From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (120 page)

In South Vietnam, Catholics and Buddhists struggled for power. One leader after another followed Diem—"government by turnstile," an LBJ adviser called it.
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None could solidify his own control, much less govern the country and fight the insurgency. Throughout 1964, the collapse of South Vietnam seemed possible if not indeed likely.

The president and his advisers refused to accept this result. The domino theory was no longer taken as gospel by most regional experts, but it continued to creep into official justifications for escalating the war. United States officials still firmly believed that inaction in Vietnam would discourage allies and embolden adversaries. Curiously, the prospect of detente in some ways reinforced traditional Cold War imperatives. The United States must uphold its commitments and demonstrate its ability to contain the presumably more militant China and keep the Soviet Union from reverting to adventurism. The specter of China loomed ominously over Southeast Asia. Turbulence in the Third World appeared to threaten international stability; firmness in Vietnam, it was reasoned, would demonstrate that violent challenges to the status quo could not succeed. Johnson often expressed premonitions of disaster from an expanded U.S. commitment in Vietnam. He still felt compelled to act. He vividly remembered the political price the Democrats had paid for the "loss" of China in 1949. The fall of South Vietnam, he later explained, would have set off a "mean and destructive debate that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy."
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He was certain that conservatives would use any foreign policy failure to thwart his liberal domestic programs. "If I don't go in now and they show later that I should have," he predicted, "they'll push . . . Vietnam up my ass every time."
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The president moved cautiously at first. Facing election in November 1964, he could not appear to do nothing, especially after Republicans nominated the hawkish Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. On the other hand, he could not alarm the electorate or jeopardize his domestic programs by taking drastic steps. He deflected proposals from the Joint Chiefs to bomb North Vietnam and even China and commit U.S. combat troops to the war. But he sent more aid and advisers. And when North Vietnamese gunboats on August 2 and 4 allegedly attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, he retaliated by bombing military installations across the seventeenth parallel. Claiming on August 4 an unprovoked
attack on U.S. ships in international waters, an assertion later disputed and now known to be false, he rushed through a compliant Congress with near unanimous consent a Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing him to use "all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the United States and to prevent further aggression." The president's decisive action helped seal a landslide victory over Goldwater in November. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution gave him authority to expand the war. But when doubts were later raised about the August 4 attack, legislators cried deceit, widening LBJ's credibility gap.
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The election over, the president during the first seven months of 1965 incrementally and often after hours of agonizing internal deliberations committed the United States to war. Chaos continued to reign in Saigon, and North Vietnam sent regular army units into the south. With South Vietnam facing near certain defeat, LBJ in February responded to NLF attacks on U.S. forces at Pleiku by ordering more retaliatory bombing raids against North Vietnam. This time, they regularized into the Rolling Thunder campaign of systematic, gradually expanding attacks moving steadily northward. The next month, he dispatched U.S. Marines to guard air bases, the first combat forces sent to Vietnam. After South Vietnamese units were mauled in a series of spring and early summer battles, U.S. military commander Gen. William C. Westmoreland urgently requested large increments of American combat forces. Following a searching analysis of the options, most likely with his mind already made up, Johnson in late July ordered the immediate dispatch of 175,000 U.S. troops, making what amounted to an open-ended commitment to save South Vietnam. Still deeply concerned about the Great Society, he cleverly disguised the significance of what he was doing. He repeatedly insisted that he was not changing U.S. policy.
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Over the next two years, LBJ steadily expanded the U.S. commitment. He rejected proposals to mobilize the reserves and rally public support for the war, fearing that such moves would threaten his domestic programs and take control of the war out of his hands. To avoid confrontation with the Soviet Union and especially China, he refused to authorize military operations outside of South Vietnam. He went out of his way to avoid Truman's mistakes in Korea by refusing to permit bombing near the Chinese border. Within those bounds, he drastically expanded American involvement—"all-out limited war," one official called it with no apparent
sense of the paradox.
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The bombing of North Vietnam grew from 63,000 tons in 1965 to 226,000 in 1967, inflicting an estimated $600 million of damage on a still primitive economy. By mid-1967, the United States had nearly 500,000 troops in South Vietnam. Westmoreland launched aggressive "search and destroy" operations against North Vietnamese and NLF regulars.

The United States could gain no more than a stalemate. The bombing did not cripple the enemy's will to resist or its capacity to support the NLF. The North Vietnamese dispersed and concealed their most vital resources; the USSR and China helped make up losses. An increasingly deadly air defense system took a growing toll in U.S. planes and pilots. On the ground, when U.S. forces engaged the enemy they usually prevailed. But an elusive foe fought only when conditions were in its favor and replaced and to some extent controlled its losses by melting into sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia and across the 17th parallel.
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The one part of the war that really excited Johnson was the "battle . . . of crops and hearts and caring," but Americanization of the struggle proved counterproductive in terms of building a stable government that could provide a better life for "Vietnamese plain people."
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Relegated to the sidelines, the South Vietnamese army did not receive the training or experience to assume later the burden of the fighting. Massive U.S. firepower devastated the South Vietnamese countryside, making refugees of as much as one-third of the population. The infusion of thousands of Americans and billions of dollars into a small country had a profoundly destabilizing effect on a fragile society. Corruption became a way of life. Tensions between Americans and South Vietnamese grew.
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As the war dragged on and its cost skyrocketed, opposition mounted at home. Frustrated with LBJ's limited war, conservative hawks demanded a knockout blow against North Vietnam to secure victory. On the other side, an extremely heterogeneous group of doves increasingly questioned the administration's policies. Radicals denounced the American ruling class's exploitation of helpless people to sustain a decadent capitalist system. Some anti-war liberals challenged the war's legality and morality. Others insisted that Vietnam was of no more than marginal significance to U.S. national security and was undermining relations with allies and holding back
detente with the USSR. The liberal critique broadened into an indictment of U.S. "globalism." The Johnson administration, Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright charged, had fallen victim to the "arrogance of power," that "fatal . . . over-extension of power and mission, which brought ruin to ancient Athens, to Napoleonic France, and to Nazi Germany."
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Opposition to the war took varied forms. Activists conducted teach-ins on college campuses and organized mass demonstrations in Washington and other cities. They openly encouraged resistance to the draft and sought to disrupt the war effort. In October 1967, some fifty thousand protestors marched on the Pentagon. Thousands of young Americans exploited legal loopholes, even mutilated themselves to avoid the draft; an estimated thirty thousand fled to Canada. A handful adopted the method of protest of South Vietnam's Buddhists, publicly immolating themselves, one young Quaker below McNamara's Pentagon office window, an act the secretary later conceded "devastated" him.
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The war's mounting costs were more important than the anti-war movement in generating public concern. Growing casualties, indications that more troops might be required, and LBJ's belated request for a tax increase combined in late 1967 to produce unmistakable signs of warweariness. Polls showed a sharp decline in support for the war and the president's handling of it. The press increasingly questioned U.S. goals and methods. Members of Congress from both parties began to challenge LBJ's policies. Doubts arose even among his inner circle. The secretary of defense had been so closely identified with Vietnam that it had once been called "McNamara's War." In 1967, a tormented McNamara unsuccessfully urged the president to stop the bombing of North Vietnam, put a ceiling on U.S. ground troops, scale back war aims, and seek a negotiated settlement. By the end of the year, for many observers, the war had become the most visible symbol of a malaise that afflicted American society. Rioting in the cities, a spiraling crime rate, and noisy street demonstrations suggested that violence abroad set off violence at home. Divided against itself, the nation appeared on the verge of an internal crisis as severe as the Great Depression.
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The United States' escalation of the war in Vietnam had a major impact on relations with adversaries and allies alike. It did not drive the Soviet Union and China back into each other's arms, as some pessimists had warned. Nor did it destroy detente. Negotiations with the USSR on such issues as arms control continued even as U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened. By keeping the war limited and repeatedly making clear its intentions to Moscow and Beijing, the administration helped avert a great-power confrontation.
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Still, the effects of escalation on relations with the Soviet Union were generally negative. Washington's naive hopes to exchange trade and improved relations for Soviet help in securing a favorable Vietnam peace settlement proved chimerical. Competing with China for leadership of the Communist world, Moscow could not appear indifferent to the fate of its ally, North Vietnam. In any event, having been sold out at Geneva in 1954, Hanoi was not about to entrust its fate to its allies. On the contrary, it brilliantly played them against each other to secure maximum aid while preserving its freedom of action. The USSR and China provided more than $2 billion in crucial supplies. Soviet bloc aid to North Vietnam in turn led Congress to reject Johnson's requests for most-favored-nation status for the USSR, an essential underpinning for detente.
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The first moves toward detente and expansion of the war in Vietnam also opened deep fissures in the Western alliance. Even as Soviet-American tensions eased, Johnson's advisers continued to view NATO as necessary to guarantee U.S. influence in Western Europe, especially with a recalcitrant France, and to keep West Germany "on a leash."
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Losing the alliance would also mean "the loss of our diplomatic cards in dealing with the Russians," Vice President Hubert Humphrey candidly admitted.
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The missile crisis had aroused European concerns about U.S. reliability. The easing of the Soviet threat seemed to reduce allied dependence on the United States. And the growing economic strength of Western Europe set off increased nationalism. At a minimum, the allies sought a partnership of equals. Determined to restore his nation to global prominence, de Gaulle entertained visions of a Europe closely tied to the USSR and free of the Anglo-Saxons. Heightened nationalism in Europe raised fears among nervous Americans of a revival of the forces that had provoked two world wars,
making an alliance under U.S. control all the more important. Facing growing costs in Vietnam, Americans wanted the Europeans to pay more for their own defense.

The differences burst out into the open after 1963. The United States insisted that the defense of South Vietnam was essential to protect Western Europe. The Europeans were not persuaded, and in any event doubted U.S. ability to succeed there. Faced with growing anti-American protest among their own people, the allies staunchly resisted LBJ's appeals for troops, even, in the case of Britain, for the symbolic commitment of a "platoon of bagpipers."
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As it grew stronger, West Germany pressed harder on reunification and acquiring nuclear weapons, setting off anxiety across the continent. Not surprisingly, the major challenge continued to come from de Gaulle. In 1964, he recognized China and especially infuriated Johnson by pushing for the neutralization of Vietnam. In February 1966, he withdrew from NATO and asked that its troops and headquarters be moved from France. He followed with an independent approach to Moscow. European refusal to support the United States in Vietnam and de Gaulle's challenge provoked forty-four senators in August 1966 to propose major cuts in U.S. forces in Europe.

Johnson and his advisers handled the European crisis adeptly. U.S. officials deeply resented the allies' refusal to support the war in Vietnam. "When the Russians invade Sussex," Rusk snapped at a British journalist, "don't expect us to come and help you."
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But there was no retribution, and in 1966 LBJ provided crucial economic assistance to bolster the faltering pound sterling. Some U.S. officials privately railed at de Gaulle's "megalomania," but the president wisely refused to get into a "pissing match" with the French leader. "When a man asks you to leave his house, you don't argue," he remarked of the request to remove NATO troops, "you get your hat and go."
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He also held off congressional pressures to withdraw troops from Europe. The administration even attempted to use detente to keep the alliance intact—and the United States in control—by encouraging West German approaches to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
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