arming, training and indoctrinating under American auspices had been pursued for fifteen years without spectacular results, the expectation that these would now enable ARVN successfully to take over the war could qualify as wooden-headedness. Recalling the conditions of 1970, an American sergeant who had been attached to a South Vietnamese unit said, “We had 50 percent AWOLs all the time and most of the [ARVN] company and platoon leaders were gone all the time.” The soldiers had no urge to fight under officers “who spent their time stealing and trafficking in drugs.”

  The grander folly was to reverse the conduct of the war only halfway—that is, by taking out the Americans while maintaining the strategy of increasing punitive pressure from the air (or “negative reinforcement,” as it was called). Apart from its domestic purpose, disen
gagement on the ground would have made sense only if the objective it had been intended to achieve had been given up at the same time.

  Withdrawal of combat troops is an unusual way to win a war, or even to force the way to a favorable settlement. Once started, it could not easily be halted and would, like escalation, build its own momentum and, as forces dwindled, become irreversible. Understandably bitter, the American military saw it as precluding success and, since they had small confidence in Vietnamization, making even a tenable settlement unlikely. It had become necessary because the idea that the war could be fought without arousing the public ire had proved an illusion. Nixon and Kissinger, for all their hard-headed calculations, were apparently victims of another illusion. They appear to have thought that American withdrawal from ground combat could be accomplished without weakening South Vietnam’s already infirm morale and without re-affirming the determination of the North. Of course it did both.

  Reduction of effort does not signal to the enemy stern and determined intentions, but rather the reverse, as in the case of General Howe’s evacuation of Philadelphia. American colonists saw in that departure a trend that was drawing the British away, and knew they need make no terms with the Carlisle Peace Commission. Hanoi received the same message. When Nixon announced the withdrawal program in June 1969 and the first American contingent of 25,000 sailed for home in August, the North Vietnamese knew the contest would end in their favor. Whatever the cost, they had only to hold out. As if in recognition, Ho Chi Minh, after half a century’s struggle, died in September.