The Best of I.F. Stone
Page 31
In a chapter on “Challenge and Response,” Mr. Tanham demonstrates his own lack of adequate response to this challenge. The lack is characteristic of the U.S. counter-insurgency establishment. He writes of the Viet Cong, “Land is taken from the landowners, many of whom are in Saigon or other large cities and redistributed to the peasants.” Naturally the peasants like this. Why don’t we do the same? Because the government we support is based on the landlords. Mr. Tanham does not ask the question nor provide the answer. Both are obvious, but this is the kind of obvious that counter-revolutionary movements are incapable by their nature of recognizing. A related example is provided by Mr. Warne’s account of Vinh Binh province. He relates that “land ownership in Vinh Binh is confused since most of the land records were destroyed by the Vietminh. It is estimated that 60 per cent of the farmers do not have title to the land they farm. Only about a third of these now pay rent because in the insecure areas the landowners are unable to collect rents.” This is revealing, but Mr. Warne seems to miss its significance. If 60 per cent of the farmers do not have title to the land, 60 per cent of the farmers stand to lose the land they till if Saigon re-establishes control. If two-thirds of these farmers now pay no rent because these areas are “insecure,” then the return of security means the return of the rent collector. From the peasant point of view the “pacification” drive thus looks like an attempt by the landlords to regain control of the land. It would be quite a feat to take a peasant’s land and win his heart at the same time.
The most revealing thing about this book is that it says so little about land reform. Mr. Warne, who worked in the Mekong Delta, where this is a crucial problem, gives us only a passing glimpse of the land ownership situation. “Through the governments Land Reform Service,” Mr. Warne writes, “some tenant farmers are making installment payments to purchase land confiscated from the French and from large Vietnamese landowners. However, the majority of these installment contracts are in arrears at present.” The land reform forced many peasants to pay for land they had seized when the landlords fled during the French war. Wherever the area is “insecure,” peasants take advantage of the fact to forget about the installments due.
“In 1958, as a land reform measure,” Mr. Warne writes, “the government disallowed holdings in excess of 240 acres, but this regulation has not been well enforced.” As a matter of fact, as I learned in talking with U.S. farm experts in Saigon only a few weeks ago, these maximums have been easily and widely evaded though they are fantastically high when compared with the land reforms in Japan (ten acres rice-land, family maximum) or Formosa (seven acres). Though an American farm adviser as early as 1955 began pressing for agrarian reform to “save the day in the coming battle for Vietnam,” the reform when Diem finally enacted it was limited, belated and tricky. In a peasant country like Vietnam, this was politically fatal. Yet the whole subject gets only a few passing remarks in Men Without Guns.
The record shows more pressure for land reform in Vietnam during the Eisenhower Administration than since; as our military intervention has grown, our capacity for political maneuver has shrunk. In the Johnson years the subject has been soft-pedalled, though it still appears in our political litany about Vietnam and Latin America. There are several reasons for muffling talk of land reform. One is that in Vietnam, as in Brazil, it alienates the local upper classes with which we are allied. Another arises from the contrast between our preaching and our practice. Where U.S. lands have been seized for agrarian reform, we have either overthrown the government and forced return of the land, as in Guatemala, or tried by every means, fair or foul, to bring down the offending regime, as in Cuba. A third reason, apparent in congressional appropriation hearings, is the instinctive hostility of Southern Senators and Congressmen, often themselves latifundistas, to talk of breaking up big estates for the sake of the landless. Eastland, who so admired Trujillo, may fear this lest it give nigras bad ideas in his own delta. The main reason we drop the subject so easily is that our real concern in Vietnam, as in Latin America, is not with the people but with our anxiety to demonstrate that we can contain communism. This inevitably degenerates into a military operation. The military may indeed carry on some “civic action.” This is no new departure. Our marines in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic built wells and improved sanitation during the occupation of the 1920s. Then we handed these countries over to dictators we had trained. Our concern was to make them safe for the United Fruit Company. Somoza and Trujillo were our products in the twenties and thirties like Diem and Ky in the fifties and sixties. Though everybody from LBJ down constantly talks of social revolution, the record shows our real concern is with putting it down, not bringing it about. We like to talk about revolution, but we rush in helicopters and napalm when it threatens to break out. This is the real face of the Pax Americana we are trying to impose.
While Others Dodge the Draft,
Bobby Dodges the War
By the fall of 1966, New York Senator ROBERT F. KENNEDY, the shining hope of many liberal Democrats, had begun his Hamlet act over Vietnam and the presidency. While expressing misgivings over the gradual escalation of the war, he was loath to break with President Lyndon Johnson over the issue, once remarking that for him to try to bring down the administration over Vietnam would be like a priest in Bogotá trying to depose the Pope. Here, I. F. Stone shows little patience for Kennedy’s equivocation.
. . .
October 24, 1966
ROBERT F. KENNEDY is not setting a good example for American youth. To be a trimmer, to put career ahead of duty, to be all but silent on the greatest moral and political issue of our time is to be no different from the other politicians. We are sure that if a young man went to the Senator and asked his advice on how best to dodge military service in Vietnam, Kennedy would regard him as a coward and unpatriotic. But we are also sure that if we had the Senator’s confidence and asked him privately why he was not speaking out on the war, he would explain it was too risky, that he had already established a position slightly to the left of the Administration in his Vietnam speech of February 19, 1966, that this was sufficient to hold his liberal constituency and that anything more would be politically dangerous, and might put him in the isolated position of a Morse or Gruening. To die for your country is one thing. To put your political future in jeopardy for it is another.
These are roles we take for granted in the ancient dramaturgy of human conflict. Honor requires the soldier to kill or be killed, whatever his scruples. But it is not regarded as dishonorable for the politician to swallow his misgivings and allow the young to go out to die without protest. Kennedy in the U.S. Senate has at his disposal a forum second only to that of the Presidency. But he hasn’t said a word about the war in the Senate since his one speech last February. A wistful committee has been organized for a Kennedy-Fulbright ticket in 1968 but Fulbright has been speaking out while Kennedy has been falling silent. Kennedy did not support his effort to rescind the Tonkin Bay resolution nor to alert the country on the danger in Thailand. He even achieved the feat of delivering a speech on peace in New York (October 11, 1966) without mentioning Vietnam!
Kennedy thinks of himself as a moral man. He proclaims it in South Africa and in Latin America but at home, where thousands are being drafted every month, he says as little as he can about the one issue that matters most. It is only in response to questions that he occasionally speaks of the war, often with a remarkable complacency. “We have to realize,” he told a questioner in Iowa (New York Times, October 10, 1966), “that the casualties are going to continue to be large.” Shouldn’t he, who sees himself as the candidate of youth, do something to stop them? He has a small army of ghost writers turning out speeches and hunting up apt quotations. Why not on the war?
At Hunter College in New York recently he confined himself, as Brother Teddy does, to the safe topic of aid to Vietnamese refugees. He met “all questions on the propriety of the war in Vietnam,” the New York Times reported October 8, 1966 “with a
n appeal for the students to acknowledge that was a subject separate from providing relief for noncombatants hurt by the war.” It is indecent to talk of helping the refugees while keeping silent about the napalm and the saturation bombings that make a hell of their lives. He would go no further than to say, coyly, “You are aware that I have some reservations about our role in Vietnam.” This drew the biggest applause of the evening, but it is time Kennedy stopped getting cheers for such tepid observations. The students cheered because they were hungry for a word against the war and because they had faith in Kennedy. But he betrays their faith, by playing skillful politics on the issue that may mean life or death for them. We are glad to see that he was heckled in Chicago and met with signs saying, “Kennedy and Douglas Support Mass Murderers in Vietnam.” There, too, in the same equivocal vein as at Hunter, he said he “happened to have some disagreements with President Johnson on Vietnam” (Washington Post, October 16, 1966). Is he saving them for his memoirs?
William Shannon in Harper’s for October (1966) says he is out for the Vice-Presidency in 1968. “With skillful publicity,” Shannon writes, “this could be made to appear not as an act of bold usurpation and impatient ambition by Kennedy but a reluctant rescue mission to prop up an aging wartime President whose popularity is sagging.” Just as Johnson moved left to outflank Goldwater, with whom he had been allied in the Senate, so Kennedy moved left to outflank Humphrey and take over the latter’s liberal constituency. But he is careful not to get so far out as to break his ties with the White House.
We do not mean to imply that Kennedy is insincere. We only note that the liberal views he has adopted also serve his political purposes. Nor do we mean to say that he is not troubled by the war. We believe he is. But he is not troubled enough to risk a confrontation with Johnson. In a Wall Street Journal (October 17, 1966) survey of Bobbys campaign activities one can see how little he deals with any concrete issues in those tours which have the bobby-soxers squealing. As for the war, that paper noted, “Actually Mr. Kennedy has been careful of late to avoid sharp attacks on the President. When he expressed doubts about Vietnam policy, he always stresses that ‘these are very complex problems, with no simple solutions.’” Johnson was for peace, too, before he won election. What guarantee that Kennedy would prove any better, under the enormous pressure of the military bureaucracy, if his convictions are already so feeble, his mind so divided?
The Mindless Momentum of a Runaway Military Machine
Yet another analysis of Vietnam with sobering contemporary echoes. William Westmoreland, the general who commanded American military operations in the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968 and served as Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972, was dispatched in 1967 to offering reassuring reports on progress in Vietnam to an American public whose patience for the war was rapidly vanishing. Stone took a much more jaundiced view: “The United States can win this war in Vietnam if it is prepared to put in a million men, or more, and then to slug it out patiently year after year until the guerrillas are worn down.” It was clear to President Johnson and to the policy-makers around him that Americans were prepared to do no such thing.
. . .
May 1, 1967
THE CENTRAL THESIS of General Westmoreland’s debut on the home front is the oldest alibi of frustrated generals—they could have won the war if it hadn’t been for those unpatriotic civilians back home. This was how the Kaiser’s ex-generals consoled themselves over their beers after World War I and this was the soothing syrup the French generals spooned up after Dienbienphu. But the former lost the war despite all their monocled splendor because they invited exactly what they had always told themselves they ought to avoid—a war on two fronts, against France and Russia at the same time. The latter lost because their perpetual talk of how they were really winning, when year after year they were losing the finest cadres of the French officer class in the Indochinese morass, finally made the French people realize their generals were first-class liars and their dirty little colonial war not worth the cost. Both cases provide obvious parallels to our own predicament, headed as we are for that major war on the Asian mainland we were always told to avoid, and led by generals who have claimed to be winning ever since 1961, and still claim it, though, as Westmoreland also said, they see no end in sight! We wonder what kind of logic they teach them at West Point.
The heart of General Westmoreland’s opening speech at the AP luncheon came when he said the enemy was “discouraged by repeated military defeats” but hanging on because “encouraged by what he believes to be popular opposition to our efforts in Vietnam.” One does not need to be a military expert to question this assessment. From the enemy point of view, they are doing far better than they had a right to expect. An undeveloped nation of 30 million people with little industry of its own has defied the world’s greatest military power for six years. The rebels have grown from a handful to a formidable army despite (or perhaps because of) the constant step-up in our bombardment North and South. In recent months a whole series of enormously expensive and glamorously named U.S. military sweeps have done little but tear swaths in the jungle. While our casualties have risen sharply, the enemy has managed to elude us, and to strike back at times and places of his own choosing. We are switching troops from the Mekong Delta to handle a swiftly deteriorating military situation in the northern part of South Vietnam. It is no secret that Westmoreland wants more troops and that we are going to need a limited mobilization to get them. Add the billion-dollar losses of our air war, and the growing difficulties of the no longer almighty dollar, as the mounting costs of this “little war” undermine it, and ask yourself whether the other side may not feel downright exuberant, indeed overconfident.
Let us put the case in the most hard-boiled terms. The United States can win this war in Vietnam if it is prepared to put in a million men, or more, and then to slug it out patiently year after year until the guerrillas are worn down. It can win if it deliberately de-escalates the firepower and meets the guerrillas on their own terms, in close combat, instead of alienating the entire population with indiscriminate artillery and airpower. A nation of 30 million cannot defeat a nation of 200 million if the bigger nation cares enough to pay the price of victory and has the patience to pursue it. The key is patience, and patience is what the United States lacks. It is not just the signs of popular opposition to the war which encourage the other side. It is the visible impatience. Even our hawks don’t like the war and want to get it over with as quickly as possible. For us the war is a nuisance. For them the war is a matter of life-and-death. They are prepared to die for their country. We are prepared to die for our country too—if it were attacked—but not for the mere pleasure of destroying theirs. This is why they have the advantage of morale, and for this General Dynamics cannot provide a substitute.
Self-deception has been the characteristic of our leadership in this war from its beginning. Self-deception is still the key to Westmoreland’s presentation. Even after so many years he still refuses to recognize the popular roots of the Vietnamese rebellion. He prefers to see it as something essentially artificial and imposed, which Hanoi can turn off with some magic spigot. First we were going to end the war by bombing Hanoi, but now that we’ll soon be running out of meaningful targets in the North, we are in effect promised a quick victory if only we can bomb Berkeley into submission. The general who couldn’t defeat the enemy abroad now returns to take it out on the peaceniks at home. Our country, he says, is founded on debate. But now, though we may be blundering toward a world war, we are told that debate is treasonable. The greatest issue in our country’s history must be decided by momentum and default. Our generals would like to suppress peace sentiment here as they do in Saigon. Free discussion is to be made suspect.
A “high government source” told an equally anonymous Baltimore Sun (April 21) reporter (we suspect it was Johnson himself talking to his friend Philip Potter) that the U.S. had to avoid the buildup of a war psychology at home and conduct the Vietnamese war
“rather coldly” because our power is so “beyond comprehension” that we mustn’t let it get out of hand “if the Northern Hemisphere is not to go up in smoke.” This is the awful truth a solemn joint session of Congress ought to hear. Yet Johnson is doing what his better judgment tells him not to. Westmoreland is stepping up war fever at home while abroad the wraps are taken off Hanoi, Haiphong and the Mig air bases in a way which brings nearer that final confrontation with China and perhaps also the Soviet Union. As Senator McGovern told a Washington Post reporter (April 26) after a brilliant and courageous Senate attack on the growing war madness, “They [i.e., Johnson and the generals] are really going for broke.” As the fog of war closes in, and the drums beat louder, which is patriotism, which is love of country, to fall silent or to try and speak some sobering word?
Same Old Formulas,
Same Tired Rhetoric
By 1969, Johnson’s war had been inherited by Richard Nixon, who had been elected president in part because of his vague promises to implement an unspecified “plan” to end the war. Here Stone analyzes a “blizzard of hints” from the Nixon White House concerning a new peace strategy, and finds them devoid of substance.
. . .
June 2, 1969
IN AN EXCHANGE OF TOASTS at the White House last month, the Australian Prime Minister drew an implied comparison between Lincoln and Nixon. Walt Rostow, too, used to get Lyndon Johnson’s juices flowing in the morning by telling him he was just like Lincoln. The Australian got so carried away that he ended up by demonstrating his native talent with the boomerang. If Lincoln had not persevered against the Copperheads and the Horace Greeleys, Mr. Gorton explained, there would today be “a slave autocracy in the South. . . . But there would have been no United States.” Since Lincoln and the North were trying to reunite the country by force of arms (“aggression”) against the wishes of the Southern states for independence (“self-determination”), Mr. Gorton’s flattery was clearly beginning to rebound. The more he went on the more it sounded like a toast to Ho Chi Minh.