American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (15 page)

Few entrepreneurs used the CIP money to help establish ambitious building projects or manufacturing businesses. Instead of importing construction equipment or factory machinery, they mostly imported motorbikes, refrigerators, watches, and air conditioners. After all, commodities, not capital goods, were the quickest and safest way to make money. And who could blame them for avoiding risky “nation building” projects when their nation was being destroyed by war? So, in practice, the CIP did not advance economic development as much as live-for-the-moment consumerism.

The U.S. media did little reporting on the nuts and bolts of U.S. aid and how it exacerbated economic inequalities in South Vietnamese society. But there were occasional stories about corruption. It was nearly impossible to ignore. Opportunities for illegal gain were rife, especially among the South Vietnamese elite in business, government, and the military. Every sort of corruption flourished—bribery, embezzlement, smuggling, extortion, black marketeering, and outright theft; much of it was orchestrated and protected by the most powerful members of South Vietnamese society. So it was possible, for example, to read stories in the U.S. press about Premier Nguyen Cao
Ky getting $15,000 a week
in kickbacks from a Saigon racetrack, or the wife of a general making a fortune exporting brass salvaged from U.S. ammunition. But until the final years of the war, most corruption stories failed to convey the full scale and intractability of the problem.

More typically the subject was treated as a slightly lurid sidebar, allowing readers to relish some of the seedy underside of wartime urban culture. GIs, bar girls, prostitutes, thieves, peddlers, hucksters, refugees, scam artists, gamblers—all these characters and more were typically thrown together in tabloid fashion, conveying the impression that cultural degradation, economic dislocation, and rampant corruption were the regrettable, but inevitable, by-products of war, not the direct result of American intervention.
A typical story in this genre
appeared in
Life
magazine (February 1966):

The capital of South Vietnam, once a lovely, gracious city praised as the “Pearl of the Orient,” and the “Paris of the East,” has become—under the pressure of war—a grubby, frantic city, choked by a population boom, cheapened by greed and corruption, paralyzed by traffic that doesn’t move. . . . Many of Saigon’s new citizens are refugees from battle areas in the countryside. But just as many are the usual denizens of a wartime boom area—peddlers, profiteers, black-marketeers, pimps, prostitutes, beggars attracted by the smell of the Yankee dollar.

The pearl of the Orient is “almost a jungle now and jungle law prevails,” says one Vietnamese official bitterly. “Everything is for sale and almost anything will find a buyer. More than with her refuse, Saigon stinks with her corruption.” But there is a sign of hope: no one is more aware of the problem—or what must be done about it—than the military junta which is now in command.

The unintentional irony of the last line is stunning. Of course the junta was “aware of the problem”—it was a major participant in the corruption—but it had no intention of doing anything about it. Nor does the article hint that one obvious response to the problem would be to remove the Yankees. Nor is it pointed out that most of the refugees pouring into South Vietnamese cities were poor farmers who had been forcibly removed from the countryside by U.S. military policy in a planned effort to deny the Viet Cong rural supporters.

Because “nation building” proved such a failure in Vietnam, it is hard to recall how much enthusiasm it generated in certain sectors of the U.S. government and academia in the late 1950s and 1960s. An enormous ensemble of institutions and individuals developed and debated the subject. Major careers were founded on the proposition that the United States could transform “backward” or “traditional” nations into rapidly modernizing capitalist democracies.

Among the most fervent advocates of nation building was a group of social scientists known as modernization theorists. Their ideas about how societies move toward modernity constituted more than a blueprint; they formed a potent and deeply held ideology, one that went hand in glove with conventional Cold War anti-Communism and the belief that the United States had a right and responsibility to direct the world—especially the Third World nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—along an American-prescribed path.

The most famous and influential modernization theorist was Walt Whitman Rostow. Rostow’s father was Victor Rostowsky, a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated to New York at the turn of the last century after czarist police discovered that he was publishing a socialist newspaper in his basement. (He dropped the “sky” from his name upon arrival at Ellis Island.) Rostow’s mother, Lillian, shared her husband’s commitment to socialism and faith in the transcendent value of education. Their deep ambition for their three sons, and their eager embrace of American political and literary traditions, was reflected in their decision to name all of the boys after famous Americans—Eugene Victor Debs Rostow, Ralph Waldo Emerson Rostow, and Walt Whitman Rostow.

Walt received a full scholarship to Yale at age fifteen, graduated at nineteen, and sailed off to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He returned to Yale and completed his PhD at twenty-four. Then came World War II, and Rostow went back to England as a bombing analyst, an experience that infused him with inordinate
confidence in the effectiveness of aerial warfare
. After the war, he returned to academic life and his boyhood dream of writing a capitalist alternative to the work of Karl Marx. That project culminated in his best-known book,
The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(1960).

Rostow’s book received admiring reviews
and a degree of public acclaim rarely accorded books about the “dismal science” of economics. Part of its appeal was its far-from-dismal conclusion. His cheerleading for American capitalism could hardly be rivaled. The United States, he argued, had reached the final stage of economic development. It was the world’s leading example of “mature” capitalism and stood as a model of progressive prosperity for all nations. Even better, Rostow was convinced that all nations, even the poorest, would eventually be swept along on the same tidal wave of history, through five stages of growth that would inevitably take them from “traditional society,” through (economic) “take-off,” and ultimately to “the age of high mass consumption,” the nearly utopian end of history with widely distributed abundance and no significant class conflict.

For Rostow, the economic development of capitalism was a virtual law of history, and it would eventually work its wonders everywhere, regardless of differences in population, politics, history, culture, or religion. One size fits all. If it works in the United States, it will work in Peru; if it’s good for Peru, it’s good for Vietnam. Detailed analysis of individual countries was, for Rostow, really not essential. The pattern could be applied anywhere.

But the United States should not wait for the magic of capitalism to unfold. That would be morally inexcusable and strategically dangerous. By promoting capitalist development, America could inoculate underdeveloped countries threatened by the virus of Communism. For Rostow, traditional societies moving toward economic takeoff were especially susceptible to the lies and coercions of Communism. He believed Communism was merely a “
crude act of international vandalism
,” not an appealing revolutionary ideology, but it had to be defeated in order for economic progress to proceed along its “natural” path.

The Stages of Economic Growth
offered a full-throated endorsement of global anti-Communism and foreign aid to promote capitalism. John Kennedy included Rostow among his campaign advisers in the 1960 presidential race. Indeed, it was Rostow who coined Kennedy’s two major campaign slogans (“Let’s get this country moving again” and the “New Frontier”). That gift for brevity was apparently short-lived, since once in Washington, JFK was soon complaining about Rostow’s wordy memos. “
Walt writes faster than I can read
.”

JFK hired Rostow to work on foreign policy, and LBJ eventually promoted him to national security adviser. He proved to be the most hawkish member of either administration. For all his talk of economic development and nation building, he was perhaps most notable as an advocate of military escalation. As a wartime adviser he seemed much more enthusiastic about bombing than well digging or school construction.

Even the centerpiece of the nation-building program—viewed by policymakers as the hallmark of “constructive counterinsurgency”—was a coercive plan that forced rural villagers off their land and relocated them in armed camps. Launched in 1961, it was called the Strategic Hamlet Program. The program’s primary goal was to deprive the Viet Cong guerrillas of the villagers they depended on for support. Strategic hamlet advocates liked to quote China’s Chairman Mao, comparing guerrillas to fish that swim in an ocean of people. If you took away the “ocean” of people, they claimed, the guerrilla “fish” would die. What they did not take into account is how the villagers might feel about being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and stuck in fortified compounds behind barbed wire and moats filled with bamboo spikes, overseen by guard towers. Residents were required to carry identification passes to prove their loyalty to the government and had to honor nighttime curfews designed to keep them inside the hamlets, allowing the military to assume that anyone outside the barbed wire was a guerrilla target. The U.S. Information Agency gave everyone in the strategic hamlets a little pamphlet called
Toward the Good Life
, spelling out the advantages of modern medicine, hygiene, and agriculture.

Most villagers never believed strategic hamlets promised a better life, but they had no choice about the move. And once they were relocated, their alienation deepened. Instead of leading rural civilians to embrace the South Vietnamese government, the program mostly helped the Viet Cong recruit the residents of what were essentially concentration camps. Within a few years, most strategic hamlets were ghost towns. The residents had fled back to their former villages even though they often had to start from scratch, since the government had burned down many of the original hamlets. By the end of 1963 the program was in shambles. Years later, one of its principal advocates, Roger Hilsman, conceded that it was “
useless—worse than useless
.” The program limped along into the mid-1960s under a more appealing name—New Life Hamlets—but it was no more successful in building support for the government or isolating the people from the insurgency.

The U.S. military then moved on to cruder forms of relocation that did not include even the promise of modernizing alternative villages. Trucks and helicopters simply arrived by the score to cart villagers off to refugee camps while giant Rome plows leveled their homes. Or villages would be burned or bombed and the villagers would be left to fend for themselves. They would move in with relatives in another village, or cobble together a shelter in a shantytown next to a large U.S. base, or join the millions who fled to the cities.

American policymakers were not deterred by the obvious fact that forced relocation enraged and alienated the Vietnamese. Walt Rostow believed the use of force enhanced the government’s credibility with peasants. Counterinsurgency programs, he wrote, “have depended for their success on a mixture of attractive political and economic programs in the underdeveloped areas and a
ruthless projection to the peasantry
that the central government intends to be the wave of the future.”

Few colleagues shared Rostow’s confidence in the progress of the war. One of the internal dissenters, James Thomson, left the government in 1966 and wrote a wickedly hilarious satire of Rostow that appeared in
Atlantic
magazine. His parody imagines a White House meeting in which some national security advisers discuss the shocking news that Saigon has fallen to the Viet Cong. The Walt Whitman Rostow character (Herman Melville Breslau) insists that the horrible news is actually quite good. “In general, he felt, the events of the previous day were
a wholesome and not unexpected phase
in South Vietnam’s growth toward political maturity and economic viability.” The “enemy was now confronted with a challenge of unprecedented proportions for which it was totally unprepared: the administration of a major city. If we could dump rice and airlift pigs at Hue and Danang, he was pretty sure that the other side would soon cave.”

The humor rides not just on Rostow’s impervious optimism in the face of dire news, but his habit of twisting the meaning of events in favor of his views and proposing bizarre new tactics that would somehow allow the United States to prevail. Men like Thomson came to see Rostow’s advocacy as nearly lunatic in its extreme denial of concrete reality. Most other officials reserved their positive spinning to public statements. Any satire of Robert McNamara, for example, would focus on the stark contrast between his private pessimism and his public reassurances. Rostow, at least, had the distinction of being publicly and privately consistent in his adherence to a sunny view of the war. Indeed, even long after 1975 (when Saigon actually did fall), Rostow argued that the war not only had been morally right to fight, but had actually accomplished a great deal. The silver linings he identifies might have been lifted directly from Thomson’s spoof:

We and the Southeast Asians used those ten years
[1965–1975] so well that there wasn’t the panic [when Saigon fell] that there would have been if we had failed to intervene. Since 1975 there has been a general expansion of trade by the other countries of that region with Japan and the West. In Thailand we have seen the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs. Malaysia and Singapore have become countries of diverse manufactured exports. We can see the emergence of a much thicker layer of technocrats in Indonesia.

For Rostow, the astonishing carnage and failure of the Vietnam War was neither a tragedy nor a crime. It was an excellent use of time. Somehow Asian neighbors found it all reassuring, Rostow suggests. In any case, they were able to get on with their profit making. Modernization was back on track.