American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (14 page)

To bolster his confidence in the days just before and after the invasion of Cambodia, Nixon
repeatedly watched
Patton
, the 1970 blockbuster in which George C. Scott plays the famous World War II commander. According to one source, Nixon sat through the three-hour film at least five times during those weeks. It begins with the swaggering Patton exhorting his troops in front of a gigantic, screen-filling American flag.

Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle . . . Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

Never lose a war, never lose a war—that injunction hounded LBJ and Nixon like a relentless, recurring nightmare. It had come down to that.

M
ANY
YEARS
BEFORE
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had nightmares about losing the war in Vietnam, President Dwight Eisenhower was making crucial decisions that started it. And, in 1953, Eisenhower did something amazing and rare—he spoke openly about the economic motives behind U.S. foreign policy. In Southeast Asia, he said, “our power and ability to get certain things we need” was at stake. If Indochina fell to Communism, he warned, the entire region would fall to our enemies and the United States would lose access to materials “we so greatly value”—“tin and tungsten” and “the riches of the Indonesian territory.” All these vital resources would “cease coming.”

The occasion for these remarks was a
Governors’ Conference in Seattle
. Press reports described Eisenhower’s speech as “off the cuff,” a polite way of saying that he was winging it. In some places he seemed not just off the cuff but off the rails. For example, while trying to describe the relationship between state and federal authority, his mind began to roam: “What we have got is a great hinterland in between those two roads and through them we have some kind of a path for all of us to walk together to decency and to progress; not to immediate salvation and the rainbow’s end, not at all, but progress.” By the end, even Eisenhower seemed embarrassed, conceding that his “rather wandering thoughts” had “gone a long way around the cabbage patch.”

Perhaps the most lucid part of the speech came when he turned to “one simple problem in the foreign field”—the war in Indochina. He sought to explain “why we are so concerned with the far-off southeast corner of Asia” and why, more specifically, we were paying France vast amounts of money to continue its long war against the anticolonial revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap.

Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away.
The [Malayan] peninsula
, the last little bit of land hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible. The tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming. . . . All of that position around there is very ominous to the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? So you see, somewhere along the line this must be blocked. It must be blocked now. That is what the French are doing.

So, when the United States votes $400 million to help that war, we are not voting for a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of the most terrible significance for the United States of America—our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesia territory, and from Southeast Asia.

Tin and tungsten? Was that it? Is that why the United States bankrolled the French war and then went on to fight its own disastrous war? “Certain things we need”?

Not exactly. There
was
a strong economic motive behind America’s effort to build a non-Communist nation in South Vietnam, but it requires a global context to understand it. U.S. policy was not rooted in a desire to gain a few specific resources or to help out a few U.S. corporations. Policymakers did not regard Vietnam itself as a significant economic prize. Nor were American corporations chomping at the bit to gain access to its resources. At a 1956 conference, America’s Stake in Vietnam, Leo Cherne tried to drum up enthusiasm for Vietnam’s long-term business potential, but his boosterism fell flat. He conceded that
Vietnam’s “primitive economy
” had so far been limited to an emphasis upon two crops—rice and rubber—by geography, French colonial rule, Japanese occupation during World War II, and a disastrous war with France. Yes, there had been surveys indicating the existence of substantial offshore oil reserves (which now make Vietnam the region’s third-largest producer of oil), but Cherne did not even mention that future possibility and historians have failed to unearth persuasive evidence that U.S. policymakers intervened in Vietnam primarily because of that country’s economic potential.

So what did Eisenhower mean? First, the “tin and tungsten that we so greatly value” came from Malaya (Malaysia after 1957), not Vietnam. He also refers to the “riches” of Indonesia, already a substantial producer of oil. Those countries were Southeast Asia’s most significant economic gold mines in the eyes of American policymakers. Indochina had to be kept non-Communist not so much because of
its
economic potential but because policymakers believed it was the strategic key to keeping the entire region open to capitalist development. Economic considerations were central to the domino theory, though not usually stated so explicitly. As Eisenhower put it, if Indochina “goes” (Communist), then “several things happen right away.” The neighboring countries would also “go” and so too would their free markets. Under Communist control important products would “cease coming.”

U.S. policymakers never lost sight of global economic priorities, especially after World War II. When Eisenhower addressed U.S. governors in 1953, he stressed the impact of lost markets on the United States because he wanted their support for the French war in Indochina. If he could convince them that American economic interests were directly threatened, they might be less inclined to believe that massive aid to France was merely a “giveaway program” for which the United States got nothing in return. But Eisenhower was not just worried about the American economy. He was thinking globally.

The Malayan tin and tungsten provides a telling example. The United States had indeed bought a great deal of it, but maintaining access to Malayan metals was not essential to U.S. wealth and power. They could be gotten elsewhere. But those products, along with rubber, were crucial to a
triangular trade that bolstered global capitalism
. American dollars spent in Malaya allowed Malayans to use those strong U.S. dollars to buy lots of British goods. That, in turn, strengthened a British economy still recovering from the wreckage of World War II and allowed the British to buy more U.S. products.

For the U.S. economy to grow, global capitalism had to be healthy. Therefore, when the United States gave $25 billion in aid to Europe after World War II, most of it through the Marshall Plan, it was not simply a humanitarian effort to help war-ravaged allies, but an investment in the future of capitalism—a way to revitalize key trading partners and secure their Cold War allegiance. For U.S. policymakers, supporting capitalism and building anti-Communist alliances were indistinguishable goals; they were “
two halves of the same walnut
,” to use Harry Truman’s phrase.

Of all the capitalist Asian “dominoes” that might fall to Communism, Japan was by far the most important to U.S. security managers. The recent archenemy of World War II was suddenly the indispensable ally, especially after China fell to the Communists in 1949. Keeping Japan in the U.S.-dominated Free World orbit was regarded as the top Asian priority. To make sure that happened, the United States occupied Japan until 1952 and continued to post more than 100,000 troops there and in Okinawa (which remained under U.S. administration). Washington understood that Japan’s economic success depended on more than trade with the United States and provisioning contracts from the U.S. military.
It required trading partners
throughout the Pacific and beyond. If Southeast Asia went Communist, U.S. policymakers feared, Japan might fall under the sway of Communist China. Keeping China surrounded by non-Communist nations was part of an integrated plan to build capitalist interdependency with Japan at the center.

This objective was put succinctly in a 1954 memo written by Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Orientation of Japan toward the West is
the keystone of United States policy in the Far East
. In the judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the loss of Southeast Asia to Communism would, through economic and political pressures, drive Japan into an accommodation with the Communist bloc. The communization of Japan would be the probable ultimate result.” A decade earlier, the United States fought a brutal Pacific war to destroy the Japanese empire—the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. A decade later, U.S. Asian policy was founded on promoting Japan’s economic power throughout the region. The major difference was that U.S. military power, not Japan’s, now presided over the “co-prosperity sphere.”

The growth of a U.S.-dominated world economic system was such a primary goal, policymakers rarely felt a need to articulate it, even to each other. But when they did, it was sometimes put quite baldly. For example, a 1953 National Security Council memo to Eisenhower included this summary: “
Economic expansion is the driving force
upon which U.S. strength is based, and is basic to our concept of successfully coping with the Soviet Union.”

However, the more typical anti-Communist rhetoric called for global freedom and democracy, not global capitalism. It would be shocking to hear a U.S. president say, for example: “If we are to remain the richest nation in the world and consume more per capita than any other, we must continue to be the world’s greatest military superpower. The very survival of the American Dream at home depends on our global supremacy and our willingness to fight wars in faraway places.” It would be even more surprising to hear a president make the opposite case: “Our far-flung military interventions are making us weaker, not stronger. Not only have they harmed our reputation and inspired greater anti-American hostility, but they are driving us into bankruptcy. If we are to preserve our national wealth and make the American Dream a real possibility for every citizen, we must dismantle our global military empire.”

Foreign policy decision makers typically describe the use of American power as a force for good in the world that asks nothing in return. As LBJ said in 1965, “
We want nothing for ourselves
—only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.” In dozens of other situations, many American presidents have made the same claim.

Since the nation’s beginning, territorial and economic expansion has been touted by American leaders primarily as an extension of freedom and opportunity, as a blessing to all it encompasses, what Thomas Jefferson described as an “
empire for liberty
.” The denial of crude imperial ambition has been a hallmark of American national identity. The greater our power and wealth, the less we have acknowledged any selfish motives in our foreign relations.

In practice, however, the United States has been far more consistent in its support of capitalism than democratic rights—the right to vote, to dissent, to a trial by jury, to organize a union, and so on. As long as a foreign government allowed “free enterprise” and was generally supportive of American foreign policy, the United States almost invariably backed that government no matter how brutally it repressed its own people. The United States backed not only liberal capitalist democracies like Britain and France, but scores of capitalist dictators—Mobutu in the Congo (Zaire), Marcos in the Philippines, Somoza in Nicaragua, Stroessner in Paraguay, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Pahlavi in Iran, and many others.

This hypocrisy was not just a Cold War phenomenon.
It predated the Berlin Blockade
of 1948 and continues to the present, decades after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. But the Cold War provided a powerful ideological cover for economic goals. The Communist threat to “freedom” always got more public attention than the Communist threat to profits.

Policies designed to incorporate South Vietnam into a global capitalist system expanded along with U.S. intervention. Even as the United States sponsored an increasingly violent counterinsurgency in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it also sought to build up South Vietnam’s economy. The key goals of economic development were to reduce the appeal of Communism while preparing South Vietnam for a capitalist future.

A major component of that project was the
Commercial Import Program
(CIP). Begun in 1955 and lasting until the Communist victory in 1975, the CIP was the conduit through which virtually all U.S. economic aid flowed into South Vietnam. Billions of dollars went to the South Vietnamese government in Saigon through the CIP. The main purpose of the aid was to pay for the South Vietnamese military and the government’s civil administration. But the United States had a larger aim. It wanted the money to move in and out of Vietnam in a way that would not just pay for the ongoing war, but would hold down inflation and stimulate the development of a capitalist economy.

Here’s how it worked
. First, the United States sent dollars to the government of South Vietnam (GVN). But the GVN was not allowed to pay its bills directly. The presence of all those American dollars in South Vietnam’s economy was a prescription for skyrocketing inflation. So instead, the Commercial Import Program required the GVN to exchange its American dollars for piasters with a select group of Vietnamese importers. These entrepreneurs, in turn, were supposed to spend the U.S. dollars on American products and import them to Vietnam. That way the inflationary U.S. dollars would come back to the United States, leaving behind Vietnamese currency to pay for the South Vietnamese military and civil administration. In addition, U.S. policymakers hoped that the entrepreneurs would help transform South Vietnam into an urban, industrialized, commodity-based economy.

This system held down rampant inflation for a few years (later in the war it soared), but as a means to promote economic development and nation building, it was a colossal failure. It merely enriched an elite few and flooded South Vietnam with commodities only the privileged could buy. It did little to create sustainable businesses or raise the general standard of living. The people who received the import licenses were well-connected businessmen. For them, the Commercial Import Program was a windfall of vast proportions. Many of them sold U.S. dollars on the black market for two or three times the official rate. Any importing they did just added to their profits.