The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Nevertheless, anti-war votes in the lower House were rising. When 153 Representatives, the largest number so far, voted against tabling, that is killing, the Cooper-Church Amendment to cut off funds for operations in Cambodia after July, it was a rumble of revolt. In the following year the number rose to 177 in favor of the Mansfield Amendment, originally fixing a deadline of nine months (modified by the House to “as soon as possible”) for withdrawal, pending release of the POWs. Though small, the rise implied growing opposition, even the possible approach of that unimaginable moment when the Legislature might say “Stop” to the Executive.

  In 1971, ARVN forces with American air support, although without American ground forces, invaded Laos in a repeat of the Cambodian operation. The cost of “Vietnamization” for ARVN proved to be a 50 percent casualty rate, with the added impression that they were now fighting and dying to permit Americans to depart. This was reinforced by Washington’s tendency to herald all operations as designed to “save American lives.” Anti-Americanism in Vietnam spread, and with it undercover cooperation with the NLF and open demands for a political compromise. Protest movements revived—this time against Thieu in place of Diem. Morale among the remaining American forces sank, with units avoiding or refusing combat, wide use of drugs, and—something new to the American Army—cases of “fragging,” or murder by hand grenade, of officers and NCOs.

  At home, polls showed a majority beginning to emerge in favor of removal of all troops by the end of the year, even if the result were Communist control of South Vietnam. For the first time a majority agreed to the proposition that “It was morally wrong for the U.S. to be fighting in Vietnam,” and that getting involved in the first place was a “mistake.” The public is volatile, polls are ephemeral, and answers may respond to the language of the question. Immorality was discovered because, as Lord North said of his war, “111 success rendering it at length unpopular, the people began to cry out for peace.”

  By 1972, the war had lasted longer than any foreign conflict in American history, and the six months Nixon had given himself had stretched out to three years, with 15,000 additional American casualties and the end not yet in sight.

  All the Paris talks and Kissinger’s secret missions failed of result, essentially because the United States was trying to negotiate itself out of a war it could not win and look good at the same time. North Vietnam was equally to blame for the prolongation, but the stakes were not equal. It was their land and their future that for them were at stake. In March 1972, when most American combat forces had gone, North Vietnam mounted an offensive that was at last to propel the war to an end.

  Launched across the DMZ, 120,000 North Vietnamese troops with Soviet tanks and field guns pierced ARVN defenses and advanced against the populated centers around Saigon. Unable to respond on the ground, the United States re-activated the first stage of the “savage blow” planned in 1969, sending the B-52S over the North for heavy attacks on fuel depots and transportation targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Nixon announced the campaign as the “decisive military action to end the war.” A month later Kissinger offered a plan for a standstill cease-fire which for the first time omitted the requirement of Northern withdrawal from the South and which declared American readiness to withdraw all forces within four months after return of the prisoners. Political settlement was left open. The four-month deadline might have summoned in Hanoi the wisdom to accept, but having always refused to negotiate under bombing, they did so again.

  With re-election on his mind, Nixon was enraged by the enemy’s recalcitrance and swore among associates that “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.” Against advice of a fearful domestic reaction and the risk that the Russians might cancel the Moscow summit scheduled in two weeks along with the signing of the painfully negotiated SALT agreement, he announced the second half of the “savage blow”—naval blockade and mining of Haiphong harbor and round-the-clock raids by the B-52s. Because of nervousness about damage to Soviet and other foreign shipping, resort to blockade and mining had long been avoided and were expected to arouse howls of censure at home. The White House staff, in its hopped-up state of nerves, believed the decision “could make or break the President” and spent over $8000 from election funds to elicit a flood of phony telegrams of approval and concocted advertisements in newspapers so that the White House could announce opinion running in support of the President. They might have spared themselves the exertion; while the press and articulate dissenters condemned the blockade, public opinion was not outraged but seemed rather to appreciate tough American action in the face of North Vietnamese intransigence.

  Another incident of sharp practice came to light shortly afterward when five agents of CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President), connected to the two chief plumbers (Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy) who had staged the Ellsberg raid, were caught in the act of rifling the files and bugging the phones of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building. Ultimate revelations of what the presidency was engaged in at this time were not to become public knowledge until the trials of the five agents and the hearings of Senator Ervin’s special investigating committee in the following year. They were to uncover an accumulated tale of cover-up, blackmail, suborned testimony, hush money, espionage, sabotage, use of Federal powers for the harassment of “enemies,” and a program by some fifty hired operators to pervert and subvert the campaigns of Democratic candidates by “dirty tricks,” or what in the choice language of the White House crew was referred to as “ratfucking.” The final list of indictable crimes would include burglary, bribery, forgery, perjury, theft, conspiracy and obstructing justice, most of it over-reacting and, like the tape that was to bring down the edifice in ruins, self-inflicted.

  Character again was fate. When worked on by the passions of Vietnam, Nixon’s character, and that of the associates he recruited, plunged his Administration into the stew that further soured respect for government. Disgrace of a ruler is no great matter in world history, but disgrace of government is traumatic, for government cannot function without respect. Washington suffered no physical sack like that which disrespect for the Papacy visited upon Rome, but the penalty has not been negligible.

  While only the tip of the Watergate scandal so far showed, the explosion of combat in Vietnam brought results. Blockade combined with destruction of fuel and ammunition stores drastically reduced North Vietnam’s supplies. The Russians proved to be more concerned about detente with the United States than about Hanoi’s need. They welcomed Nixon in Moscow and advised their friends to come to terms. China too wanted to dampen the conflict. In the flush of re-opened relations recently brought off by Nixon and Kissinger, they were now interested in playing off the United States against Russia, which led Mao Tse-tung, during a visit by NLF leaders, to advise them to give up their insistence on the overthrow of Thieu, until now their sine qua non. “Do as I did,” he said. “I once made an accord with Chiang Kai-shek when it was necessary.” Persuaded that their day too would come, the NLF agreed.

  The North too, suffering under the B-52s, was ready to yield the political condition. From the evidence of polls in the United States, where the Democratic candidate was floundering in the gaffes of an inept campaign, Hanoi realized that Nixon would be in command for the next four years and concluded that it could get better terms from him before the election. Negotiations were renewed, complicated compromises and intricate arrangements were hammered out to permit United States disengagement behind a facade of Thieu’s survival, and Kissinger was able to announce on 31 October, prematurely as it proved, that “Peace is at hand.”

  Thieu refused absolutely to accept the draft treaty, which allowed 145,000 North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South and recognized the NLF as a participant in the future political solution under its newly assumed title of Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG). Considering that to do otherwise would have been to acquiesce in his own demise, h
is position was not unnatural. At this juncture, Nixon was stunningly re-elected by the largest popular and electoral majority ever recorded, an extraordinary triumph for a President who not long afterward was driven to assure the American people that “I am not a crook.” The landslide was the result of many causes: the weakness and vacillations of his opponent, Senator McGovern, whose ill-chosen declaration that he would go “on his knees” to Hanoi and his proposal of a $1000 welfare give-away to every family repelled the voters; the success of the “dirty tricks,” which had destroyed a stronger candidate in the primaries; public relief in the expectation of peace at last; and perhaps in the background a reaction of middle America against the counterculture of long hair, hippies, drugs and radicals with all their implied threat to accepted values.

  Invigorated by his mandate, Nixon exerted the strongest pressure on both sides, in Vietnam for a settlement. He assured Thieu in a letter that while his concern about the remaining presence of North Vietnamese forces in the South was understandable, “You have my absolute assurance that if Hanoi fails to abide by the, terms of this agreement, it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.” The intention was undoubtedly just that, for the Paris agreement had not undertaken to withdraw air power from carriers in nearby waters or from bases in Thailand and Taiwan. The Joint Chiefs were in fact directed to draw plans for possible retaliatory action, using air power from Thailand, and $1 billion worth of arms were ordered for delivery to Saigon. Thieu was also told that if he continued obdurate, the United States could make peace without him, which failed to move him. In re-opened secret negotiations with the North, Kissinger backed away from the agreed terms; he now asked for a token withdrawal of Northern troops from the South, lowered status for the NLF and other changes, accompanied by threats of renewed military coercion.

  Re-confirmed in its belief in the perfidy of the United States, Hanoi refused to make the required adjustments. Freed of concern about public protest, Nixon responded with a ferocious blow, the notorious Christmas bombing, heaviest American action of the war. In twelve days of December the Air Force pounded North Vietnam with a greater tonnage of bombs than the total of the past three years, reducing areas of Hanoi and Haiphong to rubble, destroying Hanoi’s airport, factories and power plants. One effect blew back. Plane losses owed to North Vietnam’s strong concentration of SAM missile defenses cost America 95 to 100 new prisoners of war and the worrisome price of 15 heavy bombers (or 34, according to Hanoi). The purpose of the Christmas bombing was twofold: to bring about a sufficient weakening of North Vietnam to permit the survival of Saigon for long enough to allow the United States to be gone and, by this proof of America’s determination, to overcome Thieu’s resistance or else to provide the excuse to proceed without him. “We had walked the last mile with him,” according to a later explanation, “and as a consequence we could settle.”

  The fierce attack so near the end darkened America’s reputation at home and abroad, enhancing its image of brutality: New members elected to Congress by the revised rules in Democratic primaries promised an approaching challenge, which took visible shape when the Democratic caucus of both Houses voted on 2 and 4 January for an “immediate” cease-fire and cut-off of all funds for military operations in any of the countries of Indochina, contingent only upon release of the POWs and safe withdrawal of American forces. Faced by the long-discounted possibility of revolt by Congress, and with Watergate disclosures rising in Judge John J. Sirica’s courtroom, the Administration proposed to call off the bombing if Hanoi would resume peace talks. Hanoi agreed; negotiations of desperation were resumed; a treaty was drawn and Thieu given an explicit ultimatum that unless he complied, the United States would terminate economic and military support and conclude the treaty without him.

  In the final treaty, the two conditions for which North Vietnam and the United States had prolonged the war for four years—overthrow of Thieu’s regime on the one hand and removal of North Vietnam’s forces from the South on the other—were both abandoned; political status of the old Viet-Cong, now metamorphosed into the PRG, was acknowledged, though to spare Thieu’s feelings not explicitly; the DMZ or partition line, whose elimination Hanoi had demanded, was retained but—going back to Geneva—as a “provisional not a political or territorial boundary.” The unity of Vietnam was implicitly recognized in an article providing that “The reunification of Vietnam shall be carried out” by peaceful discussion among the parties, thereby relegating “external aggression” across an “international boundary”—America’s casus belli for so many years—to the dustbin of history.

  Thieu gripped refusal with the rigor of death until the last hour of Nixon’s ultimatum, then gave way. Signed in Paris on 27 January 1973, the treaty left the situation on paper no different from the insecure settlement of Geneva nineteen years before. To the physical reality had since been added more than half a million deaths in North and South, hundreds of thousands of wounded and destitute, burned and crippled children, landless peasants, a ravaged land deforested and pitted with bomb craters and a people torn by mutual hatred. The procedures for eventual agreement by the two zones were generally recognized as unworkable and an early resort to force widely assumed. The viability of a non-Communist South Vietnam, for which America had wrecked Indochina and betrayed herself, inspired confidence in no one—unless in Nixon and Kissinger, who convinced themselves that the United States could still retrieve the situation if necessary. What was left standing by the treaty was a temporary screen behind which America, clutching a tattered “peace with honor,” could escape.

  In the aftermath, as everyone knows, Hanoi overcame Saigon within two years. When Nixon had been destroyed by Watergate and Congress had finally gathered the votes to preclude, by cutting off funds, American re-intervention, North Vietnam launched a final offensive and the disheartened South failed to withstand the onslaught. For all that some units fought hard, ARVN as a national army, in the words of an American soldier, “was like a house without any foundation—the collapse came naturally.” The Communists established their rule over the whole of Vietnam, and similar results were accomplished in Cambodia. The new political order in Vietnam was approximately what it would have been if America had never intervened, except in being far more vengeful and cruel. Perhaps the greatest folly was Hanoi’s—to fight so steadfastly for thirty years for a cause that became a brutal tyranny when it was won.

  Congressional refusal to allow the United States to re-intervene represented the functioning, not, as Kissinger lamented, “the breakdown of our democratic political process.” Rather than weakness of American will to see the task through, it was belated recognition of a process clearly contrary and damaging to self-interest, and the summoning of political responsibility to terminate it. It came too late, however, for the country to escape punishment. Human casualties are bearable when they are believed to have served a purpose; they are bitter when, as in this case, 45,000 killed and 300,000 wounded were sacrificed for nothing. Expenditures of about $20 billion annually for nearly a decade, amounting to a total of about $150 billion over and above what would have been the normal military budget, contorted the economy to a condition that has not since been righted.

  More important than the physical effects was the lowered trust in and authority of government. Legislation by Congress in the post-Vietnam years was repeatedly directed to restricting the Executive in various kinds of conduct on the assumption that without such restrictions, it would act irregularly or illegitimately. The public too learned suspicion, and many would have felt their attitude expressed in two words by one of the White House staff, Gordon Strachan, who on being asked by the Ervin committee what advice he would give to other young people wishing to serve in government, answered, “Stay away.” For many, confidence in the righteousness of their country gave way to cynicism. Who since Vietnam would venture to say of America in simple belief that she was the “last best hope of earth”? What America lost in Vietnam was, to put it in
one word, virtue.

  The follies that produced this result begin with continuous over-reacting: in the invention of endangered “national security,” the invention of “vital interest,” the invention of a “commitment” which rapidly assumed a life of its own, casting a spell over the inventor. In this process the major mover was Dulles, who, by setting out to wreck the compromise of Geneva and install America as the keeper of one zone and relentless opponent of the other, was the begetter of all that followed. His zeal as a Savonarola of foreign policy mesmerized associates and successors into parroting “national security” and “vital interest,” not so much in belief as in lip service to the cold war, or as scare tactics to extract appropriations from Congress. As late as 1975, President Ford told Congress that unwillingness to vote aid for South Vietnam would undermine “credibility” as an ally, which is “essential to our national security.” Kissinger repeated the theme two months later, telling a press conference that if South Vietnam were allowed to go under it would represent “a fundamental threat over a period of time to the security of the United States.”

  Over-reacting was present in the conjuring of specters, of falling dominoes, of visions of “ruin,” of yielding the Pacific and pulling back to San Francisco, of minor dragons like the invisible COSVN, and finally the paranoia of the Watergate White House. More serious, over-reacting led to the squandering of American power and resources in a grand folly of disproportion to the national interest involved. The absence of intelligent thought on this issue was astonishing for, as General Ridgway wrote in 1971, “it should not have taken great vision to perceive … that no truly vital United States interest was present … and that the commitment to a major effort was a monumental blunder.”

  A second folly was illusion of omnipotence, cousin to the Popes’ illusion of invulnerability; a third was wooden-headedness and “cognitive dissonance”; a fourth was “working the levers” as a substitute for thinking.