In retrospect it is remarkable that the public continued to support our efforts in Vietnam to the extent that it did for as long as it did. As Newsweek columnist Kenneth Crawford observed, this was the first war in our history during which our media were more friendly to our enemies than to our allies. American and South Vietnamese victories, such as the smashing of the Tet offensive in 1968, were portrayed as defeats. The United States, whose only intent was to help South Vietnam defend itself, was condemned as an aggressor. The Soviet-supported North Vietnamese were hailed as liberators.
The My Lai atrocities against 200 Vietnamese were justifiably deplored, and Captain William Calley was prosecuted and convicted for his role in them, but brutal murders of tens of thousands of civilians by the North Vietnamese were virtually ignored. During February of 1968 a Vietcong-North Vietnamese force occupied Hué and 5,800 civilians were executed or kidnapped. Following the city’s recapture, at least 2,800 were found in mass graves—many of them apparently buried alive.
Hanoi’s totally false and cynical charge that the United States had a policy of bombing dikes in the North and causing thousands to drown were given enormous coverage, and as a result of that coverage the charge was widely accepted as true. The truth—that there was no such policy and that no one was drowned—received scarcely any attention.
The South Vietnamese were loudly condemned for their treatment of prisoners. When actress Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark traveled to Hanoi, they received massive, largely positive American media coverage of their statements praising the treatment of the American prisoners of war, who in fact were being subjected to the most barbaric and brutal torture by their North Vietnamese captors.
The dishonest, double-standard coverage of the Vietnam War was not one of the American media’s finer hours. It powerfully distorted public perceptions, and these were reflected in Congress.
On January 2, 1973, the House Democratic Caucus voted 154-75 to cut off all funds for Indochina military operations as soon as arrangements were made for the safe withdrawal of U.S. troops and the return of our prisoners of war. Two days later a similar resolution was passed by the Senate Democratic Caucus, 36-12. This, it should be noted, was before Watergate began to weaken my own position as President, and only three months before withdrawal of American forces was completed, and the last of the 550,000 American troops that were in Vietnam when I took office in 1969 were brought back.
Thompson has observed:
The point was that President Nixon, having gained a dominant bargaining position when the bombing halted on 29 December, 1972, could not press his advantage because antagonism to the bombing itself, and the very fact of his strong bargaining position, brought him under increased pressure in Congress and in the United States to accept a ceasefire on any superficially acceptable terms which would immediately end direct American involvement. . . .
President Nixon was therefore compelled to accept terms because they coincided, at least on paper, with the terms previously laid down as representing “peace with honor.” Even so, if these terms had been meticulously kept or had been enforceable, there would have been an end to the war and “peace with honor.”
If the peace agreement was to have any chance to be effective, it was essential that Hanoi be deterred from breaking it. In a private letter to Thieu I had stated that “if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement, it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.” At a news conference on March 15, with regard to North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam and violation of the agreement, I stated, “I would only suggest that based on my actions over the past four years, the North Vietnamese should not lightly disregard such expressions of concern, when they are made with regard to a violation.”
In April, May, and June of 1973, with my authority weakened by the Watergate crisis, retaliatory action was threatened but not taken. Then Congress passed a bill setting August 15 as the date for termination of U.S. bombing in Cambodia and requiring congressional approval for the funding of U.S. military action in any part of Indochina. The effect of this bill was to deny the President the means to enforce the Vietnam peace agreement by retaliating against Hanoi for violations.
• • •
Once Congress had removed the possibility of military action against breaches of the peace agreement, I knew I had only words with which to threaten. The communists knew it too. By means of the bombing cutoff and the War Powers resolution passed in November 1973, Congress denied to me and to my successor, President Ford, the means with which to enforce the Paris agreement at a time when the North Vietnamese were openly and flagrantly violating it. It is truly remarkable that, for two years after the signing of the peace agreement in January 1973, the South Vietnamese held their own against the well-supplied North, without American personnel support either in the air or on the ground and with dwindling supplies.
Throughout 1974 the Russians poured huge amounts of ammunition, weaponry, and military supplies into North Vietnam, and the North in turn poured them into the South. In March 1974 Hanoi was estimated to have 185,000 men, 500 to 700 tanks, and 24 regiments of antiaircraft troops in the South. With the threat of American air power gone, the North Vietnamese built new roads and pipelines to move their armies and supplies about. At the same time that the Soviet Union was arming Hanoi for the final assault, the United States Congress was sharply curtailing the flow of aid to South Vietnam. U.S. aid to South Vietnam was halved in 1974 and cut by another third in 1975. The United States ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that such cuts in military aid would “seriously tempt the North to gamble on an all-out military offensive.” His warning was tragically prophetic.
The original plan of the North Vietnamese was to launch their final offensive in 1976. But then they stepped up their timetable. At the start of 1975 Phuoc Long province fell to the communists, the first province South Vietnam had lost completely since 1954. There was relatively little reaction in the United States. Hanoi decided to make larger attacks in 1975 in preparation for the final offensive in 1976. On March 11 Ban Me Thout fell, and on the same day the U.S. House of Representatives refused to fund a $300 million supplemental military aid package that President Ford had proposed. Together with the earlier cutback of aid, this had a devastating effect on the morale of the South Vietnamese, as well as denying them the means with which to defend themselves; they were desperately short of military supplies and dependent for them on the United States. It also gave a tremendous psychological boost to the North. The North threw all of its remaining troops into the battle. Thieu tried to regroup his undersupplied forces in more defensible perimeters, and the hastily executed maneuver turned into a rout. By the end of April it was all over. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City.
Hanoi had suffered an overwhelming defeat when it launched a conventional attack on the South in 1972. Then the North Vietnamese had been stopped on the ground by the South Vietnamese, while bombing by our air force and mining by our navy crippled their efforts to resupply their forces in the South. B-52 strikes could have had a devastating effect on the large troop concentrations that Hanoi used in its final offensive, but in 1975 Hanoi did not have to reckon with our air and naval forces, and thanks to ample Soviet military aid they had overwhelming advantages in tanks and artillery over South Vietnam’s ground forces. After North Vietnam’s victory, General Dung, Hanoi’s field commander in charge of the final offensive, remarked that “The reduction of U.S. aid made it impossible for the puppet troops to carry out their combat plans and build up their forces. . . . Thieu was then forced to fight a poor man’s war. Enemy firepower had decreased by nearly 60 percent because of bomb and ammunition shortages. Its mobility was also reduced by half due to lack of aircraft, vehicles and fuel.”
• • •
Our defeat in Vietnam can be blamed in part on the Soviets because they provided arms to Hanoi in violation of the peace agreement, giving
the North an enormous advantage over the South in the final offensive in the spring of 1975. It can be blamed in part on the tactical and strategic mistakes made by President Thieu and his generals. It is grossly unfair to put the blame on South Vietnam’s fighting men, the great majority of whom fought bravely and well against overwhelming odds. A major part of the blame must fall on the shoulders of those members of the Congress who were responsible for denying to the President, first me and then President Ford, the power to enforce the peace agreements, and for refusing to provide the military aid that the South Vietnamese needed in order to meet the North Vietnamese offensive on equal terms.
But Congress was in part the prisoner of events. The leaders of the United States in the crucial years of the early and mid-1960s failed to come up with a strategy that would produce victory. Instead, first they undermined a strong regime, and then simply poured more and more U.S. troops and matériel into South Vietnam in an ineffective effort to shore up the weaker regimes that followed. They misled the public by insisting we were winning the war and thereby prepared the way for defeatism and demagoguery later on. The American people could not be expected to continue indefinitely to support a war in which they were told victory was around the corner, but which required greater and greater effort without any obvious signs of improvement.
• • •
By following the strategy I initiated in 1969, we and the South Vietnamese were able to win the war militarily by the time of the Paris accords of January 27, 1973. The 550,000 American troops that were in Vietnam when I came into office in 1969 had been withdrawn and South Vietnam was able to defend itself—if we supplied the arms the Paris accords allowed.
But the public had been so misinformed and misled by unwise government actions and the shallow, inflammatory treatment of events by the media that morale within the United States collapsed just when the North was overwhelmingly defeated on the battlefield. We won a victory after a long hard struggle, but then we threw it away. The communists had grasped what strategic analyst Brian Crozier said is the central point of revolutionary war: “that it is won or lost on the home front.” The war-making capacity of North Vietnam had been virtually destroyed by the bombings in December of 1972, and we had the means to make and enforce a just peace, a peace with honor. But we were denied these means when Congress prohibited military operations in or over Indochina and cut back drastically on the aid South Vietnam needed to defend itself. In the final analysis, a major part of the blame must be borne by those who encouraged or participated in the fateful decisions that got us into the war in the 1960’s, and who then by their later actions sabotaged our efforts to get us out in an acceptable way in the 1970’s.
• • •
By inaction at the crucial moment, the United States undermined an ally and abandoned him to his fate. The effect on the millions of Cambodians, Laotians, and South Vietnamese who relied on us and have now paid the price of communist reprisals is bad enough. But the cost in terms of raising doubts among our allies as to America’s reliability, and in terms of the encouragement it gives to our potential enemies to engage in aggression against our friends in other parts of the world, will be devastating for U.S. policy for decades to come.
The signals it sent around the world were pithily summed up by an Indonesian cabinet minister who has a Ph.D. from an American university. International analyst Pierre Rinfret reports that the minister told him just after the fall of Vietnam, “You Americans have lost your guts. You had the hell kicked out of you in Vietnam. You won’t solve your energy problem. We’ll make you pay and pay for oil, and you’ll pay. You’ve lost your guts. Vietnam was your Waterloo.” And for the Soviets, it meant that in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Angola détente became a one-way street.
In essence, the final climactic battle at the end of a struggle that had been going on for twenty-five years was decided in favor of the communists because when the chips were down, the Soviet Union stood by its allies and the United States failed to do so. As I stated in 1972, “All the power in the world lodged in the United States means nothing . . . unless there is some assurance, some confidence, some trust that the United States will be credible, will be dependable.”
One of the hidden costs of our abandonment of South Vietnam may well be the proliferation of nuclear weapons to the small nations faced with overwhelming hostile forces who used to trust the U.S. guarantee and no longer do. Those who protested against Vietnam to avoid a nuclear war may have helped to bring one closer.
In Indochina the consequences of the American defeat have been tragic and profound. The United States got out of the war, but the killing did not stop. In Cambodia, it accelerated massively when the Pol Pot regime launched the most brutal bloodbath in recent history.
Estimates of deaths have been staggering; so too has been the brutalization of the populace. Refugees reported that for “serious mistakes, such as stealing a banana . . ., you would be executed immediately.” Other reports indicated that the Khmer Rouge had set aside a period of two days, once or twice a year, as the “mating period.” It was only during this time that men and women were allowed to talk to each other, “except for talk about developing the country.” As for those who violated this statute, a refugee reports, “I knew of about twenty young men and women caught flirting, who were executed.” Complaining about food also became a capital crime in the brave new world the Khmer Rouge was building, one in which they boasted, “Our Communism will be better than in Russia or China, where there are still classes. . . . ” So did joking; one refugee told of a person who was executed because he was “too jovial.” At one point it was announced that holding hands was henceforth a capital crime.
In 1979 a new wave of disaster overcame Cambodia as Pol Pot’s scorched-earth tactics and North Vietnam’s starvation policy caught the Cambodian people in a vise of horror. The world watched aghast as the communist factions tore the remnants of the country to shreds. Some estimate that half of Cambodia’s population may have perished already.
In South Vietnam the communists were more subtle in their methods, but they moved just as relentlessly to uproot the old order and replace it with their own. The thousands of boat people have served to remind us starkly of the terrors of life under that new order, especially since one fourth or more of the refugees, it is estimated, drowned before reaching shore.
In June 1979 U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, speaking in Bonn, West Germany, stated that “There is no sense in trying to cast blame or condemn anyone” for the atrocities practiced by the new communist governments of Southeast Asia. He went on to suggest that these atrocities “automatically” could be traced to America’s involvement in Vietnam. This is malevolent nonsense. Worse, it is self-serving nonsense. Many of those who wish to close their eyes to today’s horrors in Southeast Asia also wish to close everyone else’s eyes to their own sabotage of the American effort there, and the ghastly effects that sabotage has brought about. But like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hand, it is a permanent stain.
• • •
The U.S. failure to keep its commitments to South Vietnam led to national tragedies as the countries of Indochina were engulfed in a modern-day holocaust. But the effects on the leadership class of the United States may make the loss of the war in Vietnam an even greater international tragedy. Some think the “lessons” of Vietnam are: it is dangerous for the United States to have power because we may use it wrongly; we should avoid more Vietnams in the future by not getting involved when small nations, even those that are friends and allies, are threatened by communist aggression; the United States is on the “wrong side” of history in opposing communist revolutionary forces in Asia and Africa and Latin America; it is impossible to win wars against communist-supported guerrillas; we should look after ourselves and leave the responsibility for leadership of the free world to others.
These are the wrong lessons, and if our leadership class follows them, our country and the West will go down the road to destruction. Thes
e lessons confuse the abuse of power with its intelligent application.
Since our failure in Vietnam, Americans have been unduly gun-shy about using force, an inhibition the Soviets and their proxies have not shared. We have stood aside and let the Soviets go unopposed into Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf. They have not become stuck in a quagmire; unfortunately for us, they are expert practitioners in the arts of war and have used their power skillfully. Unless the United States shakes the false lessons of Vietnam and puts the “Vietnam syndrome” behind it, we will forfeit the security of our allies and eventually our own. This is the real lesson of Vietnam—not that we should abandon power, but that unless we learn to use it effectively to defend our interests, the tables of history will be turned against us and all we believe in.
• • •
More nuclear power in our arsenal would not have saved Vietnam. More U.S. conventional forces would not have saved Vietnam. Vietnam was lost, not because of a lack of power, but because of a failure of skill and determination at using power. These failures caused a breach in public trust and led to a collapse of our national will. Finally, the presidency was weakened by the restrictions Congress placed on the President’s war-making powers and by the debilitating effects of the Watergate crisis. The South Vietnamese demonstrated in 1972 that they could effectively stop an invasion on the ground if they were adequately armed and provided with air support. Revolutionary wars cannot be fought and won by outside armies. But if those within a nation threatened by guerrillas are adequately armed, trained, and supplied, they can meet and defeat a guerrilla attack, provided they are fighting for their own independence and freedom. Under the Nixon Doctrine we should certainly do as much for those who are fighting to defend their independence as the Soviet Union does for those who are attempting to destroy it.
Real War Page 14