I
In early February 1966, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, cabled President Johnson with an historical analogy that could be used for justifying American involvement in Vietnam. When asked in the House of Commons in 1805 what had been gained in the war against France, the British statesman William Pitt answered, “We have gained everything that we would have lost if we had not fought this war.” Ambassador Lodge believed that this analogy “is even truer in our war in Vietnam than it was of the British war against France.”1
President Johnson and his inner circle of foreign-policy advisors believed that the central achievement of U.S. policy between 1965 and 1967 had been the defeat that had been prevented by Americanizing the war in July 1965. “The fact that South Vietnam has not been lost and is not going to be lost is a fact of truly massive importance in the history of Asia, the Pacific, and the US,” wrote the former special assistant for national security and then-president of the Ford Foundation, McGeorge Bundy, to the nation’s Commander in Chief in May 1967.2
But in 1975 South Vietnam was lost and the bitter aftermath of the war left Americans searching for the whys of initial involvement and ultimate defeat. The first books on the subject were written by participants and were personal accounts of the effects of war. The principals in the decision process often sought penance by rationalizing their roles for future history, while others refused to talk at all about their participation in the war councils. Answers to most important questions bearing on the war remained sealed in the vaults of archival repositories.
Today, a new Vietnam scholarship has emerged alongside a national willingness to understand the war as history. This willingness is symbolized by the over 143 privately financed memorials that have been built or are under construction in 45 states and by the thousands of people who daily visit the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Once referred to as “Jane Fonda’s ditch” or “a one-ton condolence card,” the Vietnam War Memorial is now the second-most popular tourist attraction in the capital after the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Many visit for personal reasons—to touch one of the over 58,000 names or to leave a memento—but no visitor can escape the sense of despair, contradiction, and senselessness of the Vietnam conflict that is captured by the black granite wall built below ground level.
The public’s interest in “Vietnam Vogue” is evidenced by the popularity of the films Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Hanoi Hilton. CBS television’s “Tour of Duty” brought the war back into prime time as did HBO’s 90-minute trilogy “Vietnam War Story.” CBS Video Library marketed The Vietnam War with Walter Cronkite, with the slogan, “Vietnam. You Have to See it to Understand it.” Subscribers were offered The Tet Offensive at the introductory price of $4.95. Time-Life Books’s multi-volume seriesThe Vietnam Experience was marketed for the general public in 1986 with the sales pitch, “Only now can we begin to understand the historical perspective and answers to the questions America has been asking for years.”
Yet, ironies from the real war remain unresolved. Those who had served their country did not return to parades or national acclaim. Their reception reflected America’s attempt to cast aside, to separate itself from the ugly war. Vietnam veterans were initially stereotyped as societal outcasts. Suicide statistics later confirmed the effects of such unsupportive, even hostile treatment: Suicide rates for army combat veterans of the Vietnam conflict were 72 percent higher within five years of returning to civilian life than of those who served elsewhere during the same period.3
The stigma of Vietnam was later passed from one generation to the next in the cruelest irony of Vietnam service. Agent Orange, the herbicide containing dioxin and sprayed in Vietnam to defoliate the jungles, poisoned not only veterans, but their innocent and unborn children, many of whom were born with birth defects attributed to dioxin. “We will always live with what we killed in Vietnam,” as one veteran lamented. In September 1987, Federal scientists would not proceed with a congressionally mandated study on the effects of Agent Orange because not enough contaminated soldiers could be identified. When Veterans Administration scientists later released a study of 50,000 Vietnam-era veterans showing excessive rates of death due to lung cancer and non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the senior analyst in the Office of Science and Technology called it “a statistical fluke.”4
The war as today’s history offers other paradoxes. Eleven years following the fall of Saigon, Vietnam initiated an aggressive campaign to attract American tourists. For $2,000 a tourist received a twelve-day package tour that used Ho Chi Minh City, once known as Saigon, as its gateway. Excursions included a tour of the American War Crimes Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Cam Ranh Bay, once the U.S. naval and air base serving as the logistical hub on Vietnam’s coast, is today the largest Soviet naval base for deployment of warships outside the Soviet Union.
For the families of individuals still classified as “missing in action,” the war might never be over. In August 1987 General John Vessey, Jr., U.S. special envoy on Americans missing in action in Vietnam, traveled to Hanoi in an effort to gain an accounting for more than 1750 Americans still missing since the war. In April 1988, Republican Senator John McCain, who had spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, introduced congressional legislation calling upon Vietnam and the United States to establish diplomatic “interest sections” in each other’s capitals to help resolve outstanding issues between the once warring nations. “Thirteen years after the fall of Saigon, the time has come for increased efforts to resolve the legacies of the Vietnam war,” wrote Senator McCain when introducing his legislation.
With respect to the geo-political justifications for U.S. military involvement, few in 1965 could have envisioned that China and Vietnam would later be at war against one another; Pol Pot’s Cambodia at war with Vietnam; and China and the United States engaged in cordial relations. The dominoes in Laos and Cambodia fell, but LBJ’s prediction that all Southeast Asia—to Singapore and Djkarta—was wrong. Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Australia did not fall when America pulled out of South Vietnam.
Was the war a noble or an ignoble cause? Did the United States lack only the will to win? Advocates in the verdict of history compare the consequences of the failed military intervention with the human tragedy exemplified by the boat people of Vietnam and the killing fields of Cambodia. In the war as military history, not one of President Johnson’s principal advisors now supports the war as it was fought. In retrospect, everyone who participated now knows better.5 A Vietnam “could-have” school of thought begins with “ifs”: If only LBJ had overruled his civilian advisors and acted on the Joint Chiefs’ recommendations for unrestricted bombing; if only he had authorized an invasion of North Vietnam; if only he had sanctioned drives into Laos and Cambodia to clean out enemy sanctuaries; if only he had sealed the border between North and South Vietnam; if only he had bombed the dikes and mined the harbors—then the United States could have forced Ho to accept a negotiated settlement. In the words of Air Force General (“Old Ironpants”) Curtis LeMay, who in 1968 joined George Wallace’s third-party ticket in quest of the presidency, “We are swatting flies when we ought to go after the dunghill.”
The failed intervention in Vietnam has created two types of “never-again” schools of thought with respect to interventionism today. A new generation of 18-year-olds (not born when Lyndon Johnson Americanized the war in Vietnam) have been politicized by the psychic humiliation of losing Vietnam into confirmed hawks with respect to foreign policy forays into Grenada or Libya. Conversely, a majority of Americans have consistently opposed U.S. intervention in Central America because they fear another Vietnam-like quagmire. Yet, the bumper-sticker “No Vietnam war in Central America” trivializes the complex issue of hemispheric security. What percentage of Americans could today locate Nicaragua and Vietnam on a blank map of the world?
Vietnam revisionism has frequently sought to shift responsibility for losing the war from those who made policy to those who pointed out the contradictions in policy. Once a favorite ploy of Lyndon Johnson, this tactic of blaming the messenger has proven useful to Johnson’s successors as well. On Memorial Day, 1986, President Reagan referred to the brave “boys of Vietnam ... who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home.” This “pass-the-guilt” school of thought is premised on the supposition that while the United States won the military battles, it lost the larger political confrontation in the corridors on Capitol Hill and in the antiwar protests across America. Accuracy in Media (AIM) has produced two shows narrated by Charlton Heston that maintain that television, not inconsistencies or contradictions in policy, turned Americans against the war: “Who betrayed those who died in Vietnam? Was it our media?” For $32.95 a purchaser could get the answer in two videotapes, “Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story and the Impact of Media.” President Reagan said that “all Americans should see” both films.
Indeed, the 1984 libel trial involving CBS and General William Westmoreland revealed just how unsettled Vietnam, as history, remained. The CBS broadcast “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception” opened with Mike Wallace’s statement that “what went wrong in Vietnam is still one of the great questions of our recent American experience. We still don’t know all the answers.” The CBS broadcast then charged that General Westmoreland, as Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), actually conspired to deceive President Johnson and the public on enemy troop strength. Had the war been rotten enough that intelligence estimates and analyses had been compromised? Had MACV intelligence officers, because of political pressure from Washington, fudged their estimates in order to show progress? And, had they succeeded in shielding data from their Commander in Chief that might have offset the shock of the massive Tet offensive in January 1968? Had General Westmoreland “cooked the books” and engaged in treasonable offenses? If so, responsibility foT the failure of Vietnam policy belonged not with Lyndon Johnson but with General Westmoreland.
When CBS failed to issue a retraction of its conspiracy charge, General Westmoreland brought legal action against CBS and the documentary’s producers. The case brought virtually all of the surviving principals into a court of law and the power of subpoena forced declassifications of hundreds of previously classified documents bearing on the subject of enemy troop strength and the cable/memo traffic that encompassed it. The courtroom proved a poor place for General Westmoreland to fight his battle with history, but the subpoenas created conditions for accelerating research into Vietnam as history. The trial ended without a verdict. Before dismissing the jury, however, Judge Pierre Leval explained that “Judgments of history are too subtle and too complex to be resolved with the simplicity of a jury’s verdict. It may be for the best that the verdict will be left to history.”